The author is obviously some kind of crazy anarchist. Private law system? You mean that all of a sudden people would become customers of multiple legal firms instead of subjects of one big system and will be able to choose laws they like while at the same time not interfering directly with others who chose different laws? You mean that all of a sudden majority would lose its power to dictate minorities how to live their lives and gay people all over the world can start marrying each other simply because they are customers of a different firm by their voluntary choice? I say impossible! We need government. Anyone who says we don't is an anarchist and we all know anarchists are bad for ya.
The strongest argument against private law is that that is how law used to operate, and our ancestors deemed it so unworkable that they invented the system of open public law we know today.
Private law does/did work for nearly all definitions of 'workable'. Heck it was more scalable than the current system of law. In India private law is/was pretty common even until now.
The only real problem with this kind of a set up is, systems by and large become culture centric. And this leads to medieval mindsets. Stuff like banning couples from having falling in love or having a love marriage, or laws against polygamy, support for child marriage, unfair treatment to widows, honor killings ... stuff like that.
Where does this leave us? Despite all their flaws(basically their own definitions of morality and thereby their own laws based on that) these sort of systems are the easiest and cheapest way of resolving a dispute with a very high rate of acceptable justice. Which continues be the case in many places in India today.
Well, then maybe we could argue the same about religion: atheism and then pantheism didn't really work, so we invented organized religions with one major god. Relying on the wisdom of ancestors is a sure way to avoid growth and to not acquire knowledge, and it is precisely this trait in people through which they are usually manipulated.
Religion didn't always exist. In fact, I would guess that it didn't for the majority of human history, although it's ultimately speculation on both of our parts.
Religion (by way of magical thinking) is one of the things that defines humanity. We have evidence of it even in Neanderthal sites, given that we find them in caves, with their feet pointed east more often than not, with flower pollen on them in places in caves where we don't otherwise find flower pollen.
Well, I guess it depends on how broadly you want to define religion. A handful of traditional and possibly superstitious behaviors and cave paintings of the big, scary blob of fire in the sky could qualify, but I think we were talking about a much more complex set of beliefs and value systems involving omnipotent, omniscient being(s).
Were the seeds of religion sown in primitive peoples observations of and attempts to reckon with all the scary shit they would witness in the natural world? Absolutely. But any "definitive" statements on pre-historical belief systems are probably anthropological hearsay, possibly weighted by our current knowledge of and feelings towards religion. What was going on back then could have been just slightly more complex than a dog hiding under the bed when there's thunder.
And keep in mind, we're talking about a 200,000 year run up to recorded history. However, I'm sure there was a more complex oral tradition of storytelling and mythmaking that was starting to develop before the Sumerians took off.
You are making an assumtion that movement of society from atheism and pantheism towards religions was unworkable for the same reasons as polycentric law. It is equally possible that there were other reasons for religions to develop. Like power and all.
Weherein we have some evidence that such was not the case with moving towards public law.
Whether or not something is "workable" depends entirely on what it is you want it to do. The questions are which of our ancestors deemed polycentric law "unworkable", and why. The fact that something was done doesn't mean it was done for the right reason, or that it had, on the whole, beneficial effects.
If you said "crazy statist" I could maybe agree, since statism is kind of crazy in my opinion, but I think attacking any ideas by disqualifying with adjectives like crazy is extremely narrow-minded and leads to poor results, even if you're talking about statists.
Just because you've never heard of something, don't be so immature to dismiss it without thinking it through... you expose yourself as ignorant of the hard work of many intelligent people that have come before you.
Since we're now on the subject. I notice that there seems to be a very high turnover of young people from the various forms of anarchism as they get older.
Would anybody who fits this description like to elaborate on why that happened? Found a convincing argument? General disillusionment with humanity?
I was an anarcho-capitalist for awhile. I thought it was the perfect system. There would be absolutely no incentives to do bad things. Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.
But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases like natural monopolies where normal market mechanisms don't lead to the best outcome, and then there is just enforcing altruism (like looking out for animal rights or children's rights, who couldn't buy legal services under this system, or redistributing income so you don't end up with people starving to death or in poverty.)
Of course the current system we have is so far from a perfect system it makes these problems seem trivial. But at least it seems ok and generally stable, whereas what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist world is a complete unknown.
There still might be a near-perfect system. Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets for making policy decisions might be a huge improvement, at least in some areas, and a semi-private legal system for some things might work. And I think libertarian policies in general are better.
> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.
And we call that system a government.
Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.
Either anarchy has never happened or it's the only thing that happens. I don't know which is more damaging to the case of doctrinaire capital-A Anarchists.
> a semi-private legal system for some things might work
> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.
And we call that system a government.
The problem here is the foolish tendency of English speaking people to use "government" for everything, when we should distinguish the government from the State.
Anarchists are obviously not opposed to having systems of government, but they are opposed to the state (and governments as their executive bodies), and in general to the concentration of power, authoritarianism and repression that emerge from it.
