Taylor Mills

I post my random thoughts. These may or may not be interesting.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@Thedukeistheman @MilesianSchool @boriquagato @BillyFostedamus What happens if the net value isn't $150, but only $75? The employer still pays the worker $100. Would you consider the employer the exploited one in that scenario?

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

If the worker could create $150 net value without the employer why would they be willing to work for only $100? They could simply work for themselves.

It is more accurate to think of the $50 not as surplus, but what the employee is willing to pay for the services the employer provides.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@HellenicVibes "material does not really exist in any definite sense" is a tough claim to justify. every single interaction you have had in the physical world has been with a material that definitely existed.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

Prosperity increases capacity for parasitism. A prosperous society with universal voting inevitably ends up being governed by the parasitic, which in turn leads to looting and collapse.

The known cure is simply to not count the votes of the unproductive. Want to have a say in how the country is governed? All you have to do is be a net contributor. Want to be useless? Cool, but you should have no say in how the country is run.

We can sustain a rich society with generous social support, or we can keep universal voting. We cannot maintain both.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@elonmusk @Not_the_Bee Is a game more or less enjoyable if you enable all the cheat codes?

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

The set of complex solutions which solve a problem is vastly larger than the set of simple ones. It is almost always the case that an initial solution has extraneous complexity. Good engineering is about finding the simplest solution which actually works. If the problem being solved requires scalability, and the simple solution doesn’t scale, then it is not a solution.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@unconvAI The eligibility criteria seems pretty conventional. I doubt the unconventional ideas you seek will be found in modern academia.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@simonmaechling Were you wrong tho?

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

Evil is when someone with a inverted understanding of reality attempts to do good.

If you have an accurate understanding of reality you can just build things, and they work. You can create value for yourself and society. I am richer because I now have the power to just press a button and have whatever I want show up at my door for a decent price.

On the other hand, a person with a significantly flawed understanding of reality is unable to build useful things. In order to survive they must rely on resources produced by others. All humans go through this parasitic phase. It takes a long time for a child to develop enough knowledge to become self sustaining.

You have spent your entire life promoting parasitism. Wealth distribution is always about taking from the useful to give to the useless. It incentivises useless. Once the parasitic path through life becomes more attractive than being useful your society is doomed.

The simple solution for a democracy to survive prosperity is to limit political power of the parasitic (note this is why we don’t let children vote, it just needs to be extended to anyone who is a net recipient of government spending). Support should be available to help everyone improve, but life on government support must always be significantly more uncomfortable than life of a useful member of society. The incentives need to be aligned.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@yacineMTB I wouldn't look for all 4. If someone is competent at 2+ they can easily learn the others.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@steipete @mitsuhiko Hate, anger, fear, anxiety, etc are the ways your brain tells you your model of reality is flawed. You can either learn and update your model, or attempt to bend reality to fit.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

If the threshold is too low you will risk seeing patterns which aren't real. This is the reason why genius borders insanity.

The accuracy of patterns learned is determined by the accuracy of perception. Regardless of threshold, if the inputs don't accurately reflect reality neither will the patterns learned.

Whether a genius becomes insane or not is entirely dependent on their ability to consistently seek out accurate information.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@leecronin Efficiency. Takes much less energy to first narrow down possibilities in model space. Then you experiment and refine the model based on results. Next time you will be even more efficient.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@QuanticASI You could attempt to calculate the probability that you exist exactly as you do now and you would get a similar number. Every single event in your life and that of all of your ancestors had to go exactly the way it did, otherwise you would be different or not exist at all.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@ylecun That is some high quality chart abuse

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

When exploring consciousness I find it most useful to look at the boundaries where it breaks down. A human under general anaesthesia has minimal if any consciousness. A person with end stage dementia has greatly reduced consciousness. An asleep person is less conscious than an awake one. A dead person is not conscious, etc.

In all of these cases what is disrupted is the continuity and/or coherence of information flow. A conscious thing has this, an unconscious one does not. As far as I am concerned the best we can do for the "why" behind qualia is that any experience is simply what happens under the specific flow, integration, and transformation of information. For me that explanation is good enough to avoid going down the hole that is the hard problem.

When it comes to your argument against emergence I would obviously disagree. The heap problem is not really a problem at all, it is a consequence of categories with fuzzy bounds. The category of heap could be refined to mean a more specific thing, but that restriction would reduce its utility. For consciousness we can define a set of things which it includes, and perhaps a similar fuzzy boundary where something may be ambiguous to whether it fits or not. If we broaden the definition of consciousness to include everything then it loses its utility as a concept.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

Productive communication with someone who has a fundamentally different worldview is more futile than with someone who speaks a different language. Unfortunately the only communication everyone understands is violence.

A major contributor to the current situation is the failure in our information ecosystem. A big factor being the MSM shift from truth seeking narrative crafting. If in court half the jury heard only the prosecutions argument, and the other half only the defence, there is little chance either would be close to the truth. We have allowed a media environment which is basically this. The simple solution is for any polarizing issue to require both sides be presented together and let the public decide.

There is however a more difficult problem to solve which underlies the current situation.

In order to be useful, to build something which works, a person must have an accurate understanding of reality. In times of scarcity being useful was a requirement. The useless would die. Truth was of the utmost importance.

An unfortunate side effect of prosperity is that society has a much higher parasite carrying capacity, the selection pressure to become productive is greatly reduced. It is possible to survive with a worldview far detached from reality. You won't be useful, but you can survive, and you have an equal vote.

Society will quickly collapse when the political power of the parasitic outweighs the productive. Most western societies are near this tipping point.

While improving the information ecosystem will help, were are really in a continuous battle with the 2nd law, and there is no easy way to beat it. The higher the prosperity of society, the higher the order — the lower entropy. From this state there opens up many more possible future paths which will increase disorder, with the paths increasing order becoming fewer and fewer — or requiring more energy to take. Entropy must increase. If we want to maintain a prosperous society we need to increase the selection pressure to cut off the new paths to disorder. However the more prosperous we become the more difficult this will be.

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@TheNormanMu Seems she was pretty sample efficient

[Taylor Mills @tmillsdev]

@jon_barron Evolution crafted the architecture, but experience determines the weights.