I've always found this line of reasoning unconvincing. It's basically a consequentialist argument, but the connection between the desired outcome and the desired course of action is tenuous as best.
To see why, let's imagine you are King Priam of ancient Troy. One of your advisers tells you that in several billion years the Earth will become inhabitable and that the Trojan culture will not survive unless it develops a way to live in the heavens. Meanwhile news of a Greek invasion fleet assembling in Aulis on the Euripus Straight...
The point is that the eventual certainty of extinction has to be weighed against scenarios of more imminent extinction; scenarios you're in a much better position to do something about. We are so far from having the technical means to survive our planet it makes no sense to make that a priority now. And we're not really in much of a better position to deal with the future uninhabitability of the Earth than the ancient Trojans were.
There are better arguments of space exploration; one of which is that science and its engineering spinoffs are now essential for human survival in a way that was not true even a hundred years ago. -- you'll notice that the predicted Malthusian population crisis never materialized. And we are nearing a point where we will be able to handle a number of more imminent civilization-ending phenomena, like asteroid impacts and global pandemics.
But fundamentally science isn't utilitarian; it's an aspect of our cultural evolution that purely as a side effect enables our culture to survive events that would have destroyed our more purely pragmatic predecessors. Things like computers and weather prediction aren't the exclusive product of market forces; they rely on fundamental advances in mathematics and physical science that were undertaken for centuries before they had any practical application.
Yes, but we're not talking about design. We're talking about re-using existing design.
Only a complete fool would try to gin up his own pseudorandom number generator algorithm; you look a good one up in a book. We're not even talking about that here; we're talking about using somebody else's scheme.
Well, the main economic impact of climate change is going to be wealth redistribution. Climate change favors people whose assets are movable; basically if you maintain a diverse asset portfolio and rebalance it at least annually you'll actually make money coming and going. If your assets are fixed -- say a family farm -- or difficult to move -- say an unskilled laborer -- you may end up losing.
When I was a kid my mom use to put this disinfectant on cuts that stung like crazy. Years later I learned that the actual active ingredient didn't sting at all, but the manufacturer added alcohol for the sole purpose of making the stuff hurt: without the sting, people doubted whether the disinfectant was actually doing anything.
There really haven't been any compelling reasons to update Office's UI in the last twenty years. Security fixes? Sure. Updates to help Microsoft pitch whatever products they were using the leverage of the Office monopoly to promote? Yep -- although people would be hacked off about paying for either of those things, even though security is a legitimate need.
So Microsoft added the sting of having to regularly re-learn one of your most used tools, so you know you're getting something new for the upgrade money you send them every few years.
Well, if you're talking about a project that doesn't have enough developers, sure. But I'm quite certain that once you reach a certain size it actually is better to have two competing projects than one larger project with twice the people to manage.
Well, it isn't hard to build a simple circuit that generates randomness from semiconductor junction noise, but pointing a video camera at a lava lamp is even easier and more within the skill set of an average software geek.
That's not the way executive orders work. Executive orders pertain to enforcement of laws that Congress has passed. The thing is in 230 years of legislating there are a lot of laws on the books, which in effect gives the president considerable leeway just by choosing which laws to focus on and why.
As if a city is some kind of natural formation of concrete and greed.
It's the wrong question. "Natural" is no longer sustainable. Human populations at the current level, living what is now considered a middle class lifestyle are unprecedented in the history of the planet.
So what is best isn't necessarily to try to return to a primitive lifestyle of small, isolated villages with stone-age technology. There are still a few native cultures where people live in villages and wear clothes made from wild animal skins, e.g. some Greenland Inuit. But if North Face tried make its jackets out of wild animal skins that would be actually a lot worse than polyester fleece -- an unnatural petroleum-based fiber that can be made from old soda bottles, and eventually could be made indefinitely recyclable.
Likewise imagine treating sewage for a city with a million people in it. It's a massive undertaking, but it doesn't cost much per person to do treatment that takes raw sewage and turns it to something that appears like clean river water. Take that million people and distribute them across a thousand neolithic villages of a thousand people and there's a lot more environment impact.
Like most calamities, it's not an existential threat to the species, but it is an existential threat to populations within the species. And it is potentially a long term threat the underlying assumptions on which our civilization rests.
One of the important things about learning from past experience is understanding the predictive limitations of past experiences. In past technological developments we've been talking about massive productivity improvements. The assumption that there would be no more work stemmed from assuming that the standards of living would remain the same. That assumption was wrong; the average household has as many possessions today as a prince would have had two hundred years ago.