"Governments", as in executive bodies, yes. "Governments", and in systems of government, definitively not. There are multitudes of non-hierarchical, stateless mechanisms that arise from communities and societies trying to solve a cooperation problem.
Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.
But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.
It's not really a government as you can't (ideally) force people to participate even if they don't want to (or if you do it's through tamer methods like boycotts or whatever rather than threat of imprisonment.) And it doesn't have to be a central organization. It sounds like a minor difference but it's really not.
Importantly most things that are done by government would be done completely differently and by private organizations. The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way. They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it. But you could still have a non-profit with elected officials and all that, if it's really better and can compete on a free market.
Again, I'm no longer certain this is the best system as there really are things where a free market doesn't lead to the best outcome and participation has to be forced (like public goods.) But there are ways of funding public goods without a government that might work, and most of what government currently does doesn't fit in that category anyways.
First, boycotts are a use of force. Everyone ganging up on someone to boycott them (shunning, as it used to be called, or making them an outlaw) is one of the oldest, cruelest forms of punishment, and we're well shut of it now. Putting someone in prison is one thing; kicking them out of society entirely is another.
> The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way.
Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
> They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it.
Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
A boycott is not the same as ostracism; nobody said anything about kicking people out of society.
Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is not some country who had an anarchist society; it's a country which had a state and a government, and where a civil war broke out, eliminating all possibility of a stable society regardless of its political system.
Judging anarchism by the state of Somalia makes even less sense than judging non-anarchist societies by the actions of the Third Reich.
>First, boycotts are a use of force. Everyone ganging up on someone to boycott them (shunning, as it used to be called, or making them an outlaw) is one of the oldest, cruelest forms of punishment, and we're well shut of it now. Putting someone in prison is one thing; kicking them out of society entirely is another.
In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.
>Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything. The same could be said for democracy until 200 years ago. It took a long time even after the first democracy was established for the idea to spread, and the creation of the US itself took a war and a few centuries of cultural evolution before that to get to that point.
The point is that you can't just say "well if it's a perfect system why has no one done it before?" Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people, how do you expect them to form perfect anarcho-capitalist societies overnight?
>Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
> In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.
But it has happened in the past. Never underestimate the power of groupthink to do horrible things to minorities.
> Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything.
No better place, then. Nothing for the anarchist utopia to compete with.
> Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people
No, it isn't. Not from what I've seen both online and off.
> People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
> Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.
Which are these "things which have to be done" that only a government could take care of?
Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
One thing is for sure, we're not ready yet for anything like that, since many necessary services and resources are "scarse", and scarsity makes people fight for their survival with brutal results. But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
> Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals?
Both.
> I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Without any state-established law there would be no criminals, just the much broader category of people that other people don't like. Quite arguably, the whole purpose of state-established law is to limit the scope and severity of punishment compared to what happens in the absence of central authority, and to provide clear rules. This aids in deterrence, since, to the extent that antisocial behavior is rational and deterrable, there needs not merely be an expectation of punishment if you do 'wrong', but a clear idea of what 'wrong' is in the context, and a clear expectation that punishment will not be imposed if you do not do 'wrong'.
Certainly, one can argue that modern states are less than ideal in each aspect of this, but that's very different than arguing that they are worse than the absence of a state would be.
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
The problem here isn't that there would be no medical practitioners apart from a mandate to provide them (after all, most states that provide medical services don't compel people to become doctors and nurses), but that medical services lack features that make it the kind of service modeled well by econ 101 rational choice assumptions, with (among other things) a very high and uncorrectable cost of bad (or even merely incompetent) suppliers.
> But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
We may be reducing the resource costs of some goods and services, but that doesn't solve scarcity (it reduces the opportunity cost of some while increasing the opportunity cost of others, since it is unequal progress, and opportunity cost is what else you could have gotten for the resources you put into getting what you chose.)
Suggesting that we are "solving scarcity" demonstrates a lack of understanding of what "scarcity" means.
> Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Sure, criminals would be punished, but in a much more arbitrary manner. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
Yes they would, but as people get richer they start to want there to be standards, at which point you need some kind of group to codify and enforce those standards. Over time, these thousands of different groups that are setting rules for their own little domains end up being grouped together, for a range of reasons, and then you have a dreaded 'government'.
Formality offers protection. In all the cases I can think of, weaker government corresponds to an increase in either the arbitrariness or the corruption of justice. This applies both to criminal justice and to the wider sense of an equitable (not equal) distribution of resources.
As they get older, they accumulate stuff and realize the government's job in protecting said stuff. It's easy to be an idealist (in any direction) when you don't have to sacrifice anything for it.
At some point in your life you have your guitar, backpack and whatever you have on you. You have no attachments, nothing to loose, nothing to fight for. You can think freely, you have no need to lie and pretend. You can express your emotions without filters.
And you build your world on that, you see world might work well like that.
Then you get your job, car, house, 2 saplings, wife. You have to defend it, system that supports it and everything that holds it together.
