This post was written by Léo Dana, Charbel-Raphaël Ségerie, and Florent Berthet, with the help of Siméon Campos, Quentin Didier, Jérémy Andréoletti, Anouk Hannot and Tom David.
In this post, you will learn what were EffiSciences’ most successful field-building activities as well as our advice, reflections, and takeaways to field-builders. We also include our roadmap for the next year. Voilà.
EffiSciences is a non-profit based in France whose mission is to mobilize scientific research to overcome the most pressing issues of the century and ensure a desirable future for generations to come.
EffiSciences was founded in January 2022 and is now a team of ~20 volunteers and 4 employees.
At the moment, we are focusing... (read 3521 more words →)
"Affronter la Singularité" is a good suggestion but like you said it's a bit aggressive. I wish we had a better word for "Facing" but I don't think the french language has one.
I'd gladly review your translation, check your email.
Translator of the articles here.
I actually pondered the two options at the very beginning of my work, and both seem equally good to me. "Face à la singularité" means something like "In front of the singularity" while "Faire face à la singularité" is closer indeed to "Facing the Singularity". But the first one sounds better in french (and is catchier), that's why I chose it. It is a little less action oriented but it doesn't necessarily imply passivity.
It wouldn't bother me to take the second option though, it's a close choice. Maybe other french speakers could give their opinion?
About the capitalized "S" of "Singularity", it's also a matter of preference, I put it to emphasize that we are not talking about any type of singularity (not a mathematical one for example), but it could go either way too. (I just checked the wikipedia french page for "technical singularity", and it's written with a capitalized "S" about 50% of the time...)
Other remarks are welcomed.
Then would you agree that any utility function should, in the end, maximize hedons (if we were rational agents, that is) ? If yes, that would mean that hedons are the goal and utilons are a tool, a sub-goal, which doesn't seem to be what OP was saying.
Has anybody ever proposed a way to value utilons?
It would be easier to discuss about them if we knew exactly what they can mean, that is, in a more precise way than just by the "unit of utility" definition. For example, how to handle them through time?
So why not defining them with something like that :
Suppose we could precisely measure the level of instant happiness of a person on a linear scale between 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst pain imaginable and 10 the best of climaxes. This level is constantly varying, for everybody. In this context, one utilon could be the value of an action that is increasing the level... (read more)