But AI poses a distinctly different possibilty: that in the upcoming decades machines may be able to replace people, not just augment them. This could lead to a version of capitalism that entails very rigid hereditary class distinctions; if you have no capital you may find yourself with no means to obtain it because your labor is now worthless.
It really boils down to a single thing: government power.
Most cryptocurrencies are unique among value-carrying assets in that the government can't control them. But this also means government can't do things that people generally consider legitimate -- say forcing people who stole cash or electronic money to return that money to you.
It's a trade-off that for most people doesn't really make a lot of sense, but for people in businesses that are either illegal or semi-legal (like locally legalized marijuana) it does make sense.
Other symptoms include cold intolerance, inexplicable hunger, weight gain, frequent colds and infections, and the need to self-medicate with coffee to avoid afternoon brain fuzz.
I had all these symptoms, and my doctor ordered a thyroid test which came back negative. He threw up his hands and said I was just getting older. A few years later I saw a respiratory specialist to look into my snoring, which had been getting worse. The sleep study came back with borderline sleep apnea; just on the edge of what was considered normal. Nonetheless he chose to treat me with a CPAP machine, and right from the very first night I used it all my "thyroid" symptoms simply disappeared. I can take or leave coffee; I still drink it because I like it but if I skip a day it doesn't bother me. In about two months I lost twenty pounds without dieting.
Probably best of all is that in the ten years since I've been using the machine I've been sick maybe twice, and those for a very short time. I used to catch everything and it always took me longer to recover than anyone else I knew.
Slipping into physical and mental misery because of chronic sleep deprivation is a bit like being the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pan of water. You don't realize you're feeling miserable because it happens so gradually you re-calibrate your idea of what "normal" feels like. But the thing is to get back on track with sleep takes discipline, something that's much harder to muster if you're sleep deprived. In my case I was lucky because there was a mechanical solution that gave me a leg up on improving my sleep hygiene. If it had been purely a matter of bad habits it would have been a lot harder to fix because I'd have had to fix it with a sleep-deprivation addled brain.
Probably because input is a major limiting factor, particularly in an age where people are doing more and more on their phone. Even a small increment in input ease translates to a large increase in convenience. But on the flip side, even a small bug can be a big frustration.
So the answer is it is sometimes quite important to improve a working bit of code, particularly in a competitive environment, but you really, really have to be sure that you're actually improving it.
Hey, so am I! And you know what, being old means you tend to be miserable a lot of the time. It's a package deal: on one hand life afflicts you with suffering. On the other hand, you get to live.
Being able to take it doesn't make you special; everyone who survives long enough learns to live with whatever it is aging has in store for them, whether it is arthritis, digestive problems, or for a majority of us, disturbed sleep patterns. That doesn't make disrupted sleep normal for younger people, or mean it should be compulsory for everyone.
Now the smart thing to do as you get older is to optimize the time you have left. And that means paying attention to the best evidence we have. You say that your cells don't know what time of day it is? Wrong. Even single-celled eukaryotic organisms have circadian rhythms. So as you get older if you want to minimize your misery you have to get serious about sleep discipline. No late night screen sessions without blue-filtered glasses, regular bedtimes, don't eat or drink to much late at night. Basically all the stupid shit you did when you were a kid because you could get by on six hours of not very good sleep.
As long as we're talking anecdotes, when I got serious about sleep hygiene I saw improvements in my arthritis and Type 2 diabetes sugar control. That makes sense because diabetes and arthritis are both inflammatory diseases, and the evidence is strong linking sleep disruption and a wide variety of inflammatory conditions linked with aging, including cardiovascular diseases and dementia.
It boils down to writing. Shows like The Twilight Zone are the drama equivalent of a short story, but we're in an age of epic, sprawling story arcs in TV. I welcome the idea of a counterbalance to that, but I'm a bit concerned that network suits might be thinking more in terms of a brand or a property.
Getting at the battery doesn't look so bad. Clearly it's not supposed to be user serviceable, but it *is* serviceable without serious risk of damaging the phone.
So is the mortgage interest deduction and the whole government backed secondary mortgage market... depending on your definition of "well-off". Certainly most of the people in the neighborhood I grew up with weren't ever going to benefit from that.
But it was a matter of federal policy that moving people (or at least some people) into homes they owned and having them build equity was good public policy.
The reason electric vehicle subsidies exist isn't to make life nicer for well-heeled consumers; it's to decrease US dependency on foreign oil in the long term. Electricity in the US is produced mainly from domestic sources: natural gas (34% and rising), coal (30% and dropping), nuclear (20%) and renewables (15%).
