HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Ah you see, the moment you enter the realm of numbers and estimates, you’ve lost! I activate my trap card: 「Bayesian Reasoning」 to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw the「Domain Expert」 card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!
Not that I'm a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you don't have to do any thinking beyond 1500×0.03×1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:
... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...
Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.
It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
lol hahah.
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're Underage
Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.
OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)
Someone who's actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:
My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwin’s theory suggests.
A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.
If you're in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Pargin's If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You%27re_in_the_Wrong_Universe
It is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series
oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series — I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like I’ve got a few books to pick up!
Someone (maybe you) recommended this book here awhile back. But it's the fourth book in a series so I had to read the other three first and so have only just now started it.
I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.
"feel free to ignore any science “news” that’s just a press release from the guy who made it up."
In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (by me) facilitates new and interesting research tools (by me) at the intersection between physics and information (according to me).
Gotta love "science" that is cited by no-one and cites the author's previous work which was also cited by no one. Really the media should do better about not giving cranks an authoritative sounding platform, but that would lead to slightly fewer eyes on ads and we can't have that now can we.
This feels like quackery but I can't find a goal...
But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.
There it is.
Edit: oh God it's worse than I thought
The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase "information as the fifth state of matter" in the scope description.
Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as "Writer, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamer". Another lists "Hyperspace and machine elves". One very honestly simply says "N/A"
The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, you've already paid for the domain, guys.
Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think it's a lock for 2025
OK this membe list experience is just 👨🍳😗👌
- Psychonaut
- Practitioner of Yoga
- Quantum, Consciousness, Christian Theology, Creativity
Perfect. No notes.
I haven't seen qualifications this relevant and high-quality since "architects and engineers for 9/11 truth."
the terrible tryfecta
Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.
Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, we'll get there
I had a flash of a vision of tomorrow, it is Nano crypto AI
Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.
Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!
General sneer against the SH: I choose to dismiss it entirely for the same reason that I dismiss solipsism or brain-in-a-vat-ism: it’s a non-starter. Either it’s false and we’ve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit we’re in, or it’s true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The "simulation hypothesis" is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.
The SH is catnip to "scientific types" who don't recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can't be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. It's basically elementary!
Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.
You're missing the most obvious implication, though. If it's all simulated or there's a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means I'm smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).
But this quickly runs into the 'don't create your own unbreakable crypto system' problem. There are people out there who are a lot smarter who quickly can point out the holes in these simulation arguments. (The smartest of whom go 'nah, that is dumb' sadly I'm not that enlightened, as I have argued a few times here before how this is all amateur theology, and has nothing to do with STEM/computer science (E: my gripes are mostly with the 'ancestor simulation' theory however)).
Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.
lol
How sneerable is the entire "infodynamics" field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the "second law of infodynamics" seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing there's not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK I'm way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesn't build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, they're making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which they're calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didn't make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of "information states" which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what it's supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the author's quotes from the associated hype article I'm 100% sure it's rubbish. It's also really funny that they didn't manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so they've pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.
Here's an interview where he's talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.
I can't definitely predict this guy's career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.
Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.
I don’t have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, let’s say, “alternative science” for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.