pjohn

If you had a perfectly massless car, at rest in perfectly still air, and you accelerated, would it go forwards (because the tyres are nevertheless still in contact with the ground albeit with 0 force pushing them into it)? Or would the wheels just spin (because since there's a 0 term in the friction equation)? Or (let's say it's rear-wheel drive) would the wheel stay in-place and the car rotate around it, like a motorcycle doing a wheelie?

I would't describe downforce only when cornering as "magical": seems eminently achievable with active aero. A control-s... (read more)

You're absolutely right that maritime law works this way - but actual shipping companies manage to get around it all the time.

1) Poorer nations compete with one another to have the absolute most permissive maritime regulations they possibly can so as to attract shipping companies registering with them as a flag state. (The money from such registry ain't great but it makes a significant difference to certain economies).

2) The shipping companies register ships under one flag state then, if they're ever forced to submit to regulations or go to court or anythi... (read more)

"If the universe were infinite, there would be infinite humans"

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, I think there are entirely plausible - perhape even probable! - cosmologies wherein an infinite universe can yield infinite Boltzmann Brains but not infinite humans. Having infinite humans would require infinite negentropy (or if you prefer infinite matter and energy), not just infinite spacetime. Boltzmann Brains could exist in an infinitely long, post-stellar-epoch, post-heat-death, maximum-entropy, infinite de-Sitter-space universe with no remaining fre... (read more)

It sounds like you understood physics pre-puberty that I'm only-just starting to speculate upon in middle-age (damn you!)

I speculated on this elsewhere - just didn't realise that's what you were describing here! Ingenious technique; I shall absolutely try it!

I speculated on this mechanism in another comment (thanks for the confirmation!) - I just didn't realise that jam jar lids were malleable enough to be levered-open from the side (I was imagining puncturing them). Thanks!

The discussion is about lids that unscrew (like on a jam jar) not lids that need to be levered-off (like on a paint tin).

I have seen jars of comestibles with paint tin style lever-off lids, but they're pretty rare where I live. Possibly they're more common where you are - which would explain the confusion?

(And personally I'd prefer to use a flat-blade screwdriver -I have quite fancy delicate teaspoons!- but if the choice is exclusively between a teaspoon and a knifeblade, I'd pick the teaspoon too!)

I don't think the lids are hard to open because they're screwed on tightly, but because there's a vacuum in the jar? (cf. those Age of Enlightenment experiments where large teams of horses couldn't open vacuum-sealed containers.. history doesn't record whether the horses ever stopped pulling in teams and tried just unscrewing them...)

Possibly you could make them easier to open despite the vacuum by making the thead pitch finer - but I suspect that since the threads are cut into glass rather than steel there's a limit to how fine-pitch they can be made and ... (read more)

Partially agree. If the universe were both infinite in size and contained infinite negentropy (or, if you prefer, infinite matter and energy) then sure, I'd agree that there would likely be vastly more human brains than Boltzmann brains.

However, if the universe were infinite in size but didn't contain an infinite amount of negentropy (for example, if the universe started with some fixed amount of negentropy -like all the matter and energy present at the Big Bang- and then became infinite in size by inflating for an infinite amount of time, but after the in... (read more)

What stops the total number of humans from being infinite is the thermodynamic death of the universe.

I'm not a cosmologist (so please do correct me if I'm mistaken here!) but I think the universe's lifespan can be divided up into epochs, and whilst Boltzmann Brains can exist within any epoch, humans can only exist in a limited few: too early and the universe is too violent and chaotic to support us (plus probably not all the elements we're made from have been produced yet); too late and there isn't sufficient negentropy left to support us.

We're currently i... (read more)

I do not think the fact that my experiences don't dissolve into chaos moment-by-moment is a good argument against my being a Boltzmann Brain. I fully understand that order-experiencing BBs must be uncountably more rare than chaos-experiencing BBs, but:

1) If the universe is infinite, all types of Boltzmann Brain must be infinite in number. Since humans are finite in number, being even the absolute-least-probable type of BB would thus still be infinitely more likely than being a human brain.

(I realise this requires some infinitie sets to be larger than other... (read more)

I would also object to @ozymandias' hedonium shockwave - but I don't understand your particular objection to it.

