I'm glad to see money thrown at philosophical problems but virtually every person who has ever studied this problem in a rigorous and intellectually honest way has concluded that it is impossible to prove whether or not we are in a simulation. It is also impossible to conclude how such a system might work even if we are in it. How can anybody propose a theory of how we might exit a simulation about which we know nothing?
There is no difference in terms of evidence between the "brains in a vat" theory and the "evil demon theory (that reality is the manipulation of the senses by a demon) because if our senses cannot be trusted then we cannot know anything. This is what Cogito Ergo Sum is about, but I would argue that even that goes too far. The only thing that can truly be proven is that something exists which produces something that looks like my consciousness. Unfortunately there isn't much space between accepting that and what you get if you allow a provisional acceptence of sense data in. In order to seriously consider what we might do to exit a simulation we have to find a consistent set of rules to follow about logic and evidence which doesn't depend on sense data Somebody is going to say "mathematics!" at this point but don't forget that mathematics is an arbitrary system which we developed. Our sense data has told us that this system has descriptive predictive power. If sense data goes away then we can no longer make that assumption.
I have no problem with people getting a budget to play around with these ideas. I would however bet everything I owned that they don't get anywhere (and no I will not give you a prize for noticing why that would be a really good deal for me).
The issue there was not whether or not it was possible, simply whether or not Apple would do it for the FBI. Buissnesses like money, access to your personal information helps them to make money, digital devices give them access to your personal information, sometimes you may not like the way that they make money using your personal information. Please tell me which of those statements is untrue.
That thing that anti-government-funded healthcare people always misquote about how you can control people through healthcare...this is that fear made real. Forget all the marketing bollocks, the endgame for this is that both Aetna and Apple have real time access to information about your health. It is absolutely possible for them to use this data malliciously and legally.
This is all terrifying and I am find the fact that people will fall for it troubling.
You aren't saying much that I disagree with (I hate push mowers). In fact, I am a proponent of the safety razor for precisely the reasons that you cited. There is much to the fact that the push to serve a large population has led to lower quality goods. However, I still think that people are better off. You're right, nobody can afford grandpa's old push mower. However, not everybody could afford it when he bought it and there were fewer goods competing for his dollars. Our disposable society is balanced by a wider range of options. The really high quality versions still exist of course, but because there is cheaper competition those prices will nessecarily go up.
The end result is that a whole bunch of people lower down can afford goods and services that significantly improve there lives, but the versions available to people in the middle are driven down in quality. The benefit for the people in the middle is that they have more options because there is more competition within the range that they can afford. That tradeoff is not always worth it to the middle class but in my estimation it is good more often than it is bad. Certainly the utilitarian would say it is good because so many poorer citizens have their lives improved so dramatically.
Of course, the people who really come out ahead are the already wealthy but that is a problem with the way that we have organized our economy, not with the notion of larger populations benefiting from distribution of fixed cost.
If I may split a hair, trade within large populations should not be confused with international trade. The general principle of a large population allows for increased specialization and efficiency benefiting everybody. The practical application of global trade in our current system is another matter and I agree entirely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That said, if we discount the world's absolute poorest people (which I would not do as a rule) I don't think it is controversial to state that even those who are not well off in our society are still doing much better than they would have at any time in the past. What effect population had on that is harder to say but I don't think that we can seperate the technological and organization growth which made it possible from the change in population if we were to going to play "what if?"
It is rational to care about what happens to those billions of other people because we have moved from being a predominantly warlike species to focusing on trade and research. Those are both areas where a larger, healthier and happier population benefits the individual. If the population were cut in half then we would lose some economies of scale and have to be more selective about the kinds of projects we take on.
I think that this is proven logically by considering a small group. If you are alone then you must expend all of your time gathering food and a single injury or run of bad luck can kill you. If you have a partner, one of you can focus on food as long as the other is healthy, allowing them to instead work on shelter. In a group of 10 the amount of food needed goes up but the amount of food wasted goes down as does your resitance to changing fortune. Less critical projects like fire and weather protection can be completed more reliably because you are more likely to be able to spare somebody to do them. Move on to 100 people and you can devide your food providers between hunters and farmers, each of whom yields more reliably than a general food gatherer but would never be able to serve as the sole provider of sustenance. All of this ignore the benefits of genetic and social diversity, things which I would argue are more important in our situation.