Current system is very well alive, self replicating and with strong immunity, it is living intelligent being, completely different from human thinking and not really communicable in direct way.
PSA: Whenever you're going to use sarcasm on the Internet, don't. Seriously, just don't. Write a straight comment instead. As demonstrated here, when you don't have tone of voice as a cue, sarcasm is just not reliably recognizable.
While there are level-headed anarchists (e.g. William Godwin), Rothbard is a terrible example. He was an anti-semite and thought children were property. He wrote a letter to Ayn Rand about his serious psychological problems.
In my opinion, private law system is pretty much anarchism, since people tend to aggregate with similarly-minded people that share the same values and rules: rules and leadership tend to form spontaneously in human groups (since we actually are tribal animals).
I have the gut feeling that as we eliminate scarcity through technology a real anarchist system is possible. I just miss enough theory to back it up.
Does anyone know any good book/author talking about that?
Not serious theory, but James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear is based on the creation of a new post-scarcity anarchist society, and the meeting between it and the "old society". Spoiler: it's not all hugs and singing Kumbaya.
It's certainly a compelling vision - at least to me - but it's not exactly a political treaty.
Yes, wild ideas except for the "2100" part. The scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been slowing down dramatically in past 50 years or so. Science fiction from 60s and 70s is embarrassingly filled with predictions such as we would have colonies in space, computers indistinguishable from humans, flying cars on street, humankind without poverty and end of cancer by 2020. How close are we? If we go back in time to meet all these writers from 60s & 70s, the major breakthroughs we would have to show for are likes of Instagram and Angry Birds. Yes, I'm downplaying all these increase in computing power and better algorithms in search etc but guess what? Moors law is dead as we know it and search is still keywords in a textbox. To me it looks like we probably had 10 fold increase in human productivity during past 50 years but major portion of it goes towards "enhancing shareholder value" or wars rather than advancing science and technology. So unless this changes somehow, all the magic that can happen is still pretty far in distant, probably much beyond 2100.
But how much did the internet actually improve people's lives or change things? The major changes of our time are nowhere near as major as the ones of the last two centuries. Industrialization and mass production and trains and electricity, and massive population growth, and crazy amounts of scientific progress.
Almost all of the major improvements happened early on in the century, not so much in recent times. All the low hanging fruit has been picked. There is never again going to be a single technology that improves people's lives as much as mass adoption of electricity did (short of a singularity at least.) More efficient or even self driving cars compared to today's cars, will be nothing compared to what cars were for horses and trains. No single medical technology is going to have as big of an impact as antibiotics did. Cell phones are not nearly as big of an improvement as the first phones were.
Did the world really change and improve as much between 1970 and now as it did between 1930 and 1970? Did it change as much then as between 1890 and 1930?
Seriously? The way I see it, containers made transport of goods more efficient. Without containers, it was still possible to have all the goods, may be at higher prices, but possible.
The scientific institution has stopped really paying that much attention to space (or computation, in relative terms), and has started paying attention to biotech and materials science instead. Not a one of those science-fiction authors thought to suggest "get your DNA sequenced for $100" in their wildest flights of fancy.
Also,
> search is still keywords in a textbox
what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" part of search now doesn't seem to be anything to do with indexing information usefully, but rather getting people to be able to clearly communicate (and before even that, clearly decide) what they're looking for.
Current search would be pretty embarrassing to future generation as much as it is awesome to current generation. Right now you can find a page only if that page contains all keywords in it. In some cases, there are band-aids to include popular synonyms and correlated keywords or remove some keywords or suggest alternative keywords (spell check). If you think of it, this is very primitive, pretty much the same stage as baby tryieng to sit up at 6 months.
Let's say you read the book Black List by Brad Thor and you had an awesome memory to remember everything. Your friend won't ask you about this novel by keywords. They will ask you questions like "What is the best way to steal a car?" or "How would you get rid of strangers chasing you?" or "what breed of dogs are very vicious when you signal but very friendly otherwise?". And you would be able to answer those questions, not only by quoting related text but also summarizing and enriching the information. This what the ideal search would look like... pretty much how you can converse with computer on Star Trek. That's why I said current search is just "keywords in a textbox", still a very far thing from making science fiction a reality.
Oh, I see where I was confused; you're not actually talking about "search" here. "Search" is the ML term for, basically, "finding something you previously stored, by using parts of it." Google is a search company. Search problems ultimately boil down to the simulation of an ideal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function generated from all the relevant data ever input. Search is an objective problem, best solved with lots and lots of Big Metal.
This, on the other hand, is recommendation--finding something you don't know you want, by clustering things together and modelling your desires and personality. Amazon and Netflix are recommendation companies. Recommendation problems ultimately "boil down to" a full Bayesian network modelling your own brain, so they can have the right context to answer you. Recommendation is a subjective problem, best solved, probably, with a neural implant or something which can literally "read your mind" to know what you would like the most even if you don't currently "want" anything in particular.
