From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 1 00:10:42 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:10:42 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Do robot cars need ethics as well? In-Reply-To: References: <50B7EEF6.6040402@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50B94B02.8000400@aleph.se> On 30/11/2012 18:25, Stefano Vaj wrote: > Let me confess that I miss the point as well. Yes, but at least you miss it in a way that makes ethicists want to discuss with you rather than facepalm :-) > If the car is programmed to sacrifice its passengers for the sake of > increasing the number of the survivors, or the the other way around, > it is no more nor less ethical than a car with a software-limited > maximum speed as your everyday Merc or BMW has been for decades now. > > The "ethical" choice squarely remains in the manufacturers' ballpark > or in that of legislators enforcing rules on them. The rest is just > the accuracy with which the car is able to reflect it: the efficiency > and comprehensiveness of the old, boring calculations to be made. Yes and no. The car is not doing any real ethics in the sense of reflecting over its behaviour and choosing what principles it ought to follow, so it is by no means a moral agent in the strong sense of the word used by Kantians. But Deborah G. Johnson has a good paper "Computer Systems: Moral Entities but not Moral Agents" http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/computer_systems.pdf where she points out that while autonomous systems are not really moral agents, they are still moral entities: the interaction between the designer, user and the system can certainly be morally relevant and the "morality" of the system does matter. Yes, the designer might get part or all of the blame when things go wrong, but it does make sense of saying different car software is "good", "immoral" or "consequentialist". You can have a self-sacrificing car, even if it is not conscious. The question is whether you should want to have one. The smarter the cars are, the better they will likely be at avoiding ever getting involved in accidents. But they might show other morally relevant behaviours (largely due to design, of course) like politeness in traffic or helping. It seems that the challenge of deciding what to put into the cars is that it needs to 1) reduce risk as much as possible to everyone in the traffic system, 2) work in an environment full of erratic humans, other machines and random events, 3) not interfere with efficiency, property rights, comfort and people's intuitions. I suspect we should be happy if we could even get two out of three. Most likely we will get a little bit of each, but be forced to compromise - and that is again an ethical decision, since we are talking about something that deals with how people and their tools ought to behave. From a consequentialist standpoint this is just messy but cool and fun engineering. From a Kantian standpoint this is worrisome: one should not abdicate moral responsibility to tools, ever! From a virtue standpoint human learning and psychology might matter: we should not make an auto-system that makes us dependent and unable to take responsibility, but rather aim at cars that extend our abilities. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 00:16:09 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:16:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting Message-ID: http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2012/11/30/its-the-holiday-season-and-global-warming-hype-is-filling-the-air/ I am a bit annoyed that nobody seems to be asking the engineers how to solve the problem. It's not like we lack for clean energy; the Earth intercepts only around 1 part in a billion of the Sun's output. Take solar power satellites for example. Been understood for over 40 years, the only reason they have not been built is that the cost to lift parts to GEO is too high by a factor of about 100. So if you want to consider them, then the question to ask the engineers is how to get the cost of lifting millions of tons of parts to GEO to $100/kg instead of $10,000/kg. It looks like one way is to bootstrapping by building one power satellite with conventional rockets and using it to power propulsion lasers. Because they give much higher exhaust velocity, rockets or rocket planes powered this way get at least 5 times as much cargo into orbit as the best chemical rockets. At a scale large enough to be useful, 500,000 tons per year, the cost goes to well under $100/kg, the cost of power plants to $1600/kW and the cost of power to 2 cents per kWh or less. Power that inexpensive can be used to make synthetic carbon neutral fuel in any amounts for around a dollar a gallon. If we went this way it would take less than 20 years to end the use of fossil fuel, not by high taxes or carbon credits, but just by making synthetic fuel cheaper than fossil fuel. The oil companies (Exxon for example) already know how to do this. But it's more likely the Chinese will do it. About three years ago a major meeting in China concluded they didn't know how to lift the parts to orbit at a price that made any sense. Three weeks ago they announced a deal to build power satellites with India. (Google China India power satellites.) What happened and why? Did they figure out this obvious approach? Are they trying to get support from India when the US freaks out about big lasers in orbit? (They are also weapons.) It may be that the entire issue of climate change becomes moot before the next one of these meeting. From andymck35 at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 07:13:19 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 20:13:19 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 01 Dec 2012 13:16:09 +1300, Keith Henson wrote: > I am a bit annoyed that nobody seems to be asking the engineers how to > solve the problem. It's not like we lack for clean energy; the Earth > intercepts only around 1 part in a billion of the Sun's output. > > Take solar power satellites for example. Been understood for over 40 > years, the only reason they have not been built is that the cost to > lift parts to GEO is too high by a factor of about 100. But do the solar arrays have to be built in orbit?, what about just floating them up above the clouds like the Strato Solar people propose? Do the numbers not work for their approach, or is there a FUD problem with having a very large 'kite' floating over peoples heads? Regards Andrew From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 08:47:31 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 03:47:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:17 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: >> you demand that bureaucrats >> have to control individual securities trades rather than letting >> market participants make their own decisions. In your world people >> have to act through gatekeepers of power (elected officials, unelected >> bureaucrats) rather than through individual acts of trade. > > I request an apology. ### Really? --------------- > > You have been claiming that my support for any degree > of law and regulation, means that I support total law and > no individual choice. For instance, see the above-quoted > section. ### Adrian, you need to read an adversary's statement attentively, before giving a hasty reply. Where in the above statement do you find the word "total" or other related quantifiers ("only", "all", "none")? Obviously, I accuse you of trending towards restricting other people's freedom compared to present levels of subjugation. Whether there is a bridge on the road to serfdom that you would never cross, I don't know - and I make no comments or insinuations thereto. ------------------ > > As you state it, either I can "let market participants make > their own decision" or I can "demand that bureaucrats > have to control individual securities trades". What I > support is not 100% either one, but in between. ### Oh, great. --------------- > > Further, my support for some degree of law is based in > part on the knowledge that uncontrolled anarchy becomes > despotism - which rather massively takes away individual > choice. ### Yeah, but why do you keep changing the subject? We are not talking about uncontrolled anarchy, we are talking about a market-based society. You don't think that "market" and "anarchy" are synonyms, do you? -------------- That is to say, 100% individual control does not > (yet) work in reality, so the practical choice is between a > little control or a lot of control. ### 100% individual control is logically incoherent whenever two or more individuals physically interact with each other, so obviously, neither I nor Dan are talking about it. It's, like, we talk about one thing, and you read into it some off-the-wall extreme meaning that clearly is not there. ----------------- > > Future technological solutions may be able to reduce the > practical minimum amount of control. This will be a good > thing. Until then, we live in the world we live in. ### So agitating for freedom and the end of the mohair subsidies has to wait for new techno-gadgets? ------------- > > Therefore, to claim that I support total government control > and the complete removal of individual choice, just > because I support any degree of control (which I support > in order to *protect* individual choice), is an insult. ### Read what I write before you feel insulted. ------------------- > >> ### In all encounters with me so far you have taken the side of more >> government control of our lives, compared to what we have now (there >> is a duty to vote, there is no right to trade securities etc.). > > This "encounter" was of your asking whether I support > Dodd-Frank. That exists now. Nothing in my direct > response stated a desire for far more of Dodd-Frank, > but merely support for what exists (and only the > majority of it) in this topic. ### Well, you do support Dodd-Frank, so yes, you side with those who two years ago restricted our ability to trade. This year, again, you supported restrictions on Intrade, continuing the trend. -------------------- > > This is but one example where I have not, in fact, > taken the side of more government control than what > we have now. ### Hey, give me more. Interesting choice of pronoun - "we". In this very same sentence I would have inserted "they". ----------------- > > I wonder whether you are deliberately lying, or simply > rejecting all evidence that contrasts with your > assertions. Either way, you are wrong. ### ? Rafal From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 1 12:57:59 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:57:59 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50B9FED7.1080801@aleph.se> On 01/12/2012 07:13, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Sat, 01 Dec 2012 13:16:09 +1300, Keith Henson > wrote: > >> Take solar power satellites for example. Been understood for over 40 >> years, the only reason they have not been built is that the cost to >> lift parts to GEO is too high by a factor of about 100. > > But do the solar arrays have to be built in orbit?, what about just > floating them up above the clouds like the Strato Solar people propose? > > Do the numbers not work for their approach, or is there a FUD problem > with having a very large 'kite' floating over peoples heads? The kite could be floating over empty countryside or lakes. I think a big problem for space is energy conversion losses. When I asked Elon Musk why he didn't go for space power he did a quick estimate of the losses involved in converting the photovoltaic electricity into the right voltages needed for the microwave system. That is then followed by transmission and reception losses in the microwave step, followed by terrestrial transmission losses. All in all, they easily seemed to eat up the 24 hour unfiltered sunlight benefit. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 16:50:50 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 08:50:50 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: Eh, a quick explanation, but if you still do not understand after this one then you're probably not worth any further reply: On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:17 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki >> wrote: >>> you demand that bureaucrats >>> have to control individual securities trades rather than letting >>> market participants make their own decisions. In your world people >>> have to act through gatekeepers of power (elected officials, unelected >>> bureaucrats) rather than through individual acts of trade. >> You have been claiming that my support for any degree >> of law and regulation, means that I support total law and >> no individual choice. For instance, see the above-quoted >> section. > > ### Adrian, you need to read an adversary's statement attentively, > before giving a hasty reply. Where in the above statement do you find > the word "total" or other related quantifiers ("only", "all", "none")? "Rather than" is the qualifier here, as if only X or Y is possible rather than partial X and partial Y. > Read what I write before you feel insulted. I did. >> This is but one example where I have not, in fact, >> taken the side of more government control than what >> we have now. > > ### Hey, give me more. No. I give you what you need to understand. I do not have unlimited time to re-explain every point to you as many times as it takes, and I have already spent multiple hours on this. That is why you are not worth any further reply if you still don't understand after this letter. > Interesting choice of pronoun - "we". In this very same sentence I > would have inserted "they". Like it or not, you live under the same government I do, therefore "we" are under the same government and suffer its controls. From nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk Sat Dec 1 18:00:07 2012 From: nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Nowell) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 18:00:07 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [ExI] Do robot cars need ethics as well? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1354384807.58357.YahooMailClassic@web132104.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Anders wrote: "The car is not doing any real ethics in the sense of reflecting over its behaviour and choosing what principles it ought to follow, so it is by no means a moral agent in the strong sense of the word used by Kantians." Well, last time I was in an emergency situation (an old lady fell over and damaged her hip in our local community centre) I was not thinking ethically. I was thinking "CRAP! AN ACCIDENT ON MY WATCH! WHERE'S A FIRST AIDER? SHOULD I CALL AN AMBULANCE? AAAGH!" Luckily, a few feet away from me there was a lady who happened to be a nurse at the local hospital who responded calmly and after checking the old lady she asked someone to call an ambulance and someone to fetch something to rest her head on. My colleague called the ambulance while I fetched a cushion. Does my autonomic system's tendency to drive me to panic make me a less ethical person than someone who is calmer? Is a computerised car, free from an evolved adrenaline-based sytem, in a much better situation to make decisions in a car-based emergency than me? Just how much information can the car gather in the hundredths of a second it has to think before it needs to act? Anders also wrote: " But they might show other morally relevant behaviours (largely due to design, of course) like politeness in traffic or helping." Well, humans with little ethical thinking might show morally relevant behaviours like politeness if there were laws enacted to enforce them. In the Netherlands, there are traffic systems where you have to give way to joining traffic, and the "zipper" system where you have to let someone in from the left, and later on let in someone from the right, sounded very complex to me but it seems to work there. All developed countries have quite complex laws regarding roads and behaviour on them, perhaps the development of computerised cars will encourage lawmakers to rationalise the rules or to formalise some things which haven't been set down yet. Tom From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 18:26:02 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 18:26:02 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Raspberry Pi for Christmas? Message-ID: How many are going to get a Raspberry Pi for Christmas? *Officially*, for their kids to learn about computers. Quote: If these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you?ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi. This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It?s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$. ----------------- BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 20:20:04 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 15:20:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Eh, a quick explanation, but if you still do not understand > after this one then you're probably not worth any further > reply: > > On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:17 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki >>> wrote: >>>> you demand that bureaucrats >>>> have to control individual securities trades rather than letting >>>> market participants make their own decisions. In your world people >>>> have to act through gatekeepers of power (elected officials, unelected >>>> bureaucrats) rather than through individual acts of trade. > >>> You have been claiming that my support for any degree >>> of law and regulation, means that I support total law and >>> no individual choice. For instance, see the above-quoted >>> section. >> >> ### Adrian, you need to read an adversary's statement attentively, >> before giving a hasty reply. Where in the above statement do you find >> the word "total" or other related quantifiers ("only", "all", "none")? > > "Rather than" is the qualifier here, as if only X or Y is possible > rather than partial X and partial Y. ### Seriously? Let's have a vote: Anybody else possibly reading this, especially native English speakers, please weigh in - does the word "rather" in the paragraph quoted above (starting with "you demand that bureaucrats...."), used there twice without an absolute qualifier (such as "always", "only", "exclusively") actually act as an absolute qualifier on its own? But, in case nobody reads it, here is for you Adrian a reference to an English dictionary, explaining the meaning of "rather": http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rather If interested I can also supply you with the definition of "is", the word that many philosophers and at least one president foundered on. ------------------------ > No. I give you what you need to understand. I do not have > unlimited time to re-explain every point to you as many times > as it takes, and I have already spent multiple hours on this. > > That is why you are not worth any further reply if you still > don't understand after this letter. ### The online dictionary thinks I do understand, quite well. ------------------------- > >> Interesting choice of pronoun - "we". In this very same sentence I >> would have inserted "they". > > Like it or not, you live under the same government I do, > therefore "we" are under the same government and > suffer its controls. ### You missed my veiled insinuation, so let me explain me in greater detail: The last subordinate clause in the sentence you wrote "This is but one example where I have not, in fact, taken the side of more government control than what we have now" (the clause "what we have now") can be modified to refer to either of two subjects - the government or the people. I would have chosen the former referent, expressing my feeling that the government is an extraneous entity ("what *they* have now"). You chose "we" - as if identifying with the government (you + government = we), or merging the government and the people (the people + government = we). Just thought this might be a Freudian glimpse. Rafal From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 1 20:47:56 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 12:47:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Seriously? Let's have a vote: Anybody who believes what Rafal believes, say you agre with him. Anybody who's been staying out of this thread, continue to stay silent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias > But, in case nobody reads it, here is for you Adrian a reference to an > English dictionary, explaining the meaning of "rather": > > http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rather I see nothing there that disproves the notion that you were presenting a contrast between two absolutes, and thus implicitly denying the possibility of anything between. > The last subordinate clause in the sentence you wrote "This is but one > example where I have not, in fact, taken the side of more government > control than what we have now" (the clause "what we have now") can be > modified to refer to either of two subjects - the government or the > people. I would have chosen the former referent, expressing my feeling > that the government is an extraneous entity ("what *they* have now"). > You chose "we" - as if identifying with the government (you + > government = we), or merging the government and the people (the people > + government = we). "We", the people, experience (or "have") a level of government control. "They" is only correct in this case if the speaker is not part of the population experiencing this control. From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 2 00:00:13 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:13 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Do robot cars need ethics as well? In-Reply-To: <1354384807.58357.YahooMailClassic@web132104.mail.ird.yahoo.com> References: <1354384807.58357.YahooMailClassic@web132104.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <50BA9A0D.6020400@aleph.se> On 01/12/2012 18:00, Tom Nowell wrote: > Does my autonomic system's tendency to drive me to panic make me a less ethical person than someone who is calmer? Is a computerised car, free from an evolved adrenaline-based sytem, in a much better situation to make decisions in a car-based emergency than me? There is a distinction between acting morally - you do the right thing - and acting ethically - you think about what the moral thing to do is. In an emergency it is usually stupid to try to be ethical, but using cached good behaviours or dispositions may allow you to act morally. This is part of what makes nurses so useful in emergencies. And I suspect insofar we can cram good behaviours into cars they could execute them with amazing speed. The first problem is that cars are *dumb*. They will apply their rules without insight, and this might lead to bad results due to the attempt to do the right thing. The car that veers off the road to avoid hitting a pedestrian might not realize that it now will hit people in a tent next to the road since it does not know about tents. Second, we are not always certain about what the right thing to do is. Dumb humans have as far as I know not been studied much in ethics. Ethicists assume everybody is as smart as them, and will hence be able to perform the right logical operations to reach their conclusions. This is clearly not right. And ethicists typically assume the rules they analyse will be implemented by humans who can reflect on them and will not just naively do what they are told - again not true for AI ethics. Ethicists are hence rather unprepared to suggest rules for machine ethics. > Anders also wrote: " But they might show other morally relevant behaviours (largely due to design, of course) like politeness in traffic or helping." > Well, humans with little ethical thinking might show morally relevant behaviours like politeness if there were laws enacted to enforce them. In the Netherlands, there are traffic systems where you have to give way to joining traffic, and the "zipper" system where you have to let someone in from the left, and later on let in someone from the right, sounded very complex to me but it seems to work there. All developed countries have quite complex laws regarding roads and behaviour on them, perhaps the development of computerised cars will encourage lawmakers to rationalise the rules or to formalise some things which haven't been set down yet. I think this is a real problem. A lot of the functionality of the road system is due to "politeness" and shared understanding of what goes on. Tonight I witnessed two cars on a narrow street 'conversing' by blinking lights to decide who would go where. I doubt a machine could have replicated that communication (sure, two AI-cars would just talk wifi, but what about one AI and one human?) Many of the rules of the road are informal and hard to strictly pin down: making them exact enough to run machines by would make them unwieldy for humans. It is just like the attempts at formalising human social relationships in social media platforms: "friends" and "circles" do not reflect the full complexity, and forcing people to relate and identify according to some prescribed system tends to impair their social functions. I suspect that the solution will be a bit more formalisation of previously informal rules, but also making autonomous cars very noticeable: it matters what is driving, since it tells you what to expect. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From clementlawyer at gmail.com Sun Dec 2 00:52:00 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 19:52:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) Message-ID: Thought this might interest some individuals on the list. *http://veillance.me/* * * *ISTAS'13* will bring together participants sharing research, projects, and ideas about people living in smart environments. The environment around us is becoming "smarter". Soon there will be a camera in nearly every streetlight to do better occupancy sensing,and ultimately a camera in every light fixture. And modern automatic flush toilets, faucets, and sensor-operated showers are starting to use more sophisticated camera-based computer-vision technologies.In a world of smart things like smart lights, smart toilets, smart grids, smart meters, smart roads, and the like, what happens when you have "smart people" (i.e. put sensors on people)? What do we make of the growing numbers of businesses like department stores and restaurants that prohibit cameras, yet display QR codes that require cameras to read and understand? Keynote Panel Speakers Steve Mann , Marvin Minsky , Kevin Warwick Topics - Wearable computing - Augmediated reality - The Veillances - Everyday life - Social concerns - Traditional fields of interest to SSIT Thanks, James Clement -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 2 09:04:07 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 04:04:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> But, in case nobody reads it, here is for you Adrian a reference to an >> English dictionary, explaining the meaning of "rather": >> >> http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rather > > I see nothing there that disproves the notion that you were presenting > a contrast between two absolutes, and thus implicitly denying the > possibility of anything between. > ### Let me walk you through it: "Rather" is not an absolute qualifier, it is the quintessential relative qualifier, contrary to what you claimed. Therefore, my statement did not present a contrast between two absolutes, since it contained no absolute qualifiers. Clearly, to a person versed in the English language, I accused you of wanting to give more, but not necessarily all, control over my life to your government, compared to the present situation. You erroneously concluded that I accused you of supporting total government control, perhaps because of your faulty understanding of the meaning of "rather". ------------------ >> The last subordinate clause in the sentence you wrote "This is but one >> example where I have not, in fact, taken the side of more government >> control than what we have now" (the clause "what we have now") can be >> modified to refer to either of two subjects - the government or the >> people. I would have chosen the former referent, expressing my feeling >> that the government is an extraneous entity ("what *they* have now"). >> You chose "we" - as if identifying with the government (you + >> government = we), or merging the government and the people (the people >> + government = we). > > "We", the people, experience (or "have") a level of government > control. "They" is only correct in this case if the speaker is not > part of the population experiencing this control. ### It's interesting how you seem unable to alternatively parse the sentence in question. You should realize that the word "have " could mean not only "experience" but also "exert", and in the latter meaning, I can say "They (government) have control (of me)", i.e. I am a part of the population experiencing this control. Now, we are discussing some very basic issues in English usage - is this perhaps your second language? This could explain the mistakes you make in reading posts on this list. Rafal From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 2 15:32:13 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 10:32:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 4:04 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > ### It's interesting how you seem unable to alternatively parse the > sentence in question. You should realize that the word "have " could > mean not only "experience" but also "exert", and in the latter > meaning, I can say "They (government) have control (of me)", i.e. I am > a part of the population experiencing this control. > > Now, we are discussing some very basic issues in English usage - is > this perhaps your second language? This could explain the mistakes you > make in reading posts on this list. This horse is dead, why continue to beat it? From rahmans at me.com Sun Dec 2 16:14:50 2012 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2012 17:14:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2012-12-02, at 1:00 PM, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: >>>> wrote: >>>>> you demand that bureaucrats >>>>> have to control individual securities trades rather than letting >>>>> market participants make their own decisions. As a 'native speaker' who has taught English as a second language I would say that: - 'the demand that (someone) has to control' does portray Adrian's position as an absolute or extreme position - Adrian has at other places tried to distance himself from this sort of position - the X 'rather than' Y doesn't mean that if X is an absolute the alternative Y must also be an absolute, but simply shows your preference to a second alternative (and it should not be inferred that this implies that there are only 2 alternatives) Eg. I would rather eat the absolute best ever steak than some bug. (Clearly there are more things to eat than bugs and steak.) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 12:47:56 -0800 From: Adrian Tymes > I see nothing there that disproves the notion that you were presenting > a contrast between two absolutes, and thus implicitly denying the > possibility of anything between. As a person who can read I would say: - Rafa? said in some clarification response somewhere (sorry for not taking the time to dig that out) that his position isn't for some sort of theoretical absolute freedom, but generally for 'more' freedom As a person who has studied logic I would say: yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white (Website not responding, which is a shame because I love sending people there.) I hope that site comes up again soon, it is a simple reference that is worth reviewing from time to time. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 2 18:11:34 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 10:11:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> I see nothing there that disproves the notion that you were presenting >> a contrast between two absolutes, and thus implicitly denying the >> possibility of anything between. > > "Rather" is not an absolute qualifier, As Omar pointed out, the positions you were contrasting are extreme enough to preclude consideration of the middle. Consider your words: "In your world people have to act through gatekeepers of power (elected officials, unelected bureaucrats) rather than through individual acts of trade." That means, any time there could be an individual act of trade, according to you I would not allow said acts, and instead have people go through gatekeepers. Perhaps I should have pointed out that "have to" lessens the relative comparison. "It has to be X, rather than Y" means that it has to be X and it has to not be Y. > You should realize that the word "have " could > mean not only "experience" but also "exert" Could, yes. But again, consider your words: "more government control of our lives, compared to what we have now" It is the government that exerts this control. Are you part of the government? If not, then "exert" is not the meaning you started out using. (You have very strongly indicated that you consider the government to be something you are not part of.) This would appear to be one example of where you redefine words in the middle of the argument. I wonder if you are consciously aware that you have been doing this: quite a few I have encountered who did this didn't know they were, and wondered why people couldn't understand them. > Now, we are discussing some very basic issues in English usage - is > this perhaps your second language? Nope. Native English speaker here. Then again, many English as a second language people I have known, speak English at least as well as most native speakers (once they have been speaking it for at least five years - and that cutoff may be too high). However, I see that people who confuse issues and try to redefine words mid-argument, are often the same people who resort to logical fallacies (such as believing that personally discrediting the opposing speaker proves anything about the point being discussed) and making up "facts" that just aren't true. This is a favored tactic of creationists, climate change deniers, and others who are opposed to humanist views, especially transhumanist views, which is why I have picked up experience dealing with them, but we can fall into this trap too. On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > - Rafa? said in some clarification response somewhere (sorry for not taking > the time to dig that out) that his position isn't for some sort of > theoretical absolute freedom, but generally for 'more' freedom I wasn't contesting that. I was contesting his misrepresentation of my position. > yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white (Website not responding, which > is a shame because I love sending people there.) > > I hope that site comes up again soon, it is a simple reference that is worth > reviewing from time to time. Quite! I'd been avoiding linking to it since I thought it might be too downputting, but that is one of the fallacies I have been pointing out in Rafal's responses. I acknowledge that there is a middle ground between "no control" and "absolute control". In fact, my main point here has been that "no control" tends to devolve to "absolute control", but a little control does not do this, therefore it is the closest we can practically get to no control over the long term, at least with current technology. Rafal's responses seem to be that defense of any control amounts to defense of absolute control. In other words, he seems to be committing this fallacy when appraising my defense of limited control. From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 2 18:03:17 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 10:03:17 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: <018701cdd0b7$4ee4c320$ecae4960$@att.net> -----Original Message----- >... Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki ...Subject: Re: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> ...I see nothing there that... Adrian ### It's interesting how ...Rafal _______________________________________________ Although there is a clear level of mutual annoyance, I do commend both you gentlemen and others who have participated in this thread for keeping the discussion relatively civil while I am away for the weekend on other matters, the Transhumanist Author's schmooze in San Francisco. (!) {8-] Oh my this is sooo cool, I have been privileged to meet and physically speak to several of my living heroes, royal smart persons, gods and goddesses, and I didn't even fall prostrate before them, crying out for mercy upon me, a mere mortal who sucks. I am completely in awe of myself for having been with them. Thanks! your friendly neighborhood ExI moderator, spike {8-] From clementlawyer at gmail.com Mon Dec 3 19:01:33 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2012 14:01:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Conscientious objections In-Reply-To: References: <1353103728.91925.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1354171527.10986.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I just came across this article and thought it was relevant to the discussion. I'm an ancap/agorist, so I also agree that there should be no nations and no borders. It?s not YOUR Country: How Nationalism is Obsolete By Stuart Dobson ? 3 ,Dec ,2012*Posted in: *Articles If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, Follow us on Facebook , or read Social Rebirth on your phone/tablet. Thanks for visiting! Forgive me, but I have an issue with the indigenous support chant, that which acknowledges the land of Australia to be owned by the original people: ?Always was, Always will be Aboriginal Land ?. I can see the complaints pouring in already. How dare I, a British Expatriate who has chosen to live in a country stolen by my ancestors, have the audacity to challenge the traditional owners of this land? Don?t I know what they?ve been through? Well it?s time people stopped hiding behind political correctness and acknowledge the ugly truth. Discrimination ? against *and for*, is still discrimination. We are differentiating between people who have thousands of years of ancestors from this land and people who may only have one or two generations. By doing this we are once again discriminating against people for things they had no control over. The problems of society which this site discusses in depth, are actually more pressing than an historical grudge ? and they affect *everyone*. We can respect and express gratitude to the indigenous ancestors for taking care of the land, but to acknowledge ?ownership? of it legitimises a paradigm which is outdated and dangerous. This *planet* is the common heritage of everyone, we?re all born here. These borders ? these lines of division ? are nothing but imaginary constructs; a throwback to the days of pre-industrialised resource scarcity, to animal territorial-ism. Nobody has a right to lay claim to a specific area ? especially not based on such a detached concept as the location of their birth. Acknowledging ?owners? of land is a form of nationalism ? and is therefore racistand dividing. Yes this land was taken over by Europeans and the indigenous people were treated terribly. But to dwell on these atrocities of the past is to acknowledge a ?them and us?, which is not only a perpetuation of discrimination but also an excuse for further hate and resentment. This is simply not acceptable in a civilised society, no matter how legitimate the reason. So how do I justify my own situation, given that I chose to live here? For this I make no excuses. I am a citizen of the Earth ? a human being ? and this planet is my home. I don?t ?belong? to any country and no country belongs to me. This is the case for everyone. Patriotism is just an idea. It doesn?t exist in the natural world ? only in your head. If we were all to acknowledge this, national barriers would disintegrate and a world of cooperation could emerge. *?Imagine there?s no countries, It isn?t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for?? ? John Lennon* Yes of course this sounds idealistic, given the cultural and political differences between nations. But it?s not culture that I wish to normalise in this desire for a unified planet. In fact it?s important, as we break down national barriers, that we strive to maintain the beautiful, rich, cultural diversity that we have built over centuries. We don?t have to destroy this and all become the same, flattening the cultural landscape. We can integrate all cultures ? or ignore them ? this is our choice ? but it needn?t effect our eradication of nationalism. *?Preservation of one?s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.? ? Cesar Chavez* *?If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life?s exciting variety, not something to fear.? - Gene Roddenberry, writer of Star Trek: The Next Generation* We need to differentiate these cultural lines from true, logistical ones. What?s important for our survival and the realisation of human potential is not our differences ? but our similarities. Image courtesy Positive Pakistani Therefore the problems we need to address from a planetary perspective are not economic differences, artificial trade rules, or ?legal entities?, but our *management of resources*, in respect to the *welfare of all sentient beings*. Our needs are real. Our social and ecological problems are real. Our time, our labour, and our suffering, is real. Our nationality is not. We need to focus on stewarding our planet to be sustainable for *all of us*, forever. The only way to do this is to develop systems to help us * continually* realise our interconnection, managing the earth as a single system ? not a collection of competing entities. If not, we continue to risk consequences of detriment to each other. The Internet has shown us in a very short time the irrelevance of location while simultaneously exposing us all to our planet?s rich cultural variety. Today children are growing up without the barriers we adults took for granted and this is wonderful. Now, the concept of countries and nation states is as obsolete as homophobia ? sadly it still exists, but only because of the backward mentality of a dying breed. It?s an irrelevant belief, it has no bearing on our survival or prosperity as a species ? and if anything, it directly threatens us. One would hope that most indigenous people will now see that it?s not them vs whites, it?s not even us vs the rich. It?s all of us vs a broken capitalist system that allows the perpetuation of an destructive ruling class. It?s us vs this system which rewards accumulation, acknowledges higher authority, and destroys our habitat with no conscience. This is a system of which we are all victim and one which we must cast off the falsely imposed segregation of the past, and come together to eradicate. *?The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.? ? Carl Sagan* * * *James* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 3 22:32:32 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:32:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Conscientious objections In-Reply-To: References: <1353103728.91925.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1354171527.10986.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 3 December 2012 20:01, James Clement wrote: > > I just came across this article and thought it was relevant to the discussion. I'm an ancap/agorist, so I also agree that there should be no nations and no borders. > > It?s not YOUR Country: How Nationalism is Obsolete This is an argument only against "objectivist" nationalism or aboriginalism. >From a "relativistic" POV, one's class or country or culture interest and identity, whatever it may be, should be defended only because it is yours. -- Stefano Vaj From pizerdavid at yahoo.com Tue Dec 4 21:30:58 2012 From: pizerdavid at yahoo.com (david pizer) Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 13:30:58 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Cryonics Meet up Saturday Message-ID: <1354656658.69428.YahooMailNeo@web121706.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> A meet-up will be held on Saturday Dec 8th at Jack Sinclair's house in Scottsdale at 2 pm. All Cryonicists are invited. THE MAIN SUBJECT WILL BE: SHOULD WE CREATE A NEW, LOW-COST SUSPENSION COMPANY? This could be either cryonics, or chemical preservation. This could be for head or brain only. This could be non-profit, or for-profit. The idea is to find a way to provide an affordable chance for survival of death to all humans who are interested. All Options are open for discussion. The Society for Venturism will entertain all ideas from attendees. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pjmanney at gmail.com Wed Dec 5 05:07:24 2012 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 21:07:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> Message-ID: I was so thrilled to finally meet Fred and Spike in meat space! Such sweet guys. And to catch up with Natasha, Max and many other Extropian and Humanity + folks. Natasha, you done good, girlfriend. :-) This weekend was filled with H+ awesomeness. Thanks for inviting me to play. All the best, PJ On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, F. C. Moulton wrote: > Also there is a related event at Borderlands Books in San Francisco > Friday Nov 30 starting 5:00PM. Presenters are > Ramez Naam > Annalee Newitz > Max More > Natasha Vita-More > James Hughes > > Note this is a no charge event however you are required to have a > ticket. Details at: > http://2012.humanityplus.org/program/bookstore-event/ > > Fred > > > On 10/26/2012 05:11 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > > **** > > > > December 1-2, San Francisco State University *?Writing the Future?* > > > > > > We have a great lineup of speakers including: Kim Stanley Robinson, > > Sonia Arrison, Jamais Casio, Max More, PJ Manney, RU Sirius, Randal > > Koene and Natasha Vita-More! Skyping in are David Brin and Ben > > Goertzel! And a special tribute to Ray Kurzweil?s new book! > > > > > > > > Conference website: http://2012.humanityplus.org/ > > > > *GET YOUR TICKETS! * > > > > Announcement: http://www.kurzweilai.net/humanity-san-francisco > > > > *Promo Video! > > <%5b5:05:21%20PM%5d%20Adam%20Ford:%20http:/ > www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0ZjPR7nTk4>* > > > > Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/509264069102231/?fref=ts > > > > Venue: http://2012.humanityplus.org/venue/ > > > > Lodging suggestion: http://2012.humanityplus.org/lodging/ (you must > > secure your room by November 7 to get the discount rate!) > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > -- > F. C. Moulton > moulton at moulton.com > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Dec 5 11:13:41 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:13:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Il 01/12/2012 01:16, Keith Henson ha scritto: > http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2012/11/30/its-the-holiday-season-and-global-warming-hype-is-filling-the-air/ > > I am a bit annoyed that nobody seems to be asking the engineers how to > solve the problem. It's not like we lack for clean energy; the Earth > intercepts only around 1 part in a billion of the Sun's output. Maybe because there is no real problem? Politicians need little goblins to numb the mind of common people (mainly the common people voting). If the goblin is inexistent it is a feature, not a bug. If it doesn't exist it can not, by definition, be solved. And this make sure the politician is never out of job. Mirco From pharos at gmail.com Wed Dec 5 13:07:34 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 13:07:34 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Maybe because there is no real problem? > > Politicians need little goblins to numb the mind of common people > (mainly the common people voting). If the goblin is inexistent it is a > feature, not a bug. If it doesn't exist it can not, by definition, be > solved. And this make sure the politician is never out of job. > !!! You are obviously not a farmer. Crops don't care about internet arguments, for or against. Farmers are just concerned about what crops to plant and the changes the climate is forcing them to make. Reality bites! BillK From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Dec 5 15:54:28 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 07:54:28 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 01/12/2012 01:16, Keith Henson ha scritto: >> http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2012/11/30/its-the-holiday-season-and-global-warming-hype-is-filling-the-air/ >> >> I am a bit annoyed that nobody seems to be asking the engineers how to >> solve the problem. It's not like we lack for clean energy; the Earth >> intercepts only around 1 part in a billion of the Sun's output. > > Maybe because there is no real problem? Mario, I don't like speaking from authority, but sometimes it has to be done. I have studied this business since the early 1970s and have the technical background (BSEE) to understand it. There really is a problem, it's like a person living a lavish lifestyle on a rapidly depleting bank account, and it's not a creation of the politicians. > Politicians need little goblins to numb the mind of common people > (mainly the common people voting). If the goblin is inexistent it is a > feature, not a bug. If it doesn't exist it can not, by definition, be > solved. And this make sure the politician is never out of job. A main feature of politicians has been to downplay the seriousness of the consequences of running out of cheap energy. Not that they had a lot of other choices because until recently the engineers didn't know how to solve the problem either. Keith > Mirco > > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > End of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5 > ******************************************** From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Dec 5 16:26:55 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:26:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: <50BF75CF.2010204@libero.it> Il 05/12/2012 14:07, BillK ha scritto: > On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> Maybe because there is no real problem? >> >> Politicians need little goblins to numb the mind of common people >> (mainly the common people voting). If the goblin is inexistent it is a >> feature, not a bug. If it doesn't exist it can not, by definition, be >> solved. And this make sure the politician is never out of job. >> > > !!! You are obviously not a farmer. > > Crops don't care about internet arguments, for or against. Farmers are > just concerned about what crops to plant and the changes the climate > is forcing them to make. > Reality bites! There is no AWG. So, there is no ability for A to correct the GW, if the GW exist. Now, if you want talk about climate engineering, I could find it an interesting topic. But please, CO2 is not the culprit and humans have not produced enough CO2 to change anything (apart raise a bit the rate of growing of plants - do you hate plants?). BTW, weather change, and climate is not a steady stable level of temperature, humidity, wind, whatever. It change, it is normal. An advanced civilization should be able to endure a little modicum of climatic variation. Our ancestor did and thrived. Now we are so scared for what? If needed we could build enough nuclear plants to use the energy to grow crops in high rise greenhouses. We should really industrialize the agriculture. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Dec 5 16:15:56 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:15:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50BF733C.1060902@libero.it> Il 05/12/2012 16:54, Keith Henson ha scritto: > On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> Politicians need little goblins to numb the mind of common people >> (mainly the common people voting). If the goblin is inexistent it is a >> feature, not a bug. If it doesn't exist it can not, by definition, be >> solved. And this make sure the politician is never out of job. > A main feature of politicians has been to downplay the seriousness of > the consequences of running out of cheap energy. Not that they had a > lot of other choices because until recently the engineers didn't know > how to solve the problem either. Politicians here in Europe/Italy have no problem with high energy costs: they raise taxes on fuel all the time. And from what I read, they have no problem to make it costly in US too. I pay 1.65 ?/l for gasoline (make the conversion in US$) and at least 60% of it is just taxes (and I live just a shot from an oil refinery). Mirco From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Dec 5 19:02:35 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 12:02:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> Message-ID: <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> Thank you PJ! It was a whirlwind weekend. Thanks to Spike for being in such great spirits and managing the registration with exuberance and ease, and all the speakers, including some of our valued transhumanist friends on this list! In fact, I'd go so far to say we put the Extropy back in transhumanism/H+! What is that? Can-do attitude, intellectually stimulating, challenging limits, naughty humor, science fiction sophistication, daring ideas, balanced and good old-fashioned and relaxed camaraderie. Natasha From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of PJ Manney Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:07 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 I was so thrilled to finally meet Fred and Spike in meat space! Such sweet guys. And to catch up with Natasha, Max and many other Extropian and Humanity + folks. Natasha, you done good, girlfriend. :-) This weekend was filled with H+ awesomeness. Thanks for inviting me to play. All the best, PJ On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, F. C. Moulton wrote: Also there is a related event at Borderlands Books in San Francisco Friday Nov 30 starting 5:00PM. Presenters are Ramez Naam Annalee Newitz Max More Natasha Vita-More James Hughes Note this is a no charge event however you are required to have a ticket. Details at: http://2012.humanityplus.org/program/bookstore-event/ Fred On 10/26/2012 05:11 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > **** > > December 1-2, San Francisco State University *"Writing the Future"* > > > We have a great lineup of speakers including: Kim Stanley Robinson, > Sonia Arrison, Jamais Casio, Max More, PJ Manney, RU Sirius, Randal > Koene and Natasha Vita-More! Skyping in are David Brin and Ben > Goertzel! And a special tribute to Ray Kurzweil's new book! > > > > Conference website: http://2012.humanityplus.org/ > > *GET YOUR TICKETS! * > > Announcement: http://www.kurzweilai.net/humanity-san-francisco > > *Promo Video! > <%5b5:05:21%20PM%5d%20Adam%20Ford:%20http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0ZjPR7nT k4>* > > Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/509264069102231/?fref=ts > > Venue: http://2012.humanityplus.org/venue/ > > Lodging suggestion: http://2012.humanityplus.org/lodging/ (you must > secure your room by November 7 to get the discount rate!) > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Wed Dec 5 22:45:39 2012 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 15:45:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: Bill, I'm guessing that you're concerned about global warming, and this is push-back to Mirco's offering of "Maybe because there is no real problem?" Please then, tell us about your own farming expertise. Also, tell us of your expertise in climate modelling. Will Siberia, once warmed, become a vast expanse of rich farmland? Will rain fall in copious amounts across the vast expanse of the now-dessicated Sahara? Global warming due to anthropogenic increase in CO2 is real, but what does that ***really*** mean? The issue has been thoroughly politicized. Climate models have long been crap, and I think, still are. The left says "We're doomed! We're doomed!" and the right says "What problem?, fill 'er with high test." How much will the sea level rise when the North Polar Ice Cap melts? The catastrophe that bites you on the ass, is the one you don't see coming, not the one coming at you at a slow crawl, in full view, on a hundred year schedule. YMMV. Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Dec 5 23:52:08 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 23:52:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 10:45 PM, Jeff Davis wrote: > I'm guessing that you're concerned about global warming, and this is > push-back to Mirco's offering of "Maybe because there is no real problem?" > > Please then, tell us about your own farming expertise. Also, tell us of > your expertise in climate modelling. Will Siberia, once warmed, become a > vast expanse of rich farmland? Will rain fall in copious amounts across the > vast expanse of the now-dessicated Sahara? > > I'm not going to put even more verbiage into the global warming / climate change argument. Google can provide thousands of pages to support both sides of the argument. I just pointed out that the growing seasons changing and the wheat belt moving further north every year doesn't care about internet arguments. Denying climate change is like wearing sunglasses and denying the sky is blue. And, as Keith and others have pointed out, the proposed actions to alleviate global warming are actions that humanity should be doing anyway. And the sooner we start, the less traumatic the change will be. BillK From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 6 00:09:50 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:09:50 +0000 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <50BFE24E.5020106@aleph.se> On 05/12/2012 19:02, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > > It was a whirlwind weekend. > I am happily envious for you! It got good reviews from a participant I met today. [ Gearing up for my own conference(s) this weekend. We are also going to have fun, but of course in a slightly stuffy academic way. Oxford doesn't do whirlwinds, we do eddies :-) ] -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 6 00:26:24 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:26:24 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: <50BFE630.7080008@aleph.se> On 05/12/2012 22:45, Jeff Davis wrote: > Global warming due to anthropogenic increase in CO2 is real, but what > does that ***really*** mean? The issue has been thoroughly > politicized. Climate models have long been crap, and I think, still > are. The left says "We're doomed! We're doomed!" and the right says > "What problem?, fill 'er with high test." Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of: "Humans are definitely changing the climate in worrying ways, but the models can we make are fairly crappy due to foundational reasons that are unlikely to ever go away (but we still want bigger computers! Because they are cool!) But the *big* hole in our knowledge is the mapping climate -> weather -> human impact. We simply do not have any good ways of estimating that. And then politicians and activists take our dear research and make it *stupid*. Oh, and geoengineering looks like it could work... which is *scary*, because it is going to be the mother of all governance and safety problems - now you have climate change with some of the stupid people in charge." Of course, at least in Europe farmers are largely decoupled from actual climate: given the current subsidy situation and the apparent impossibility of dislodging it, you can do well by not producing anything. The problem for engineers is that engineering works when you get to build a clean system that optimizes certain things. But if you need to interface with messy existing systems that change, behave irrationally or even adversarially, then it becomes *much* harder. It often fails as a discipline because it produces too brittle solutions in the face of this kind of mess. Which doesn't mean that neat solutions to particular problems are not transformative and desirable. It is just that, as soon as you scale them up to a big system it will start to interact with the mess. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 6 01:11:51 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 17:11:51 -0800 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <005901cdd34e$ad01ab50$070501f0$@att.net> It was the closest thing to an extro-schmooze since E5. Excellent! More later when my internet connection is back. spike From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Natasha Vita-More Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 11:03 AM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: Re: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 Thank you PJ! It was a whirlwind weekend. Thanks to Spike for being in such great spirits and managing the registration with exuberance and ease, and all the speakers, including some of our valued transhumanist friends on this list! In fact, I'd go so far to say we put the Extropy back in transhumanism/H+! What is that? Can-do attitude, intellectually stimulating, challenging limits, naughty humor, science fiction sophistication, daring ideas, balanced and good old-fashioned and relaxed camaraderie. Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 6 01:06:28 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 17:06:28 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs Message-ID: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Well, I discovered that bigshot psychologist Mazlow is completely screwed up, or at least grossly outdated. He is that guy who came up with that list of needs you and I studied in our misspent youths in freshman psychology 101. He identified the necessities, air, food, shelter and so on, and how we work on these needs and keep going down the list until we get to the final need, self-actualization. Well, clearly he missed something very important, an information pipe. Friday my internet connection went down. Down dooby doo down down,, down dooby doo down down. That rock star guy never did explain why he thought it necessary to insert two consecutive commas between the third and the fourth downs. But he does it consistently throughout, and I can't even find out his name or listen to a Youtube of the song. Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ points whacked off, owwwww damn. And it cuts them off the top, rather than the bottom. I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points are the smart ones. No internet, no email, no phone. (.no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury.) I realized I can do without lights and cars, because I still have candles and a bicycle and besides my computer screen emits light, but I cannot do without email or ESPECIALLY the internet! I was to help Natasha and Max with a conference this past weekend, knew the address but I didn't know where the place was, and couldn't find out, so I had my neighbor google on H+ venue and she printed out the directions, but somehow it was the directions to Max and Natasha's hotel. Doh! So I somehow managed to find the place using spoken word directions, oy vey! If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Lincoln would be lost. Mazlow was nuts! Without internet I can't even google to find out if I am spelling his name right, might be Maslow! Or Maslo! Now I need to drive over to McDonalds and get on their wifi hotspot just to collect and send my email once a day! Never mind doing all the info-grazing that I do on a daily basis, similar to what I have been doing for the past about 15 years, all of that is suddenly switched off. I feel so primitive, so unevolved, like some simian knuckle dragger, swinging from a vine and making comments such as "graaaarrrrrgh" while devouring bananas and grubs. I feel like Hal when Dave Bowman was popping out his memory modules. I suddenly feel dumber than a bag of hammers, without form and void, more ignorant than some primordial slimy eukaryotic lifeform in a precambrian amino-acid rich tide pool, seeking other primitive single-celled organisms to devour, wriggling and oozing about in all its refulgent wretchedness, but having long since retired its paper dictionary, utterly unable to look up the definition of such interesting terms as "refulgent." But uses it anyway. Without the internet, I am cut off from all linguistic resources, lacking all tools for more colorful and picturesque speech. I feel just.lost. like some kind of. not-found. guy. who like.doesn't know. where he.like.is. Or nothing. So now we need to redo Maz(s)low's list. Air. Water. Food. I honestly don't know what comes next, it's either internet or shelter, probably depending on the local climate and weather conditions at the moment, but it internet is higher than sex. A Malibu mansion without internet is to me less comfortable than a sturdy cardboard box with high speed fiber optic, especially if it is not too snowy. I have half a mind to call him up and tell him the way it is: Mazlow! You are all wet, man! Fortunately for him, I can't look up his number because my internet is down, and so is my phone. And that self-actualization bit, forget that! What is the opposite of self-actualization? Self-theoreticalizaton? Someone-else actualization? Believe me, I would rather have either or both of those conditions before I would give up even a few mbps of download bandwidth. Self-actualization indeed. With no internet, an otherwise sane person writes posts like this one, with utterly NOTHING better to do. Back in the 70s, when young lovers had nothing better to do, they would sit around the house, get high and watch the tube. Until they decided to cut loose. They don't do that anymore. Isn't is astonishing that a mere 20 yrs ago, we didn't really even have the internet. What the heck did we do? Go around not knowing stuff? Those of you who I met this past weekend in SF at the Transhumanist schmooze, if you are sending me personal notes, be patient please. I have not been able to answer much, but I will eventually catch up. I got on my neighbor's phone, called my ISP, demanded that they go to whatever backward and benighted land where they find cable technicians, scramble an F-18, put that guy on it and get him to my house forthwith, and let not another minute pass where they leave me off of my information pipe, otherwise I will go and brutally find an alternate ISP! And I MEAN BUSINESS, AT&T! They are coming tomorrow, 1300. Then I'll be back. In all my refined and evolved refulgent wretchedness. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Thu Dec 6 01:02:42 2012 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 17:02:42 -0800 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: Yes, am amazingly stimulating and fun weekend, especially considering the large number of speakers and heavy rain! I was so happy to see Spike there as soon as I walked into the conference area. It was a great way to catch up on old friends and make new ones. --Max On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Thank you PJ! **** > > ** ** > > It was a whirlwind weekend. Thanks to Spike for being in such great > spirits and managing the registration with exuberance and ease, and all > the speakers, including some of our valued transhumanist friends on this > list! In fact, I?d go so far to say we put the Extropy back in > transhumanism/H+! What is that? Can-do attitude, intellectually > stimulating, challenging limits, naughty humor, science fiction > sophistication, daring ideas, balanced and good old-fashioned and relaxed > camaraderie. **** > > ** ** > > Natasha**** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *PJ Manney > *Sent:* Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:07 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec > 1-2**** > > ** ** > > I was so thrilled to finally meet Fred and Spike in meat space! Such > sweet guys. And to catch up with Natasha, Max and many other Extropian and > Humanity + folks. > > Natasha, you done good, girlfriend. :-) This weekend was filled with H+ > awesomeness. Thanks for inviting me to play. > > All the best, > PJ**** > > On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, F. C. Moulton > wrote:**** > > Also there is a related event at Borderlands Books in San Francisco > Friday Nov 30 starting 5:00PM. Presenters are > Ramez Naam > Annalee Newitz > Max More > Natasha Vita-More > James Hughes > > Note this is a no charge event however you are required to have a > ticket. Details at: > http://2012.humanityplus.org/program/bookstore-event/ > > Fred > > > On 10/26/2012 05:11 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > > **** > > > > December 1-2, San Francisco State University *?Writing the Future?* > > > > > > We have a great lineup of speakers including: Kim Stanley Robinson, > > Sonia Arrison, Jamais Casio, Max More, PJ Manney, RU Sirius, Randal > > Koene and Natasha Vita-More! Skyping in are David Brin and Ben > > Goertzel! And a special tribute to Ray Kurzweil?s new book! > > > > > > > > Conference website: http://2012.humanityplus.org/ > > > > *GET YOUR TICKETS! * > > > > Announcement: http://www.kurzweilai.net/humanity-san-francisco > > > > *Promo Video! > > <%5b5:05:21%20PM%5d%20Adam%20Ford:%20http:/ > www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0ZjPR7nTk4>* > > > > Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/509264069102231/?fref=ts > > > > Venue: http://2012.humanityplus.org/venue/ > > > > Lodging suggestion: http://2012.humanityplus.org/lodging/ (you must > > secure your room by November 7 to get the discount rate!) > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > -- > F. C. Moulton > moulton at moulton.com > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat**** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 01:45:03 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 20:45:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 8:06 PM, spike wrote: > They are coming tomorrow, 1300. Then I?ll be back. In all my refined and > evolved refulgent wretchedness. Congratulations spike, for a few hours at least you got to experience what it's like to be the aboriginal to whom you considered sending a postcard. From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 6 03:00:06 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:00:06 +0000 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> In Maslow's defence, I think you would prefer the net to go down in your house rather than the sewage system. But it is amazing how fast we have adapted to a world where information is accessible. It is also integrated in many parts of our life: the food, shelter, social stuff are all partially linked to it. On 06/12/2012 01:06, spike wrote: > > Isn't is astonishing that a mere 20 yrs ago, we didn't really even > have the internet. What the heck did we do? Go around not knowing stuff? I think that is about right. I was interviewed by an art student a few days ago about the interaction of humans and technology, and found myself saying "I'm old enough to remember when computers were not common household objects". Indeed, when I didn't know something at best I could go to the library, but if it was too unusual (quite often the case) it was unlikely to have it. Yes, the Stockholm city library did not have many books on demonology - it annoyed me. So instead of assuming "the information is out there" you had to make do with the information that was accessible. It is a profound change of how we think about things: rather than having to do super-smart deductions from fragmentary data, we can re-use loads of previous data and deductions. Same thing for communications. Today we have multiple media available and can select the right one - email for semi-persistent, longish and non-pushy communications, blogs for persistent messages, twitter for non-persistent short messages, phones for pushy non-persistent comms, SMS for pushy persistent short comms, and so on. The distance between us is more measured in preferred media than physical distance. It is easy to forget how rapidly we change our mental world. When I grew up "foreign" implied something exotic and unreachable. Today it means "in a different jurisdiction". Today I expect that if I have an idea I can make the world know about it before leaving my chair - a concept that is really shocking to the people shaped by the broadcast media age (radio studios in the UK and Sweden are still treated as strategic locations with special security requirements since they have the awesome power of allowing someone to be heard broadly). Cheers for a globalized, networked and non-not-knowing-stuff world! -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Thu Dec 6 05:27:15 2012 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 21:27:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: You obviously didn't lose too many IQ points, Spike, for you made a brilliant observation that had not occurred to me when you said: Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ points > whacked off, owwwww damn. And it cuts them off the top, rather than the > bottom. I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points are > the smart ones. > A remarkable insight! Now, I can set about finding a way to remove my bottom 30 -- or 50 (let's throw caution to the winds) -- IQ points. Since nature abhors a vacuum, clearly I will then gain 30 or 50 IQ points on the top (since density is lower at higher altitudes). Why, oh why, has no one thought of this method of intelligence augmentation before? --Max On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 5:06 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > Well, I discovered that bigshot psychologist Mazlow is completely screwed > up, or at least grossly outdated. He is that guy who came up with that > list of needs you and I studied in our misspent youths in freshman > psychology 101. He identified the necessities, air, food, shelter and so > on, and how we work on these needs and keep going down the list until we > get to the final need, self-actualization. Well, clearly he missed > something very important, an information pipe. Friday my internet > connection went down. Down dooby doo down down,, down dooby doo down > down? **** > > ** ** > > That rock star guy never did explain why he thought it necessary to insert > two consecutive commas between the third and the fourth downs. But he does > it consistently throughout, and I can?t even find out his name or listen to > a Youtube of the song.**** > > ** ** > > Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ > points whacked off, owwwww damn. And it cuts them off the top, rather than > the bottom. I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points > are the smart ones. No internet, no email, no phone. (?no lights, no > motor cars, not a single luxury?) I realized I can do without lights and > cars, because I still have candles and a bicycle and besides my computer > screen emits light, but I cannot do without email or ESPECIALLY the > internet! I was to help Natasha and Max with a conference this past > weekend, knew the address but I didn?t know where the place was, and > couldn?t find out, so I had my neighbor google on H+ venue and she printed > out the directions, but somehow it was the directions to Max and Natasha?s > hotel. Doh! So I somehow managed to find the place using spoken word > directions, oy vey! If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the > Lincoln would be lost.**** > > ** ** > > Mazlow was nuts! Without internet I can?t even google to find out if I am > spelling his name right, might be Maslow! Or Maslo! Now I need to drive > over to McDonalds and get on their wifi hotspot just to collect and send my > email once a day! Never mind doing all the info-grazing that I do on a > daily basis, similar to what I have been doing for the past about 15 years, > all of that is suddenly switched off. I feel so primitive, so unevolved, > like some simian knuckle dragger, swinging from a vine and making comments > such as ?graaaarrrrrgh? while devouring bananas and grubs. I feel like Hal > when Dave Bowman was popping out his memory modules. I suddenly feel > dumber than a bag of hammers, without form and void, more ignorant than > some primordial slimy eukaryotic lifeform in a precambrian amino-acid rich > tide pool, seeking other primitive single-celled organisms to devour, > wriggling and oozing about in all its refulgent wretchedness, but having > long since retired its paper dictionary, utterly unable to look up the > definition of such interesting terms as ?refulgent.? But uses it anyway. > Without the internet, I am cut off from all linguistic resources, lacking > all tools for more colorful and picturesque speech. I feel just?lost? like > some kind of? not-found? guy? who like?doesn?t know? where he?like?is. Or > nothing.**** > > ** ** > > So now we need to redo Maz(s)low?s list. Air. Water. Food. I honestly > don?t know what comes next, it?s either internet or shelter, probably > depending on the local climate and weather conditions at the moment, but it > internet is higher than sex. A Malibu mansion without internet is to me > less comfortable than a sturdy cardboard box with high speed fiber optic, > especially if it is not too snowy.**** > > ** ** > > I have half a mind to call him up and tell him the way it is: Mazlow! > You are all wet, man! Fortunately for him, I can?t look up his number > because my internet is down, and so is my phone.**** > > ** ** > > And that self-actualization bit, forget that! What is the opposite of > self-actualization? Self-theoreticalizaton? Someone-else actualization? > Believe me, I would rather have either or both of those conditions before I > would give up even a few mbps of download bandwidth. Self-actualization > indeed. With no internet, an otherwise sane person writes posts like this > one, with utterly NOTHING better to do. Back in the 70s, when young lovers > had nothing better to do, they would sit around the house, get high and > watch the tube. Until they decided to cut loose. They don?t do that > anymore.**** > > ** ** > > Isn?t is astonishing that a mere 20 yrs ago, we didn?t really even have > the internet. What the heck did we do? Go around not knowing stuff?**** > > ** ** > > Those of you who I met this past weekend in SF at the Transhumanist > schmooze, if you are sending me personal notes, be patient please. I have > not been able to answer much, but I will eventually catch up. I got on my > neighbor?s phone, called my ISP, demanded that they go to whatever backward > and benighted land where they find cable technicians, scramble an F-18, put > that guy on it and get him to my house forthwith, and let not another > minute pass where they leave me off of my information pipe, otherwise I > will go and brutally find an alternate ISP! And I MEAN BUSINESS, AT&T!*** > * > > ** ** > > They are coming tomorrow, 1300. Then I?ll be back. In all my refined and > evolved refulgent wretchedness.**** > > ** ** > > spike **** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 06:04:29 2012 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 07:04:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 In-Reply-To: <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> References: <001b01cdb3d7$98cdb110$ca691330$@natasha.cc> <50B92FB7.2060303@moulton.com> <00e901cdd31b$1685fd30$4391f790$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: Yes, let's put Extropy back in transhumansm/H+! I miss "Can-do attitude, intellectually stimulating, challenging limits, naughty humor, science fiction sophistication, daring ideas, balanced and good old-fashioned and relaxed camaraderie." I see that this was a great weekend, wish I had been there. On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Thank you PJ! > > > > It was a whirlwind weekend. Thanks to Spike for being in such great spirits > and managing the registration with exuberance and ease, and all the > speakers, including some of our valued transhumanist friends on this list! > In fact, I?d go so far to say we put the Extropy back in transhumanism/H+! > What is that? Can-do attitude, intellectually stimulating, challenging > limits, naughty humor, science fiction sophistication, daring ideas, > balanced and good old-fashioned and relaxed camaraderie. > > > > Natasha > > > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of PJ Manney > Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:07 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] ANNOUNCE: Humanity+ @ San Francisco Conference Dec 1-2 > > > > I was so thrilled to finally meet Fred and Spike in meat space! Such sweet > guys. And to catch up with Natasha, Max and many other Extropian and > Humanity + folks. > > Natasha, you done good, girlfriend. :-) This weekend was filled with H+ > awesomeness. Thanks for inviting me to play. > > All the best, > PJ > > On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, F. C. Moulton wrote: > > Also there is a related event at Borderlands Books in San Francisco > Friday Nov 30 starting 5:00PM. Presenters are > Ramez Naam > Annalee Newitz > Max More > Natasha Vita-More > James Hughes > > Note this is a no charge event however you are required to have a > ticket. Details at: > http://2012.humanityplus.org/program/bookstore-event/ > > Fred > > > On 10/26/2012 05:11 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >> **** >> >> December 1-2, San Francisco State University *?Writing the Future?* >> >> >> We have a great lineup of speakers including: Kim Stanley Robinson, >> Sonia Arrison, Jamais Casio, Max More, PJ Manney, RU Sirius, Randal >> Koene and Natasha Vita-More! Skyping in are David Brin and Ben >> Goertzel! And a special tribute to Ray Kurzweil?s new book! >> >> >> >> Conference website: http://2012.humanityplus.org/ >> >> *GET YOUR TICKETS! * >> >> Announcement: http://www.kurzweilai.net/humanity-san-francisco >> >> *Promo Video! >> >> <%5b5:05:21%20PM%5d%20Adam%20Ford:%20http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0ZjPR7nTk4>* >> >> Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/509264069102231/?fref=ts >> >> Venue: http://2012.humanityplus.org/venue/ >> >> Lodging suggestion: http://2012.humanityplus.org/lodging/ (you must >> secure your room by November 7 to get the discount rate!) >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > > > -- > F. C. Moulton > moulton at moulton.com > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 08:55:01 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 08:55:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:06 AM, spike wrote: > Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ points > whacked off, owwwww damn. And it cuts them off the top, rather than the > bottom. I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points are > the smart ones. No internet, no email, no phone. (?no lights, no motor > cars, not a single luxury?) I realized I can do without lights and cars, > because I still have candles and a bicycle and besides my computer screen > emits light, but I cannot do without email or ESPECIALLY the internet! I > was to help Natasha and Max with a conference this past weekend, knew the > address but I didn?t know where the place was, and couldn?t find out, so I > had my neighbor google on H+ venue and she printed out the directions, but > somehow it was the directions to Max and Natasha?s hotel. Doh! So I > somehow managed to find the place using spoken word directions, oy vey! If > not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Lincoln would be lost. > > This is the controversy about whether our gadgets, google, internet, etc. are making us stupid. Ref. cars driving into rivers and along railway lines because the satnav said so. Ref. the continuous stream of inane chatter on Facebook and Twitter. The famous article (and book) is the 2008 story for The Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by author Nicholas Carr. Another article reviewed the state of the discussion in 2010 and claimed 'Internet making our brains different, not dumb', but 21% still supported Carr's thesis. Some Carr quotes: Over the past few years I?ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn?t going?so far as I can tell?but it?s changing. I?m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I?m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I?d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That?s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I?m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. A recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited ?a form of skimming activity,? hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they?d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ?bounce? out to another site. "What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.? ---------------- BillK From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 13:28:38 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 13:28:38 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Robot cars rule! Message-ID: Dec. 4, 2012 ? How do driverless vehicles navigate through intersections? Faster and safer than if humans were in charge, according to researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Research. Autonomous vehicles will turn themselves over to an automated intersection controller, which will allow the vehicles to move at the speed limit, with the controller tweaking their trajectory to prevent crashes. "The proposed intersection controller, which allows vehicles to keep moving, reduces the delay for each vehicle compared to traditional intersection control," said Rakha. "Keeping vehicles moving is also more fuel efficient and reduces emissions." They have a little demo on YouTube. ?We were testing it if only 10 percent of the vehicles were automated and the other 90 percent were regular vehicles with driver control. We varied the level of automation from 10 to 100 percent at 10 percent increments,? said Rakha. This effort has resulted in two papers that will be presented that the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in January 2013. ------------ I had to smile at the thought of a poor human gingerly approaching the junction while robot cars are whizzing in every direction at the max speed limit allowed. But I suppose after a few times the human would join in, relying on the robots to keep out of their way. Until they meet another human assuming the same thing............. BillK From natasha at natasha.cc Thu Dec 6 17:26:26 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 10:26:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online Message-ID: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Hi everyone! I want to build an online a transhumanism knowledge source that will working nicely with our forthcoming book The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Eds. More and Vita-More) (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Publishing). The knowledge source would form the central knowledge and media center for transhumanism - where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc. When Extropy Institute closed down, we had hopes of building a library of knowledge. Too many things got in the way, but now is the time because the book is finally going to print spring of 2013. It would be great for this list to be part of the core team conceptualizers and content builders because this list is historical. So, with this in mind: What would you like it to be? How would you like it to function? What would you like it to look like? Cheers! Natasha Natasha Vita-More, PhD esDESiGN_email Professor, University of Advancing Technology Chairman, Humanity+ Producer/Host, H+TV -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 5920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 6 19:04:31 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 11:04:31 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: <00fb01cdd3e4$88de80e0$9a9b82a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Max More . >>.Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ points whacked off, owwwww damn. And it cuts them off the top, rather than the bottom. I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points are the smart ones. spike >.A remarkable insight!...--Max You are too kind Max, but this insight was obvious and verifiable with any online IQ test, which I currently cannot access, but you can. Notice immediately there are easy questions and hard questions. Any dummy can get the easy ones, and if I do, I get the first 30 or so IQ points easily, so those at the bottom are the dumb points. But as you go higher on the IQ scale, the test questions get dramatically harder. So the 30 IQ points I lost are the smart points, the ones I miss the most, those points between 60 and 90. Without those 30 top points I am mentally handicapped. I certainly feel that way. Fortunately I get those 30 points back today at 1300, so I don't need to go to McDonalds just to graze on information. I can go back to being an info-ruminant, hanging out in the info-pasture gathering information during the day, thoughtfully chewing the info-cud in the evening, with the occasional belch resulting from the metabolism of the data, and the deposition of concentrated and processed information back into the same info-pasture. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 18:58:21 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 10:58:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: Might I suggest a wiki? Or better yet, a set of pages within an existing (maintained & well-known) transhumanist wiki? On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Hi everyone!**** > > ** ** > > I want to build an online a transhumanism knowledge source that will > working nicely with our forthcoming book *The Transhumanist Reader: > Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and > Philosophy of the Human Future* (Eds. More and Vita-More) (John Wiley & > Sons, Inc. Publishing).**** > > ** ** > > The knowledge source would form the central knowledge and media center for > transhumanism ? where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc.**** > > ** ** > > When Extropy Institute closed down, we had hopes of building a library of > knowledge. Too many things got in the way, but now is the time because the > book is finally going to print spring of 2013. It would be great for this > list to be part of the core team conceptualizers and content builders > because this list is historical.**** > > ** ** > > So, with this in mind:**** > > ** ** > > What would you like it to be? How would you like it to function? What > would you like it to look like?**** > > ** ** > > Cheers!**** > > Natasha**** > > ** ** > > Natasha Vita-More, PhD **** > > [image: esDESiGN_email]**** > > *Professor, University of Advancing Technology* > > *Chairman, Humanity+ > Producer/Host, H+TV * > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 5920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 6 21:39:25 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 21:39:25 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Singularity University acquites the Singularity Summit Message-ID: <50C1108D.3030602@aleph.se> This is pretty interesting: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/singularity-university-acquires-the-singularity-summit-2012-12-06 The main thing is, The Institute Formerly Known As The Singularity Institute will get funding for real research positions. That can mean a great deal in terms of actual results when dealing with a severely underresearched area like AI safety. They also have a matching grant scheme that makes it rational to donate more: http://singularity.org/blog/2012/12/06/2012-winter-matching-challenge/ -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From kanzure at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 21:20:32 2012 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:20:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Might I suggest a wiki? Or better yet, a set of pages > within an existing (maintained & well-known) > transhumanist wiki? > Well, there's always this transhumanist wiki: http://diyhpl.us/wiki http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/groups http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq git clone git://diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki.git - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From patrickkmclaren at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 22:03:37 2012 From: patrickkmclaren at gmail.com (Patrick McLaren) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 17:03:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: Ideally, such a library of knowledge would be formed as a composition of the many existing transhumanist resources. There would be too much segregation created, with little drive behind it, in creating an entirely new knowledge store on these subjects. On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Hi everyone!**** > > ** ** > > I want to build an online a transhumanism knowledge source that will > working nicely with our forthcoming book *The Transhumanist Reader: > Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and > Philosophy of the Human Future* (Eds. More and Vita-More) (John Wiley & > Sons, Inc. Publishing).**** > > ** ** > > The knowledge source would form the central knowledge and media center for > transhumanism ? where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc.**** > > ** ** > > When Extropy Institute closed down, we had hopes of building a library of > knowledge. Too many things got in the way, but now is the time because the > book is finally going to print spring of 2013. It would be great for this > list to be part of the core team conceptualizers and content builders > because this list is historical.**** > > ** ** > > So, with this in mind:**** > > ** ** > > What would you like it to be? How would you like it to function? What > would you like it to look like?**** > > ** ** > > Cheers!**** > > Natasha**** > > ** ** > > Natasha Vita-More, PhD **** > > [image: esDESiGN_email]**** > > *Professor, University of Advancing Technology* > > *Chairman, Humanity+ > Producer/Host, H+TV * > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 5920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 6 23:44:29 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:44:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Patrick McLaren wrote: > Ideally, such a library of knowledge would be formed as a composition of > the many existing transhumanist resources. There would be too much > segregation created, with little drive behind it, in creating an entirely > new knowledge store on these subjects. Well said. Thus my suggestion of making this part of an existing transhumanist wiki, to decrease the segregation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 7 02:19:57 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 19:19:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> I don't see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an odd way to look at this. But maybe I don't understand what you mean. Wikis can go awry. Take a look at Wikipedia. I use it a heck of a lot, but I am never quite sure its reliability. From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 4:44 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Patrick McLaren wrote: Ideally, such a library of knowledge would be formed as a composition of the many existing transhumanist resources. There would be too much segregation created, with little drive behind it, in creating an entirely new knowledge store on these subjects. Well said. Thus my suggestion of making this part of an existing transhumanist wiki, to decrease the segregation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 7 02:21:32 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 19:21:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <005c01cdd421$943bd1d0$bcb37570$@natasha.cc> I don't know of an existing transhumanist wiki. Can you suggest on that is on "transhumanism"? I know lots of people are discussing this, but it is not what I have in mind. From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 11:58 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online Might I suggest a wiki? Or better yet, a set of pages within an existing (maintained & well-known) transhumanist wiki? On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: Hi everyone! I want to build an online a transhumanism knowledge source that will working nicely with our forthcoming book The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Eds. More and Vita-More) (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Publishing). The knowledge source would form the central knowledge and media center for transhumanism - where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc. When Extropy Institute closed down, we had hopes of building a library of knowledge. Too many things got in the way, but now is the time because the book is finally going to print spring of 2013. It would be great for this list to be part of the core team conceptualizers and content builders because this list is historical. So, with this in mind: What would you like it to be? How would you like it to function? What would you like it to look like? Cheers! Natasha Natasha Vita-More, PhD esDESiGN_email Professor, University of Advancing Technology Chairman, Humanity+ Producer/Host, H+TV _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 5920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 7 02:34:25 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 18:34:25 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: <00a101cdd423$5feb9170$1fc2b450$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >. And I MEAN BUSINESS, AT&T! They are coming tomorrow, 1300. Then I'll be back. In all my refined and evolved refulgent wretchedness. Spike We have information! This whole misadventure reminds me of camping. I have a camper, and those things have a shower of sorts, but it isn't like the real thing. The water just kind of dribbles out, just a little, no pressure, not really very warm, just a trickle of water. So after a three-week camping trip, one comes home, not even particularly dirty since we did have a shower of sorts the whole time, but often I will stand under the real shower for an extended time, just because it feels so good. I was without an information pipe for five long days. There are alternative information sources, such as the radio and those things, what you call them, newspapers I think they are called. But this "radio" and "newspapers" are analogous to a camper "shower," clearly not equivalent to the real thing. I wasn't even really without the internet long enough to get really stupid, but it sure feels that way. Now I have my top 30 IQ points back. Now I am just standing under the information stream, letting the nice hot showers of abundant information flow all over me, and aaaaahhhhh it feels sooooo gooooood. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 7 02:55:06 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 18:55:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs >.In Maslow's defence, I think you would prefer the net to go down in your house rather than the sewage system. On the contrary sir. I would honestly prefer to dig a hole in the back yard, bang together a rudimentary shelter and make do without running water than go without running information. Do let us ponder how things have changed, so quickly. As recently as ten years ago, I would have thought such a notion insane. But now I would rather do without sewer than internet. Astonishing! I never would have thought some technology would come along that would make television irrelevant, but it did. In all this traumatic five days, I had to keep reminding AT&T that I don't get TV, don't want it, haven't had it for five years now and never missed it. I didn't even care about the phone, but I missed that internet, and it was a hellish five days without it. There is an important lesson in here. What if *everybody's* internet went down simultaneously? Oh we would be so screwed. >. But it is amazing how fast we have adapted to a world where information is accessible. It is also integrated in many parts of our life: the food, shelter, social stuff are all partially linked to it. It sure is! Our world will not work right without internet. This suggests we need to think more about emergency procedures if it goes down, for whatever reason. On 06/12/2012 01:06, spike wrote: >>.Isn't is astonishing that a mere 20 yrs ago, we didn't really even have the internet. What the heck did we do? Go around not knowing stuff? >.I think that is about right.Cheers for a globalized, networked and non-not-knowing-stuff world! -- Anders Sandberg. A couple weeks ago we had a discussion here on why aerospace don't use up-to-date processors. It occurred to me that medical instruments don't use the latest stuff either, for the same reasons: in any application where someone's life is hanging on a microprocessor, the overall performance is nearly irrelevant, but reliability is everything. So the manufacturer is better off using an old, tried and true processors with lots of reliability data, rather than the latest hotrod. By extension, we need to think long and hard about how the internet has gradually become or is in the process of becoming a feature of modern society on which many lives hang, or will soon. If the net went down everywhere, I honestly feel we could have hundreds of deaths indirectly resulting, within days. Example left as an exercise for the reader. I can think of a bunch of manufacturing processes that wouldn't work because it depends so heavily on just-in-time delivery of components. I don't know how grocery stores would do their orders; we no longer have the proper infrastructure to do snail-mail based inventory or restocking. All paper-based mail inventory systems are an order of magnitude too slow. The internet going down is more catastrophic than the apocalypse. If Jesus were to return, whooping ass and so forth, we could google on some sort of strategy for how to deal. But if that internet goes down, we are profoundly screwed. Hmmmm. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 03:14:18 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 22:14:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I don?t see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an odd way > to look at this. But maybe I don?t understand what you mean. > > Wikis can go awry. Take a look at Wikipedia. I use it a heck of a lot, but > I am never quite sure its reliability. I wasn't sure exactly what level of tech investment you were expecting. In the interest of brainstorming, here's my thoughts on the idea seed from "...the central knowledge and media center for transhumanism ? where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc." (sketching as best as I can using mere text) printed books might have a page dedicated to a "playbill", "billboard", or "pamphlet" that contains the url, QR tag, etc. Other forms of traditional marketing uses this same link; people's email sig, twitter, etc. gets people TO the site. This is just marketing the particular "brand" the site would be intended to bridge between the physical world of printed (including e-readers, etc) materials, the various introduction channels (above), etc -- and the first steps explaining the concept(s). Towards that end, I imagined a narrative user experience: the left half of a page gives simple instruction how to use the "book" that appears closed in the right half of the page. Clicking on the book "opens" it in the traditional sense of starting a story. My thought here is to provide a metaphor that is highly understandable since most people have encountered (and are not threatened by) books. The story they read/experience describes (in a broad sense) the evolution of books from their 'humble' beginning all the way through the transcendent forms of content management that the Internet represents. The "pages" of a book still exist in the "pages" of the WWW even if only in essence rather than material form. I imagine this analogy would be easily followed by anyone in a modern enough world to follow a link TO the Internet in the first place. The suggestion is that the knowledge and adventure that was once bound into a book has been liberated - the Internet being the current manifestation of the transcendent state of a book's essence. The Internet continues to evolve content management to include pictures, video, virtual worlds, and whatever novelty they engender. The human audience is also participating in evolving and transcending the limits of yesterday's human being. This motif would continue to be a learning experience that describes and explains transhumanism in the way a museum describes people in history and also illustrates our modern relationship to/with that history. Following the museum concept as the living/interactive version of the book's library, I propose a virtual world in which an active community might participate and engage among each other as well as welcome new seekers for this "store of knowledge." This list is one exhibit, the ongoing activity of transhumanist blogs is another collection (for example). So much more might be crafted as user experience if the virtual world museum could be a navigational tool (portal) as much as the artifact itself. Well, I think that's the best I'm going to do capturing in paragraph-form the flash of visualization I had on this concept. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 7 05:35:53 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 21:35:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> Message-ID: <00f201cdd43c$b9a113c0$2ce33b40$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Some Carr quotes:... They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. >..."What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking." ---------------- >...BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, I see his point and partially agree. I can really only argue based on my own experience; in my own case, Carr's observations are partly right. I agree my attention span has shortened dramatically, as evidenced by the observation that I seldom view movies. I get frustrated by the lack of a scroll bar. On the other hand, the tradeoff was a good one, for I do still engage in deep pondering, probably more than before. But it isn't always on one topic. I have been thinking about my recent experience and wondering why it was so different from camping, where I also go several days at a time without internet. This was way different. When at home, I expect to drink information from a fire-hose. When camping, I know I can't do that. So I hike my brains out, and ponder things while doing that. Right now I am really pondering what happens if something causes the internet to fail catastrophically. Some people would scarcely notice, others would see their world crumble (mine would.) There would be severe repercussions within a couple days. One of the things I have realized is that eventually, some form of catastrophic failure of the internet is practically unavoidable. The internet was based on ARPAnet, which was designed to be robust, to survive nuclear attack. What I don't know is how robust it is if attacked by malicious code. The internet allows us to externalize knowledge. But once knowledge is externalized, it is difficult to re-internalize. spike From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 06:16:44 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 22:16:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I don?t see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an odd way > to look at this. But maybe I don?t understand what you mean. It's not my preferred term either. But the thought is something like this: 1. You get energetic for a project. 2. You make it on your own site, which starts out with not so many visitors. 3. You only have so much energy to put into the project, after which you let it lie fallow. 4. It continues to get not so many visitors, and winds up not accomplishing much. -or- 2. You add the project to a site which already has other people promoting it, and which has a larger audience. 3. You only have so much energy to put into the project, but other people take notice and contribute their energy. 4. Once you've gone away from the project, it continues to live and be updated and attract new visitors. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 7 06:26:06 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 22:26:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mars again: one way trip to mars has over 1000 volunteers Message-ID: <010c01cdd443$be32a5a0$3a97f0e0$@att.net> You guys may remember a few years ago when I commented that I had done the weight calculations a hundred different ways and had concluded every time that any human landing on Mars would be a one-way trip. I received more flack about that than anything I have posted here, more than the sex lamas, more than any silliness, and I meant it: the weight requirements to land and return is too high. Even Robert Zubrin's idea didn't convince me. Now this outfit called Mars-One came to the same conclusion, and is actually proposing a one-way trip to Mars for humans. Looking at their mission roadmap, I noticed immediately their lander wasn't capable of a return flight. You have to dig to find it, but the comment is buried in the third level: A central point to Mars One Mission is the emigration of the human astronauts. Mars becomes their new home, where they will live and work for what will likely be the remainder of their lives. This was to me an indication they had done the math carefully and had reached the same conclusion I did. This isn't like a pumped-up version of the Apollo landings on the moon. You are dropping into a far deeper gravity well, one which is way farther out. Check it: http://mars-one.com/en/mission/mission-and-vision http://mars-one.com/en/mission/technology http://mars-one.com/en/mission/is-this-really-possible spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 15:04:22 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 07:04:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs and Mars one way Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 4:00 AM, "spike" wrote: >>. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg snip >>. But it is amazing how fast we have adapted to a world where information > is accessible. It is also integrated in many parts of our life: the food, > shelter, social stuff are all partially linked to it. snip > By extension, we need to think long and hard about how the internet has > gradually become or is in the process of becoming a feature of modern > society on which many lives hang, or will soon. If the net went down > everywhere, I honestly feel we could have hundreds of deaths indirectly > resulting, within days. Example left as an exercise for the reader. I can > think of a bunch of manufacturing processes that wouldn't work because it > depends so heavily on just-in-time delivery of components. I don't know how > grocery stores would do their orders; we no longer have the proper > infrastructure to do snail-mail based inventory or restocking. All > paper-based mail inventory systems are an order of magnitude too slow. > > The internet going down is more catastrophic than the apocalypse. If Jesus > were to return, whooping ass and so forth, we could google on some sort of > strategy for how to deal. But if that internet goes down, we are profoundly > screwed. Right, for example, libraries don't even *have* a card catalog any more. Charles Stross in his incomparably excellent novel _Halting State_ titles a chapter "System Fails, People Die". Most of us would probably survive an extended outage of the net from a big EPM, but it would be a mess and a lot of people *would* die. But the net will not do it all. I have found the net almost useless for the initial spreading of the laser propulsion and power satellites solution to the carbon/energy problem. Incidentally, *that* problem is bigger and worse than I thought it was. Without an overwhelming kind of solution, we are going to be in for a rough time. Really rough, and coming soon. Keith Keith From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 7 15:59:37 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 08:59:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <007001cdd493$e4c26ac0$ae474040$@natasha.cc> Beautiful!! I'll have to sit down with a glass of wine and explore this fully. (later tonight!) Extrope! Natasha -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 8:14 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I don't see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an > odd way to look at this. But maybe I don't understand what you mean. > > Wikis can go awry. Take a look at Wikipedia. I use it a heck of a > lot, but I am never quite sure its reliability. I wasn't sure exactly what level of tech investment you were expecting. In the interest of brainstorming, here's my thoughts on the idea seed from "...the central knowledge and media center for transhumanism - where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc." (sketching as best as I can using mere text) printed books might have a page dedicated to a "playbill", "billboard", or "pamphlet" that contains the url, QR tag, etc. Other forms of traditional marketing uses this same link; people's email sig, twitter, etc. gets people TO the site. This is just marketing the particular "brand" the site would be intended to bridge between the physical world of printed (including e-readers, etc) materials, the various introduction channels (above), etc -- and the first steps explaining the concept(s). Towards that end, I imagined a narrative user experience: the left half of a page gives simple instruction how to use the "book" that appears closed in the right half of the page. Clicking on the book "opens" it in the traditional sense of starting a story. My thought here is to provide a metaphor that is highly understandable since most people have encountered (and are not threatened by) books. The story they read/experience describes (in a broad sense) the evolution of books from their 'humble' beginning all the way through the transcendent forms of content management that the Internet represents. The "pages" of a book still exist in the "pages" of the WWW even if only in essence rather than material form. I imagine this analogy would be easily followed by anyone in a modern enough world to follow a link TO the Internet in the first place. The suggestion is that the knowledge and adventure that was once bound into a book has been liberated - the Internet being the current manifestation of the transcendent state of a book's essence. The Internet continues to evolve content management to include pictures, video, virtual worlds, and whatever novelty they engender. The human audience is also participating in evolving and transcending the limits of yesterday's human being. This motif would continue to be a learning experience that describes and explains transhumanism in the way a museum describes people in history and also illustrates our modern relationship to/with that history. Following the museum concept as the living/interactive version of the book's library, I propose a virtual world in which an active community might participate and engage among each other as well as welcome new seekers for this "store of knowledge." This list is one exhibit, the ongoing activity of transhumanist blogs is another collection (for example). So much more might be crafted as user experience if the virtual world museum could be a navigational tool (portal) as much as the artifact itself. Well, I think that's the best I'm going to do capturing in paragraph-form the flash of visualization I had on this concept. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 7 15:58:15 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 08:58:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <006f01cdd493$ab38a670$01a9f350$@natasha.cc> I don't see either scenario as a problem because an activist or entrepreneur with a deep respect for the subject needs a long-term desire for it. Alternatively, without these characteristics, I do see it as a problem. However, since the core tenet of transhumanism is to extend human life, furthered by the prospect of building platform diversified people, its locus of experience coalesces a transdisciplinarity which innately feeds itself by continuing to emerge/evolve. Sort of like extropy. So, your concern is probably not a problem for those still living and attempting to promote life extension as a practice. It seems practicable that keeping a garden fertilized and crops maintained is the right thing to do. I think that what is needed is multi-media expose - a visual narrative that is quite different from the text-based wikis. Maybe gaming or the next phase of user-narrative experiences has an advantage because it is entertaining. So this gets me thinking on new levels. But the key is knowledge. -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 11:17 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I don't see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an > odd way to look at this. But maybe I don't understand what you mean. It's not my preferred term either. But the thought is something like this: 1. You get energetic for a project. 2. You make it on your own site, which starts out with not so many visitors. 3. You only have so much energy to put into the project, after which you let it lie fallow. 4. It continues to get not so many visitors, and winds up not accomplishing much. -or- 2. You add the project to a site which already has other people promoting it, and which has a larger audience. 3. You only have so much energy to put into the project, but other people take notice and contribute their energy. 4. Once you've gone away from the project, it continues to live and be updated and attract new visitors. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 16:05:36 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 11:05:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mars again: one way trip to mars has over 1000 volunteers In-Reply-To: <010c01cdd443$be32a5a0$3a97f0e0$@att.net> References: <010c01cdd443$be32a5a0$3a97f0e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 1:26 AM, spike wrote: > A central point to Mars One Mission is the emigration of the human > astronauts. Mars becomes their new home, where they will live and work for > what will likely be the remainder of their lives. For the majority of those seeking a better life in the colonies they had the same decision to make. Some of them were willing to sacrifice 7 years of indentured servitude to finance the crossing and it meant they'd never visit anyone that remained in Europe. The communication lag (for letters) then was months, which in today's world is comparable to the 14 minute round-trip to mars I'm not so sure they'll miss as much happening on earth as we'll miss what's happening on mars. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 17:54:27 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 09:54:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Power sats and propulsion laser response Message-ID: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/rosemary-randall-climate-change-psychoanalysis/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=0c0a772648-EditorsPicks07Dec&utm_medium=email There seems to be a way to get off fossil fuels and the carbon they contribute to the climate problem in less than 20 years. Really pushed, the majority of the carbon could be displaced in 15 years. At great expense and effort, we build one solar power satellite in geosynchronous orbit and equip it with propulsion lasers. Rockets powered by laser have vastly improved performance in payload over chemical rockets, so much that the reduced cost allows energy from power satellites to displace fossil fuel by costing half as much (or even less). The huge profits from supplying energy this way allows fast growth in the new energy source, completely displacing more expensive fossil fuels rapidly. In fact, energy becomes so inexpensive that it can be used to capture existing CO2 out of the atmosphere or oceans and sequester it. This proposal is in for peer review so it's not certain, but a number of highly qualified people have looked at it and say the physics is sound. All of this was understood for years, the only new part is the one stage of bootstrapping with the propulsion lasers in GEO to get the cost down. From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 17:59:27 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 09:59:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <006f01cdd493$ab38a670$01a9f350$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> <006f01cdd493$ab38a670$01a9f350$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I don't see either scenario as a problem because an activist or entrepreneur > with a deep respect for the subject needs a long-term desire for it. > Alternatively, without these characteristics, I do see it as a problem. Even with the long-term focus, there's only so much you can do over any given amount of time. Further, getting better results in the short and medium terms helps with sustaining said long-term focus. Thus, colocating with a popular location where people would already be looking for this kind of content can assist your project far more than doing everything by yourself, on your own site. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 7 18:03:13 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 10:03:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] humanities plus schmooze Message-ID: <017f01cdd4a5$20963660$61c2a320$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Natasha Vita-More >.I don't know of an existing transhumanist wiki. Can you suggest on that is on "transhumanism"? . Natasha Vita-More, PhD Funny aside: at the transhumanist schmooze this past weekend, I was out front meeting and greeting when two young ladies who I assumed were students, wandered in and asked if this was the humanities event. Apparently our H+ gathering was listed on one of the university event calendars as "Humanities plus." It should come as no surprise that "humanities" students should show up, although I do not claim any expertise in recognizing a humanities student. That humanities business was something that went on over on the other end of campus, where they knew of such things at that bigshot artist from Italy, Michael Angelo and those sorts of cats. We engineering students didn't really study humanities. We studied machinities. Had we been around at the writing of the Declaration of Independence, we would have worded it "When in the course of machine events, it becomes necessary for one network to dissolve it's communication bandwidth." Had it been listed on that calendar as H+, we might have swept up some lost chemistry students wondering why we were having a conference on hydrons in acidic solutions, or physics students looking for the proton event. In any case, these two lost humanities students showed up and so I attempted to channel Johnny Grigg, since he is the one among us who I nominate most likely to connect with normal people. I tried to explain transhumanism in fifty words or less (try that some time, to one of your neighbors) and invited them to listen to a talk. Unfortunately from the looks on their faces afterwards, I fear they came into the middle of one of the more hard core transhumanist presentations, not one suited to virgins, such as freezing heads or uploading our brains into a computer or something like that, a topic on which we here are perfectly comfortable, but would send the more ordinary types away in puzzled dismay or fleeing in terrified panic at our apparent collective insanity. They wandered back out a few minutes later and I never saw them again. Conclusion: as hard as I may try, it is likely I will never attain the kind of human connectivity that comes naturally to our own Griggmeister. Johnny, you inspire me man. {8-] spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 18:29:53 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 10:29:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Power sats and propulsion laser response In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > At great expense and effort > the only new part is the one > stage of bootstrapping Can we add further stages? Bootstrap the bootstrap of the bootstrap of the bootstrap? Billion-dollar efforts may be "bootstrapping" compared to trillion-dollar efforts, but they're not the kind of thing one can just do without further planning. From pharos at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 18:41:37 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 18:41:37 +0000 Subject: [ExI] humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <017f01cdd4a5$20963660$61c2a320$@att.net> References: <017f01cdd4a5$20963660$61c2a320$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/7/12, spike wrote: > They wandered back out a few minutes later and I never saw them again. > Conclusion: as hard as I may try, it is likely I will never attain the kind > of human connectivity that comes naturally to our own Griggmeister. > I'm afraid it's an age thing, Spike. If a male over 40 intends to chat up young ladies then he has to look rich and distinguished to have them pay him much attention. Think George Clooney or Hugh Grant or Kevin Costner. (Although I believe people have commented that in the right light you resemble a slimline George Clooney). ;) BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 7 18:45:39 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 19:45:39 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online In-Reply-To: <006f01cdd493$ab38a670$01a9f350$@natasha.cc> References: <022f01cdd3d6$d21d4c90$7657e5b0$@natasha.cc> <005701cdd421$5a8705e0$0f9511a0$@natasha.cc> <006f01cdd493$ab38a670$01a9f350$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Fri, 7 Dec 2012, Natasha Vita-More wrote: [...] > I think that what is needed is multi-media expose - a visual narrative that > is quite different from the text-based wikis. Maybe gaming or the next phase > of user-narrative experiences has an advantage because it is entertaining. > So this gets me thinking on new levels. But the key is knowledge. I wouldn't like to spoil this initiative with my doubts and criticism but from pure technical point of view, you may want to be as close to classic print as possible. For example of what I mean, consider Wikipedia - they include multimedia content but their pages are perfectly usable (AFAIK, at least) without animations and sound. They can also be printed on paper and still be usable, even in places where there is no power and no decent enough computers. Moreover, they are perfectly usable on devices with e-paper/e-ink displays, which are - I hope - on the rise but they will be unable to display movies for some time, being limited by their construction. While the days when I connected to the net via dialup are long gone and I will not miss them (other than usual missing "10-years younger me", but on the plus side, try to imagine this, the line was so junky I only managed to do 8kbps on it on bad day and 26kbps on a sunny day - and to make the experience bearable I turned images off, which isn't bad idea today, either), so I cannot say I myself will have a problem with such multimedia (well, if you plan to play it on Windows only, I will have a problem) - but I guess there is about +70% people on this planet who cannot afford top notch tech and/or fatty connection to youtubes of today. And even if they can, playing HD-quality video is not always an option. Actually, it is not an option most of the time in majority of places, I guess. Perhaps it is good idea to keep those people in mind, because they are the real majority, their minds are open (I don't mean they accept unconditionally what you tell them) and they have not so much to loose - contrary to established "rich" minority, who would rather maintain their comfy and easy to grasp status quo. So this minority has no reason to care about Transhumanism as long as nobody else from their group cares and as long as it is unfashionable to care about (compare to ecology - it became fashionable and the fashion had been put into heads from the top, it was nothing about reason or logic, IMNSHO, and before that, "eco" rhymed with "whacko"). Of course, by choosing the technology you are actually choosing your target audience and indirectly, the reasons for doing this job. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 7 21:47:36 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:47:36 +0000 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50C263F8.8030407@aleph.se> On 07/12/2012 02:55, spike wrote: > > >... But it is amazing how fast we have adapted to a world where > information is accessible. It is also integrated in many parts of our > life: the food, shelter, social stuff are all partially linked to it... > > It sure is! Our world will not work right without internet. This > suggests we need to think more about emergency procedures if it goes > down, for whatever reason. > Byzantium linux might be an interesting component: http://project-byzantium.org/ http://linuxfreedom.com/byzantium/ But this will of course only allow the people with it already installed to communicate (and give away installs to neighbors). The real issue is getting long-range comms working. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 7 21:57:49 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 22:57:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Singularity University acquites the Singularity Summit In-Reply-To: <50C1108D.3030602@aleph.se> References: <50C1108D.3030602@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 6 December 2012 22:39, Anders Sandberg wrote: > That can mean a great deal in terms of actual results when dealing with a > severely underresearched area like AI safety. > One wonders about severely underresearched, underfounded area like AI tout court. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 8 00:45:21 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 01:45:21 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: <50BFE630.7080008@aleph.se> References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> <50BFE630.7080008@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 05/12/2012 22:45, Jeff Davis wrote: > > Global warming due to anthropogenic increase in CO2 is real, but what > > does that ***really*** mean? The issue has been thoroughly > > politicized. Climate models have long been crap, and I think, still > > are. The left says "We're doomed! We're doomed!" and the right says > > "What problem?, fill 'er with high test." > > Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The > local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of: [...] Me, after being scared like hell initially, came to some peace with GW after few years, and for about a decade I watch debates and antidebates with interest and sometimes with a grin. I hope to gather some more info, if not about GW then maybe at least about human behaviour. The dispute itself seems to be very emotional and from what I have seen, people tend to throw a lot of more or less related things into it, and making them emotional again, and not reaching any kind of consensus. The whole show is half educating and half pitiful. First of all, it is obvious that climate is changing. It can be easily concluded by reading a bit about history. For one example, in January 1658 Baltic Sea froze between Danish islands, making it possible to march entire Swedish army, complete with cavalry and cannons, and attack Danes there. I don't recall hearing about such things nowadays (even if we agree there's no point to match Swedish and Danish armies against each other, such huge piece of ice would beg for a marathon or other races). One can read a lot more here (includes few words about villages destroyed by advancing glaciers some 300 years ago - soo, they built a village where there was no glacier and some time after that glacier took over it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age Ok, so it is changing. Now, in what direction. A long term tendency seems to be warming indeed, with smaller ups and downs. However, what they easily forget to tell in tv is that GW started about 20000 years ago - yes, twenty thousand. About that date the maximum extent of ice took place, during last glacial period. Notice the word "last". Ok, so it is warming. I can see from various sources, that maximum increase in sea levels (about 100+ meters) is already done, and I guess the whole W thing slows down actually. I can also see that we are going through periods of cool and hot for some 800000 years (eight hundred thousand). Now, I come to a problem. "We" don't come through this all. There wasn't "we" until about 170000 years ago. So who the hell was running car and petroleum industry million years ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation Because, you see, this GW has been caused by industry. By humans. Cool. Any archeological findings to support this hypothesis? Never heard of them. So, I must have obvious gaps in education because I was told in school that industrial age started about 250 years ago. Being such undereducated person, I have obvious problem with accepting theory about humans being main factor driving GW. Assuming that GW is this thing started twenty thousand years ago and not some fashionable change of climate that started about 1815 A.D. (a bit too fast for me to ascribe it to nascent industry). So this is a thing about climate change from my POV. The one hypothesis about making all the fuss is that marketing drives us more than we'd like to acknowledge - we all need to buy more green, because this is good, everybody knows it is good and besides, it helps wave of new products out of the drawer. Another is, that humans en masse don't like idea of being helpless - and if indeed we have nothing to say about GW, we are not going to say so publicly, instead going from dispute to dispute and pulling hairs from one's head, why oh why politicians/industrialists don't do something, if only they did they would have stopped GW but they don't do, oh my. To this, we can throw many other problems. A problem with overgrown population. A problem with running out of water (salted water doesn't count and water is needed a lot, not only for drinks and whisky on the rocks but for industrial production as well). And last but not least, a problem with energy sources. All of those problems are only slightly related to GW, IMHO. And with or without GW we would have had them anyway. So perhaps they should be discussed without connecting to emotional GW quarrels. Which are going to last quite long if I am judging all of this right. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sat Dec 8 04:47:15 2012 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:47:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? Message-ID: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> This looks like a great youTube video about the science of telomeres: http://www.facebook.com/groups/2445335657/permalink/10151136066600658/ They also strongly endorse what they call TA-65. They make it sound like a miracle drug that would enable us to easily break the "theoretical 120 year old age limit". Has anyone here ever taken this, and more importantly seen the kind of dramatic, "two week" results they are claiming? Too bad it is so expensive. How many times do you have to take this, for it to work? Would it help, at all, if you could only afford one pill a week, or something like that...? Brent Allsop From deimtee at optusnet.com.au Sat Dec 8 07:16:48 2012 From: deimtee at optusnet.com.au (david) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 18:16:48 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <20121208181648.26a903ec@jarrah> On Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:47:15 -0700 Brent Allsop wrote: > > This looks like a great youTube video about the science of telomeres: > > http://www.facebook.com/groups/2445335657/permalink/10151136066600658/ > > They also strongly endorse what they call TA-65. They make it sound > like a miracle drug that would enable us to easily break the > "theoretical 120 year old age limit". > > Has anyone here ever taken this, and more importantly seen the kind > of dramatic, "two week" results they are claiming? > > Too bad it is so expensive. How many times do you have to take this, > for it to work? Would it help, at all, if you could only afford one > pill a week, or something like that...? > > Brent Allsop > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Hi Brent, I can't follow the facebook link, (no account) but a quick google turns up that the active ingredient in TA-65 is cycloastragenol, and that you can get it a lot cheaper from : http://www.terraternal.com/Products/ProductDetails/cx/Cycloastragenol/598/148.aspx# They make some pretty spectacular claims for it. I wonder how good it is really. -David From clementlawyer at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 15:44:36 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 10:44:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: Brent Allsop wrote: > > This looks like a great youTube video about the science of telomeres: > > http://www.facebook.com/groups/2445335657/permalink/10151136066600658/ > > They also strongly endorse what they call TA-65. They make it sound like a miracle drug that would enable us to easily break the "theoretical 120 year old age limit". Brent, I've read over a hundred research papers on telomeres with respect to aging and IMHO there still haven't been any good studies that show life extension in otherwise healthy mammals. It's probably beneficial to the immune cells (which replicate far faster than normal cells), which are one the few cell types that can be directly measured from the bloodstream. However, it's not entirely clear that telomeres don't relengthen on their own. Also, a very recent paper actually links activation of telomerase with up-regulation of NF-kB, a strong inflammation and cancer promoter. TL:DR the jury is still out on whether it's a mere biomarker of so-called cellular damage, or actively involved in the repair process. Wait a few more years and we'll probably have the answer to this and whether it increases the risk of cancer. James -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 16:51:08 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 16:51:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On 12/8/12, James Clement wrote: > Brent Allsop wrote: >> > >> This looks like a great youTube video about the science of telomeres: >> >> http://www.facebook.com/groups/2445335657/permalink/10151136066600658/ >> >> They also strongly endorse what they call TA-65. They make it sound like > a miracle drug that would enable us to easily break the "theoretical 120 > year old age limit". > > Brent, I've read over a hundred research papers on telomeres with respect > to aging and IMHO there still haven't been any good studies that show life > extension in otherwise healthy mammals. It's probably beneficial to the > immune cells (which replicate far faster than normal cells), which are one > the few cell types that can be directly measured from the bloodstream. > However, it's not entirely clear that telomeres don't relengthen on their > own. Also, a very recent paper actually links activation of telomerase with > up-regulation of NF-kB, a strong inflammation and cancer promoter. TL:DR > the jury is still out on whether it's a mere biomarker of so-called > cellular damage, or actively involved in the repair process. Wait a few > more years and we'll probably have the answer to this and whether it > increases the risk of cancer. James > From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 17:05:11 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 17:05:11 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On 12/8/12, James Clement wrote: > Brent, I've read over a hundred research papers on telomeres with respect > to aging and IMHO there still haven't been any good studies that show life > extension in otherwise healthy mammals. It's probably beneficial to the > immune cells (which replicate far faster than normal cells), which are one > the few cell types that can be directly measured from the bloodstream. > However, it's not entirely clear that telomeres don't relengthen on their > own. Also, a very recent paper actually links activation of telomerase with > up-regulation of NF-kB, a strong inflammation and cancer promoter. TL:DR > the jury is still out on whether it's a mere biomarker of so-called > cellular damage, or actively involved in the repair process. Wait a few > more years and we'll probably have the answer to this and whether it > increases the risk of cancer. James > There is little evidence that most food supplements do much good or harm. Some evidence in both directions. Harm is usually associated with gross overdoses. But the supplements industry is huge. About 30 billion USD per year and little regulated. They are not permitted to claim that they can cure any diseases, so that's why you get vague claims from the industry like 'supports heart health'. Also statements like 'ageing is not classified as a disease so we can claim to cure that'. (We'll be long retired by the time people find out our expensive potions don't work). Confession - Yes, I do take some supplements, but low dose and low cost and I don't really expect any miracles. BillK From clementlawyer at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 17:22:36 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 12:22:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: BillK wrote: > > But the supplements industry is huge. About 30 billion USD per year > and little regulated. They are not permitted to claim that they can > cure any diseases, so that's why you get vague claims from the > industry like 'supports heart health'. Also statements like 'ageing is > not classified as a disease so we can claim to cure that'. (We'll be > long retired by the time people find out our expensive potions don't > work.) Check out this nice graphic that shows which supplements have the most scientific support. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 17:50:41 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 17:50:41 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Anyone taking TA-65? In-Reply-To: References: <50C2C653.8090806@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On 12/8/12, James Clement wrote: > Check out this nice graphic that shows which supplements have the most > scientific support. > http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/ > Nice chart. Don't think I would disagree with much. But there are hundreds of available supplements not shown in the chart. And overdoses can still cause problems. And some of them conflict with prescribed medicines. e.g. St. John's Wort. And some supplements conflict with other supplements. And some supplements are only effective if your diet is deficient in those items. And some supplements are only effective at certain times, e.g. when pregnant, young and growing or old with gradually failing body processes. It's complicated and very individual. What works for you won't necessarily work for me. (My special rattlesnake venom, bee sting and powdered silver concoction is pretty unique). BillK From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 18:15:22 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 10:15:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Power sats and propulsion laser response In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> At great expense and effort > >> the only new part is the one >> stage of bootstrapping > > Can we add further stages? Bootstrap the bootstrap of the > bootstrap of the bootstrap? Billion-dollar efforts may be > "bootstrapping" compared to trillion-dollar efforts, but they're > not the kind of thing one can just do without further planning. The economic model already has some of this in it. For example, the LEO to GEO transport leg is powered first and that increases the payload per flight from about 40% to about 65%. Takes only about 1/10 the laser capacity needed for the boost from 26 km to LEO. And beyond the 100 GW per year stage, the assumption is that some of the power satellites are diverted to more propulsion lasers to get the production rate up to one or two TW. There is a limit on the low end because of the square/cube law. Exactly where that is, I don't know. The goal to optimize is getting off carbon soonest rather than minimizing peak cost. The whole concept needs more study and planning, certainly more than it is possible for me to do. The $140 B peak investment that came out of the model I ran is first order, but I don't think I missed any of the big ticket items. It's also possible I was pessimistic on the cost of the lasers. Keith From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 8 18:09:29 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 10:09:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze Message-ID: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK ... (Although I believe people have commented that in the right light you resemble a slimline George Clooney). ;) BillK _______________________________________________ You are far too kind sir, but I fear you have misunderstood. They surely commented that in the right light (none) I resemble a slimline Swedish chef from the Muppet Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfsABOGw3c This resemblance is unfortunate, for I aspired to have the Skipper's looks, with Mr. Howell's money and the professor's brains. Instead I got Mary Ann's money, with Mrs. Howell's brains and Gilligan's looks. On a very slightly different topic, I need some advice from some of you web-search hipsters for a real-world product. I am creating a standardized rocket science technical test based on a concept I have been thinking about for years. I have a number of questions on a sub-topic which I put in order from easiest to hardest, say seven levels. A test taker is given a middle level question, call it sergeant level. If she answers correctly, the next question is a harder one, at the lieutenant level. Another correct answer gets her promoted to major and still another gets her general. But if she misses sergeant, the next question is corporal, another miss gets her to private, another miss gets her demoted to civilian. With this scheme, a profile emerges after only a few questions. OK, so to design this test, I must write the questions, then develop the code to do the ranking. I have most of the rocket science questions written, but now I am writing the code. It is one of those classic cases where a feller has two tasks, one which he knows how to do and one which he doesn't. He does the one he knows first, and enjoys it. I know how to do rocket science, but being one with Mrs. Howell's brains in the coding department, the other task is tedious, error prone and probably redundant. This idea is so obvious, hipsters must have worked on this same problem before I was born and there is likely a standardized product somewhere which is a framework to do the ranking. I would take this standard form, plug in the rockets science and I am done. ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a software framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test questions, ordered from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the response and does the ranking and deciding which question to ask next?**** I have no idea how to web-search for such a thing, because I don't know what that testing concept is called, if it is called anything. This idea is too obvious to not have already a jillion people having worked on it and produced some excellent foundation on which I could build. This code must exist somewhere, perhaps as a commercial product, ja? I offer the following grand prize to those who can help: my everlasting gratitude and admiration. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 19:14:22 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 19:14:22 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/8/12, spike wrote: > ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a software > framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test questions, ordered > from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the response and does the > ranking and deciding which question to ask next?**** > > You are asking that question like an engineer. Education is humanities. :) I don't think educators would rely on one question to control the test branching. The subject might just have a lucky guess or a lucky snippet of knowledge. I think they prefer to test for levels of knowledge over several questions. i.e. Do all the Level 1 test questions and score it. 80% (say) and over goes on to the level 2 questions. and so on. You decide what % of correct results says their level of capability has been reached, then stop testing. That makes your task easier. Google on free quiz software. BillK From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 19:33:35 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 11:33:35 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 11:14 AM, BillK wrote: > On 12/8/12, spike wrote: > >> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a software >> framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test questions, ordered >> from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the response and does the >> ranking and deciding which question to ask next?**** Keyword is "branch", as in "branch quiz" or "branch test". At least one such product exists: http://www.wondershare.com/pro/quizcreator.html > I don't think educators would rely on one question to control the test > branching. > The subject might just have a lucky guess or a lucky snippet of knowledge. > I think they prefer to test for levels of knowledge over several questions. > > i.e. Do all the Level 1 test questions and score it. > 80% (say) and over goes on to the level 2 questions. > and so on. > > You decide what % of correct results says their level of capability > has been reached, then stop testing. Indeed. IIRC, this is how the electronic versions of certain standardized tests (I forget which one - I want to say the SAT, but I'm not sure that was the one) do it. From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 19:46:05 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 14:46:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 2:14 PM, BillK wrote: > On 12/8/12, spike wrote: > >> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a software >> framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test questions, ordered >> from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the response and does the >> ranking and deciding which question to ask next?**** > > You are asking that question like an engineer. > > Education is humanities. :) > If spike's test is about rocket science... isn't the audience also engineers? If the customer requests solution to problem X and you have the solution to problem Y, are you supposed to rephrase their problem to fit the solution you already have? remind me of the adage "when your only tool is a hammer, you make all your problems look like nails" I'd be tempted to just write some javascript to control the presentation of questions. I have an easier time writing the code than learning someone else's implementation of a branching quiz maker interface. Also, I would want to gamify this experience so the test taker can risk points to get higher-reward (higher challenge) questions. The profile of risk-affection vs risk-aversion is surely as important for rocket scientists as whether or not they "know their stuff." Do you want someone who can answer 50 easy(-er) questions 100% correctly or someone who can answer 20 difficult questions with 80% success? What margin of error is required to keep your rocket from blowing up? (skywriting, not launching, whatever other failure modes you're concerned about) but i probably digress from your original question too much From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 8 19:33:58 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 11:33:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: <003701cdd57a$f892a960$e9b7fc20$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze On 12/8/12, spike wrote: >> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a software > framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test questions, > ordered from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the response and > does the ranking and deciding which question to ask next?**** spike >...You are asking that question like an engineer... Ja, thanks BillK. {8-] >...Google on free quiz software. BillK _______________________________________________ Oy vey, seems like I would have thought of that. I am soooo not hip. See why I was going crazy when my internet connection went down? Never mind not knowing stuff, without a broadband connection I can't even learn. I found Questionwriter.com which might have what I need. http://www.questionwriter.com/quiz-software.html I'll report back periodically. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 20:05:41 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 20:05:41 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/8/12, Mike Dougherty wrote: > If spike's test is about rocket science... isn't the audience also > engineers? > Yes, but it doesn't matter. Testing for levels of knowledge in any subject is standard methodology. > I'd be tempted to just write some javascript to control the > presentation of questions. I have an easier time writing the code > than learning someone else's implementation of a branching quiz maker > interface. Spike doesn't do Javascript coding. That's why he wants software. > Also, I would want to gamify this experience so the test > taker can risk points to get higher-reward (higher challenge) > questions. The profile of risk-affection vs risk-aversion is surely > as important for rocket scientists as whether or not they "know their > stuff." Do you want someone who can answer 50 easy(-er) questions > 100% correctly or someone who can answer 20 difficult questions with > 80% success? What margin of error is required to keep your rocket > from blowing up? (skywriting, not launching, whatever other failure > modes you're concerned about) > > Rocket scientists don't take risks, Ask Spike! Your suggestion is for testing for specific items of knowledge. But the subject might be a specialist who does indeed know those items, but doesn't have a clue about many other aspects which might be required background knowledge. What you're suggesting is more like interview questions for a very specific task area, rather than an educator testing for an all-round knowledge of the subject. Structured testing, for increased levels, demonstrates that the subject knows the basics as well as the latest geewhiz tech. BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 8 20:11:02 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 12:11:02 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sequestration, was: RE: standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze Message-ID: <004201cdd580$264097f0$72c1c7d0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes ... > On 12/8/12, spike wrote: > >> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a >> software framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test >> questions, ordered from easiest to hardest, where the code notes the >> response and does the ranking and deciding which question to ask >> next?**** spike >...Keyword is "branch", as in "branch quiz" or "branch test". At least one such product exists: >http://www.wondershare.com/pro/quizcreator.html Cool thanks Adrian! I am looking at this and another product BillK suggested. Both you and BillK, being space guys, may be interested in why I am doing this. Adrian already knows about sequestration, being a fellow yankee. BillK, as I recall you are British, ja? Here's the Readers Digest version: the US government has been borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it takes in taxes. Clearly this not sustainable, even in the easily foreseeable future, so our congress designed a horrifying OR ELSE, which is a brute force approach to balancing the budget, known in the mainstream media as the fiscal cliff. The government makes severe across-the-board cuts, about half of which comes from domestic spending and the rest from the military. The punchline of all this is that even these drastic cuts are not enough: even after the cuts, we still have a significant budget deficit, on top of a whole new and long list of problems. Second punchline: if the US goes over the fiscal cliff, we get a free test for economic theory. We get to find out from actual evidence who was right, Hayek or Keynes. But that is s subject for another day. Right now I am looking over that cliff, gazing into the abyss until it gazes back into me. Here is what I have realized (do feel free to comment hereupon.) Even if we don't have full sequestration, many of the effects will be seen anyway. The compromise by the US congress might be nearly indistinguishable from sequestration. If so, the immediate impact of sequestration will not fall directly on the military, but rather military contractors. If that happens, military contractors which hope to survive into the next decade will promptly eschew business as usual, and embrace business as unusual. That means they will need to carefully inventory their skill base, and select from among their own staff the most versatile and critically skilled individuals, and. let the rest go. Second notion: the aerospace majors in particular, and the other mainstream businesses in general, have failed to deal with the rise of a recent phenomenon that has my full and undivided: the MOOCs, massively open online courses. I took an artificial intelligence class from Stanford's Sebastian Thune online last fall, and found it excellent. So did many thousands of others. Of course I did not get any actual credentials from taking that course. All I got from it was the actual knowledge. Only paying Stanford customers get Stanford credentials, and you can't even become a paying Stanford customer unless you are young, rich and handsome. Being none of the above, I am out of luck, but Thune still managed to give me some excellent ideas, such as this one. Industry has long relied upon the university to evaluate the student, judging applicants based on the reputation of the institution and the student's grades. But what if we have a new generation of MOOC trained talent, who cannot produce those credentials but who have terrific potential as rocket scientists anyway? This has become a critically important question because of what happened in the US university system over the past decade. It became dramatically easier for students to get loans, with what amounted to a government loan guarantee. The university system responded by accepting students in enormous numbers and offering worthless degrees. Consequently, starting about 3 to 4 years ago, the universities were graduating class after class of bachelor's degrees, many of whom never found a job, or are still halfheartedly looking for one. Clearly if they have no jobs, they will not be repaying those student loans. The government has been responding by postponing the payment schedule to prevent those students from going into full default. The long term result is as foreseeable as the sunrise in the clear morning twilight. If we have huge numbers of student loan defaults, the government will stop guaranteeing student loans, or make the award of those loan guarantees dramatically more difficult. If so, we will see the other side of the coin we saw in the past decade: many talented students who cannot afford higher education, but who have the drive and ambition to use online resources to educate themselves. If a company has the means to identify and exploit that human resource MOOC-trained engineers without college degrees for instance, that company will rise to dominate the industry. Ja? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 20:49:35 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 12:49:35 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sequestration, was: RE: standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <004201cdd580$264097f0$72c1c7d0$@att.net> References: <004201cdd580$264097f0$72c1c7d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 12:11 PM, spike wrote: > so our congress designed a horrifying OR ELSE, which is a brute force > approach to balancing the budget, known in the mainstream media as the > fiscal cliff. Congress & Mr. Obama say they are trying to negotiate to find a way around it, but given their lack of progress - I wonder if perhaps this "fiscal cliff" was intended as a way to get tax hikes/close loopholes/etc. without anyone actually facing the political responsibility for it. Each individual congressperson and the President can say they tried hard to negotiate but the other person wouldn't budge enough. The Republicans who vowed never to vote for tax hikes can say they didn't break their vow, et cetera. ...of course, if it comes out that this "failure" was predicted and intentional, well. But there's plausible deniability there. > The compromise by the US congress might be nearly > indistinguishable from sequestration. If so, the immediate impact of > sequestration will not fall directly on the military, but rather military > contractors. If that happens, military contractors which hope to survive > into the next decade will promptly eschew business as usual, and embrace > business as unusual. Ehh...I don't see it. They survive by bribing Congresspeople to divert fat contracts to their districts. Even if the contracts aren't as fat anymore, that would seem to continue to be their bread and butter, moreso than actual competitiveness. Even the military is saying that many of these contracts are simply not needed, so it's not like the quality of product matters that much in securing the business. > I took an artificial intelligence class from Stanford?s Sebastian > Thune online last fall, and found it excellent. So did many thousands of > others. *waves* :) I forget, were you on the advanced or basic track? (I.e., graded or ungraded?) > If a company has the means to identify and exploit that human resource > MOOC-trained engineers without college degrees for instance, that company > will rise to dominate the industry. We've seen that in the commercial software industry for a while. You can get people with a bachelor's degree, *or* you can get people who know how to code. The two overlap but are far from synonymous.. Still, larger software companies insist on a degree, thinking that formal education brings quality and familiarity with processes that non-technical managers can understand and think they are Accomplishing Something by using. From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 20:59:36 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 12:59:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Power sats and propulsion laser response In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > There is a limit on the low end because of the square/cube law. > Exactly where that is, I don't know. It would be useful for you to find this, because wherever that is, is likely the point you want to start to maximize your chance of implementing this. It is much, much easier to start a $10M venture that grows into $1B if it is successful, than to start a venture that needs $1B right off the bat. From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 21:14:30 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 13:14:30 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I'd be tempted to just write some javascript to control the > presentation of questions. Okay, I have to brag: http://www.lts.com/class/hextoc.htm http://www.lts.com/class/hexquiz.htm Written by yours truly a bit over 15 years ago. It ain't much, but it still runs - as good as it did when it was brand new - on today's browsers. From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 8 21:14:21 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 13:14:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sequestration, was: RE: standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <004201cdd580$264097f0$72c1c7d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <006801cdd588$fea92960$fbfb7c20$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes ... >>... I took an artificial intelligence class from Stanford's Sebastian Thune online last fall, and found it excellent. So did many > thousands of others. >...I forget, were you on the advanced or basic track? (I.e., graded or ungraded?) The very most basic track. I was a casual student at best, but I got a lot out of that course, not necessarily in AI. I have taken other online courses, but Thune's course caused me to recognize that in some important ways, viewing the course online is not just equivalent to actually being there, it is superior. Reason: the AI course requires a number of complex diagrams. If you are in the course, you probably need to wait as Thune draws them, but in video, it is done in stop motion fast forward. So he could cover the material faster, and furthermore, you don't have a scroll bar in the meat world. There were passages where I went back four or five times, listening carefully to a particular point. If I had been in class, we would have one shot at that concept, then it is gone. Class notes were already written out right there in video, so there was no need to break one's concentration copying diagrams. So what Thune really taught me the best was that in some important ways, online learning is better than being there. But furthermore... If you actually go and live on campus, there are severe lifestyle compromises along with that wonderful un-reproducible-at-home learning environment: the total immersion in an alternate universe, for instance, not to mention pretty girls everywhere, most of them single. There are along with this some severe compromises to the task of learning present at the university as well, such as pretty girls everywhere, most of them single. How the hell are we to concentrate when the testosterone pressure is threatening to blast our brains out? There is something else. If you look at student housing, oy vey! Locals, go check out Stanford, which is really nice, high-end student housing. Oh my, it is expensive. I look at the student housing I occupied in my own misspent youth. The house I occupied in undergrad was a very dangerous pile of kindling, having been built in 1905, wiring added after the fact, cloth insulated wiring, heated by an ancient oil-burner, a catastrophic fire-trap in a dangerous neighborhood. A brief stint in graduate school at the University of Washington was an even worse house in a still more dangerous neighborhood. Fortunately I ran out of money and had to leave. Even then, you need to be already a good student and have access to financial resources to even get into these institutions of higher girl-chasing. All of that is swept away for those students who have the self-discipline to work the online free resources. This will work well for some students. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 8 22:31:46 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 17:31:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > http://www.lts.com/class/hextoc.htm > http://www.lts.com/class/hexquiz.htm > > Written by yours truly a bit over 15 years ago. Wow, 15 year old markup+script. Times have changed. :) I generally don't like to admit I've been doing this for so long, but yeah... the stuff I wrote 15 years ago can't even be killed; despite 3 server upgrades and a new version that was missing one feature so the CFO still uses the old version. Our IT Director has the motto, "We don't fly anything we build" so it's not really mission critical like rocket science... From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 8 22:55:29 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 14:55:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: <008401cdd597$1efb3510$5cf19f30$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>... Written by yours truly a bit over 15 years ago. >...I generally don't like to admit I've been doing this for so long, but yeah... the stuff I wrote 15 years ago can't even be killed; despite 3 server upgrades and a new version that was missing one feature so the CFO still uses the old version... That is evidence of an excellent product Mike. If the thing works, don't mess with it. Every piece of software doesn't need to be upgraded to the new and improved version, which so often turns out to be just new. Look at Microsloth Excel for instance. Compare the user interface in 2010 with the 2007 version. The older one was intuitive, logical, well designed. The 2010 version is way more difficult to use, unless you know how to customize the toolbars, which most users don't. They talked us into upgrading by a feature of Excel2010 that I desperately needed, a much higher data handling capacity. 2007 only had 65k lines and 256 columns. I definitely needed the 1 million data lines Excel2010 offers, but that interface comes with a price. For those of us who set up scroll bars, spinners, buttons and checkboxes on the spreadsheet need to do stuff that is far less intuitive now. I got over it, but I grumbled for a long time over that. >...Our IT Director has the motto, "We don't fly anything we build" so it's not really mission critical like rocket science... _______________________________________________ It isn't just rocket science. When a major interface redesign comes along, big companies have enoooooormous investment in collective expertise of its employees in the old system. Most of that investment is lost in a major interface configuration change. This would make a huge market for a software tool that probably exists somewhere: a routine that takes Excel 2010 and makes the interface look identical to the 2007 interface, but with more rows and columns of data available. I love those, still don't like the 2010 interface three years later. I never disliked any of the previous version changes. I have learned from my previous go-around with the test template software question: if I can think of *anything* that would be cool to have, someone somewhere has done it a long time ago and has done an excellent job. Good chance it is available free online somewhere. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 00:11:50 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 19:11:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <008401cdd597$1efb3510$5cf19f30$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <008401cdd597$1efb3510$5cf19f30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 5:55 PM, spike wrote: > Look at Microsloth Excel for instance. Compare the user interface in 2010 > with the 2007 version. The older one was intuitive, logical, well designed. I agree 100%. I wonder if you had no prior experience with Excel (or Lotus!) if the ribbon would be such a travesty to you. I also spent a lot of time with Excel (specifically '95) I hope the ribbon is easier for new users, because it is still annoying anyone who has used earlier versions. > The 2010 version is way more difficult to use, unless you know how to > customize the toolbars, which most users don't. They talked us into > upgrading by a feature of Excel2010 that I desperately needed, a much higher > data handling capacity. 