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That's the nice thing about not doing anything. You can imagine yourself doing things, without any of those pesky realities interfering with what would totally work if you just tried. Like, I can totally imagine putting together a little handcrank AC generator, maybe hook it to gutter spout so it'll power a lightbulb or something when it rains. And as long as I'm just imagining it, I can see how I'd wind the wire and whatnot, never having to experience the frustration of "I wound this wire hundreds of times! Why am I not getting enough voltage to light this lightbulb!" and having to actually fix bugs in implementation. And that's something SIMPLE.
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Jun 3, 2014 18:53
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Night10194 posted:The Nazis actually did this. It mostly resulted in shoddily made or outright sabotaged equipment because, it turns out starving, beaten, tortured people who you're murdering in droves are not really motivated to help you and will even fight back quietly if an opportunity presents itself. My Polish grandmother was a forced labourer, who was forced by the Nazis to make artillery shells. One of the last lucid things she told me, because at that point I was old enough, is that one of the prisoners showed them how to sabotage shells. Every so often, she would have one slip down the line assembled in such a way that it would explode in the breech of the gun when it as fired. She said that if that actually worked, she was proud of what she did.
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Jun 3, 2014 19:02
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Patter Song posted:http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/23wmr4/repost_from_askreddit_because_i_figure_the/ I just wanted to take a shot at this. June 1st, 1942, eh? Like a year after launching Barbarossa, and about six months after declaring war on the US. The British strategic bombing is really getting into swing, and Stalingrad and El Alamein are waiting just around the corner. If I found myself in Hitler's shoes, I'd do everything in my power to get some kind of ceasefire (or preferably a separate peace) in the East at basically any cost (up to and including the restoration of 1940 borders), I'd pull my troops completely out of the impending clusterfuck in northern Africa, and then call up Roosevelt and tell him "Hey, did we declare war on you? Yeah, that was a translation mistake. We meant that we want to be super-best friends forever. Cool?".
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Jun 3, 2014 22:59
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Mr. Sunshine posted:I just wanted to take a shot at this. June 1st, 1942, eh? Like a year after launching Barbarossa, and about six months after declaring war on the US. The British strategic bombing is really getting into swing, and Stalingrad and El Alamein are waiting just around the corner. If I found myself in Hitler's shoes, I'd do everything in my power to get some kind of ceasefire (or preferably a separate peace) in the East at basically any cost (up to and including the restoration of 1940 borders), I'd pull my troops completely out of the impending clusterfuck in northern Africa, and then call up Roosevelt and tell him "Hey, did we declare war on you? Yeah, that was a translation mistake. We meant that we want to be super-best friends forever. Cool?". Yeah, your one big ray of hope is that "unconditional surrender" isn't a thing yet. Other than that, you are pretty drat hosed. The idea that you can just go "oh well I should invade England instead" is so amazingly dumb that it is really hard to even comprehend how someone with even a superficial amount of historical knowledge would come up with it.
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Jun 3, 2014 23:49
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ArchangeI posted:Yeah, your one big ray of hope is that "unconditional surrender" isn't a thing yet. Other than that, you are pretty drat hosed. The idea that you can just go "oh well I should invade England instead" is so amazingly dumb that it is really hard to even comprehend how someone with even a superficial amount of historical knowledge would come up with it. To be fair, they do have a superficial knowledge of history. "Hitler would have won the war if it wasn't for X" is a pretty prevalent theory among people who's only exposure to WWII history is school and History Channel documentaries, mostly because "Hitler was never going to win WWII because of a massive raft of institutional factors ranging from the vast difference in the scale of industry between the USA and the USSR and Germany and the German military generally ignoring their fleet leading to insufficient transport numbers to pull off Operation Sealion even if they did somehow secure aerial control" is hard to get into a kid's head and "The Second World War was an inevitable, though hard fought and bloody, Allied Victory" doesn't mesh with the narrative that Western and Russian education systems want to instill in young people. Let's be fair to Less-Wrongers. They know a tiny about the subject they talk about. The inherent stupidity of the Less-Wronger is that they think that their tiny bit is literally everything they need to know, which is why you get poo poo like "An NP-hard activity has never occured naturally."