SF from the sixties and seventies is also filled with predictions which were not nearly ambitious enough.
(Two examples that come immediately to mind: I recall one of Heinlein's characters describing something that seemed a lot like a microSD card. It had a capacity of something like a million words. I got the impression that it was quite expensive. And in Neuromancer, "three megabytes of hot RAM" was contraband.)
(I think actually those examples are both from the eighties, but I don't think that's particularly important in this case.)
Kurzweil has been getting it right because his near-term predictions are pretty safe bets, many of them true in some form even in 2000. For examples,
* Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain through both destructive and non-invasive scans.
* Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.
* People can talk to their computer to give commands.
He has crafted his long term predictions such a way that 8 out of 10 are pretty trivial and 2 most likely to go wrong. No wonder he often claims 80% success rate. For example, for 2020 he is predicting trivial stuff like this which has been in works already since he started predicting:
* Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).
* People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet.
* People are able to wirelessly access the Internet at all times from almost anywhere
* Nanotechnology is more capable and is in use for specialized applications, yet it has not yet made it into the mainstream. "Nanoengineered machines" begin to be used in manufacturing.
However his non-trivial predictions are almost guerenteed to be false:
* By 2020, there will be a new World government.
* The basic needs of the underclass are met.
* Most human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge.
* Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.
The point is predicting long term future is not just hard, it's impossible. But there is an expectation from long term future that sets our sense of progress and achievements.
I didn't mean the futuristic almanac style predictions. Kurzweil's main point is that mankind's evolution and abilities are exponential, or that Moore's law is not a special case but rather the norm in scientific evolution. His charts on stuff not related to transistor count do hold up for the near future.
More important than that, in this context, Kurzweil shows that scientific evolution has not stagnated or decelerated, in the last few decades, as the parent comment was proposing. Much to the contrary, the current pace is faster than in the past.
Try this: we don't get alien visitors because space travel is prohibitively expensive. But communication is cheap. So you'd expect the sky to be filled with messages, maximally compressed and/or encrypted, and so indistinguishable from noise: background radiation.
The only catch here is that such messages would be prohibitively costly (power wise) to transmit uniformly in all directions. They would be point to point to reduce the power, required to transmit, and increase privacy.
It's difficult to intercept line of sight communications and it's unlikely we'd fall on the line of sight of two hot spots of intelligent communication in all the vastness of space.
Even if they broadcast, I doubt it would be so completely uniform in all directions through long periods of time so as to appear as background.
They are point to point. There's just so many, billions more than the number of stars (imagine cell phones radiating point to point), and even alien technology can't prevent beam-spread over billions of light years (another assumption).
I like it, but: I guess you're talking about civilizations deliberately communicating with each other. If they don't already know each other, then maximal compression or encryption would prevent them recognising each other's signals, by your argument. If they do, then how did that happen?
By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive.
Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me? All of them?
If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people.
Would it make them smart or just filled with hard coded knowledge? I would expect that in this case the goal would be to create a system that is able to acquire common sense knowledge on its own from a given environment and reason from it. What we might consider as common sense in our daily lives might not be fully applicable in different situations.
I will be your resident biologist tonight (not working in cognition/memory but I will try to make a more general point).
Putting aside the philosophical problems for a moment, the notion that the only relation between a brain and a mind is the pattern of neuronal connections is pretty naive.
The formation and maintenance of memory is controlled at multiple levels: single atoms (ionic gradients determining the polarization of neurons), small chemicals and hormones (e.g. neurotransmitters in the synapses and signalling peptides), DNA (epigenetic control, mainly methylation), proteins (constant synthesis and degradation in the process of memory consolidation and long-term potentiation) and finally cells (pattern of connections between neurons).
I highlight these different levels because they are formed by compounds that are very different from a biological and chemical point of view. You can't just snap-freeze them all in their place. And freezing is the easy part -- how do you thaw a brain and preserve the state of all these components (all of which have different thermodynamic properties)?
Assuming you don't want to thaw it but, as the article suggests, 'scan it' you would have to be able to determine the conformation and activation state of each involved protein and compound, along with all their density gradients in intracellular spaces... Not by 2100, sorry.
Biology is hard because it's all relations, thresholds, gradients and fuzzy logic. To escape this probabilistic haze into a clean world of ones and zeroes -- I read HN.
The links that you provide make o lot of bold, unsubstantiated claims (outright dismissing protein shedding as 'trivial' borders on funny) so I am not sure whether you are agreeing with me or disagreeing. They are also from the 90's and the understanding of the physiological complexity of the brain has changed a bit since then.
Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem.
IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.
It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong.
Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so.
What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much.
So yes, both simulations will be sure they are you (and in a sense, both will be you—if we allow the simulations, we must abandon the idea of there being only one “you” at the moment). The funny thing, these simulations will immediately diverge by obtaining different experiences, and thus can be thought of “forks” of you.
Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person?
