[ExI] Inevitability of the Singularity (was Re: To Max, re Natasha and Extropy (Kevin Haskell)

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/7/17 Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl>:
> On Sun, 17 Jul 2011, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> [...]
>> 2) The Marshal Plan
>> 3) The Post WWII GI Bill (if you weren't black)
>> 4) The Interstate Highway System
>> 5) The Space Program
>>
>> These government programs are among the most successful ever in US
>> history.  And they did come as a direct result of WWII (and the cold
>> war).
>
> Yep. Education and infrastructure - truly admirable connection. This is
> exactly what I was trying to state in my original post. All those things
> went into existence thanks to US involvement in WW2. Maybe some would
> happen anyway, but I doubt that they all would happen and to the same
> extent.

Look, I'm not going to stand up here and say that government never
gets it right... but it is so little, so few and so far between, that
I can't imagine that there isn't a better way! For every successful
government program, I can name ten that I think are absolute
disasters. That is a worse track record than startups taking venture
capital. The difference is that a failed startup ENDS, and the bad
government programs go on forever. Once a bureaucracy is instantiated,
it is hard to get it to go away.

I'll give you a small example of how things get messed up. And to be
fair, this example even involves the government outsourcing, which is
what I advocate for most things. The Crane Paper Company is the sole
provider of paper for US currency to the US treasury. They employ
around 150 people. About half of the paper provided by Crane Paper is
used in the production of $1 bills. Roughly, that's 75 jobs tied to
the $1 bill. The $1 bill wears out in about 18 months. On the other
hand, the life expectancy of a typical US coin is 18 YEARS. Because of
an accounting principle going back centuries in England and other
places called seigniorage, the difference in price between the cost of
the production of a coin, and it's face value, goes into the treasury.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage,

So, for example, if it cost 7 cents to coin a $1 coin, the treasury
would gain 93 cents for that coin. This comes straight off the
national debt. This principle DOES NOT APPLY to paper money in the US.
The seigniorage on a 1 cent piece is just about break even.

Warlords, drug lords, criminals, rich people all over the world and so
forth have largely switched from carrying around large suitcases full
of $100 bills for large suitcases full of $100 Euro bills, because
those bills are worth more. This is worth a lot to the USA because
these dollars kept overseas are counted against the trade deficit.

So, if the US stopped minting the 1 cent piece and slowly demonetized
it... Started minting a $1 coin (that could go into the coin drawer
where the 1 cent piece was)... and stopped printing $1 bills
(absolutely necessary to get adoption of the $1 coin)... and started
printing $500 bills... It would bring benefits to the US worth well
over $300,000,000 a year, probably much more.

And why don't we do this simple thing? Go back to those 75 jobs at the
Crane Paper Company. They have someone lobbying congress (the "Save
the Greenback" lobby, I think it's called) to make sure that they keep
those 75 jobs. How many more jobs would be created with $300 million
dollars a year? Those 75 jobs cost the United States at least $2
million dollars per job, per year.

Only government could get this SO wrong. Admittedly, they have a
little help from a special interest group. But this is a classic case
study of stupidity in Washington. When asked, most congressmen say
"people like pennies"... but most people don't know the cost of
maintaining the lowly cent. Hell, put Lincoln on the new dollar coin!
Put Washington on the new $500 bill! It won't matter in a few months.

> [...]
>> actions in the past might be indicative of results in the future. If
>> LBJ did X and it resulted in Y, and now BHO is doing X, I might point
>> out that Y might be an expected outcome. So for me, history is most
>> useful as a predictive tool.
>
> As they say, history repeats itself but not in the same way. So don't
> overestimate the power of prediction :-).

I don't, but homo sapiens are far more predictable than most people think.