The only question is whether or not this scales up and I believe that the explosion of great projects, discoveries and luxury goods in the modern world very clearly shows that it does. The American railway could not exist without a large Chinese population for whom the economy had no other particular use. The advances made in elective plastic surgery could be made because the percentage of surgeons we needed to sacrifice to make them was small. We can afford to manufacture computres for the masses because there is a mass to buy them.
In short, humans benefit from the largest sustainable population possible.
But, as mentioned below, it ignores the long tern needs of the vehicle owner. My last car drove back and forth between Central Ontario and Nova Scotia maybe ten times in its 3 year life under my ownership. However, if you were to look at far more than 90 percent of the driving that I did with it you would find exactly 150 km a day on the highway, well within EV range. The cost of renting (flying not an option when I was completely filling a hatchback) would have been prohibitive as well as exceptionally inconvenient.
Then there is the fact that some times I would be arriving home late and leaving only 6 hours later, not as far as I know long enough for a full charge (do that several days in a row and it becomes a problem). Charging in the place that I parked for university was not an option. Oh, then there were those few times a year that the car would have to go to the city, around the city, back home and then to the city and back again for one reason or another...all in a single day. Oooh, and Nova Scotia Power sucks which meant that we lost electricity for meaningful periods a few times, certainly long enough to keep me home.
Now that I have moved to Ontario permanently the problem is different. I don't have electricity anywhere near my car, and I can assure you that fact is extremely irritating. Oh, and we are lucky that we have two cars because I had to do a ton of driving between hotels, airports and attractions in Ottawa and Toronto last month while my girlfriend was able to use the Miata while I was gone. The small "not-for-long highway-journeys" car which we bought instead of a four-door as a luxury. A luxury which, like an EV, has incoveniences that we have judged to be worthwhile. An EV has far more inconveniences and, aside from instant torque, gives back much less for your trouble.
My point here is that we would appear to be an ideal candidate for an electric car on the basis of 95% of our driving. Yet, that 5% would cost so much to replace or be so inconvenient that the claim of this study falls apart. I like the methodology of using energy consumed rather than kilometers covered, and I am surprised that they found an entire 10% of trips not to conform. However, in the real world the internal combustion engine gives people an option which most will use from time to time and which is of tremendous economic and psychological value.
We went through the EV vs ICE (and steam!) decision a century ago and all the same factors were in play. I am not claiming that the picture has not changed in favour of the EV, because it has. However, there is a reason that we went the the complexity and expense of the reciprocating piston engine and we would do well not to ignore that face.
At this point I would like to express my frustration at Tesla's use of the term super charger. Not to be confused with that hundred year old internal combustion engine technology the supercharger...or maybe it was meant to be confused.
Unfortunately we don't always get to choose what gets saved and what gets lost to time. I believe that once something exceeds a certain delta of age and signifigance it is almost always worth restoring and making use of. This fulfills the more nebulous roles of preservation, for example those of providing tangible reminders of history and allowing subtle details to be saved until we happen to find them interesting.
Put another way, consider that other nautical wonder The Great Eastern. I think it lasted 20 years before being scrapped because it was of no further use. If it existed today I believe it would be restored as some kind of hotel/museum and we would be very happy to have it. However, at the time there was no basic instinct to preserve and so now 100 years later it is lost to us. We can only imagine how frigging (in the rigging) huge it was.
Have you looked at the cost of a quality American university education lately? Crippling debt in your 20s is not nessecarily the result of mismanagement. You may call that an investment but it works out to the same thing: huge economic pressure on young people with little to no experience and very limited short-term prospects.
Since these tests were implimented the EPA has made it clear that they are for comparison and not expected to match a given user's real world results. If you look at car ads from the late seventies and early eighties you will see the following sentence in each one: "EPA estimates for comparison only. Your milage may vary with trip length, speed and weather. Actual highway mileage will probably be less."