A policy in the long term of switching to electricity benefits the poor people, not only because the cars will become cheaper and enter the second-hand market, but because it's poor people who largely defend US petroleum sources overseas.
Well, that's a Silicon Valley corporate culture for you. The early game is disruption and the end game is domination, and up to that point you're dominating you're not really expected to turn a profit. In fact Amazon investors are known to complain when Amazon occasionally makes money.
Think Bradley/Chelsea Manning an E-4 specialist who was entrusted with access to an astonishing breadth of sensitive information. Manning was, according to other soldiers, bullied to the point of a nervous breakdown during basic training, and yet even after that they moved him (as she was then) right into training as an intelligence analyst.
Assange cultivated Manning with methods anyone who'd read a LeCarré novel: pick out someone emotionally vulnerable and work to gain their trust.
Somebody's got to handle the grunt work of managing sensitive information, either in the military or private sector; but it's not going to be someone who spent four years at West Point or getting an engineering degree. But just because a job doesn't require *those* particular credentials doesn't mean anyone can or should do it.
The problem isn't that low level people have access to sensitive information; the problem is that organizations are sloppy about hiring people for those positions because they aren't high status jobs.
What you say may be true of smaller pyramids, but the Great Pyramid does have internal passageways and rooms. With 2.5 million cubic meters there's plenty of room.
The medieval castle analogy is apt; to a first approximation the Great Pyramid is solid rock. But you can leave plenty space for a burial chamber and it would still to a first approximation be solid rock.
Nobody is questioning the fact that concrete is a good material from a structural and construction standpoint.
But wood, properly maintained, lasts quite a bit longer than 30 years. The oldest wooden building in the world is 1300 years old, a five-story pagoda in the temple complex of Horyuji in Japan.
There's no question concrete is more durable with less maintenance, and people are working on lower carbon-footprint concrete. Switching to non-carbon energy sources for converting limestone to cement would eliminate most of the carbon footprint of cement, and is probably the best long-term solution.
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I've always found this line of reasoning unconvincing. It's basically a consequentialist argument, but the connection between the desired outcome and the desired course of action is tenuous as best.
To see why, let's imagine you are King Priam of ancient Troy. One of your advisers tells you that in several billion years the Earth will become inhabitable and that the Trojan culture will not survive unless it develops a way to live in the heavens. Meanwhile news of a Greek invasion fleet assembling in Aulis on the Euripus Straight...
The point is that the eventual certainty of extinction has to be weighed against scenarios of more imminent extinction; scenarios you're in a much better position to do something about. We are so far from having the technical means to survive our planet it makes no sense to make that a priority now. And we're not really in much of a better position to deal with the future uninhabitability of the Earth than the ancient Trojans were.
There are better arguments of space exploration; one of which is that science and its engineering spinoffs are now essential for human survival in a way that was not true even a hundred years ago. -- you'll notice that the predicted Malthusian population crisis never materialized. And we are nearing a point where we will be able to handle a number of more imminent civilization-ending phenomena, like asteroid impacts and global pandemics.
But fundamentally science isn't utilitarian; it's an aspect of our cultural evolution that purely as a side effect enables our culture to survive events that would have destroyed our more purely pragmatic predecessors. Things like computers and weather prediction aren't the exclusive product of market forces; they rely on fundamental advances in mathematics and physical science that were undertaken for centuries before they had any practical application.
Yes, but we're not talking about design. We're talking about re-using existing design.
Only a complete fool would try to gin up his own pseudorandom number generator algorithm; you look a good one up in a book. We're not even talking about that here; we're talking about using somebody else's scheme.
Well, the main economic impact of climate change is going to be wealth redistribution. Climate change favors people whose assets are movable; basically if you maintain a diverse asset portfolio and rebalance it at least annually you'll actually make money coming and going. If your assets are fixed -- say a family farm -- or difficult to move -- say an unskilled laborer -- you may end up losing.
When I was a kid my mom use to put this disinfectant on cuts that stung like crazy. Years later I learned that the actual active ingredient didn't sting at all, but the manufacturer added alcohol for the sole purpose of making the stuff hurt: without the sting, people doubted whether the disinfectant was actually doing anything.
There really haven't been any compelling reasons to update Office's UI in the last twenty years. Security fixes? Sure. Updates to help Microsoft pitch whatever products they were using the leverage of the Office monopoly to promote? Yep -- although people would be hacked off about paying for either of those things, even though security is a legitimate need.