>> The difficulty for Poland seems to me to have been that they were
>> always in the way of greater powers who wanted to fight each other. So
>> Poland all too often became the battleground of a fight they had no
>> real part in.
>
> That's part of it. However, in Europe, practically all countries have been
> a battlefield, some for 30 or 100 years (albeit not recently, heh). We
> were able to fight off Soviet Union because other countries (Great
> Britain, France, I think) were watching Germans to not attack us. I guess
> we would do better job with Germans 20 years later if Soviets didn't help
> them. I think Wehrmacht was slowly loosing steam and we could easily go on
> for another month, maybe even two, which would be very long, leading them
> on the verge of exhaustion. This wasn't an army that knocked off Russians
> in 1941, mind you.
>
> BTW, I have read that as later research showed, only Poles and Russians
> were able to fight Germans on equal terms when strength factor was close
> to 1:1. Western allies, when they won battles, had it more like 1:3 or 1:5
> in their favor.

It doesn't matter how you win, just that you do! We all know how good
a defense Poland had vs. Blitzkrieg... perhaps that made the Poles mad
later... :-)

> However, this is alternative history :-). And it reflects my current
> knowledge which is subject to change, even five minutes from now if I am
> lucky enough.
>
> As a comment to recent 100 years, here goes a Polish "Polish joke". On the
> picture, God says to angels something like this: "And now let's have some
> fun and place Poland between Russia and Germany" :-)

Q: Where do Poles keep their armies?
A: In their sleevies.

> http://patrz.pl/zdjecia/polakom-zrobimy-numer
>
> Very interesting. I hope one day I explore this subject.

There is one book on Orderville. The Wikipedia article is a bit short,
and could be improved. Maybe I'll get to that some day.

>> > When one has close to nothing, one is willing to share with others
>> > similarly ill-fated individuals.
>>
>> Just as there are no atheists in foxholes (you'll never catch me in a
>> fox hole, thank you very much ;-), extreme stress causes people to
>> join together in ways that otherwise would be difficult to imagine.
>> Sometimes the stress is manufactured, as in this case. Brigham Young
>> sent people to these godforsaken places and "called" them to figure
>> out how to make the place profitable to "the Kingdom". If they failed,
>> which many did, I imagine that they saw it as a lack of faith.
>
> Ouch! That's not the way to treat loyal guys.

God does that to people all the time ;-)  The idea that you were not
faithful enough, and that's the reason you're having troubles is all
too common. Very defeating to a psychology.

>> Programming methodology is at least as complex as politics. :-(
>
> This why I like low level so much - 0s are 0s and 1s are 1s. The only
> real stuff.

It's just that it takes so MANY 1's and 0's to do anything useful... ;-)

> [...]
>> >> At least you can envision a future with cinemas... :-)
>> >
>> > Now the puzzle is, am I an optimist or a pessimist?
>>
>> Depends on whether the movies are good or bad. Whether they are all
>> propaganda, or some of them are educational and uplifting. Hitler's
>> Germany had a lot of movies, but some are probably illegal to own in
>> Germany now, not sure about that...
>
> I guess such films are treated as normal nazi propaganda - in most
> coutries they are forbidden by constitution, from what I know (as hate
> spreading materials). Or, if not quite forbidden (because it is good to
> know errors we want to avoid and because there are free speech concerns),
> they are mostly forgotten. At least they very rarely (and only in
> fragments) appear in the mainstream.

Yes. Some of them were good films too. It's too bad that sometimes the
baby gets thrown out with the bath water.

> Some could have been destroyed during and after the war. Some could have
> been collected as proofs for future trials of war criminals.

Mostly the propaganda was light, and embedded, like today's Hollywood
films. Take Happy Feet, for example... a fun film with just a
smattering of propaganda about climate change. (Whether the propaganda
is correct or not is secondary to the fact that it is propaganda.)

>> Movies are a tool, like computers and hammers, that can be used for
>> good or bad ends.
>
> Right! I tend to forget it. Thanks for reminding this to me.

This is a very general concept, not to be forgotten. One way I explain
this to people is by explaining that the number one murder weapon in
the Old West was not the Colt 45, but the shovel. Apparently, there
were a lot of fights over water turns. Oops.