You make 'respect property rights' sound kind of like some sort of inviolable religious commandment! Surely the point of property rights is not a fundamental principle that the entire universe must obey but merely that, as a rule-of-thumb, respecting property rights (in our limited world absent hedonium shockwaves) generally yields more wellbeing, less suffering, etc.?

If so: why not skip the "property rights" kludge and optimise for wellbeing dir... (read more)

I find myself in the rather peculiar position of fully agreeing with your argument and your conclusions - but disagreeing with the critical central point upon which your argument hinges!

I do not think chickens were ever doing well. I think that "doing well" requires more than just an existence that's pain-free relative to your ancestors' existences, and moreover I think it's essentially orthogonal to population size.

(The argument that population size is orthogonal to wellbeing is pretty self-explanatory so I'll skip that and focus on the potential other re... (read more)

Do we know anything about when humans or Neanderthals started having sex in missionary (or other) positions rather than just the "doggy style" position that other animals (presumably including apes?) have sex in? Could the missionary sex have contributed to the evolutionary pressure for breast permanence? Or could the breast permanence have contributed to the origin of missionary-position sex?

Regarding weening, lactose-tolerance, and breast permanence: I suspect this is a red herring because A) the animal milk humans drink even after they've stopped drinki... (read more)

Why do companies that own shopping centres lease their units out to individual shops, instead of running shops themselves? Why do airports and railway stations lease out space to coffee shops, newsagents, etc. rather than operating coffee shops and newsagents themselves? Are these things different to selling AI access instead of doing whatever it is the companies buying AI access are doing?

(Perhaps they are! Perhaps a dedicated clothes shop or coffee shop has some advantage that a shopping centre or railway station can't duplicate, but the companies that a... (read more)

Hey - same to you! Interesting discussion!

I think I understand your point - the gamblers know they will lose money, but they're willing to pay that money in order to have the dopamine hit from contemplating the chance that they might win; it's a fair exchange: money for dopamine hit.

My claim is not "gamblers must be trying to make money and gambling is a bad way to do that", my claim is "this particular dopamine hit is only possible because the casino is exploiting a kind of cognitive dissonance". Witness my engaging with your "sports event" comparison, wh... (read more)

Gambling: good point - this really made me think! I'm not sure you can have it both ways, though; you seem to be saying that the gamblers know full well that they'll lose money therefore it's a fair purchase of thrills in exchange for money - but that the thrill comes from believing they might win money? If the gamblers truly know that they're going to lose money then there'd be no thrill, and if they don't know they're going to lose money then they're not making a fair purchase.

Scott Alexander calls it something along the lines of "exploiting a known-fail... (read more)

I think it's a natural category, yes, and that it also contains things like casinos, chiropractors, herbal medicine practitioners, psychics, etc.: it's the category of "pretending to provide a product/service in exchange for money, but the product/service is actually worthless (or entirely imaginary) and sometimes even harmful".

Beggars: you feel good about giving but you're doing vastly less good than if you'd just walked past the beggar and later donated the equivalent to UNICEF (or whoever). If the beggar were to spend your money on Fentanyl, giving migh... (read more)

Almost-fully agree, and I find your framing of it - in terms of a tradeoff between a model's predictive power and how much useful ethical leeway the model grants us - really useful. (Considerably more useful than my "we just always deny personhood all the time"..)

I think the only part I couldn't fully agree with is "whether there is enough [human-ness] to be personhood": I do agree that we don't know how much human-ness there really is in AI cognition and that we don't know whether AIs ought ever be treated as people, I just think the question of what beings deserve moral patienthood likely doesn't reduce to how human-like the being's cognition is.

"humans are still just... really hardwired to see faces and personhood where it is not"

Faces - sure. But personhood - I think we're the exact opposite.

There are vast tracts of history where entire civilisations considered women, or slaves, or lower-castes, or Jews, or the poor, or immigrants, or (&c. &c.) to not really be people. Today it takes a great deal of imagination and conscious effort to treat children as though they're actually people. We think nothing of building factory farms and slaughterhouses. We routinely buy consumer goods made from... (read more)