The EPA tests could probably use an update, but they were designed intelligently to provide useful results that would continue to be of value after unforseen technology was introduced. The Mazda rotary engine cars are a great example of this in action because they are completely unlike anything else and yet the results they get from the EPA are right where we would expect them to be, down around 20 MPG (doesn't include oil of course:p). As much as we have seen issues with hybrids, the differentiation of highway and city tests really does tackle the problem well. I owned a Honda Civic Hybrid which was the subject of a lawsuit about misleading milage ratings and I can tell you that with a light foot (which I don't have) 45 MPG highway is certainly possible to achieve. 40 MPG city is fairly believeable but I didn't do much in-town at the time.
Just to cut you off, yes I know that those are the revised ratings and that the original ratings were higher. That doesn't actually matter because the question is whether or not the numbers are useful for comparison, but in any case we are talking about the tests as they stand now.
He isn't just speculating, he is making a positive claim about the probability. Refuting unfounded claims is a generally useful thing to do because it hones the reasoning of everybody involved and can reveal logical conclusions of our knowledge which we had not previously considered. It is an exercise.
As to the last part, who said that skeptics are closed minded? The only people who say that are people who have just had their core beliefs discounted by reason and evidence.
probably a third of all the philosophy courses I have taken started with Descartes' Meditations, which I think makes it the most basic and read philisophical text of modern times. Elon must (heh) have read it at some point. The takeaway is clear and I have yet to encounter a convincing refutation.
It is impossible to accurately speculate about the nature of an external world which we are not able to percieve. The nature of things in the world as we know it may or may not bear any relation to that "true" external world. We cannot claim to truly "know" anything about that which we can percieve, it is absurd to claim that we have knowledge of that which we don't. Descartes himself tried, and to most readers failed, to rescue our knowledge of the external world.
The point is that claims either that we are or are not in a computer simulation are meaningless because they must always be built enitrely upon assumptions about the claimed "real" world. In this case, there is a further problem that in Elon's world there must be a near infinite regression of simulations because the same logic that he uses to prove that we are in a simulation must apply to the society which created it as well.
Further, he is ignoring the issue of whether or not somebody would WANT to create this simulation. That is another giant assumption. His argument is assumption upon assumption, and his premises are by definition untestable because they are about a world which we cannot even demonstrate the existence of.
Seriously, read Descartes and just replace God with a pantheistic entity. It's one of the best things a person can do for their intellectual development.
Given the limitations of a cell phone for audio, I sure hope that the engineers haven't wasted energy making them emit and detect frequencies outside the true range of human hearing. 18 Khz is still well within audibility for many people.
Me too, though I will be really annoyed if I have to say to pro-cell-phone-cancer people that their hypothesis was correct but their reasoning was flawed. Still, those results are very VERY strange. ClearlyMoreResearchIsNeeded GrantMoneyPlease MyThesisWillBeDoneInAYearISwearThisTime.
I bet you that 50% of Nazi jokes are made by women as well. I make racist, homophobic and sexist jokes. I am in no way any of those things (and no, I am not interested in being told otherwise by a stranger). Those types of jokes and words are funny because we know they are absurd and a bit innapropriate.
This does not mean that racism, homophobia and sexism do not exist. Simply that the only way to identify those attitudes in a person is to discuss what they believe and watch what they do. A study like this only tells us what is happening on the very surface of pop culture. That is interesting in itself, but you must be very careful what you extract from it. As happens so often, these people have started with a conclusion and would have concluded that it was proven no matter what the data said.
I felt the same way. I have an SD -> MicroSD adapter but that isn't great for something that you carry around. For the last few years the best option I have seen for large capacity players had two MicroSD slots and even that wouldn't build playlists across both of them (it also isn't great for syncing).
But uh...I was already over-capacity on that 128, so I don't know how long it will be until I need a 256. If you consider that My parent's started collecting CDs in the mid-90s, this is essentially a 20 year music collection.
I just today received a 200 GB card which has dropped sharply in price over the past month. I had wondered why, and now it seems clear.
Since the death of HDD music devices the capacity of MicroSD has determined their capacity. As somebody who stores their music in FLAC I have had to move music out of my library to fit. The 200 will do for now, but I'm glad to see that there will be an option when I need to upgrade again.
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Does this mean that you are the annoying people who don't respond to emails and have to eventually be called about something that I needed a week ago?