> [...]
>> > Glaciers are moving back since 18000 years. I
>> > understand, temps are going up during this period, too. I think most of
>> > Antropocentric GW talk is marketing, selling houses in Spain, or in
>> > tundra. GW is not antropocentric, I'm afraid. It is something else,
>> > probably.
>>
>> I think it is probably human caused. The science is fairly definitive
>> in that direction.
>>
>> > [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period ]
>> >
>> > [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period ]
>
> Well, I'm not really convinced. I think humans could have added something
> to the process, that started long before industrialisation, long even
> before agrarian revolution.
>
> Science is what it is - it is fluid thing, as new data come in, old
> hypotheses are revised. As far as I know, there is no good enough climate
> model. And it is quite possible that there are still some factors not
> taken into current best models. With no correct model we are unable to
> make longterm predictions. While daily meteorological prognosis have
> improved, the longest give some insight into the week-long future, AFAIK.

Don't confuse weather with climate. We can't predict whether there
will be cloud cover in three days (VERY hard problem). But the global
average temperature over the next few decades is much easier to model.
No model is perfect, which is why there are so many competing models.
The very best studies IMHO are those that take the results from 8-10
different models and show you all of the model's predictions on the
graph together. The thing is that they all trend in the same basic
direction. NOBODY has a model that shows extra CO2 and other
greenhouse gases causing global cooling. It just doesn't work that
way. Nobody has a model that compensates for ALL the peripheral data.

If you believe generally in Moore's Law, then climate is much like
that. You can't say who is going to have a processor at 4 Ghz first,
or exactly when, but over the long term, you can more or less predict
the direction things are going. The climate is more like that.

> Of course models don't bother themselves with exact temperature in my
> place in a day July 18st, 2110. But still, I see that climate modeling
> will improve a lot during next ten years. And then, who knows, maybe I
> become convinced, or maybe they will lead to some other conclusions.

It is hard to believe in global warming. I myself was a big skeptic
until about 4 months ago. I dug into it and came up with little doubt
that there is a problem. How big a problem is still a question. How to
react to the problem is even more of an open question.

> But I confess that I have never tried my hands on anything
> climate-related. So I am not even a novice.
>
> And I have no access to any data, so even if I had my hands stuck deeply
> in papers, without data all effort would be useless.

I agree. More climate data should be publicly published. My last
company was working on this (and other data sources) before it pivoted
and I left. :-(

> However, I can look around. For example, they build a whole new city in
> Dubai, on a current sea level, and don't seem frightened that in hundred
> years all this investition will go under water. Maybe they are stupid, or
> maybe they do fraud, or maybe something else.

Dubai doesn't have much choice, seeing how they are so small.

> Guess for some foreseeable future I will remain unconvinced. ;-)

You just need more data.

>> > Kiosks could be put inside communes/villages (if we are talking 3rd
>> > world), perhaps with participation of local schools and churches. So that
>> > children can meet there together and maybe learn from each other.
>>
>> Thanks for the nice chat Tomasz all of the Poles I have talked to have
>> been genuine seekers of the truth. It's a great national attribute if
>> my sampling is accurate. Then again, there are a LOT of Catholics
>> there... :-)
>>
>> -Kelly
>
> Glad to hear you had good experiences with Poles (even thou, as in every
> group, there can be found examples of many different human behaviours).
> Truth is good and it makes us stronger, so seeking it is a worthy goal. As
> of Catholics, I am one of them (at least formally). I learned to be
> critical about institutions built upon humans, even if they are said to be
> rocks ;-) and I like critical thinking ability that I found in many
> Americans (must be somehow connected with individualism) - wish we had
> more of it in Poland :-).

It is very bad to characterize someone based on nationality... but
I've had good interactions with many Poles. I think you are going to
get more of that in Poland, if from no other source than the Internet.

Have a great day!

-Kelly