I believe you do. In fact I believe you are a different person moment-to-moment. The concept of 'you' is simply a mental convenience. This is exactly why Buddhists deny the 'self.' It's not that you don't exist- it's just that there is no single thing that remains unchanging, and the idea of a 'you' that exists through time is illusory.
I occasionally find myself wondering whether it is the same "me" that wakes up in the morning as falls asleep the night before. So is it really the same instance of my consciousness that boots up in the morning as was shut down the night before?
Not the most productive thing to think about as you fall asleep :-)
Yep. It's a consequence of information entropy. Both start receiving different stimuli or have other subtle differences that make each different like twins. The ethics seem to be that each should have rights equal to exist (run) as egalitarian as any other, regardless of origin. Stopping is deleting is killing.
#2, about health insurance, overlooks a big part of the RAND HIE's findings: people who were sick and poor in the study did have worse health outcomes.
The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]:
"[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods."
The authors speculate about the reasons:
"The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes."
Not that I am aware of. But it is safe to assume that no one doubts the effectiveness of emergency care or most basic procedures in general. However, everything beyond that is likely on average not helpful and might be even harmful.
Also, his idea of increasing taxes will mean that even if his statement were true ("[if] people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy"), a flat increase in drug tax would at best make this effect true on average.
Due to higher taxation, low-income individuals would have even less access to medicine than today. Keeping people away from drugs with prohibitive taxation means starving entire demographics of this component of health care.
So sure, people who have the funds to take excessive amounts of medicine may be "just as healthy." Others would be considerably worse off.
Only if those low-income individuals have to pay the same for their medicine as those with higher incomes.
If the purpose of taxing medicine is to subsidise the provision of medicine to people who couldn't afford it at cost price, then that would give such people greater access.
It's just a bad argument in general...saying that because people spend 30% more when stuff is free (without improved results) means they have twice as much as they need. It doesn't follow, at all.
I have a "science-fictiony" idea that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. The idea is this: If we can see light from planets thousands of light years away, then we can see the past. Once our telescopes are good enough to basically do a "google maps" zoom-in on other planets, we will be able to watche the past on other planets. But then, if we can ever watch our own Earth from a thousand light years away, then we can see what happened in the past. The missing link is for us to be able to travel faster than the speed of light so we can go far enough to view Earth's past.
While not "obvious", I still feel like others have probably thought of this idea. It could make a cool science fiction story.
In Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, they do this with another planet. It was destroyed, and they fly/transport/whatever a camera out so many lightyears from it, so they can see what happened.
Here's an even crazier version: we develop a quantum computer the size of Jupiter with seemingly infinite computational capacity, and "scan" and simulate the earth. Similar to how a sufficiently advanced AI application today could probably take an overview picture of a pool table at any point in a game, and deduce the past shots that had to be taken in order for it to result in it's current state, you might be able to develop a virtual time machine.
That sounds enticing, but I think you could never rewind the state of the Earth without considering the variables external to it. If you couldn't also simulate anything that could alter the course of events, such as exposure to the Sun, I think you'd end up accumulating enough lossy transitions that the simulation would be rendered (ha) worthless in a deterministic sense.
If we consider that only simulating the atoms contained within the Earth is enough to have a perfect understanding of it's state across time, by logical conclusion simulating a house would be enough to rewind the history of it's structure.
"So we expand the computer to simulate everything. Hell, if we were to correctly determine the state of the universe at the big bang and simulate every atom since then we could answer everything about the past, have a perfect image of the present (intelligence dream!), predict the future... We could simply write an algorithm to know where or if intelligent life exists outside of Earth..."
Then, after some consideration I realized that the smallest possible computer capable of simulating every particle in real time... was probably reality itself.
Fair enough, although I bet with a "high-res" enough simulation and physics engine, you could probably account for most of those externalities that would impact the simulation via context clues, like (simplistic examples) crater == asteroid, increased radiation == solar flare, etc.
For example, if you took a video of a coin being tossed into a coin pond, and then CGIed the coin out of the video, you could probably hire a criminal forensics-style physicist who could go through the video frame by frame, and then tell you the type of coin, velocity, point of impact, etc. just based on the splash and ripples.
Chaos theory [1] will make sure that any minor change will result in drastically different result, so assumptions and guesses won't be sufficient.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
On the Great Filter, there was a discussion here about an excellent essay on the matter by Nick Bostrom, which I summarized in a comment[1] and extended the thinking. Still haven't read the one linked this time.
Soul Extraction - Assuming that there is a technological singularity at some point in the future, and assuming that time travel is possible[1], but that we've seen no evidence of it because it must be mostly observational in nature in order to prevent disruptions that would create time paradoxes, humanity adopts the practice of extracting the brain/nervous systems (and then replacing w/ equivalent matter) of every human in history at the moment of their death, to live in a post-singularity utopia.
[1]: Einstein, Hawking, and many others have speculated that time travel should be possible, but were ultimately skeptical of it because of the "Where are all of the time travelers?" argument. Fear of the creation of time paradoxes could be the reason why there's no evidence of time travel.
Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving post-humans: knowledge and understanding the beauty of it.
All of the things humans do, we do because we are humans. There is no "natural set of universal goals for sentient beings"; we simply like what evolution has made us like. Changing (and especially removing) our terminal goals is the same as creating a new species with no relation to us. Why would we want to do that?
What is your consciousness, separate from a subsumptive architecture of event loops that react to recognized stimuli in response to goal conditions?
Which is to say, if you remove all your goal conditions, all your reference points that could be moved away from center to provoke response -- if you are reduced to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orgasmium, in other words -- are you really aware any more?
I like to imagine at least that our consciousnesses are abstract enough, and derive enough pleasure from art, and music, and conversation, etc., that they don't need arbitrary goal conditions like "death is relatively imminent, so get out of bed." Or at least, if they do, we'd be smart enough in the short term to manufacture goal conditions. And that they'd happily exist, and flourish even, in a new substrate.
It's me; and I'd be happy to give up the biological machine I'm running on and trade it for an equivalent or better technological machine or VR environment where the limits of biology no longer applied. Removing my biology doesn't remove all of my goal conditions; it removes the ones nature imposed upon me. I could add back any I like and choose to drop those I don't.
We're intelligent beings who have transcended being driven by instinct alone; we can choose our own goals independent of nature.
What if the "info" is in the heart... And for those who downvoted, you need to read more about the functions of the heart besides blood pumping. The heart has neurons too and an electromagnetic field far stronger than the brain's.
All the time machines that seem possible in current physics require massive objects and must exist before the earliest point in time to which you can travel. So, the simplest explanation for why there are no time travelers is that we haven't constructed a time machine for them to use to visit us, yet.
I've heard that argument before, but people much more knowledgeable on the issue than you or I (no offense) always seem to obsess on the time paradox issue, and to a lesser extent the radiation feedback loop that could be created from an expanded wormhole, as the only stopping blocks:
1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True.
2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise.
3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. False.
4. If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100. Maybe.
5. By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers running brain simulations. True.
6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.
7. By 2100, world economic growth rates will have increased
by over a factor of a hundred. Maybe - progress & growth keep happening faster and faster.
8. The growth of humanity and its descendants will stop forever within a thousand years or so. False - see _The Beginning of Infinity_ by David Deutsch.
9. Our descendants will colonize millions of star systems within ten thousand years or so. True, if we don't fuck up - again, see _The Beginning of Infinity_.
10. The nearest intelligent aliens are many millions of light-years away. True.
11. Billions of years ago, intelligent aliens had a colony near here, but left in a big hurry. False. It's a bad explanation.
12. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. Maybe - I don't know about "complete freedom of contract" (can you sell yourself into slavery?) but privatizing law might be a good idea, eventually.
13. If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. Maybe - if we're going to deviate from tradition, better to do it in the direction of more freedom and less government control - which is known to make people richer.
14. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. True. For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while. People will keep finding new problems with the latest theory, and they'll have to sort that out, but eventually truth-seeking should lead to plateaus of agreement.
> 1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True.
The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of various phenomena through mathematical equations -- that's as far as I read into it.
QM provides a clear set of equations that govern how wavefunctions evolve, but some versions also include the notion that wavefunctions collapse when an observation is made, but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen. Many-worlds is founded on the observation that the equations governing wavefunctions are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the observations that originally led people to believe that waveforms collapse, and that therefore the collapse postulate ought to be discarded as redundant. And because it's spooky action at a distance.
> ... but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen
That's why it isn't science ;)
Maybe when QM was being developed "collapse" was a debated concept; I'm not too familiar with its history. Currently though, modern QM predicts that ensembles of identically prepared systems select an eigenstate of the linear operator corresponding to whatever observable it is you're measuring. Each of these eigenstates has a probability that can be calculated for it, and the mean value of these measurements is given by <Ψ|A|Ψ>, where A is the operator. I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.
> I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.
Not exactly, your statement is correct for single states, however it breaks down for entangled states. When one wavefunction describes two or more particle a measurement on one particle can be thought of collapsing the two particle wavefunction, which then forces the other particle into a well defined state.
Edit, I am not arguing in favour many worlds theory, only that the 'collapse' of the wavefunction is a well developed and useful idea in quantum physics.
I guess I just view the wavefunction as an inherently multiparticle function on a configuration space. The concept of approximating single-particle states seems peculiar to me; it seems simpler just to have one state for an entire system (and the corresponding probabilities of what measurements you'll get on that system, regardless of how the system is distributing spatially). Then again, we're coming from different research backgrounds so we probably have a different way of looking at it ;)
Quantum entanglement doesn't seem to be particularly unusual any more so than the fact that electron-electron correlation must be taken into effect when computing energy levels with some kind of QMC. All particles within a quantum system are correlated, so entanglement just kind of falls naturally out of that; I'm not assuming any kind of locality. I suppose what you're saying is that collapse is defined as the process of "fixing" these correlations?