I'm glad to see money thrown at philosophical problems but virtually every person who has ever studied this problem in a rigorous and intellectually honest way has concluded that it is impossible to prove whether or not we are in a simulation. It is also impossible to conclude how such a system might work even if we are in it. How can anybody propose a theory of how we might exit a simulation about which we know nothing?
There is no difference in terms of evidence between the "brains in a vat" theory and the "evil demon theory (that reality is the manipulation of the senses by a demon) because if our senses cannot be trusted then we cannot know anything. This is what Cogito Ergo Sum is about, but I would argue that even that goes too far. The only thing that can truly be proven is that something exists which produces something that looks like my consciousness. Unfortunately there isn't much space between accepting that and what you get if you allow a provisional acceptence of sense data in. In order to seriously consider what we might do to exit a simulation we have to find a consistent set of rules to follow about logic and evidence which doesn't depend on sense data Somebody is going to say "mathematics!" at this point but don't forget that mathematics is an arbitrary system which we developed. Our sense data has told us that this system has descriptive predictive power. If sense data goes away then we can no longer make that assumption.
I have no problem with people getting a budget to play around with these ideas. I would however bet everything I owned that they don't get anywhere (and no I will not give you a prize for noticing why that would be a really good deal for me).
The issue there was not whether or not it was possible, simply whether or not Apple would do it for the FBI. Buissnesses like money, access to your personal information helps them to make money, digital devices give them access to your personal information, sometimes you may not like the way that they make money using your personal information. Please tell me which of those statements is untrue.
It's not paranoia when somebody is out to get you.
That thing that anti-government-funded healthcare people always misquote about how you can control people through healthcare...this is that fear made real. Forget all the marketing bollocks, the endgame for this is that both Aetna and Apple have real time access to information about your health. It is absolutely possible for them to use this data malliciously and legally.
This is all terrifying and I am find the fact that people will fall for it troubling.
You aren't saying much that I disagree with (I hate push mowers). In fact, I am a proponent of the safety razor for precisely the reasons that you cited. There is much to the fact that the push to serve a large population has led to lower quality goods. However, I still think that people are better off. You're right, nobody can afford grandpa's old push mower. However, not everybody could afford it when he bought it and there were fewer goods competing for his dollars. Our disposable society is balanced by a wider range of options. The really high quality versions still exist of course, but because there is cheaper competition those prices will nessecarily go up.
The end result is that a whole bunch of people lower down can afford goods and services that significantly improve there lives, but the versions available to people in the middle are driven down in quality. The benefit for the people in the middle is that they have more options because there is more competition within the range that they can afford. That tradeoff is not always worth it to the middle class but in my estimation it is good more often than it is bad. Certainly the utilitarian would say it is good because so many poorer citizens have their lives improved so dramatically.
Of course, the people who really come out ahead are the already wealthy but that is a problem with the way that we have organized our economy, not with the notion of larger populations benefiting from distribution of fixed cost.
If I may split a hair, trade within large populations should not be confused with international trade. The general principle of a large population allows for increased specialization and efficiency benefiting everybody. The practical application of global trade in our current system is another matter and I agree entirely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That said, if we discount the world's absolute poorest people (which I would not do as a rule) I don't think it is controversial to state that even those who are not well off in our society are still doing much better than they would have at any time in the past. What effect population had on that is harder to say but I don't think that we can seperate the technological and organization growth which made it possible from the change in population if we were to going to play "what if?"
It is rational to care about what happens to those billions of other people because we have moved from being a predominantly warlike species to focusing on trade and research. Those are both areas where a larger, healthier and happier population benefits the individual. If the population were cut in half then we would lose some economies of scale and have to be more selective about the kinds of projects we take on.
I think that this is proven logically by considering a small group. If you are alone then you must expend all of your time gathering food and a single injury or run of bad luck can kill you. If you have a partner, one of you can focus on food as long as the other is healthy, allowing them to instead work on shelter. In a group of 10 the amount of food needed goes up but the amount of food wasted goes down as does your resitance to changing fortune. Less critical projects like fire and weather protection can be completed more reliably because you are more likely to be able to spare somebody to do them. Move on to 100 people and you can devide your food providers between hunters and farmers, each of whom yields more reliably than a general food gatherer but would never be able to serve as the sole provider of sustenance. All of this ignore the benefits of genetic and social diversity, things which I would argue are more important in our situation.