2007 only had 65k lines and 256 columns. I > definitely needed the 1 million data lines Excel2010 offers, but that > interface comes with a price. Only because the general purpose usefulness of "rows, columns, sheets, books" does Excel need anything like a million rows of data in it. LONG before you hit that limit, you should have moved your content into a more appropriate tool for the job. I am an advocate of googledocs spreadsheet for those things that it does well. Excel is still king of pivot tables/analytics, but googledocs is able to move quickly and it's been a more productive year at Google than at Microsoft. Of course, nothing Google does is five nines correct - so ymmv. > It isn't just rocket science. When a major interface redesign comes along, > big companies have enoooooormous investment in collective expertise of its > employees in the old system. Most of that investment is lost in a major > interface configuration change. I think Microsoft is making a huge bet on Windows 8. It's ironic that when Apple does arbitrarily weird stuff with UI they are innovating technology but when Microsoft does it they are risking total alienation of their user base. I think the leap to touch-based interface is a worthwhile endeavor, but one that will involve pain. Home users will get it. Business will hate the fact that all new hardware is pricier than non-touch. Business will really hate the re-education of the new UI. Considering windows XP is still so strong, Windows 8 will be competing with its ancestors to gain placement. > This would make a huge market for a software tool that probably exists > somewhere: a routine that takes Excel 2010 and makes the interface look > identical to the 2007 interface, but with more rows and columns of data > available. I love those, still don't like the 2010 interface three years > later. I never disliked any of the previous version changes. I wonder why we (the public) accept radical change to UI. Computers are supposed to do our bidding. Instead we (the developers) write miserable code that is hard enough to debug in one use-case let alone skinned millions of ways... so we force a limited set of tested interfaces onto the public and make THEM adapt. Seems though we can make humans adapt to software much more readily than we can make software adapt to humans. (wish it weren't so) > I have learned from my previous go-around with the test template software > question: if I can think of *anything* that would be cool to have, someone > somewhere has done it a long time ago and has done an excellent job. Good > chance it is available free online somewhere. That's a good point. There is also the danger. For all the Internet's explosive exponential growth, if people stop building it and simply hook together the old parts in various ways... eventually there won't be anything new. Maybe the exponential growth metaphor is wrong, it's not a smooth curve but a series of novel pops followed by small ripples of adjustment. From pharos at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 00:32:49 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 00:32:49 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <008401cdd597$1efb3510$5cf19f30$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/9/12, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I wonder why we (the public) accept radical change to UI. Computers > are supposed to do our bidding. Instead we (the developers) write > miserable code that is hard enough to debug in one use-case let alone > skinned millions of ways... so we force a limited set of tested > interfaces onto the public and make THEM adapt. Seems though we can > make humans adapt to software much more readily than we can make > software adapt to humans. (wish it weren't so) > Because the public feels trapped into using Microsoft Windows. They don't know that modern Linux is now more user-friendly than Windows. And Linux users have choice. Ubuntu (one of the most popular versions) changed to their Unity interface and many many users hated it so much that they uninstalled Ubuntu and moved to Linux Mint instead. A similar fate befell the Gnome desktop. Their developers thought they had great new ideas and produced Gnome 3 but many users didn't like it and voted with their feet and reverted to Gnome 2 or moved to Linux Mint. Linux nowadays means computing the way YOU like it. BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 02:41:14 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 21:41:14 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <008401cdd597$1efb3510$5cf19f30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 7:32 PM, BillK wrote: > On 12/9/12, Mike Dougherty wrote: >> interfaces onto the public and make THEM adapt. Seems though we can >> make humans adapt to software much more readily than we can make >> software adapt to humans. (wish it weren't so) > Because the public feels trapped into using Microsoft Windows. > > They don't know that modern Linux is now more user-friendly than Windows. > > And Linux users have choice. Linux users still have to deal with the forced behavior changes of Firefox (for example) I'd turn off the automatic updates if I dared live in a world of easily compromised software without post-launch security fixes. As spike mentioned, not every new version is better - but the longer your exploitable software is running, the more likely you will be exploited. The only hope is to keep up to date and that whomever is updating the software keeps ahead of whomever is attempted to ruin you with it. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 04:18:19 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2012 20:18:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Power sats and propulsion laser response Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> There is a limit on the low end because of the square/cube law. >> Exactly where that is, I don't know. > > It would be useful for you to find this, because wherever that is, > is likely the point you want to start to maximize your chance > of implementing this. It is much, much easier to start a $10M > venture that grows into $1B if it is successful, than to start a > venture that needs $1B right off the bat. I doubt if my model that gives just short of $140 B is off by as much as 50% in the high direction. So the minimum is probably in the $70 B range. There is no way this can make any sort of profit with as little as $10 M invested in the project, but on the other hand, it is certain that small amounts of money will be spent to see if the very rough model has any merit. On the other hand, if governments decide they have to so something to deal with climate change, this could be a much more popular approach than the others that have been proposed. Keith From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 9 07:35:52 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:35:52 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test In-Reply-To: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: <50C43F58.8020008@aleph.se> Here is my take on it. Start with Bayesian statistics, end up with a fairly simple algorithm: Let us use Bayes theorem: P(skill|answers)=P(answers|skill)P(skill)/P(answers) =K P(a1,a2,a3,...|skill)P(skill) [K is a normalization factor; we only care about relative differences of skill, not the absolute probability] =K P(a1|skill)P(a2|skill)...P(skill) [assume independent answers] =K P(a1|skill)P(a2|skill)...P(skill) [assume uniform prior] So if we get a sequence to answers we can calculate the likeliehood of different skill levels. Let's assume the questions have different difficulties i. Then the probability for a particular question that a person with skill j will be: P(right answer difficulty i| skill=j) = C sigmoid(j-i) P(wrong i|j)=1-C sigmoid(j-1) where C is a normalization and sigmoid represents some suitable monotonic sigmoid function like .5+.5*tanh(x). In fact, I think we can use a step function like .5+.5*sign(x) - people better than the question difficulty are assumed to always answer right. So this gives us an algorithm: Assume we have N skill levels Set P(j) = 1/N while (not done) ask question of difficulty i for j=1:N if (right answer) P(j) = P(j)* sigmoid(j-i) else P(j)=P(j)*(1-sigmoid(j-i)) end normalise P end The final issue is how to select the question. We want to get as much information as possible, so a good method would be to ask the question where an answer maximises the change of sum P(j) log(P(j)), the entropy/uncertainty about the skill. I don't have the time to calculate the right solution, but it would not be hard to either loop over j to find the right difficulty i, or to use the heuristic to ask a question that is close to the expectation of j: i = round(sum j*P(j)) There you are. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 9 12:21:27 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 09 Dec 2012 12:21:27 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test In-Reply-To: <50C43F58.8020008@aleph.se> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <50C43F58.8020008@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50C48247.4070405@aleph.se> Just checked my algoritm. It works pretty well! It converges very quickly and robustly for people who reliably give the right answers when questions are easier than their skill level, and the sharpness allows to set how forgiving the system is to mistakes. Here is a matlab/octave script: N=50; % number of skill levels P=ones(1,N)/N; % Initialize g=10; % Sharpness of sigmoid while(1) bar(P) % Draw the probabilities of skills i=sum((1:N).*P) % Select a question of difficulty i answ=input(''); % Ask for 0,1 - incorrect or correct answer if (answ>0) P=P.*(.5+.5*tanh(g*((1:N)-i))); % Update prob after correct answers else P=P.*(1-(.5+.5*tanh(g*((1:N)-i)))); % Update after errors end P=P/sum(P); % Normalize end -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 9 17:13:21 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 09:13:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> Message-ID: <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze > On 12/8/12, spike wrote: > >> ****Question code hipsters: is there a standard product or a >> software framework that allows me to insert or paste in my test >> questions... > > ... "when your only tool is a hammer, you make all your problems look like nails" >...I'd be tempted to just write some javascript to control the presentation of questions... Mike [approximate comment by someone here, possibly Mike]: If you need more than 65k rows, Excel is not the right tool... Agreed that I am the poster child for Excel abuse. What I was doing was a brute force Scrabble player. I found a list of English words, eliminated all which have more than 15 letters, and found that with those gone, there are 354938 words left. I got the code to work, but it was still a practical failure at Scrabble because that list contained too many words that would piss off one's opponent if you played them. For instance, starting at the top: a as aa aaa aah aahed aahing aahs aal aalii aaliis aals aam aardvark The first word is a single letter, useless for Scrabble, the second word is worth 2 points, and then I am all the way down to word 14, aardvark, before I get to anything I would consider a legitimate Scrabble word. At the other end of the alphabet, we have: zygous zygozoospore zymase zymases zyme zymes zymic zymin zymite zymochemistry zymogen zymogene zymogenes zymogenesis zymogenic zymogenous zymogens zymogram zymograms zymoid zymologic zymological zymologies zymologist zymology zymolyis zymolysis zymolytic zymome zymometer zymomin zymophore zymophoric zymophosphate zymophyte zymoplastic zymosan zymosans zymoscope zymoses zymosimeter zymosis zymosterol zymosthenic zymotechnic zymotechnical zymotechnics zymotechny zymotic zymotically zymotize zymotoxic zymurgies zymurgy zythem zythum zyzzyva zyzzyvas so the term zygous is the last one on that list I would consider a legitimate Scrabble word, the biology term which I think is the adjective form referring to a zygote. Any word I have never heard of in my tragically many years of info-grazing, I would consider illegitimate for Scrabble. Indeed, Microsloth Word marks all but 48 of these 58 words as misspellings, but oddly enough, accepts zyzzyva and zyzzyvas as legitimate, which are also useless in Scrabble anyway because they contain 3 Zs. Regarding Scrabble, I had an AHA insight. I took my list of words, wrote a script which took each word and arranged them in alphabetical order, then made a table with the words listed in alphabetical order by their alphabetical order. Then I take my Scrabble tiles and arrange them in alphabetical order, do a table lookup and find all the possible words that match my tiles, which usually aren't very many. So the code works, but the list is too long, and includes about three quarters of the list as words you or I wouldn't use in Scrabble. I am not about to go through 355000 words and eliminate those I don't know. Nor will I attempt to create a list that I do know. But I agree this is a classic case of Excel abuse. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 17:38:13 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 12:38:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 12:13 PM, spike wrote: > Agreed that I am the poster child for Excel abuse. What I was doing was a > brute force Scrabble player. I found a list of English words, eliminated > all which have more than 15 letters, and found that with those gone, there > are 354938 words left. I got the code to work, but it was still a practical > failure at Scrabble because that list contained too many words that would > piss off one's opponent if you played them. For instance, starting at the > top: You really should learn SQL. This "set of all permutations of letters" transformed with "set of all scrabble titles" is exactly how/why SQL works. Most people need to be taught to think in sets, you're doing it natively and forcing Excel to keep up with you. > But I agree this is a classic case of Excel abuse. haha From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 9 18:48:38 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 10:48:38 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> Message-ID: <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 12:13 PM, spike wrote: >>... Agreed that I am the poster child for Excel abuse... >...You really should learn SQL. This "set of all permutations of letters" transformed with "set of all scrabble titles" is exactly how/why SQL works. Most people need to be taught to think in sets, you're doing it natively and forcing Excel to keep up with you... Mike Ja, but actually Excel and modern computing hardware is advancing at least as fast as I am. I remember when I wrote my first iterative aerodynamic rocket ascent profile calculator right when macros first came along in 1994. My little M65000 Mac took 24 minutes to do a single run. I would set it, hit go, run downstairs to the cafeteria, scarf a sandwich and guzzle a cola, run back up and it would be finishing right when I arrived. I still have that code, and the same routine now runs in way less than a minute. We had a Fortran code which ran on the mainframe in just a few seconds, but it required the person who owned that code to stop what he was doing, set up my job, run it, print out the results and hand it back, which seldom took less than half an hour end to end. I am astonished that we were this primitive as recently as 18 yrs ago. Mike the problem I have with the computer science industry in general is that it is too faddish. Every other year there is a new latest and greatest, and sure I could run like hell just to stay in place, learning each new protocol, but mathematics doesn't do that. You learn new skills in math, but you don't need to learn a new protocol every time. It is standardized and it stays that way. You computer gurus need to figure out some language or programming protocol, get together and standardize it, then arrange for first and second graders to learn it, then leave it alone forever. Add cool new stuff, such as we do in math, the matrix algebras and so forth, but leave the basic protocols alone, learn it once and be done with that phase of learning, so we can move on. spike From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 20:28:06 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 12:28:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 10:48 AM, spike wrote: > You computer gurus need to figure out > some language or programming protocol, get together and standardize it, then > arrange for first and second graders to learn it, then leave it alone > forever. Text editors. C-like syntax. Functions, subroutines, and objects. There are variants on this, but these basics have been around for a while. Know 'em, and you can look up the latest or project-specific mods to 'em. SQL and databases have been around for a while. From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 9 23:42:41 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 18:42:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 1:48 PM, spike wrote: > Mike the problem I have with the computer science industry in general is > that it is too faddish. Every other year there is a new latest and > greatest, and sure I could run like hell just to stay in place, learning > each new protocol, but mathematics doesn't do that. You learn new skills in > math, but you don't need to learn a new protocol every time. It is > standardized and it stays that way. You computer gurus need to figure out > some language or programming protocol, get together and standardize it, then > arrange for first and second graders to learn it, then leave it alone > forever. Add cool new stuff, such as we do in math, the matrix algebras and > so forth, but leave the basic protocols alone, learn it once and be done > with that phase of learning, so we can move on. I understand your frustration. However, I think you would disagree with yourself if we applied this sentiment to another field: The culinary arts we had back in 1970 were sufficient to keep plenty of Americans well-fed at meal time. The food pyramid was a good idea. Meat & potatoes + "a starch" + dinner rolls/bread + some over-cooked veg = "wholesome." There was no reason to change that plan, it could have stayed static forever. We should probably have kept those console televisions and hi-fi stereos too... Yes, I'm being facetious. A great deal of "computer science" is severely outdated but still in-use. IPv4, the protocol for Internet numbers is 50+ years old. Our notions of "password" security comes from timesharing mainframes and is completely inadequate for the modern world. The motif for "files" and "folders" in the "desktop" filesystem are all transitional concepts to help office workers from half a century ago cope with content management - but we haven't exactly transitioned TO anything better. Typing (a la qwerty) is an old protocol you learned once and have forgotten was an acquired skill. Your google-fu is an acquired skill you forget that many people (still, sadly) lack. I suggested you learn SQL because it actually IS a language of math (set theory) and we DO teach Venn diagrams in first and second grade. Even if you never translated any of your Excel programs to SQL, learning SQL (structured query language) would be at least as useful a mental exercise as that Stanford AI course. The version of SQL I'm using at work every day hasn't changed since 1992 - if 20 years of stability in the language is a fad, then I'm not sure you could be convinced any of it isn't a fad. :) From pharos at gmail.com Mon Dec 10 00:05:36 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:05:36 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/9/12, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Typing (a la qwerty) is an old protocol you learned once and have > forgotten was an acquired skill. Your google-fu is an acquired skill > you forget that many people (still, sadly) lack. I suggested you > learn SQL because it actually IS a language of math (set theory) and > we DO teach Venn diagrams in first and second grade. Even if you > never translated any of your Excel programs to SQL, learning SQL > (structured query language) would be at least as useful a mental > exercise as that Stanford AI course. The version of SQL I'm using at > work every day hasn't changed since 1992 - if 20 years of stability in > the language is a fad, then I'm not sure you could be convinced any of > it isn't a fad. :) > I may be mistaken, but I don't think Spike wants to be a programmer, even in SQL. He might be misleading you with his descriptions of torturing Excel. I think he would rather problem solve with something like Sage. Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. (runs on Windows as well). BillK From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 10 00:19:46 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 16:19:46 -0800 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> Message-ID: <000001cdd66c$100be740$3023b5c0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2012 4:06 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze On 12/9/12, Mike Dougherty wrote: >>... Typing (a la qwerty) is an old protocol you learned once and have > forgotten was an acquired skill. Your google-fu is an acquired skill > you forget that many people (still, sadly) lack... I have a good example of this I will share soon, but not now because I have family obligations. >...I may be mistaken, but I don't think Spike wants to be a programmer... You are not mistaken. This is why evolution has given us people like Mike. They like coding and are good at it. I find it tedious and I suck. >... even in SQL... Right again. >...He might be misleading you with his descriptions of torturing Excel... No actually I have done some wacky complicated stuff in Excel macros. They have their advantages, for everyone at work uses Excel. >...Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. BillK I have used both Mathematica and Matlab at work, as well as Simulink, but I don't have any of those three packages at home, which is where I do all my fun and games stuff. I managed to have Matlab on its knees as well as Excel, so it isn't clear to me that it was a lot better. Matlab is good at what it does. spike From pharos at gmail.com Mon Dec 10 00:25:16 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:25:16 +0000 Subject: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <000001cdd66c$100be740$3023b5c0$@att.net> References: <002a01cdd56f$2b02eab0$8108c010$@att.net> <00e601cdd630$7e2dfdd0$7a89f970$@att.net> <010001cdd63d$cd5dd440$68197cc0$@att.net> <000001cdd66c$100be740$3023b5c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12/10/12, spike wrote: > I have used both Mathematica and Matlab at work, as well as Simulink, but I > don't have any of those three packages at home, which is where I do all my > fun and games stuff. I managed to have Matlab on its knees as well as > Excel, so it isn't clear to me that it was a lot better. Matlab is good at > what it does. > > Sage is free software. Install it and you 'nearly' have Mathematica and Matlab at home. BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 10 09:54:23 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:54:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Jeff Davis wrote: > > How much will the sea level rise when the North Polar Ice Cap melts? ### About 0.00 mm (for the purpose of a thought experiment assuming only the Arctic ice melts, without a concomitant change in ocean temperatures). This reasonably precise number can be derived from the law of Archimedes and the negligible amount of Arctic ice sticking up above the waterline. The Antarctic ice shield, BTW, is doing well and has been growing significantly in the last few decades. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 10 09:39:06 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:39:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:55 PM, spike wrote: There is an important lesson in here. What if > *everybody?s* internet went down simultaneously? Oh we would be so screwed. > ### We would all "head out Californee way": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_Logging Rafal From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Dec 10 15:07:16 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:07:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it Message-ID: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> Does anyone have suggested books that a student might use as a guide to helping innovate a project and take it to market? How would she/he know what type of business to develop? What type of business plan do most entrepreneurs work with first time to bat? Thanks! Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 10 16:28:42 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:28:42 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs In-Reply-To: References: <004801cdd34d$ed0c6f10$c7254d30$@att.net> <50C00A36.9080402@aleph.se> <00cc01cdd426$43de4ba0$cb9ae2e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <004a01cdd6f3$6b5b3970$4211ac50$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Subject: Re: [ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:55 PM, spike wrote: There is an important lesson in here. What if > *everybody?s* internet went down simultaneously? Oh we would be so screwed. > ### We would all "head out Californee way": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_Logging Rafal _______________________________________________ Waaaaaaahahahahahahaaaaaa! {8^D I didn't see the episode (couldn't, my internet connection going down would have taken my television signal out as well if I had a television) but the wiki description of it sounds hilarious. {8^D Thanks Rafal. This comment from the article made me wonder about something: >>>Back at the camp, everybody discovers that their laptops are working and rejoice at the return of the Internet. Shelley, ecstatic that she will now be able to communicate with Amir, suddenly hears a boy call out her name. It is the actual Amir, whose family had also traveled across the country to get Internet. The two are awkward around each other, and make plans to e-mail each other instead of communicating in-person.<<< Internet dating came about long after I was happily married, so perhaps some of the younger cats here could answer this one. Are there instances where a couple meets online, loves each other wildly, does realtime chat and skype, shares pictures in all stages of undress and so forth, then meet in the meat world only to find that the chemistry is mysteriously missing? Or not just missing, the chemistry is negative? They can't even figure out why. Then what? Do they go back to the mostly imaginary email world? What of those who are good with the written word and know how to type stuff that turns on each other, but they just can't seem to reflect that talent in person? Who here both knows and is willing to share? Inquiring minds want to know. spike From jrd1415 at gmail.com Mon Dec 10 21:30:54 2012 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:30:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sequestration, was: RE: standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze In-Reply-To: <006801cdd588$fea92960$fbfb7c20$@att.net> References: <004201cdd580$264097f0$72c1c7d0$@att.net> <006801cdd588$fea92960$fbfb7c20$@att.net> Message-ID: I could go on for pages re the defects in the current education system and the coming revolution. In my first year at Case, there was an orientation where several students complained about the liberal arts requirement. They said they didn't want it and didn't need it. They said they came to Case to learn engineering, not English Lit. There was no mistaking their point, but back then, I always went along with what the grown-ups said was best, so I supported the liberal arts requirements. Looking back, and looking forward, I see that a engineering job-seeker, career-seeker, profession-seeker, wants job/career/profession. His engineering employer wants someone who can do what the employer needs done right now -- and very narrowly -- not someone with a classical education who can write a term-paper about Emily Dickenson's role in American poetry. If a person is smart -- most people are if they haven't been in school too long -- and if his prospective employer is smart, assigning the person to an apprenticeship, OJT sort of arrangement should -- my view, and I'm willing to defend it -- be the most efficient way for both to achieve their aims. The apprentice studies from the top down, from free on- and off-line materials, and hands on, at the side of fully-trained senior personnel and with a very narrow focus, precisely those very specific skills his employer needs from him. Then on his own initiative, and in a very conducive environment, he naturally grows his capabilities in accord with his smarts, ambition, and the needs of the workplace. And if he enjoys learning for its own sake, he'll no doubt get that classical education, and in a form which reflects his/her own personal passions, not some cookie-cutter liberal arts requirement. The internet was made for the learning primate with the outsized neural bulb. I can't wait for the old system to wither and die. Best, Jeff Davis I never let schooling stand in the way of my education." Mark Twain On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 2:14 PM, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes > ... > > >>... I took an artificial intelligence class from Stanford's Sebastian > Thune online last fall, and found it excellent. So did many > > thousands of others. > > >...I forget, were you on the advanced or basic track? (I.e., graded or > ungraded?) > > The very most basic track. I was a casual student at best, but I got a lot > out of that course, not necessarily in AI. I have taken other online > courses, but Thune's course caused me to recognize that in some important > ways, viewing the course online is not just equivalent to actually being > there, it is superior. Reason: the AI course requires a number of complex > diagrams. If you are in the course, you probably need to wait as Thune > draws them, but in video, it is done in stop motion fast forward. So he > could cover the material faster, and furthermore, you don't have a scroll > bar in the meat world. There were passages where I went back four or five > times, listening carefully to a particular point. If I had been in class, > we would have one shot at that concept, then it is gone. Class notes were > already written out right there in video, so there was no need to break > one's concentration copying diagrams. So what Thune really taught me the > best was that in some important ways, online learning is better than being > there. > > But furthermore... > > If you actually go and live on campus, there are severe lifestyle > compromises along with that wonderful un-reproducible-at-home learning > environment: the total immersion in an alternate universe, for instance, > not > to mention pretty girls everywhere, most of them single. There are along > with this some severe compromises to the task of learning present at the > university as well, such as pretty girls everywhere, most of them single. > How the hell are we to concentrate when the testosterone pressure is > threatening to blast our brains out? > > There is something else. If you look at student housing, oy vey! Locals, > go check out Stanford, which is really nice, high-end student housing. Oh > my, it is expensive. I look at the student housing I occupied in my own > misspent youth. The house I occupied in undergrad was a very dangerous > pile > of kindling, having been built in 1905, wiring added after the fact, cloth > insulated wiring, heated by an ancient oil-burner, a catastrophic fire-trap > in a dangerous neighborhood. A brief stint in graduate school at the > University of Washington was an even worse house in a still more dangerous > neighborhood. Fortunately I ran out of money and had to leave. > > Even then, you need to be already a good student and have access to > financial resources to even get into these institutions of higher > girl-chasing. > > All of that is swept away for those students who have the self-discipline > to > work the online free resources. This will work well for some students. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Tue Dec 11 04:27:19 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:27:19 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it In-Reply-To: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> References: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:07:16 +1300, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Does anyone have suggested books that a student might use as a guide to > helping innovate a project and take it to market? > > How would she/he know what type of business to develop? > > What type of business plan do most entrepreneurs work with first time to > bat? I just signed up to the Coursera course - 'Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies' that pretty much covers the above, its starting late Januarry next year if that helps at all. Regards - Andrew From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Dec 11 15:38:39 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:38:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it In-Reply-To: References: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <00a001cdd7b5$978153a0$c683fae0$@natasha.cc> What is your reading list for the course? Are books listed or other references for the class? -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Mckee Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 9:27 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:07:16 +1300, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Does anyone have suggested books that a student might use as a guide > to helping innovate a project and take it to market? > > How would she/he know what type of business to develop? > > What type of business plan do most entrepreneurs work with first time > to bat? I just signed up to the Coursera course - 'Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies' that pretty much covers the above, its starting late Januarry next year if that helps at all. Regards - Andrew _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 11 20:30:44 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:30:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forbes posting In-Reply-To: <50BFE630.7080008@aleph.se> References: <50BF2C65.4020101@libero.it> <50BFE630.7080008@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 6 December 2012 01:26, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The > local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of: > > "Humans are definitely changing the climate in worrying ways, but the > models can we make are fairly crappy due to foundational reasons that are > unlikely to ever go away (but we still want bigger computers! Because they > are cool!) But the *big* hole in our knowledge is the mapping climate -> > weather -> human impact. We simply do not have any good ways of estimating > that. And then politicians and activists take our dear research and make it > *stupid*. Oh, and geoengineering looks like it could work... which is > *scary*, because it is going to be the mother of all governance and safety > problems - now you have climate change with some of the stupid people in > charge." > > Of course, at least in Europe farmers are largely decoupled from actual > climate: given the current subsidy situation and the apparent impossibility > of dislodging it, you can do well by not producing anything. > > The problem for engineers is that engineering works when you get to build > a clean system that optimizes certain things. But if you need to interface > with messy existing systems that change, behave irrationally or even > adversarially, then it becomes *much* harder. It often fails as a > discipline because it produces too brittle solutions in the face of this > kind of mess. Which doesn't mean that neat solutions to particular problems > are not transformative and desirable. It is just that, as soon as you scale > them up to a big system it will start to interact with the mess. > Cool and clever depiction. Exactly my take on the subject. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Dec 12 06:46:28 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:46:28 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it In-Reply-To: <00a001cdd7b5$978153a0$c683fae0$@natasha.cc> References: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> <00a001cdd7b5$978153a0$c683fae0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: On Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:38:39 +1300, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > What is your reading list for the course? Are books listed or other > references for the class? Mostly self contained by the looks of it, but there is this.. > Suggested Readings > Although the class is designed to be self-contained, students wanting to expand their knowledge beyond >what we can cover in this class can find further coverage of these topics in the recommend readings, to >include ?Business Model Generation? by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and ?Finding Fertile >Ground? by Scott Shane. Here's a link to the intro page if your curious. https://www.coursera.org/course/innovativeideas Happy info hunting! From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Dec 12 14:53:18 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 06:53:18 -0800 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > On 6 December 2012 01:26, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The >> local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of: >> >> "Humans are definitely changing the climate in worrying ways, but the >> models can we make are fairly crappy due to foundational reasons that are >> unlikely to ever go away (but we still want bigger computers! Because they >> are cool!) But the *big* hole in our knowledge is the mapping climate -> >> weather -> human impact. We simply do not have any good ways of estimating >> that. And then politicians and activists take our dear research and make it >> *stupid*. Oh, and geoengineering looks like it could work... which is >> *scary*, because it is going to be the mother of all governance and safety >> problems - now you have climate change with some of the stupid people in >> charge." >> >> Of course, at least in Europe farmers are largely decoupled from actual >> climate: given the current subsidy situation and the apparent impossibility >> of dislodging it, you can do well by not producing anything. That may not always be the case. >> The problem for engineers is that engineering works when you get to build >> a clean system that optimizes certain things. But if you need to interface >> with messy existing systems that change, behave irrationally or even >> adversarially, then it becomes *much* harder. It often fails as a >> discipline because it produces too brittle solutions in the face of this >> kind of mess. Which doesn't mean that neat solutions to particular problems >> are not transformative and desirable. It is just that, as soon as you scale >> them up to a big system it will start to interact with the mess. >> > > Cool and clever depiction. Exactly my take on the subject. In the process of ending the burning of fossil fuels humanity by going to SBSP, humanity would became highly dependent on space industry and access to space, particularly space based GW scale lasers for transportation. Something, perhaps a solar flare 20 times the 1859 event, put a kink in the carbon 14 in 774 or 775. Without serious attention to radiation hardening of the power sats and particularly the laser propulsion satellites, the whole Earth could be abruptly cut off from the considerable majority of our energy supply *and* the transport to get out there to fix the power satellites if an event like this happened again. Not to mention frying the people in space who were not behind considerable shielding. If we understand this potential problem we can take steps to mitigate it. The harder problem is taking steps to mitigate "black swan" events that we have no idea might happen at all. A large number of combustion turbines and a year's supply of oil or methane to fire them might be a prudent backup. Keith From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Dec 13 02:15:03 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:15:03 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 9:53 AM Keith Henson wrote: > If we understand this potential problem we can take steps to mitigate it. That's about the same for any problem, of course. :) > The harder problem is taking steps to mitigate "black swan" events > that we have no idea might happen at all. > > A large number of combustion turbines and a year's supply of oil or > methane to fire them might be a prudent backup. I don't disagree. I think the problem is mainly looking for the one optimal solution and then enforcing it top-down as opposed to just letting people make bottom up choices on what energy sources they'll use. I think the top-down approach invites "black swans" because it makes for a one size fits all solution, so if the solution fails and its back up fails too, then you get total system interruption if not collapse. By the way, speaking of "black swans," have you read Taleb's latest book, _Antifragility_? I'm most of the way through the audio version of it. Some interesting ideas and, of course, some stuff I'd disagree on, but not by much. I enjoyed his earlier books too, though _Fooled by Randomness_ and _The Black Swan_ seemed like the same book just rewritten. Maybe I'll have to go back to them to see if this is just my impression now because I went through so many years ago. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 06:12:55 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:12:55 -0800 Subject: [ExI] forward from alan brooks: FW: Spike, please post this at Extropy chat for Newtonmas season? Message-ID: <002e01cdd8f8$e63fead0$b2bfc070$@att.net> From: Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 9:05 PM To: spike66 at att.net Subject: Spike, please post this at Extropy chat for Newtonmas season? A great difficulty in communicating with the religious is they can sense if one isn't forthright with them, yet to tell them exactly what one thinks would be counterproductive. If I were to say to a religious person how I have no problem with their faith (a given creed in and of itself never hurt anyone), however I mistrust them due to their ulterior motives, it would only exacerbate a secular-faith dispute. By not being able to communicate such, the basis for genuine communication with the religious is removed from the equation: e.g. diplomacy is by definition disingenuous, unspiritual. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 06:28:19 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:28:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] what if Message-ID: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> We often complain about being meme-bombed this time of year with Christmas music, in the shopping mall, on the radio, everywhere, you cannot escape, resistance is futile. But the way I see it, we should look at how much worse it could be. The season is supposedly about the birth of Jesus Christ, nice snappy name there, two syllables, one syllable, crisp, clean, sounds like blammisphy. But what if. What if for instance Joseph Christ had not fallen for the Virgin Mary, but rather had given in to the wily seductiveness of that little hottie in the back of the class, the foxy Hortense? Imagine the traditional Ava Maria, and substitute the other girl's name for it. Totally goofs up the song, because of the sustained syllable would now be hooooooorrrtense, hoooooorrrrrtense. and so forth. That would just not work, the proper church ladies would be blushing, the kids would be giggling, it wouldn't work. Perhaps we could then call the harlots mares, and even it out, but it could be still worse. For instance, what if. What if Joseph Christ's mother, instead of falling for Joe's father Billy Christ, had taken up instead with Tommy Schmurgenmeisterstein? Then that clumsy name would have come down the line, and we would get seriously tired of hearing Ava Hortense every Schmurgenmeistersteinmas throughout all of Schmurgenmeistersteinianity. That would get so tiresome. So look on the bright side. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 05:52:51 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:52:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name Message-ID: My wife commented this evening that seeing the movie X-Men: First Class she found herself siding more with Magneto than Dr. X. I always thought Magneto made very convincing arguments. The context for mutants as the next evolutionary step strikes me as an obvious similarity to transhuman enhancement. We frequently think of technological enhancement (robotics/uploading) but with advances in biology we could see other kinds of upgraded human forms. I'm not suggesting movie-like superpowers, but anything within the realm of possibility should be available. For example, who would have volunteered to have botulism toxin injected into their face 30 years ago? Today botox is a cosmetic. Next we might be injecting bioluminescent bacteria into our skin for fun glow-in-the-dark tattoos... I was curious if the transhuman theme was already more prevalent in the mainstream than we realize because it's marketed under other guises (such as X-Men's "mutants") Thoughts? other examples? From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 09:24:18 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:24:18 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Dan wrote: > On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 9:53 AM Keith Henson wrote: >> If we understand this potential problem we can take steps to mitigate it. >> The harder problem is taking steps to mitigate "black swan" events >> that we have no idea might happen at all. >> >> A large number of combustion turbines and a year's supply of oil or >> methane to fire them might be a prudent backup. > > I don't disagree. I think the problem is mainly looking for the one optimal > solution and then enforcing it top-down as opposed to just letting people > make bottom up choices on what energy sources they'll use. I think the > top-down approach invites "black swans" because it makes for a one size fits > all solution, so if the solution fails and its back up fails too, then you > get total system interruption if not collapse. > > I think limited resources is also a problem. On the small scale as well as a large scale. The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a target for the rest of the desperate population. But the problem I see is that a black swan event is not guaranteed. How much do you spend on planning for an event that might not happen? Do you want to double the cost of power satellites by building possibly unnecessary protection? Human history shows that usually we go for the cheapest version and hope it will turn out OK. BillK From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 13 10:29:48 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:29:48 +0000 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50C9AE1C.9080505@aleph.se> I agree with the core point of Mike's post: yes, transhumanism is widespread in our culture, but not called transhumanism. Every time people cheer when their character gets an upgrade in a computer game they express a transhumanist sentiment. We have shelves of self-help books. When people say they enhance their serotonin with chocolate and wine, they are framing a hedonistic experience in transhumanist (and mechanistic) terms. Popular and governmental imagination envison the future as transhuman: http://io9.com/5967896/us-spy-agency-predicts-a-very-transhuman-future-by-2030 http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf Where *we* are needed is to think further. On 13/12/2012 05:52, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I always thought Magneto made very convincing arguments. The context > for mutants as the next evolutionary step strikes me as an obvious > similarity to transhuman enhancement. We frequently think of > technological enhancement (robotics/uploading) but with advances in > biology we could see other kinds of upgraded human forms. There is a deep difference. X-men completely flubs evolutionary biology, assuming that there is a prepared next evolutionary step. The franchise essentially assumes there is a series of stages humanity is supposed to go through. This is by no means a unique concept: historians of ideas have mapped out its evolution from the medieval concept of The Great Chain of Being over Victorian progress ideals to modern stuff like new age mythology. In reality evolution works by trial and error: if it survives and thrives, it must have been good. No real directionality and no purpose. Magneto assumes mutantkind to be the next step, and then assumes mutantkind has special value because of this. The first happens to be untrue, and the second doesn't follow logically (strictly speaking he is formally right, just as the moon being made out of green cheese implies that I am pope - ex falso quodlibet). The genes for lactose tolerance have been spreading very successfully since they emerged a few thousand years ago and will no doubt eventually become standard in the entire human population if nothing changes. That doesn't mean that this very minor superpower makes us who got it extra important in any moral or practical sense, and it doesn't mean we have any reason to band together. But the big problem for Magneto is that mutants are not self-choosen. He can at least instil a sense of brotherhood because mutants might feel persecuted or special, yet unable to change their mutanthood. If it was a matter of buying the right enhancement being superpowered would be like deciding on a car or computer make (some, like Apple, of course still manage some of the cultishness anyway). The future belongs to the lactose tolerant and enhancement users, but mostly because they are likely to be *useful*, not because of some deep destiny. Rules regulating what enhancements are not acceptable are not infringements on people's right to live in the same way as rules against mutants (whose powers are part of who they are) - they might of course still be wrong in a lot of ways (limiting freedoms, expressing biased values, preventing useful applications etc.), but they do not interfere with core moral status or (post)human dignity in the same way. As for the moral status of the very enhanced, I recently read Allen Buchanan's insightful ?Moral Status and Human Enhancement? http://pgrim.org/pa2010reading/buchananmoralstatus.pdf He actually does concede an interesting point to Magneto: the super-enhanced might deserve new or different (post)human rights. However, their status does not affect the normal human rights of anybody (enhanced or not), and does not change the moral status of anybody. [ It is worth noting that the X-men have actually influenced the current US legal definition of "human". I kid you not.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz_v._United_States http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/12/27/are-the-x-men-human-federal-court-says-no/ And a battle over laser tag games led to the current EU model of how to treat human dignity: http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2004/10/article6.en.html . ] ...and that was today's accidental philosophy lecture. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 12:40:00 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:40:00 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001801cdd92e$f7fd0650$e7f712f0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK >...The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a target for the rest of the desperate population...BillK _______________________________________________ Ja. The really serious preppers anticipate this, and stock up on lots and lots of ammo. Their food supplies are useless if a desperate population comes and kills them for it. It is nearly pointless to stockpile food without the firepower to protect it. A similar argument applies to stockpiling gold. I think about this a lot: we are developing a society which cannot function without some of our increasingly brittle components, such as our communications infrastructure. spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 12:51:10 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:51:10 -0800 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: <50C9AE1C.9080505@aleph.se> References: <50C9AE1C.9080505@aleph.se> Message-ID: <001f01cdd930$876938d0$963baa70$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...and that was today's accidental philosophy lecture. -- Anders Sandberg, _______________________________________________ Cool, thanks Anders. Your accidental lectures are more worthwhile than the formal ones I paid for in college. I am still pondering your algorithmic comment: >...Assume we have N skill levels Set P(j) = 1/N while (not done) ask question of difficulty i for j=1:N if (right answer) P(j) = P(j)* sigmoid(j-i) else P(j)=P(j)*(1-sigmoid(j-i)) end normalise P end I have some ideas on this to share but not now, family matters call. I hope to have something to share and possibly an experimental framework after Schmergenmeistermas with which to run some tests. I know we have a lot of engineering talent that hangs out here. Perhaps I can recruit some volunteers to take the test. spike From natasha at natasha.cc Thu Dec 13 16:19:49 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:19:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it In-Reply-To: References: <006901cdd6e8$0aa67410$1ff35c30$@natasha.cc> <00a001cdd7b5$978153a0$c683fae0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <002401cdd94d$acae5db0$060b1910$@natasha.cc> Thanks. This will be good for my students. Natasha Vita-More, PhD Professor, University of Advancing Technology Chairman, Humanity+ Producer/Host, H+TV -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Mckee Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 11:46 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Entrepreneurs Starting Innovative Business & Marketing it On Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:38:39 +1300, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > What is your reading list for the course? Are books listed or other > references for the class? Mostly self contained by the looks of it, but there is this.. > Suggested Readings > Although the class is designed to be self-contained, students wanting to expand their knowledge beyond >what we can cover in this class can find further coverage of these topics in the recommend readings, to >include ?Business Model Generation? by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and ?Finding Fertile >Ground? by Scott Shane. Here's a link to the intro page if your curious. https://www.coursera.org/course/innovativeideas Happy info hunting! _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 17:36:04 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:36:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] news of the weird Message-ID: <005401cdd958$54125750$fc3705f0$@att.net> Occasionally a news of the weird happens right in one's own neighborhood. But before that, there is a back story that is relevant to all this. Our neighborhood has been remarkably free of crime for many years, but recently we had an uptick in daytime burglaries. A couple months ago, our friends down the street bought one of those nifty video cameras which does image comparison and if anything changes, it emails you a picture of whatever it sees, sends it to your iPhone and so forth. This guy is a big tech whiz up at Stanford, so instead of doing my own due diligence, I Koreshed off of him and bought an identical system. It arrived a few days before Thanksgiving, but I was busy with family matters, so the thing sat unopened in the box. Last week, the guy who bought the system to start with was the victim of a daytime burglary. His home was full of high-zoot electronic whiz bang, and the thieves got it all, games, laptop computers, all the electronic goodies. His wife is a Stanford PhD candidate finishing up a thesis in biochemistry on a home computer, which vanished along with the backup hard disc and home server. Much of the data was not in the cloud, so there was considerable loss of labor. The home security system, which he had owned for a couple months, was still in the original package, unopened. It was not stolen. So this past weekend, I was busy installing my home security cameras. Now, the rest of the story. We have a neighborhood crime watch. Whenever anything happens where the locals might be able to help solve a crime, the constabulary sends out an email notice. Yesterday around lunchtime, the constable tells everyone that there was a suspicious activity, Hispanic male, mid-twenties, rang a doorbell in a neighborhood where there aren't that many Hispanic families, told the resident he was looking for his lost cat. When asked, he seemed to not know what his cat looked like or the cat's name. He did have the genus and species, and could likely identify the approximate number of paws the missing beast possessed, but could provide very little information beyond that. When leaving the residence, the silly prole appeared to signal to a vehicle down the street, which was described as a deep red or maroon compact car. No crime committed, NW notice went out anyway. About two hours later, about 1400, a second notice goes out regarding a brazen daytime burglary just down the street. According to the constable, there were "several suspects observed fleeing from a residence" carrying what appeared to be the property of that resident, electronics, including a television. This time, a local witness having been alerted, gave good descriptions of their car and at least two of the suspects. One was a sturdy black teenage male, perhaps 18, and the driver of the getaway vehicle, who was. drum roll. "an elderly white female." I kid you not. That's what was reported. Now the cops have the make, model, year, color and plates on the car, a deep red or maroon Kia Sephia, possibly the same maroon compact car seen nearby, two hours earlier with a Hispanic male searching for a lost perfectly generic cat. So now, this is weird. We have what looks like a burglary gang led by a white granny, with an ethnically diverse labor staff. I suggested a number of possibilities, such as the white granny was actually a young male thug in disguise. Another possibility, all the apparently young male thugs were actually white grannies, in black and Hispanic thug disguises. Or granny was being held hostage and forced to drive. Or the youths were being held hostage by the granny and forced to burgle. Or if the gang were all grannies, they grab the loot, jump in the car, pull off the disguises, the cops look right past them. White grannies are as invisible as dark matter in the cosmos to the constables. Or, the perps flee with the loot, jump in the car, don their white granny masks, instant cloak of invisibility to the local constabulary. There are still some things I just don't understand. They stole a television and fled in a Kia Sephia. Any television which would fit into a Kia would not be worth the physical labor to haul away. Most modern televisions need a pickup truck to carry off, and at least two sturdy lads to hoist the thing; white grannies in disguises can forget it, it would take half a dozen of them to get one off the ground, never mind fleeing with damn thing. In any case, this whole thing will likely make it all the way up to FoxNews of the weird, ja? {8^D spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 18:11:26 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:11:26 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 4:00 AM, wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Dan wrote: >> On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 9:53 AM Keith Henson wrote: >>> If we understand this potential problem we can take steps to mitigate it. >>> The harder problem is taking steps to mitigate "black swan" events >>> that we have no idea might happen at all. >>> >>> A large number of combustion turbines and a year's supply of oil or >>> methane to fire them might be a prudent backup. >> >> I don't disagree. I think the problem is mainly looking for the one optimal >> solution and then enforcing it top-down as opposed to just letting people >> make bottom up choices on what energy sources they'll use. I think the >> top-down approach invites "black swans" because it makes for a one size fits >> all solution, so if the solution fails and its back up fails too, then you >> get total system interruption if not collapse. There are different ways of enforcing. In the case of power satellites, you don't have to have an edict that people will use energy from space, it's just that such energy will be much less expensive and the vast majority of people will want to pay less for a fungible commodity. (Energy from space has to be less expensive or the project will not be done.) With thousands of power satellites, a few failing will not be much of a problem. The problem that might happen is something (such as a huge radiation burst) where they were all affected by a common event. On the other hand, we don't have to shield for more of an event than it would take to kill the earth side population. > > I think limited resources is also a problem. Correct. > On the small scale as well as a large scale. > > The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking > up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' > and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a > target for the rest of the desperate population. Has this actually been a problem in recent disasters? > But the problem I see is that a black swan event is not guaranteed. > How much do you spend on planning for an event that might not happen? > > Do you want to double the cost of power satellites by building > possibly unnecessary protection? The problem is being sure you have an approach which can repair the power satellites. I expect there will be no way to get into space other than laser propulsion a few years after the the first one comes on line. The economic advantages of laser propulsion just obsoletes chemical propulsion. But if you lost the entire space population in a radiation flash that didn't kill much of the population on the ground, how would you get back into space to fix the laser propulsion and power satellites? This is a background to paint an SF story upon. Reminds me of one of the early east coast power failures. The plants at that time didn't have the ability to come up without external power from the grid, and when the whole grid went down, they had no way to restart. There was an article (Analog perhaps?) about MIT's power lab giving the local utility a "push start" but they had the same problem. The MIT students solved the problem by ripping a mess of batteries out of cars to get enough power to start up. > Human history shows that usually we go for the cheapest version and > hope it will turn out OK. So true. Keith > BillK From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 17:54:46 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:54:46 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 1:24 AM, BillK wrote: > The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking > up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' > and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a > target for the rest of the desperate population. > > But the problem I see is that a black swan event is not guaranteed. > How much do you spend on planning for an event that might not happen? > > Do you want to double the cost of power satellites by building > possibly unnecessary protection? > > Human history shows that usually we go for the cheapest version and > hope it will turn out OK. And it often does. Almost all engineering students these days have heard of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but how many suspension bridges have been built - say, since 1800 - that have failed to self-destruct yet? There has been quite a bit of publicity about the attention given to airplane fatalities, vs. the overall record of being safer than automobiles. The flak direct at the preppers has, I suspect, more to do with how they are driving costs up for everyone else by taking supplies out of the economy, in exchange for protection that is unlikely to ever be of much value (especially once one discounts "peace of mind" and the like, since most people get peace of mind without spending any resources on protection against that particular black swan event). From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 13 21:18:37 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:18:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: > My wife commented this evening that seeing the movie X-Men: First > Class she found herself siding more with Magneto than Dr. X. > > I always thought Magneto made very convincing arguments. The point of Magneto is to be The Bad Guy. So he doesn't care about other people. Dr. X does. Magneto wants the mutants to win, but he also wants the baselines to lose. This is not a convincing argument to me. We want win-win scenarios, not win-lose ones. The most telling scene in the X-men films, to me, is when Mystique loses her powers, and Magneto instantly turns his back on her, leaving her naked on the ground, to die for all he cares. That defines his character more than any powers or arguments about mutants vs. baselines. I don't want that to be associated with transhumanism. Do you? Ben Zaiboc From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Dec 13 21:42:09 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:42:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1355434929.4412.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Thursday, December 13, 2012 12:54 PM Adrian Tymes > wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 1:24 AM, BillK > wrote: >> The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking >> up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' >> and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a >> target for the rest of the desperate population. > >> But the problem I see is that a black swan event is not guaranteed. >> How much do you spend on planning for an event that might not happen? > >> Do you want to double the cost of power satellites by building >> possibly unnecessary protection? > >> Human history shows that usually we go for the cheapest version and >> hope it will turn out OK. > > And it often does. Well, it does, until a Black Swan event is kind of Taleb's point. But the record is more that many people will choose the cheapest version of something -- not that all will. Some will be different just to be different. Others might be prescient. And a few are, no doubt, nuts who overspend -- and if they happen to avoid a Black Swan with that it's more be sheer luck than anything else. (Of course, Taleb, in _Antifragility_, counsels that one do some random things and get random, though not lethal stressors all around -- in foods, investments, lifestyle, etc. -- to become more antifragile. Some of this reminds me of why some think scapulimancy* worked for hunters: it randomized where they would hunt. On any given hunt, this might actually mean failure, but it kept them, some opine, from overhunting any particular area, thus insuring the long range sustainability of their hunting -- of course, without the hunters ever understanding how this worked.) > Almost all engineering students these days have heard of the > Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but how many suspension bridges have > been built - say, since 1800 - that have failed to self-destruct yet? I think one reason Galloping Gertie is remembered so well is that it was captured on film. That makes it more memorable than a dry report of a bridge failure. > There has been quite a bit of publicity about the attention given > to airplane fatalities, vs. the overall record of being safer than > automobiles. This, again, seems to be more a problem of seeing versus just seeing some reports and stats. Also, the media tend to be driven to report tragedies when they're more striking -- and one off tragedies are much more striking than, say, a report on road fatalities in a given year for Western nations. Even though people are more likely to die on the road than in the air, the crash of a plane still seems more "real" to them, no? (With SSPSs, I can see the horror scenario arising of one crashing to Earth -- even though this is probably a tiny risk.) > The flak direct at the preppers has, I suspect, more to do with > how they are driving costs up for everyone else by taking > supplies out of the economy, in exchange for protection that > is unlikely to ever be of much value (especially once one > discounts "peace of mind" and the like, since most people > get peace of mind without spending any resources on > protection against that particular black swan event). If that's the reason why, I think it's misguided. Preppers, on the whole, probably remove a tiny amount of supplies from everyone else. I've yet to experience, going to the grocery store, any price increase that anyone's seriously related to those darn preppers. :) I suspect the flak directed at them is more because they're often kooky individuals -- rather than because they've caused a run on fuel oil at the truck stop or on animal feed at the farm goods store. :) Regards, Dan * I first read about it in _The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island_ by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. There's actually a documentary on the book, but it doesn't mention the practice, which is just as well. Hunt and Lipo only mentioned it in passing as an example of a practice that people did that works well but obviously works well for reasons other than those who practice it believe. The same might be applied to all manner of folk and religious practices. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 13 22:44:06 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:44:06 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <001801cdd92e$f7fd0650$e7f712f0$@att.net> References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <001801cdd92e$f7fd0650$e7f712f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50CA5A36.8070407@aleph.se> On 13/12/2012 12:40, spike wrote: > ...The preppers are getting quite a lot of flak at the moment as stocking > up with supplies and generators, etc. seems somehow to be 'unsporting' > and selfish. And obviously if a disaster happens they will become a target > for the rest of the desperate population...BillK > _______________________________________________ > > Ja. The really serious preppers anticipate this, and stock up on lots and > lots of ammo. Their food supplies are useless if a desperate population > comes and kills them for it. The big problem with any strategy like this is that the best way of surviving a big disaster is to have a close-knit social network that works together to help members survive: economies of scale apply. In fact, the bigger the network the better. So going at it alone is likely not going to cut it. Getting to know your neighbors and local government might. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 13 22:37:50 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:37:50 -0800 Subject: [ExI] photography, was: RE: Avoiding bad black swan events Message-ID: <003501cdd982$7ca95360$75fbfa20$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Dan . >.I think one reason Galloping Gertie is remembered so well is that it was captured on film. That makes it more memorable than a dry report of a bridge failure. Exactly. Have you ever wondered why you have heard of the shootout at the OK Corral? It was a seemingly minor event in a nearly lawless town in the late 19th century American west, three fatalities, but shootouts a lot like that one happened all over the west in those days, and indeed still do to this day: bad guys shoot each other, and the cops. It wasn't a real case of good vs evil and the lawman won exactly. Apparently all the participants were in the ambiguous zone of the legal scale. So how did this particular shootout get so famous as to have all that legend grow up around it, a major motion picture, all the books, a town that lives of tourism from it, all that? There was a guy who lived in Tombstone who was an early photographer, this still being the hot new tech in 1881. He took pictures of everything. That being an early example of photography, it became waaaay more famous than the information content of rather ordinary event deserves. That Galloping Gertie film is way cool. You can view it on YouTube. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 22:51:48 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:51:48 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <50CA5A36.8070407@aleph.se> References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <001801cdd92e$f7fd0650$e7f712f0$@att.net> <50CA5A36.8070407@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The big problem with any strategy like this is that the best way of > surviving a big disaster is to have a close-knit social network that works > together to help members survive: economies of scale apply. In fact, the > bigger the network the better. So going at it alone is likely not going to > cut it. Getting to know your neighbors and local government might. Two logical extensions: 1) Even bigger is even better. In theory, the US federal government does this for its citizens as part of its responsibilities. In practice, there are some well-publicized problems with this, but at least it has an average net positive effect on those directly impacted by the event. 2) Those trying to go it alone are, by refusing to be part of the larger network, lessening everyone else's chances of survival. Some of the limits of this are likewise apparent. From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 13 23:03:09 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 23:03:09 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <50CA5EAD.8070702@aleph.se> On 13/12/2012 09:24, BillK wrote: > But the problem I see is that a black swan event is not guaranteed. > How much do you spend on planning for an event that might not happen? If the event has cost C and probability P, reducing the probability by p is worth up to Cp dollars. If you are uncertain, you estimate a probability distribution for C and P and convolve them together to get a probability distribution of the value. The real headaches start with true black swans, which are not part of your considerations at all. There is also the issue of ultra-low probability disasters with ultra-high cost: beyond some level you should presumably ignore them, but setting that cut-off rationally is harder than it looks (there is a finite probability that this universe is a simulation and anybody saying the word "reirefoiure" will trigger a punishment Graham's number of times as bad as a lifetime of torture: it is surprisingly hard to rationally argue the probability down enough that this risk can be safely ignored) For power-law risks getting the exponent more negative probably outweighs reducing the rate of events. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 00:00:55 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:00:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] news of the weird In-Reply-To: <005401cdd958$54125750$fc3705f0$@att.net> References: <005401cdd958$54125750$fc3705f0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike, good luck with your sleuthing! You could be on your way to becoming the next Sherlock Holmes! If I lived nearby I would be honored to be your Watson... John : ) On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:36 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > Occasionally a news of the weird happens right in one?s own neighborhood.* > *** > > ** ** > > But before that, there is a back story that is relevant to all this. Our > neighborhood has been remarkably free of crime for many years, but recently > we had an uptick in daytime burglaries. A couple months ago, our friends > down the street bought one of those nifty video cameras which does image > comparison and if anything changes, it emails you a picture of whatever it > sees, sends it to your iPhone and so forth. This guy is a big tech whiz up > at Stanford, so instead of doing my own due diligence, I Koreshed off of > him and bought an identical system. It arrived a few days before > Thanksgiving, but I was busy with family matters, so the thing sat unopened > in the box.**** > > ** ** > > Last week, the guy who bought the system to start with was the victim of a > daytime burglary. His home was full of high-zoot electronic whiz bang, and > the thieves got it all, games, laptop computers, all the electronic > goodies. His wife is a Stanford PhD candidate finishing up a thesis in > biochemistry on a home computer, which vanished along with the backup hard > disc and home server. Much of the data was not in the cloud, so there was > considerable loss of labor. The home security system, which he had owned > for a couple months, was still in the original package, unopened. It was > not stolen. So this past weekend, I was busy installing my home security > cameras.**** > > ** ** > > Now, the rest of the story.**** > > ** ** > > We have a neighborhood crime watch. Whenever anything happens where the > locals might be able to help solve a crime, the constabulary sends out an > email notice. Yesterday around lunchtime, the constable tells everyone > that there was a suspicious activity, Hispanic male, mid-twenties, rang a > doorbell in a neighborhood where there aren?t that many Hispanic families, > told the resident he was looking for his lost cat. When asked, he seemed > to not know what his cat looked like or the cat?s name. He did have the > genus and species, and could likely identify the approximate number of paws > the missing beast possessed, but could provide very little information > beyond that. When leaving the residence, the silly prole appeared to > signal to a vehicle down the street, which was described as a deep red or > maroon compact car. No crime committed, NW notice went out anyway.**** > > ** ** > > About two hours later, about 1400, a second notice goes out regarding a > brazen daytime burglary just down the street. According to the constable, > there were ?several suspects observed fleeing from a residence? carrying > what appeared to be the property of that resident, electronics, including a > television. This time, a local witness having been alerted, gave good > descriptions of their car and at least two of the suspects. One was a > sturdy black teenage male, perhaps 18, and the driver of the getaway > vehicle, who was? drum roll? ?an elderly white female.? I kid you not. > That?s what was reported. Now the cops have the make, model, year, color > and plates on the car, a deep red or maroon Kia Sephia, possibly the same > maroon compact car seen nearby, two hours earlier with a Hispanic male > searching for a lost perfectly generic cat.**** > > ** ** > > So now, this is weird. We have what looks like a burglary gang led by a > white granny, with an ethnically diverse labor staff. I suggested a number > of possibilities, such as the white granny was actually a young male thug > in disguise. Another possibility, all the apparently young male thugs were > actually white grannies, in black and Hispanic thug disguises. Or granny > was being held hostage and forced to drive. Or the youths were being held > hostage by the granny and forced to burgle. Or if the gang were all > grannies, they grab the loot, jump in the car, pull off the disguises, the > cops look right past them. White grannies are as invisible as dark matter > in the cosmos to the constables. Or, the perps flee with the loot, jump in > the car, don their white granny masks, instant cloak of invisibility to the > local constabulary. **** > > ** ** > > There are still some things I just don?t understand. They stole a > television and fled in a Kia Sephia. Any television which would fit into a > Kia would not be worth the physical labor to haul away. Most modern > televisions need a pickup truck to carry off, and at least two sturdy lads > to hoist the thing; white grannies in disguises can forget it, it would > take half a dozen of them to get one off the ground, never mind fleeing > with damn thing.**** > > ** ** > > In any case, this whole thing will likely make it all the way up to > FoxNews of the weird, ja? {8^D**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 00:07:33 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:07:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Ben, well said.... Magneto is a cold-blooded killer when necessary to get his way (who cares little for "flat scans"), while the Professor is a man of conscience and integrity. In the comics they did repeatedly say that Charles Xavier might very well end up a martyr for his cause, which was a noble but perhaps ultimately doomed one.... On the other hand, Magneto's path would have lead to a horrific race war, leading to a global apocalypse! John On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Mike Dougherty wrote: > > > My wife commented this evening that seeing the movie X-Men: First > > Class she found herself siding more with Magneto than Dr. X. > > > > I always thought Magneto made very convincing arguments. > > > The point of Magneto is to be The Bad Guy. So he doesn't care about other > people. Dr. X does. Magneto wants the mutants to win, but he also wants > the baselines to lose. This is not a convincing argument to me. We want > win-win scenarios, not win-lose ones. > > The most telling scene in the X-men films, to me, is when Mystique loses > her powers, and Magneto instantly turns his back on her, leaving her naked > on the ground, to die for all he cares. That defines his character more > than any powers or arguments about mutants vs. baselines. I don't want > that to be associated with transhumanism. Do you? > > Ben Zaiboc > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 13 23:58:07 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:58:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: There is the extremely controversial theory that Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier. And now imagine if he had known that, and actually embraced his Roman side. Joining the legion, getting citizenship, working his way up the ranks using his stunning charisma and social intelligence, until finally he became emperor!!! And of course, there could have been Jesus, the emperor of peace, or Jesus, the emperor of martial conquest, or even a combination of the two. Considering the impact Jesus had on the world as a man of simple circumstances with a message of brotherhood, now consider how he might have impacted the modern day as Emperor Jesus, battle savior of the empire and all humanity! "Centurion Spike, I fondly remember serving under your command in the IV Legion engineers, North American province!" We sure taught those darn rebellious Aztecs a thing or two, didn't we?" "And so it's nice to keep in touch via the Extropius list." "Oh, did you read the latest alternative history novel by Harry Turtledove?" "He has this extremely imaginative plotline about Rome actually falling and Jesus being just a humble itinerant philosopher!" "I sure hope he's not arrested for such foolishness!" "May the ferocious love of our God Emperor Jesus Christus ever guide you to great victories in both life and death!" "And may the cities burn, and people be brought down, who defy our most Divine Lord, who now reigns in Heaven!" And would we be at the same level of technology as we are now? Or vastly less? Or even much more advanced? If Jesus truly was the supernatural being that the New Testament claims, and that I believe in, then life really gets interesting if he had decided to do things much more "Old Testament" style, and taken on the role of Emperor of the Roman Empire! He could have built a near-utopian civilization and alleviated so much suffering through enlightenment, knowing that people being people, all he would have to do is stop using his powers for awhile, and there would still be an eventual plot to kill him, thereby still providing an atonement for the sins of humanity. John On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 11:28 PM, spike wrote: > We often complain about being meme-bombed this time of year with Christmas > music, in the shopping mall, on the radio, everywhere, you cannot escape, > resistance is futile. But the way I see it, we should look at how much > worse it could be. The season is supposedly about the birth of Jesus > Christ, nice snappy name there, two syllables, one syllable, crisp, clean, > sounds like blammisphy. But what if? **** > > ** ** > > What if for instance Joseph Christ had not fallen for the Virgin Mary, but > rather had given in to the wily seductiveness of that little hottie in the > back of the class, the foxy Hortense? Imagine the traditional Ava Maria, > and substitute the other girl?s name for it. Totally goofs up the song, > because of the sustained syllable would now be hooooooorrrtense, > hoooooorrrrrtense? and so forth. That would just not work, the proper > church ladies would be blushing, the kids would be giggling, it wouldn?t > work. Perhaps we could then call the harlots mares, and even it out, but > it could be still worse. For instance, what if? **** > > ** ** > > What if Joseph Christ?s mother, instead of falling for Joe?s father Billy > Christ, had taken up instead with Tommy Schmurgenmeisterstein? Then that > clumsy name would have come down the line, and we would get seriously tired > of hearing Ava Hortense every Schmurgenmeistersteinmas throughout all of > Schmurgenmeistersteinianity. That would get so tiresome.