> I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds".
In addition to the parsimony/redundancy argument already brought up, our weird fascination with "many worlds" should be utterly obvious from a psychological perspective. It's a powerful, potentially soothing thought: anything that could have been has been, in some strange way.
Thinking about the "what if" constitutes a deeply human tendency (or weakness, if you will). The notion that all our missed chances, fantasies, dreams, ideas, etc. may be actual as opposed to potential -- that's way too attractive a thought to ignore.
From the standpoint of Metaphysics it makes sense and provides a solution for the problem: What is a cause? If B follows A, and in another world B follows not A, then we can say that A is the cause of B.
This theory does not claim to be Science as it uses a different model to find answers.
Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of various phenomena through mathematical equations -- that's as far as I read into it.
Science is about explaining the world/universe, not merely making predictions.
No, I can't. Scientific theories should be testable, but they should also be explanations, not merely predictions.
This came up at Galileo's trial. The Church was happy to accept his theories as mere predictions of astronomical observations. What they wouldn't accept was that the earth actually DID move around the sun. But Galileo was adamant on explaining what as actually out there. "According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase And yet it moves." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves)
What are we supposed to do with this? Did you intend to stimulate discussion? Or are you asserting your views in the hope that others will buy into them just because you happen to be first commenter?
Last time I checked HN was still interested in rational and scientific discourse. Most of your "True/False/Maybe" assertions are nothing of the sort.
I say "most" because for #2, #3, #4, #11, #12, #13 there is room for scientific falsifiability so we could set up experiments to support or invalidate your hypotheses. From there rational discussion is possible.
For the rest... about #1, #6: there's no way you can know this for sure. As another commenter says these theories are untestable. So it's just your beliefs speaking.
About #8 and #9: the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support. I can't see how you can support an assertion with this reference.
I can specifically address #5, #7, #8, #9 as I have studied this stuff: all I can say is that your statements amount to a big optimistic wish for the future. There is in our current world and recent history no evidence whatsoever that we can escape the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. All exponential laws supporting your wishes (Moore's law, economic growth etc) are not really "laws" but simply models of recent history built in hindsight. The real question to be asked is: what are the enabling factors that make this model accurate until now, and will these enabling factors continue to exist for 80 more years?
Of course it boils down to 1) USA supremacy in world politics, a mere historical incident due to WWII and 2) fossil fuels.
For all we know at this time, infighting and China will probably make #1 disappear within <20 years, and finite supply will take care of #2 within <50 years. Then what? Your belief there will be a magic way can save the energy and politic stability is just that -- belief.
(This is where HN turns into Reddit or 4chan. A series of sci-fi statements cited from a blog, with the commenters assertions next to them with no justification whatsoever. Not cool.)
There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.
I mean that as time goes on and we get better at making technology, we also get better at making moral decisions. For instance, most people in the world today think slavery is wrong. Even 200 years ago, this wasn't the case.
First of all, sentience of beings is not a necessary condition for the simulation to be borderline unethical. No other species on our planet is sentient, yet many people don't consider hurting these for fun to be moral.
I was joking of course, the joke being that ability to recognize itself in the mirror is a common test of self-awareness used by biologists. And Sims can (sort of) do that.
What ever civilization that runs our simulation could have drawn a distinction culturally/legally between their real sentience and sentience in their simulation. Linking and granting rights to a simulated sentience isn't a guaranteed step after all.
> 6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.
This, along with most arguments based on morality just doesn't hold water, it assumes both that the Simulators (those running the simulation) hold the same moral values as us and that our suffering is deemed unnecessary.
The first also assumes that every member of a Simulator level race is perfectly moral on top of assuming they share the 'suffering = cruel' moral bullet point because at some point all member of a society would likely have the ability to create and run UniverseSimulator.exe.
Today we do tons of cruel things for science or to learn who's to say that the Simulator runners wouldn't make a similar valuation or draw a distinction between their real existence and our simulated existence?
"For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while"
This is called Logical positivism [1], well-known in the world of philosophy, and there are many criticisms. I'm not sure the matter is as self-evident as you present it to be.
Isn't logical positivism the idea that "any idea that can't be scientifically tested is meaningless"? By that criteria, logical positivism itself is meaningless.
"Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.
Two other approaches, a bit messier but with bigger coverage:
* ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier to use, but less precision and a lot of ambiguity due to polysemy.
* CMU's "Read the Web" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/) and U. Washington's "Open IE" (http://openie.cs.washington.edu/), both projects that combine a shallow-parsing fact-extractor with web-scale crawling. They are truly gigantic, but the accuracy is not very high.
Cool - it's a long time since I paid much attention - I did research on commonsense qualitative models of engineering domains and that led to a personal interest in the wider issues of commonsense reasoning but at that time (early 90s) I ended up deeply skeptical of the approaches that were common then (in my case mostly various qualitative/sorted/temporal logics).
2. [...] The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc.