So Microsoft added the sting of having to regularly re-learn one of your most used tools, so you know you're getting something new for the upgrade money you send them every few years.
Well, if you're talking about a project that doesn't have enough developers, sure. But I'm quite certain that once you reach a certain size it actually is better to have two competing projects than one larger project with twice the people to manage.
Well, it isn't hard to build a simple circuit that generates randomness from semiconductor junction noise, but pointing a video camera at a lava lamp is even easier and more within the skill set of an average software geek.
That's not the way executive orders work. Executive orders pertain to enforcement of laws that Congress has passed. The thing is in 230 years of legislating there are a lot of laws on the books, which in effect gives the president considerable leeway just by choosing which laws to focus on and why.
Well, most people's idea of "fair" is pretty subjective, but what makes you think signing on wouldn't benefit us?
As if a city is some kind of natural formation of concrete and greed.
It's the wrong question. "Natural" is no longer sustainable. Human populations at the current level, living what is now considered a middle class lifestyle are unprecedented in the history of the planet.
So what is best isn't necessarily to try to return to a primitive lifestyle of small, isolated villages with stone-age technology. There are still a few native cultures where people live in villages and wear clothes made from wild animal skins, e.g. some Greenland Inuit. But if North Face tried make its jackets out of wild animal skins that would be actually a lot worse than polyester fleece -- an unnatural petroleum-based fiber that can be made from old soda bottles, and eventually could be made indefinitely recyclable.
Likewise imagine treating sewage for a city with a million people in it. It's a massive undertaking, but it doesn't cost much per person to do treatment that takes raw sewage and turns it to something that appears like clean river water. Take that million people and distribute them across a thousand neolithic villages of a thousand people and there's a lot more environment impact.
AI is bull shit.
Like most calamities, it's not an existential threat to the species, but it is an existential threat to populations within the species. And it is potentially a long term threat the underlying assumptions on which our civilization rests.
One of the important things about learning from past experience is understanding the predictive limitations of past experiences. In past technological developments we've been talking about massive productivity improvements. The assumption that there would be no more work stemmed from assuming that the standards of living would remain the same. That assumption was wrong; the average household has as many possessions today as a prince would have had two hundred years ago.
But AI poses a distinctly different possibilty: that in the upcoming decades machines may be able to replace people, not just augment them. This could lead to a version of capitalism that entails very rigid hereditary class distinctions; if you have no capital you may find yourself with no means to obtain it because your labor is now worthless.
It really boils down to a single thing: government power.
Most cryptocurrencies are unique among value-carrying assets in that the government can't control them. But this also means government can't do things that people generally consider legitimate -- say forcing people who stole cash or electronic money to return that money to you.
It's a trade-off that for most people doesn't really make a lot of sense, but for people in businesses that are either illegal or semi-legal (like locally legalized marijuana) it does make sense.
Other symptoms include cold intolerance, inexplicable hunger, weight gain, frequent colds and infections, and the need to self-medicate with coffee to avoid afternoon brain fuzz.
I had all these symptoms, and my doctor ordered a thyroid test which came back negative. He threw up his hands and said I was just getting older. A few years later I saw a respiratory specialist to look into my snoring, which had been getting worse. The sleep study came back with borderline sleep apnea; just on the edge of what was considered normal. Nonetheless he chose to treat me with a CPAP machine, and right from the very first night I used it all my "thyroid" symptoms simply disappeared. I can take or leave coffee; I still drink it because I like it but if I skip a day it doesn't bother me. In about two months I lost twenty pounds without dieting.
Probably best of all is that in the ten years since I've been using the machine I've been sick maybe twice, and those for a very short time. I used to catch everything and it always took me longer to recover than anyone else I knew.
Slipping into physical and mental misery because of chronic sleep deprivation is a bit like being the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pan of water. You don't realize you're feeling miserable because it happens so gradually you re-calibrate your idea of what "normal" feels like. But the thing is to get back on track with sleep takes discipline, something that's much harder to muster if you're sleep deprived. In my case I was lucky because there was a mechanical solution that gave me a leg up on improving my sleep hygiene. If it had been purely a matter of bad habits it would have been a lot harder to fix because I'd have had to fix it with a sleep-deprivation addled brain.
Sure, in the long run everything's doomed.
That doesn't mean that when things go away nothing of value was lost.
Conservation is the most conservative of the liberal positions, if you think about it.
Probably because input is a major limiting factor, particularly in an age where people are doing more and more on their phone. Even a small increment in input ease translates to a large increase in convenience. But on the flip side, even a small bug can be a big frustration.