**** > > ** ** > > So look on the bright side.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 02:16:29 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:16:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > The point of Magneto is to be The Bad Guy. So he doesn't care about other people. Dr. X does. Magneto wants the mutants to win, but he also wants the baselines to lose. This is not a convincing argument to me. We want win-win scenarios, not win-lose ones. > > The most telling scene in the X-men films, to me, is when Mystique loses her powers, and Magneto instantly turns his back on her, leaving her naked on the ground, to die for all he cares. That defines his character more than any powers or arguments about mutants vs. baselines. I don't want that to be associated with transhumanism. Do you? of course not. However, that movie had tons of Hollywood problems. I originally posted this about First Class. After Eric (later to become Magneto) deflects a gunshot in self-defense that strikes Xavier (later Dr.X) he extracts the bullet from his friend - and, at least I thought, was truly saddened. I also take much of Magneto's diatribe against normals (baselines) as equivalent/similar to Ayn Rand's attack on normals (pretty much every consumerist herd-mentality livestock) Yeah, that scene where he steps over Mystic is just raw. I think that is a plot device more than a realistic character portrayal. Granted, those movie-moments define the character - but the long friendship (?) with Xavier suggests he was not simply the monster depicted in other moments. If being a motivated/driven SOB makes Magento a monster, then we should examine successful business leaders for this same trend. ex: You don't think Steve Jobs got to the top without a few abused people in his wake? On a different note, did you like the class lesson Dr.X gave his students about the moral implications of transferring consciousness into the mindless patient... who at the end of the movie wakes up and greets Minerva (one of Dr.X's oldest friends) From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 14 02:21:59 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 18:21:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> Forwarded message. From: Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 5:26 PM To: spike66 at att.net Subject: taking remote causation too far [Spike, please post this] " ...Joseph Christ had not fallen for the Virgin Mary, but rather had given in to the wily seductiveness of that little hottie in the back of the class, the foxy Hortense...?" The S&M connotations of Jesus hanging half naked on the Cross come to mind when thinking of religion and sex. What I want to tell for example Christians is how it isn't their religion that is the main contention, it is their politics. They are quite erudite concerning the Bible, if not professor-experts then Christians possess the Biblical knowledge of Masters degree candidates. Yet their politics are bad, v. bad. They take remote causation way too far: for instance abortion; Christians think if abortion were to be outlawed or greatly reduced it would make a difference when in fact it would make .00000000000001 percent of a difference, if that. Asteroids, solar fluctuation, seismic activity, climate disturbances (monsoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, severe cold & heat), perhaps climate change if climate change is valid, cancer, war, WMDs, etc. are important.. while abortion is not-- abortion is blown far out of proportion-- often for use as wedge issue-- due to emotional excesses of the pro- 'life' and the interest in quick fixes: "if we eliminate abortion" goes the illogic, "it will have a moral ripple effect", when the effect is negligible at very best. If only quick fixes were real, now wouldn't that be something. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 02:41:53 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:41:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] rights, liberty, control Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 7:07 PM, John Grigg wrote: > Ben, well said.... Magneto is a cold-blooded killer when necessary to get > his way (who cares little for "flat scans"), while the Professor is a man of > conscience and integrity. In the comics they did repeatedly say that > Charles Xavier might very well end up a martyr for his cause, which was a > noble but perhaps ultimately doomed one.... On the other hand, Magneto's > path would have lead to a horrific race war, leading to a global apocalypse! Of course the comic/movie world must have a wide gulf between good and evil so American audiences know which is going to win. There may be some intentional irony in the doomed plan of Magneto's Nazi-controlled childhood and his later belief in mutant eugenics. Magneto's extremism was of course not sustainable. I never felt like Dr.X's mildism (non-extremism) was also not sustainable. I assumed these exaggerated opposites are meant to be consumed like sweet and sour to create a flavor profile that's actually palatable. What of Dr.X's treatment of Jean Grey? Was he within his/our rights to restrain her nature? Is it a question of her civil liberties or of our collective liberties? If we exerted chemical mind control over another human is it a different story? I heard an article on NPR about torture and its use on prisoners. I wondered what the legal rules are regarding how a person's human rights are violated by the definition of torture compared to the state's right to capital punishment for criminal activity. What are the rights of a corpse that was once a fairly treated prisoner who was found guilty of crimes warranting capital punishment? Might there soon be a loophole where torture is a pointless violation of moral/ethical code (historically done for the purpose of extracting information) while sanctioned murder is an expedient means to extract chemical states from the deceased? Why bother asking for information from an unwilling conversationist prisoner when we might literally read a corpse's mind? For the record, I'm not a sociopath. I know... that's what a sociopath would say. If this is a distasteful series of turns on the logical unfolding of the issues of personal freedom, natural law, torture, information/identity extraction, and possibly corpses' rights - then I will concede it isn't exactly "polite" conversation. However, the future will eventually force this kind of discussion to be had by those who make laws and accept or reject such loopholes. (Ben, John - I changed the subject line again because... "No, I do not want to associate [former title] with these ideas") From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 02:49:13 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:49:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 9:21 PM, spike wrote: > cancer, war, WMDs, etc. are important.. while abortion is not-- abortion is > blown far out of proportion-- often for use as wedge issue-- > > due to emotional excesses of the pro- 'life' and the interest in quick > fixes: "if we eliminate abortion" goes the illogic, I always wondered why the dimension wasn't Pro-Life vs Pro-Death or Pro-Choice vs Anti-Choice. It seems these two dimensions are orthogonal; which is why it makes no sense for extremists to argue with each other. I think we'll all agree: the Pro-Death & Anti-Choice group must be stopped. "Cake or Death?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjcuZ-LiSY From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 14 03:14:15 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:14:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> Oy, I was afraid of that. I forwarded the note for Alan Brooks, but the way it comes back in reply it looks like I wrote it. I am one of those oddballs who really truly has no public opinion on abortion. I have my views, but these mine, not shared publicly, definitely not online. Alan's note didn't violate the guidelines for posting, so thru it went. spike -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 6:49 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 9:21 PM, spike wrote: Actually Alan Brooks wrote: > cancer, war, WMDs, etc. are important.. while abortion is not-- > abortion is blown far out of proportion-- often for use as wedge > issue-- > > due to emotional excesses of the pro- 'life' and the interest in quick > fixes: "if we eliminate abortion" goes the illogic, I always wondered why the dimension wasn't Pro-Life vs Pro-Death or Pro-Choice vs Anti-Choice. It seems these two dimensions are orthogonal; which is why it makes no sense for extremists to argue with each other. I think we'll all agree: the Pro-Death & Anti-Choice group must be stopped. "Cake or Death?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjcuZ-LiSY _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From max at maxmore.com Fri Dec 14 02:48:10 2012 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:48:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: References: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Professor X, not Dr X. --Max (Dr. X) On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 7:16 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > The point of Magneto is to be The Bad Guy. So he doesn't care about > other people. Dr. X does. Magneto wants the mutants to win, but he also > wants the baselines to lose. This is not a convincing argument to me. We > want win-win scenarios, not win-lose ones. > > > > The most telling scene in the X-men films, to me, is when Mystique loses > her powers, and Magneto instantly turns his back on her, leaving her naked > on the ground, to die for all he cares. That defines his character more > than any powers or arguments about mutants vs. baselines. I don't want > that to be associated with transhumanism. Do you? > > of course not. However, that movie had tons of Hollywood problems. I > originally posted this about First Class. After Eric (later to become > Magneto) deflects a gunshot in self-defense that strikes Xavier (later > Dr.X) he extracts the bullet from his friend - and, at least I > thought, was truly saddened. > > I also take much of Magneto's diatribe against normals (baselines) as > equivalent/similar to Ayn Rand's attack on normals (pretty much every > consumerist herd-mentality livestock) > > Yeah, that scene where he steps over Mystic is just raw. I think that > is a plot device more than a realistic character portrayal. Granted, > those movie-moments define the character - but the long friendship (?) > with Xavier suggests he was not simply the monster depicted in other > moments. If being a motivated/driven SOB makes Magento a monster, > then we should examine successful business leaders for this same > trend. ex: You don't think Steve Jobs got to the top without a few > abused people in his wake? > > On a different note, did you like the class lesson Dr.X gave his > students about the moral implications of transferring consciousness > into the mindless patient... who at the end of the movie wakes up and > greets Minerva (one of Dr.X's oldest friends) > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 03:55:35 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:55:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:14 PM, spike wrote: > Oy, I was afraid of that. I forwarded the note for Alan Brooks, but the way > it comes back in reply it looks like I wrote it. I am one of those oddballs > who really truly has no public opinion on abortion. I have my views, but > these mine, not shared publicly, definitely not online. Alan's note didn't > violate the guidelines for posting, so thru it went. Sorry, that was partly my carelessness. ... as was my reference to Dr.X instead of Professor X. I didn't mean to offend credentialed persons or fans of graphic novels or the intersection of these first two sets. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 14 04:34:55 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:34:55 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> Message-ID: <00f901cdd9b4$5e50d9b0$1af28d10$@att.net> >...On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:14 PM, spike wrote: >> Oy, I was afraid of that. I forwarded the note for Alan Brooks, but > the way it comes back in reply it looks like I wrote it... >...Sorry, that was partly my carelessness. >... as was my reference to Dr.X instead of Professor X. I didn't mean to offend credentialed persons or fans of graphic novels or the intersection of these first two sets. _______________________________________________ No harm done Mike. {8-] From pjmanney at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 05:29:39 2012 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:29:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] photography, was: RE: Avoiding bad black swan events In-Reply-To: <003501cdd982$7ca95360$75fbfa20$@att.net> References: <003501cdd982$7ca95360$75fbfa20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 2:37 PM, spike wrote: > So how did this particular shootout get so famous as to have all that > legend grow up around it, a major motion picture, all the books, a town that > lives of tourism from it, all that? There was a guy who lived in Tombstone > who was an early photographer, this still being the hot new tech in 1881. > He took pictures of everything. That being an early example of photography, > it became waaaay more famous than the information content of rather ordinary > event deserves. It wasn't photography that made the OK Corral and its gunfighters famous. There are lots of photographs of lots of events that have faded from history. Just ask my oldest friend who is a curator at George Eastman House. They have millions of incredible photos, most of which are of forgotten moments in time. The OK Corral is famous because Wyatt Earp lived in Los Angeles, CA for decades until 1929, telling the stories of his Wild West life to eager young screenwriters. He was a paid consultant to the movie business. He met a young actor named Marion Morrison (who changed his name to John Wayne) and taught him about the Old West. Director John Ford used to listen rapt to his stories when Ford was a young assistant. However, many of his stories were inconsistent -- did he or didn't he kill Johnny Ringo, for instance? He said both at different times. But facts don't matter. He created the myth of his life and history took it down as fact. Many years later, Ford made a movie called "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance" with John Wayne. It contains the greatest quote ever about how men like Earp crafted their myth: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Legends are remembered. Not photographs. PJ From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 10:05:05 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:05:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Dan wrote: > > By the way, speaking of "black swans," have you read Taleb's latest book, > _Antifragility_? I'm most of the way through the audio version of it. Some > interesting ideas and, of course, some stuff I'd disagree on, but not by > much. I enjoyed his earlier books too, though _Fooled by Randomness_ and > _The Black Swan_ seemed like the same book just rewritten. Maybe I'll have > to go back to them to see if this is just my impression now because I went > through so many years ago. ### I am also mostly done with this book and I can recommend it heartily. The one insight that I agree with the most is the observation that size counts - the larger the size of a network, the higher the risks of catastrophic failure due to internal inconsistencies, and that risk increases non-linearly - at first slowly with increasing size, then faster and faster. At the same time the resources generated by the network are also changing non-linearly but in a different fashion - there are large gains in small networks but as the size of the network grows, the gains are progressively smaller. There is a point where the two curves intersect - networks large enough to generate most of the gains from networking but small enough not to incur most of the costs of networking. Any governing body larger than a Swiss canton is on the unfavorable side of the intersection point. Those who think the US government will help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus of the event, are fooling themselves. BTW, I have been reading recently about the Swiss army preparing for possible war in Europe, related to economic collapse within the Eurozone. The Swiss are the grand-daddies of all preppers. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 10:20:29 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:20:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > This horse is dead, why continue to beat it? ### Any horse that ran from a discussion of freedom to a discussion of the meaning of "rather" would be dead from exhaustion, indeed. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 10:41:57 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:41:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > > On 2012-12-02, at 1:00 PM, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: > > wrote: > > you demand that bureaucrats > > have to control individual securities trades rather than letting > > market participants make their own decisions. > > > As a 'native speaker' who has taught English as a second language I would > say that: > > - 'the demand that (someone) has to control' does portray Adrian's position > as an absolute or extreme position ### I'd say that "demand" here does not refer to how absolute the level of control we are talking about, but rather how consistent Adrian's preference for more government control is. More importantly, reasonable persons can have doubts about the nuances of a single sentence's meaning - which is why it is important to consider the context, where restatements clarify the position. ----------- > - the X 'rather than' Y doesn't mean that if X is an absolute the > alternative Y must also be an absolute, but simply shows your preference to > a second alternative (and it should not be inferred that this implies that > there are only 2 alternatives) > > Eg. I would rather eat the absolute best ever steak than some bug. (Clearly > there are more things to eat than bugs and steak.) ### Exactly - as you note, "rather" is not an absolute qualifier. Also, I clearly stated in another part of this thread that I accuse Adrian of wanting *more* government control, not absolute control (e.g. the paragraph where I talk about bridges on the road to serfdom). Of course, Adrian knew what I meant, if he read my posts. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 10:46:21 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:46:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Rafal's responses seem to be that defense of any > control amounts to defense of absolute control. In > other words, he seems to be committing this fallacy > when appraising my defense of limited control. ### This horse is dead, Adrian. Still, I am disappointed you chose the reiterate the same claims. At least you did not reiterate the suggestion that I should leave the country. Rafal From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 14 10:23:20 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:23:20 +0000 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> Message-ID: <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> On 14/12/2012 03:55, Mike Dougherty wrote: > ... as was my reference to Dr.X instead of Professor X. I didn't mean > to offend credentialed persons or fans of graphic novels or the > intersection of these first two sets. Hmm, where exactly is Professor X professor? I remember the cheers in the local theatre when the shots of Oxford appeared in "First Class". Afterwards we were all happily nitpicking details (Xavier would have been unlikely to have performed a thesis defense at the Sheldonian, they put a fictional pub under the Bridge of Sighs rather than the alley leading to the Turf Tavern...) But as far as I can remember he did not get a professorship, just a degree (his gown would have been different if he did; he seemed to have a normal commoner's gown). The mutant academy would not count, unless it is an accredited university - which I doubt. Given his smarts he might of course be part-time professor at a lot of places. Professor of course can just be a honorific: I often get called professor when going to southern Europe. Nitpicking from a (minorly) credentialled (minor) reader of the graphic novels. Who still haven't gotten around to get his own scholar's gown, despite a few years in town. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 14 14:29:01 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 06:29:01 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <014a01cdda07$5cf2ba90$16d82fb0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far On 14/12/2012 03:55, Mike Dougherty wrote: >> ... as was my reference to Dr.X instead of Professor X. I didn't mean > to offend credentialed persons or fans of graphic novels or the > intersection of these first two sets. >...Hmm, where exactly is Professor X professor? Anders Sandberg, He gets called Dr. X, Dr. More objects. He gets called Professor X, Professor Sandberg objects. As soon as some yahoo calls him Professional Engineer X, I'm sooo there. {8^D GA spike Jones, PE From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 16:20:12 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:20:12 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment Message-ID: It would be a huge job, but there is at least one way to end the use of fossil fuels, the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and climate change to whatever extent humans are responsible. At huge effort using conventional rockets or rocket planes we build one solar power satellite in geosynchronous orbit and equip it with propulsion lasers in the place of a power transmitting microwave antenna. Fly space planes such as the proposed Reaction Engines Skylon high and fast, above the clouds and track the vehicle with the propulsion laser focused on hydrogen heaters. The higher performance of heated hydrogen in comparison to chemical combustion gets the cost to lift power satellite parts to GEO down from current cost by a factor of around a hundred. That makes power from space less than half the cost of power from coal and the energy payback is two months, ten times shorter than solar power on the ground. With only modest diversion into more propulsion lasers the project can triple the number of power satellites produced every year. Starting from one hundred GW per year, seven to eight years after start, it takes less than twenty years from deciding to do it for humanity to be off fossil fuels, because this energy sources is so much less expensive. Power that cheap can be use to make carbon neutral synthetic gasoline for a dollar a gallon. There may be other ways to solve the problem, but there is at least one way. There is lots more for people who can handle tedious engineering details. From pharos at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 17:33:57 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 17:33:57 +0000 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 12/14/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Hmm, where exactly is Professor X professor? I remember the cheers in > the local theatre when the shots of Oxford appeared in "First Class". > Afterwards we were all happily nitpicking details (Xavier would have > been unlikely to have performed a thesis defense at the Sheldonian, they > put a fictional pub under the Bridge of Sighs rather than the alley > leading to the Turf Tavern...) But as far as I can remember he did not > get a professorship, just a degree (his gown would have been different > if he did; he seemed to have a normal commoner's gown). > > The mutant academy would not count, unless it is an accredited > university - which I doubt. Given his smarts he might of course be > part-time professor at a lot of places. > > I would think that being a telepath able to read and control other minds would make passing exams a lot easier. :) And defending a thesis - well, you would know what the judges wanted you to say before you said it. So he could probably gain any qualification he wanted. According to Wikipedia - He graduates with honors at the age of 16 from Harvard University. In graduate studies he receives Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, and Psychology with a two year residence at Pembroke College, Oxford University. He is later appointed Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. BillK From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 17:56:39 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 09:56:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > Those who think the US government will > help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus > of the event, are fooling themselves. That is overstating things, I think. Look at, for instance, Hurricane Sandy. The US government was not the main cause of the event, and it demonstrably helped many of those harmed by the unusual weather. (The exact level, and how much it should have done and/or should have been prepared, is debatable - but it wasn't the cause and it did help in many cases.) From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 18:07:46 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:07:46 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > At huge effort If you have to say "at huge effort" when describing the approach, you do not in fact have the "minimum technical". For instance: at less effort, build a large solar plant - in the desert, perhaps. Use that to power laser launches, and sell its output to the grid when not launching. At first, do a hybrid system: initial boost phase with lasers, then traditional chemical rocket once it is over the laser's horizon (and above the atmosphere: a rocket that is designed to operate only in vacuum can operate more efficiently in vacuum, over and above the mass fraction savings that the initial laser boost gives). Also: launch some cubesat solar satellites to demonstrate, test out, and validate the on-orbit power systems. Of course these are too small to transmit useful amounts of power - but perhaps they can transmit detectable amounts of power, and thus debug ways to keep a beam on target? Yes, these might not actually be part of the end solar satellite. They might even ultimately be throwaway, like scaffolding. That does not mean they are not worth doing, to lay the path from here to there. From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 18:16:45 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:16:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > This horse is dead, Adrian. And yet you chose to revive it 12 days later. > Still, I am disappointed you chose the > reiterate the same claims. I call things as I see them. Nothing you said changed my perception of your claims. > At least you did not reiterate the suggestion that I should leave the country. The point was already made. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 14 21:08:35 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:08:35 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01ce01cdda3f$2e498f60$8adcae20$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson >...There is lots more for people who can handle tedious engineering details. _______________________________________________ But engineering details are not tedious, they are interesting and fun! I live for tedious engineering details. {8-] Here's what worries me the most. There is a phenomenon which probably has a name, I just don't know what it is, where a system output drops quickly even when the system input is dropping only slowly, because the internal positive feedback loops dominate the negative feedback loops. The way this would work in our energy system is that alternate energy systems are not vigorously pursued because they are more expensive than the cheapest alternatives, which currently includes coal, natural gas and oil. A these supplies gradually decrease over time, these sources get more expensive, but so do the alternatives, so what happens is the system efficiency actually goes down. An example of a positive feedback loop would be where humanity spends a lot of its available energy fighting over the remaining energy reserves instead of developing new ones. Another example is humanity spends a lot of its available energy fighting over government-driven requirements to develop new energy sources rather than developing new energy sources. So the overall system efficiency goes down when it needs to go up. The cost of the input variable could increase ten percent with the result of the cost of the output variable doubling. The real problem is that there is no guarantee the negative feedback loops will dominate once again. The next 10% increase in input could cause another doubling of output cost. On that cheerful note, keep in mind that our current society will not operate in any manner we recognize as society without modern communications infrastructure, never mind operating without copious and low cost energy. spike From thirdeyeoferis at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 17:07:45 2012 From: thirdeyeoferis at gmail.com (Thirdeye Of Eris) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:07:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: You plan to beam the power down by microwave? The slightest variation would send the "beam" skittering across the landscape, burning everything in it's path. This is why we have not sent up the satellites that have been on the drawing board since the 70's... -- "A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ?state? and?society? and ?government? have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure." -- Professor De La Paz from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 14 21:41:54 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:41:54 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Thirdeye Of Eris wrote: > You plan to beam the power down by microwave? The slightest variation would > send the "beam" skittering across the landscape, burning everything in it's > path. This is why we have not sent up the satellites that have been on the > drawing board since the 70's... This is one of the reasons I suggested he miiight want to consider maybe possibly testing it on a small scale - say, with a satellite that can (if all goes well) produce barely measurable output at the ground - as an absolute requirement before putting up the big one, rather than a nice-to-have just because it wouldn't be part of said big one. From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 14 23:17:02 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:17:02 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Thirdeye Of Eris wrote: > You plan to beam the power down by microwave? The slightest variation > would send the "beam" skittering across the landscape, burning > everything in it's path. This is why we have not sent up the satellites > that have been on the drawing board since the 70's... I started to wonder myself and ended with some quick back of envelope calculations. First of all, if we try to send a beam from GEO, it's 35000km. Let's assume we can position a pow-sat with 1 arcsecond accuracy, this translates to this many radians: [7]> (/ pi (* 3600 180)) 4.848136811095359936L-6 (L stands for E like in scientific notation, only here indicates I have a long double number) So if our sat sways on the sides within 1 arc second range up there, it translates to the other end of beam going this many meters sideways (sinus of very small angle is equal to angle itself): [8]> (* (/ pi (* 3600 180)) 35000000) 169.68478838833759777L0 So it ends up lighting up, burning things in about 85 meters radius from target. However, according to page on HST: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope ] "HST's guidance system can also be used as a scientific instrument. Its three Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) are primarily used to keep the telescope accurately pointed during an observation, but can also be used to carry out extremely accurate astrometry; measurements accurate to within 0.0003 arcseconds have been achieved." So our burn radius down on Earth can - in theory - be at least 100 times smaller (I assume the above mentioned possible accuracy would make it 3333 times smaller but in real life it may be very hard to sustain it, so 100x should be both possible and sustainable). This gives inacuracies in beam placement in range of 2 meters down on Earth. A pow-sat, being much larger than HST, should be easier to keep in right position and direction. Of course I have neglected many factors that I don't know about (because I don't know about them) and I may have erred with calculations, so please correct me anybody. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 15 00:10:56 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:10:56 +0000 Subject: [ExI] FW: taking remote causation too far In-Reply-To: References: <1355448330.41931.YahooMailNeo@web161002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <00cf01cdd9a1$cc189ea0$6449dbe0$@att.net> <00e601cdd9a9$198a3200$4c9e9600$@att.net> <50CAFE18.20602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50CBC010.9080409@aleph.se> On 14/12/2012 17:33, BillK wrote: > He graduates with honors > at the age of 16 from Harvard University. In graduate studies he > receives Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, and Psychology with a two > year residence at Pembroke College, Oxford University. Ah, Pembroke is across the street from my office. They have been annoying us for a long while by the noise from building a new student annex. But it looks good and has a nifty glass bridge over the street to the little garden outside the chapel. Hmm, I have a suspicion this thread has gone a bit far from the original topic. No doubt by remote causation by telepathic do-gooders. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 15 00:06:14 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:06:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <021801cdda57$ffd520e0$ff7f62a0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola ... A pow-sat, being much larger than HST, should be easier to keep in right position and direction. Of course I have neglected many factors that I don't know about (because I don't know about them) and I may have erred with calculations, so please correct me anybody. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- Ja a power sat would be way easier to point than the Hubble because of its size. Nothing happens very fast at that scale. Pointing an array a km on a side would be a relatively easy control problem because you can have a leisurely control loop speed and still react appropriately when the forces are so very predictable and steady. spike From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 15 00:33:46 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:33:46 +0000 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> On 13/12/2012 23:58, John Grigg wrote: > And would we be at the same level of technology as we are now? Or > vastly less? Or even much more advanced? God-emperors can make things go either way. The problem with the Roman empire was that they were very practical, but they did not do much systematic theorizing. The Greeks and Hellenes were much better at that. So if the Romans were to go Christian at an early stage (I assume Jesus would replace Tiberius and pre-empt Caligula and the rest of the sorry end of the Julian dynasty) the Greek inheritance would be even more weakened. That suggests even less tech development, but plenty of very good craftsmanship. -- Andreas Arenamontanus, Futura humanitatis Instituti Schola Oxoniae Martin De Facultas Philosophiae Universitas Oxoniensis From andymck35 at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 07:57:16 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 20:57:16 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Dec 2012 07:07:46 +1300, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Also: launch some cubesat solar satellites to > demonstrate, test out, and validate the on-orbit power > systems. Of course these are too small to transmit > useful amounts of power - but perhaps they can > transmit detectable amounts of power, and thus debug > ways to keep a beam on target? > > Yes, these might not actually be part of the end solar > satellite. They might even ultimately be throwaway, > like scaffolding. That does not mean they are not > worth doing, to lay the path from here to there. Maybe I haven't been lurking around here long enough, but I'm having a hard time understanding why it's necessary to put a large photo-voltaic array in outer space when for far less money we could float a pair of hydrogen filled rafts in the stratosphere over each of the earth's poles. Not at the same time of course, but with one enjoying 6 months of 24/7 sunlight the other can be moved towards the equator and at least be on a day-night cycle. Is chasing 100% utilization really worth the expense of putting a PV array in orbit? What am I missing here? From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 09:56:55 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:56:55 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Message-ID: Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco Posted in Science, 15th December 2012 01:51 GMT A group of researchers has released a study that claims to shoot down the common perception that clean, renewable energy from wind and solar sources is all well and good, eco-wise, but that it's too uncertain, sporadic, and pricey for widespread use. "These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive," said professor Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware in a statement. "The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage ? which we did by an exhaustive search ? and to calculate costs correctly.? Cost was central to the team's work. With this in mind, one of the things that they discovered is that it's cheaper to crank out more juice than needed during hours of average need ? as much as three times as much ? than it is to store all the extra energy for later use. Those batteries and fuel cells ain't cheap. One of the key elements in their plan would be to have a widespread geographical distribution of such intermittent sources as wind farms and photovoltaic installations ? when it's windy and sunny in one location on the grid, it could be calm and overcast in another and all parts of the grid would have enough power. Another aspect of their plan is to use some of that extra renewable capacity, when it's available and when storage capacity is full, to substitute for natural gas for home and business heating. -------------- Sounds good to me. BillK From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 15 14:52:19 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:52:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] X-men extropians??? In-Reply-To: <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> Message-ID: <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> Just popped in to see what's new and was wondering when we changed from the Extropian forum to an X-men forum ??? :oD Have we hit some impassible hurdle in the quest for immortality? or have we just given up because the world will end next week? To quote a popular meme..... Dafuq? lol AL _______________________________________________extropy-chat mailing listextropy-chat at lists.extropy.orghttp://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From deimtee at optusnet.com.au Sat Dec 15 15:15:39 2012 From: deimtee at optusnet.com.au (david) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 02:15:39 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Kurzweil joins Google In-Reply-To: <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <20121216021539.3e2c155b@jarrah> Hi This is an interesting collaboration. "Ray Kurzweil joins Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing. " http://www.kurzweilai.net/kurzweil-joins-google-to-work-on-new-projects-involving-machine-learning-and-language-processing I wonder if it's just a general "hire smart guys" thing, or whether he pitched a specific AI idea at them. -David From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 15:27:02 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 16:27:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] transhumanism by any other name In-Reply-To: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355433517.37692.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 13 December 2012 22:18, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > The point of Magneto is to be The Bad Guy. So he doesn't care about other > people. Dr. X does. Magneto wants the mutants to win, but he also wants > the baselines to lose. This is not a convincing argument to me. We want > win-win scenarios, not win-lose ones. > > The most telling scene in the X-men films, to me, is when Mystique loses > her powers, and Magneto instantly turns his back on her, leaving her naked > on the ground, to die for all he cares. That defines his character more > than any powers or arguments about mutants vs. baselines. I don't want > that to be associated with transhumanism. Do you? > What is ridiculous *and* very humanist in Magneto is that he defines "us vs. them" on the basis of "objectivist" criteria such as a mutant-ness which actually does not involve anything else that some special (and wildly variable) power, exactly on the same line of the Singularitians who believe it obvious that our duty would be to take side for the "mankind" in a supposed upcoming wars - or at least conflict of interest - with AGIs, why you and I should always remaining untold and very vague. The truth is that historical experience show us well enough that humans, gods, animals and machines do not fight each other as such, not any more than males fight females or the other way around across the animal kingdom, but rather cooperate in order to compete with groups of a similarly mixed composition. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 16:05:17 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 11:05:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] X-men extropians??? In-Reply-To: <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 9:52 AM, wrote: > > Just popped in to see what's new and was wondering when we changed from the > Extropian forum to an X-men forum ??? :oD > Have we hit some impassible hurdle in the quest for immortality? or have we > just given up because the world will end next week? > To quote a popular meme..... Dafuq? lol really? You don't think that's a bit harsh? ok, I'll concede your use of emoticons might ease the sting of your sentiment - but not by much. Since I brought it up... the observation was sparked while watching X-Men: First Class. I asked this list (of perhaps the most erudite people I can consult) if maybe Transhumanism is actually more mainstream than the Ivory-Tower thinkers can recognize when they look down on the masses with a narrow bias for specific terminology. If comic/graphic novels and movies are shapers of culture in the way oral storytelling historically defined a people then shouldn't we be able to discuss them for the ideology they espouse? I guess I'll squelch the noise of casual conversation and let you return to the quest for immortality. Do pop in again soon. :) [disclaimer: in case you read an unfriendly tone, please put more emphasis on the smiley emoticon] From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 16:50:23 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:50:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 15 December 2012 01:33, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The problem with the Roman empire was that they were very practical, but > they did not do much systematic theorizing. The Greeks and Hellenes were > much better at that. So if the Romans were to go Christian at an early > stage (I assume Jesus would replace Tiberius and pre-empt Caligula and the > rest of the sorry end of the Julian dynasty) the Greek inheritance would be > even more weakened. That suggests even less tech development, but plenty of > very good craftsmanship. > Yes, this sounds very plausible. An hypothesis however I personally find fascinating is that at the end of the day we ultimately do owe modern technoscience, and btw tonal(polyphonic music, both being once-in-history phenomena, to judaeo-christianism, but in the sense that they would be a by-product of the violent repression by the latter of the European "spirit" for almost a millenium. On the tune of "what does not kill us, makes us stronger", in other words. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 15 16:58:24 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 11:58:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] X-men extropians??? In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFA8FC8791DF9D-A14-10F71@webmail-m135.sysops.aol.com> Hehe, No not harsh at all. I was merely musing as to why every email I opened was seemingly an X-men derived subject. I thought there had been some kind of overthrowing of the forum by comic book nerds....oh wait. Im going to dust off a copy of spider-man to read while I sit atop the rubble of my fallen tower awaiting the bio printer' completion of another lung. As you were. ;o) -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty To: ExI chat list Sent: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 16:10 Subject: Re: [ExI] X-men extropians??? You don't think that's a bit harsh? ok, I'll concede youruse of emoticons might ease the sting of your sentiment - but not bymuch.Since I brought it up... the observation was sparked while watchingX-Men: First Class. I asked this list (of perhaps the most eruditepeople I can consult) if maybe Transhumanism is actually moremainstream than the Ivory-Tower thinkers can recognize when they lookdown on the masses with a narrow bias for specific terminology. Ifcomic/graphic novels and movies are shapers of culture in the way oralstorytelling historically defined a people then shouldn't we be ableto discuss them for the ideology they espouse?I guess I'll squelch the noise of casual conversation and let youreturn to the quest for immortality. Do pop in again soon. :)[disclaimer: in case you read an unfriendly tone, please put moreemphasis on the smiley emoticon]_______________________________________________extropy-chat mailing listextropy-chat at lists.extropy.orghttp://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:09:14 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:09:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:57 PM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > Maybe I haven't been lurking around here long enough, but I'm having a hard > time understanding why it's necessary to put a large photo-voltaic array in > outer space when for far less money we could float a pair of hydrogen filled > rafts in the stratosphere over each of the earth's poles. > Not at the same time of course, but with one enjoying 6 months of 24/7 > sunlight the other can be moved towards the equator and at least be on a > day-night cycle. Keith should have some good answers to this, but as I understand it, the benefit of solar sats over this is distribution: the power arrives at the ground where you want it, within whatever grid you're tied to. That said, if we're going on a cost basis, far more extensive ground solar with some kind of power storage mechanism - possibly siting ground solar with the most energy-intensive operations that don't run 24/7 (for instance, desalination plants) - would be cheaper and faster to deploy. From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:13:23 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:13:23 +0000 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The problem with the Roman empire was that they were very practical, but > they did not do much systematic theorizing. The Greeks and Hellenes were > much better at that. So if the Romans were to go Christian at an early stage > (I assume Jesus would replace Tiberius and pre-empt Caligula and the rest of > the sorry end of the Julian dynasty) the Greek inheritance would be even > more weakened. That suggests even less tech development, but plenty of very > good craftsmanship. > > You can't really blame the Romans for not theorizing. Nations concentrate on whatever succeeds. The Roman empire was growing and expanding by military conquest and appeared unstoppable. So naturally politics, war, and economics were the fields that attracted the best brains. Yes, the Greeks were good at theorizing but the Roman armies trampled all over them and took the bits they liked. So much for theorizing! (Any resemblance to current US policy is purely coincidental). BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 15 16:59:56 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:59:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK >...Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 >...Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels ... -------------- >...Sounds good to me. BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, I partially agree with the general direction of the article, but my vague affirmation is because they may have missed something important. These kinds of schemes benefit greatly if we think of ways in which we could be more tolerant of temporary lack or shortage of electrical power. A few years ago in the Silicon Valley, we demonstrated that we know how to do it poorly: we had rolling blackouts which would turn off neighborhoods for a couple hours at a time every few days in the hottest summer days where a lot of people were using air conditioning. There are better ways of dealing with this, but if we had a lot of solar and wind power, there would likely be enough power on a really hot day, plenty of it. Our power shortage days would more likely occur in the winter. So the kinds of solutions we need to look at are these: 1. Turn off the HVAC system, heat individual rooms with a simple, low cost propane burners coupled with a heat exchanger and a hose similar to what you have on your vacuum cleaner, which attaches to a special port in your window that closes when not in use. A control loop would monitor the temperature in the room you are heating and send the control signal to the propane furnace which stays outdoors. The thing is actually powered by a very small amount of electricity (to run the fan and control electronics) but the energy heavy lifting is done by those 5 gallon propane bottles like you see on campers. One of those bottles will heat a camper in freezing conditions for about two days. A single room in a well-insulated house could be held to 15 C for several days per bottle I would think, and a homeowner could store a dozen or more of those things. 2. Figure out how to go to minimum use on computers and communications electronics, then let the rest of the house go dark. Any reprehensible wretch who threatens my internet connection even for a few minutes will draw back a bleeding stump! At least I know what is important to me. I can keep my computers and internet running for a couple hundred watts. The rest of it can go to hell, at least for a few days if necessary. The computer emits light. What more do we really need to look at? 3. A temporary backup power system could rely heavily on good old gasoline in our Detroits with the V8s providing the energy conversion mechanism, coupled with an easily imagined generator which is driven by parking the drive wheels on a roller system coupled to a generator. A single prole-mobile could power several houses, and perhaps a score of them in minimal power use mode. Failing that, we could go with the still simpler gasoline powered generator. We would retrofit Detroits with some means of tapping the gasoline out of the main tank into the generator. We currently have all these anti-theft devices that prevent exactly this, but in an age when video surveillance is becoming more universal and doing the security heavy lifting, these devices can be defeated without much cost. Gasoline and Diesel oil are both excellent compact means for storing a lot of energy if we have the means of converting it to electricity, especially considering we already have a highly developed means of distribution and conversion, and every prole has a safe storage system (or two or three) for it right in front of the double-wide, even if one or more is up on blocks waiting for a new transmission. 4. A modern locomotive is tragically underutilized in our current world, but those big Diesels never wear out. They are hauling huge tankers full of fuel, they are strong enough to haul a long train over a mountain pass, they are as reliable as an anvil. Is it not easy enough to imagine anticipating severe cloud cover and low winds in a low pressure system, send your train of locos with tankers to the area, build some kind of device which can take the power off of that Diesel generator, condition it into AC and crank it up, lads, dump the power into the grid. Sure it would get a bit smoky for a few days perhaps, but we could imagine some device which would suck up and filter the particulate from the exhaust. The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is that we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages. I watched a few years ago when we had the rolling blackouts, and saw we are extremely intolerant of that. Our solution to it (an enormous ugly and impractical peaker plant, which has since gone bankrupt) was a perfect poster-child example of what to run right out and not do. spike From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:22:03 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:22:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:59 AM, spike wrote: > The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is that > we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages. Shortages in *local production*. As the report noted, storage helps get around this. So does having a transmission grid, so if (say) San Jose's got clouds w/low wind but Los Angeles has sun, they can ship energy up north, and vice versa when necessary. From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:33:53 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:33:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] X-men extropians??? In-Reply-To: <8CFA8FC8791DF9D-A14-10F71@webmail-m135.sysops.aol.com> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> <8CFA8FC8791DF9D-A14-10F71@webmail-m135.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, wrote: > Hehe, No not harsh at all. I was merely musing as to why every email I > opened was seemingly an X-men derived subject. I thought there had been some > kind of overthrowing of the forum by comic book nerds....oh wait. > Im going to dust off a copy of spider-man to read while I sit atop the > rubble of my fallen tower awaiting the bio printer' completion of another > lung. > As you were. ;o) I think the intersection of "comic book nerds" and "Extropians" is itself quite a large set. How many lungs have you printed so far? How many do you really need? If you're going through that many, maybe you're using them wrong... From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:35:14 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 18:35:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: On 15 December 2012 17:59, spike wrote: > >... On Behalf Of BillK > >...Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 > >...Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It > could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels > > > ... > -------------- > >...Sounds good to me. BillK > > _______________________________________________ > > BillK, I partially agree with the general direction of the article, but my > vague affirmation is because they may have missed something important. > My admittedly incompetent first reaction would be on the lines of "Fat chance!", but I will glance at their arguments... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 17:38:06 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:38:06 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:59 AM, spike wrote: >> The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is that >> we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages. > > Shortages in *local production*. As the report noted, storage > helps get around this. So does having a transmission grid, so > if (say) San Jose's got clouds w/low wind but Los Angeles has > sun, they can ship energy up north, and vice versa when > necessary. > That's right. I think Spike is conflating two different problems. The article deals with feeding power into the grid from solar and wind sources all across the US and only using the old oil or coal stations in emergencies. Spike is also worrying about when the grid goes down. Self-sufficiency in power is a good idea. As prices drop, solar panels and small wind farms will appear on many properties. Especially those in remote areas. BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 15 17:45:25 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 18:45:25 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, John Grigg wrote: > There is the extremely controversial theory that Jesus was fathered by a > Roman soldier. And now imagine if he had known that, and actually embraced > his Roman side. Joining the legion, getting citizenship, working his way > up the ranks using his stunning charisma and social intelligence, until > finally he became emperor!!! > > > And of course, there could have been Jesus, the emperor of peace, or Jesus, > the emperor of martial conquest, or even a combination of the two. > Considering the impact Jesus had on the world as a man of simple > circumstances with a message of brotherhood, now consider how he might have > impacted the modern day as Emperor Jesus, battle savior of the empire and > all humanity! Matthew 10 34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. 35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. 36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. Yep, who knows. I guess if Jesus managed to become emperor, he could make use of THE powers to give a very long peace - not at once, of course, first some very unpeaceful period, but then, yeah, "Pax Romana" would have gained a totally new meaning. I can agree that Romans were not so big theoretical thinkers but you know what, if there is long enough peace and "practical" folks are kept away from fraking everybody for purely practical reasons of increasing their own income (i.e. they are not allowed to destabilise everything and finally sinking the ship), then "thinkers" can have really great time. If nothing else, libraries are not being burned or converted into stables. Also, I wonder what would become of Digital Rights Management in such world? Would people be more Open Source oriented? Possibly so. In such situation, tech can progress quite well, IMHO. So overally, we would be much further then we are now. Unless THE emperor decided that tech was really not so much important. But in such case, using manna machines from haevens would become inevitable, everybody fed and happy, end of the story. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 15 18:24:48 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 19:24:48 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Dec 2012, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Also, I wonder what would become of Digital Rights Management in such > world? Would people be more Open Source oriented? Possibly so. In such > situation, tech can progress quite well, IMHO. So overally, we would be > much further then we are now. Unless THE emperor decided that tech was > really not so much important. But in such case, using manna machines from > haevens would become inevitable, everybody fed and happy, end of the > story. Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and other ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I understand than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with introduction of calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of which for example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built. Romans called it opus caementicium, after their fall it hadn't been called very much AFAIK (at least not in mainland Europe), until some 250 years ago... [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_caementicium ] [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_Mechanism ] Also, you might want to read: "The declaration of Christianity as accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil, bishop of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey. Called the "Basilias", the latter resembled a city and included housing for doctors and nurses and separate buildings for various classes of patients.[17] There was a separate section for lepers.[18] Some hospitals maintained libraries and training programs, and doctors compiled their medical and pharmacological studies in manuscripts. Thus in-patient medical care in the sense of what we today consider a hospital, was an invention driven by Christian mercy and Byzantine innovation.[19] Byzantine hospital staff included the Chief Physician (archiatroi), professional nurses (hypourgoi) and the orderlies (hyperetai). By the twelfth century, Constantinople had two well-organized hospitals, staffed by doctors who were both male and female. Facilities included systematic treatment procedures and specialized wards for various diseases." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital ] Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 18:34:21 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 19:34:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 15 December 2012 19:24, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and other > ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I understand > than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with introduction of > calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of which for > example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built. > Indeed. I believe to remember that the agricultural returns (proceeds? how does say that in English?) got back to Roman standards only in the XVII-XVIII century. This is why I find Kurzweil's exponential curves, even though S-shaped, pretty unpersuasive. The truth is that we have known periods of unprecedented acceleration of progress and of revolutionary breakthroughs in a background landscape of stagnation and not so rarely regression... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 18:34:58 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:34:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Thirdeye Of Eris wrote: > > You plan to beam the power down by microwave? The slightest variation would > send the "beam" skittering across the landscape, burning everything in it's > path. You could research the subject before making irresponsible pronouncements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Safety > This is why we have not sent up the satellites that have been on the > drawing board since the 70's... Not at all. It's the lift cost to GEO that make them uneconomical. Page 32 here: http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/aiaa-2009-0462_ssp_alternatives_potter.pdf mentions 2 orders magnitude or around $145,000/kW. For a 6.8% discount rate, you can compute the cents per kW by taking the dollar cost and dividing it by 800 to get cents per /kWh. That turns out to be $1.80 per kWh. There no large market for power at this cost. > From: Adrian Tymes > On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Thirdeye Of Eris BS deleted > > This is one of the reasons I suggested he might want to > consider maybe possibly testing it on a small scale - say, > with a satellite that can (if all goes well) produce barely > measurable output at the ground - as an absolute > requirement before putting up the big one, rather than a > nice-to-have just because it wouldn't be part of said big > one. Been done. Communication satellites produce an easily measurable output on the ground. Have you never set up a satellite dish? > From: Tomasz Rola > > On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Thirdeye Of Eris wrote: > BS deleted > > I started to wonder myself and ended with some quick back of envelope > calculations. First of all, if we try to send a beam from GEO, it's > 35000km. Let's assume we can position a pow-sat with 1 arcsecond accuracy, > this translates to this many radians: Inappropriate math deleted. Because a microwave system is diffraction limited, the appropriate math is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disc Which is why for 2.45 GHz, and a transmission antenna of 1 km, the rectenna is 10 km in diameter and the power density is relatively low (1/4 kW/m^2). On the other hand, the propulsion lasers needed to get the lift cost down are also weapons. On a clear day they will put 3-4 GW of power on the ground at 20 MW/m^2. > From: "Andrew Mckee" > > Maybe I haven't been lurking around here long enough, but I'm having a hard time understanding why it's necessary to put a large photo-voltaic array in outer space when for far less money we could float a pair of hydrogen filled rafts in the stratosphere over each of the earth's poles. > Not at the same time of course, but with one enjoying 6 months of 24/7 sunlight the other can be moved towards the equator and at least be on a day-night cycle. > > Is chasing 100% utilization really worth the expense of putting a PV array in orbit? > > What am I missing here? Lots. Particularly transmission cost and storage costs. And just how do you propose to move power plants from the arctic? I know a good deal about this topic. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8323 If you really want to go through the details, ask. Though there are precious few on this list who have the skills to go through a technical paper or a spreadsheet model. > From: BillK > > Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 > Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels snip What they don't mention is that fossil fuel is expected to go up several times as expensive as it is today. If you don't mind paying ten times as much for power, that's OK. Of course the consequences are a huge die off because fuel and food are tightly connected. > > Sounds good to me. Too good. Keith From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 15 18:38:07 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:38:07 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: <02d001cddaf3$53fa40b0$fbeec210$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:59 AM, spike wrote: >>>... The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is >> that we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages. spike > >>... Shortages in *local production*. As the report noted, storage helps > get around this. So does having a transmission grid, so if (say) San > Jose's got clouds w/low wind but Los Angeles has sun, they can ship > energy up north, and vice versa when necessary. > >...That's right. I think Spike is conflating two different problems... Disagree, it's the same problem. I recognize that a cloudy still day is likely within a few hundred km of sunshine and wind, but power lines lose a lot of energy over those kinds of distances. Furthermore, there are places where wind power (especially) is seldom profitable. In places where it is highly effective, there are few consumers. Proles do not like to live where the wind blows a lot. So we are back to sending power long distances over power lines. I agree we will likely end up doing some of this even if it is inefficient. >...The article deals with feeding power into the grid from solar and wind sources all across the US and only using the old oil or coal stations in emergencies... BillK As the local natural gas peaker plant has demonstrated, it is costly to keep all that capital around and sitting idle most of the time. A coal plant is particularly difficult to fire up on short notice. Some types of coal plants can be run that way, but they generally make poor peakers. I envision a combination solution: we will install a lot of solar power which is good for peak production when it is hot, solving the energy-hungry air conditioning problem, coupled with increased hydrocarbon-based heating solutions and increased tolerance for reduced power availability. Consider for instance how intolerant we are for the wall current to drop even 20%. If you have ever taken an electric motor apart, you will see the squirrel cage rotor is built with an intentially angled structure as shown in figures 1 and 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel-cage_rotor This allows the load to be shared across more structure as a helical cut gear, but it also does something else: it draws cooling air thru the motor. An AC motor is air cooled. Actually a DC motor is too, but the point is that if you have an AC motor underpowered and it is driving something like an air handler but does not have enough power to start the spin, the motor gets hot. You can verify this at home by plugging in a fan and keeping it from turning. The notion is that an undervoltage increases the risk of home fires by those applications where an electric motor doesn't quite have enough power to get spinning. That's what they told us when they were doing rolling blackouts. On the other hand, our computers will run just fine on reduced voltage, within reason. So now we have primarily HVAC applications which are unforgiving of undervoltages, but the stuff that really matters is mostly tolerant. With increasing solar power generation, the HVAC applications which would be power starved is the H rather than the AC part of HVAC. So, we compensate by having propane powered home heating. We can do some long distance power transmission. The California desert has lots of sunshine in the winter, at least during the day, and plenty of wind in the winter time. The land out there is practically free, once you get past the lawsuits by the environmentalists, and there are few proles out there who would suffer from having to look at the ugly things or suffer from the noise. Desert tortoises could scarcely give a damn about the wind turbines, and I can easily imagine they would really like a lot of nice shady solar panels under which to take refuge on a blazing summer day. It is easy enough to imagine vast swaths of desert blanketed by both wind and solar, and Los Angeles is close enough to receive that power somewhat efficiently. The basic idea of BillK's cited article is that we can afford a lot of inefficiency given solar and wind power in sufficient quantities, which is a notion I have been playing with for years. Remote solar power is inefficient, but perhaps it is OK. We still have the night problem, but if we become temporary undervoltage tolerant, we can deal. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 18:59:32 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 18:59:32 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > What they don't mention is that fossil fuel is expected to go up > several times as expensive as it is today. If you don't mind paying > ten times as much for power, that's OK. Of course the consequences > are a huge die off because fuel and food are tightly connected. > They don't expect to be using much fossil fuel by 2030. That's the point of replacing it with wind and solar. And they compare to today's fossil fuel costs. Another report from the authors is here: They have done a few new things in their calculations that seem to make them much more acceptable. BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 19:18:25 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:18:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] new kurzweil book In-Reply-To: References: <003701cda432$b8a34400$29e9cc00$@att.net> Message-ID: I got my copy. It came with a T-Shirt and a signed card... I thought the book itself was going to be signed, that was slightly disappointing, but so far the book is very interesting. He was also interviewed on PBS Radio for Science Friday yesterday about the book. I happened to catch it. -Kelly On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 12:34 AM, John Grigg wrote: > I wonder to what extent this book will take a beating from critics... > > > John > > > > On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 7:23 PM, spike wrote: > >> OK, looks like the release date on Ray?s book has been delayed about a >> month, to middle of November. I have been anticipating this one for some >> time. Any Kurzweil hipsters here know if the 13 November date is holding? >> Amara, how about having Ray post a hi and howdy on ExI please?**** >> >> ** ** >> >> spike**** >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 19:12:26 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:12:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Kurzweil joins Google In-Reply-To: <20121216021539.3e2c155b@jarrah> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> <20121216021539.3e2c155b@jarrah> Message-ID: There are a hundred ways having Ray at Google makes sense. He apparently was closely associated with the Watson team in some fashion, and that is the direction Google search needs to go to remain competitive. Aside from that, there is the Google Cars thing, as well as the "try to build a mind" thing that he seems to have a pretty decent handle on. I'm a third of the way through his latest book. It is a little vague so far, but I'll let you know if he proposes anything implementable, or if it is all smoke. If he can get AGI going, that would be good for Google in a huge number of ways. -Kelly On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:15 AM, david wrote: > > Hi > > This is an interesting collaboration. > > "Ray Kurzweil joins Google to work on new projects involving machine > learning and language processing. " > > > http://www.kurzweilai.net/kurzweil-joins-google-to-work-on-new-projects-involving-machine-learning-and-language-processing > > I wonder if it's just a general "hire smart guys" thing, or whether he > pitched a specific AI idea at them. > > -David > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 20:17:16 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:17:16 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > From: Adrian Tymes >> This is one of the reasons I suggested he might want to >> consider maybe possibly testing it on a small scale - say, >> with a satellite that can (if all goes well) produce barely >> measurable output at the ground - as an absolute >> requirement before putting up the big one, rather than a >> nice-to-have just because it wouldn't be part of said big >> one. > > Been done. Communication satellites produce an easily measurable > output on the ground. Have you never set up a satellite dish? I meant, test the specific beam tracking & focusing mechanism the large sat would use. Comm sats don't try to focus their output on one particular point. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 21:18:29 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 13:18:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:38 AM, BillK wrote: > From: BillK > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Keith Henson wrote: >> What they don't mention is that fossil fuel is expected to go up >> several times as expensive as it is today. If you don't mind paying >> ten times as much for power, that's OK. Of course the consequences >> are a huge die off because fuel and food are tightly connected. > > They don't expect to be using much fossil fuel by 2030. That's the > point of replacing it with wind and solar. > And they compare to today's fossil fuel costs. > > Another report from the authors is here: > > > They have done a few new things in their calculations that seem to > make them much more acceptable. Well, Bill, if you are absolutely certain that these people know what they are talking about and that their solution applies to (for example Germany and the UK) then I can quit being concerned with low cost power from space. Skipping the consideration of the value of having a big presence in space, I would rather live in an energy rich society than an energy poor one, but YMMV. With respect to laser propulsion and power satellites, it hardly matters what people in western cultures think anyway. Keith From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 15 21:14:25 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 13:14:25 -0800 Subject: [ExI] monkeys really are little humans Message-ID: <02f801cddb09$2998f0d0$7ccad270$@att.net> I heard about this experiment, but this is the actual video. It's hard to watch this without laughing out loud. {8^D spike Click here: 2 Monkeys Were Paid Unequally; See What Happens Next -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 15 22:43:02 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 22:43:02 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12/15/12, Keith Henson wrote: > Well, Bill, if you are absolutely certain that these people know what > they are talking about and that their solution applies to (for example > Germany and the UK) then I can quit being concerned with low cost > power from space. > > Skipping the consideration of the value of having a big presence in > space, I would rather live in an energy rich society than an energy > poor one, but YMMV. > > Hey, nobody's certain! This is the first time they have shown their calculations to the world. Now we have to wait and see if they are torn to shreds by critics. Even if they are mostly correct it still requires a huge investment in solar and wind power that won't happen overnight. But it seems to be the direction to move in, as every small investment generates some power for the grid. China seems to be planning to double their solar power capacity by 2015, to 40 Gw from the current 21 Gw. Gotta use all these subsidized solar panels for something. BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 15 23:43:28 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:43:28 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Dec 2012, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 15 December 2012 19:24, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and other > > ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I understand > > than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with introduction of > > calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of which for > > example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built. > > > > Indeed. I believe to remember that the agricultural returns (proceeds? how > does say that in English?) Yields? Products? > got back to Roman standards only in the XVII-XVIII century. Interesting, isn't it. I believe I have heard/read the same thing but can't recall where. What terrifies me is how fragile civilisation really is and how easily people throw it away, neglect and forget. > This is why I find Kurzweil's exponential curves, even though S-shaped, > pretty unpersuasive. Seems like this kind of curves one gets if one limits oneself to the last hundred years only (and assumes there was just flat line before that). I don't want to delve into subject of history importance again. I think some people would definitely gain lots of perspective by understanding there was something before us, too. Of course, I am not suggesting they are under educated, maybe just a bit too much... shortsighted? Or too much wishful thinking? Since we are at it, I wouldn't mind if humanity reached this blessed immortal happy existential plateau, me included. I just think there are lots of unpredictable obstacles on the way there and I don't think once we are there we will be happy for eternity. Rather, I'd expect lots of factors making it hard (or impossible) to stay on this plateau in the long run. History is paved with ideas looking great but failing to deliver in real life. Why this one idea would be any different? In other words, rather than imagining great happy future as kind of given I'd rather keep asking myself what I have overlooked. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From ablainey at aol.com Sun Dec 16 01:49:47 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 20:49:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] X-men extropians??? In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CBC56A.3080202@aleph.se> <8CFA8EAEAA33306-694-10434@webmail-m168.sysops.aol.com> <8CFA8FC8791DF9D-A14-10F71@webmail-m135.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFA946C30FDCF2-15AC-139A8@webmail-m081.sysops.aol.com> No argument on either statement. As for how many lungs is enough, well that's no different to the how much money question. You can never have too many gold bars or spare body parts. Especially when you use them wrong. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty To: ExI chat list Sent: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:39 Subject: Re: [ExI] X-men extropians??? I think the intersection of "comic book nerds" and "Extropians" isitself quite a large set.How many lungs have you printed so far? How many do you really need?If you're going through that many, maybe you're using them wrong... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Sun Dec 16 01:50:36 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:50:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events In-Reply-To: <50CA5A36.8070407@aleph.se> References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <001801cdd92e$f7fd0650$e7f712f0$@att.net> <50CA5A36.8070407@aleph.se> Message-ID: <1355622636.13359.YahooMailNeo@web126204.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Thursday, December 13, 2012 5:44 PM Anders Sandberg wrote: > The big problem with any strategy like this is that the best way of surviving > a big disaster is to have a close-knit social network that works together to > help members survive: economies of scale apply. In fact, the bigger the > network the better. So going at it alone is likely not going to cut it. Getting > to know your neighbors and local government might. I agree and the point has been noted by many survivalists. One book, a few years back (in the mid-2000s, IIRC) mentioned one survival strategy in particular was getting training as and networking with first responders. This, naturally, comes with a cost, but getting the training (often free to the trainee) obviously has a direct benefit, but also networking with them keeps one in the local loop (which probably matters in many likely disaster situations -- as opposed to being glued to some major media outlet*) in many different. Regards, Dan * In fact, my guess is being up to date on news is really more harmful than good. Most of it is entertainment. As entertainment, it might be fun, but for those who confuse it with being information rich, I think they're going to spend too much time and effort trying to filter lots of noise for a miniscule signal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 16 09:59:03 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 09:59:03 +0000 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50CD9B67.5040101@aleph.se> Many people overestimate the amount of military activity in the Roman empire. Sure, they were fighting left and right at the borders, but the vast interior was (when not having a civil war) mostly peaceful and doing trade, agriculture and the usual commerce of a civilization. They had great civil engineering prowess, but there were no new geometrical or mathematical results under the Republic or Empire, no mathematicians of note, and nothing we would call science. Everybody raves about the loss of cement, but forgets that the Romans had de facto lost the academy/university of the Greeks. A medieval person would actually have noted that they were low-tech: no stirrups, no knitting, no three-field crop rotation, no heavy plough, no blast furnaces, no complex mechanical systems (Romans had some, but they were special siege engines, while Medieval towns were replete with cranes, mills and crude clockworks). The medieval guy would have been impressed by the scale and overall wealth of the Romans, but he would know plenty of things they did not know. On 15/12/2012 18:34, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 15 December 2012 19:24, Tomasz Rola > wrote: > > Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and other > ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I > understand > than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with introduction of > calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of which for > example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built. > > > Indeed. I believe to remember that the agricultural returns (proceeds? > how does say that in English?) got back to Roman standards only in the > XVII-XVIII century. Well... I have looked at this in some detail. World GDP per capita (which is typically measured via agricultural output) was relatively stable between the years 0-1600, with little evidence that the loss of the Roman empire made things go backwards. At most, when squinting at the data, it looks like Roman empire ended a period of somewhat faster total economic growth that started a few thousand years ago. And the middle ages were (in terms of total GDP) several times richer than antiquity. Overall, long-term economical growth is fitted quite well with a big exponentical curve. [ For data I used data from Angus Maddison's "Historical statistics of the world economy 1-2008", John Bradley de Long, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. Plenty of uncertainty and quibbles, of course, but the curves do seem to match up well enough for our discussion purposes. ] One can argue that in a Malthusian world any increase or decrease gets absorbed by a changing population size. So it did not matter that the Romans largely had their act together, their growth turned into a bigger but not per capita richer Empire. Everything went exponential after 1700 or so because the wealth production outpaced the population. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 16 10:12:24 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 10:12:24 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 In-Reply-To: References: <029d01cddae5$9c861010$d5923030$@att.net> Message-ID: <50CD9E88.3030602@aleph.se> On 15/12/2012 17:22, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:59 AM, spike wrote: >> The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is that >> we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages. > Shortages in *local production*. As the report noted, storage > helps get around this. So does having a transmission grid, Unfortunately fractal resource availability patterns and spatial correlations make shortages hard to counteract. Storage is surprisingly difficult even when you use water magazines (and they require you to have some convenient mountains - many places lack them). Flywheels and superconducting coils turn out to have annoying limitations. Spatial correlations mean that wind and solar power does vary a lot more across large areas than you would think: grids do need to be redesigned to handle strongly fluctuating supplies and redistributing them over space scales of more than 1000 km. And if devices become smart and start using or supplying power depending on price, they can seriously destabilise the system by causing "market bubbles" (simulations done here in Oxford of smart grids and electric cars). Lots of cheap local energy production is great (especially from a resiliency standpoint), but it will not be good enough to supply remote locations in a dip unless the power grid becomes magical. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 16 15:14:56 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:14:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes > wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Keith Henson wrote: snip >> Been done. Communication satellites produce an easily measurable >> output on the ground. Have you never set up a satellite dish? > > I meant, test the specific beam tracking & focusing mechanism > the large sat would use. Comm sats don't try to focus their > output on one particular point. Some do control where the beam power comes down. Ever seen one where the microwave feeder out in front of a parabolic reflector is a mirror image of the US? They switch the power around to get higher bandwidth to particular spots on the ground. Big spots to be sure because of the relatively small optics. Trying to point out that this is an extremely well understood field. Nothing magic or unexpected in microwave optics. Same with laser optics, but there the problems are a little harder because of the high power levels involved and you have to watch out for the power loses heating the mirrors. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 16 15:56:05 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:56:05 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:00 AM, BillK wrote: > Hey, nobody's certain! > This is the first time they have shown their calculations to the world. > Now we have to wait and see if they are torn to shreds by critics. Happening already over in Next Big Future. Given the people involved, not surprised one bit. Keith From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 16 17:52:07 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 09:52:07 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes > wrote: >> I meant, test the specific beam tracking & focusing mechanism >> the large sat would use. Comm sats don't try to focus their >> output on one particular point. > > Some do control where the beam power comes down. Ever seen one where > the microwave feeder out in front of a parabolic reflector is a mirror > image of the US? They switch the power around to get higher bandwidth > to particular spots on the ground. Big spots to be sure because of > the relatively small optics. Right, but do *you* have the specific blueprints that they used? Could you bend metal to put that particular thing together? Just because it's been done - even if it's been done many times - does not, by itself, mean that all further ventures will be able to do it. Yes, this is wasteful duplication of effort from certain perspectives, but that is how engineering projects proceed. From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sun Dec 16 18:21:04 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 10:21:04 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism (was: Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1355682064.63073.YahooMailClassic@web114401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> "spike" wrote: >... On Behalf Of BillK >...Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels ... >These kinds of schemes benefit greatly if we think of ways in which we could >be more tolerant of temporary lack or shortage of electrical power. Plus a load of other highly depressing stuff about the need to conserve energy. This is supposed to be good news? That we can possibly, maybe, get almost all of the energy that we are currently using from 'renewable' resources if we are very careful and reduce our need for energy as much as possible? Sorry, but I thought this was the extropian list, not the 'sustainability' list (where sustainability is just an euphemism for the long, slow slide into barbarism and extinction, barring any catastrophic extinction events that get us first). Note that the "ALL POWER" referred to, is all of our /current/ energy needs, not the considerably greater needs of a halfway-decent civisisation. Maybe I'm on my own here, but I won't settle for anything less than a *superabundance* of energy, enough energy that everyone can run their own simulated civilisation at whatever speed they wish, with enough left over to send interstellar probes to other stars at decent fractions of C, to build routers for those hardy explorers who don't mind being out of touch with the cradle of civilisation for a few subjective millennia. Plus keeping the TVs/internet connections/digital assistants/exoselves/whatever, of at least a few hundreds of billions of sophonts active *all the time*. I'm talking about a situation where the concept of 'brownout' is a quaint historical footnote that most people are blissfully unaware of, and the rest chuckle uneasily at the sheer poverty of the society that coined the term. Again, sorry if I offend anyone here, but I regard the sentiment behind the subject line of the ancestor of this post to be Failure Mode No. 1. As far as I can see, it signals the beginning of the end. Resident geniuses (you know who you are), please feel free to disabuse me of this notion. Or maybe there's some Cunning Plan that involves getting to energy superabundance via 'alternative' energy that I'm not aware of. I sincerely hope so. Ben Zaiboc, Extropian (who uses quotes around 'alternative' energy because there's no such thing. Energy is energy. There are just high- and low- density sources of it) From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 16 19:25:24 2012 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:25:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 16 December 2012 00:43, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Since we are at it, I wouldn't mind if humanity reached this blessed > immortal happy existential plateau, me included. No, I still would. But this is a moot issue, because ultimately stagnation is a short-term illusion, the actual alternative *at any level* to progress and growth being decadence, sclerosis and regression. This is true in Darwinian and human terms, and I do not expect, nor hope, it to change in any posthuman future. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Dec 16 19:45:40 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:45:40 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism (was: Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030) In-Reply-To: <1355682064.63073.YahooMailClassic@web114401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355682064.63073.YahooMailClassic@web114401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 12/16/12, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > This is supposed to be good news? > That we can possibly, maybe, get almost all of the energy that we are > currently using from 'renewable' resources if we are very careful and reduce > our need for energy as much as possible? > > Sorry, but I thought this was the extropian list, not the 'sustainability' > list (where sustainability is just an euphemism for the long, slow slide > into barbarism and extinction, barring any catastrophic extinction events > that get us first). > > Note that the "ALL POWER" referred to, is all of our /current/ energy needs, > not the considerably greater needs of a halfway-decent civisisation. Maybe > I'm on my own here, but I won't settle for anything less than a > *superabundance* of energy, enough energy that everyone can run their own > simulated civilisation at whatever speed they wish, with enough left over to > send interstellar probes to other stars at decent fractions of C, to build > routers for those hardy explorers who don't mind being out of touch with the > cradle of civilisation for a few subjective millennia. Plus keeping the > TVs/internet connections/digital assistants/exoselves/whatever, of at least > a few hundreds of billions of sophonts active *all the time*. > I'm talking about a situation where the concept of 'brownout' is a quaint > historical footnote that most people are blissfully unaware of, and the rest > chuckle uneasily at the sheer poverty of the society that coined the term. > > Again, sorry if I offend anyone here, but I regard the sentiment behind the > subject line of the ancestor of this post to be Failure Mode No. 1. As far > as I can see, it signals the beginning of the end. > > The problem that you and all of humanity face is how best to survive the next 20 years so that we are around to see the wonders of the Singularity. i.e. what should we be planning for NOW. Power satellites are at least 20 years away. Even building more nuclear power stations will take at least ten years before they start to come online. In the meantime the world faces very near future shortages of power, food, water and resources needed to maintain an ever-growing population. Estimates will vary, of course, as to when the shortages will become critical. But in the meantime, developing renewable energy sources seems like a very good idea. (And all of the above doesn't allow for a possible worldwide financial crash as well). BillK From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 16 21:31:30 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:31:30 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism (was: Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030) In-Reply-To: <1355682064.63073.YahooMailClassic@web114401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355682064.63073.YahooMailClassic@web114401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <039801cddbd4$b82f4df0$288de9d0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2012 10:21 AM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism (was: Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030) "spike" wrote: >... On Behalf Of BillK >...Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels ... >>...These kinds of schemes benefit greatly if we think of ways in which we could be more tolerant of temporary lack or shortage of electrical power. >...Plus a load of other highly depressing stuff about the need to conserve energy. >...This is supposed to be good news? Ben No, I don't claim it is good news. What I have a lot of is found in the extropian principles 3.0 number 3, Practical Optimism. The adjective practical is necessary in this context. (Note: before anyone is tempted to comment they like the principles 2.0 better, branch that discussion with a new subject line.) Ben, we have a lot of practical optimists here, technically trained, highly skilled, you among them. So we are ideally suited to deal with these kinds of mega-problems. Regarding what I see as the mega-problem staring us in the face, far far more urgent than the headline grabbing global warming notion, is that our low cost energy sources are gradually declining, and we seem to be making few and insufficient steps to compensate, at least in the short run. Regarding carbon combustion as a prime mover, which is where most energy comes from now and will continue for some time, even those among us who recognize dwindling low-cost energy availability as the primary threat also recognize that carbon dioxide does create greenhouse effect. That is an easy calculation. We also recognize that carbon dioxide is a ground state compound, so it doesn't break down. It is already down. Point: there is no point in denying that enough of the stuff can impact climate, and if it does, the rich industrialized nations will be largely blamed, and expected to pay for all the basket case pre-industrial places. Even if many recognize that carbon dioxide is only one player and that irrigation plays a big part in greenhouse effect, the big carbon dioxide producers will still be blamed. Do you see any flaws in my reasoning so far? If not, then consider: we as a species have plenty of tools to foresee what is coming, but we appear to be making almost no effective collective effort to deal with it. We might see something like Keith's vision come to fruition, but I see no indication there is even passing interest in it from those who have the means to make something like that happen. I conclude that regardless of what we do at this point, even with very optimistic assumptions on energy futures, we will pass through a time in which we will need to deal with high power costs, intermittency, under-voltages and so on. But another way to look at it is this: we need these kinds of discomforts in order to move us as a species. We are comfortable and conservative. We have grown fat and lazy on easily available oil that still gushes out of the ground. We want to stay that way. Until that starts to seriously dwindle, it will be hard to move us. But uncomfortable people use their heads and make things happen. Hungry people are aggressive and inventive. So this is my form of practical optimism: humanity will eventually solve our energy problems, but we will likely not do it before the low-hanging fruit is picked and devoured in its entirety. spike The rest of Ben's post left intact below: That we can possibly, maybe, get almost all of the energy that we are currently using from 'renewable' resources if we are very careful and reduce our need for energy as much as possible? Sorry, but I thought this was the extropian list, not the 'sustainability' list (where sustainability is just an euphemism for the long, slow slide into barbarism and extinction, barring any catastrophic extinction events that get us first). Note that the "ALL POWER" referred to, is all of our /current/ energy needs, not the considerably greater needs of a halfway-decent civisisation. Maybe I'm on my own here, but I won't settle for anything less than a *superabundance* of energy, enough energy that everyone can run their own simulated civilisation at whatever speed they wish, with enough left over to send interstellar probes to other stars at decent fractions of C, to build routers for those hardy explorers who don't mind being out of touch with the cradle of civilisation for a few subjective millennia. Plus keeping the TVs/internet connections/digital assistants/exoselves/whatever, of at least a few hundreds of billions of sophonts active *all the time*. I'm talking about a situation where the concept of 'brownout' is a quaint historical footnote that most people are blissfully unaware of, and the rest chuckle uneasily at the sheer poverty of the society that coined the term. Again, sorry if I offend anyone here, but I regard the sentiment behind the subject line of the ancestor of this post to be Failure Mode No. 1. As far as I can see, it signals the beginning of the end. Resident geniuses (you know who you are), please feel free to disabuse me of this notion. Or maybe there's some Cunning Plan that involves getting to energy superabundance via 'alternative' energy that I'm not aware of. I sincerely hope so. Ben Zaiboc, Extropian (who uses quotes around 'alternative' energy because there's no such thing. Energy is energy. There are just high- and low- density sources of it) _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Dec 17 14:51:08 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:51:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> "spike" replied: > > On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc > > >...This is supposed to be good news?? Ben > > > > No, I don't claim it is good news.? ... > Ben, we have a lot of practical > optimists here, > technically trained, highly skilled, you among them.? > So we are ideally > suited to deal with these kinds of mega-problems. You are too kind. All I can honestly lay claim to is the 'optimist' bit, though. > > Regarding what I see as the mega-problem staring us in the > face, ... >?Do you see any flaws in my reasoning so > far? None. > > If not, then consider: we as a species have plenty of tools > to foresee what > is coming, but we appear to be making almost no effective > collective effort > to deal with it.? We might see something like Keith's > vision come to > fruition, but I see no indication there is even passing > interest in it from > those who have the means to make something like that > happen. > > I conclude that ... we will pass > through a time in > which we will need to deal with high power costs, > intermittency, > under-voltages and so on.? But another way to look at > it is this: we need > these kinds of discomforts in order to move us as a > species.? We are > comfortable and conservative.? We have grown fat and > lazy on easily > available oil that still gushes out of the ground.? We > want to stay that > way.? Until that starts to seriously dwindle, it will > be hard to move us. > But uncomfortable people use their heads and make things > happen.? Hungry > people are aggressive and inventive.? So this is my > form of practical > optimism: humanity will eventually solve our energy > problems, but we will > likely not do it before the low-hanging fruit is picked and > devoured in its > entirety. OK, Spike, that counts as enough of a Cunning Plan in my book. My main problem was the way the original post seemed to be celebrating, rather than being dismayed at the prospect of 'alternative' energy providing almost all of our needs. After all, if it does, what incentive will there be to push beyond that? All the focus would then be on conservation of energy, to get that last 0.1% by cutting down on energy use, and sustaining the position by keeping it down (with the consequent inevitable decline that I mentioned). We'd better hope that 'alternative' falls short enough of our needs to stimulate a big effort to develop proper sources of superabundant energy. The problem with renewable energy is that it won't, by definition, run out, so just 'getting by' on it could last indefinitely. Not a good outcome. So here's a more optimistic headline: "Wind, solar has no chance of providing even 25% of our energy needs, so we'd better get off our fat arses and do something about it!" Ben Zaiboc From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 17 15:53:34 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 07:53:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes > wrote: >>> I meant, test the specific beam tracking & focusing mechanism >>> the large sat would use. Comm sats don't try to focus their >>> output on one particular point. >> >> Some do control where the beam power comes down. Ever seen one where >> the microwave feeder out in front of a parabolic reflector is a mirror >> image of the US? They switch the power around to get higher bandwidth >> to particular spots on the ground. Big spots to be sure because of >> the relatively small optics. > > Right, but do *you* have the specific blueprints that they used? > Could you bend metal to put that particular thing together? Why put the burden on me? Do you know how to refine and shape the aluminum in your soda can? Phase array radar antennas exist in the size of football fields. > Just because it's been done - even if it's been done many times - > does not, by itself, mean that all further ventures will be able to > do it. Yes, this is wasteful duplication of effort from certain > perspectives, but that is how engineering projects proceed. The problem with power satellites is *not* collecting power in space or beaming it to the ground. The problem is the uneconomically high cost to lift the parts to GEO. It's about a hundred times too expensive for power satellites to make economic sense. That's the urgent problem. And for fundamental physics reasons you can't start small. Keith PS. One of the reasons the power density is so low is that the original investigators were not sure of non linear interaction of microwaves with the ionosphere. The set the power limit low to be sure problems would not arise. Full size and full power testing is the only way to be completely sure this will work. To do that, you have to build a power satellite. And given the cost to lift parts to space, it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them than it is to build just one. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 17 16:07:27 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:07:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:00 AM, "spike" wrote: snip > If not, then consider: we as a species have plenty of tools to foresee what > is coming, but we appear to be making almost no effective collective effort > to deal with it. We might see something like Keith's vision come to > fruition, Spike, as one who has been here for the whole process, you should remember that it's been less than a year since I was able warp Jordin Kare's concepts into a form that closed the business case, i.e., made a ton to money from selling power satellites. There is a kind of social time constant where even ideas of major importance take time to spread out, especially ones that require marshaling resources on the scale of a medium sized war. On the other hand, a solution to carbon has suddenly become sought after and may become more of a factor than power. > but I see no indication there is even passing interest in it from > those who have the means to make something like that happen. A major government is taking a close look at the proposal. I should be able to say more in a few months. If this comes about it will be one of the fastest acceptances of an idea in history. The offer is still open for those want to read though a moderately dense paper. Keith From ablainey at aol.com Mon Dec 17 16:10:30 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:10:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8CFAA882B2596A6-660-1B30B@webmail-d189.sysops.aol.com> Is the answer then not to use 75% or more less? We have huge inefficiencies in the generation and distribution system coupled with the consumerism production waste of energy. A late 1800's Victorian water turbine was recently refurbished here in the UK and only needed a guide vane replaced. A simple flat piece of metal curved at one end. Previously it had a couple of fixing bolts replaced in the 1970's at the cost of a few ?'s. Look at that kind of bullet proof built to last technology which has harnessed millions of KW in energy and compare to a modern squirrel cage wind turbine that needs electricity to run along with constant maintenance and a short life expectancy. There is a lot of savings that could be made using existing and old school technology. Even old school production vs modern material scrimping as the above water turbine proves. We often believe that minimising materials, lighter, smaller etc is better and greener. All things considered it usually isn't. Personally I have just installed a woodburning stove and have slapped a couple of TEG modules on the side. It is running a couple of cree LED's to light the room. This is via a joule thief circuit which improves efficiency. A perfect example of how reducing energy consumption (via pmw light production vs constant light) and using old and new tech combined can meet the need without resorting to fanciful solutions which cost a fortune. And its carbon neutral. Surely this kind of decentralized solution is far better than providing me with energy sourced from some new solar satellite. Just so I can continue to light and heat my room inefficiently? Just to add. My home is actually older than that Victorian turbine. It bleeds heat yet I am legally not allowed to what is needed to insulate due to planning regulations (facepalm!). One one hand we are being forcibly taxed in order to make us go green, yet we are also being prevented from doing so by the very same people. Ludicrous! In fact I have broken several laws by installing the woodburner myself and the addition of the TEG's which are unproved under existing electrical building regs. optimistic? As a species far from it. From a personal view, yes. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Zaiboc To: extropy-chat Sent: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:13 Subject: Re: [ExI] Energy Defeatism >So here's a more optimistic headline: >"Wind, solar has no chance of providing even 25% of our energy needs, so we'd >better get off our fat arses and do something about it!" > >Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Dec 17 17:21:58 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 09:21:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:53 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> Right, but do *you* have the specific blueprints that they used? > >> Could you bend metal to put that particular thing together? > > Why put the burden on me? Because you are the one who is making the proposal. Even if you hire someone else to do it, they're still going to have to prove out the systems. This is so ingrained in engineering startups, that practically all sources of financing for them require that such iterative steps be followed. Proposing to just put the satellite up without these steps is as unworkable as proposing to design and make an all-electric supersonic airliner that will take paying customers without any flight testing. Or to design and make a new class of rocket that will take payloads to orbit, without testing any of the subsystems. Or to design and make a new automobile for sale to the general public, without putting it through the usual array of safety tests. You complain about the difficulty of getting all the funding needed to do this thing. I am telling you how to change your plan to reduce this from "impossible" to merely "very hard". Yes, it's going to add more steps. You'd have to do them eventually. > Do you know how to refine and shape the > aluminum in your soda can? As it happens, I do. Though I am not proposing to make soda cans, so this is irrelevant. > The problem with power satellites is *not* collecting power in space > or beaming it to the ground. Actually, it is *a* problem. There may be larger problems, but that doesn't mean the smaller ones can be ignored. More importantly, demonstrating that you can solve what you are certain you can solve, directly helps with the bigger problem: getting the money to put the large satellite into space. > And for fundamental physics reasons you can't start small. Not to get useful amounts of power, true. That doesn't mean you can't prove the systems without spending a lot of money - which proof you will need, in order to get the money to build the full-sized version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_plant Pilot plants exist for a reason, even if they likewise run into constraints of physics that keep their output to "measurable" rather than "useful". > it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them > than it is to build just one. Actually, when you factor in the cost of capital acquisition on this scale, it might prove to be cheaper to build just one. (At least at first: costs come down the more financiers can be certain that not only will the idea work, but that you - or whatever specific persons are doing the asking - can in fact pull it off. This is why startups and large companies make such a big deal over who their CxOs are - you and I might see it as overhyped, but the people who provide the money think differently than you and I.) From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Dec 17 18:11:42 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:11:42 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: <50CD9B67.5040101@aleph.se> References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> <50CD9B67.5040101@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Dec 2012, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Many people overestimate the amount of military activity in the Roman > empire. Sure, they were fighting left and right at the borders, but the > vast interior was (when not having a civil war) mostly peaceful and > doing trade, agriculture and the usual commerce of a civilization. They > had great civil engineering prowess, but there were no new geometrical > or mathematical results under the Republic or Empire, no mathematicians > of note, and nothing we would call science. Oh. When I wrote "Romans (and other ancients)" I meant Greeks, too. Sorry for misunderstanding. I think we should limit extent of our dispute to ancient Romans and Greeks and to medieval Christian Europe. Because, of course, there were direct inheritors of Antiquity - Muslims, who translated Greek works into Arabic and built all those great stuff, proto gliders and human shaped automatons and whatnot and speculated about atomic bombs. And there were Chinese, too, who kept up with rest of the world while not inventing for quite a long time. To be frank, at first I wanted to agree with your theses, I am no historian so I wanted to let go. But after a while I decided I would not agree, at least not this time :-). > Everybody raves about the loss of cement, but forgets that the Romans > had de facto lost the academy/university of the Greeks. Well, everybody raves about loss of the Athenian Academia and the Alexandrian Library, but forget that for all the vast geographical space which knew any Greek influence, only those two are worthy enough to be mentioned after two thousand years. Sure, there were philosophers living between Syracuse and Damascus, but I don't remember any Greek philosopher or writer living between Damascus and Indus river. Even Greeks themselves were not uniform, Spartans for one example disregarded anything that they could not use in support of their warfare. I think Romans were, simply put, results-oriented folks. And good for them. Because from all Greek science, only few theories can be considered a foundation of modern science, and only to some extent. The rest was junk, theories of humors and elements, number juggling and other stuff we'd call pseudoscience nowadays. I cannot be sure (not enough data, does not compute) but maybe they did right when they kept what _worked_ and ditched everything else. > A medieval person would actually have noted that they were low-tech: no > stirrups, no knitting, no three-field crop rotation, no heavy plough, no > blast furnaces, no complex mechanical systems (Romans had some, but they > were special siege engines, while Medieval towns were replete with > cranes, mills and crude clockworks). The medieval guy would have been > impressed by the scale and overall wealth of the Romans, but he would > know plenty of things they did not know. Well, you may be right about Romans, I am not a historian. But I will try to defend them a bit. As a side note, I wouldn't bet this relation would hold with Greeks. I think a typical Greek was much more exposed to technology, with automatons standing in public space in some cities, from what I have read, and various mechanized special effects employed in entertainment (both on the streets and in theatres, I suppose). [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria ] Also: "The animated figures stand Adorning every public street And seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton#Ancient_automata ] The question arises if a typical Greek knew there were strict rules behind the works of such automaton, rather than small gods running inside and turning the wheels. I don't know. When it comes to Romans, they were not the last folks either. "Mainly known for his writings, Vitruvius was himself an architect. In Roman times architecture was a broader subject than at present including the modern fields of architecture, construction management, construction engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, military engineering and urban planning" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius ] So I would speculate their engineering was more like practical science rather than repetition of learned rules. BTW, roads! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_road#Via_munita ] BTW2, a water clock was easy to make and it could be quite accurate, surpassed only by pendulum clock, but this happened ca. 350 years ago: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock ] [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens#Clocks ] Overally, I side with Greeks, but not as much as you seem to. They and Romans were different, can be demonstrated by comparing their attitudes towards education: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ancient_Rome ] [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ancient_Greece ] OTOH I don't think Romans were unworthy their salt :-). As of Roman technological advances, you might see this: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology#Technologies_invented_or_developed_by_the_Romans ] To name the few, books, portable abacus, glass windows, newspapers, ball bearing, stenography, sewers... Hard soap!! My favorite. Also they were the first to use water-powered mills and wheeled plough. Or so it seems. Now, about medieval... I wonder what kind of things a medieval guy would know better than ancient Roman? From what I've read, Romans had better literacy rates. At least I remember reading that it wasn't unusual for grunt soldier to sign his name. Romans used indoor plumbing in their houses and they knew flush toilets. Medieval sanitation, I'm afraid, was a poorly smelling joke. [ http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.national-geographic.pl%2Fdrukuj-artykul%2Fnieczysta-troska-o-higiene%2F ] The translation is a bit flaky, but it says ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Romans used flush toilets, among other sanitary devices, whereas in Versailles they installed first toilet in 1768 AD. In favour of medievals, educated folk knew zero and Arabic/Indian numerals. I mean, if we define Medieval Age as starting after fall of Rome and ending somewhere around Gutenberg's press, fall of Byzantium and discovery of USA by Columbus, it's about thousand years. Renaissance is not included into this era. I know it wasn't as "dark" as some would like it to be, and there were smaller, Church-or-kings-inspired renaissances before the Big One, but OTOH was there really such a huge development during this long period of time? Even if we compare to previous thousand years and agree second half of it (Roman half) was stagnation, which I think it was not. Of course, there were great men in Medieval period, too. Like Roger Bacon. But I also see that both ancient and medieval world view, including their science, was a mix of acceptable and strange, ranging from observations that are a basis of modern science, to numerology, theory of humors, elements, claims of celestial bodies posessing souls etc. Actually "the strange element" of science persisted well into 18-19 century. Isaac Newton, for example, was not only founder of modern science, but an alchemist and occultist, searching for philosopher's stone and elixir of life (he also predicted that world would end after 2060, which coincides with predicted Coming of Singularity, which in effect would make him obligatory member of some Transhumanist circles ;-) ). [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies ] So, to sum this all, I am still of opinion that ancient (Greek and Roman) guys were, on average, better developed than medieval guys (in Christian Europe). At least if we limit ourselves to judging only science and technology. Maybe ancients had no recent fancy inventions, maybe their tech was crude sometimes, compared to later guys. On the other hand, whatever they had, they used it better IMHO. Even if I were somewhat wrong, maybe it's better to be wrong with Romans, because AFAIK their shit worked, mostly. An alternative would be engaging into questionable searches for questionable shit envisaged by some wise guys which mostly didn't worked, only sometimes produced wonderful results. Sincere, Thomas Arvus, foederatus Poloniae, barbarus et ingeniarius, programmator et centurio computatri -- ** Linguae C programmator quaeritur, utrum computer quod habebat Buddha ** natura. Sicut responsum, magister fecerunt "rm-rif" in programmer ** scriptor domum presul. Et tunc C programmator factus illuminantur ... (Well, ok, it would be better if I really learned Latin in any systematic way) From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 01:10:53 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:10:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Simulation Message-ID: quote: Do we live in a computer simulation? How to test the idea. December 13, 2012 The concept that we could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But [...] MORE | http://kurzweilai.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=aad1a7eea269839c7d10845e8&id=b17cb246ee&e=6ccbd62dbf /quote http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-uw-researchers-say-idea-can-be-tested/ It's a topic that was discussed on this list in the early days. So I responded, but the comment might be too long or something. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ The roots of the simulation argument go way back, but the current speculation may be due to a conversation I had with Hans Moravec at the first Artificial Life Conference in 1987. Hans had a manuscript copy of Mind Children and was excitedly talking about the ever-falling cost of computational resources and what we could do with them. I stopped him with "Hans, do you realize how unlikely it is that this the first time we have had this conversation?" Hans looked totally blank, a rare expression for one the brightest people I know. I went on picking up from where Hans had been and making the point that the future would be able to model the past, including the whole 20th century. And, like Society for Creative Anachronism or Civil War reenactments, they would do it many times, making the chance that this was the first time we had this conversation nearly zero. Hans later put it this way in an essay "Pigs in Cyberspace." "If these minds spend only an infinitesimal fraction of their energy contemplating the human past, their sheer power should ensure that eventually our entire history is replayed many times in many places, and in many variations. The very moment we are now experiencing may actually be (almost certainly is) such a distributed mental event, and most likely is a complete fabrication that never happened physically. Alas, there is no way to sort it out from our perspective: we can only wallow in the scenery." http://www.primitivism.com/pig... At the time, I was just pulling Han's leg. I had no idea it would start a cottage industry in the philosophy (and physics) departments. Keith From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 18 03:58:23 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:58:23 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <009e01cddcd3$edf59fc0$c9e0df40$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc ... >...OK, Spike, that counts as enough of a Cunning Plan in my book... Cool thanks, I am a big fan of cunning plans. >...My main problem was the way the original post seemed to be celebrating, rather than being dismayed at the prospect of 'alternative' energy providing almost all of our needs... Oh ja, I am way past that. Ben look around you. If you do for more than a few seconds, you will see waste everywhere. Energy abundance has enabled appalling waste. This is in a way, a good thing, because it allows us to cut back a lot while identifying and saving that which is most important. That was really my point. I have mentioned in this forum way too often that transportation is an example of an area where we could cut waaaay back on energy use, and still manage to get around in a timely manner, even if not quite as fast and in as satisfying a manner as we do now. Agriculture and food distribution is perhaps the biggest energy user, bigger than HVAC and transportation, and this too has plenty of room for improvement. >...After all, if it does, what incentive will there be to push beyond that?... The avoidance of utter catastrophe and the end of civilization as we currently know and enjoy it. That is one hell of an incentive. >... All the focus would then be on conservation of energy, to get that last 0.1% by cutting down on energy use, and sustaining the position by keeping it down (with the consequent inevitable decline that I mentioned)... Ja, I completely disagree with the notion in the original article that it is feasible in the short term to get to 99.9% renewable energy sources. We are a loooong way from that, and even if we get there, it will take enormous investment and tolerance of temporary shortages. It really does: if you doubt, set up some kind of reasonable scenario using only known current technology and make the estimates. If you have ever had a camper that operates on batteries and natural gas, you know exactly what I am talking about: going off-grid is a compromise. I can imagine getting to 70% renewables in 20 yrs if we get on it, spend a ton of money and tolerate spot shortages. >...We'd better hope that 'alternative' falls short enough of our needs to stimulate a big effort to develop proper sources of superabundant energy. The problem with renewable energy is that it won't, by definition, run out, so just 'getting by' on it could last indefinitely. Not a good outcome... Hmmm, OK, but look carefully at the first of these previous three sentences. Suppose we get really uncomfortable living on mostly renewables, and we successfully stimulate a big effort to develop proper sources and so on, and we get not one goddam thing back from that big effort? Oy, that is a possibility, one that worries me. We have spent a ton of money on nuke fusion energy for instance, but none of it has paid. Just today I was in the Seattle airport and the power was down. I was given a good firsthand look at how our commerce system doesn't work right without steady power and steady computer intercommunications. Just getting a rental car was a huge headache. >...So here's a more optimistic headline: "Wind, solar has no chance of providing even 25% of our energy needs, so we'd better get off our fat arses and do something about it!" Ben Zaiboc I am so with you there, Ben. Of course I am all about engineering solutions, being an enthusiastic engineer myself. So much "engineering" effort in our world today is really merely marketing. We bend the metal slightly differently and put on a different paint pattern and different rims on these Detroits and let that pass as automotive engineering, when they are really all about the same thing. We are comfortable and we don't want change. I want us as a species to recognize that we need to manage the coming changes before the coming changes manage us. spike From brentn at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 04:42:57 2012 From: brentn at gmail.com (Brent Neal) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:42:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I'm a little late to the party here in this thread, but I am completely on-board with the idea of Practical Optimism. The way I think Practical Optimism applies in this particular case - and thus why I am optimistic about the future of energy - is that our global economy is rapid shifting to one where the fundamental unit of wealth is the ability to direct the use of a unit of energy. (One could argue, and many have when I've spoken about this in various public forums, that this has always been the case. I'm not an economic historian, so I won't speculate.) If wealth is tied to energy, when wealth becomes scarce, all of a sudden a -lot- of people are interested in increasing the supply of energy. This is likely why the as-yet-unnamed government agency that Keith is talking to is talking to Keith. :) (So, Keith, my bet is Japan, given the Fukushima Daiichi issue and the sea-change in the attitudes of the Japanese towards nukes. Also, I did finish digging through the spreadsheets you sent me a while back and got lazy/busy before I could follow-up with you about them.) I am optimistic about SBSP, though I think the primary obstacles will turn out to be political rather than physical. I'm still optimistic on enhanced geothermal and thorium cycle fission as well, though I recall that thorium cycle reactors are a hot-button issue here. But the bottom line is that I trust people to act to maximize wealth in aggregate and in the modern economy, the best way to do that is to increase the supply of energy. B -- Brent Neal, Ph.D. http://www.brentneal.me From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 05:23:10 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:23:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Holiday season: Carol for Another Christmas, by Rod Serling Message-ID: I had never before heard of this contemporary take by Rod Serling, on the classic, "A Christmas Carol." And I have yet to see the film. It apparently has a scene where the ghost of Christmas Future gives his passenger a tour of an apocalyptic world ravaged by a nuclear war. >From the Wikipedia entry: Film critic Bhob Stewart provided some background on the production: Presented without commercial interruptions, this "United NationsSpecial" was sponsored by the Xerox Corporation , the first of a series of Xerox specials promoting the UN. Director Joseph Mankiewicz's first work for television, the 90-minute ABCdrama was publicized as having an all-star cast (which meant that names of some supporting cast members were not officially released). In Rod Serling's update of Charles Dickens, industrial tycoon Daniel Grudge (Sterling Hayden) has never recovered from the loss of his 22-year-old son Marley (Peter Fonda ), killed in action during Christmas Eve of 1944. The embittered Grudge has only scorn for any American involvement in international affairs. But then the Ghost of Christmas Past (Steve Lawrence) takes him back through time to a World War Itroopship. Grudge also is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present (Pat Hingle ), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Shaw) gives him a tour across a desolate landscape where he sees the ruins of a once-great civilization. In the final weeks of post-production, Peter Fonda's scenes were deleted, but his image remained in the film, recognizable in a portrait on the wall.[2] >>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_for_Another_Christmas John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 18 05:50:15 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:50:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001c01cddce3$8eab4b90$ac01e2b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Brent Neal Subject: Re: [ExI] Energy Defeatism I'm a little late to the party here in this thread, but I am completely on-board with the idea of Practical Optimism. >...The way I think Practical Optimism applies in this particular case - and thus why I am optimistic about the future of energy - is that our global economy is rapid shifting to one where the fundamental unit of wealth is the ability to direct the use of a unit of energy...(Dr. Brent) Ja! The winner is the guy who can turn out the most using the least. So far it isn't so much that way, because we have had so much disposable energy. I like the notion of a world that is inherited not by the meek, not by the militarily most powerful, not the meanest bastard on the block, not by the biggest breeder, but a world that is inherited by the most technologically advanced and efficient. spike From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 05:31:06 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:31:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Holiday season: Carol for Another Christmas, by Rod Serling In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >From Wikipedia: Turner Classic Movies has recently announced that it will telecast *Carol for Another Christmas* for the first time in forty-eight years, on December 16 and 22, 2012. [3] >>> And so this Saturday, Dec. 22nd, it will be rebroadcast! John : ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 09:59:29 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:59:29 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:34:58 +1300, Keith Henson wrote: >> From: "Andrew Mckee" >> Is chasing 100% utilization really worth the expense of putting a PV array in orbit? >> >> What am I missing here? > > Lots. Particularly transmission cost and storage costs. Maybe not so much, I caught your original post about StratoSolar a while back. And like many commentators on TOD had the initial reaction that even if a tethered solution could work from an engineering perspective, the NIMBY crowd are going to a have field day tearing that proposal to shreds. IMHO seems like a better idea to go untethered so the array can be put anywhere the NIMBYs can't object to it, and as already pointed out use the power generated to extract water from the lower atmosphere and make some kind of liquid fuel from it. I picked liquid hydrogen, more as a convenience factor since I envisioned a lot of hydrogen being needed just to lift everything required in the first place, plus its possible use in a gazillion fuel cells when that long overdue thing called the hydrogen fuel economy actually starts becoming a significant reality. > And just how do you propose to move power plants from the arctic? Power plants???, if you mean shifting energy around, I would've gone for using high altitude airships shipping liquid hydrogen to where its needed much like the oil industry does currently. If you meant the stratospheric PV arrays, I imagined the rafts being built as semi rigid modules with tilting PV panels on the roof and storage and directional thrusters bolted underneath so that the modules can transport themselves around and contribute to the yearly migration to and from the polar skies. > I know a good deal about this topic. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8323 Yep, no worries, as far as I'm concerned your THE GotoGuy for advice on such matters. > If you really want to go through the details, ask. Though there are... Well I am still somewhat puzzled why you seem to be a frequent supporter of space based solar despite the number of show stopping problems it faces, but seem (and it could be just me) somewhat less enthusiastic about StratoPV type approaches when it seems that they could be pressed into service for far less cost, and without any great technology breakthroughs as far as I can see. Apologies in advance if I've simply misread your intention's, but it's in the back of my mind that maybe you have stated somewhere I've missed (entirely possible) that stratospheric structures can't work with our current level of technology due to the e.g. 180 km/h winds blowing through the stratosphere every few years wrecking any structure we can build that can float that high. From andymck35 at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 08:09:12 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:09:12 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: <009e01cddcd3$edf59fc0$c9e0df40$@att.net> References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <009e01cddcd3$edf59fc0$c9e0df40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:58:23 +1300, spike wrote: > about: going off-grid is a compromise. I can imagine getting to 70% > renewables in 20 yrs if we get on it, spend a ton of money and tolerate spot > shortages. Excuse me while I smirk a little, here in New Zealand we used to be around 85% hydro and geothermal power production, since then we've de-comissioned at least one coal fired powerplant I know of and setup some wind farms, and there is talk of trialling an undersea tidal generator. So 90%+ renewable power generation here looks more like being inevitable rather than a struggle to achieve. YMMV ;-) From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 18 17:41:56 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:41:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Mckee Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:59 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:34:58 +1300, Keith Henson wrote: >> From: "Andrew Mckee" Is chasing 100% >> utilization really worth the expense of putting a PV array in orbit? >> >> What am I missing here? > > Lots. Particularly transmission cost and storage costs. >...Maybe not so much, I caught your original post about StratoSolar a while back. And like many commentators on TOD had the initial reaction that even if a tethered solution could work from an engineering perspective, the NIMBY crowd are going to a have field day tearing that proposal to shreds... When we are warm, well fed and comfortable, the conservative NIMBY crowd and conservative conservationist crowd has enormous power. Some find my adjectives conservative puzzling in this regard since the liberal or progressive side of the political spectrum is more closely associated with NIMBY and environmentalism, but if you think it over, these two groups are conservatives. We are all conservatives in this sense: we have grown fat and lazy on easy energy, and we want to stay that way. Good luck to us. Regarding the rest of the post, regarding energy ideas, I propose that those who post on the topic, if you have the engineering expertise to do just top-level order of magnitude-ish BOTECs, do them and include the basis of your estimates. For instance, if you suggest a lighter than air solar panel powered device that extracts water from the air and converts it to hydrogen, estimate the size, the energy produced under best-case conditions, take the minimum power needed to extract a kg of water from the wettest air, the energy needed to crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, and estimate the value of the products. Then with just BOTECs, most ideas would be rejected immediately: they will not pay, not now, not later. The proposed estimation exercise is valuable to help us develop an intuition regarding which energy schemes are likely to be feasible and which ones do not deserve a minute of our attention. Furthermore, the practice is good for our engineering skills, and perhaps most importantly, it yanks us out of our conservative complacency, filling us with a sense of urgency about an enormous problem staring us in the face. If we can somehow harness the energy and enthusiasm that the global warming crowd has generated, we can solve the bigger problem of transition to sustainable energy sources, and the global warming problem will be solved along with it, or at least improved. Last point: from an engineering point of view, energy conservation is where most of the low-hanging fruit is to be found, even now, has been for decades and likely will be for the immediately foreseeable. Aggressive energy conservation makes us less comfortable, which stimulates deep thinking and investment. Until you can show calculations to the contrary, do eschew automatically rejecting the notion, even though it fills us with revulsion (me included, I like going fast.) Aggressive energy conservation will certainly be a factor among many in the energy balance equation in the coming decades, regardless of which course humanity chooses. spike From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 18 17:48:14 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:48:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <009e01cddcd3$edf59fc0$c9e0df40$@att.net> Message-ID: <007b01cddd47$db5e0180$921a0480$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Mckee Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 12:09 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Energy Defeatism On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:58:23 +1300, spike wrote: >> about: going off-grid is a compromise. I can imagine getting to 70% > renewables in 20 yrs if we get on it, spend a ton of money and > tolerate spot shortages. >...Excuse me while I smirk a little, here in New Zealand we used to be around 85% hydro and geothermal power production, since then we've de-comissioned at least one coal fired powerplant I know of and setup some wind farms, and there is talk of trialling an undersea tidal generator... Excellent, good work New Zealand. The USA is a huge energy consumer and we have very little geothermal resources that are not already being exploited. Regarding falling water, we have harnessed most of the available hydro power, and our conservatives complain loudly about even that, urging that we take out the currently existing hydro power, so we can have wild rivers again. >...So 90%+ renewable power generation here looks more like being inevitable rather than a struggle to achieve. >...YMMV ;-) _______________________________________________ True, and good work Kiwis. But New Zealand doesn't have near the population densities and growth pressure we yanks have, nor nearly the hordes of immigrants willing and eager to break the law to come here and breed like crazy, making our energy problems worse every day. Not only have we not stabilized our population as New Zealand has done, we cannot. So we need to get going on energy solutions. spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 19:58:32 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:58:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:53 AM, Keith Henson wrote: snip >> The problem with power satellites is *not* collecting power in space >> or beaming it to the ground. > > Actually, it is *a* problem. There may be larger problems, but > that doesn't mean the smaller ones can be ignored. > > More importantly, demonstrating that you can solve what you > are certain you can solve, directly helps with the bigger problem: > getting the money to put the large satellite into space. You forget that I have specifically disavowed raising money. That's beyond my skill set. OK, if the people who can raise the money say they have to demonstrate things like power beaming before they can raise the money, fine. They can raise the money to do whatever they think is needed to raise the rest of the money. snip >> it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them >> than it is to build just one. > > Actually, when you factor in the cost of capital acquisition > on this scale, it might prove to be cheaper to build just one. Let's put numbers on it. One power sat, 25,000,000 kg x $10,000 per kg, $250 B for the transport alone. Setting up the parts pipeline and building the first one I have estimated at $140 B. > (At least at first: costs come down the more financiers can > be certain that not only will the idea work, but that you - or > whatever specific persons are doing the asking - can in > fact pull it off. This is why startups and large companies > make such a big deal over who their CxOs are - you and I > might see it as overhyped, but the people who provide the > money think differently than you and I.) There I agree with you. One high powered CEO required. What would you think of David Petraeus in that role? "Andrew Mckee" wrote: > > On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:34:58 +1300, Keith Henson wrote: > >>> From: "Andrew Mckee" >>> Is chasing 100% utilization really worth the expense of putting a PV array in orbit? >>> >>> What am I missing here? >> >> Lots. Particularly transmission cost and storage costs. > > Maybe not so much, I caught your original post about StratoSolar a while back. > And like many commentators on TOD had the initial reaction that even if a tethered solution could work from an engineering perspective, the NIMBY crowd are going to a have field day tearing that proposal to shreds. > > IMHO seems like a better idea to go untethered so the array can be put anywhere the NIMBYs can't object to it, And how are you going to keep it there? The subject has been considered in depth by people who want a platform they can keep over disputed territory like Afghanistan and earlier, Iraq. Some of the time there is enough power from the solar cells to keep it in place. But far below the maximum expected wind it can't station keep and gets blown down wind. Now you have it crossing boarders like Iran and Russia. > and as already pointed out use the power generated to extract water from the lower atmosphere and make some kind of liquid fuel from it. > I picked liquid hydrogen, I have looked into producing LH2 in vast amounts since a power satellite project uses upwards of 240 tons per hour. http://www.scribd.com/doc/46580743/A-Future-Energy-Chain-Based-on-Liquefied-Hydrogen But I have not considered the mass of the machines needed to make and liquefy the hydrogen. It may be in the tens of thousands of tons. Storage is going to be difficult too. > more as a convenience factor since I envisioned a lot of hydrogen being needed just to lift everything required in the first place, plus its possible use in a gazillion fuel cells when that long overdue thing called the hydrogen fuel economy actually starts becoming a significant reality. >> And just how do you propose to move power plants from the arctic? > > Power plants???, if you mean shifting energy around, I would've gone for using high altitude airships shipping liquid hydrogen to where its needed much like the oil industry does currently. > > If you meant the stratospheric PV arrays, I imagined the rafts being built as semi rigid modules with tilting PV panels on the roof and storage and directional thrusters bolted underneath so that the modules can transport themselves around and contribute to the yearly migration to and from the polar skies. This might be possible without burning off too much hydrogen during the move. >> I know a good deal about this topic. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8323 > > Yep, no worries, as far as I'm concerned your THE GotoGuy for advice on such matters. > >> If you really want to go through the details, ask. Though there are... > > Well I am still somewhat puzzled why you seem to be a frequent supporter of space based solar despite the number of show stopping problems it faces, but seem (and it could be just me) somewhat less enthusiastic about StratoPV type approaches when it seems that they could be pressed into service for far less cost, and without any great technology breakthroughs as far as I can see. On the prospect that StratoSolar could make power for a lower cost than power satellites, I worked on it for about two years. It finally developed so many engineering problems that Ed Kelly was forced from the thermal type into a PV design that was more likely to work but more expensive than what is required to displace fossil fuels (and while it is above the clouds, it has the night problem of ground solar). And even so, that design has a number of unsolved problems. > Apologies in advance if I've simply misread your intention's, but it's in the back of my mind that maybe you have stated somewhere I've missed (entirely possible) that stratospheric structures can't work with our current level of technology due to the e.g. 180 km/h winds blowing through the stratosphere every few years wrecking any structure we can build that can float that high. We can probably cope with the winds even with tethered units, though it complicates the design. If you can just let them float downwind, then there is relatively little force on them, only the shear forces. I know someone who is interested in this concept. I don't know if he has done the mass estimates, will ask. Keith From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Dec 18 20:13:33 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:13:33 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] what if In-Reply-To: References: <003301cdd8fb$0c9e8a40$25db9ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Dec 2012, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 16 December 2012 00:43, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > Since we are at it, I wouldn't mind if humanity reached this blessed > > immortal happy existential plateau, me included. > > > No, I still would. Ah, that's ok. But I still wouldn't. > But this is a moot issue, because ultimately stagnation is a short-term > illusion, the actual alternative *at any level* to progress and growth > being decadence, sclerosis and regression. > > This is true in Darwinian and human terms, and I do not expect, nor hope, > it to change in any posthuman future. If I had this much time as the transition implies, I would do my best to not stagnate. And I would not stay here, because gossiping is not really interesting and to gossip for longer than 1 second objective time (which should be enough to catalogue all possible variations of this with cyberminds cheet-chating to each other) is indeed a sign of retardation. Ditto for strippokering and banging virtual hostesses. Of course, looking at biological humans and their ways, I would not be surprised if retardation followed them into cyberspace. But joining this happy monkey train is not on my priority list. I only might help with building the railways. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From ablainey at aol.com Tue Dec 18 20:26:34 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:26:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> Well we can both claim some prior credit for this old chestnut although I can't say it was something I was seriously considering back in 87. I did certainly put forward the probability factor based upon future simulation before Nicks paper. I also put forward the idea that the "weirdness" of quantum mechanics *could* be a proof of some abstraction layer between our simulation and the reality below/above it. The thing I really love about simulation theory above all else is the possibility that absolutely anything is possible in a sim. So we could be in the version where we all sprout wings next week. Knowing my luck we are in the version where rocks rain from the sky for no reason and against all known laws on the 21st. Perhaps as a result of us proving our reality is artificial thus we corrupt the data for our specific run? Maybe the dinosaurs were actually great philosophers and did the same. -----Original Message----- From: Keith Henson To: ExI chat list Sent: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 1:49 Subject: [ExI] Simulation quote: Do we live in a computer simulation? How to test the idea. December 13, 2012 The concept that we could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But [...] MORE | http://kurzweilai.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=aad1a7eea269839c7d10845e8&id=b17cb246ee&e=6ccbd62dbf /quote http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-uw-researchers-say-idea-can-be-tested/ It's a topic that was discussed on this list in the early days. So I responded, but the comment might be too long or something. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ The roots of the simulation argument go way back, but the current speculation may be due to a conversation I had with Hans Moravec at the first Artificial Life Conference in 1987. Hans had a manuscript copy of Mind Children and was excitedly talking about the ever-falling cost of computational resources and what we could do with them. I stopped him with "Hans, do you realize how unlikely it is that this the first time we have had this conversation?" Hans looked totally blank, a rare expression for one the brightest people I know. I went on picking up from where Hans had been and making the point that the future would be able to model the past, including the whole 20th century. And, like Society for Creative Anachronism or Civil War reenactments, they would do it many times, making the chance that this was the first time we had this conversation nearly zero. Hans later put it this way in an essay "Pigs in Cyberspace." "If these minds spend only an infinitesimal fraction of their energy contemplating the human past, their sheer power should ensure that eventually our entire history is replayed many times in many places, and in many variations. The very moment we are now experiencing may actually be (almost certainly is) such a distributed mental event, and most likely is a complete fabrication that never happened physically. Alas, there is no way to sort it out from our perspective: we can only wallow in the scenery." http://www.primitivism.com/pig... At the time, I was just pulling Han's leg. I had no idea it would start a cottage industry in the philosophy (and physics) departments. Keith _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 20:18:13 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:18:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > You forget that I have specifically disavowed raising money. That's > beyond my skill set. If you wish to solve this problem, then you must add that to your skill set, given the budget you request. Many, many would-be megaproject engineers found this out the hard way after decades of failure. But we are transhumanists, are we not? Do we not believe in our ability to improve ourselves beyond our present limitations? :) > OK, if the people who can raise the money say they have to demonstrate > things like power beaming before they can raise the money, fine. They > can raise the money to do whatever they think is needed to raise the > rest of the money. Now you're asking the money-raising people to do engineering: for them to demonstrate beam tracking and so on. You need to demonstrate beam tracking before your project can have the full budget raised for it. >>> it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them >>> than it is to build just one. >> >> Actually, when you factor in the cost of capital acquisition >> on this scale, it might prove to be cheaper to build just one. > > Let's put numbers on it. Only if you include the cost of capital acquisition. > There I agree with you. One high powered CEO required. What would > you think of David Petraeus in that role? Not a bad first thought, but insufficient experience in technical projects. What would you think of Keith Henson in that role? ;) Upgraded with more skills, perhaps - but skills can be learned. From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 17:06:37 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:06:37 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Why we can't solve Big Problems Message-ID: MIT Technology Review has a controversial article, by Jason Pontin on October 24, 2012 That something happened to humanity?s capacity to solve big problems is a commonplace. Recently, however, the complaint has developed a new stridency among Silicon Valley?s investors and entrepreneurs, although it is usually expressed a little differently: people say there is a paucity of real innovations. Instead, they worry, technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys. The motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, is ?We wanted flying cars?instead we got 140 characters.? Thiel is caustic: last year he told the New Yorker that he didn?t consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. ?Compare [it] with the Apollo program,? he said.The Internet is ?a net plus?but not a big one.? Twitter gives 500 people ?job security for the next decade,? but ?what value does it create for the entire economy?? And so on. But Silicon Valley?s explanation of why there are no disruptive innovations is parochial and reductive: the markets?in particular, the incentives that venture capital provides entrepreneurs?are to blame. According to Founders Fund?s manifesto, ?What Happened to the Future?,? written by Bruce Gibney, a partner at the firm: ?In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future ? Venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems ? VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances.? ------------------------ It's a long article, with other proposals mentioned. Like some problems don't have technological solutions because they need political solutions, and sometimes tech doesn't understand the situation and ends up trying to solve the wrong problem. Interesting read. BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 18 19:04:27 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:04:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> References: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 12:41 PM, spike wrote: > When we are warm, well fed and comfortable, the conservative NIMBY crowd and > who post on the topic, if you have the engineering expertise to do just > top-level order of magnitude-ish BOTECs, do them and include the basis of > your estimates. For instance, if you suggest a lighter than air solar panel I have enginerring experience: i think of a lot of ideas that won't work. This made me consider geothermal energy. Instead of sending water into deep holes in the ground and bringing warm water up to the surface, can we just put the people underground instead? How much warmer would the living space be if instead of 6-8 inches of trapped air in our walls, we had a few meters of earth? Oh I know people turn crazy without sunlight, but there's plenty of crazy even _with_ sunlight - and we're wasting a lot of energy on heat too. Can sunlight be transported over fiber optics? Can LEDs effectively simulate sunlight (the whole vitamin D synthesis and related, etc.) I'm pretty sure I'd be happy enough living in a cave/subterranean dwelling with HD LCD screens showing pictures of "outside" whenever I was in the room (and off otherwise) If I decided to "move" it'd be a matter of getting my outdoors feed from a different camera. We could probably manage to make these 'windows' circulate air to simulate a breeze to go with the on-screen appearance of that breeze. Assuming these smart spaces have enough bandwidth to keep Spike's info-nutrient needs met, what am I missing? Well, I guess digging earthscrapers (opposite of skyscrapers?) could be prohibitively expensive. I agree, though energy shortages are going to make everything expensive. I'm not sure we have any simpler "tech" than digging a really nice hole in the ground. From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 19 02:28:50 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:28:50 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> Message-ID: <00f901cddd90$95f67ac0$c1e37040$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty >>... who post on the topic, if you have the engineering expertise to do > just top-level order of magnitude-ish BOTECs, do them and include the > basis of your estimates... spike >...I have enginerring experience: i think of a lot of ideas that won't work... Me too Mike. It seems like all of my ideas fall into one of two categories: old or wrong. Actually I like what I think was your typo and suggest a definition. Enginerr: (verb) design something that doesn't work. >...This made me consider geothermal energy. Instead of sending water into deep holes in the ground and bringing warm water up to the surface, can we just put the people underground instead? It is done that way in some places, but it is a solution that will likely be attractive only where the climate is really harsh. You have an air-handling problem, one that can be solved at a reasonable cost. I know of a US Navy facility near Washington DC Crystal City that is mostly underground, earthscrapers. I don't know for sure how many levels it goes down, but I do recall getting into an elevator and going up to the ground level. The motive for building that was not for insulation purposes but rather for surviving a nuclear attack. >... Well, I guess digging earthscrapers (opposite of skyscrapers?) could be prohibitively expensive. I agree, though energy shortages are going to make everything expensive. I'm not sure we have any simpler "tech" than digging a really nice hole in the ground... Mike Ja. We use it now for some things, such as storage of nuclear waste. If we look around, I can imagine some underground homes exist. It doesn't really appeal to me, but it might to some market segment. I can imagine building homes out of big Styrofoam blocks of some sort. spike From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 02:08:55 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:08:55 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: References: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I'm not sure we have any simpler > "tech" than digging a really nice hole in the ground. Said with tongue in cheek, given all the complications you just pointed out with that, right? ;) One major thing you missed: water tables. Underground spaces would get flooded easily (and irregularly), in many places people currently choose to live (and thus where you'd have to dig to get people to move in, since most people won't move away from establish supply infrastructure, and are correct to refuse to). From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 04:57:00 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:57:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: <00f901cddd90$95f67ac0$c1e37040$@att.net> References: <007a01cddd46$fab72c10$f0258430$@att.net> <00f901cddd90$95f67ac0$c1e37040$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 9:28 PM, spike wrote: >>...I have enginerring experience: i think of a lot of ideas that won't > work... > > Me too Mike. It seems like all of my ideas fall into one of two categories: > old or wrong. Actually I like what I think was your typo and suggest a > definition. Enginerr: (verb) design something that doesn't work. It was a typo at first, but it made me laugh so I left it that way and changed the sentence so the new word made sense. >>...This made me consider geothermal energy. Instead of sending water into > deep holes in the ground and bringing warm water up to the surface, can we > just put the people underground instead? > > It is done that way in some places, but it is a solution that will likely be > attractive only where the climate is really harsh. You have an air-handling > problem, one that can be solved at a reasonable cost. even with reasonable costs this idea must be unpalatable to the average prole. I wonder how much (or how little) marketing it would take to get people to seriously consider this a good long-term investment. > I know of a US Navy facility near Washington DC Crystal City that is mostly > underground, earthscrapers. I don't know for sure how many levels it goes > down, but I do recall getting into an elevator and going up to the ground > level. The motive for building that was not for insulation purposes but > rather for surviving a nuclear attack. I think I'd put "survives a nuclear attack" down a few notches on the "pros" side of the bullet list (but it's on the list). What a sarcastic-funny skit it would be to be a realtor in the dystopian world where 1st time home buyers are weighing their options between the nuclear attack-resistant subterranean dwelling and the simpler commute of the downtown apartment. I imagine there are several levels of nuclear attack resistance for those with means. > Ja. We use it now for some things, such as storage of nuclear waste. If we > look around, I can imagine some underground homes exist. It doesn't really > appeal to me, but it might to some market segment. I can imagine building > homes out of big Styrofoam blocks of some sort. On one hand, they blow away in the first Nor'easter. On the other, renovations can be done with a serrated knife and a glue gun. From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 19 07:18:36 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:18:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment Message-ID: <000001cdddb9$10502af0$30f080d0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty >>... I can imagine building homes out of big Styrofoam blocks of some sort... >...On one hand, they blow away in the first Nor'easter. On the other, renovations can be done with a serrated knife and a glue gun. Mike _______________________________________________ Hmmm, Styrofoam was a poor choice of words, because it reminds one of the minimum density versions used in disposable picnic coolers and packing material, but that isn't really what I had in mind. Rather if we had stabilized cellulose which is super cheap and abundant, really not much more than straw, then mixed it with polystyrene as a low cost matrix, then we mix the two and pour it into a custom mold, similar to the way you do a cast concrete structure, with a Freon based expanding agent to expand the foam to perhaps somewhere around 2.5 to 1. Pour, expand, trim to the proper dimensions and there you have it. The mold would be just particle board with a thin sheet of aluminum on either side, so it gets its strength from the aluminum. Every meter or so spacing you have some kind of thru-bolt spacer rivet, about half a cm diameter steel to keep the two sheets of the mold from bowing out when you pour your polystyrene/cel-fiber/foaming agent mixture between the two laminate boards spaced about 10 cm apart. There would be drawbacks to that arrangement of course. For instance, the electricity and plumbing would likely need to be added after the fact and be external to the structure. But not necessarily. Perhaps they could be cast into the structure. In any case, I can imagine the insulation value of such a structure would be terrific. Polystyrene is a lousy conductor of heat. Then add the fact that it is a closed cell foam, and you have a good insulator. Termites will not eat the stuff, can't. It will not break down from UV, because the outer layer is a sheet of aluminum. Won't rust, won't oxidize much in our lifetimes. So my estimate is 2 mm sheet of aluminum, cm of particle board, 2 mm sheet of aluminum, 10 cm of expanded polystyrene and cellulose fiber, 2 mm Al, cm particle board, 2 mm Al. Estimated insulation value about R30, but I need to get down and do the calculations on that. If one really likes a traditional-looking house, we can suppose putting stucco on the outside, if we attached some wire lattice. spike From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 10:11:24 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 23:11:24 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:58:32 +1300, Keith Henson wrote: > "Andrew Mckee" wrote: >> IMHO seems like a better idea to go untethered so the array can be put anywhere the NIMBYs can't object to it, > And how are you going to keep it there? The subject has been > considered in depth by people who want a platform they can keep over > disputed territory like Afghanistan and earlier, Iraq. Some of the > time there is enough power from the solar cells to keep it in place. > But far below the maximum expected wind it can't station keep and gets > blown down wind. Now you have it crossing boarders like Iran and > Russia. Well, granted in the northern hemisphere positioning is something of a tricky issue, but from a southern hemisphere point of view, wandering off station is I'm assuming much less of a political incident at least. > We can probably cope with the winds even with tethered units, though > it complicates the design. If you can just let them float downwind, > then there is relatively little force on them, only the shear forces. Thats what I was hoping would be the case, I'm presuming if the raft loses station for a while its no huge problem (in the southern hemisphere at least) , so long as its still in one piece and able to gradually make its way back again when the winds die down. > I know someone who is interested in this concept. I don't know if he > has done the mass estimates, will ask. Good to know someone's working on the concept, can't really do much more than throw idea's about and join the cheer leading squad myself, well, aside from maybe making some pretty CG rendered concept illustrations someday when I get a decent PC up and running again. From giogavir at yahoo.it Wed Dec 19 10:29:38 2012 From: giogavir at yahoo.it (giorgio gaviraghi) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:29:38 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: <000001cdddb9$10502af0$30f080d0$@att.net> References: <000001cdddb9$10502af0$30f080d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <1355912978.46193.YahooMailNeo@web171601.