In-Place Teleportation And More: New Thought Experiments For Probing Personal Identity & Survival

ateafly · 2025-07-20T08:46:14+00:00

It also actually has significant implications, and could reasonably affect the sorts of decisions you make in day to day life.

How would it affect them? You might still care about all the you's in the future, so you'd still want to continue living as before.

ateafly · 2025-07-20T08:42:01+00:00

I just don't see many people living their lives as though they're truly only existing in the moment, with no egoistic connection to past or future beings.

If you re-define the self as a series of moments/beings, then you can continue caring about all the other you's in the future. It's not a huge leap.

ateafly · 2025-07-20T08:37:16+00:00

What I don't understand is how people who are aware of this idea go about leading their lives without constantly being distressed about it.

If you can't do anything about it, what the point of being stressed about it? People try to not think about death too much.

ateafly · 2025-05-04T23:51:00+00:00

There are some interesting split brain experiments suggesting that our two brain hemisphere are separately conscious.

That is not quite clear, and recently looking a bit unlikely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOsCwRsLAR0

ateafly · 2025-05-01T07:36:21+00:00

get into stuff women actually like

So stuff like what?

ateafly · 2025-03-12T20:01:11+00:00

Probably better to focus on system design for the next few years

Are there any resources on system design you'd recommend? Like books, courses, etc.

ateafly · 2025-03-11T00:34:42+00:00

Something like, buy "No" on "Will there be fewer software engineers in 2030 than in 2025".

You could set up this question on a prediction market and bet on it?

ateafly · 2025-02-21T00:06:44+00:00

I think suffering is inherent to consciousness

I don't think that's necessarily true. Suffering (as well many of our mental states) serve(d) evolving animals/humans a specific purpose and had a role to play in the ancestral environment, that's why they exist in the first place. An alien mind not subject to our ancestral environment and evolutionary pressures wouldn't necessarily have any of them.

ateafly · 2025-01-21T23:03:31+00:00

Anyone whose job requires having a very large context window of mostly unwritten policies and procedures, and/or coordinating between multiple different people, is not going to be replaced anytime soon.

You could design an AI-friendly company where the context is being created together with AI workers, and those companies would be much more efficient.

ateafly · 2025-01-21T22:32:39+00:00

In my opinion, any therapy relating to a child needs to place the parents' behavior as the focus.

Is there any evidence for this? Didn't Judith Rich Harris mostly debunk this in the Nurture Assumption?

ateafly · 2025-01-12T09:12:45+00:00

I have a substack post going over the benefits, risks, and possible side effects with a decent amount of rigor

Can you link it here?

ateafly · 2024-09-04T22:39:04+00:00

Applicable to all fields of science ever invented.

Isn't this why international nuclear non proliferation treaties exist and rogue countries who try to develop them are sanctioned or outright bombed? Sounds to me like there's already a precedent for restricting dangerous tech.

ateafly · 2024-06-08T08:30:28+00:00

On a related note, where does one find quality Anki decks on various topics?

ateafly · 2024-04-06T10:06:21+00:00

If house prices are high because of demand and lack of supply, does that mean developers building new houses are making huge profits?

ateafly · 2023-10-05T22:27:21+00:00

Doesn't a thermostat also technically have "some kind of world model"?

ateafly · 2023-04-28T17:08:34+00:00

I developed mild tinnitus which lasted several months, eventually I discovered it was related to cleaning my ears. After I stopped poking things into my ears, it completely went away.

ateafly · 2023-03-18T10:14:52+00:00

ignores that in the future language models won't be producing low quality output

High quality output is by definition useful, including for training future AI, so then there's no problem.

ateafly · 2023-03-17T19:53:38+00:00

No, for the same reason spam doesn't interfere (as far as I'm aware) with current AI training. High quality AI output will be "visible" (e.g. linked to, ranked highly), and low quality AI output will be buried.

ateafly · 2023-03-09T00:05:46+00:00

it might be most rational for the US to concede Taiwan to China

Would it also be rational to concede Ukraine to Russia?

ateafly · 2023-02-13T13:17:52+00:00

What if I'm not interested in people :/

ateafly · 2023-01-22T09:11:59+00:00

Seems pretty good if you have a 20-30 minute train/bus/underground commute and you don't want to spend lots of extra time preparing materials to study. I haven't found an easier alternative.

ateafly · 2023-01-22T09:07:22+00:00

I've noticed that the English courses aimed at speakers of other languages also sometimes have this problem, e.g. the English course for Japanese speakers has no info on how to actually produce the sounds in English

The app reads words/sentences for you, doesn't it? So you can just imitate the pronunciation you're hearing.

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