The only question is whether or not this scales up and I believe that the explosion of great projects, discoveries and luxury goods in the modern world very clearly shows that it does. The American railway could not exist without a large Chinese population for whom the economy had no other particular use. The advances made in elective plastic surgery could be made because the percentage of surgeons we needed to sacrifice to make them was small. We can afford to manufacture computres for the masses because there is a mass to buy them.
In short, humans benefit from the largest sustainable population possible.
But, as mentioned below, it ignores the long tern needs of the vehicle owner. My last car drove back and forth between Central Ontario and Nova Scotia maybe ten times in its 3 year life under my ownership. However, if you were to look at far more than 90 percent of the driving that I did with it you would find exactly 150 km a day on the highway, well within EV range. The cost of renting (flying not an option when I was completely filling a hatchback) would have been prohibitive as well as exceptionally inconvenient.
Then there is the fact that some times I would be arriving home late and leaving only 6 hours later, not as far as I know long enough for a full charge (do that several days in a row and it becomes a problem). Charging in the place that I parked for university was not an option. Oh, then there were those few times a year that the car would have to go to the city, around the city, back home and then to the city and back again for one reason or another...all in a single day. Oooh, and Nova Scotia Power sucks which meant that we lost electricity for meaningful periods a few times, certainly long enough to keep me home.
Now that I have moved to Ontario permanently the problem is different. I don't have electricity anywhere near my car, and I can assure you that fact is extremely irritating. Oh, and we are lucky that we have two cars because I had to do a ton of driving between hotels, airports and attractions in Ottawa and Toronto last month while my girlfriend was able to use the Miata while I was gone. The small "not-for-long highway-journeys" car which we bought instead of a four-door as a luxury. A luxury which, like an EV, has incoveniences that we have judged to be worthwhile. An EV has far more inconveniences and, aside from instant torque, gives back much less for your trouble.
My point here is that we would appear to be an ideal candidate for an electric car on the basis of 95% of our driving. Yet, that 5% would cost so much to replace or be so inconvenient that the claim of this study falls apart. I like the methodology of using energy consumed rather than kilometers covered, and I am surprised that they found an entire 10% of trips not to conform. However, in the real world the internal combustion engine gives people an option which most will use from time to time and which is of tremendous economic and psychological value.
We went through the EV vs ICE (and steam!) decision a century ago and all the same factors were in play. I am not claiming that the picture has not changed in favour of the EV, because it has. However, there is a reason that we went the the complexity and expense of the reciprocating piston engine and we would do well not to ignore that face.
At this point I would like to express my frustration at Tesla's use of the term super charger. Not to be confused with that hundred year old internal combustion engine technology the supercharger...or maybe it was meant to be confused.
Unfortunately we don't always get to choose what gets saved and what gets lost to time. I believe that once something exceeds a certain delta of age and signifigance it is almost always worth restoring and making use of. This fulfills the more nebulous roles of preservation, for example those of providing tangible reminders of history and allowing subtle details to be saved until we happen to find them interesting.
Put another way, consider that other nautical wonder The Great Eastern. I think it lasted 20 years before being scrapped because it was of no further use. If it existed today I believe it would be restored as some kind of hotel/museum and we would be very happy to have it. However, at the time there was no basic instinct to preserve and so now 100 years later it is lost to us. We can only imagine how frigging (in the rigging) huge it was.
Oh. Good.
Have you looked at the cost of a quality American university education lately? Crippling debt in your 20s is not nessecarily the result of mismanagement. You may call that an investment but it works out to the same thing: huge economic pressure on young people with little to no experience and very limited short-term prospects.
So those people with 12 kids living in Africa and eating 2 grains of rice a day are just saving for a Mercedes?
Since these tests were implimented the EPA has made it clear that they are for comparison and not expected to match a given user's real world results. If you look at car ads from the late seventies and early eighties you will see the following sentence in each one: "EPA estimates for comparison only. Your milage may vary with trip length, speed and weather. Actual highway mileage will probably be less."
