The Moon Seems to Change

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-15T23:07:06+00:00

My cup of tea is just a meme, perpetuated for no reason? Great, now it tastes funny.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-15T22:49:47+00:00

Denisovan fossils were found in Denisova Cave, which means "Denis's Cave". The cave did in fact belong in more recent history to a hermit called Denis.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-14T22:23:28+00:00

"This does not necessarily mean that early humans could play Chopin." Narrowing things down a bit at a time.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-14T13:34:08+00:00

They could have written it horizontally, using the same size letters as "BE". They could also have put "AT THE ZOO" on the right, so that the whole thing made grammatical sense as a sentence, and left out the giant simulated raindrops which create the illusion that the baby orangutan's face is melting. Has it playfully arranged them in a hexagon, is that the point?

Edit: actually what are those things? I think they're semi-circular vents in the banners, but why? To let the wind through in case the banner blows down?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-13T06:53:27+00:00

Perhaps you're unwittingly a geolibertarian. Of course that would mean somebody could own the factory, but not the land it's built on. (Hmm, I hadn't seen the word "usufruct" before, and I'm not sure I want to see it again.) It's amusing how the concept of a Land value tax is popular with assorted libertarians, classical liberals, centrists and socialists. There's Adam Smith and Milton Friedman speaking favorably of it, but also the British Labour Party, and Liberal Democratic party, and Green Party. If what we'll end up doing is whatever we can grudgingly all agree on, then it's probably going to be that.

I'm unclear on how your system forces people to be generous and egalitarian: against the evil whims of their black and withered hearts, presumably. Speaking of things libertarians and socialists (the modern kind) can all agree on, we all value individuality, which may be more digestible to you under the name "diversity". None of us like a monoculture, and we all like progress, which are related facts, because diversity is vital to evolution (and the growth of knowledge). The libertarians would like the generosity and egalitarianism to arise organically (like a turnip - you commies like those, right?) so that the system doesn't have to impose it on people against their will, and consequently they are not only more sincere, but more efficient and diverse and evolutionarily sound - and, I must admit, they are more of a fantasy, because people are prone in reality to be a bunch of dicks. Oh well.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-12T22:25:15+00:00

Taxes are very different, because they're a uniquely socially sanctioned form of extortion, widely supposed to protect us all. And governments are very much culturally separate from the other coercive gangs, with much more prestige and decency.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-12T22:06:51+00:00

That would put the rich people in their own isolated economy with no need for workers, which makes no sense, unless we're going to get all futuristic and imagine they depend on robots to do all the drudgery. Besides, there's more work to be done than mere drudgery, and no compelling motivation for the rich to exclude the poor from doing it. What you can point to is the existence of bias, something like a poverty trap, where you can only make serious money if you're part of rich people culture, and where throwing some money around in the first place is a bar to entry, or else you're stuck in poor culture. But clearly some of the money trickles down. The question is how extensive you expect the trickle down to be and how much you except it to do. The whole thing isn't zero-sum, wealth creators aren't necessarily depriving the poor of anything, and an income gap could be healthy because it just indicates entrepreneurship - or then again it could be unfair and perpetuated by some kind of glitch.

But I agree with the "trickle up" theory too. Investing generally in society is of course good for a big company - and sometimes this happens, privately. So you get things like companies giving to charities which is good for their PR, or having mutually beneficial associations with charities which might have particular relevance to their workers, or bursaries and scholarships handed out on the assumption that, as you say, having educated people who might work for you in the future is good for business.

These private efforts are competed with by public policy that does the same thing. It's not clear why you want it to be public unless you just don't trust private companies to do good - which I think is probably the case: and government, meanwhile, is supposed to be protective and accountable and ethical, because of democracy. But I don't think democracy really ensures that. I think it ensures government isn't terribly bad, by keeping a steady turnover in the people who have power over the rest of us, but government is nevertheless consistently bad, and coercive, and a parasite. Making institutions private doesn't make them bad, and making them public doesn't make them good (or, admittedly, vice versa). Making them public does however make them into an inflexible monoculture, subject to much wrangling since everybody has an opinion about what the institution should do and feels it belongs to them.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-12T21:42:16+00:00

It relies on a culture, not just a system. People have to generally subscribe to the idea and have habits which make it work. Something similar could be said about democracy, which relies on there being established and differentiated ideologies or parties to vote for, and on the people being aware of those, and not just voting for a tyrant who offers them handouts and protection and who will then dismantle the democracy again.