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Jun 4, 2014 09:34
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MinistryofLard posted:Let's be fair to Less-Wrongers. They know a tiny about the subject they talk about. The inherent stupidity of the Less-Wronger is that they think that their tiny bit is literally everything they need to know, which is why you get poo poo like "An NP-hard activity has never occured naturally." Or, put simply: 
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Jun 4, 2014 09:46
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Sunshine89 posted:Every so often, she would have one slip down the line assembled in such a way that it would explode in the breech of the gun when it as fired. She said that if that actually worked, she was proud of what she did. I have to admit, that made me smile. 
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Jun 4, 2014 15:25
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ArchangeI posted:Yeah, your one big ray of hope is that "unconditional surrender" isn't a thing yet. Other than that, you are pretty drat hosed. The idea that you can just go "oh well I should invade England instead" is so amazingly dumb that it is really hard to even comprehend how someone with even a superficial amount of historical knowledge would come up with it. The Americans were out for blood against Japan and the Soviets weren't particularly thrilled about a year of military onslaught, I doubt that a negotiated settlement would be easy and I'm not even sure 1938 borders + leaving Japan twisting in the wind would be a deal the USSR + US would be interested in. 1938 borders would be especially awkward due to all the recently opened death camps on Polish soil. "OK, we'll pull out, just give us time to transfer the high-value prisoners from Auschwitz to Dachau."
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Jun 4, 2014 18:16
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Patter Song posted:The Americans were out for blood against Japan and the Soviets weren't particularly thrilled about a year of military onslaught, I doubt that a negotiated settlement would be easy and I'm not even sure 1938 borders + leaving Japan twisting in the wind would be a deal the USSR + US would be interested in. Easy? No. My offer to the western Allies would be complete withdrawal from areas occupied after January 1939, with plebiscites under international observation in the Sudetenland and Austria (we all know how those would go), combined with a Treaty about disarmament in Europe. Maybe write to Roosevelt and declare that this entire war has been the product of prejudices and paranoia between the people of Europe. Perhaps we need something like a United Nations to discuss these things. Basically show them that they can have something that very much looks like a victory right now - or complete victory in three years, after they each lost hundreds of thousands of men and untold amounts of money, and handed over half of Europe to the Communists. Of course, if the Soviets insist on occupying their part of Poland, that is between them and the Allies to work out. And yeah, I would probably spin the Holocaust as something that was entirely Himmler's and Goering's idea. The moment I became aware of it, I did everything in my power to stop it. After all, Germany needs these people to fight. Besides, we are a cultured nation, when I meant that the Jews needed to be removed I meant by voluntary resettlement to Palestine. Mein Kampf was complete ghostwritten, by the way, I've never even read it. Did you know that one of my best friends and comrades in the trenches was Jewish?
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Jun 4, 2014 18:47
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Linked off that tumblr post earlier: DARE YOU ENTER THE CATGIRL SEX VOLCANO???i'm a scientist
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Jun 4, 2014 19:34
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And then all the joyous fun of setting up new post-occupation regimes in Denmark, Norway, Greece, Albania (presuming Italy is surrendering along with you, which is likely in this situation), Bohemia-Moravia (assuming Tiso's puppet state in Slovakia remains extant, which it probably would in this scenario), Poland, resurrecting the Humpty Dumpty of Yugoslavia, figuring out whether Germany's newly-ordained borders between Hungary and Romania are going to remain in effect, whether the Nazi-occupied Baltic states are to be resurrected as independent or incorporated into the USSR...fun diplomatic wrangling. At least with the 1945 settlement there was a general attitude that you could sweep away every element of the German order in Europe and build a new one from scratch, here the give and take would be stunning. Cue massive swearing in Tokyo as the USSR, with no need to worry about its western front, declares war on Japan and joins Britain and the USA. Patter Song fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 19:36
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Easire morality test is if you wake up as Hitler before the invasion of Poland. See how many of them decide to optimize strategy instead of just calling the whole thing off.
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Jun 4, 2014 19:57
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Seriously, reading about them talking about winning WWII makes it seem like their entire knowledge of WWII comes from playing way too much Hearts of Iron. "And then if I spend the prewar years building IC, I'll be able to build a massive kriegsmarine which will support my paratrooper rush to England's victory points at the same time as my panzer charge into France, forcing them to surrender early. Then I gotta make sure the Holocaust event doesn't fire and transfer my western army to Korea and attack the Soviets on two fronts with the Japanese and I'll win the war!"