The EPA tests could probably use an update, but they were designed intelligently to provide useful results that would continue to be of value after unforseen technology was introduced. The Mazda rotary engine cars are a great example of this in action because they are completely unlike anything else and yet the results they get from the EPA are right where we would expect them to be, down around 20 MPG (doesn't include oil of course :p). As much as we have seen issues with hybrids, the differentiation of highway and city tests really does tackle the problem well. I owned a Honda Civic Hybrid which was the subject of a lawsuit about misleading milage ratings and I can tell you that with a light foot (which I don't have) 45 MPG highway is certainly possible to achieve. 40 MPG city is fairly believeable but I didn't do much in-town at the time.
Just to cut you off, yes I know that those are the revised ratings and that the original ratings were higher. That doesn't actually matter because the question is whether or not the numbers are useful for comparison, but in any case we are talking about the tests as they stand now.
He isn't just speculating, he is making a positive claim about the probability. Refuting unfounded claims is a generally useful thing to do because it hones the reasoning of everybody involved and can reveal logical conclusions of our knowledge which we had not previously considered. It is an exercise.
As to the last part, who said that skeptics are closed minded? The only people who say that are people who have just had their core beliefs discounted by reason and evidence.
probably a third of all the philosophy courses I have taken started with Descartes' Meditations, which I think makes it the most basic and read philisophical text of modern times. Elon must (heh) have read it at some point. The takeaway is clear and I have yet to encounter a convincing refutation.
It is impossible to accurately speculate about the nature of an external world which we are not able to percieve. The nature of things in the world as we know it may or may not bear any relation to that "true" external world. We cannot claim to truly "know" anything about that which we can percieve, it is absurd to claim that we have knowledge of that which we don't. Descartes himself tried, and to most readers failed, to rescue our knowledge of the external world.
The point is that claims either that we are or are not in a computer simulation are meaningless because they must always be built enitrely upon assumptions about the claimed "real" world. In this case, there is a further problem that in Elon's world there must be a near infinite regression of simulations because the same logic that he uses to prove that we are in a simulation must apply to the society which created it as well.
Further, he is ignoring the issue of whether or not somebody would WANT to create this simulation. That is another giant assumption. His argument is assumption upon assumption, and his premises are by definition untestable because they are about a world which we cannot even demonstrate the existence of.
Seriously, read Descartes and just replace God with a pantheistic entity. It's one of the best things a person can do for their intellectual development.
It's not just you.
Given the limitations of a cell phone for audio, I sure hope that the engineers haven't wasted energy making them emit and detect frequencies outside the true range of human hearing. 18 Khz is still well within audibility for many people.
Me too, though I will be really annoyed if I have to say to pro-cell-phone-cancer people that their hypothesis was correct but their reasoning was flawed. Still, those results are very VERY strange. ClearlyMoreResearchIsNeeded GrantMoneyPlease MyThesisWillBeDoneInAYearISwearThisTime.
I bet you that 50% of Nazi jokes are made by women as well. I make racist, homophobic and sexist jokes. I am in no way any of those things (and no, I am not interested in being told otherwise by a stranger). Those types of jokes and words are funny because we know they are absurd and a bit innapropriate.
This does not mean that racism, homophobia and sexism do not exist. Simply that the only way to identify those attitudes in a person is to discuss what they believe and watch what they do. A study like this only tells us what is happening on the very surface of pop culture. That is interesting in itself, but you must be very careful what you extract from it. As happens so often, these people have started with a conclusion and would have concluded that it was proven no matter what the data said.
That is literally how security on the PS3 worked.
I felt the same way. I have an SD -> MicroSD adapter but that isn't great for something that you carry around. For the last few years the best option I have seen for large capacity players had two MicroSD slots and even that wouldn't build playlists across both of them (it also isn't great for syncing).
But uh...I was already over-capacity on that 128, so I don't know how long it will be until I need a 256. If you consider that My parent's started collecting CDs in the mid-90s, this is essentially a 20 year music collection.
I expect that they were lying. Sandisk and Samsung pour millions into these projects.
I just today received a 200 GB card which has dropped sharply in price over the past month. I had wondered why, and now it seems clear.
Since the death of HDD music devices the capacity of MicroSD has determined their capacity. As somebody who stores their music in FLAC I have had to move music out of my library to fit. The 200 will do for now, but I'm glad to see that there will be an option when I need to upgrade again.