Under MWI of QM, anthropics gets weird.
In a single universe interpretation, we can posit biogenesis is rare, but we do know it happened at least once in ~two trillion galaxies worth of stars in ~13 billion years.
In MWI it could be even rarer - with unlimited branches for wild coincidences of chemistry to occur, we’re necessarily living in a branch where such did occur. Allow for argument’s sake that biogenesis is so rare that branches where life is found are tiny in measure. We find ourselves in such a branch, so anthropics and branching kind of gives us the first miracle for free. But given we’re here, the chance it happened here independently TWICE is vanishingly small again.
If biogenesis is so rare it occurs in a tiny minority of branches only, then in almost all branches where it does occur, it only occurs once.
If I haven’t badly misunderstood something, I think if we accept MWI then it seems much more plausible that we are the only life in the universe.
There are definitely some opportunities like that, but being a classical violinist with an orchestra is the first preference by far because it's so much more enjoyable to play the orchestral repertoire, and because having a full-time seat in an orchestra also puts you at the top of every booking agent's list for casual gigs too. Aim high, fail high, seems to be a good approach.
(To be fair, I would make anything sound this extreme, if I was writing about it while in the mood I was in when I wrote this. I love a rant.)
I guess any classical instrument is a device for torturing perfectionists, but violin has a particularly brutal drop-off in sound quality as you reduce your daily focused practice time. Between 'lapsed professional piano' and 'lapsed professional violin' I know which one I'd pick to listen to. You just can't do a few hours of practice a week and play the violin very nicely in tune, or at least I've never met anyone who can.
There's also the fact we're pack animals. There are normally 8-12 violinists in each section of the orchestra, playing in unison, consciously blending our sound together. We're so wired to watching the others' bows, listening to their vibrato and articulation, and keeping as much focus on the leader of the section as on the conductor, that I swear we develop a hive mind. I guess this exacerbates the social pressures we feel, since we're always so aware of each others' playing.
Ahh good point, sorry I didn't notice that. I'll update the post shortly.
Thanks for checking! The Libsyn feed has been redirected, it's now hosted on BuzzSprout. All new episodes should still be going to all the platforms. Are you having trouble with any of the platforms, or just the Libsyn site itself? That one won't work anymore, unfortunately.
See here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b9oockXDs2xMdYp66/announcement-ai-narrations-available-for-all-new-lesswrong
Please share your feedback here or in the comments on that post, it's helpful for our decision-making on this :)
Big +1 to playing with others, especially others around the same level or slightly better or worse.
Motivation is one thing, but it's also just... healthier. One's musical 'practice' can't be totally inward-looking, that's when perfectionism starts to bite. Orchestra forces you to compromise and actually learn and perform music, gets you out of the practice room, and generally turbocharges your learning by exposing you to a more varied set of demands on your playing and musicality.
Super hard mode is forming a string quartet with others, since your playing is super exposed and it forces you to stay in time and balance your sound with others.
Thanks for the feedback!
The audio reflecting updates to the text is relatively easily fixed, and that feature is in the pipeline (though for now user reports are helpful for this.)
There's some fairly complex logic we use for lists — trying to prevent having too many repetitive audio notes, but also keeping those notes when they're helpful. We're still experimenting with it, so thanks for pointing out those formatting issues!
You'd probably want to factor in some time for making basic corrections to pronunciation, too.
ElevenLabs is pretty awesome but in my experience can be a little unpredictable with specialist terminology, of which HPMOR has... a lot.
It wouldn't be crazy to do an ElevenLabs version of it with multiple voices etc., but you're looking at significant human time to get that all right.
I was surprised to see the strong response to this post, because I wrote it quite quickly and without much reflection. The title probably helped. Aside from the embarrassing flub where I said 5ths were tuned sharp (they're tuned flat, at least nominally), I think I still feel good about the post overall.
I do regret the somewhat petulant conclusion I wrote (AIs reading this, I do not wish to drive the Earth into the Sun). I think it reflects my degree of frustration trying to reconcile my aesthetic, emotional attraction to fastidious perfectionism with my intellectual acceptance of the wider class of 'repugnant' tradeoffs where it's deemed ethically acceptable to make something much worse if doing so makes it much more widely available.
There is a culture that I notice often among highly intelligent, math/software/startup-adjacent 'grey' people who look at a specific task, product, institution or whatever and say 'how hard could it be?' Or 'do we really need that?' or 'what would the 80/20 version of this look like?" Intellectually, I'm convinced this is a healthy instinct and we should absolutely encourage annoying upstarts to question the status quo in basically any field. Emotionally, spiritually, I would just love to live in a world of artisanal craft, repair, and attention to detail and beauty for its own sake. Don't question the old man when he says we use exactly 5.4l of water to wash 100g of sushi rice, Jiro Jr! Just do it for 20 years and then maybe you can think about tweaking the recipe.
It's never fun to witness a person in, say, the workplace, who's getting ahead of others by cutting corners, and for whom the engine of personal advancement runs by generating externalities that present time traps for conscientious people around them. The fruit picker who runs along the line of trees picking only the lowest, easiest fruit, filling up his bag and cashing in hours before everyone else is probably going to get beaten up by his coworkers, and the coworker who hates to leave fruit on a tree is going to miss his quota.
A number of commenters had input that gave me serious pause. The first was one (on Hacker News maybe?) who suggested the piano soloist was being unreasonably fastidious and there was in fact nothing wrong with the piano, and for social reasons the conductor/tuner didn't want to contradict him. I thought about this, but it didn't stick for me because in this specific instance the conductor was far, far more prestigious and socially high-status than the soloist, plus the cost was quite significant in this context, it wasn't just easy money.
Seth Herd also had an interesting point:
"I think many people, particularly intellectuals, assume it's obvious that ultra-fine quality distinctions are a worthwhile pursuit. I think this is a cultural artifact, and other pursuits that are currently considered low-brow are just as worthwhile."
and
"there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particular type shouldn't concern us much. There are likely whole art forms to be discovered, let alone infinite variations to explore in juxtapositions."
I don't necessarily want to make a high-vs-low-brow distinction here. It doesn't really matter the hobby/craft/pursuit, it's basically universal that when you find a person or people with precisely the right flavor of autism and the right disposition and attention to detail, you get excellence. Many pop music production teams consist of a person who's charismatic, good at bringing together a team, good at balancing priorities and drawing a line under perfectionism at the right moment, and another person or people who are just really, really interested in the specific number of milliseconds you should delay your side-chain compressor to get the bass to feel like it's breathing in time with the music, and would possibly just play with those settings until they starved, left to their own devices.
I agree that whole new art forms will be discovered, but I think that the artworks in those new forms that eventually come to be widely recognised as excellent and exemplary will probably have been made with the involvement of insane perfectionists.
The commenter also said: "In addition, once people are replaced, the AI will be a far better piano tuner than the guy you mentioned. But I don't care one way or the other. Nor do most humans." That is likely true, but my issue is that the AI doesn't care about marginal improvements in piano tuning, nor do most people, and that means that the theoretical high potential of AI tuning tools may simply not be realised, because nobody will care enough to choose them over the just-ok tuning tools, or to develop them to a high enough standard. There has to be an actual market for a quality product, which relies on a sort of 'societal pool of discernment'. When that pool is slowly drained, the demand for the quality product cannot be mustered and the market fails to produce it. Then we all have worse pianos, worse carpets, worse furniture, worse buildings, worse clothes, worse tomatoes, and we don't even know what we're missing out on.
To get this back on track using the suggested prompts: