One last thing: I misunderstood the point you were making when you were talking about blackholes. The point you were making was '"What maximizes entropy" is a bad morality'; what I thought I was reading was 'dissipative adaptation does not work because it predicts that we will into a black hole and Earth developed complex life because the complex life did some nuclear fission after it was developed'.
My point was a bit more complex. Yes, there's absolutely the morality argument - obviously something that prescribes "thou shalt make black holes" is a dumb morality and I will not follow it. But there's also a predictive power argument. At a planetary scale, putting aside all the complexity issues you rightly bring up, it may be possible that life truly maximises entropy production given certain constraints. The Earth would have more entropy as a black hole, but the potential barrier to reaching that state is enormous, and so we're stuck in the local maximum of a planet teeming with life instead. But Beff and e-acc carry the argument all the way to the universal scale, and that's where it breaks down, because at the universal scale, black holes absolutely do dominate entropy production, and everything else is a rounding error, so life becomes inconsequential for the ledger.
To make a practical example: suppose future humanity becomes a Kardashev 3 civilization, using up all the energy output of the Milky way and dissipating it at cosmic background temperature via radiation. That makes for an entropy production of approximately . Now suppose that this powerful civilization at some point predicts that two stellar black holes, each of 3 solar masses, will at some point in the future merge near an inhabited system, and this will cause trouble. With their immense power, this civilization finds a way to change the trajectory of one of those black holes, avoiding the merger, and save the system. Well, with that single change this civilization has averted the creation of roughly of entropy, that is, over 3 trillion years' worth of their current entropy production! The civilization that does this will forever be a net negative in entropy creation for its whole existence, regardless of how much it splurges on using energy otherwise.
So, entropy production itself does not predict life at universal scales. It can't. Life is just a tiny rounding error several digits down on that balance sheet. And even if on some local scales it may be possible that life is an avenue to maximizing entropy, overall those goals don't stay aligned all the way to life taking over the universe.
the only point I disagree on is that I think that a tree is in fact a more efficient dissipator than no tree
I think that genuinely depends on details like the precise colour of the soil and efficiency of the plant. We know photosynthesis is not very efficient at energy conversion (IIRC the top efficiency belongs to the sugar cane and is a meager 8%). Also, you could probably make a more dissipative surface by putting up a very dark, very efficient solar panel and then using it to power a heater. I suppose there's an argument that solar panels are created by life but that seems like a very tortuous way for thermodynamics to work.
Yeah, it's not like the point of outreach is to mobilise citizen science on alignment (though that may happen). It's because in democracy the public is an important force. You can pick the option of focusing on converting a few powerful people and hope they can get shit done via non-political avenues but that hasn't worked spectacularly either for now, such people are still subject to classic race to the bottom dynamics and then you get cases like Altman and Musk, who all in all may have ended up net negative for the AI safety cause.
That's just not true, try buying clothes from Shein instead of some at least half decent shop. Heck, I once bought a screwdriver at a pound store, thinking they couldn't really ruin that easily. The steel was so bad it basically bent and chipped upon meeting a screw.
consider how hard it was for society just to realize that COVID was transmitted via aerosols!
It was only hard because inexplicably no one bothered checking for over a year into the pandemic, we just took the whole "fomites and large droplets" stuff from cold and flu for granted despite the evidence being as we see here pretty scant. There's a serious coordination problem there IMO in how chaotic research ended up being rather than exploring systematically and rapidly all these very obvious things that we should have had some decent evidence on by April/May 2020.
1True though to be fair they're a different type of story. The trickster has skills, they're not conventional skills but they have them in spades; they are also clever and ambitious enough to use those skills to upend the existing order. Trickster narratives reward cunning, initiative and ambition, whereas traditional warrior narratives reward strength, bravery and honour. Meanwhile the classic Christian narrative is something like "the saint fasted for fifty days and lashed himself for no good reason other than to prove how much he thought he was sinful; then the Romans came to martyr him and he let them, the end. But joke's on them 'cos now he's in Heaven". Humility, passiveness and guilt.
That said, Christianity hasn't exactly erased either warrior narratives nor trickster narratives. The knights of the Round Table or the paladins of Charlemagne are classic Christian warrior templates. Robin Hood is a classic Christian trickster (and medieval folklore also abounds with stories in which the Devil is foolish and easily tricked by a clever human whom he was trying to ensnare).
That's not a bad idea. You could link something like "this post is a reply to X" and then people could explore "threads" of posts that are all rebuttals and arguments surrounding a single specific topic. Doesn't even need to be about things that have gotten this hostile, sometimes you just want to write a full post because it's more organic than a comment.
To a first approximation, they are as likely as you to be biased, so why do they get to be the judge?
I think the answer to this is, "because the post, specifically, is the author's private space". So they get to decide how to conduct discussion there (for reference, I always set moderation to Easy Going on mine, but I can see a point even to Reign of Terror if the topic is spicy enough). The free space for responses and rebuttals isn't supposed to be the comments of the post, but the ability to write a different post in reply.
I do agree that in general if it comes to that - authors banning each other from comments and answering just via new posts - then maybe things have already gotten a bit too far into "internet drama" land and everyone could use some cooling down. And it's generally probably easier to keep discussions on a post in the comments of the post. But I don't think the principle is inherently unfair; you have the same exact rights as the other person and can always respond symmetrically, that's fairness.
Fun Baader-Meinhof effect I experienced: the very evening of the day in which I read this article, while chatting with my father-in-law, he mentioned (without me prompting) eating and enjoying a sandwich with lard, honey and chestnuts while vacationing in the Alps. Not quite the same but close enough, for more accessible ingredients. And the mountain setting makes a lot of sense because:
- all the ingredients would be local and traditional
- the cold means people burn more energy and thus favours the development of more energy-dense foods
But I don't think the right conclusion is "Unpredictable!" so much as "So put in the work if you care to predict it?".
I still think there's a bit of post-hoc reasoning here; it's easy to rationalise why we would like ice cream, specifically, after the fact, and harder to make novel predictions that are that spot-on. Though as you say prediction can bring you a bit further than expected.
There's also the matter of information. How much information are the aliens even given to work from? To predict "chocolate ice cream" you would need data on the chemical composition of our biosphere, the ecological niches occupied by various animals, how mammalian biology and child-rearing works, how parasites work, how our biochemical energy producing mechanisms work, how DNA bases, insect nervous systems, and human nervous systems work (to guess that caffeine or similar compounds might be produced and enjoyed) and who knows what else. That's a lot of info, probably much more than we comparably have for hypothetical future ASIs. Absent all that, you get stuck with stupid predictions like "gasoline" or "bear fat with honey and salt".
I think they are because in practice they just didn't produce the same amount of economic growth. And for most people, their direct impact of these things are entertainment applications, or using them at work (where sometimes they feel like they make things worse). Meanwhile I remember hearing a story of a woman (someone's grandma) who was in awe of the washing machine they had just bought because well, it had saved her hours of daily gruelling work. And that's more impactful to one's life than almost anything computers or the internet have done.