eschew contextualizing because it ruins the commons

I don't understand. What do you mean by contextualizing?

Did Bostrom ever call it singleton risk? My understanding is that it's not clear that a singleton is more of an x-risk than its negative; a liberal multipolar situation under which many kinds of defecting/carcony factions can continuously arise.

For a while, we've been exploring a similar question but more in the direction of pre-committing to giving simulants better lives, rather than just not bringing them into existence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiN6fNXjnS9hMSB2C/principia-compat-the-potential-importance-of-multiverse

Trivially, if we prevent simulatees from using anthropic reasoning, or any method of self-location, then the only thing you'll need to do to ensure your status as a nonsimulatee is to just self-locate every once in a while.

Doesn't that protocol just allow some people to prove they're not simulants, while doing little to aleiveate the real anguishes of being one; growing up in an immature low-tech society (with aging, disease and fear) and then dying before spreading out into the stars?

I hope you are trying to understand the causes of the success (including luck) instead of just mindlessly following a reward signal. Not even rats mindlessly obey reward signals.

Why aren't presidential races already essentially ITT Tournaments? It would seem like that skill would make you really good at drawing support from lots of different demographics.

Idea: Screen burn correction app that figures out how to exactly negate your screen's issues by pretty much looking at itself in a mirror through the selfie cam, trying to display pure white, remembering the imperfections it sees, then tinting everything with the negation of that from then on.

Nobody seems to have made this yet. I think there might be things for tinting your screen in general, but it doesn't know the specific quirks of your screenburn. Most of the apps for screen burn recommend that you just burn every color over the entire screen that isn't damaged yet, so that they all get to be equally damaged, which seems like a really bad thing to be recommending.

I've been meaning to do a post about the near future of VR because I feel like a lot of people don't believe how good it will be, and how soon. But I guess maybe it doesn't need a post of its own. It can be boiled down to:

• Reaching maximum levels of visual acuity is very achievable via foveated rendering: the optimization of only rendering the patch of the scene that the user is actually looking at in full detail.
• No mouse will be needed. That prospect, foveated rendering, incents providing eye tracking. External peripherals that aren't right next to your eye can already provide a faster kind of hands-free mouse, accurate enough for most legitimate demands. For others tasks, perhaps some form of hand tracking could make up the difference.
• Field of view (Angle. Amount of peripheral vision) has already been maxed out by pimax.
• Further ahead, there just wont be much of a difference in the optical properties of VR and reality if the focal length of the screen can be made dynamically adjustable to resolve vergence conflict.

It's concerning how accurate facebook's face tracking seems to be vs how unrealistic it feels. They're doing the best they can. They're doing a really good job. I can't explicitly point out any flaws. It still doesn't feel right at all :(((

Still probably a big step up from not being able to see people at all though.

As long as most of what you're looking at is at the VR's natural focal point (resolving vergence conflict) and the pixel density is high enough.. maybe it will be fine.

It's possible that something bad happens if you don't refocus your lenses very often, and it seems likely to me that it may be a long long time before VR that can present multiple focal lengths starts getting cheap. There might not be a lot of enthusiastic demand for it. Maybe there will be though. Gamers will demand every achievable kind of realism, even this weird silly stuff like realistic depth of field simulation. Once that happens I can't imagine what differences to reality would be left for the eye to complain about.

I expect it humorlessly. In a lot of ways, computer screens can't be improved upon that much:

• The third dimension is unlikely to turn out to be useful when most of the work we do is already neglecting to use the color dimensions. Hopefully it'll be useful to people who work with 3d objects (3d modellers) though.
• I'd predict operating systems that at least start presenting larger computer screens, but even that has practical limits. Once it's wide enough, it would require you to physically turn your head to be able to see things. Right now you can just hit a switch workspace or show overview keybinding for that kind of thing, which is faster. Working while looking to the side is not ergonomic, and it would be hard to get the OS to consistently put stuff at the sides that's occasionally worth looking at but not ever worth looking at for long enough to get uncomfortable.
  Caveat: Turning your body to look around at different stuff would probably be healthy, and intuitive, so we might hope for some hip new VR-optimized standing desks with keyboards that can be yawed around to different angles. Optimally, keyboards would be mounted on a fairly long robot arm that lets you just move and position it in 3d space anywhere in a room.
  Still seems kinda gimicky on net but who knows, might be nice.