So the answer is it is sometimes quite important to improve a working bit of code, particularly in a competitive environment, but you really, really have to be sure that you're actually improving it.
I'm old.
Hey, so am I! And you know what, being old means you tend to be miserable a lot of the time. It's a package deal: on one hand life afflicts you with suffering. On the other hand, you get to live.
Being able to take it doesn't make you special; everyone who survives long enough learns to live with whatever it is aging has in store for them, whether it is arthritis, digestive problems, or for a majority of us, disturbed sleep patterns. That doesn't make disrupted sleep normal for younger people, or mean it should be compulsory for everyone.
Now the smart thing to do as you get older is to optimize the time you have left. And that means paying attention to the best evidence we have. You say that your cells don't know what time of day it is? Wrong. Even single-celled eukaryotic organisms have circadian rhythms. So as you get older if you want to minimize your misery you have to get serious about sleep discipline. No late night screen sessions without blue-filtered glasses, regular bedtimes, don't eat or drink to much late at night. Basically all the stupid shit you did when you were a kid because you could get by on six hours of not very good sleep.
As long as we're talking anecdotes, when I got serious about sleep hygiene I saw improvements in my arthritis and Type 2 diabetes sugar control. That makes sense because diabetes and arthritis are both inflammatory diseases, and the evidence is strong linking sleep disruption and a wide variety of inflammatory conditions linked with aging, including cardiovascular diseases and dementia.
Wait, so you lie about yourself in your social media feeds?
I'm shocked, shocked to find that deceptive self-representation is going on here!
It boils down to writing. Shows like The Twilight Zone are the drama equivalent of a short story, but we're in an age of epic, sprawling story arcs in TV. I welcome the idea of a counterbalance to that, but I'm a bit concerned that network suits might be thinking more in terms of a brand or a property.
Getting at the battery doesn't look so bad. Clearly it's not supposed to be user serviceable, but it *is* serviceable without serious risk of damaging the phone.
So is the mortgage interest deduction and the whole government backed secondary mortgage market ... depending on your definition of "well-off". Certainly most of the people in the neighborhood I grew up with weren't ever going to benefit from that.
But it was a matter of federal policy that moving people (or at least some people) into homes they owned and having them build equity was good public policy.
The reason electric vehicle subsidies exist isn't to make life nicer for well-heeled consumers; it's to decrease US dependency on foreign oil in the long term. Electricity in the US is produced mainly from domestic sources: natural gas (34% and rising), coal (30% and dropping), nuclear (20%) and renewables (15%).
A policy in the long term of switching to electricity benefits the poor people, not only because the cars will become cheaper and enter the second-hand market, but because it's poor people who largely defend US petroleum sources overseas.
Well, that's a Silicon Valley corporate culture for you. The early game is disruption and the end game is domination, and up to that point you're dominating you're not really expected to turn a profit. In fact Amazon investors are known to complain when Amazon occasionally makes money.
Think Bradley/Chelsea Manning an E-4 specialist who was entrusted with access to an astonishing breadth of sensitive information. Manning was, according to other soldiers, bullied to the point of a nervous breakdown during basic training, and yet even after that they moved him (as she was then) right into training as an intelligence analyst.
Assange cultivated Manning with methods anyone who'd read a LeCarré novel: pick out someone emotionally vulnerable and work to gain their trust.
Somebody's got to handle the grunt work of managing sensitive information, either in the military or private sector; but it's not going to be someone who spent four years at West Point or getting an engineering degree. But just because a job doesn't require *those* particular credentials doesn't mean anyone can or should do it.
The problem isn't that low level people have access to sensitive information; the problem is that organizations are sloppy about hiring people for those positions because they aren't high status jobs.
What you say may be true of smaller pyramids, but the Great Pyramid does have internal passageways and rooms. With 2.5 million cubic meters there's plenty of room.
The medieval castle analogy is apt; to a first approximation the Great Pyramid is solid rock. But you can leave plenty space for a burial chamber and it would still to a first approximation be solid rock.
Nobody is questioning the fact that concrete is a good material from a structural and construction standpoint.
But wood, properly maintained, lasts quite a bit longer than 30 years. The oldest wooden building in the world is 1300 years old, a five-story pagoda in the temple complex of Horyuji in Japan.
There's no question concrete is more durable with less maintenance, and people are working on lower carbon-footprint concrete. Switching to non-carbon energy sources for converting limestone to cement would eliminate most of the carbon footprint of cement, and is probably the best long-term solution.