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Jun 6, 2014 18:50
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Are you really surprised? The guy whose big claim to fame isn't published papers but a giant fanfiction of a fantasy series he hasn't even read because he thinks it's too sappy and emotionally driven having followers who think geopolitics work exactly like a game of Hearts of Iron or Civilization should not be a surprise. Everything this guy writes is bound into standard geeky sci fi/fantasy/anime tropes and pondering with a thin veneer of cargo-cult academic language. Even then, the astonishing failure isn't that their plans are unrealistic or stupid, or even that they see the hypothetical and wonder how to reach an optimal solution, it's that their idea of an optimal solution is loving Nazi Germany trying to win the war and not 'Oh god oh god how can I stop as many people from dying horribly in this insane war I started before I woke up oh god oh god!'
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Jun 7, 2014 07:12
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Night10194 posted:Are you really surprised? The guy whose big claim to fame isn't published papers but a giant fanfiction of a fantasy series he hasn't even read because he thinks it's too sappy and emotionally driven having followers who think geopolitics work exactly like a game of Hearts of Iron or Civilization should not be a surprise. Everything this guy writes is bound into standard geeky sci fi/fantasy/anime tropes and pondering with a thin veneer of cargo-cult academic language. Even if you did not have an altruistic bone in your body, you have to understand that a) you are going to lose the war, no matter how well you do and b) the longer the war goes on, the worse your crimes will be, and c) if you lose the war and the extend of the Holocaust becomes public knowledge, you will be hanged. Therefore, simple self-preservation dictates that you end the holocaust immediately and try to get out of the war as soon as you possibly can. poo poo, at that point you have to consider sending Churchill a message reading "Does that Palace on St. Helena still stand? Because I would be interested". But I guess if you honestly believe you belong in the top 0.1 percentile of intellectuals, without ever finishing college, then having one of the biggest industrialized countries at your beck and call appeals to you. Think about the things you could do, unshackled by petty morality or international law! Yes, a few people must suffer for the greater good, but there are, like, 100 million Germans and what, maybe ten million Jews? The math totally works in your favor here.
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Jun 7, 2014 09:29
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You know, this does actually get me wondering what would be the optimal way for you to stop the Holocaust/carnage of World War II if you wake up as Hitler. As in, how much control did he have by that point? If you try to push too far too fast, what are the odds on someone 'prematurely retiring' you due to an obvious psychotic break and carrying on with the Jew-murder? Would the world be best served by you immediately putting a cap in your head, or would it require some more involved legwork? It's actually a kind of interesting topic, it's just that the absolute worst people seem to have latched onto it.
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Jun 7, 2014 11:07
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Like any alternate history, any such scenario runs almost entirely on author fiat. You succeed because you declare that your night of the long knives manages to get all the high ranking SS members, or fail because you declare that Himmler activates a plot he had planned for years just for this case. "Optimal" implies some sort of verifiable hypotheses, which is not something history works with, both as a concept and as a science.
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Jun 7, 2014 11:22
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So I was linked an article about an actual honest to god experiment!quote:On April 1, I started working full-time for MIRI. In the weeks prior, while I was winding down my job and packing up my things, Benja and I built Botworld, a cellular automaton that we've been using to help us study self-modifying agents. Not sure how a cellular automaton could help there, seems like that'd be a bit simplistic-- quote:Botworld is a high level cellular automaton: the contents of each cell can be quite complex. Indeed, cells may house robots with register machines, which are run for a fixed amount of time in each cellular automaton step. quote:Botworld consists of a grid of cells, each of which is either a square or an impassable wall. Each square may contain an arbitrary number of robots and items. Robots can navigate the grid and possess tools for manipulating items. Some items are quite useful: for example, shields can protect robots from attacks by other robots. Other items are intrinsically valuable, though the values of various items depends upon the game being played. Oh. So it's a cellular automaton where each cell can contain an arbitrary number of virtual machines with their own programs and memory or god knows what else. As opposed to every other cellular automata in existence where each cell contains a state. And most of those states are "on/alive" or "off/dead". Like, for example, Conway's Game of Life. It'd hurt less if they didn't try to pick completely unfitting terms for things just to sound smarter. There's other problems I have with this article but I'm sure there are people here who could pick up on them and explain them better than I ever could. Maybe when I'm not posting from a phone.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:10
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Darth Walrus posted:You know, this does actually get me wondering what would be the optimal way for you to stop the Holocaust/carnage of World War II if you wake up as Hitler. Hell, for all we know this already happened and that's why Hitler ordered so many strategic blunders.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:34
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That "cellular automata" sounds like 'I convinced my boss that Dwarf Fortress was work-related.'