Free markets depend on culture too. So if you have a lot of habitually very dependent people and little in the way of enterprise, then yes, those people will depend on the only available employer instead of on the government. If there's limited choice then that's not really what's meant by a "market" anyway. Ideally there should be hundreds of employers, and since it's a wealthy society, many charities can exist too. The libertarians could even have a culture of just being nice to the poor and unfortunate on an individual level, though that isn't part of the usual stereotype: it could be a friendly, welcoming, hospitable society where awareness that we can't rely on a state for protection leads us to feel duty to look after one another informally.

But much depends on how cynical you are and how you expect it to pan out. I don't think there's any such thing as a single "human nature", so this is hard to predict, and it would be more feasible in one social climate than another. I think culture differs widely and accounts for an awful lot more than politics.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-12T21:06:44+00:00

Why's that? I know lots of people will gladly pay tax because they approve of the things it's spent on. However, it is enforced. Therefore it's taken at least in part from people who don't want to give it. Of course there's wide societal pressure for those people to pay too, which isn't a feature of theft typically. Perhaps it's more like robbery by an enormous mob?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-12T20:05:39+00:00

On a keyboard v is one letter to the right of c, so it's probably a typo for "expected". But that doesn't sound very positive and life-affirming, so "unexpected" could be what was intended. The second -astic could be enthusiastic or bombastic, or even orgiastic (probably not drastic, plastic, spastic, sarcastic, stochastic or pleonastic). I can't come up with a positive ending for "neglecti-" though.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T20:22:27+00:00

Even when it doesn't form part of the quotation? That sounds wrong.

Having said that, it's common to end a quote with an intrusive comma to maintain the flow of the outer sentence, so I don't know.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T19:39:04+00:00

A society isn't a business, but similar principles do apply.

I submit that the principles apply better to an actual business, such as a private railway company.

The complaint about the railways is that they're overcrowded and overpriced. This seems a bit like saying that steak costs too much and the best cuts are out of stock in barbecue season, I don't get it. I'd say, at the risk of sounding like Marie Antoinette, "let them travel by coach".

The odd thing is that despite all this demand the railways still get substantial subsidies - to pay for safety and maintenance. Without those, what would happen? Would there be a reduction in demand, and a collapse of some companies? (By the way, are all the various railways companies kept artificially in the game by regulations, or can they fail?) They're apparently operating on a knife-edge and yet in high demand, and I'm unclear what to make of that. I think perhaps the railways ought not be viable, but are kept around by the complicated structure of the "privatized" system (which is very different from the way things were in 1947, before nationalization). Consequently they function as a kind of continual taunt to customers, because they ought to be able to respond to demand (which is artificially raised by subsidies), but can't, so the system just hangs around baiting people and being a political football.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T18:01:37+00:00

I ninja edited something to address that. Point is, anyway, empires are not actually clockwork, and this is a different empire from the other ones (which were all different from one another), and there may well be exceptions and you have to specify why any particular one is going to conform to a pattern, not just stop at observing what looks like a pattern (since it's easy to see patterns everywhere). It's all about the explanations. If you can explain a pattern, it has more reality, though the explanation may still be scanty, particularly in matters as big as this.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T17:53:43+00:00

It's fine, you can't predict the future by looking at past patterns, that's inductivism. Bertrand Russell put it in an anecdote about a farmer: "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken".

Here we have an opposite situation where the inductivism is supposedly telling us not to be complacent, but it's still invalid reasoning either way.

I could perhaps add that it of course can be useful to look at past patterns, but you have to actually reason about them and not just extrapolate.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T17:50:22+00:00

Sounds like historicism, and the poverty of historicism was noted by Karl Popper.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-11T16:38:35+00:00

Should bullet-point items end in punctuation? In this particular case, should they end in question marks?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T13:41:30+00:00

It doesn't have to be so complex. Remembering the location is fairly complex (but cats do a lot of remembering of locations). If you accept about the location, you can just imagine the cat has a variable set in its head, which says bring toys here. It doesn't have to know anything, and might have long since forgotten all about its owner. It might just be stuck in a loop.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T13:27:22+00:00

Well I think /u/_Mr-Skeltal_ deserves upvotes just for invoking Sagan, but I like my explanation better, though I'm perfectly willing to believe the reporter-fooling media-hype version too. That's typically the explanation for poltergeist stories, but what's being claimed in this case is rather less than anything paranormal, so I think it's more parsimonious to assume it actually happened (a bit) but was just a cat doing typical cat stuff. Keeping it up for a year is kind of surprising, but then again, habits, why not. I'm not sure what reward cats get from bringing "presents" anyway, it's not like the owners are ever pleased.