That's what many doctors (also in Europe) argue. An argument against that could be based in Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma depressing review of the flow of money in relation to how medical trials are used to decide what's better.
> If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit.
This Anarcho-Capitalist ideal has never come to pass in any scenario where it could have happened: That is, there have been multiple scenarios where the established government has broken down entirely, and nobody's ever created this system with government-by-contract or anything like it.
We can argument-from-fiction this to death, and many people have, but if it can only happen if it's set up by some external agency it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen, so why bother?
> If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other.
Only if everyone starts from the same premises.
For example, does every example of Homo sapiens sapiens count as a human being? If no, then arguing against some plan because those supposed 'non-humans' would be made unhappy by it is worthless. You might as well argue against a plan because gneiss would be put out by it: In the minds of the people you're arguing against, it would be a total non sequitur.
A lesser, but more important, version of this is "Does every human matter equally as much?" Again, if you're arguing against people who hold as axiomatic that some matter more than others (due to tribalism, "racial realism", etc.), certain arguments aren't going to work.
Maybe we'll have to kill everyone who holds those ideas so we can stop having wars. (Your task: Am I being serious?)
>This Anarcho-Capitalist ideal has never come to pass in any scenario where it could have happened: That is, there have been multiple scenarios where the established government has broken down entirely, and nobody's ever created this system with government-by-contract or anything like it.
A collapsed society isn't really a good example of anything. There are some good examples of private law systems here http://youtu.be/o0TBE-pcEi0.
>Only if everyone starts from the same premises.
Only if you are talking about subjective things like values or definitions of words or something like that.
If you are debating actual facts like "I expect X to happen tomorrow with 30% probability" or "if I do this experiment I will get this result" or even "this event happened in the past" (like debating whether someone is guilty of a crime for example.)
Given all the same information and arguments, 2 perfectly rational agents should always come to the same conclusion on these things.
Maybe important parts of our personality are in the nerves of our spines and guts. Also, maybe important information in the brain is lost during freezing. Otherwise, yes, #4 is true.
If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people.
We learn more about brains and making smart computers, but we seem to have run out of major architectural innovations -- better ones won't make a huge difference. The big stumbling block seems to be how much "common sense" a system knows, like that things tend to fall down when you bump them. One group has been writing these down for fifteen years with moderate success; a century more effort may be plenty.
This seems like a really inefficient way to go about it.
The idea of living within a simulation is an odd one, assuming awareness and control over resources. Being somewhat defined by our limitations and then taking away limitations like memory, ability to learn new concepts ("Whoa, I know kung fu") doesn't actually sound like a lot of fun. And that's from someone who views life as a largely intellectual pursuit; it'd be super depressing for those who are defined by physical ability like athletes.
1. Human cloning
2. Giant solar collectors the size of states
3. Pandemics
4. Self aware computers
5. Tailored assassination drugs to induce swift cancer
6. Colonies on the moon
7. Genetic alteration and enhancement
8. Thought control
9. Man and machine war like the Matrix
Is there any practical purpose in human cloning short of cloning specific organs for replacement? As for tailored drugs to induce cancer, that is rather specific. There are a lot of ways to kill people, not sure if that would be the most efficient. And if you have that level of technology, there might also be dangers like custom made viruses that are super-contagious and 100% lethal.
Which makes #9 more interesting. A war between man and machines would end very quickly if the AI just designs a super-virus and kills 99% of the population overnight.
The sequel is that the machines then fight against each other which makes a lot of sense. Mr Smith and all. There will probably always be a struggle to replicate and for resources. It's not specific to humans.
- Aliens from billions of years into the future with an infinite source of energy and computational power have managed to slice the universe and put us into the solar system as a simulation. Everything coming back beyond the solar system is simulated, matter and energy alike.
- If academics kept compiling the knowledge of the world starting at 2000BC, and everybody were taught the knowledge, we'd have reached our current level of science by 1000BC.
= 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((1000 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3
= around 14.5 million stars
So given 10,000 years, and out-migration by Hansonian 'ems' (mental-simulations) at just 0.2c, and even starting more than a thousand years from now, many tens of millions of stars would be reachable.
Of course, there are many other challenges with that prediction, but the speed of light is not an absolute barrier, as you suggest.
Whose 10,000 years are we talking about? From an earth perspective we can't get there in 10,000 years. From a colony ship's perspective it could be within a human lifetime.
You don't seem to get what the speed of light is. The speed of light isn't the problem.
Acceleration, time dilation and deceleration are.
But barring the g-forces and enough of an engine we could travel to Alpha Centauri in less than 4 years, which may surprise you. Although that would be less than 4 spaceship years, not less than 4 Earth years.
At 1G acceleration, you can accelerate to a large fraction of the speed of light in about a year. A suitable rocket engine does not yet exist, but g-forces and human lifespans don't prevent travel to nearby stars.
the scariest part of us living in a simulated environment is what happens when the players get bored and decide to turn us off (that thought might have been controlled by one of the players)