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Jun 8, 2014 08:00
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I'm not overly familiar with cellular automata, but isn't the whole point of them that each cell is a simple unit with only two possible states? The complexity comes from how the cells interact, not from what a single cell can do alone.
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Jun 8, 2014 16:02
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I've seen examples of a rare few where you can have multiple states, usually depicted in rendering as different colours of cells, but I can't find any good examples that aren't just separate CAs layered on top of each other for whatever reasons, usually relating to generative art. But yes, the entire point of cellular automata is the complexity arising out of very simple interactions and rules. This isn't that. I think what they want is something more like discrete or grid-based environment. Edit: I've managed to get through almost three years of a PhD in AI research without touching Haskell and I'm not about to start now, so I have no idea if their experimental code is any good or not yet.
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Jun 8, 2014 16:12
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Cirrial posted:I've seen examples of a rare few where you can have multiple states, usually depicted in rendering as different colours of cells, but I can't find any good examples that aren't just separate CAs layered on top of each other for whatever reasons, usually relating to generative art. I don't know if their code is good in the sense that it works, but it's not at all idiomatic. It's the Haskell equivalent of refusing to use classes or structs to organize data (only in this case they're refusing to use monads, the Haskell flow control abstraction, to abstract around flow control) and writing everything in one function. They don't really abstract around anything or logically subdivide their program into units and they regularly use type synonyms over tuples instead of ADTs because I guess data declarations are scary? (???) Let's see, the extremely heavy use of manual pattern matching (the caseof statements) makes me think they don't really understand what Functors are about (although they use them occasionally in code that's stylistically much better than the other code in the project), which is kind of like saying "I'm a C programmer -- what was a pointer again?" (short version -- a functor basically generalizes pointers, lists, nullable values, functions returning values and pretty much any attribute of a value that provides context for it) It reminds me of the code I wrote when I first learned the language and really makes me feel like it was written by people who didn't know it all that well. I almost feel like maybe they did it in Haskell because that's the scary math language and if you can write working code in it clearly it means you're very impressive. Oh, I also can't help but notice that almost all the code that's actually up there is dedicated to rendering the world to text. They have some example files which do things that are more interesting, I guess. (check out the /games folder for what seems to be most of them) but I don't feel competent to critique them except in code quality (which is generally acceptable, but unremarkable -- it's code that wouldn't have been hard to write anyway) All that said, I'm judgmental so take my words with a grain of salt.
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Jun 9, 2014 05:45
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The cool thing about thought experiments like "You wake up as Hitler in the middle of WW2, what do" is that there is no explicitly stated "win" condition and it is entirely up to the person answering it to determine what they think is success or the optimal solution. Most decent people looking at it would think "What is the best way to minimise suffering", perhaps with a side condition of "without getting myself declared mad by my subordinates and kicked out so someone else becomes the new Hitler". Heck, even a win condition of "Don't get executed for war crimes or kill my are self and live to a ripe old age with Eva and the dogs" could kind of maybe work. But when they impose on themselves a win condition of "win the war while upholding all the Nazi codes and honours and adhering to party dictates", it kind of shows you what kind of people they are. Similarly, see Prisoner's Dilemma and variations thereof, where you can tell a lot about the person playing it by whether they assume "win" to mean "get the maximum amount of money for myself, loving over others if need be" or "minimise suffering (and gently caress over the banker)". As well, as, obviously, the billions of years of torture vs a metric fuckton of dust specks. Mind you, that kind of illustrates how they have no understanding of minimising or categorising suffering in the first place. e: I could also include a side note to the final parts of Higurashi, because anime, but I don't think I will. CROWS EVERYWHERE fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Jun 15, 2014 |
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Jun 15, 2014 07:06
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Before this thread falls completely off the earth, I remember someone posted a link to a PDF of a story called The Island. I quite liked it and want to share it with friends, but can't find it in my browser history. I also can't seem to find it by searching the text of the thread. Does someone still have the link?
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Jun 17, 2014 04:48
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LordSaturn posted:Before this thread falls completely off the earth, I remember someone posted a link to a PDF of a story called The Island. I quite liked it and want to share it with friends, but can't find it in my browser history. I also can't seem to find it by searching the text of the thread. Does someone still have the link? Is it this? http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf
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Jun 17, 2014 05:56
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Ah, man, but that's still so much to talk about. Like, is this some really obvious philosophic concept that he reinvented? I read the article as a young teenager and it seemed clever. Reading it now, it's incredible pretentious but seems like a pretty good criticism of everything he's ever written about Friendly AI or the singularity.