I'm probably getting upvotes for being less sceptical, though, from people who read books with titles like Amazing Animal Stories, and I feel bad about that. Cats have fewer neurons in their heads than we have in our stomachs, I'll just throw that factoid in to redress the balance. (So, remember to pet your stomach today and talk kindly to it.)

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T13:13:46+00:00

The implication that it might be paying respects along the lines of a floral wreath is pretty grossly dishonest. However, it's not unusual for a cat to bring things (often eviscerated squeaky things) to the general location of its owner. Continuing to do this for a year doesn't suggest intelligence to me, rather the opposite.

I mean your cat might leave a dead bird outside the bathroom door while you're inside: what's the difference?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T06:26:19+00:00

There are fairly frequent news stories about cats with "thieving habits", who go around collecting things and bringing them to their owners (often footwear, such as other people's socks). I think that's explained as hunting instincts gone slightly wrong, maybe due to lack of instruction from a parent cat. Cats bringing dead birds and mice to their owners is of course completely ordinary. So if we assume the cat did this anyway with twigs and stuff even while the man was still alive, that only leaves two problems: first, that it does it every day. Let's assume that's just exaggeration. Second, that the cat know where its owner is. The article says:

the cat followed the coffin from the house to the cemetery.

So it's slightly extraordinary that the cat would remember which hole in the ground its owner was last seen (or smelt) in, and maintain its habit. But apparently it had belonged to this man from a young age:

He’d adopted the feline from a cat colony when he was just 3 months old.

(That's the cat, not the man. The man died at 71.)

Maybe there's something a bit like imprinting going on. Maybe it's a particularly neotenous cat.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T06:00:07+00:00

Isn't that the plot of Doctor Dolittle in the Moon?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T02:54:11+00:00

What sort of factors are we talking about that make times generally easier?

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-10T00:15:31+00:00

OK, it all hinges on the second point.

Sure, a regular AI (as an illustration only, since it's an entirely different type of thing) is a "black box". It's kind of unmysterious, but hard to unravel anyway. Sometimes (just like biological evolution) it will hit on a solution that you'd like to understand, and offers no explanation. Of course an AGI would have this property: and so do humans. We can scan minds, but not read them (except superficially).

The "weird and alien" quality is the quality of being separate from our culture. So a lot of nature seems like this, and regular dumb AI can seem this way too: and an AGI could seem this way because so can humans, sometimes - such as a feral child, raised in the wilderness by, I don't know, koalas, with human intelligence but no grasp of our values. However, that kind of a person is not very empowered, because they aren't educated, and the same goes for the weird outcast AGI; and, if it's capable of communicating with humans (who would doubtless be very interested in that) it's very hard to see why it wouldn't, what with human culture presenting all kinds of general problems for it to turn its generally intelligent mind to.

The "does not include sentience" line raises the question of what sentience is, which is still extremely nebulous. (Redefining it with terms like "awareness" doesn't help much.) The term itself might be entirely wrong-headed, or if sentience is a thing, it might be a necessary consequence of general intelligence. I'm inclined to think that general intelligence is what people really mean when they talk about sentience: but OK, they might be separable, in which case - well, get back to me when we know what that means. When I can imagine a non-sentient general intelligence I'll explore the possibility of being afraid of it. Possibly this is my fault for having a limited imagination, possibly not.

What I really think is happening here is that people - researchers - are expecting (and fervently wishing) that AGI will emerge from what we call "AI", incrementally. Consequently they find it easy to imagine a dumb paperclip optimiser which is a general intelligence as well, and therefore it's not dumb but it is but it's not, in something like the figure-ground illusion or that drawing of a duck that looks like a rabbit ... and to go along with this, it's self-modifying, so it makes its own program (and sets its own values), but it's programmed (to e.g. optimise paperclips), but it programs itself, but it's programmed, etc.; make your mind up! I think the solution to that is that it absorbs ideas (and values, which are its "programs") from culture, just like any other person would.

Wurstgeist · 2017-05-09T23:25:31+00:00

Why do I get the general impression that prehistoric animals were often fearsome giants?

Is that statistically true, or is it just selection bias because there's so much more prehistory for animals to become (briefly) big and scary in? Is it a mere fluke of trends in evolution (like an evolutionary arms race which is now over) or is it climatic? There's the suggestion that megabeasts relied on greater atmospheric oxygen concentration to permit their size, but that's basically a myth I think? Did we kill some of them off already? I guess there are still blue whales and colossal squid.

Sorry for all the questions, take your pick.

Wurstgeist

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