pjohn

"why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?"

Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or - perhaps even worse - because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.

"They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expec

Okay, it sounds like we're pretty much in full agreement here. (And for the parts where neither of us know how reality works - we seem to nevertheless agree on what we don't know and why we don't know it!)

For what it's worth I did have a bit of trouble parsing your original message in places, and I clearly misunderstood parts of it (sorry!) - but it absolutely didn't appear rude or impolite at all to me; just as arguing (politely) for something that, it turns-out, you weren't actually arguing for. I'm sure it's my error as much as yours!

My own English is, ... (read more)

I disagree with many of the Tegmarks' re-labellings - in that I think in many cases the original label is more fair, accurate, and appropriate than their proposed new label - but I do not think it is obnoxious at all to say "here are the labels you probably currently use; here are some others you might consider".

"you should always use language which prioritises my particular idea of what the bad results of your actions are and implicitly bakes in my worldview"

I think this is a pretty uncharitable characterisation of what the authors were trying to do. A mo... (read more)

"Vasily Arkhipov was criticized after vetoing a Soviet nuclear strike against the US"

My goodness, I think this might be the most beautifully understated claim in all of philosophy!

In addition to the "enduring criticism" angle, I think people in large corporations are under social and economic pressure to follow-along with the corporation's position and are often expected to make moral decisions whilst enduring personal discomforts (lack of sleep, pressure of deadlines, family/life worries, etc.), and Arkhipov also provides an excellent example/inspiration ... (read more)

[Edit: What follows has turned-out to be a fairly strenuous disagreement with your position. Sorry - I only noticed how strenuous it was after the words/thoughts were done pouring out of my head! I know you're new ..I'm pretty new around these parts myself.. so I thought I'd message to apologise in advance and ask you to not take it personally. Even though I do very much disagree with you I'm nevertheless interested in your opinion and glad to have the discussion!]

I think this is false because the premise "muscles are internal whereas morality is external"... (read more)

Great read. Thanks for sharing!

....How did the three decisions turn-out? Do you eat meat, use cutlery, and/or use chairs today?

For me it was a motorcycle. I didn't want to Interrail because, even though I adore the railway as an institution, I didn't like the idea of being a passenger and being passively being carried to different places without somehow "achieving them" by my own hand (I realise this is an absurd and ridiculous decision... not a reasonable and sensible decision like refusing to sit in chairs...)

So, I loaded-up my ER5 (an objectively boring... (read more)

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)