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Jun 17, 2014 06:33
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Monocled Falcon posted:Ah, man, but that's still so much to talk about. Yeah it's "the halo effect exists" dressed up in a bunch of bullshit that it's borderline unreadable. It's also useless because the infinite love of science feedback loop doesn't happen except to other unemployed thirty-year-old autistics who jerk off 24/7 to Knuth's up arrow notation.
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Jun 17, 2014 06:41
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Yeah, thanks!
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Jun 17, 2014 13:23
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So, I just found a video that is a perfect simulation of getting revieved/minduploaded in the objectivist paradise that the less wrong crowd imagines the future to be. http://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
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Jun 17, 2014 14:46
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Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:Given a task, I still have an enormous amount of trouble actually sitting down and doing it. (Yes, I'm sure it's unpleasant for you too. Bump it up by an order of magnitude, maybe two, then live with it for eight years.) My energy deficit is the result of a false negative-reinforcement signal, not actual damage to the hardware for willpower; I do have the neurological ability to overcome procrastination by expending mental energy. I don't dare. If you've read the history of my life, you know how badly I've been hurt by my parents asking me to push myself. I'm afraidto push myself. It's a lesson that has been etched into me with acid.
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Jun 17, 2014 15:45
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dumb nerds everywhere posted:I'M A GENIUS IF ONLY I WASN'T SO LAZY I'D CHANGE THE WORLD AND SHOW YOU ALL
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Jun 17, 2014 15:55
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"From personal experience I know I could save the planet and yet couldn't be arsed." I'm sure you you've experience in almost saving planets, Yud, I'm sure you do.
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Jun 17, 2014 16:12
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quote:I can alter my behavior patterns by expending willpower - once. Put a gun to my head, and tell me to do or die, and I can do. Once. Put a gun to my head, tell me to do or die, twice, and I die. ... Really, where the gently caress did he get this idea from? Even imagining that there's a part of his brain that places this nonsensical and arbitrary restriction on changing his behaviour (which is an utterly retarded idea anyway), I'm surprised he can't wish for more wishes or whatever by overwriting the limit so that he can change his behaviour 3^^^3 times instead of 1. That would be the smug HP:MoR solution.
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Jun 17, 2014 16:32
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"alter behavior patterns" probably means "temporarily do something outside of normal behavior patterns" here. He can't alter his behavior to start going to the gym every day, even though he can theoretically force himself to go to the gym once (though we know he hasn't). Making meaningful changes/improvements stick in the long term is hard. That's not a result of Magical Nerd Limited Rewiring Syndrome or whatever, that's "people often fall back on bad habits". A wise person uses this knowledge to arm themselves against a tendency to backslide and becomes more vigilant against slipping. Yudkowsky uses this knowledge as an excuse to never to try to improve himself at all, because why bother if backsliding is so easy? Remember that time a TCC mod killed a girl by saying "don't bother with rehab because in the long run a lot of people relapse, just do a bunch of LSD instead"? That's what Yudkowsky is doing to himself here. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jun 17, 2014 |
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Jun 17, 2014 17:03
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Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:... Really, where the gently caress did he get this idea from?
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Jun 17, 2014 17:08
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This is way better than the baby eaters. The characters seem like people, instead of weird logic bots who joke about 4 chan.
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Jun 17, 2014 17:39
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GWBBQ posted:The Vampire: The Masquerade rule book. I wonder what he imagines he's saving this imaginary brain-reprogramming for that's more useful than being able to put effort into things. I'm sure he's worked out all the priors and settled on this for a reason. Maybe he wants to be able to reprogram himself to enjoy being tortured by an AI, so it won't bother because timeless decision theory.
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Jun 17, 2014 18:09
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Not coincidentally, Peter Watts has been published and won awards, rather than recreated the Cult of Reason on a blog.
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Jun 17, 2014 18:11
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Peel posted:Not coincidentally, Peter Watts has been published and won awards, rather than recreated the Cult of Reason on a blog. Well I have to assume he spent all his points on understanding people and actually having willpower, unlike Big Yud who spent all his points on Bayesian Judo.
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Jun 17, 2014 18:56
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