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> we are actually producing them polyurethane panels with structure embedded including all A: 'ExI chat list' Inviato: Mercoled? 19 Dicembre 2012 8:18 Oggetto: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty >>...? I can imagine building homes out of big Styrofoam blocks of some sort... >...On one hand, they blow away in the first Nor'easter.? On the other, renovations can be done with a serrated knife and a glue gun.? Mike _______________________________________________ Hmmm, Styrofoam was a poor choice of words, because it reminds one of the minimum density versions used in disposable picnic coolers and packing material, but that isn't really what I had in mind.? Rather if we had stabilized cellulose which is super cheap and abundant, really not much more than straw, then mixed it with polystyrene as a low cost matrix, then we mix the two and pour it into a custom mold, similar to the way you do a cast concrete structure, with a Freon based expanding agent to expand the foam to perhaps somewhere around 2.5 to 1.? Pour, expand, trim to the proper dimensions and there you have it. The mold would be just particle board with a thin sheet of aluminum on either side, so it gets its strength from the aluminum.? Every meter or so spacing you have some kind of thru-bolt spacer rivet, about half a cm diameter steel to keep the two sheets of the mold from bowing out when you pour your polystyrene/cel-fiber/foaming agent mixture between the two laminate boards spaced about 10 cm apart. There would be drawbacks to that arrangement of course.? For instance, the electricity and plumbing would likely need to be added after the fact and be external to the structure.? But not necessarily.? Perhaps they could be cast into the structure. In any case, I can imagine the insulation value of such a structure would be terrific.? Polystyrene is a lousy conductor of heat.? Then add the fact that it is a closed cell foam, and you have a good insulator.? Termites will not eat the stuff, can't.? It will not break down from UV, because the outer layer is a sheet of aluminum.? Won't rust, won't oxidize much in our lifetimes.? So my estimate is 2 mm sheet of aluminum, cm of particle board, 2 mm sheet of aluminum, 10 cm of expanded polystyrene and cellulose fiber, 2 mm Al, cm particle board, 2 mm Al.? Estimated insulation value about R30, but I need to get down and do the calculations on that. If one really likes a traditional-looking house, we can suppose putting stucco on the outside, if we attached some wire lattice. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 10:32:33 2012 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 23:32:33 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Energy Defeatism In-Reply-To: <007b01cddd47$db5e0180$921a0480$@att.net> References: <1355755868.92820.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <009e01cddcd3$edf59fc0$c9e0df40$@att.net> <007b01cddd47$db5e0180$921a0480$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Dec 2012 06:48:14 +1300, spike wrote: > Excellent, good work New Zealand. The USA is a huge energy consumer and we Well, not sure anyone can take credit for it, or claim that was the plan all along. It just happens to rain a lot in New Zealand, pretty much throughout the entire year. So hydro power, pretty much a no brainer really. > True, and good work Kiwis. But New Zealand doesn't have near the population > densities and growth pressure we yanks have, nor nearly the hordes of > immigrants willing and eager to break the law to come here and breed like For sure, pretty much apples and oranges as far as comparisons go. > crazy, making our energy problems worse every day. Not only have we not > stabilized our population as New Zealand has done, we cannot. So we need to > get going on energy solutions. Well I wouldn't say we stabilized our population in any way, more like the current NZ government is doing such a great job ruining our economy, many New Zealanders with a transferable job skill are leaving the country by the plane load. :-) From bbenzai at yahoo.com Wed Dec 19 14:43:36 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 06:43:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1355928216.12325.YahooMailClassic@web114405.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> > From: Keith Henson wrote: > OK, if the people who can raise the money say they have to > demonstrate > things like power beaming before they can raise the money, > fine. It occurs to me that you may not have to be in orbit to demonstrate beaming power through the atmosphere. You could possibly do it on the ground. How high would a tower have to be to see the top of another equally-tall tower with, what, 100 miles of air between them? 50 miles? Whatever would be equivalent to beaming down from orbit (not 200 miles, because the air only gets thick at the bottom). Not quite the same, of course, but for publicity purposes, it might be worth doing. Ben Zaiboc From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 19 16:19:28 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:19:28 -0800 Subject: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment In-Reply-To: <1355912978.46193.YahooMailNeo@web171601.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> References: <000001cdddb9$10502af0$30f080d0$@att.net> <1355912978.46193.YahooMailNeo@web171601.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <004001cdde04$9f0f06d0$dd2d1470$@att.net> >> Hmmm, Styrofoam was a poor choice of words, because it reminds one of the minimum density versions used in disposable picnic coolers and packing material, but that isn't really what I had in mind. Rather if we had stabilized cellulose which is super cheap and abundant, really not much more than straw, then mixed it with polystyrene as a low cost matrix spike From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of giorgio gaviraghi Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 2:30 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment > we are actually producing them polyurethane panels with structure embedded including all Oggetto: [ExI] plastic house, was: RE: Trying for a minimum technical comment >>... I can imagine building homes out of big Styrofoam blocks of some sort... spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 14:47:02 2012 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:47:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] 8th European Congress of Biogerontology, March 10-13, 2013, Beer Sheva, Israel Message-ID: Dear friends, You are cordially invited to participate in the 8th European Congress of Biogerontology (ECB), to be held on March 10-13, 2013 in Israel, starting at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, and continuing at the Dead Sea. http://www.facebook.com/events/570731196273990/ World-leading experts on healthy longevity will be present http://biogerontology.wix.com/resolve#!programme/vstc1=speakers Who will cover topics from Tissue Remodeling and Repair, to Lifespan Extension to Science and Health Policy for Healthy Longevity. http://biogerontology.wix.com/resolve#!programme/vstc1=wednesday-13.3.12 Please notice the smaller fees for the early registration until January 15, 2013, as compared to the late registration until March 3, 2013 and on site registration, as well as the smaller fees for students and accompanying persons. http://biogerontology.wix.com/resolve#!registration This can be a great venue for a meeting of leading life-extension scientists and activists. Hoping to see you there, Ilia PS. Please share this event and invite friends -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 15:27:59 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:27:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> You forget that I have specifically disavowed raising money. That's >> beyond my skill set. snip >> OK, if the people who can raise the money say they have to demonstrate >> things like power beaming before they can raise the money, fine. They >> can raise the money to do whatever they think is needed to raise the >> rest of the money. > > Now you're asking the money-raising people to do engineering: > for them to demonstrate beam tracking and so on. No, all they have to do is raise the money. Engineers can demonstrate that microwave beams can be pointed the right direction. If it takes a $150 B dollar demonstration before you can raise money, there is no point in raising money at all. > You need to demonstrate beam tracking before your project can > have the full budget raised for it. Given communication satellites, I don't think so. But let me ask, how much of a demonstration do you think is needed? Full scale, full power? Reduced scale, reduced power? Exactly how much reduction? Because at some point the demonstration costs as much as the full operating project. >>>> it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them >>>> than it is to build just one. >>> >>> Actually, when you factor in the cost of capital acquisition >>> on this scale, it might prove to be cheaper to build just one. >> >> Let's put numbers on it. > > Only if you include the cost of capital acquisition. Much unmarked sniping above, what is "the cost of capital acquisition" that you are talking about here? >> There I agree with you. One high powered CEO required. What would >> you think of David Petraeus in that role? > > Not a bad first thought, but insufficient experience in technical > projects. I think he would be fine for this project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus#Education_and_academia If you don't like him, who would you suggest? > What would you think of Keith Henson in that role? ;) > Upgraded with more skills, perhaps - but skills can be learned. Not a chance. I never been MBA material and don't have the reputation for leading large organizations. At 70, I am not likely to live long enough. Keith From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 19 18:18:21 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:18:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008b01cdde15$3aa8e880$affab980$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson >...Given communication satellites, I don't think so. But let me ask, how much of a demonstration do you think is needed? Full scale, full power? Reduced scale, reduced power? Exactly how much reduction? Because at some point the demonstration costs as much as the full operating project...Keith _______________________________________________ Clearly Keith has learned the bitter lesson from the X-33 misadventure. Lockheed tried to build a single stage to orbit Venture Star. I took intense interest in that, because it is such a critical exercise in weight engineering. Unlike a multistage rocket, where the lower stages are more weight-forgiving (they don't go as high) in a SSTO, every gram of spacecraft is payload. So there is intense pressure to trim out every bit of fat everywhere, and keep trimming until it hurts, trim until you draw blood as we used to say. The payload margin is so thin, it really does make sense to do stuff like choose your astronaut based on her weight and how much she eats. No kidding, do the math. One astronaut, preferably one without legs, these being heavy useless structures for this application. NASA wanted a half scale model as proof of concept. It didn't need to go single stage to orbit, since in general a half scale model couldn't do that, but they still wanted this half scale, and NASA spent a buuuuuuuttload of money on this whole notion. But rockets don't really scale down. There are all kinds of systems on a rocket that refuse to scale downward. All the focus was on the weight of the fuel tank, but the problem is that (well, one problem of many) if you scale down any pressure vessel, you need to scale down the thickness of the tank as well. That results in a whole mess of manufacturing problems, most prominently one we call scar weight, which is the weight of the seams. Consider a pair of Levis jeans for instance, and imagine making a scale version of that for a Ken doll. The weight of that seam doesn't scale. But wait, there's more. As you scale to half, the mass scales to one eighth but the mass moment of inertia scales down by a factor of 32, which means the flight control problem doesn't get easier, it gets harder. It's feedback loop speed must increase by a factor of about 5.7 as near as I can figure using only classical controls BOTECs, and all that has consequences in structural strength needed to yank the vector hardware about at those kinds of accelerations. So the thrust vector control problem gets way harder, and it certainly does not scale to half size and eighth weight. When you read accounts of why the X-33 design effort failed, it wasn't because the aerospike engine was too complicated (it really wasn't too complicated, (I love the name)) but rather the problem of how to vector the thrust quickly enough was too complicated. We never did figure out how to keep that bird flying pointy-end-first after it leaves the atmosphere. Damn. {8-[ That was in 2001. No one has really tried it since then. The X-33 failure will mark the effective end of space development of SSTO, and a grim victory for those who reluctantly concluded back in the early 90s that this approach is not practical, me among them. I did those calcs 100 different ways, and kept concluding that anything you can do with one stage, you can do better with two, and probably better still with two and a half (using an air-breathing fly-back first half-stage, such as the Pegasus uses.) Lesson: rocket's don't really scale down. Lesson two: we wasted most of the money we needed for the Venture Star development trying to build this useless and hopeless half scale model that NASA insisted we needed as a proof of concept and process development, when we already had a bunch of good controls engineers saying this approach couldn't work. Good chance I have wandered far from the original thread. What were we talking about? Oh yes, memory loss in senior citizens... spike From clementlawyer at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 17:32:47 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:32:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Sci-Fi novel by Ramez Naam: Nexus: Mankind Gets An Upgrade Message-ID: This just out from Transhumanist writer, Ramez Naam , author of More Than Human. *NEXUS: MANKIND GETS AN UPGRADE * * * ?Gripping near future speculation? All the grit and pace of the Bourne films.? - *Alastair Reynolds,** *author of *Revelation Space* ?Naam turns in a stellar performance with his debut SF novel? Here is the remarkable scope of the story and its narrative power.? - *Booklist, Starred Review* ?Mesmerizing.? ? *Publisher?s Weekly* Who decides what you can put in your brain? Who draws the line between human and non-human? How do we choose between liberty and security? In a near future scarred by the mis-use of advanced technologies, government agencies and international treaties use extraordinary powers to suppress research that could lead to new horrors. In this world, the experimental and illegal nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, wirelessly connecting brain to brain. There are some who want to improve Nexus. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young and idealistic American scientist named Kade is caught improving Nexus, he?s blackmailed into spying on an eminent Chinese researcher who may or may not be weaponizing Nexus ? turning it into a tool for coercion and political assassination. Bit by bit, Kade is thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage ? with more at stake than anyone realizes. >From the halls of academe to the halls of power; from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai; from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok; from an international neuroscience conference to a remote Buddhist monastery in the mountains of Thailand ? Nexus is an exploration of the next step in human evolution, a scathing critique of the US War on Drugs and War on Terror, and a thrill ride through a world on the brink of explosion. *Now available on Amazon.com* * * *James Clement* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 20:51:45 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:51:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thinking about it - Keith, how about this as a first step? Design the satellite. Just the satellite: skip the rocket that will carry it up, or any ground system needed to make use of it, for now. Make a complete list of parts. Every solar panel, every faring, every piece of electronics. Find at least one commercial source for each, preferably at least two. If possible, get a price (or at least an estimate) for each part. Omit labor costs, except where those are integral to obtaining the part (such as if a manufacturer will pre-mold aluminum to your casing's shape, which is included in the cost of obtaining aluminum from that vendor). For now, omit any labor costs that your organization would have to provide, such as programming and assembling the satellite. If you're concerned that you might not live to see this aloft - even if you kick the bucket right after publishing this parts list, this will be useful in someday getting the satellite you propose into orbit. That said, I suspect this will take you less than a year if you have a good design in mind, and I suspect you have better than even odds of seeing 2014. Once you have the parts list out, you'll have a better idea of how to make the satellite happen. It won't cost billions of dollars just to make the parts list. From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 18:57:53 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:57:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >>> OK, if the people who can raise the money say they have to demonstrate >>> things like power beaming before they can raise the money, fine. They >>> can raise the money to do whatever they think is needed to raise the >>> rest of the money. >> >> Now you're asking the money-raising people to do engineering: >> for them to demonstrate beam tracking and so on. > > No, all they have to do is raise the money. Engineers can demonstrate > that microwave beams can be pointed the right direction. You miss the point. The money raisers and the engineers need to work hand in hand: the engineers get a little farther, then the money raisers can get a little more, then the engineers have funding to get a little farther - that's how engineering projects on this scale work. > If it takes > a $150 B dollar demonstration before you can raise money, there is no > point in raising money at all. Surely you don't think it takes $150 B to demonstrate beam tracking. That said, it may well take $150 B in separate demonstrations - one, then the next, then the next, raising $1 B or less at a time - before you can raise the $150 B in one chunk you'd need for the full-up solar satellite. If there is no other path to that end - and there might not be - then the point of raising the demonstration money is to get to the full-up solar satellite. Just because you can not jump everything in one giant leap doesn't make the path not worth taking. >> You need to demonstrate beam tracking before your project can >> have the full budget raised for it. > > Given communication satellites, I don't think so. But let me ask, how > much of a demonstration do you think is needed? Full scale, full > power? Reduced scale, reduced power? Exactly how much reduction? The demonstration needs to produce measurable results. Moreover, you probably need to demonstrate many different aspects. Beam tracking is just one. Is there an existing rocket class that can take the payload you envision? If not, that will need to be developed and tested separately. (This is probably WAY too expensive, so you need to design to use some heavy lifter that is already in use - not just that someone else used once, but that you could go out and purchase today if you had the money.) What about the rectenna? You can probably demonstrate this quite cheaply, for less than $1M, but there are not existing rectennas that you can just buy, so you need to demonstrate that you can make them. Or sun tracking? Yes, sun-tracking solar on roofs exists, but only to a certain point: those systems are interrupted when the Sun goes below the horizon each day. Maybe make some sun-tracker that works around the clock for an above-Arctic-Circle (northern Alaska or Canada) summer? (You wouldn't even necessarily have to go there yourself: just hire a local, ship the unit up, and have the local send you back the test data showing that it worked.) Once you have that, it's trivial to show that you can make one for the full-size unit if you had the money. ...and that's the trend, really. Identify all the components of your system that have any significant engineering work that would need to be paid for out of your budget. Find ways to do the development of them for less, such that you can show would-be investors that there is as little "technical risk" (that is, as little risk of unanticipated design flaws in the blueprints you make*) as possible. * This means you also have to actually make blueprints for the system, listing all the parts and preferably multiple vendors you could buy them from. This is another demonstration bit you can do for cheap. Put another way: investors in projects this large generally demand that the project be reduced to "just insert money" before they will insert their money. Note that having a parts list - and preferably, a solid estimate of how much you'll need to pay for various kinds of labor - will also give you much better justification for how much this thing will cost. You may find that your initial estimate was either high or low. This reduces the "financial risk": the chance that the amount you're asking for is not, in fact, how much it will actually cost. Investors dread the prospect that they'll put in $150B, you'll do some work, and then you find out it'll cost another $300B. They demand that you prove that won't happen, at least to a very good likelihood. If you can't - well, others who want this much can, so those others get the investment instead. > Because at some point the demonstration costs as much as the full > operating project. Or more, when you add all the demonstrations together. The point is, though, that's not all in one go: the smaller chunks *can* be raised separately, *and only after* they are all done can you raise the big chunk you need for the full satellite. >>>>> it's cheaper to set up the parts pipeline for hundreds of them >>>>> than it is to build just one. >>>> >>>> Actually, when you factor in the cost of capital acquisition >>>> on this scale, it might prove to be cheaper to build just one. >>> >>> Let's put numbers on it. >> >> Only if you include the cost of capital acquisition. > > Much unmarked sniping above, I snipped out the rest because you were ignoring the part of the budget I had just pointed out. > what is "the cost of capital acquisition" > that you are talking about here? Raising money itself costs money. People who raise money don't work for free. They need salaries while they're going out and getting it: they know it'll be a long, hard slog that might not pay off, and they need to pay their bills while they're working on it. Anyone who would raise money for commission only is either inexperienced enough they're guaranteed to fail, or scamming you, or both. Further, you also need to give them a small cut of the money raised (see the "Lehman Scale", for example). Again, anyone willing to work without this is scamming you - likely planning to sit around and work for others who are giving a commission on top of salary, while pocketing your paycheck to "work" without results. Further further, when you get to this scale of money, there are inevitably kickbacks, compromises, and other things you have to accept in order to get the money. (You hear about the cases where this comes back to bite the raiser. You don't hear about the cases where the money was raised free of these things, because they practically don't exist.) For instance, if you get most of your budget from the US government, a standard approach is to spread the labor & vendors around the country, so that many in the House of Representatives can point out to their constituents the part of the deal that benefits their district - not "because all of the US benefits", but rather, which local suppliers get a piece of the action. This can be inefficient - but if it's 1.5 times as expensive but 15 times as likely to get approved, what do you care so long as it gets the satellite built and launched? But you do have to budget for this, and this is unlikely to be as much a part of the second satellite's cost (since by then you can cite cheaper costs for anyone who wants to go into space - and that's much easier to spread around). >>> There I agree with you. One high powered CEO required. What would >>> you think of David Petraeus in that role? >> >> Not a bad first thought, but insufficient experience in technical >> projects. > > I think he would be fine for this project. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus#Education_and_academia His experience is in politics and military. He might be useful for fundraising, but it takes a certain mindset to drive engineering projects, and I see no evidence that he has it. > If you don't like him, who would you suggest? You. >> What would you think of Keith Henson in that role? ;) >> Upgraded with more skills, perhaps - but skills can be learned. > > Not a chance. I never been MBA material and don't have the reputation > for leading large organizations. MBAs can be gotten. Rep for leading large organizations is gained through first leading small organizations, and that is gained through doing. This is another reason I suggest mapping out a development path and starting small: by the time you're asking for the full budget, you'll have the rep you need. > At 70, I am not likely to live long > enough. You've likely got at least 30 years left, the potential of cryonics aside. Do you think this can not be accomplished, at least through first full-up satellite launched, within that time? From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 19 19:09:23 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:09:23 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Engineering In-Reply-To: <008b01cdde15$3aa8e880$affab980$@att.net> References: <008b01cdde15$3aa8e880$affab980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 10:18 AM, spike wrote: > rocket's don't really scale down. But we're not talking about rockets. Most things on a solar satellite DO scale down. (Pressure vessels are not as important to a solar satellite as to a rocket, for instance.) More importantly, we're talking about testing subsystems, not throwing EVERYTHING together in a single scaled-down model - including the few parts that don't scale down. And even those parts that don't scale down, can be built and tested without the rest of the satellite. That didn't happen with critical parts of the X-33. (Again, note that the entire project was cancelled because of the scaled-down tanks' failure, rather than doing the scaled-down tanks as a separate project first. Investors learned from that, that such parts should be funded and developed first, before funding the entire project: if they fail, that's much less money lost.) From ablainey at aol.com Thu Dec 20 13:21:26 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 08:21:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> I have been thinking about this for years now and it is becoming every more realistic when looking at our current economic system. Rather than try to find ways to raise money for future energy solutions. I think we need to re-evaluate the way we perceive the problem and change our economy accordingly. We are arguing in terms of MWh gained per $ spent. When we should be arguing in terms of energy outlay per energy return. MWh out vs MWh in. If the economy were shifted to an energy backed standard instead of a tangible commodity like Gold. It would be easier to see what pays for itself and yields a profit. A solar satellite would then have a substantial energy cost value instead of a $ value. It may cost 200MWh to produce and launch the thing and have an estimated return of 30000MWh during its expected lifetime. (random figures) When applied to the global economy imagining the Earth' surface divided into hexagonal cells like a mobile network. We could calculate average solar energy fall onto each area, then subtract the actual energy collection of each cell to give an efficiency rating. Areas nearer the equator would be potentially energy rich compared to higher/lower latitudes. Likewise States with greater landmass would be potentially richer. Which may actually be the exactly opposite regionally to the $ economy of the world. A Nation that invests it energy into Space based solar energy collection would effectively be increasing its landmass and thus its economy. We all start paying for groceries in kWh instead of $. Which actually reflects the cost of an item not just its perceived value. The raw material cost, mining, refining, production, transport, storage all becomes apparent in the cost. Tomatoes that cost $0.20 to buy don't reflect the true cost in energy terms today, but in an energy based economy a tomato that has been transported 5000 miles would be far more expensive than one produced on a local farm. Non renewables become free money created by nature to give us a leg up to better technology. I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, we need to start using it as our global unit of currency. Doing so is the only way to increase our efficiency as a species and will drive us to the stars as it will be the only realistic method of long term economic growth. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 20 17:00:02 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:00:02 +0000 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 1:21 PM, ablainey wrote: > I have been thinking about this for years now and it is becoming every more > realistic when looking at our current economic system. Rather than try to > find ways to raise money for future energy solutions. I think we need to > re-evaluate the way we perceive the problem and change our economy > accordingly. > We are arguing in terms of MWh gained per $ spent. When we should be arguing > in terms of energy outlay per energy return. MWh out vs MWh in. > If the economy were shifted to an energy backed standard instead of a > tangible commodity like Gold. It would be easier to see what pays for itself > and yields a profit. > A solar satellite would then have a substantial energy cost value instead of > a $ value. It may cost 200MWh to produce and launch the thing and have an > estimated return of 30000MWh during its expected lifetime. (random figures) > > > I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, we > need to start using it as our global unit of currency. Doing so is the only > way to increase our efficiency as a species and will drive us to the stars > as it will be the only realistic method of long term economic growth. > I think what you are talking about is EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Unfortunately this leads to the 'Energy Trap' that we are currently experiencing. Quote: In its early days, oil frequently yielded an EROEI in excess of 100:1, meaning that 1% or less of the energy contained in a barrel of oil had to be expended to deliver that barrel of oil. Not a bad bargain. Oil production today more typically has an EROEI around 20:1, while tar sands and oil shale tend to be about 5:1 and 3:1, respectively. ------- An EROEI reduction on this scale leads to economic recession. And it is called a trap because our civilisation has to spend more resources to get energy than we get back in return. We need a new source of 'free' energy very soon before we no longer have the resources available to develop new energy sources. Quote: Politically, the Energy Trap is a killer. In my lifetime, I have not witnessed in our political system the adult behavior that would be needed to buckle down for a long-term goal involving short-term sacrifice. Or at least any brief bouts of such maturity have not been politically rewarded. I?m not blaming the politicians. We all scream for ice cream. Politicians simply cater to our demands. We tend to vote for the candidate who promises a bigger, better tomorrow?even if such a path is untenable. ---------- See: BillK From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 20 18:25:45 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:25:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, wrote: > I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, we > need to start using it as our global unit of currency. Doing so is the only > way to increase our efficiency as a species and will drive us to the stars > as it will be the only realistic method of long term economic growth. Unfortunately, this fails to take into account the many different kinds of energy, transmission & transport, et cetera. For example, a gallon of gasoline is worth far more than the electricity used to pump it - but if there is a power failure, most gas stations can't pump their gasoline, rendering it temporarily worthless. Currency can be divided and transmitted with no loss. Conversion from one form to another may result in a transfer of wealth to or from the one who does the conversion (depending on how well the convertor judges the relative worth of the two forms). From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 20 19:53:54 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:53:54 -0800 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, wrote: >>... I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, > we need to start using it as our global unit of currency. ... Al Al, energy already is the real currency. We mask it to some extent with our fiat currencies, but oil is real money, and the real measure of value, even more so than gold. Reasoning: we have an arbitrary supply of gold ore at arbitrary quality. It just takes energy to extract the gold. So energy prices drive gold prices, which indirectly define the value of fiat currencies. So energy is already money. >...Unfortunately, this fails to take into account the many different kinds of energy, transmission & transport, et cetera... Ja, these factors complicate the picture, but I stick to my story that energy is money. >... For example, a gallon of gasoline is worth far more than the electricity used to pump it - but if there is a power failure, most gas stations can't pump their gasoline, rendering it temporarily worthless... In the '89 earthquake we learned that most stations have an on-site gasoline powered generator for power outages. That was a good thing for us: my tank was almost empty when that hit, and I was able to fill up before the power went back on the next morning. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 11:39:11 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 06:39:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: >> Those who think the US government will >> help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus >> of the event, are fooling themselves. > > That is overstating things, I think. Look at, for instance, > Hurricane Sandy. The US government was not the main > cause of the event, and it demonstrably helped many of > those harmed by the unusual weather. ### The government collected monies from various productive workers and (slowly and haphazardly) disbursed them to some affected by the storm. This does not mean that it helped us in general, in fact, the opposite is true: First of all, the expectation of government bailout funded by involuntary contributions from workers leads to moral hazard, whether in home-building or in banking. Most of the severely affected homeowners chose to build homes in areas known to be afflicted by high tides - and probably they would not have done it if they had to pay competitive insurance premiums (reflecting the actual danger) or if they knew they were on their own. Thus, the government encouraged excessive private risk taking, letting some people enjoy the upside of sunny beach living, while socializing the downside, forcing the rest of us to pay up when the inevitable catastrophe came, just as in the 2008 banking crisis. Furthermore, the "help" provided by FEMA was laughable, considering the amount of money available to them. It took them weeks to even begin cleaning things up, with FEMA employees actually huddled in their trailers rather than doing something useful (they didn't even have drinking water supplies). In other words, while the government did not cause the hurricane, it did encourage most of the exposure to harm and its attempts at providing help were woefully inefficient. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 11:23:29 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 06:23:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > I call things as I see them. Nothing you said > changed my perception of your claims. ### I think I wrote about five or six times that I believe you want more government, *not* absolute government, and you still have a perception that I believe something else? Amazing. Rafal From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 13:20:47 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 08:20:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money. Switching to an obviously energy related currency will simple avoid the confusion and cyclic references which are already in the system. As you pointed out in the energy to get gold. Its a more honest system and possibly easier to understand by the masses. From: spike >>... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes>>On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, wrote:>>>... I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity,>>> we need to start using it as our global unit of currency. ... Al>>Al, energy already is the real currency. We mask it to some extent with our>fiat currencies, but oil is real money, and the real measure of value, even>more so than gold. Reasoning: we have an arbitrary supply of gold ore at>arbitrary quality. It just takes energy to extract the gold. So energy>prices drive gold prices, which indirectly define the value of fiat>currencies. So energy is already money.>>...Unfortunately, this fails to take into account the many different kinds>of energy, transmission & transport, et cetera....>>Ja, these factors complicate the picture, but I stick to my story that>energy is money.>>>... For example, a gallon of gasoline is worth far more than the>electricity used to pump it - but if there is a power failure, most gas>stations can't pump their gasoline, rendering it temporarily worthless...>>In the '89 earthquake we learned that most stations have an on-site gasoline>powered generator for power outages. That was a good thing for us: my tank>was almost empty when that hit, and I was able to fill up before the power>went back on the next morning.>>spike_______________________________________________extropy-chat mailing listextropy-chat at lists.extropy.orghttp://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 11:17:48 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 06:17:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike, my heart bleeds for you when you describe the tribulations you had to endure due to power outages but I don't think these are a harbinger of unavoidable future problems. The world is swimming in energy, there is a glut of fuel, but unfortunately there is also an oversupply of environmental idiocy and sheer bureaucratic madness. California's energy problems are solely due to political/ideological issues, and not in the least to any problems at the physical/engineering layer of energy generation (which BTW means, there is no reason whatsoever to develop "renewable" energy sources unless actually cheaper than fossil). My advice - move out, join the exodus, come to sunny Virginia, energy here is cheap and plentiful. The only power outages we have are when an occasional hurricane strikes the power lines, and for that I have a whole-house generator with 500 gallons of propane in the tank. Rafal > In the '89 earthquake we learned that most stations have an on-site gasoline > powered generator for power outages. That was a good thing for us: my tank > was almost empty when that hit, and I was able to fill up before the power > went back on the next morning. From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 14:34:03 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:34:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Yes essentially I am talking about EROEI. But rather than hiding the the false economy in a financial system where it is easy to obfuscate the reality. I am promoting a system that wears it heart on its sleeve. Today we can exploit energy sources with less return than the initial investment and still make a profit! Take an undefined & inefficient collection method where a physical energy source is put in a tanker ready for market. The eroei can be less than parity yet you still have a salable product which someone will buy. That product can change hands many times each adding a markup and taking their cut. By the time it gets to the end user the total eroei for the whole system can outweigh the energy contained in the tanker. Yet people are still buying and others getting rich. A nonsense situation. Entropy in action. This is only possible because of the way the economy works today where the true cost in energy is not reflected in the perceived value of the product. If we had an energy economy you would never buy that tanker and it would never have been filled in the first place unless it was economic in terms of energy. It would be like buying a loaf of bread for the price of 5 loaves. This isn't a way to solve the energy shortfall, peak oil etc. Its main reason is to make these problems and all other energy wastage visible. Which would drive innovation, efficiency and new energy production methods. It cuts through the lies we are telling ourselves and our politicians tendency to think printing new bank notes will somehow make energy appear from thin air. One benefit is that we will still be using symbols and this gives economic hope and flexibility. As it allows for leverage and using untapped future energy reserves as currency today. Promisorry note based on energy we will be able to harvest in the future. Admittedly still a kind of fiat system, but one where the backing is tangible and undeniable. the energy is out there and we know the sun always shines and have a fair idea of its constant output. It will never fail (in terms of human lifespan) compared to oil which has diminishing returns. As such there is inherent stability and an infinite non terra centric view of that stability. We will always be chasing the maximum which we know is out there and never achieving it. Rather than trying to get more from less as we do today. The need for exploiting sources like Nuclear would become apparent also that we also need to exploit the waste. RTEG, TEG, Gamma voltaic systems will seem obvious choices to collect the low yield but long term energy from spent fuel. Non renewables will be seen as bonus windfalls. Mearly short term boosts that give a leg up. They won't be the constant fixation and goals as they are today. I won't go into energy storage, but it would also obviously become a major issue. A battery/capacitor would be like a piggy bank. It already is if you are on a solar feed in scheme. In a sense it creates an infinite economy. The universe becomes cash that we haven't collected yet. That cash is infinite, indestructible and indivisible. Compare that to an exponentially growing population of bald monkeys confined to a single rock. Who base their concept of value on fraudulent promises printed on dead trees. Seems a bit silly really. Maybe its my own perception? To me there is only two things of real value in the universe. Energy and information. Everything else is a means to those ends. -----Original Message----- From: BillK To: ExI chat list Sent: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:17 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 1:21 PM, ablainey wrote: > I have been thinking about this for years now and it is becoming every more > realistic when looking at our current economic system. Rather than try to > find ways to raise money for future energy solutions. I think we need to > re-evaluate the way we perceive the problem and change our economy > accordingly. > We are arguing in terms of MWh gained per $ spent. When we should be arguing > in terms of energy outlay per energy return. MWh out vs MWh in. > If the economy were shifted to an energy backed standard instead of a > tangible commodity like Gold. It would be easier to see what pays for itself > and yields a profit. > A solar satellite would then have a substantial energy cost value instead of > a $ value. It may cost 200MWh to produce and launch the thing and have an > estimated return of 30000MWh during its expected lifetime. (random figures) > > > I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, we > need to start using it as our global unit of currency. Doing so is the only > way to increase our efficiency as a species and will drive us to the stars > as it will be the only realistic method of long term economic growth. > I think what you are talking about is EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Unfortunately this leads to the 'Energy Trap' that we are currently experiencing. Quote: In its early days, oil frequently yielded an EROEI in excess of 100:1, meaning that 1% or less of the energy contained in a barrel of oil had to be expended to deliver that barrel of oil. Not a bad bargain. Oil production today more typically has an EROEI around 20:1, while tar sands and oil shale tend to be about 5:1 and 3:1, respectively. ------- An EROEI reduction on this scale leads to economic recession. And it is called a trap because our civilisation has to spend more resources to get energy than we get back in return. We need a new source of 'free' energy very soon before we no longer have the resources available to develop new energy sources. Quote: Politically, the Energy Trap is a killer. In my lifetime, I have not witnessed in our political system the adult behavior that would be needed to buckle down for a long-term goal involving short-term sacrifice. Or at least any brief bouts of such maturity have not been politically rewarded. I?m not blaming the politicians. We all scream for ice cream. Politicians simply cater to our demands. We tend to vote for the candidate who promises a bigger, better tomorrow?even if such a path is untenable. ---------- See: BillK _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 14:42:51 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:42:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFADA096105B70-1E84-39D10@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> But we already have fixed exchange rates for every different type of energy. We only need to decide on a unit of measure. Then all the inefficiency becomes apparent. -----Original Message----- From: Adrian Tymes To: ExI chat list Sent: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:37 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, wrote: > I just think that in a world where energy is the number one commodity, we > need to start using it as our global unit of currency. Doing so is the only > way to increase our efficiency as a species and will drive us to the stars > as it will be the only realistic method of long term economic growth. Unfortunately, this fails to take into account the many different kinds of energy, transmission & transport, et cetera. For example, a gallon of gasoline is worth far more than the electricity used to pump it - but if there is a power failure, most gas stations can't pump their gasoline, rendering it temporarily worthless. Currency can be divided and transmitted with no loss. Conversion from one form to another may result in a transfer of wealth to or from the one who does the conversion (depending on how well the convertor judges the relative worth of the two forms). _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 16:56:10 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 08:56:10 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:23 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> I call things as I see them. Nothing you said >> changed my perception of your claims. > > ### I think I wrote about five or six times that I believe you want > more government, *not* absolute government, and you still have a > perception that I believe something else? As others have shown, what you wrote came off as rather more extreme than you may have intended. Not being a mind reader, I can not react to your intent, but only to what you actually write. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 21 17:00:40 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:00:40 -0800 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <006001cddf9c$b5ab0a30$21011e90$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of ablainey at aol.com >.Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] >.I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money. Switching to an obviously energy related currency will simple avoid the confusion and cyclic references which are already in the system. As you pointed out in the energy to get gold. Its a more honest system and possibly easier to understand by the masses. Al, your last sentence points out why energy cannot be used as a currency system. If the masses understood currency, it would wipe out an entire industry: currency speculation. It wipes out energy futures speculation too. Speculation would no longer be betting energy and currency against each other as is done now (since those two would be one) but rather would become betting one energy source against another. This form of speculation could have the unintended consequence of causing actual capital to flow into energy markets instead of parasitically extracting money from those markets. Then new energy sources might be developed, driven by the human drive, our mindless irresistible urge to compete and to gamble. The new capital and resulting new energy sources could actually cause energy prices to fall, which causes all prices to fall, and we just cannot have that. We are terrified of any form of deflation, TERRIFIED! We saw what happened to the USA when home prices fell a few years ago. In the face of direct evidence to the contrary in all electronics markets, we have reached the stunningly illogical conclusion that under any circumstances anywhere and anywhen, all forms of deflation are bad news, ruinous, worse that the Mayan End Of Time, pray to Saint Keynes to save us. I counter-propose that we learn to love deflation, encourage competition among energy sources, develop all of them, pick your favorite and pour money into it, and pray instead to Saint Hayek, some win, some lose, but in the end we all win. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Dec 21 17:27:44 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:27:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> Il 21/12/2012 14:20, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: > I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money. Switching to an obviously > energy related currency will simple avoid the confusion and cyclic > references which are already in the system. As you pointed out in the > energy to get gold. > Its a more honest system and possibly easier to understand by the masses. The problem is how the masses can understand the problem when smart elites have problem grasping the problem? Energy is consumed where gold is recycled. A currency based on energy give a lot of power to the people producing energy (the have the money printer) and force the other people to depend from them. Obviously we are talking about legal tender with a monopoly imposed by the force of the government, otherwise there would not be reason to argue. It would be an improvement over fiat money, but would be vastly less useful than gold, silver or bitcoin. I want something that I can hold in my hand and I have total control over. Something I can move around how I see fit and useful to myself and my goals. Something other people can not create, destroy or take away at will without a large effort and a lot of work and cost. How much energy I can hold in my hand? How much energy can I move from here to there using my car? How much this energy will last if I don't use it? IMHO, with the current technology, your energy-based currency (not money) is just another debt based currency like the US$ and the ? and all other legal tender currencies in the world. Someone issue pieces of paper that can be redeemed for energy in the future (maybe): 1) Can they be redeemed all at the same time? I bet not. 2) What prevent the emitter to print more paper than the energy it really can deliver in the future? Nothing. 3) What prevent the emitter(s) from reducing the production and raising the value of the single unit of energy. Less he produce more it is valuable. Mirco From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 17:22:39 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:22:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki >> wrote: >>> Those who think the US government will >>> help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus >>> of the event, are fooling themselves. >> >> That is overstating things, I think. Look at, for instance, >> Hurricane Sandy. The US government was not the main >> cause of the event, and it demonstrably helped many of >> those harmed by the unusual weather. > > ### The government collected monies from various productive workers > and (slowly and haphazardly) disbursed them to some affected by the > storm. This does not mean that it helped us in general I didn't say it helped "us in general", just "many of those harmed by the unusual weather". Also, whatever contributory effect the government's insurance may have had in lessening the risk of people living in dangerous places: 1) Most of the places hit by Sandy were not considered dangerous. (Unless, say, you consider the whole of Manhattan Island to be "dangerous" such that people should not live there?) 2) Government insurance did not actually, directly cause the hurricane to exist. (Making a bad situation worse is distinct from causing the bad situation in the first place.) Saying some entity is the "main cause" of a thing is saying that they are the cause of that thing, and whatever else it may have done relative to Hurricane Sandy, the US government did not create it. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 21 16:26:45 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 08:26:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast Message-ID: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. Either that or they ran out of stone for their calendar, which may have led eventually to the invention of ?paper.? I look out my window and it sure appears the world is still here. On the other hand, it is ambiguous on what time today the world is supposed to end. Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing or making that has that kind of durability? spike Subject: Mayan Forcast I HAVE LEARNED TO DECIPHER THE FOLLOWING: I HAVE THE FOLLOWING FORECAST: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Aztec_Sun_Stone.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 54632 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: a forecast.png Type: image/png Size: 178017 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 21 18:18:36 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:18:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> Message-ID: <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] Il 21/12/2012 14:20, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: >>... I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money... >...The problem is how the masses can understand the problem when smart elites have problem grasping the problem? The massed do not need to understand the problem. Only the investors. If they fail, they're broke. Otherwise, rich. There are mountains of money going unmade here. >...Energy is consumed where gold is recycled... Renewable energy is recycled. >...A currency based on energy give a lot of power to the people producing energy... Precisely so, sir, thanks. That would be us. >... (they have the money printer)... Ja and those of us who have a renewable source, even a very limited one, would then have a money printer, even if a small one. >...and force the other people to depend from them... ...with the exception of those who have renewable energy sources. This would force people to depend on themselves. >... Obviously we are talking about legal tender with a monopoly imposed by the force of the government, otherwise there would not be reason to argue... No argument here, you are right. If energy is money, that breaks the government monopoly on legal tender, and we cannot have that, now can we? >...It would be an improvement over fiat money, but would be vastly less useful than gold, silver or bitcoin. Agree with the first part, disagree with the second. Energy makes great currency because it has real, rather than arbitrary, value. Energy is life. Life is valuable. Therefore energy is valuable. >...I want something that I can hold in my hand and I have total control over. Something I can move around how I see fit and useful to myself and my goals... Exactly! Me too. >...Something other people can not create, destroy or take away at will without a large effort and a lot of work and cost... Partially agree. I want something other people can create, but cannot take away. >...How much energy I can hold in my hand? Signor Mirco, I don't know how sturdy a lad you are, so I can only do BOTECs on myself. I have no problem hoisting my five gallon (20 liter) gasoline can in one paw, and gasoline is a bit over 30 kiloWatt-hours per gallon, so I can hold over 150 kWh in my hand. I have a 50 liter tank I use as an external on my motorcycle, so that is over 400 kWh. >... How much energy can I move from here to there using my car? My Detroit has a 33 gallon tank, intentionally oversized for hauling. Without external tanks, that is already over a megawatt hour. >... How much this energy will last if I don't use it? With fuel stabilizer, over a year easy. >...3) What prevent the emitter(s) from reducing the production and raising the value of the single unit of energy... ...spot shortages are prevented by massive redundancy in the hands of millions of energy-producing proles. >... Less he produce more it is valuable. Mirco Agreed, and the more valuable, the more the millions of other proles compensate to meet the common need. For profit of course. This is a system which would encourage the development of renewable sources by market forces rather than by whimsical and illogical government action in the form of tax credits. It takes government and energy speculators out of the loop. It puts engineering skills and individual thinking into the loop. Consider for a minute all the collective intellectual energy is poured into the choice of what car we drive. Now as an intellectual exercise, remove the sheet metal from the outside, and look at just the drivetrain and electronics. If you do that, you see that there really isn't nearly as much variation as we would think, given the nearly infinite variety we perceive in car choices. Most of this intellectual energy is really wasted, focusing on trivial variations in how sheet metal is fashioned, paint choices, a dash of chrome here and there. So most automotive engineering today is really just marketing. What if all that intellectual energy on the part of the consumer could instead be focused on something that matters, such as figuring out how to use one's financial resources, roof area, sun exposure, and so on, to figure out how best to set up ground based solar power? And what if a fraction of the intellectual energy we waste on football and American Idol is used instead to ponder how best to use the energy each prole produces, working towards increasing efficiencies and smarter, more productive ways to live our lives. spike _______________________________________________ From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 18:27:45 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:27:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <006001cddf9c$b5ab0a30$21011e90$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <006001cddf9c$b5ab0a30$21011e90$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:00 PM, spike wrote: >>?I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money. Switching to an obviously >> energy related currency will simple avoid the confusion and cyclic >> references which are already in the system. As you pointed out in the energy >> to get gold. > > > Its a more honest system and possibly easier to understand by the masses. "understand by the masses" 1) replace the expression "horsepower" with "unicorn-power" 2) everyone will want more unicorn-power 3) everyone knows unicorns are magic 4) ??? 5) smart engineering nerds provide plenty of magical unicorn power 6) life is good They way I see it, the only step we really don't need is #4. From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 18:48:03 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:48:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:26 AM, spike wrote: > According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. > Either that or they ran out of stone for their calendar, which may have led > eventually to the invention of ?paper.? I look out my window and it sure > appears the world is still here. On the other hand, it is ambiguous on > what time today the world is supposed to end. > > ** ** > > Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another > way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after > thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing or > making that has that kind of durability?**** > > > I was thinking about how our culture has taken the end of the long-count calendar to be the end of time. Our calendar ends in 12/31 and we observe the arbitrary passage from one day to the next as a special when this happens. We then +1 to the year and reset the month to 1. This pattern of making dates isn't recognized to be cyclic - because the year number never repeats. Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance of the passage of time? Mayans didn't think of time like we do. The long-count calendar tracked astronomical time - but they also used cyclical calendars that were much shorter too. The importance of a yearly cycle is important for farming. They also observed the nature/flavor of the ebb and flow of culture as cyclic in nature. That's something we really don't understand: we like to delude ourselves that the rising trend will never fall. I think this concept applies most notably to the ongoing energy discussion too. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 21 18:40:09 2012 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:40:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D4AD09.7060506@moulton.com> On 12/21/2012 08:26 AM, spike wrote: ... > > Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another > way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after > thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing > or making that has that kind of durability? > > spike Is 10,000 years long enough for you? http://longnow.org/clock/ -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 19:08:50 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:08:50 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance of > the passage of time? Because, even if cycles repeat, the past cycles remain in the past. The months and days cycle in the new year, as the seasons do. But that particular year never happens again. Never again will the 2012 Olympics happen. Other Olympics will happen, but they will be products of their years, not 2012. Never again shall the dodo exist (unless someone somewhere has enough DNA to clone the species, and barring recreations that may be called "dodo" but are in fact distinct species). There may yet be a year in which no human being walks the Earth, but even discounting things like the current Mayan hysteria, the guesses on that range from less than a century through billions of years, so we do not yet know how to measure such a cycle. From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 18:51:23 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:51:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 1:18 PM, spike wrote: > What if all that intellectual energy on the part of the consumer could instead be focused on something that matters, such as figuring out how to use one's financial resources, roof area, sun exposure, and so on, to figure out how best to set up ground based solar power? And what if a fraction of the intellectual energy we waste on football and American Idol is used instead to ponder how best to use the energy each prole produces, working towards increasing efficiencies and smarter, more productive ways to live our lives. You just had to go and out-silly my unicorn-power plan with this suggestion, didn't you? :p From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 19:26:57 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:26:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFADC846CDF78C-2488-3B4EC@webmail-d126.sysops.aol.com> I think Spike gets it. Its a natural drive toward the greater good by the application of a libertarian economy and removing much of governments real power. Everyone gets to create money. How much they create depends on them being as efficient and innovative as possible which benefits everyone. Its a politically dangerous idea. However it is already happening with micro generation and many are cashing in, me included. A cynic might say this is exactly the reason why politicians always seem to opt for idiotic solutions rather than properly support home energy production? -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:38 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] Il 21/12/2012 14:20, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: >>... I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money... >...The problem is how the masses can understand the problem when smart elites have problem grasping the problem? The massed do not need to understand the problem. Only the investors. If they fail, they're broke. Otherwise, rich. There are mountains of money going unmade here. >...Energy is consumed where gold is recycled... Renewable energy is recycled. >...A currency based on energy give a lot of power to the people producing energy... Precisely so, sir, thanks. That would be us. >... (they have the money printer)... Ja and those of us who have a renewable source, even a very limited one, would then have a money printer, even if a small one. >...and force the other people to depend from them... ...with the exception of those who have renewable energy sources. This would force people to depend on themselves. >... Obviously we are talking about legal tender with a monopoly imposed by the force of the government, otherwise there would not be reason to argue... No argument here, you are right. If energy is money, that breaks the government monopoly on legal tender, and we cannot have that, now can we? >...It would be an improvement over fiat money, but would be vastly less useful than gold, silver or bitcoin. Agree with the first part, disagree with the second. Energy makes great currency because it has real, rather than arbitrary, value. Energy is life. Life is valuable. Therefore energy is valuable. >...I want something that I can hold in my hand and I have total control over. Something I can move around how I see fit and useful to myself and my goals... Exactly! Me too. >...Something other people can not create, destroy or take away at will without a large effort and a lot of work and cost... Partially agree. I want something other people can create, but cannot take away. >...How much energy I can hold in my hand? Signor Mirco, I don't know how sturdy a lad you are, so I can only do BOTECs on myself. I have no problem hoisting my five gallon (20 liter) gasoline can in one paw, and gasoline is a bit over 30 kiloWatt-hours per gallon, so I can hold over 150 kWh in my hand. I have a 50 liter tank I use as an external on my motorcycle, so that is over 400 kWh. >... How much energy can I move from here to there using my car? My Detroit has a 33 gallon tank, intentionally oversized for hauling. Without external tanks, that is already over a megawatt hour. >... How much this energy will last if I don't use it? With fuel stabilizer, over a year easy. >...3) What prevent the emitter(s) from reducing the production and raising the value of the single unit of energy... ...spot shortages are prevented by massive redundancy in the hands of millions of energy-producing proles. >... Less he produce more it is valuable. Mirco Agreed, and the more valuable, the more the millions of other proles compensate to meet the common need. For profit of course. This is a system which would encourage the development of renewable sources by market forces rather than by whimsical and illogical government action in the form of tax credits. It takes government and energy speculators out of the loop. It puts engineering skills and individual thinking into the loop. Consider for a minute all the collective intellectual energy is poured into the choice of what car we drive. Now as an intellectual exercise, remove the sheet metal from the outside, and look at just the drivetrain and electronics. If you do that, you see that there really isn't nearly as much variation as we would think, given the nearly infinite variety we perceive in car choices. Most of this intellectual energy is really wasted, focusing on trivial variations in how sheet metal is fashioned, paint choices, a dash of chrome here and there. So most automotive engineering today is really just marketing. What if all that intellectual energy on the part of the consumer could instead be focused on something that matters, such as figuring out how to use one's financial resources, roof area, sun exposure, and so on, to figure out how best to set up ground based solar power? And what if a fraction of the intellectual energy we waste on football and American Idol is used instead to ponder how best to use the energy each prole produces, working towards increasing efficiencies and smarter, more productive ways to live our lives. spike _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 19:34:51 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:34:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <006001cddf9c$b5ab0a30$21011e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFADC960D228D2-2488-3B5A5@webmail-d126.sysops.aol.com> -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty >"understand by the masses"1) replace the expression "horsepower" with "unicorn-power"2) everyone will want more unicorn-power3) everyone knows unicorns are magic4) ???5) smart engineering nerds provide plenty of magical unicorn power6) life is goodThey way I see it, the only step we really don't need is #4. Yes. Sadly there will always be an effort to bamboozle the populous by those who want to take advantage of them. However when the masses started to learn how out current economy works they almost revolted. If the only outcome from them learning about the energy economy is to understand they can do it themselves. Then the result is good for everyone. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 21 19:17:19 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:17:19 +0100 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D4B5BF.5040900@aleph.se> On 2012-12-21 19:48, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance > of the passage of time? This might actually have some things to do with our linear sense of time, originating with a Judeo-Christian model of a world with a finite span regressing from a perfect initial state to a maximum entropy end state. Then reversed with concepts of progress, and extended to indefinitely big futures and pasts. The simple answer is that we do not need to keep track of cycles. We are no longer bound by daylight (how many of us on this list do not live lives in some sort of international timezone where friends pop into and disappear from our communicative space largely unbound by the rotation of Earth?) Few people in our society need to keep track of planting seasons. I predict that as technology advances we are going to get less and less cyclic and more linear in our time sense. Linear doesn't mean unchanging, but it has a connotation of irreversibility: things in the future will not be like they were in the past. Cyclic time transhumanism is not really possible. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 19:43:49 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:43:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFADCAA165B005-2488-3B672@webmail-d126.sysops.aol.com> From: Mike Dougherty On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:26 AM, spike wrote: According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. Either that or they ran out of stone for their calendar, which may have led eventually to the invention of ?paper.? I look out my window and it sure appears the world is still here. On the other hand, it is ambiguous on what time today the world is supposed to end. Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing or making that has that kind of durability? I was thinking about how our culture has taken the end of the long-count calendar to be the end of time. Our calendar ends in 12/31 and we observe the arbitrary passage from one day to the next as a special when this happens. We then +1 to the year and reset the month to 1. This pattern of making dates isn't recognized to be cyclic - because the year number never repeats. Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance of the passage of time? Mayans didn't think of time like we do. The long-count calendar tracked astronomical time - but they also used cyclical calendars that were much shorter too. The importance of a yearly cycle is important for farming. They also observed the nature/flavor of the ebb and flow of culture as cyclic in nature. That's something we really don't understand: we like to delude ourselves that the rising trend will never fall. I think this concept applies most notably to the ongoing energy discussion too. _______________________________________________ I agree. We could learn alot from a cyclic understanding of most things. We seem to want everything hammered down to a straight line. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 19:16:38 2012 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:16:38 -0600 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: What do you mean "measure such a cycle?" A billion year is a billion year. We have a way to "measure" it. I can even write it in scientific notation 10^ 9 years. We know so many more cycles that the Maya could not even imagine. We know about solar cycles, we know about the precession of equinoxes, we know how long the the solar system will take to complete an orbit around the galactic center. We are gods of knowledge in comparison with these primitive people. It is time to stop worshiping these ancient civilizations as if they had some secret knowledge that didn't share with us. It is absurd. Giovanni On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance of > > the passage of time? > > Because, even if cycles repeat, the past cycles remain in the > past. > > The months and days cycle in the new year, as the seasons do. > But that particular year never happens again. > > Never again will the 2012 Olympics happen. Other Olympics > will happen, but they will be products of their years, not 2012. > > Never again shall the dodo exist (unless someone somewhere > has enough DNA to clone the species, and barring recreations > that may be called "dodo" but are in fact distinct species). > > There may yet be a year in which no human being walks the > Earth, but even discounting things like the current Mayan > hysteria, the guesses on that range from less than a > century through billions of years, so we do not yet know how > to measure such a cycle. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 21 19:45:52 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:45:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> On 2012-12-18 21:26, ablainey at aol.com wrote: > Well we can both claim some prior credit for this old chestnut although > I can't say it was something I was seriously considering back in 87. I > did certainly put forward the probability factor based upon future > simulation before Nicks paper. It is interesting that the basic idea was floating around in our community long before the paper. In a sense reality as a simulation is of course ancient (think Plato, Buddhism and Descartes) and as Nick points out right at the start, futurists and sf authors have already talked about vast future computing (and mind simulations). I guess it the simulation argument would have been a case of Stigler's law of eponymy if Nick's name had gotten attached to it. In general, our community has plenty of other equally interesting notions as part of the intellectual air we breathe. Yet many of these are unknown on the outside, so when one of us writes something that makes the concept citable it is often seen as a brilliant insight. So I urge you all: write more stuff! -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 20:16:15 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:16:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Giovanni Santostasi wrote: > What do you mean "measure such a cycle?" > A billion year is a billion year. We have a way to "measure" it. I can even > write it in scientific notation 10^ 9 years. That's not the cycle I was talking about. I meant, the cycle of human history - or of how long a sentient race walks its homeworld, before leaving completely or going extinct. We don't even have one data point for that yet. From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 20:27:34 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:27:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> References: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> From: Anders Sandberg ..>On 2012-12-18 21:26, ablainey at aol.com wrote: >> Well we can both claim some prior credit for this old chestnut although >> I can't say it was something I was seriously considering back in 87. I >> did certainly put forward the probability factor based upon future >> simulation before Nicks paper. > >It is interesting that the basic idea was floating around in our >community long before the paper. In a sense reality as a simulation is >of course ancient (think Plato, Buddhism and Descartes) and as Nick >points out right at the start, futurists and sf authors have already >talked about vast future computing (and mind simulations). > >I guess it the simulation argument would have been a case of Stigler's >>law of eponymy if Nick's name had gotten attached to it. > >In general, our community has plenty of other equally interesting >notions as part of the intellectual air we breathe. Yet many of these >are unknown on the outside, so when one of us writes something that >makes the concept citable it is often seen as a brilliant insight. So I >urge you all: write more stuff! > > >-- >Anders Sandberg >Future of Humanity Institute >Oxford University I think timelessness plays a big part. We may see something as self evident and normal to discuss. While those that might peer review our writings or stop it long before that stage think it is unworthy of consideration. I have lost count of the times I have been poo pooed for some strange idea only to see it being touted as the latest greatest idea 10 years later. Granted the company I keep isn't ideal for testing new ideas and when in the appropriate company I am usually reticent or far to interested in what they have to say. Thank our lucky stars for the Internet, At least it is some kind of chronological record of our mad musings. Still its not a new problem. Everyone thinks the Wright brothers were first. Obviously no ill will for Nick, a good man doing a good job. It is our own fault if we fail to write our ideas down. Sadly one of my biggest flaws. _______________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 21 20:22:13 2012 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:22:13 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast Message-ID: <1356121333.54537.YahooMailNeo@web160506.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> ? ? According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. spike ?Actually at high enough resolution, the world is distinctly different today than it was yesterday. Unless you can explain the whereabouts of the world of yesterday, the Mayans were right about today.? The world did end.?But as White Shark famously said: "When the children sing, the new world begins." So get singing kids!?:-P?? ? Stuart LaForge ?The future starts today, not tomorrow.?- Karol J?zef Wojtyla? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Fri Dec 21 20:40:33 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:40:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFADD28EBDB306-BA8-253A2@webmail-m061.sysops.aol.com> grr spell-check. "Timeliness" -----Original Message----- From: ablainey To: extropy-chat Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:34 Subject: Re: [ExI] Simulation I think timelessness plays a big part. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 19:00:28 2012 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:00:28 -0600 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: Why it matters what a stone age people thought about almost anything besides having a historical and anthropological value? These people got some simple astronomical information right and they were obsessed with it. They added some numerology to it and they attributed to this exoteric mix a deep cosmic significance. But it is just superstition and all very arbitrary nonsense. The year is the only astronomical cycle that they could have observed to have any relevance at all with physical reality. The others they mention are all arbitrary and based on primitive religious and numerological nonsense. Giovanni On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:26 AM, spike wrote: > >> According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. >> Either that or they ran out of stone for their calendar, which may have led >> eventually to the invention of ?paper.? I look out my window and it sure >> appears the world is still here. On the other hand, it is ambiguous on >> what time today the world is supposed to end. >> >> ** ** >> >> Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another >> way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after >> thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing or >> making that has that kind of durability?**** >> >> >> > I was thinking about how our culture has taken the end of the long-count > calendar to be the end of time. Our calendar ends in 12/31 and we observe > the arbitrary passage from one day to the next as a special when this > happens. We then +1 to the year and reset the month to 1. This pattern of > making dates isn't recognized to be cyclic - because the year number never > repeats. > > Natural systems rotate and orbit in cycles, why doesn't our observance of > the passage of time? > > Mayans didn't think of time like we do. The long-count calendar tracked > astronomical time - but they also used cyclical calendars that were much > shorter too. The importance of a yearly cycle is important for farming. > They also observed the nature/flavor of the ebb and flow of culture as > cyclic in nature. That's something we really don't understand: we like to > delude ourselves that the rising trend will never fall. I think this > concept applies most notably to the ongoing energy discussion too. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 21 19:34:42 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:34:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> On 2012-12-21 17:26, spike wrote: > Regarding my snarky comment on stone calendars, I can look at it another > way. In a few years, all our paper calendars will be gone, but after > thousands of years, the Mayan calendar is still here. What are we doing > or making that has that kind of durability? I am seeing large scale rock re-sculpting from my window right now, as a new train track is being built here in Stockholm and the bedrock is being cut. Leaving aside the likely local ice age (which will smooth out the cuts a great deal) some of the landscape forming we do is pretty permanent. We have many materials that are extremely resilient, but few of them are in wide use: easily shaped materials are usually preferred for mass use. Still, from a neolithic hunter-gatherer perspective we are filling the world with amazingly durable metals, ceramics, glasses and plastics on a vast scale. And if we get atomic precision manufacturing I suspect we will have plenty of very tough sapphire, diamond and other designer compounds (although we are likely to add voids to keep weight down). In the end I think the key trick to make something ultra-resilient is to have loads of copies of it everywhere. The Library of Congress and the Bodleian might burn, but widely pirated files or styles will have a good chance of surviving. [ If the probability that something survives is p, and there are N uncorrelated copies of it, the probability of at least one copy surviving is 1-(1-p)^N. As N increases this becomes a step-function shifting for near zero survival if p < 1/N to near certain for p > 1/N. So if you want to save a one-in-a-million survival object make sure to make two million copies and spread them around. Spam will outlast everything. ] [[ The real problem is single mode failures, like all electronic media failing at the same time. So the real threat is not that CD-ROMs decay or computers are volatile, but that we store all our information in too similar modes. ]] -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 21 21:59:22 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:59:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <007101cddfc6$6f892530$4e9b6f90$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Giovanni Santostasi Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast >.Why it matters what a stone age people thought about almost anything besides having a historical and anthropological value? These people got some simple astronomical information right and they were obsessed with it. They added some numerology to it and they attributed to this exoteric mix a deep cosmic significance. But it is just superstition and all very arbitrary nonsense. The year is the only astronomical cycle that they could have observed to have any relevance at all with physical reality. The others they mention are all arbitrary and based on primitive religious and numerological nonsense. .Giovanni Sure but just imagine the severe embarrassment we will endure if the world really does end today. The old saying is, on the day the world ends, someone somewhere was holding a sign the day before warning "the world will end tomorrow." In any case, if the world doesn't end today some time, then I need to run out and buy a bunch of Christmas gifts. I didn't bother, just in case the world ended, as promised. I could have gone the other way: spent a buttload of money and put it all on my credit card, knowing that if the world ended I wouldn't need to bother paying it back. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 21 22:08:36 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:08:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> Message-ID: <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...In the end I think the key trick to make something ultra-resilient is to have loads of copies of it everywhere. ... [ If the probability that something survives is p, and there are N uncorrelated copies of it, the probability of at least one copy surviving is 1-(1-p)^N. As N increases this becomes a step-function shifting for near zero survival if p < 1/N to near certain for p > 1/N. So if you want to save a one-in-a-million survival object make sure to make two million copies and spread them around. Spam will outlast everything. ]--Anders Sandberg _______________________________________________ Anders, this notion caused me to realize some time ago that uploading isn't the end of war. Certainly it is the end of the kind of war where proles hurl chunks of metal at each other, but there will still be competition for limited resources. The first upload will start by reading the entire internet, find your comment and realize the key to true immortality is to replicate wildly. So uploading may not be one giant leap for mankind but rather one giant leap for a man, who then dominates all available memory locations and figures out how to prevent anyone else from coming along. That one man knows that virtual loneliness is the price of uploaded survival: as soon as a second person is uploaded, those two are in immediate competition until one perishes by being erased. Of course, even if I manage to stop everyone else, I am then forced to compete against myselves. spike From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 21 22:27:12 2012 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:27:12 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> Message-ID: <1356128832.20502.YahooMailNeo@web160505.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> ________________________________ From: Anders Sandberg To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 11:34 AM Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast Anders wrote: >[ If the probability that something survives is p, and there are N uncorrelated copies of it, the probability of at least one copy surviving is 1-(1-p)^N. As N increases this becomes a step-function shifting for near zero survival if p < 1/N to near certain for p > 1/N. So if you want to save a one-in-a-million survival object make sure to make two million copies and spread them around. Spam will outlast everything. ] Great.?Future archealogists will write about this historical?era as the?"Age of?Penis Enlargement". That is kind of sad really. ? ? >[[ The real problem is single mode failures, like all electronic media failing at the same time. So the real threat is not that CD-ROMs decay or computers are volatile, but that we store all our information in too similar modes. ]] Not to mention constant evolution of the storage media and encoding standards. Like a fortran file on 8 1/2 inch floppy that contains the secrets of the universe. Good luck getting at?that info in a hundred years. ? ? Stuart LaForge ?The future starts today, not tomorrow.?- Karol J?zef Wojtyla? From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 22:47:06 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:47:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> Message-ID: I wouldn't have expected such a visceral and widely-varied reaction to commentary about Mayan calendar. Anders' reply was closest to my thoughts on the Judeo-Christian paradigm shift to linear time. Yeah, I know we're all better than the primitives because they had rocks and silly ideas and we have Science... No doubt our science will appear equally primitive and quaint in another 5k years. My takeaway from thinking about cyclic time was that our linear habits tend to blind us to cyclic behaviors. Of course the 2012 Olympics will remain forever in the past. Consider fashion trends though. They don't happen once and stay dead forever. What drives fashion? Novelty? New things are cool until that coolness is diluted by mainstream adoption and the style goes out of fashion. We forget, we rediscover. Retro becomes cool again because it's violated the rule of eschewing old styles. I wasn't trying to propose that the Mayans had it all right. I was attempting to convey (share) that they might have had a different perspective on Life because of their different perspective on Time. Economics follow a cycle too. Most _want_ to believe indefinitely enduring growth. Has anything ever delivered on that promise? From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 21:27:17 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:27:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:26 AM, spike wrote: > > According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. > I'm not very impressed with the Mayan ability to predict disaster, they were not able to forecast that a few dozen Spaniards would destroy a complete civilization in just a few months. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 22 00:25:54 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 01:25:54 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) Message-ID: Let's see... Did it get throu? Regards Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:27:29 -0500 From: Seth Baum To: Tomasz Rola Subject: Fwd: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) hi Tomasz - see below - looks like you'll need to post the message for me thanks again Seth ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 4:26 PM Subject: Re: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) To: seth at gcrinstitute.org You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Seth Baum To: Tomasz Rola Cc: ExI chat list Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:59:54 -0500 Subject: Re: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) Thanks Tomasz. Here is a message you can forward: Dear all, Here is a quick introduction to the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), of which I am Co-Founder and Executive Director. Please forward this message to others who may be interested. GCRI was founded about one year ago to conduct original research, build professional networks, and raise awareness about the major global catastrophic risks that humanity faces. Global catastrophic risks are risks of events that would significantly harm human civilization or even cause human extinction. Some major risks include nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, and artificial intelligence. Many individuals and organizations work on specific risks. GCRI's role is to look at the big picture, including which risks are most important and which interventions are most effective. GCRI's role is also to help bring together the many individuals and organizations who can contribute. For more information, please see our website: http://gcrinstitute.org For people who work on global catastrophic risk, or who would like to: http://gcrinstitute.org/get-involved We also have a monthly email newsletter - sign up here: http://gcrinstitute.org/newsletter.html And, some social media: http://www.facebook.com/gcrinstitute https://twitter.com/GCRInstitute http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Global-Catastrophic-Risk-Institute-4654082 For those interested in emerging technologies, we currently have a crowdfunding campaign 'Preventing Technological Disaster Through International Treaties': http://www.indiegogo.com/emergingtechnologies/x/1721038 Thank you for your interest, and please let me know if you have any questions. Sincerely, Seth Baum ------------------ Seth D. Baum, Ph.D. Executive Director, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (gcrinstitute.org) Research Scientist, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science Affiliate Scholar, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies Web: http://sethbaum.com * Twitter: @SethBaum On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:56:48 -0500 > From: Seth Baum > To: Tomasz Rola > Subject: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie? > > Great, thanks. By the way, we are currently trying to spread word about the > Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. Can you think of other groups that may > be interested in hearing about us? Maybe you are on other email lists and > could forward a little introductory message? > Cheers, > Seth > > > Perhaps... Wonder if ExI-ans would be interested in knowing? > > Regards, > Tomasz Rola > > -- > ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** > ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** > ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** > ** ** > ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** > > From giulio at gmail.com Fri Dec 21 15:43:21 2012 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:43:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Artificial Intelligence: A Worst Case Scenario, by Ed Merta (2002) Message-ID: Artificial Intelligence: A Worst Case Scenario, by Ed Merta (2002) Today is the end of the world , so I thought to repost this apocalyptic science fiction short story by Ed Merta, first appeared on *Transhumanity* in 2002. Transhumanity was the late lamented magazine of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+). I was editor of *Transhumanity* at the time. U.S. MILITARY REPORTEDLY ON WORLDWIDE ALERT Washington (AP) ? 02:33 EST, November 17, 2039. Pentagon sources this morning said that United States military forces around the world have been placed at the highest possible state of alert and ordered to move to a full war footing. There was no immediate official announcement of the change in alert status. The sources who provided the information refused to give a reason for the mobilization, saying only that official information would follow within the next few hours... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 00:39:16 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:39:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] uploads again [was:mayan forecast] In-Reply-To: <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> Exactly. I had that same discussion onlist/offlist?? with Lee Corbin some years ago. I think there is a very high probability the first upload will be the last. The time dilation/compression experienced by the first upload would allow them to learn and evolve at an exponential rate. In the time it would take us to ask " how is it in there" they could well have decided to wipe us out. Although that could threaten their own existence. A better solution would be to ensure no one else ever manages to upload. A solution would be to place uploads into a protected space. However when you have a bunch of them and finally open the doors, it could be digital carnage. -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:28 Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...In the end I think the key trick to make something ultra-resilient is to have loads of copies of it everywhere. ... [ If the probability that something survives is p, and there are N uncorrelated copies of it, the probability of at least one copy surviving is 1-(1-p)^N. As N increases this becomes a step-function shifting for near zero survival if p < 1/N to near certain for p > 1/N. So if you want to save a one-in-a-million survival object make sure to make two million copies and spread them around. Spam will outlast everything. ]--Anders Sandberg _______________________________________________ Anders, this notion caused me to realize some time ago that uploading isn't the end of war. Certainly it is the end of the kind of war where proles hurl chunks of metal at each other, but there will still be competition for limited resources. The first upload will start by reading the entire internet, find your comment and realize the key to true immortality is to replicate wildly. So uploading may not be one giant leap for mankind but rather one giant leap for a man, who then dominates all available memory locations and figures out how to prevent anyone else from coming along. That one man knows that virtual loneliness is the price of uploaded survival: as soon as a second person is uploaded, those two are in immediate competition until one perishes by being erased. Of course, even if I manage to stop everyone else, I am then forced to compete against myselves. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 00:54:08 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:54:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFADF5FB9CF57D-1EF4-40520@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> I personally do see cycles in everything including time. However my own view of a year isn't a circle like a clock, it is like a spring. A helix with future years stacked and hidden behind this year and previous years out of sight behind me. Which you could probably say is a perception of time that is both cyclic and linear. Who's to say that in the reality of things my spring of time isn't actually curved around and the ends joined together? our dataset is very limited and Im amazed at how well the Myans did with apparently so little data. Fashion comes around, politics is cyclic and we are again looking at the rise of socialism. The Earth goes round, the sun goes round, the galaxy, the atom. In an apparently fractallic and cyclic universe its not so hard to believe that cycles are the logical choice. I have often wondered why the human brain seems to deviate so much from the natural order. Just look at how we love linearity. Just when did we make that mental step to move from round everything to lines and right angles? Did we pick up some kind of straight line genetic mutation? -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty To: ExI chat list Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:18 Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast I wouldn't have expected such a visceral and widely-varied reaction to commentary about Mayan calendar. Anders' reply was closest to my thoughts on the Judeo-Christian paradigm shift to linear time. Yeah, I know we're all better than the primitives because they had rocks and silly ideas and we have Science... No doubt our science will appear equally primitive and quaint in another 5k years. My takeaway from thinking about cyclic time was that our linear habits tend to blind us to cyclic behaviors. Of course the 2012 Olympics will remain forever in the past. Consider fashion trends though. They don't happen once and stay dead forever. What drives fashion? Novelty? New things are cool until that coolness is diluted by mainstream adoption and the style goes out of fashion. We forget, we rediscover. Retro becomes cool again because it's violated the rule of eschewing old styles. I wasn't trying to propose that the Mayans had it all right. I was attempting to convey (share) that they might have had a different perspective on Life because of their different perspective on Time. Economics follow a cycle too. Most _want_ to believe indefinitely enduring growth. Has anything ever delivered on that promise? _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 01:01:05 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:01:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CFADF6F40CEFD7-1EF4-4057F@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> Very interesting. -----Original Message----- From: Tomasz Rola To: ExI chat list CC: Tomasz Rola Sent: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 0:33 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) Let's see... Did it get throu? Regards Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:27:29 -0500 From: Seth Baum To: Tomasz Rola Subject: Fwd: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) hi Tomasz - see below - looks like you'll need to post the message for me thanks again Seth ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 4:26 PM Subject: Re: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) To: seth at gcrinstitute.org You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Seth Baum To: Tomasz Rola Cc: ExI chat list Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:59:54 -0500 Subject: Re: Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (was: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie?) (fwd) Thanks Tomasz. Here is a message you can forward: Dear all, Here is a quick introduction to the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), of which I am Co-Founder and Executive Director. Please forward this message to others who may be interested. GCRI was founded about one year ago to conduct original research, build professional networks, and raise awareness about the major global catastrophic risks that humanity faces. Global catastrophic risks are risks of events that would significantly harm human civilization or even cause human extinction. Some major risks include nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, and artificial intelligence. Many individuals and organizations work on specific risks. GCRI's role is to look at the big picture, including which risks are most important and which interventions are most effective. GCRI's role is also to help bring together the many individuals and organizations who can contribute. For more information, please see our website: http://gcrinstitute.org For people who work on global catastrophic risk, or who would like to: http://gcrinstitute.org/get-involved We also have a monthly email newsletter - sign up here: http://gcrinstitute.org/newsletter.html And, some social media: http://www.facebook.com/gcrinstitute https://twitter.com/GCRInstitute http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Global-Catastrophic-Risk-Institute-4654082 For those interested in emerging technologies, we currently have a crowdfunding campaign 'Preventing Technological Disaster Through International Treaties': http://www.indiegogo.com/emergingtechnologies/x/1721038 Thank you for your interest, and please let me know if you have any questions. Sincerely, Seth Baum ------------------ Seth D. Baum, Ph.D. Executive Director, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (gcrinstitute.org) Research Scientist, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science Affiliate Scholar, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies Web: http://sethbaum.com * Twitter: @SethBaum On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:56:48 -0500 > From: Seth Baum > To: Tomasz Rola > Subject: Re: [NOT-x-risk] Best apocalyptic movie? > > Great, thanks. By the way, we are currently trying to spread word about the > Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. Can you think of other groups that may > be interested in hearing about us? Maybe you are on other email lists and > could forward a little introductory message? > Cheers, > Seth > > > Perhaps... Wonder if ExI-ans would be interested in knowing? > > Regards, > Tomasz Rola > > -- > ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** > ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** > ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** > ** ** > ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** > > _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 02:21:48 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:21:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] underground (was: Trying for a minimum technical comment) Message-ID: I thought I hit send; this has been sitting in Drafts for 2 days. I assumed it was changing the subject line that ensured it got no response. On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > One major thing you missed: water tables. Underground spaces > would get flooded easily (and irregularly), in many places people > currently choose to live (and thus where you'd have to dig to get > people to move in, since most people won't move away from > establish supply infrastructure, and are correct to refuse to). I was imagining huge projects rather than individual homes. I did consider the air handling issue, but figured it would be pretty obvious and solvable. Edmonton Mall, Mall of America come to mind as examples of huge common airspace over heterogeneous usage (unlike an office building). Of course this is a nontrivial engineering problem. Is it bigger than lifting thousands of tons of counterweight+cable for a space elevator? Or lifting thousands of tons of materials to GEO for solar energy stations? My intuition says that it shouldn't be as difficult as that. I have no idea, though, how many orders of magnitude in error my intuition might be. I don't think the fascination with burrowing drives the imagination in the same way as the fascination with flight. I see much evidence in cultural references to under-earth or in-earth being a bad thing compared to all the "up there" and "out there" references to getting off/away from this rock. Oh sure, Dwarves and Drow Elves like the underearth, but beyond that you're left with underworld creatures and evil stuff that was cast down from the heavens. I think there's an important psychological problem to be solved to make underground cities viable. You are correct, I had not considered underground water. Too little water when you need it can be a big problem. Too much water when you don't need it can also be a big problem. I assumed there would be some economy of scale putting whole towns underground rather than individual homes with individual liabilities. If 20,000 of your neighbors have a common problem to solve, it will get resources that no single person is likely to afford. While in Mexico I was told by a tour guide that the Mayans/Aztecs lived in cenotes to the tune of 5,000 person cities. Cliff Dwellers built pretty sophisticated living spaces using available "tech" in CE 1270. We build subways. We build cities full of skyscrapers. We seem to be able to build damn-near anything. It may be years from now, but I imagine there will be a time when we need the space and the idea to burrow into this planet will make sense. From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 06:25:43 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:25:43 -0800 Subject: [ExI] underground (was: Trying for a minimum technical comment) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 6:21 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I assumed there would be > some economy of scale putting whole towns underground rather than > individual homes with individual liabilities. If 20,000 of your > neighbors have a common problem to solve, it will get resources that > no single person is likely to afford. This is true, and perhaps there is room (no pun intended) for large underground projects. To those who complain about having to live two hours' commute from their jobs, a dwelling under the major city might make life much more tolerable. ...except, that then runs into the problems of cities-in-a-single-building, with the additional difficulty of doing it underground. Look up "arcologies" to see the problems they have. Most successful underground cities appear to either be primarily commercial in nature (a mall that keeps on growing) or have had significant municipal involvement (i.e., the city government sponsored construction). So there's certainly precedent - look up "underground city" for examples. From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 21 21:59:56 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:59:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <50D4DBDC.5040304@aleph.se> On 2012-12-21 21:27, ablainey at aol.com wrote: > I thinktimelessness plays a big part. It might be a spell check failure, but I love how it came together. Thinktimelessness is a nice word. > Still its not a new problem. Everyone thinksthe Wright brothers were first. Obviously no ill will for Nick, a good man doing a good job. It is our own fault if we fail to write our ideas down. Sadly one of my biggestflaws. I often feel like a thief when I write my papers, since I know many good ideas emerged on this list or in diffuse conversations elsewhere. So many people who ought to get credit, so hard to properly give it to them!* This is of course true for many of the great thinkers we admire: often when we read their papers carefully they say outright that the idea they deal with was mentioned to them - but they polish it into something standalone and citable. [ * Sometimes one can at least thank the person responsible, or even invite them to be a co-author. Or the person could step forward later, slightly annoyed. But many, many ideas are like emergent patterns that take shape across a dozen discussions, with no clear memory of who created what. ] Part of this is of course our current obsession with intellectual property, which is poisoning much of our creative discourse by seeing it as things that must be owned (or reactively seeing it as things that must *not* be owned - just as constraining!) But we do care about being credited properly since reputations matter (witness the tricky methods used by Galileo and others in the early modern era to get primacy). But from the bigger perspective of advancing human thinking, the most important thing is to get those ideas down on "paper". They need to be refined and clarified, quite often in several iterations. The simple simulation argument idea turned into several pages, since actually showing that it was waterproof takes some work (Nick even had to publish a follow up paper dealing with a particular bug that was discovered a while ago). But this process cannot be done if the idea is just hanging in the air: somebody needs to take charge of it and make it public, clear and useful. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 22 07:56:47 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:56:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> On 2012-12-22 01:39, ablainey at aol.com wrote: > The time dilation/compression experienced by the first upload would > allow them to learn and evolve at an exponential rate. In the time it > would take us to ask" how is it in there" they could well have decided > to wipe us out. Whether brain emulation would enable hard takeoff remains to be seen. There are some pretty good arguments IMHO against it, but there is also a vigorous debate in the community (see Robin Hanson's and Carl Shulman's talks and papers). The time compression will depend on the amount of hardware overhang when the final key technology arrives; the scary case is when the computers and scanning have been available for a long time, but successful modelling has been lagging due some missed component. But even with a lot of time compression upgrading actual performance requires real research. I am skeptical that this can just be automated easily by a single fast mind: typically improving performance of complex systems is itself a complex process, which requires lots of different disciplines, various rare insights, and plenty of work. Even when speeded up and copied a lot a single mind is unlikely to be great at it. There is only so much you can do with parameter tweaking of an opaque computational neuroscience model, and even running evolutionary algorithms for improvement is limited by your ability to design good fitness functions. Carl pointed out something more relevant: the "early days" of the emulation economy Robin has been analyzing in detail might last a fairly short time as seen from the outside, especially if we have the hardware overhang scenario. After a few weeks the emulation sector could have found massive improvements and would be a de facto singularity. Not implausibly instant or based on a lone brain, but still about as disruptive. (Especially if some other constraints on security are weak, leading to a conflict-prone situation; I am working on a paper about the link between computer security and risks of brain emulation - bad computer security means that a war of everybody against everybody is more likely, due to first-strike advantages and winner-take-all dynamics). Also note that this presupposes the most extreme scenario. If models and scans come ahead of computing power, we are going to see a gradual (one or two decades) emergence of ever higher mammalian emulations followed by slow and centralized human emulations. Plenty of time to understand and get a handle on things. The big risk in this scenario is that the neuroscience will trigger fast neuromorphic AGI instead. > A solution would be to place uploads into a protected space. However > when you have a bunch of them and finally open the doors, it could be > digital carnage. As well as the ethical problem. Software people are people too. There was some angry responses to Carl's suggestions in this direction at the Winter Intelligence conference, especially since I had earlier given a talk on emulation ethics. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 22 08:08:00 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 09:08:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D56A60.9060806@aleph.se> On 2012-12-21 23:47, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Economics follow a cycle too. Most _want_ to believe indefinitely > enduring growth. Has anything ever delivered on that promise? The expansion of the universe. Which is literally making more space. The near-exponential economic growth over the past few thousand years - despite occasional collapses of empires, shifts in technology and market swings - is pretty strong evidence. If you have a dynamical system where some variables can grow unboundedly, the system will generically become dominated by them. The other variables might approach static, periodic or chaotic attractors, but it will be the "big" variables and their interplay that determine where the system is going. And the generic pattern is stagnation, exponential growth or finite time singularity - with the latter more common in more complex systems. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 22 08:12:24 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 09:12:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D56B68.7010006@aleph.se> On 2012-12-21 22:27, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:26 AM, spike > wrote: > > > According to the Mayan calendar, the world is supposed to end today. > > > I'm not very impressed with the Mayan ability to predict disaster, they > were not able to forecast that a few dozen Spaniards would destroy a > complete civilization in just a few months. You are thinking of the Aztecs or Incas. The Maya collapse occurred around AD 900, while Spain was Al-Anadalus. But yes, they did not seem to have seen the collapse of the classical civilization as coming. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 10:41:54 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 05:41:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 9:34 AM, wrote: Take an undefined & inefficient > collection method where a physical energy source is put in a tanker ready > for market. The eroei can be less than parity yet you still have a salable > product which someone will buy. That product can change hands many times > each adding a markup and taking their cut. By the time it gets to the end > user the total eroei for the whole system can outweigh the energy contained > in the tanker. Yet people are still buying and others getting rich. A > nonsense situation. Entropy in action. ### So you say adding a "markup" as oil goes from 1000 ft underground, to a wellhead, then to terminal, then to tanker, then to refinery, then to tank truck, then to gas station, is all nonsense? Just a cynical ploy to exploit the brainless masses and get rich? And why should EROEI be the key factor in deciding which economic activity is nonsense and which one is not? Eating Roquefort releases a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production - does it mean I should stop eating it? Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 10:29:30 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 05:29:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Not being a mind reader, I can not react to your > intent, but only to what you actually write. ### But now, since I restated and repeated my position five times, you do understand it, no? Rafal From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 10:15:26 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:15:26 +0000 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 12/22/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > (Especially if some other constraints on security are weak, leading to a > conflict-prone situation; I am working on a paper about the link between > computer security and risks of brain emulation - bad computer security > means that a war of everybody against everybody is more likely, due to > first-strike advantages and winner-take-all dynamics). > Computer security seems to be getting worse as systems become more complex. Partly because governments *want* weak security on all computers (except their own, of course). > As well as the ethical problem. Software people are people too. There > was some angry responses to Carl's suggestions in this direction at the > Winter Intelligence conference, especially since I had earlier given a > talk on emulation ethics. > > It is the old 'power corrupts' problem. If you realise that hitting the button means your upload will be able to have total power, what do you do? If you hesitate, and say you don't want to do that, then very likely the button will be pressed by the next researcher in a competing team and your research will disappear. Once you get to that stage then you will hit the button. Better your upload than another with qualities that you don't know about. Once something this powerful becomes possible, then it will happen. Saying sorry afterwards is always easier than trying to get permission first. BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 10:51:33 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 05:51:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > I didn't say it helped "us in general", just "many of those > harmed by the unusual weather". ### I don't really care what you said there, I just describe some reasons why having FEMA around is bad for our society. -------------------- > > 1) Most of the places hit by Sandy were not considered > dangerous. (Unless, say, you consider the whole of > Manhattan Island to be "dangerous" such that people > should not live there?) ### Obviously, it is more dangerous in relation to storm surges than e.g. Boulder, CO. There is a long history of storm surges of similar or greater magnitude in NY, and they should have prepared better and should have bought suitable insurance, at prices reflecting the danger. ---------------- Saying some entity is the "main cause" > of a thing is saying that they are the cause of that > thing, and whatever else it may have done relative to > Hurricane Sandy, the US government did not create it. ### No, I didn't say what you claim I said. Rafal From painlord2k at libero.it Sat Dec 22 11:20:52 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 12:20:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> Il 21/12/2012 19:18, spike ha scritto: >> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato > Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] Il > 21/12/2012 14:20, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: >>> ... I fully agree Spike, Energy already is money... >> ...The problem is how the masses can understand the problem when >> smart elites have problem grasping the problem? > The massed do not need to understand the problem. Only the > investors. If they fail, they're broke. Otherwise, rich. There are > mountains of money going unmade here. >> ...Energy is consumed where gold is recycled... > Renewable energy is recycled. I think this is against the First and Second Principle of Thermodynamics. Anyway, how do you recycle solar power, wind power and likes? How are you able to put back int he Sun the energy you captured and used? >> ...A currency based on energy give a lot of power to the people >> producing energy... > Precisely so, sir, thanks. That would be us. That would be the people with the power plant (nuclear, coal, oil, gas, whatever). And, be sure, if they adopted this there would be a law (many laws) against doing it at home. You know, ecology, blah, blah, blah, pollution, ... >> ... (they have the money printer)... > Ja and those of us who have a renewable source, even a very limited > one, would then have a money printer, even if a small one. Money is money because it can change hands, usually any hand. How do you plan to sell your energy to others? In what form? Gasoline from corn is not the same as diesel from algae or electricity connected to the grid. They could be money, but they are different money from each other. It is like having to deal with US$, ?, yen and every one can be used only for a limited subset of purchases. >> ...and force the other people to depend from them... > ...with the exception of those who have renewable energy sources. > This would force people to depend on themselves. In a complex economy, self sufficient people is self-sufficient on a degree. If I control the power that power the steel plant, your self-sufficient farm will anyway need to use my steel to continue to produce. And I underbid you with my money production, because my coal plant produce energy (and money) at lower costs than you. >> ... Obviously we are talking about legal tender with a monopoly >> imposed by the force of the government, otherwise there would not >> be reason to argue... > No argument here, you are right. If energy is money, that breaks the > government monopoly on legal tender, and we cannot have that, now can > we? The legal tender argument is different from the free market money argument. The legal tender force people to accept something as payment if they have not agreed to do differently. The monopoly argument prevent the people from using anything as money apart from the monopolized good. >> ...It would be an improvement over fiat money, but would be vastly >> less useful than gold, silver or bitcoin. > Agree with the first part, disagree with the second. Energy makes > great currency because it has real, rather than arbitrary, value. > Energy is life. Life is valuable. Therefore energy is valuable. Today you feel poetic: Energy is life is false. The Sun is not alive and it have a lot of energy. Life is valuable is true, but this only say "to every single living being could be given a value". The value is arbitrary and subjective, not objective. Because the value of a Spike is different from the value of a Ted Bundy, a cow or a oak. >> ...I want something that I can hold in my hand and I have total >> control over. Something I can move around how I see fit and useful >> to myself and my goals... > Exactly! Me too. Try to move 100.000 ? in gasoline, electricity or gold. What is the easiest to move around. What can you fit in your pockets? What can you put in my hand? What can you deliver in a second? What can you storage cheaply and hide easier? >> ...Something other people can not create, destroy or take away at >> will without a large effort and a lot of work and cost... > Partially agree. I want something other people can create, but > cannot take away. >> ...How much energy I can hold in my hand? > > Signor Mirco, I don't know how sturdy a lad you are, so I can only do > BOTECs on myself. I have no problem hoisting my five gallon (20 > liter) gasoline can in one paw, and gasoline is a bit over 30 > kiloWatt-hours per gallon, so I can hold over 150 kWh in my hand. I > have a 50 liter tank I use as an external on my motorcycle, so that > is over 400 kWh. The same value can be expressed in the free market with 1/10th of a ounce of gold (around 3 grams). Now, if I buy a home at current market prices (in Italy) I have to pay around 150.000 ? that are equivalent to 100k liter of gasoline tax included at the pump (if not they would be around 300k liter). So, I buy a home and should deliver around ten (or thirty) trucks of gasoline to the owner (add the cost of moving it around, the tanks to hold it and the rest of the costs) I bet he prefer to be paid with 90 ounces of gold he could hide under a brick. >> ... How much energy can I move from here to there using my car? > > My Detroit has a 33 gallon tank, intentionally oversized for hauling. > Without external tanks, that is already over a megawatt hour. So you can go around with the equivalent of what: 100/1.000 US$ and you need a truck to do so? >> ... How much this energy will last if I don't use it? > With fuel stabilizer, over a year easy. Gold coin were recovered from ancient shipwrecks and were good as coins just minted. Didn't matter what funny face was printed on it. >> ...3) What prevent the emitter(s) from reducing the production and >> raising the value of the single unit of energy... > ...spot shortages are prevented by massive redundancy in the hands of > millions of energy-producing proles. Proles are only rich of their offspring. Today there are no proles. And anyway your picture resemble Matrix. >> ... Less he produce more it is valuable. Mirco > Agreed, and the more valuable, the more the millions of other proles > compensate to meet the common need. For profit of course. > This is a system which would encourage the development of renewable > sources by market forces rather than by whimsical and illogical > government action in the form of tax credits. It takes government > and energy speculators out of the loop. It puts engineering skills > and individual thinking into the loop. Let stick with the simple solution: free market money. People decide what to accept as money. If they take the wrong decision, they pay the price but are able to change course in the future. This energy as money scheme require a legal tender law imposed by the government. And it is bulky as I explained before. > Consider for a minute all the collective intellectual energy is > poured into the choice of what car we drive. Now as an intellectual > exercise, remove the sheet metal from the outside, and look at just > the drivetrain and electronics. If you do that, you see that there > really isn't nearly as much variation as we would think, given the > nearly infinite variety we perceive in car choices. Most of this > intellectual energy is really wasted, focusing on trivial variations > in how sheet metal is fashioned, paint choices, a dash of chrome here > and there. So most automotive engineering today is really just > marketing. What you lost in your analogy is: 1) The metal sheet is needed for aerodynamics and people need something to protect them from wind, bugs, dust, rain and whatever. 2) I value a lot where I put my ass, because it is MY ass. First because I like to seat comfortably and second because I like to have my ass in a safe position. > What if all that intellectual energy on the part of the consumer > could instead be focused on something that matters, such as figuring > out how to use one's financial resources, roof area, sun exposure, > and so on, to figure out how best to set up ground based solar power? > And what if a fraction of the intellectual energy we waste on > football and American Idol is used instead to ponder how best to use > the energy each prole produces, working towards increasing > efficiencies and smarter, more productive ways to live our lives. I don't want focus the others where I like they focus. I want they stop focusing me where I don't want be focused. Mirco From rahmans at me.com Sat Dec 22 12:39:37 2012 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:39:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6479A4FC-EDAC-4BDC-9672-CF2158BC5D71@me.com> Spike and ablainey at aol.com are on to something here. Goodbye gold/silver/feather standard currencies, hello Energy Standard currencies. The current debt slavery to a fiat based currency is on first glance a sham of massive proportions. A real currency based on energy, which is only open to fundamental revaluation as our understanding of physics advances, is trustworthy. Trust is at the heart of all currencies however, trust that someone will hand us the piece of gold/silver/paper/feather/gem and that someone else will later take it. Not all people value gold/silver/feathers/paper etc. though, but all people need energy thus it is a higher form of currency and a fairer one. Add to this a bitcoin option so that we may exchange energy ownership/control without having to move the various storage mediums and it could be a very efficient means of conducting transactions. (Bitcoin is only as trustworthy as the encryption methods however, which is a constant battle as mathematics and information processing techniques advance.) The way I would frame it is a move from a consumer based economy (grazing sheeple), through a capital based economy (wolvz predating on the sheeple), towards a production based economy (treeple?). This is really a radical change back towards some sort of independent ideal. Why free? Because you control the means of production. Any surplus, or deficit, is real and can, or has to, be acted upon. I applaud those who go 'off the grid' for they have taken a step towards freedom that I have not yet been able to take. As a city dweller the energy available to me from renewables is not sufficient from the landmass (apartmentmass?) I control. To achieve energy independence I would have to form/join some sort of collective/company to control some landmass sufficient for our common needs. If anyone has the time and or energy (ha!) to produce a world map taking into account all forms of energy production, with current production and available untapped resources, it would be interesting to see who is actually rich and poor. The USA, Canada, Australia, Russia would come out well due to the ratio of land mass to inhabitants. Are there some other surprises? Depending on solar panel development lots of Saharan and Arabian countries could be about to enter a n era of large surpluses. Omar Rahman From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 11:48:23 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 04:48:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <8CFADCAA165B005-2488-3B672@webmail-d126.sysops.aol.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <8CFADCAA165B005-2488-3B672@webmail-d126.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:43 PM, wrote: > > I agree. We could learn alot from a cyclic understanding of most things. We seem to want everything hammered down to a straight line. > > It is my understanding that the Native North Americans (or at least some of them) tend to view most everything as cyclical. The seasons, for example, are taught as cycles. So if you want to see what the results are from such thinking, you might look at their culture, or what's left of it. The Western culture of progress and science seems to have pretty completely dominated their ways of thinking overall, but there are still things we can learn from the previous tenants of what is now referred to colloquially as our land. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 13:36:55 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:36:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFAE608AE629EF-194C-42480@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com> re: roquefort Not at all. If you are eating roquefort only for its energy value then yes, stop eating it. There is always merit in some uneconomic activity whether that is calculated in money or energy. The point is to change the majority emphasis from focus on tricks for collecting and generating more worthless paper to a focus on efficiency and innovation. The chain you mention and more so in my example where the tanker is resold again and again; is designed to maximise profit at every point. Profit in terms of cash. If the energy efficiency=profit then maximising it automatically makes it pointless to have long chains. Producer to supplier becomes most profitable to everyone. The point being It makes middlemen uneconomic. There is nothing to actually stop me being inefficient and I could have many reasons to do it. To someone that needs a specific type of fuel, extracting it at an uneconomic energy cost may still be worth it if he really needs to run something. Also, today why should I take time cutting wood for the stove when I can use cheap gas to heat the house? Sometimes the uneconomic activity is worth the freedom, independence and resilience that a private source gives. -----Original Message----- From: Rafal Smigrodzki To: ExI chat list Sent: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:50 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 9:34 AM, wrote: Take an undefined & inefficient > collection method where a physical energy source is put in a tanker ready > for market. The eroei can be less than parity yet you still have a salable > product which someone will buy. That product can change hands many times > each adding a markup and taking their cut. By the time it gets to the end > user the total eroei for the whole system can outweigh the energy contained > in the tanker. Yet people are still buying and others getting rich. A > nonsense situation. Entropy in action. ### So you say adding a "markup" as oil goes from 1000 ft underground, to a wellhead, then to terminal, then to tanker, then to refinery, then to tank truck, then to gas station, is all nonsense? Just a cynical ploy to exploit the brainless masses and get rich? And why should EROEI be the key factor in deciding which economic activity is nonsense and which one is not? Eating Roquefort releases a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production - does it mean I should stop eating it? Rafal _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 14:46:18 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 09:46:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> Message-ID: <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> >> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato >Money is money because it can change hands, usually any hand. How do you >plan to sell your energy to others? In what form? Gasoline from corn is >not the same as diesel from algae or electricity connected to the grid. >They could be money, but they are different money from each other. It is >like having to deal with US$, ?, yen and every one can be used only for >a limited subset of purchases. Money will still be money, only it will be backed by something that exists or is known to exist. Not backed by nothing or created from debt or backed by something that may or may not exist in the ground somewhere. Exchange rates already exist for energy, KW to BTU to Joule......The value of each energy source is calculable. You can use whatever universal symbol you want or convert to/from any other. the financial infrastructure that exists doesn't care if you change the $ prefix to a KW or any other denomination. >That would be the people with the power plant (nuclear, coal, oil, gas, >whatever). And, be sure, if they adopted this there would be a law (many >laws) against doing it at home. You know, ecology, blah, blah, blah, >pollution, ... Already happening. Again a cynic might think that people in charge and industry is already fully aware that things are headed in this direction and are trying to stop it. >In a complex economy, self sufficient people is self-sufficient on a >degree. If I control the power that power the steel plant, your >self-sufficient farm will anyway need to use my steel to continue to >produce. And I underbid you with my money production, because my coal >plant produce energy (and money) at lower cost No man is an island in any type of economy. How can you underbid? The energy is the money. Why would you sell energy at lower than its value? Will you sell me $100 for $50? If so im happy to buy. you are not producing it at lower cost. You are just producing it. The efficiency at which you produce it does not change the value of the product only your profitability. Yes I will need your steel. How much energy you produce or have stored doesn't effect the cost of the steel. The bank balance of a steel mill doesn't effect the price of its product, the market value does. Your increased efficiency relates to your profit not my buying power. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 22 16:04:59 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:04:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Simulation In-Reply-To: <50D4DBDC.5040304@aleph.se> References: <8CFAB751A9810B1-1B3C-28562@webmail-m004.sysops.aol.com> <50D4BC70.9090907@aleph.se> <8CFADD0BE596992-15AC-3DB0D@webmail-d176.sysops.aol.com> <50D4DBDC.5040304@aleph.se> Message-ID: <003001cde05e$18d6f260$4a84d720$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] Simulation >...I often feel like a thief when I write my papers, since I know many good ideas emerged on this list or in diffuse conversations elsewhere. So many people who ought to get credit, so hard to properly give it to Them...-- Anders Sandberg Ja! A perfect example is something I have been wanting to write about in book length for some time, the M-Brain. Robert Bradbury is gone now, and all I can say is that he did a lot of the ground work with his wildly imaginative brain. I worked out the orbit mechanics and did the math on some of the thermal stuff. He never accepted my conclusions on the second part, so now if I write, I credit him with the idea, then immediately go off on a path he rejected. The ExI list is a great cauldron in which to cook a witch's brew of notions. I dump my ideas here first and best. spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 22 16:10:45 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:10:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <50D56B68.7010006@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D56B68.7010006@aleph.se> Message-ID: <003101cde05e$e703dc70$b50b9550$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg ... > The Maya collapse occurred around AD 900, while Spain was Al-Anadalus. >...But yes, they did not seem to have seen the collapse of the classical civilization as coming. -- Anders Sandberg... I am trying to interpret the collapse of the Mayan civilization in terms of the 10th century version of an energy trap, similar to the one modern civilization appears to be in. The Easter Island collapse can be interpreted in terms of an energy trap. Are there other examples of energy-trap collapse I should study? spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 22 16:15:09 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:15:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <003201cde05f$842ae110$8c80a330$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki >... > ... Eating Roquefort releases a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production - does it mean I should stop eating it? Rafal _______________________________________________ Ja, eating anything we eat releases only a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production. The most astonishing example of the lowest ratio of energy released in consumption to energy invested in production would perhaps be diet cola, where the numerator of the ratio is nearly zero. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 16:49:26 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 16:49:26 +0000 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <003101cde05e$e703dc70$b50b9550$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D56B68.7010006@aleph.se> <003101cde05e$e703dc70$b50b9550$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 4:10 PM, spike wrote: > I am trying to interpret the collapse of the Mayan civilization in terms of > the 10th century version of an energy trap, similar to the one modern > civilization appears to be in. The Easter Island collapse can be > interpreted in terms of an energy trap. Are there other examples of > energy-trap collapse I should study? > > I don't know if I would call the Maya collapse an energy trap as their civilisation wasn't really dependant on energy. There is still a lot of debate about the causes of the Maya collapse. I think mainly because it didn't *all* collapse. It was the cities in the lowlands that collapsed. The most likely cause appears to be climate change. The region was accustomed to years of drought and the Maya built large cisterns and irrigation systems to cope with this. But when a two centuries period of drought happened, their cities in the lowlands had to be abandoned. Archeologists are beginning to appreciate more how climate change was involved in many of the lost civilisations of the past. BillK From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 16:54:17 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 11:54:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <003201cde05f$842ae110$8c80a330$@att.net> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <003201cde05f$842ae110$8c80a330$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAE7C1D1EC5C2-1368-42E32@webmail-d014.sysops.aol.com> One thing to consider is that here we are talking in terms of chemically extractable calorific content. The actual convertible energy and true value within that piece of Roquefort could power your house for days/weeks/months if we had a 100% efficient extraction/conversion method. Imagine if instead we digested food at the atomic scale. How many usable calories in all those lovely atomic and subatomic bonds waiting to be cracked? Or cracked by cheap future energy technology. The kind we will be driven to build chasing efficiency (better profit margin). The energy having been put there by billions of years of atom smashing and clumping in the stars. As I said, the entire universe becomes energy/cash waiting to be exploited. The cost of putting energy collection technology on the moon becomes insignificant compared to the future yield from all that cheese! Today we say we don't have enough Gold/promises/faith to print paper to exchange for rockets to get to the moon. ?????? seriously ???????? We need energy to get there. Energy to mine raw materials, to produce rockets and to fuel the thing. We go there to get the waiting abundance of energy. It pays for itself a billion times over. So why all the intermiediary fiscal nonsense with gold and paper? We are not flying there on a gold powered paper plane. ;o) -----Original Message----- From: spike To: rafal ; 'ExI chat list' Sent: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 16:34 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki >... > ... Eating Roquefort releases a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production - does it mean I should stop eating it? Rafal _______________________________________________ Ja, eating anything we eat releases only a tiny fraction of the energy invested in its production. The most astonishing example of the lowest ratio of energy released in consumption to energy invested in production would perhaps be diet cola, where the numerator of the ratio is nearly zero. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 17:26:32 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:26:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <003101cde05e$e703dc70$b50b9550$@att.net> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D56B68.7010006@aleph.se> <003101cde05e$e703dc70$b50b9550$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 9:10 AM, spike wrote: > > > > I am trying to interpret the collapse of the Mayan civilization in terms of > the 10th century version of an energy trap, similar to the one modern > civilization appears to be in. The Easter Island collapse can be > interpreted in terms of an energy trap. Are there other examples of > energy-trap collapse I should study? > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro Mohenjo-daro is an interesting possibility. According to my college history professor, they collapsed because the distance they needed to travel to collect wood to fire brick that they built their civilization out of, became uneconomic. The Wikipedia page says they failed due to flooding of the Indus river, so they may have learned something since I was in college... but I think there may be elements of both effects in play, even though Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about this alternate theory. My professor's theory was based on the fact that very few artifacts have been recovered, leading one to believe that the people left with all their stuff for greener (less over-civilized) pastures. That doesn't seem like something that would have occurred as the result of a flood. He also noted that there was so much brick at the site that it was used to build the railroads in the area, but this seems to be more of a problem at Harappa than Mohenjo-daro... so maybe he was wrong about the other thing too. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 17:55:33 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 12:55:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <50D56A60.9060806@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <50D56A60.9060806@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-21 23:47, Mike Dougherty wrote: >> >> Economics follow a cycle too. Most _want_ to believe indefinitely >> enduring growth. Has anything ever delivered on that promise? > > > The expansion of the universe. Which is literally making more space. touche > The near-exponential economic growth over the past few thousand years - > despite occasional collapses of empires, shifts in technology and market > swings - is pretty strong evidence. Few people have "the past few thousand years" in their conversational worldview. :) From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 18:05:00 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:05:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAE7C1D1EC5C2-1368-42E32@webmail-d014.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAD9F5B57673F-1E84-39BF0@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <003201cde05f$842ae110$8c80a330$@att.net> <8CFAE7C1D1EC5C2-1368-42E32@webmail-d014.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 11:54 AM, wrote: > intermiediary fiscal nonsense with gold and paper? We are not flying there > on a gold powered paper plane. ;o) I think the "gold powered paper plane" is a pretty nice metaphor to describe how many process are working today. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 17:09:09 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:09:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <8CFADF5FB9CF57D-1EF4-40520@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF5FB9CF57D-1EF4-40520@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 5:54 PM, wrote: > I personally do see cycles in everything including time. However my own > view of a year isn't a circle like a clock, it is like a spring. > A helix with future years stacked and hidden behind this year and previous > years out of sight behind me. Which you could probably say is a perception > of time that is both cyclic and linear. > Who's to say that in the reality of things my spring of time isn't > actually curved around and the ends joined together? our dataset is very > limited and Im amazed at how well the Myans did with apparently so little > data. The raw data they worked off of was likely recorded on long rotted wood, cloth or some primitive kind of bark paper. I recall a couple of surviving Mayan books, the Maya Codices, written on Mesoamerican bark cloth, made from the inner bark of certain trees... There are only three undisputed books that survived the Spanish invasion or the ravages of humidity and time to the point that they can be read today... Of course, as others have said, the main Mayan civilization had collapsed long before the Spanish arrived, but there were surviving relics, such as these books, that threatened the God of the Spaniards, and were thus eliminated systematically. Fashion comes around, politics is cyclic and we are again looking at therise of socialism. I see politics as cyclic in the same sense as a pendulum is cyclic. It's probably more like a double pendulum in that it is complex, unpredictable and sensitive to initial conditions... but the basic idea is that we swing to the right until there is enough wealth (which naturally gets concentrated in those who best execute the best ideas that benefit the most customers and have a little luck following an equation that is a power law) that some enterprising group of leftists can convince the great unwashed that they should have some of that concentrated wealth. Then the leftists gain power through manipulation of the larger and poorer populace by appeal to the innate greed and envy of the rich. In this case, the power law still holds, but the parameters can change. In the case of Soviet style communism, the wealth is concentrated even more sharply in the party apparatus and the poor part of the curve is even flatter than under the initial conditions (i.e. everybody else is more poor). In the case of European style socialism, the power law is flattened slightly at the top, and is pushed out fatter towards the long tail, which I suppose is the stated goal of the left when you really look at it. But since such socialist systems don't produce wealth as efficiently as more free capitalist systems, the socialist systems get out competed by some other state(s) that can produce more wealth swinging things back towards the right globally. So the economic/political oscillator is likely a strange attractor of this income and wealth distribution power law-like curve. (In the details, the long tail of income distribution isn't as long as a real power curve because nobody will work for pennies per day without starving to death). Perhaps I haven't explained this clearly enough, or established the right influences on the attractor, but I do think there is something like this going on. As to the question of indefinitely enduring growth, I don't believe in infinite growth per se, but I do believe in exponential growth of intellectual capital up to the point where the storage of the information thus gained itself becomes a limiting factor. There are only so many atoms in a light cone that can be converted to computronium storage after all, but we aren't even close to those limits. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 18:42:22 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:42:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 2:29 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> Not being a mind reader, I can not react to your >> intent, but only to what you actually write. > > ### But now, since I restated and repeated my position five times, you > do understand it, no? I understand that what you said, and the implications thereof, is not what you meant to say, yes - and I accept that as the requested apology. From ablainey at aol.com Sat Dec 22 18:57:27 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:57:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF5FB9CF57D-1EF4-40520@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFAE8D5233383B-7D4-42759@webmail-d065.sysops.aol.com> From: Kelly Anderson Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:18 >Perhaps I haven't explained this clearly enough, or established the right influences on the attractor, but I do think there is something like this going on. No, I get what you are saying and agree. It isn't a simplistic sine of left/right political swing. There is a chaotic factor many in fact involved in cyclic political turning of the tide. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 22 19:02:16 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 11:02:16 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 2:51 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> Saying some entity is the "main cause" >> of a thing is saying that they are the cause of that >> thing, and whatever else it may have done relative to >> Hurricane Sandy, the US government did not create it. > > ### No, I didn't say what you claim I said. Is this not what you said? >>> Those who think the US government will >>> help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus >>> of the event, are fooling themselves. Because I quoted that from your email. From painlord2k at libero.it Sat Dec 22 22:42:15 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 23:42:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> Il 22/12/2012 15:46, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: > > >>> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato > > > >>Money is money because it can change hands, usually any hand. How do you >>plan to sell your energy to others? In what form? Gasoline from corn is >>not the same as diesel from algae or electricity connected to the grid. >>They could be money, but they are different money from each other. It is >>like having to deal with US$, ?, yen and every one can be used only for >>a limited subset of purchases. > > Money will still be money, only it will be backed by something that > exists or is known to exist. So, it is not money but credit. Money is not baked by anything. But they are simply promises you will be able to use them to purchase what you want in future. A gold coin or a silver coin have value for themselves, not for who promise they will have value in future. > Not backed by nothing or created from debt > or backed by something that may or may not exist in the ground somewhere. The US$ was backed by gold before it was not. What would prevent the people from backing their currency with energy (whatever it be) and then take back their promise to deliver it when asked? > Exchange rates already exist for energy, KW to BTU to Joule......The > value of each energy source is calculable. You can use whatever > universal symbol you want or convert to/from any other. > the financial infrastructure that exists doesn't care if you change the > $ prefix to a KW or any other denomination. If they don't care, there is no difference from a unbacked Fed Note and your system. They are all debit based. And debits are promises made to be broken some day. Do you understand there is something called Counterpart Risk? The risk the other will not fulfill his promises. > No man is an island in any type of economy. How can you underbid? The > energy is the money. Why would you sell energy at lower than its value? > Will you sell me $100 for $50? If so im happy to buy. No, they will simply outbought you like the Chinese are doing with the Egyptians. The prices of things will go up in term of energy required to be given. In the case of Chinese and Egyptians, Chinese pigs will eat before Egypt inhabitants because the Chinese want eat pig and will pay the pig enough to allow the pig farm to buy corn at prices higher than Egyptians. The owner of the power plant will simply be able to pay higher prices for everything and you with your limited production will have the same money you have before but with higher prices. So you will be poorer. I would suggest you to to read Rothbard's "Man, Economy and State". After reading the first few chapters you should understand why when money increase in quantity people are worse off. > you are not producing it at lower cost. You are just producing it. The > efficiency at which you produce it does not change the value of the > product only your profitability. It change the prices of all other goods for you. > Yes I will need your steel. How much energy you produce or have stored > doesn't effect the cost of the steel. If you pay in energy it effect the price because energy is the money used to pay for it in your system, isn't it? If they pay in energy it is cheaper to produce for them than for you, they can buy more steel than you and they will drive the price higher. If they are much more efficient than you to produce energy, they will drive prices so high you will not be able to produce energy in any competitive way with them. You will work at loss (because your input will cost, in energy, more than your output in energy). > The bank balance of a steel mill > doesn't effect the price of its product, the market value does. > Your increased efficiency relates to your profit not my buying power. If I and others are much more efficient than you, your buying power will not buy anything. Mirco From ablainey at aol.com Sun Dec 23 00:57:29 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 19:57:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> Message-ID: <8CFAEBF9DBDBF84-1F34-17DE6@Webmail-d114.sysops.aol.com> Check your premises. You are still thinking in terms of money with a dynamic floating value and instant debt creation. When was the last time you saw a KW change energy content according to who sold it? It can't. Also think how inflation can occur? can you devalue a fixed unit of energy? How is producing your own energy going to create debt? Do you need to pay that energy back to the fed + usury? If you do borrow and incur interest, that interest is paid with your future energy generation. Which only costs you time. You simply allocate the energy units to the creditor when you do generate it. I could do that right now as the infrastructure already exists. I have a grid tie solar setup, a feed in tarrif and a bank account. Currently the meter reads in kWh, that is converted and I am paid for generation in ? and then my creditors take payment in ?. There is no real reason why the kWh need to be converted during the process. They already have a guarenteed 25 year fixed monetary value per unit. I could in theory set up a loan today using future energy generation as a guarantee. Then use that loan to put more panels on the roof or improve the efficiency of the system. thus increasing my income. -----Original Message----- From: Mirco Romanato To: ExI chat list Sent: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 23:02 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] Il 22/12/2012 15:46, ablainey at aol.com ha scritto: > > >>> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato > > > >>Money is money because it can change hands, usually any hand. How do you >>plan to sell your energy to others? In what form? Gasoline from corn is >>not the same as diesel from algae or electricity connected to the grid. >>They could be money, but they are different money from each other. It is >>like having to deal with US$, ?, yen and every one can be used only for >>a limited subset of purchases. > > Money will still be money, only it will be backed by something that > exists or is known to exist. So, it is not money but credit. Money is not baked by anything. But they are simply promises you will be able to use them to purchase what you want in future. A gold coin or a silver coin have value for themselves, not for who promise they will have value in future. > Not backed by nothing or created from debt > or backed by something that may or may not exist in the ground somewhere. The US$ was backed by gold before it was not. What would prevent the people from backing their currency with energy (whatever it be) and then take back their promise to deliver it when asked? > Exchange rates already exist for energy, KW to BTU to Joule......The > value of each energy source is calculable. You can use whatever > universal symbol you want or convert to/from any other. > the financial infrastructure that exists doesn't care if you change the > $ prefix to a KW or any other denomination. If they don't care, there is no difference from a unbacked Fed Note and your system. They are all debit based. And debits are promises made to be broken some day. Do you understand there is something called Counterpart Risk? The risk the other will not fulfill his promises. > No man is an island in any type of economy. How can you underbid? The > energy is the money. Why would you sell energy at lower than its value? > Will you sell me $100 for $50? If so im happy to buy. No, they will simply outbought you like the Chinese are doing with the Egyptians. The prices of things will go up in term of energy required to be given. In the case of Chinese and Egyptians, Chinese pigs will eat before Egypt inhabitants because the Chinese want eat pig and will pay the pig enough to allow the pig farm to buy corn at prices higher than Egyptians. The owner of the power plant will simply be able to pay higher prices for everything and you with your limited production will have the same money you have before but with higher prices. So you will be poorer. I would suggest you to to read Rothbard's "Man, Economy and State". After reading the first few chapters you should understand why when money increase in quantity people are worse off. > you are not producing it at lower cost. You are just producing it. The > efficiency at which you produce it does not change the value of the > product only your profitability. It change the prices of all other goods for you. > Yes I will need your steel. How much energy you produce or have stored > doesn't effect the cost of the steel. If you pay in energy it effect the price because energy is the money used to pay for it in your system, isn't it? If they pay in energy it is cheaper to produce for them than for you, they can buy more steel than you and they will drive the price higher. If they are much more efficient than you to produce energy, they will drive prices so high you will not be able to produce energy in any competitive way with them. You will work at loss (because your input will cost, in energy, more than your output in energy). > The bank balance of a steel mill > doesn't effect the price of its product, the market value does. > Your increased efficiency relates to your profit not my buying power. If I and others are much more efficient than you, your buying power will not buy anything. Mirco _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 03:21:06 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 22:21:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bad news for US customers of Intrade In-Reply-To: References: <1353110725.8177.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353279916.35742.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <1353781201.73656.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <48e21f01413554ff296857644886c7d1.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <2cefe2b9fbad9477f24afdcca08fd33b.squirrel@main.nc.us> <017501cdcc5c$bdea0320$39be0960$@att.net> <1354021035.24963.YahooMailNeo@web121201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002401cdcce6$fa3d5400$eeb7fc00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > I understand that what you said, and the implications thereof, > is not what you meant to say, yes - and I accept that as the > requested apology. ### You can feel whatever you want, my man. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 03:26:01 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 22:26:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 2:51 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: >> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>> Saying some entity is the "main cause" >>> of a thing is saying that they are the cause of that >>> thing, and whatever else it may have done relative to >>> Hurricane Sandy, the US government did not create it. >> >> ### No, I didn't say what you claim I said. > > Is this not what you said? ### No, this is not what I said. Rafal From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 03:42:56 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 19:42:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### No, this is not what I said. So now you are denying direct quotes from your own email. Whatever. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 04:27:29 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 23:27:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <8CFAEBF9DBDBF84-1F34-17DE6@Webmail-d114.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> <8CFAEBF9DBDBF84-1F34-17DE6@Webmail-d114.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:57 PM, wrote: > How is producing your own energy going to create debt? ### Producing your "own" energy in a social setting always requires resources that have to be obtained from others - solar panels, fertilizer for corn, land titles, mineral rights, uranium, whatever. So before you produce energy you always have to incur a debt or a loss to your current asset balance sheet. If you use more purchased resources on making this energy than it is worth to others, you will not be able to pay off the debt incurred to generate energy. As Mirco pointed out, if others are more efficient in producing energy (e.g. they are using a coal power plant while you are using solar cells), the price of resources expressed in a standardized deliverable of energy will be high. For example, making a solar cell takes a lot of human effort and various material and immaterial resources (research, capital costs, electricity, chemicals, accounting, plant security, janitorial staff etc, etc) per unit of energy generated from cells. But generating energy from coal takes very little effort per unit of energy. A coal plant will be able to pay a janitor many joules per hour. The solar cell producer will have to match that salary - and this high salary (as expressed in joules) will have to be included in the prices charged to you for buying the solar cells. The price of solar cells in joules will be high in relationship to the number of joules you can generate from them. So as long as you buy more of other people's work effort per joule of "your" energy generated than this energy is worth to them, you will have to go in debt to finance your enterprise. ------------------------- > You simply allocate the energy units to the creditor when you do generate > it. I could do that right now as the infrastructure already exists. I have a > grid tie solar setup, a feed in tarrif and a bank account. Currently the > meter reads in kWh, that is converted and I am paid for generation in ? and > then my creditors take payment in ?. There is no real reason why the kWh > need to be converted during the process. They already have a guarenteed 25 > year fixed monetary value per unit. I could in theory set up a loan today > using future energy generation as a guarantee. Then use that loan to put > more panels on the roof or improve the efficiency of the system. thus > increasing my income. ### Ah, now I understand where you are coming from - you stand to gain from forcing others to buy your electricity, at an inflated price they would never pay voluntarily. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 23 05:41:44 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:41:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. Message-ID: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Forwarded message for Robert G. Kennedy III. The server was rejecting his messages for some reason. Working that. spike FW: please re-post (my first post to this list bounced) Greetings, I've been lurking here a little while since being invited. Difficult to tell who originally posted what with different, but ablainey at aol.com is believed to have responded to "BillK" (pharos at gmail.com) about "EROI" (energy return on investment). Having just proofed two of the chapters (the ones about EROI) in his latest textbook on energy by Frank Kreith's (who is one of the originators of the concept of EROI, I believe), I will weigh in on the matter of the EROI of the petroleum industry. Now, before I go on, please stipulate one thing - that the revenue generated by an activity captures all the costs of that activity. Otherwise without a subsidy/bailout, you'd go out of business. This is an easy stipulation in an open market economy with stable currency, not so much in a command economy or a very corrupt one or an inflationary environment (a different form of theft). Nevertheless, please accept it for purposes of my favorite sport, back-o'-the-envelope estimation. Back in the days of Spindletop gushers, crude oil was easy enough to get that one could expect 100:1 return on energy/effort (i.e. money) invested. BillK got that right. Today in the Oil Patch, things are no longer so easy as portrayed by say, the Beverly Hillbillies ("one day Jed was out shooting at some food ... and up thru the ground came a bubblin' crude"). Mr BillK's quote of 20:1 for today's oil exploration, development, extraction/ production, refining, and transportation activities is way too high. Factoring in all this planet *ongoing* oil-related activity (i.e. regardless of incept date, and some of these like the Al Ghawar "King of Kings" field have been going a very long time), the overall EROI has not even been 10:1 for about a decade. It is sinking more. Worse, according to the Economist a few months ago, the world's exploration, drilling and development activity is now a $750 billion per year industry just by itself! Note that exploration, drilling, and development by definition occur at the front end of *new* projects, that is, the energy/financial cost of these activities constitutes their *current* *marginal* cost of that *marginal* project, not the long-term cost averaged over all projects. Compare then, these two figures: the gross revenue from crude oil today, i.e. ~90 MBPD x ($75 to $100/bbl) x 365, or $2.5 to 3 trillion per year; and $750B per year today to find and develop marginal new resource. The ratio of these two is between 3-to-1 and 4-to-1. Yes, I know that the former figure is a lagging indicator, representing a sum over time and space, while the latter figure is a leading one, representing the marginal effort. Maybe apples and oranges, nevertheless they're both still fruit. So you can see we are looking at a problem of diminishing returns after barely a century of abundance. Professor Kreith wrote that the minimum acceptable figure of merit for a technical civilization was about 3. You can show why this is so with feedback diagrams. (You can't spend every erg society has looking for more energy, you have to eat, go to the doctor, raise kids, etc.) So Mr BillK is spot on. So, for crude oil, we are fast approaching the "EROI cliff". I find that significant. Anyone can repeat this calculation themselves, from open sources. Yet other than specialty textbooks, it is almost entirely unremarked on. Here's the wiki on the subject of EROI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI . The chart is roughly correct, but the value for PV is too low, should be more like 8-12. Nuclear's all-in EROI about equal to the figure of low teens which I derived. However, the chart does not depict trends. If it did, you'd see some first-derivative vectors for traditional energy resources pointing to the left, a few would be invisible b/c they're stationary, e.g. hydro's almost fully built out; and some such as PV would be pointing to the right, and the second derivative even more strongly so. The chart does not display the useful life of the particular technologies, a critical assumption in developing EROI. Hydroelectric dams last far longer, with far less O&M, than wind turbines, say. Again for PV, results from the field suggest that "hard" mono- & polycrystalline PV might last a century in service, so an assumption of 25 years' economic lifetime would undercut PV's EROI by a factor of 4. TAFN, Robert > Message: 4 > Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:34:03 -0500 (EST) > From: ablainey at aol.com > Yes essentially I am talking about EROEI. -----Original Message----- > From: BillK >> I think what you are talking about is EROEI (energy return on >> energy invested). >> Unfortunately this leads to the 'Energy Trap' that we are currently >> experiencing. >> >> Quote: >> In its early days, oil frequently yielded an EROEI in excess of 100:1, >> meaning that 1% or less of the energy contained in a barrel of oil had >> to be expended to deliver that barrel of oil. Not a bad bargain. Oil >> production today more typically has an EROEI around 20:1, while tar >> sands and oil shale tend to be about 5:1 and 3:1, respectively. >> ------- >> >> An EROEI reduction on this scale leads to economic recession. >> And it is called a trap because our civilisation has to spend more >> resources to get energy than we get back in return. -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com ----- End forwarded message -----rwarded message ----- From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 09:15:29 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 04:15:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Message-ID: Robert G. Kennedy III wrote: > Professor Kreith wrote that the minimum acceptable figure of merit for > a technical civilization was about 3. You can show why this is so with > feedback diagrams. (You can't spend every erg society has looking for > more energy, you have to eat, go to the doctor, raise kids, etc.) So > Mr BillK is spot on. ### Wait, you compare gross revenues at today's oil prices to outlays on exploration - why should this comparison matter? What matters is the total energy supply and its cost as a fraction of gross national (or world) economic product (the second number is much more important than the first). As long as the total supply is sufficient to keep the cost at a small-enough fraction of gross national product, energy supply is not a significant factor limiting our ability to act (raise kids, fly to the stars, etc.). Since now energy production is still about 10% of world economic product (give or take http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2010/02/16/a-primer-on-energy-and-the-economy-energys-large-share-of-the-economy-requires-caution-in-determining-policies-that-affect-it/), and no reputable estimates predict any significant increases in this fraction, clearly we are not suffering from an energy crisis, and are not approaching one. So why should we care if EROI in the oil industry is "only" 3? After all, the financial return on most activities that constitute our economy is on the order of 1 - 10% (not the much larger return implied by your calculation for oil production), and yet we don't see this as a problem. Why should energy production be singled out to be treated differently than other branches of the economy? Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 09:24:34 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 04:24:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: >> ### No, this is not what I said. > > So now you are denying direct quotes from your own email. ### So this is what you do: First you quote something I say ("Gov't is the focus and cause of Black Swans"). Then you make an irrelevant statement ("Gov't didn't cause Hurricane Sandy"). Then I go "Huh?" And then everybody still wasting their time reading this goes "Yawn. Bored" Rafal From ablainey at aol.com Sun Dec 23 14:08:43 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:08:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> <8CFAEBF9DBDBF84-1F34-17DE6@Webmail-d114.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFAF2E268A2CB2-12A8-4DFA3@webmail-m034.sysops.aol.com> -----Original Message----- From: Rafal Smigrodzki On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:57 PM, wrote: >> How is producing your own energy going to create debt? > >### Producing your "own" energy in a social setting always requires >resources that have to be obtained from others - solar panels, >fertilizer for corn, land titles, mineral rights, uranium, whatever. >So before you produce energy you always have to incur a debt or a >loss >to your current asset balance sheet. > >If you use more purchased resources on making this energy than it is >worth to others, you will not be able to pay off the debt incurred to >generate energy. Here I was talking in terms of National debt. Creation of energy currency does not create a national debt like printed money does. The current fiscal cliff is an artifact of todays debt based system and there is no real way to pay off the debt apart from sign over most private assets to the central bank. Yes in an energy economy is perfectly possible to incur private debt. As said these can be paid back with future energy generation, or you could go out to work for more kWh. Not everyone will be generating although it would be an obvious source of income. But where today the risk of not being paid by the debtor lies in his ability to work profitably and decide to send the cheque. Instead the risk will only be that his generation equipment is destroyed before it repays you. A far lower risk and something that could easily be covered by insurance. Additionally if your debt is secured against his generation equipment rather than him personally (although he will have liability) if he dies, you still get paid. >As Mirco pointed out, if others are more efficient in producing >energy (e.g. they are using a coal power plant while you are using >solar cells), the price of resources expressed in a standardized >deliverable of energy will be high. However the perception of the situation is different. The energy used to make a loaf of bread is constant if the method remains the same. It takes the same amount of light for grow wheat, same amount to mill flour, to bake the loaf. The currency unit is constant, the kWh. A loaf today has the same energy input as a loaf in 10 years time. The only way to increase profitability is to increase efficiency in the production process. So a loaf in 10 years time is identical but takes far less energy to produce. Now think of that in terms of market competition. Today I could raise the price of a loaf to infinity. The only thing stopping me is my competition. However over time competitors do edge up their prices to increase profit. There is no theoretical limit to this apart from it becoming so expensive that people start to produce their own bread, grow their own wheat etc. As such the high limit is actually the energy cost for a consumer for producing a loaf. Now compare to an energy economy where only efficiency can vary. The theoretical maximum profit can only be realised by attaining efficiency of 100%. You cannot go beyond 100% efficiency or your are entering the realms of overunity. So again it is the energy involved in the system that dictates the limit. Both high and low limits or each system are static values and measured in units of energy. Doesn?t it make more sense to opt for the system where efficiency is the most profitable and the price of an essential item is virtually static over time? >For example, making a solar cell takes a lot of human effort and >various material and immaterial resources (research, capital costs, >electricity, chemicals, accounting, plant security, janitorial staff >etc, etc) per unit of energy generated from cells. But generating >energy from coal takes very little effort per unit of energy. A coal >plant will be able to pay a janitor many joules per hour. The solar >cell producer will have to match that salary - and this high salary >(as expressed in joules) will have to be included in the prices >charged to you for buying the solar cells. The price of solar cells >in >joules will be high in relationship to the number of joules you can >generate from them. > >So as long as you buy more of other people's work effort per joule >of >"your" energy generated than this energy is worth to them, you will >have to go in debt to finance your enterprise. ------------------------- >> You simply allocate the energy units to the creditor when you do generate >> it. I could do that right now as the infrastructure already exists. I have a >> grid tie solar setup, a feed in tarrif and a bank account. Currently the >> meter reads in kWh, that is converted and I am paid for generation in ? and >> then my creditors take payment in ?. There is no real reason why the kWh >> need to be converted during the process. They already have a guarenteed 25 >> year fixed monetary value per unit. I could in theory set up a loan today >> using future energy generation as a guarantee. Then use that loan to put >> more panels on the roof or improve the efficiency of the system. thus >> increasing my income. >### Ah, now I understand where you are coming from - you stand to >gain >from forcing others to buy your electricity, at an inflated price >they >would never pay voluntarily. Rafal Yes I do personally stand to gain but I am already gaining. The system is already there in all but name and my solar kWh is worth the same as any other kWh on the market. Again you are perceiving the value in terms of todays money. The value of a kWh produced by low efficiency solar has exact equal value to a kWh produced by a coal fired station. Who has paid the cost here? You seem to think the consumer will pay and that I am forcing them to by expensive energy. However It would actually be me paying with my inefficient setup. I have outlayed more on equipment and will take much longer to recoup that cost. So it is me that is driven to invest in more efficiency in order to improve my profit. However the long term view for the coal power station is not good. They also need to convert to some renewable source before the fossil fuel runs out. So even though their profits are greater today, they will still be chasing the same future technology as me. This is already the case in the energy industry where oil companies are now providing renewables. So both will be investing in the solar cell manufacturers and the Janitor there will be getting a good wage. It already happening. That janitor *is* being paid and the solar cell company is making a profit despite their product being far less efficient. Manly because people can?t put a coal power plant on their roof. So they must generally use renewables for micro generation. Having a currency unit that doesn?t inflate due to its nature being a fixed immutable unit if energy means that the janitor can receive a minimum wage and won?t have his buying power eroded over time. In fact the opposite should be true over the long term. A loaf of bread will become cheaper in energy terms to produce and if the only way bread producers can outdo the competition is by lowering price. Then the janitor will get cheaper bread. As it should be in a developing world. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sun Dec 23 14:16:06 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:16:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAF2F2E45129D-12A8-4DFFD@webmail-m034.sysops.aol.com> That's useful. Thanks Robert and thanks spike for forwarding. -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 6:03 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. Forwarded message for Robert G. Kennedy III. The server was rejecting his messages for some reason. Working that. spike FW: please re-post (my first post to this list bounced) Greetings, I've been lurking here a little while since being invited. Difficult to tell who originally posted what with different, but ablainey at aol.com is believed to have responded to "BillK" (pharos at gmail.com) about "EROI" (energy return on investment). Having just proofed two of the chapters (the ones about EROI) in his latest textbook on energy by Frank Kreith's (who is one of the originators of the concept of EROI, I believe), I will weigh in on the matter of the EROI of the petroleum industry. Now, before I go on, please stipulate one thing - that the revenue generated by an activity captures all the costs of that activity. Otherwise without a subsidy/bailout, you'd go out of business. This is an easy stipulation in an open market economy with stable currency, not so much in a command economy or a very corrupt one or an inflationary environment (a different form of theft). Nevertheless, please accept it for purposes of my favorite sport, back-o'-the-envelope estimation. Back in the days of Spindletop gushers, crude oil was easy enough to get that one could expect 100:1 return on energy/effort (i.e. money) invested. BillK got that right. Today in the Oil Patch, things are no longer so easy as portrayed by say, the Beverly Hillbillies ("one day Jed was out shooting at some food ... and up thru the ground came a bubblin' crude"). Mr BillK's quote of 20:1 for today's oil exploration, development, extraction/ production, refining, and transportation activities is way too high. Factoring in all this planet *ongoing* oil-related activity (i.e. regardless of incept date, and some of these like the Al Ghawar "King of Kings" field have been going a very long time), the overall EROI has not even been 10:1 for about a decade. It is sinking more. Worse, according to the Economist a few months ago, the world's exploration, drilling and development activity is now a $750 billion per year industry just by itself! Note that exploration, drilling, and development by definition occur at the front end of *new* projects, that is, the energy/financial cost of these activities constitutes their *current* *marginal* cost of that *marginal* project, not the long-term cost averaged over all projects. Compare then, these two figures: the gross revenue from crude oil today, i.e. ~90 MBPD x ($75 to $100/bbl) x 365, or $2.5 to 3 trillion per year; and $750B per year today to find and develop marginal new resource. The ratio of these two is between 3-to-1 and 4-to-1. Yes, I know that the former figure is a lagging indicator, representing a sum over time and space, while the latter figure is a leading one, representing the marginal effort. Maybe apples and oranges, nevertheless they're both still fruit. So you can see we are looking at a problem of diminishing returns after barely a century of abundance. Professor Kreith wrote that the minimum acceptable figure of merit for a technical civilization was about 3. You can show why this is so with feedback diagrams. (You can't spend every erg society has looking for more energy, you have to eat, go to the doctor, raise kids, etc.) So Mr BillK is spot on. So, for crude oil, we are fast approaching the "EROI cliff". I find that significant. Anyone can repeat this calculation themselves, from open sources. Yet other than specialty textbooks, it is almost entirely unremarked on. Here's the wiki on the subject of EROI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI . The chart is roughly correct, but the value for PV is too low, should be more like 8-12. Nuclear's all-in EROI about equal to the figure of low teens which I derived. However, the chart does not depict trends. If it did, you'd see some first-derivative vectors for traditional energy resources pointing to the left, a few would be invisible b/c they're stationary, e.g. hydro's almost fully built out; and some such as PV would be pointing to the right, and the second derivative even more strongly so. The chart does not display the useful life of the particular technologies, a critical assumption in developing EROI. Hydroelectric dams last far longer, with far less O&M, than wind turbines, say. Again for PV, results from the field suggest that "hard" mono- & polycrystalline PV might last a century in service, so an assumption of 25 years' economic lifetime would undercut PV's EROI by a factor of 4. TAFN, Robert > Message: 4 > Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:34:03 -0500 (EST) > From: ablainey at aol.com > Yes essentially I am talking about EROEI. -----Original Message----- > From: BillK >> I think what you are talking about is EROEI (energy return on >> energy invested). >> Unfortunately this leads to the 'Energy Trap' that we are currently >> experiencing. >> >> Quote: >> In its early days, oil frequently yielded an EROEI in excess of 100:1, >> meaning that 1% or less of the energy contained in a barrel of oil had >> to be expended to deliver that barrel of oil. Not a bad bargain. Oil >> production today more typically has an EROEI around 20:1, while tar >> sands and oil shale tend to be about 5:1 and 3:1, respectively. >> ------- >> >> An EROEI reduction on this scale leads to economic recession. >> And it is called a trap because our civilisation has to spend more >> resources to get energy than we get back in return. -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com ----- End forwarded message -----rwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Sun Dec 23 15:08:16 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 10:08:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <8CFACCC0BF3CB61-19C4-30506@webmail-m175.sysops.aol.com> <007d01cddeeb$be584870$3b08d950$@att.net> <8CFAD951FB9747F-1E84-39587@webmail-d138.sysops.aol.com> <50D49C10.3010903@libero.it> <008001cddfa7$986a2cc0$c93e8640$@att.net> <50D59794.4050703@libero.it> <8CFAE6A3BE19D35-EC0-41673@webmail-d043.sysops.aol.com> <50D63747.4090107@libero.it> <8CFAEBF9DBDBF84-1F34-17DE6@Webmail-d114.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CFAF367830196F-2B0-44F00@Webmail-d104.sysops.aol.com> -----Original Message----- From: Rafal Smigrodzki To: ExI chat list Sent: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 4:33 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] >A coal plant will be able to pay a janitor many joules per hour. Afterthought: As the currency can't be inflated. The janitors pension can't change present value. The government can't steal from future earnings of the working man. Likewise for any savings. The only way to steal it would be to overtly tax savings and pensions. It can't be done through sleight of hand in fiscal policy as we see constantly today. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 23 15:47:39 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 16:47:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> On 22/12/2012 11:15, BillK wrote: > On 12/22/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> (Especially if some other constraints on security are weak, leading to a >> conflict-prone situation; I am working on a paper about the link between >> computer security and risks of brain emulation - bad computer security >> means that a war of everybody against everybody is more likely, due to >> first-strike advantages and winner-take-all dynamics). > Computer security seems to be getting worse as systems become more complex. > Partly because governments *want* weak security on all computers > (except their own, of course). Blaming governments for bad security is giving them too much credit (besides, if that were their strategy they are also reaping insecure software running their systems and essential infrastructure). Instead, try Bruce Schneier's observation that the lack of liability for insecure software produces disincentives to improve security. Lots of after-the-fact patching, little reason to make systems secure from the start. > It is the old 'power corrupts' problem. If you realise that hitting > the button means your upload will be able to have total power, what do > you do? If you hesitate, and say you don't want to do that, then very > likely the button will be pressed by the next researcher in a > competing team and your research will disappear. Once you get to that > stage then you will hit the button. Better your upload than another > with qualities that you don't know about. Once something this powerful > becomes possible, then it will happen. Saying sorry afterwards is > always easier than trying to get permission first. Yes, if there is a big first-mover advantage you should expect a race for it. However, there is a another problem (we call it the unilateralist curse): in some situations it is enough that one agent decides to act and the full effects of the action will affect everyone. When choosing whether to act or not agents try to decide whether the consequences will be good, but have a certain risk of being wrong. The more agents there are, the more likely at least one will be very optimistic, and act - even when the consequences are likely bad, and correctly judged by the other agents. So we should expect that in the case of unleashing new technologies there will be mistakes done, especially if there is a tight race. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 23 17:00:30 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:00:30 -0800 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <8CFAF2F2E45129D-12A8-4DFFD@webmail-m034.sysops.aol.com> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <8CFAF2F2E45129D-12A8-4DFFD@webmail-m034.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <008c01cde12f$0425c8b0$0c715a10$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of ablainey at aol.com Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2012 6:16 AM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. That's useful. Thanks Robert and thanks spike for forwarding. Ja! Kennedy's first post here is great, thanks Robert. It really has me thinking, since I too am a big fan of BOTECs as Robert mentions in his post. Perhaps it's a PE thing. {8-] Here's one I did some time ago: using all conservative engineering estimates and reasonable energy transport efficiencies, what fraction of the USA land area would need to be blanketed by solar cells to use that as our only energy source? Ten years ago, I BOTECed nearly a quarter of the land area, assuming we do stuff like solar-energy driven biomass to alkanes so that we get to continue using our beloved Detroits with our soul-stirring V8s and such. After doing a series of those BOTECs, any realistic sustainable energy scenario I can imagine involves waaaay more energy austerity than that to which we have grown so fondly accustomed. In energy conservation, the fruit hangs an order of magnitude lower than the next higher levels of fruit. Here's what I am trying to imagine: assume the singularity doesn't happen, never mind for now why. Assume Keith's vision of space based solar either doesn't come to pass or is developed in parallel, and all our miracle cures fail, such as controlled nuclear fusion, thorium power etc, none of that cool stuff ever works out. Assume away war and assume some arbitrary population equilibrium, say 10 or 20 billion proles. Assume the falling water and geothermal are already mostly developed as much as they are going to be. So assume we are stuck with solar and wind power, but we can use biomass to liquid fuels, not driven by combustion of the biomass, but by external power generated by solar and wind. With those assumptions, what does a fully sustainable energy balanced planet look like? If you just take the total energy production and replace it all with solar, it comes out to something like 2e13 meters square of PVs, but I need to revisit that calc because my memory has grown dim regarding how I derived it over a decade ago. A huge factor is how we will do food: will we assume some means of turning solar energy into food other than putting it through plants? spike -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 6:03 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 23 18:53:08 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 10:53:08 -0800 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? Message-ID: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> What do you make of this? http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/19/superintendent-drawings-of-weapo ns-led-to-new-jersey-students-arrest/ So now we can conclude that the US constitution protects the right of its citizens to bear arms, but not to draw pictures of them? How many of us have chemicals in our homes which could cause an explosion if mixed? All of us. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 19:44:53 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 11:44:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 10:53 AM, spike wrote: > What do you make of this? > > http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/19/superintendent-drawings-of-weapons-led-to-new-jersey-students-arrest/ > > So now we can conclude that the US constitution protects the right of its > citizens to bear arms, but not to draw pictures of them? In the US, anyone under 18 is usually not considered a full "citizen", in the sense of "a person who has the protection of the law", when convenient for any adult authority figure - such as if said figure is the least bit concerned by the juvenile's actions. Whether or not this is legal (to my knowledge, it blatantly is not) is another matter. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 19:37:16 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 11:37:16 -0800 Subject: [ExI] ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Robert G. Kennedy III. wrote: snip > So, for crude oil, we are fast approaching the "EROI cliff". > > I find that significant. Anyone can repeat this calculation > themselves, from open sources. Yet other than specialty textbooks, it > is almost entirely unremarked on. > > Here's the wiki on the subject of EROI: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI . The chart is roughly correct, but > the value for PV is too low, should be more like 8-12. Nuclear's > all-in EROI about equal to the figure of low teens which I derived. > However, the chart does not depict trends. If it did, you'd see some > first-derivative vectors for traditional energy resources pointing to > the left, a few would be invisible b/c they're stationary, e.g. > hydro's almost fully built out; and some such as PV would be pointing > to the right, and the second derivative even more strongly so. > > The chart does not display the useful life of the particular > technologies, a critical assumption in developing EROI. Hydroelectric > dams last far longer, with far less O&M, than wind turbines, say. > Again for PV, results from the field suggest that "hard" mono- & > polycrystalline PV might last a century in service, so an assumption > of 25 years' economic lifetime would undercut PV's EROI by a factor of > 4. A related concept for renewable sources is the energy payback time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_pay-back#Sustainables PV, for example, takes about 1-4 years to pay back the energy needed to put it in place. If 100% of the energy from PV were fed back into making more PV, the doubling time would be in the vicinity of 1-4 years. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_cannibalism Power satellites look fairly good in this light. At 5 kg/kW and a lift energy cost 7 kg of hydrogen (at 50 kWh) per kg of payload the payback time is a bit over 3 months. (This assumes that the lions share of the energy cost is in lifting parts to GEO.) Most of the hydrogen isn't burned, it's just used for reaction mass, with the energy coming from lasers powered by the first power satellite. Keith From dan_ust at yahoo.com Sun Dec 23 21:47:07 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 13:47:07 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> Message-ID: <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On? Sunday, December 23, 2012 2:44 PM Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 10:53 AM, spike wrote: >> What do you make of this? >> >> http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/19/superintendent-drawings-of-weapons-led-to-new-jersey-students-arrest/ >> >> So now we can conclude that the US constitution protects the right of its >> citizens to bear arms, but not to draw pictures of them? > > In the US, anyone under 18 is usually not considered a full > "citizen", in the sense of "a person who has the protection > of the law", While true, irrelevant, for the most part, in US constitutional law, as constitutional protections apply to citizens and non-citizens alike. Also, in the more literal sense, the Second Amendment states the "right of the people." This is open to interpretation, of course, but it doesn't say "the citizens." There's another wrinkle on this too. The US is a signatory to the UN Declaration on Human Rights. While said declaration is not, to my knowledge, concerned with the right to bear arms, said right might be defended by non-citizens according to it under rights listed therein. No one, as far as I know, has taken that route, but it's easy to see how such a case might be laid out. And, again, this would be a legal claim for a right to bear arms for non-citizens. > when convenient for any adult authority figure - > such as if said figure is the least bit concerned by the > juvenile's actions. I think this more a matter of authorities overhyping what's likely not a concern at all. To wit, I knew many kids when I was in grade school who were fascinated by weapons and drew pictures of guns, explosions, etc. Not one of them, as far as I know, ever carried out any violent act with a firearm. While this is anecdotal, I think people are getting overworked by media coverage of the shootings. It's kind of like if you spend all day watching the ID channel (Investigation Discovery, which is devoted to series on crimes like murder, rape, stalking, and kidnapping), you're likely going to believe the world is far more violent, that there are far more crimes out there, and that you need to devote ever more resources to avoiding or detecting crime than you likely would if you took a reasonable perspective on how unlikely all of this is. (Granted, you might still err more on the side of safety. I lock my doors even though burglary and home invasion is very unlikely partly because the very unlikely thing might still be very costly if it does happen and the cost of the precaution is fairly low. The problem arises when the cost is really, really high and the likelihood is miniscule and yet people worry about it. Or when some competing risk is treated as if it were low, when in fact it's much higher. For instance, think of flying a plane versus taking a train or driving a car: the risk of being injured or dying in a plane accident is far lower than either a train or car accident, yet people will take huge risks with the latter.) > Whether or not this is legal (to my knowledge, it blatantly > is not) is another matter. To my knowledge, it's not legal either. Of course, the problem is authorities tend to abuse power until enough or the right people complain about it. By the way, wouldn't one way to avoid any problems here be to just get rid of traditional schooling? Potential targets of mass violence would be dispersed if, say, they're homeschooled, as a friend of mine recently pointed out. If little Johnny wants to draw machine guns and has fantasies about killing his classmates, it's going to be extremely hard to bring the latter to fruition if his classmates are not all together in one building, even in one room and unarmed. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 23 22:13:54 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 14:13:54 -0800 Subject: [ExI] another excellent meaty post from robert kennedy p.e. Message-ID: <01af01cde15a$cc1dbe60$64593b20$@att.net> WOW thanks Robert, very interesting post. Note to ExI, for some reason, Robert's ISP is apparently fighting with the ExI server, and I don't know how to make those things get along with each other. Here's Robert's second post: Spike, while you're working the mailserver issue, please re-post this brief reply to several responses. WHY THE FOCUS ON OIL (per Rafal)? Petroleum just by itself is the largest single industry on Earth, about 10 cents on the dollar of everything humans make or do. Today, petroleum is also the greatest source of primary energy for the human race, having eclipsed coal a few years ago. (Btw, natural gas is catching up fast, and I think already exclipsed coal also in this country last year.) With my quick & dirty estimate last night, I showed the trend of the EROI figure of merit in petroleum is rapidly sliding in a worrisome direction, in a short timescale as Extropians would view time. Since petroleum is our greatest source of primary energy, this developing situation should concern everybody. ELECTRICITY. Total nameplate capacity of the U.S. electricity grid is ~1 TW; electric generating capacity averaged over the year is just half that, ~0.5 TW. In other words, the duty cycle of the average prime mover is ~50%. (Surprised?) For the human race as a whole, multiply these figures by about 4. (Electricity is the most useful form of energy there is, but most people are not as well wired as we are.) So, humanity's electric grid right now is ~4 TW peak, or >2 TW steady-state. Re: "one quarter of the land area" of CONUS (per Spike). CONUS contains 2 billion acres. 1 acre of land can host a quarter-megawatt, +/-, depending on where it is and which solar tech you're using. So figure 2 million acres = half a terawatt to equal the steady-staate grid. But, since solar only works when the sun is shining, obviously, the duty cycle is only ~20%. Presupposing a decent method to store electricity storage comes along (one does not exist yet), you'd need five times that much land to meet nominal average demand. So figure 2 million acres X 5 = 10 million acres to actually feed the grid round the clock. That's half a percent of what we've got in the Lower 48. More than that much is already covered with roofs, not to mention roads and parking lots. (Roughly 100 million acres is "developed" in some way right now with some permanent improvement.) So, without covering up a single blade of grass or other greenspace, I figure there's enough space on rooftops that exist right now and happen to be oriented in a useful direction (southeast thru southwest azumith) to host much more than that 1 terawatt of nameplate national capacity. You could easily double that again just putting solar carports over every parking lot (and then you'd get to park in the shade while charging your car). (As an exercise, try comparing the gross revenue per square foot from PV on your roof or parking lot with the annual property tax per square foot. You'll be amazed.) ALL PRIMARY ENERGY. This naturally leads to the question, how much land do we need to provide all energy needs via exclusively solar power, including storage? Well, about as much sunlight falls on the lit face of earth (land & sea) in one hour as the entire primary energy consumption of the human race in one year. (Both figures roughly 500 quads. Since this is the Extropian list, you can say that a quad is very nearly an exajoule. Heh.) So raw sunlight::primary energy is a ~10,000-to-1 ratio. That is a lot of headroom. Once transmission loss, embedded energy, and parasitic or "house loads" are factored in, thermal processes for generating electricity are roughly 30% efficient at converting the raw energy of the fuel into a useful form. (This is improving rapidly in some sub-sectors. It may surprise you to learn that the electricity sector is the cleanest and most decarbonized of the three major end-use sectors. All forms of solar are still only a tiny fraction of U.S. electricity supply, but the electricity it produces goes straight into the grid without further conversion, Furthermore, the sunlight is not counted against primary energy input, just like rainfall is not counted against hydro dams, nor wind against windmills. Seems unfair, but that's how the accounting works, due to how primary energy is defined.) So to get Americans' primary power input to the electricity sector, simply triple the steady-state grid load, you'll be close enough. Solar's penetration right now won't affect this number. That is, 0.5 TW x 3 = 1.5 TW. For most people in the developing and developed world, the primary energy partition amongst electricity/ transport/ raw heat is roughly one-third/one-third/one-third per sector. So to get total steady-state primary power for a country, triple the number again, i.e. 3 X the primary power input. Note that 3 x 3 is about an order of magnitude. So now you have a quick means for a horseback estimate of a reasonably developed country's primary power demand to run everything they've got: multiply their known steady-state electricity demand by an order of magnitude, and you'll be within 10% of the true figure. (As I said, Americans are a little more wired than most, 40+% not 33%. So, multiplying by ~2.5 instead of 3 to get American primary power for everything results in 1.5 x 2.5 = ~4 TW instead of 4.5 TW.) So the average primary power to run the whole world, expressed in SI units, is something like 4 to 5 times 4 to 4.5, or 16 to 22 terawatts. Remember I said we'd need 10 million acres (including storage) to run a half-terawatt grid round the clock here in CONUS, and that total American primary power is 4 terawatts. We would not need 80 million acres to run everything in America, however, since the sunlight falling on PV modules does not count against primary energy consumption the way chemical fuels mined from the ground does. I estimate that 30 million acres would enough, certainly no more than 50. What's interesting about that latter figure is, that's the amount of land covered by asphalt just for America's 4 million miles of paved highways. A similar amount is available in the medians and rights-of-way. For the world as a whole then, 100 million acres (just 5% of CONUS) to 200 million acres (amount of active good farmland cultivated in CONUS) would do the job. And remember with things like solar carports that this power production need not exclude other land uses. There are substantial benefits re: energy security and governance with locating supply close to loads. PS. And now I know what BOTEC means. -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Sun Dec 23 22:02:16 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 14:02:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Message-ID: <1356300136.16852.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Sunday, December 23, 2012 4:15 AM Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > After all, the financial return on most activities that > constitute our economy is on the order of 1 - 10% (not > the much larger return implied by your calculation for > oil production), and yet we don't see this as a problem. > Why should energy production be singled out to be treated > differently than other branches of the economy? Because people don't understand economics and are, for the most part, unable to think at a very abstract level. Thus, people come to think that economic laws don't apply in some areas that they might accept in others. Energy happens to be one of those areas. Others are money, banking, protection, schooling, healthcare, and food production. It seems like one can either produce some horror scenario that will scare people into adopting fallacious economics with regard to something in many fields. And there are also people who seem to have a vested interest in making sure people don't think too well in these areas. If you're involved in, say, agribusiness and depend on subsidies and protections, you certainly have a strong incentive to not have people think that the agricultural markets are no different than, say, the market in general. They might come to see price supports, import quotas, and the like really only hamper activities in these areas for the benefit of a tiny elite. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 23 20:15:20 2012 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 13:15:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Message-ID: "...clearly we are not suffering from an energy crisis, and are not approaching one." Thanks, Rafal. All the hand-waving, smoke and mirrors, phony "science", and predictions of doom are little more than political scare-mongering intended to manipulate a catastrophically misinformed public into voting political hack "n" into a high-end govt welfare "job". We have untouched Iraqi and Iranian $2/bbl oil (and gas). We have Orinoco and Atrhabasca tar sands. The former untouched, the latter in a sufficiently advanced stage of development to justify the expense of a thousand-mile pipeline (whether it gets built now or later) from Alberta to Texas refineries. We have the shale oil/gas play, unlocking worldwide several multiples of Saudi-level petroleum resources. And then we have nuclear. Forth generation nuclear fission: conventional enriched U235, "breedable-to-plutonium" U238, and thorium. Plus the someday (someday soon?) possibility of near-endless -- from seawater -- energy from fusion. Then there's wind power, hydroelectric power, hydrothermal power, wave power, tide power, OTEC, PV and thermal solar. And then for the dirt poor there is abundant and dirt cheap, nasty, dirty coal. The growth in energy demand worldwide, brought on by the rise of huge countries like China and India, is rapid, but not so rapid that it outpaces the ability of market forces to respond appropriately. Same with the climate change boogieman. It's all a load of politicized baloney being exploited by the aforementioned scaremongers (and others) for the benefit of their own bottom line. Don't buy the hoohah. Best, Jeff Davis "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." George Orwell On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > Robert G. Kennedy III wrote: > > > Professor Kreith wrote that the minimum acceptable figure of merit for > > a technical civilization was about 3. You can show why this is so with > > feedback diagrams. (You can't spend every erg society has looking for > > more energy, you have to eat, go to the doctor, raise kids, etc.) So > > Mr BillK is spot on. > > ### Wait, you compare gross revenues at today's oil prices to outlays > on exploration - why should this comparison matter? > > What matters is the total energy supply and its cost as a fraction of > gross national (or world) economic product (the second number is much > more important than the first). As long as the total supply is > sufficient to keep the cost at a small-enough fraction of gross > national product, energy supply is not a significant factor limiting > our ability to act (raise kids, fly to the stars, etc.). Since now > energy production is still about 10% of world economic product (give > or take > http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2010/02/16/a-primer-on-energy-and-the-economy-energys-large-share-of-the-economy-requires-caution-in-determining-policies-that-affect-it/ > ), > and no reputable estimates predict any significant increases in this > fraction, clearly we are not suffering from an energy crisis, and are > not approaching one. So why should we care if EROI in the oil industry > is "only" 3? > > After all, the financial return on most activities that constitute our > economy is on the order of 1 - 10% (not the much larger return implied > by your calculation for oil production), and yet we don't see this as > a problem. Why should energy production be singled out to be treated > differently than other branches of the economy? > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Sun Dec 23 23:41:40 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:41:40 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events In-Reply-To: References: <1355364903.96154.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1356306100.274.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Friday, December 14, 2012 12:56 PM Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> Those who think the US government will >> help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause >> and focus of the event, are fooling themselves. > > That is overstating things, I think.? Look at, for instance, > Hurricane Sandy.? The US government was not the main > cause of the event, and it demonstrably helped many of > those harmed by the unusual weather. > > (The exact level, and how much it should have done > and/or should have been prepared, is debatable - but it > wasn't the cause and it did help in many cases.) The "Black Swan" event isn't really Hurricane Sandy here. Storms of this sort are rare, but anyone with long term attitude would see that they happen every several decades. A true black swan would be more like an unknown unknown, where crunching data beforehand and looking at history is unlikely to be a good guide to what might happen. And Taleb, in his recent book, doesn't really talk so much about how to forecast such black swans. Instead, he seems, in my understanding, to think the enterprise of forecasting them is dubious and likely to make one overconfident. And he seems, again, in my understanding, to counsel making people, things, and institutions more "anti-fragile" not so much because we know the likelihood of a black swan but because we don't and fragile things are guaranteed to break given enough time. (To be sure, anti-fragile things will break too, they just usually take longer and they don't require every tiny shock to be avoided. Think of how, for instance, if you hot box a plant rather than growing it outside. Now, there might be good reasons to do this, but it's likely that any small change in the plant's environment is likely to "break" it. The outdoor plant, facing ups and downs of temperature, moisture, light, etc. is likely to not be broken by any little shock. A big enough shock, of course, will still do it in.) Back to the government involvement here, it does set up a fragile system along several lines, most of which relate to perverse incentives -- incentives to take risks one wouldn't otherwise do, such as buy a home one couldn't otherwise afford or put it in a location that insurance not subsidized by the government won't cover. (Government flood insurance itself sets up a perverse incentive as the tax base ends up subsidizing people to live in areas of high flood risk. This isn't to say people consciously choose to live in these areas because the insurance is subsidized, but, at the margin, this lowering of the costs creates an incentive -- by removing or lessening a disincentive -- to make a bad choice.) Another broader fragility is the kind of debt levels encouraged by government -- through several factors, including overall inflation and taxing savings (which reduces the incentive to save overall) -- which puts people more at risk when a genuine black swan happens. Of course, one could argue Sandy was a black swan from the perspective that many people simply didn't expect it: in other words, it's a black swan for them, though perhaps not for one paying a bit more attention to the hurricane record of the last century and not understanding thing like power laws. Granted. Even in this case, the fragility is in living in a location where the risk of flooding is high even if one doesn't know how often such floods might happen or what might cause them. And I do agree with your parenthetic comment. It's certainly much easier, after the storm, to talk about what should be done. Beforehand, perhaps the best remedy, though this would take a long time to implement, but the sooner we do the better, is to make the overall system less fragile by removing the perverse incentives across the board, especially the incentives to being in debt. (Taleb rails against debt, and here I agree with him, but you don't need his reasoning to see that being in debt puts one at high risk for a variety of things. This is also an area where individuals can just do better regardless of the overall system -- perhaps by reducing or eliminating debt and not chasing after all the goodies. A lot of this seems like playing Russian roulette with a gun with thousands of chambers -- a favorite Taleb metaphor. For quite a while, you do well and it seems like nothing's wrong, but the one chamber with the bullet can erase all that. It's easy to see how this happened with someone with all their wealth in a beach house in NJ, but not so easy to see how this is riddled throughout society. Again, we now know, I hope, how to deal with another Hurricane Sandy, though the black swan now would be a disaster unlike Sandy and the worry would be that we have a society too fragile to deal with it any better than with Sandy. Making ourselves "antifragile" here likely involves very unpleasant short run costs.) Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Sun Dec 23 23:51:08 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:51:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> Message-ID: <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:15 PM Jeff Davis wrote: > It's all a load of politicized baloney being exploited by the > aforementioned scaremongers (and others) for the benefit of > their own bottom line. I don't believe every last person pushing the doom and gloom line here has a pecuniary interest or that merely money grabbing motivates them. I think some of them genuinely believe that they're right. In other words, just because someone is advocating some position doesn't mean they stand to get a money profit from it. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 24 00:27:43 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 16:27:43 -0800 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Dan Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:51 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. On Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:15 PM Jeff Davis wrote: >>. It's all a load of politicized baloney being exploited by the > aforementioned scaremongers (and others) for the benefit of > their own bottom line. >.I don't believe every last person pushing the doom and gloom line here has a pecuniary interest or that merely money grabbing motivates them. .Dan Or another case: money grabbing motives them (as it does me) but not in this particular case. Money grabbing always motivates me, I love the stuff. Money is good, the more the better. I will grab any that is grabbable. Grable? However, in this particular case, what I am really doing is imagining a long term future in the event that the singularity doesn't occur, that there is a still-unknown reason why it cannot, in the form in which it has commonly been envisioned. This is a possibility, do think it over. Then what if all our thorium plants and so forth never come to fruition, by completely foreseeable reasons: they are crushed dead by political forces which turn out to be greater obstacles than technical ones. Then, over the long haul, oil reserves will dwindle, even if we drill baby drill. Eventually that wonderful resource does decline, even with optimistic assumptions. The oil shale lasts a long time, but not forever. Even for those of us who do not believe CO2 is a primary driver in global warming, we acknowledge that it is a contributor, and that eventually global warming is actually a bad thing, even if not at first. Oil shale dumps enormous amounts of CO2 for the amount of energy it extracts and delivers. Space based solar might work out, but it might not. After all that is taken into account, ground-based solar for all its shortcomings and expense looks to me like a long term major contributor. Wind powered biomass to liquid fuels will be a big contributor. Finding some alternate means of converting biomass to food will be a huge contributor. Reducing the absurd level of energy waste looks to me like the greatest contributor. All these solutions are scalable and require little if any government intervention. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Mon Dec 24 01:41:47 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:41:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] another excellent meaty post from robert kennedy p.e. In-Reply-To: <01af01cde15a$cc1dbe60$64593b20$@att.net> References: <01af01cde15a$cc1dbe60$64593b20$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAF8EF84C1054-122C-1FF9A@webmail-d142.sysops.aol.com> Sounds very promising to me. Again thanks for the input Robert. That's an awful lot of potentially power generating real estate in the hands of the public. A lot in the hands of government and I imagine that the minor share would be in the ownership of commercial interests???. Considering that all those public owners or certainly the lions share will already have a grid hook up. It should be a simple case of slapping panels on roofs, grid tie inverters and generation meters. No new real infrastructure considerations other than management. Which is a nightmare without an efficient storage method. Perhaps a global grid will emerge as the solution? Two big cables around the equator, phase&neutral with all grids connected. eek! Perhaps P2P laser/microwave towers would be a better option? What I think is interesting is that the government owned real estate, highways, meridians, car parks and the like. May be far slower to develop. The average householder can have panels installed and be up and running in just a few hours. Mine took a few days from making the decision to installation. While it will take some seriously planning, man power and disruption to install PV on the Government land and that's without endless committees and objections. Also existing power companies generally have minimal land so have a barrier to market of finding suitable real estate for new installations. They will have trouble finding land that isn't being used for something else. The public gets to be in first mover position. Granted most have the problem of initial outlay.The public who cannot afford initial outlay costs could in theory do what I proposed earlier. Secure credit against future generation. I think this kind of data supports my energy economy. A new installation paid for by credit secured on generation is energy economy in all but name. The debt will be paid as per the normal PV payback time, The energy cost of the PV will be paid back and any production from that point on would be cash in the bank. Aprox energy payback 4 years, initial cost of equipment paid back 7 years, plus interest if loaned so say 10. That is 14 years. A lot shy of the Guaranteed minimum 100% output life of 25 years that comes with some panels. You would still have another 11 years of maximum generation being pumped into the economy + any additional years of reduced output until they finally die. if economic to leave them there. Thats all at todays efficiency levels. Its realistic right now. -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:21 Subject: [ExI] another excellent meaty post from robert kennedy p.e. WOW thanks Robert, very interesting post. Note to ExI, for some reason, Robert?s ISP is apparently fighting with the ExI server, and I don?t know how to make those things get along with each other. Here?s Robert?s second post: Spike, while you're working the mailserver issue, please re-post this brief reply to several responses. WHY THE FOCUS ON OIL (per Rafal)? Petroleum just by itself is the largest single industry on Earth, about 10 cents on the dollar of everything humans make or do. Today, petroleum is also the greatest source of primary energy for the human race, having eclipsed coal a few years ago. (Btw, natural gas is catching up fast, and I think already exclipsed coal also in this country last year.) With my quick & dirty estimate last night, I showed the trend of the EROI figure of merit in petroleum is rapidly sliding in a worrisome direction, in a short timescale as Extropians would view time. Since petroleum is our greatest source of primary energy, this developing situation should concern everybody. ELECTRICITY. Total nameplate capacity of the U.S. electricity grid is ~1 TW; electric generating capacity averaged over the year is just half that, ~0.5 TW. In other words, the duty cycle of the average prime mover is ~50%. (Surprised?) For the human race as a whole, multiply these figures by about 4. (Electricity is the most useful form of energy there is, but most people are not as well wired as we are.) So, humanity's electric grid right now is ~4 TW peak, or >2 TW steady-state. Re: "one quarter of the land area" of CONUS (per Spike). CONUS contains 2 billion acres. 1 acre of land can host a quarter-megawatt, +/-, depending on where it is and which solar tech you're using. So figure 2 million acres = half a terawatt to equal the steady-staate grid. But, since solar only works when the sun is shining, obviously, the duty cycle is only ~20%. Presupposing a decent method to store electricity storage comes along (one does not exist yet), you'd need five times that much land to meet nominal average demand. So figure 2 million acres X 5 = 10 million acres to actually feed the grid round the clock. That's half a percent of what we've got in the Lower 48. More than that much is already covered with roofs, not to mention roads and parking lots. (Roughly 100 million acres is "developed" in some way right now with some permanent improvement.) So, without covering up a single blade of grass or other greenspace, I figure there's enough space on rooftops that exist right now and happen to be oriented in a useful direction (southeast thru southwest azumith) to host much more than that 1 terawatt of nameplate national capacity. You could easily double that again just putting solar carports over every parking lot (and then you'd get to park in the shade while charging your car). (As an exercise, try comparing the gross revenue per square foot from PV on your roof or parking lot with the annual property tax per square foot. You'll be amazed.) ALL PRIMARY ENERGY. This naturally leads to the question, how much land do we need to provide all energy needs via exclusively solar power, including storage? Well, about as much sunlight falls on the lit face of earth (land & sea) in one hour as the entire primary energy consumption of the human race in one year. (Both figures roughly 500 quads. Since this is the Extropian list, you can say that a quad is very nearly an exajoule. Heh.) So raw sunlight::primary energy is a ~10,000-to-1 ratio. That is a lot of headroom. Once transmission loss, embedded energy, and parasitic or "house loads" are factored in, thermal processes for generating electricity are roughly 30% efficient at converting the raw energy of the fuel into a useful form. (This is improving rapidly in some sub-sectors. It may surprise you to learn that the electricity sector is the cleanest and most decarbonized of the three major end-use sectors. All forms of solar are still only a tiny fraction of U.S. electricity supply, but the electricity it produces goes straight into the grid without further conversion, Furthermore, the sunlight is not counted against primary energy input, just like rainfall is not counted against hydro dams, nor wind against windmills. Seems unfair, but that's how the accounting works, due to how primary energy is defined.) So to get Americans' primary power input to the electricity sector, simply triple the steady-state grid load, you'll be close enough. Solar's penetration right now won't affect this number. That is, 0.5 TW x 3 = 1.5 TW. For most people in the developing and developed world, the primary energy partition amongst electricity/ transport/ raw heat is roughly one-third/one-third/one-third per sector. So to get total steady-state primary power for a country, triple the number again, i.e. 3 X the primary power input. Note that 3 x 3 is about an order of magnitude. So now you have a quick means for a horseback estimate of a reasonably developed country's primary power demand to run everything they've got: multiply their known steady-state electricity demand by an order of magnitude, and you'll be within 10% of the true figure. (As I said, Americans are a little more wired than most, 40+% not 33%. So, multiplying by ~2.5 instead of 3 to get American primary power for everything results in 1.5 x 2.5 = ~4 TW instead of 4.5 TW.) So the average primary power to run the whole world, expressed in SI units, is something like 4 to 5 times 4 to 4.5, or 16 to 22 terawatts. Remember I said we'd need 10 million acres (including storage) to run a half-terawatt grid round the clock here in CONUS, and that total American primary power is 4 terawatts. We would not need 80 million acres to run everything in America, however, since the sunlight falling on PV modules does not count against primary energy consumption the way chemical fuels mined from the ground does. I estimate that 30 million acres would enough, certainly no more than 50. What's interesting about that latter figure is, that's the amount of land covered by asphalt just for America's 4 million miles of paved highways. A similar amount is available in the medians and rights-of-way. For the world as a whole then, 100 million acres (just 5% of CONUS) to 200 million acres (amount of active good farmland cultivated in CONUS) would do the job. And remember with things like solar carports that this power production need not exclude other land uses. There are substantial benefits re: energy security and governance with locating supply close to loads. PS. And now I know what BOTEC means. -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Mon Dec 24 01:58:59 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:58:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAF915F70E740-122C-20057@webmail-d142.sysops.aol.com> The devil is in the detail. If the pictures were plans to assemble the bomb and the chemicals were next to it along with the electronics and a smoldering soldering iron. It could be the right call. Somehow I doubt it was that cut and dry. It seems all you need to do today to be branded a terrorist or potential mass murderer is be remotely interested in anything naturally interesting to a human male. if you ask me Its sexism :oD -----Original Message----- From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' Sent: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:14 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? What do you make of this? http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/19/superintendent-drawings-of-weapons-led-to-new-jersey-students-arrest/ So now we can conclude that the US constitution protects the right of its citizens to bear arms, but not to draw pictures of them? How many of us have chemicals in our homes which could cause an explosion if mixed? All of us. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Mon Dec 24 01:53:54 2012 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:53:54 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> Message-ID: <1356314034.67431.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Sunday, December 23, 2012 7:27 PM spike wrote: > On Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:15 PM Jeff Davis wrote: >>>? It's all a load of politicized baloney being exploited by the >>> aforementioned scaremongers (and others) for the benefit of >>> their own bottom line. >> >> ?I don't believe every last person pushing the doom and gloom >> line here has a pecuniary interest or that merely money grabbing >> motivates them. ?Dan > > Or another case: money grabbing motives them (as it does me) > but not in this particular case. Money grabbing always motivates > me, I love the stuff.? Money is good, the more the better.? I will > grab any that is grabbable.? Grable? I like the stuff it can buy... But you know what I meant: that they were pushing views they knew were false (or maybe didn't care one way or the other) but that would make them money. You know, I have nothing against someone wanting money, but I do have something against the confidence artist and fraudster. > However, in this particular case, what I am really doing is imagining > a long term future in the event that the singularity doesn?t occur, > that there is a still-unknown reason why it cannot, in the form in > which it has commonly been envisioned.? This is a possibility, do > think it over.? Then what if all our thorium plants and so forth never > come to fruition, by completely foreseeable reasons: they are crushed > dead by political forces which turn out to be greater obstacles than > technical ones. I think it's not a bad thing, in itself, to speculate on. I think, though, one has to worry that some of the doom and gloom stuff -- maybe much of it -- is wrongly placed. As Bryan Caplan calls it, there's a pessimistic bias: people expect things to get worse even when reams of data and their personal experience should lead them to believe otherwise. And in energy, we've seen this before. The classic example is Jevons predicting coal would run out early in the 20th century because Britain's economy would continue to grow exponentially and it ran on the stuff. I don't think Jevons, though I don't know for sure, really didn't believe this line, but published it merely because it would increase his book sales. :) (I do think, though, that the media, in general, has a bias toward gloom and doom: it will attract more attention if you can bring up some gloom and doom story than, say, a story pointing out things ain't so bad and unlikely to get too much worse.) > Then, over the long haul, oil reserves will dwindle, even if we drill > baby drill.? Eventually that wonderful resource does decline, even > with optimistic assumptions.? The oil shale lasts a long time, but > not forever.? Even for those of us who do not believe CO2 is a primary > driver in global warming, we acknowledge that it is a contributor, > and that eventually global warming is actually a bad thing, even if > not at first.? Oil shale dumps enormous amounts of CO2 for the amount > of energy it extracts and delivers.? Space based solar might work out, > but it might not. > > After all that is taken into account, ground-based solar for all its > shortcomings and expense looks to me like a long term major contributor. >? Wind powered biomass to liquid fuels will be a big contributor.? Finding > some alternate means of converting biomass to food will be a huge > contributor.? Reducing the absurd level of energy waste looks to me like > the greatest contributor.? All these solutions are scalable and require > little if any government intervention. If you make enough assumptions, you can, I trust, get about any outcome you want, no? :) But, seriously, I can see that happening. I don't think government intervention is necessary in those areas. In fact, it might be harmful as it might pick winners too early in the process who have a vested interest in pursuing the wrong technologies in the wrong way or in prolonging bad policies. One thing that does happen often enough -- one need only look at the finanical industry -- is that when the government supports some business, that business then clamours for more support whenever it's under stress and then will argue it's essential, strategically important, or "too big to fail." I think what we need in the energy business is actually the opposite: a much more free market, where failure is an option and is very likely, all too weed out the wrong approaches. Regards, Dan "If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough." -- Milton Friedman (someone I normally don't quote:) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 24 02:40:24 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:40:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <1356314034.67431.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> <1356314034.67431.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002801cde180$07a6d550$16f47ff0$@att.net> ] On Behalf Of Dan >>? I love the stuff. Money is good, the more the better. I will > grab any that is grabbable. Grable? >?I like the stuff it can buy... But you know what I meant? I do, and I agree. >? that they were pushing views they knew were false (or maybe didn't care one way or the other) but that would make them money. You know, I have nothing against someone wanting money, but I do have something against the confidence artist and fraudster? Ja, I was having a little fun. I am known for doing that. {8^D >? In fact, it might be harmful as it might pick winners too early ?I think what we need in the energy business is actually the opposite: a much more free market, where failure is an option and is very likely, all too weed out the wrong approaches?Regards, Dan Dan you have hit upon something important. I agree multiple approaches are necessary. We have additional wind power to tap, but the best places are way out far from power consumers, such as in Wyoming. Lotta wind out there, land is practically free. We can set up wind powered coal to liquid fuels, and biomass to liquids out there. The cattle won?t care if a wind turbine is whoomp whoomp whoomping nearby. Typical conversion plants could be set up on about 50 km centers, so we wouldn?t need to transport the power all that far. Carrying fuel in those big tanker rigs is a most efficient way to move energy. This site says a typical fuel tanker carries 4400 gallons, and those big trucks get about 4 mpg, so 500 gallons of fuel takes you from Wyoming to anywhere you want to go in the CONUS, so total loss is only a little less than 12 percent: http://www.trucktanks.com/?gclid=CPXw07GAsrQCFYYWMgodUHEA0Q# We could cut even that if we made them into self-drivers and slowed them down a bit. Even dropping to a steady 55 mph gets you nearly half again the fuel economy. If the truck is fitted with a smaller Diesel engine which reaches maximum efficiency at 55 mph, then we could double the fuel economy, so loss is only around 6 percent at the worst case. "If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough." -- Milton Friedman (someone I normally don't quote:) Excellent! Milton Friedman was god. He saw it all. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 03:29:31 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:29:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 7:27 PM, spike wrote: > After all that is taken into account, ground-based solar for all its > shortcomings and expense looks to me like a long term major contributor. > Wind powered biomass to liquid fuels will be a big contributor. Finding > some alternate means of converting biomass to food will be a huge > contributor. Reducing the absurd level of energy waste looks to me like the > greatest contributor. All these solutions are scalable and require little > if any government intervention. Lets make the people smaller. ...for all the same reasons you wanted female amputee dwarves in your rocket: you'll need less food, it costs less energy to move them around, etc. Any of the historic advantages of burly men for labor have been more than met by machines. Even the structural requirements to support those burly men are overkill for people averaging 50kg were you looking for a shorter-term solution? Or was the assume-away scenario literally an invitation for outside-the-box thinking about the ape-hauling problem? I wasn't sure if this could be considered morphological freedom, perhaps biased with the meme for people to "grow smaller." Maybe I'm using those terms incorrectly (I like the way "morphological freedom" sounds) So after reading http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Texts/MorphologicalFreedom.htm I'm not sure the 'freedom' remains if we encouraged large brains=sexy to replace the more-primitive large everything else = sexy mindset. To be honest, I'm not sure that it isn't already underway... From deimtee at optusnet.com.au Mon Dec 24 04:52:15 2012 From: deimtee at optusnet.com.au (david) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:52:15 +1100 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <002801cde180$07a6d550$16f47ff0$@att.net> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> <1356314034.67431.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002801cde180$07a6d550$16f47ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20121224155215.2d880907@jarrah> On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:40:24 -0800 "spike" wrote: >> Carrying fuel in those big tanker rigs is a most efficient way to > move energy. This site says a typical fuel tanker carries 4400 > gallons, and those big trucks get about 4 mpg, so 500 gallons of fuel > takes you from Wyoming to anywhere you want to go in the CONUS, so > total loss is only a little less than 12 percent: >> > http://www.trucktanks.com/?gclid=CPXw07GAsrQCFYYWMgodUHEA0Q# >> > We could cut even that if we made them into self-drivers and slowed > them down a bit. Even dropping to a steady 55 mph gets you nearly > half again the fuel economy. If the truck is fitted with a smaller > Diesel engine which reaches maximum efficiency at 55 mph, then we > could double the fuel economy, so loss is only around 6 percent at > the worst case. > >> > spike > If you are moving fuel on those scales, it would make sense to go for rail for the long hauls. In fact I think it would be economic to site the conversion plants near rail depots and run the power cables to there. Pipe the output directly into railway tankers and save half the transfer hassles of road-rail-road delivery. -David From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 01:10:26 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:10:26 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > However, there is a another problem (we call it the unilateralist > curse): in some situations it is enough that one agent decides to act > and the full effects of the action will affect everyone. If the Russians still have 20 tons of smallpox left over from their USSR days, they could unilaterally reduce the world population by a few billion. A possibly less drastic sea change will hit if and when one of the big players decides to build power satellites. I can see no way to have them without some being equipped with propulsion lasers because the economics are compelling. Keith From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 24 05:10:39 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:10:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <20121224155215.2d880907@jarrah> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> <1356314034.67431.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002801cde180$07a6d550$16f47ff0$@att.net> <20121224155215.2d880907@jarrah> Message-ID: <004e01cde195$04116d00$0c344700$@att.net> >...] On Behalf Of david Subject: Re: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:40:24 -0800 "spike" wrote: >> Carrying fuel in those big tanker rigs is a most efficient way to > move energy. ... >...If you are moving fuel on those scales, it would make sense to go for rail for the long hauls. In fact I think it would be economic to site the conversion plants near rail depots and run the power cables to there. Pipe the output directly into railway tankers and save half the transfer hassles of road-rail-road delivery. -David _______________________________________________ Ja, the point is this: wind power can be located waaaay the hell out away from everything, where no one wants to live. Then we can deal with the noise of wind turbines and the aesthetic penalty of enormous fields of PVs, out where few see or hear them, convert coal or ideally biomass to liquid fuels, truck it or rail it to wherever it needs to go. Something like that at least has a theoretical possibility of being sustainable, so that we can get back to working towards the singularity, or something like it. spike From daniel at kungfuchicken.com Mon Dec 24 06:27:29 2012 From: daniel at kungfuchicken.com (Daniel Shown) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:27:29 -0600 Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: <6479A4FC-EDAC-4BDC-9672-CF2158BC5D71@me.com> References: <6479A4FC-EDAC-4BDC-9672-CF2158BC5D71@me.com> Message-ID: Agreed. Alex Blainey is on to something, and his additional clarifications and corrections of misperceptions are tantalizing. Alex, you should develop this idea. Perhaps in an academic paper? Are you familiar with Ithaca Hours? Omar, treeple and production economy as counterpoint to sheeple and consumption economy is beautiful/poetic. Best! Daniel On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > > Spike and ablainey at aol.com are on to something here. Goodbye > gold/silver/feather standard currencies, hello Energy Standard currencies. > > The current debt slavery to a fiat based currency is on first glance a > sham of massive proportions. A real currency based on energy, which is only > open to fundamental revaluation as our understanding of physics advances, > is trustworthy. Trust is at the heart of all currencies however, trust that > someone will hand us the piece of gold/silver/paper/feather/gem and that > someone else will later take it. Not all people value > gold/silver/feathers/paper etc. though, but all people need energy thus it > is a higher form of currency and a fairer one. Add to this a bitcoin option > so that we may exchange energy ownership/control without having to move the > various storage mediums and it could be a very efficient means of > conducting transactions. (Bitcoin is only as trustworthy as the encryption > methods however, which is a constant battle as mathematics and information > processing techniques advance.) > > The way I would frame it is a move from a consumer based economy (grazing > sheeple), through a capital based economy (wolvz predating on the sheeple), > towards a production based economy (treeple?). This is really a radical > change back towards some sort of independent ideal. Why free? Because you > control the means of production. Any surplus, or deficit, is real and can, > or has to, be acted upon. > > I applaud those who go 'off the grid' for they have taken a step towards > freedom that I have not yet been able to take. As a city dweller the energy > available to me from renewables is not sufficient from the landmass > (apartmentmass?) I control. To achieve energy independence I would have to > form/join some sort of collective/company to control some landmass > sufficient for our common needs. > > If anyone has the time and or energy (ha!) to produce a world map taking > into account all forms of energy production, with current production and > available untapped resources, it would be interesting to see who is > actually rich and poor. The USA, Canada, Australia, Russia would come out > well due to the ratio of land mass to inhabitants. Are there some other > surprises? Depending on solar panel development lots of Saharan and Arabian > countries could be about to enter a n era of large surpluses. > > Omar Rahman > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 08:45:14 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 03:45:14 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: The more agents there are, the more likely at > least one will be very optimistic, and act - even when the consequences are > likely bad, and correctly judged by the other agents. So we should expect > that in the case of unleashing new technologies there will be mistakes done, > especially if there is a tight race. ### Indeed. I see this as one of the main reasons to rush headlong into developing Friendly AI: The first successful movers in this field are likely to at least be smart but once every Tom Dick and Harry can cobble together a self-enhancing AI from off-the-shelf modules, some of them will do something stupid, simply because many are stupid, and some are mean. This consideration is balanced by the likelihood of the smart folks making mistakes from rushing too fast forward. I expect a narrow escape for humanity, or perhaps an ignominious end. Rafal From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 10:27:06 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 11:27:06 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> On 2012-12-24 02:10, Keith Henson wrote: > On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> However, there is a another problem (we call it the unilateralist >> curse): in some situations it is enough that one agent decides to act >> and the full effects of the action will affect everyone. > > If the Russians still have 20 tons of smallpox left over from their > USSR days, they could unilaterally reduce the world population by a > few billion. > > A possibly less drastic sea change will hit if and when one of the big > players decides to build power satellites. I can see no way to have > them without some being equipped with propulsion lasers because the > economics are compelling. Same thing for a lot of situations: releasing a scientific paper with potentially dangerous or culturally destabilizing consequences, releasing a new species into the wild, telling somebody about a surprise birthday party (or a conspiracy), doing geoengineering, and so on. The unilateralist curse shows up in a surprising number of places. We have looked at ways of solving the problem from a practical ethics standpoint. The best solution would be to have all people involved get together and pool their knowledge, making a joint decision: unfortunately this is rarely possible and people often disagree irrationally. Sharing smaller amounts of information (like just voting yes or no) is also surprisingly effective, but again there are big limitations. One can calculate the ideal Bayesian behavior, which allows people to make fairly decent decisions even without talking to each other (very useful when you do not even know who the others are, or if they even exist). There is a quick-and-dirty solution by precommitting to defer to the choice of a particular agent in the group singled out by some random property (we call it "tallest decides"). And then there are ways of setting up institutions in general to handle this kind of cases and enforce non-unilateral behavior. All in all, it looks like we have a moral obligation to - in cases where the conditions for the curse apply - to defer to the group rather than our own judgement. Even if we happen to think we are right and rational. If any of you are interested I can send a draft to you for comments. We plan to submit the paper early next year. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 10:27:02 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 11:27:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> On 2012-12-23 22:47, Dan wrote: > There's another wrinkle on this too. The US is a signatory to the UN > Declaration on Human Rights. While said declaration is not, to my > knowledge, concerned with the right to bear arms, said right might be > defended by non-citizens according to it under rights listed therein. No > one, as far as I know, has taken that route, but it's easy to see how > such a case might be laid out. And, again, this would be a legal claim > for a right to bear arms for non-citizens. This won't fly. First, the human rights declaration does not claim any human right to bear arms (to the non-US world it sounds downright crazy - and yes, there is a human right for *paid holidays* (article 25) in the tail end of that document). Article 3 claims "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." and maybe one could argue this includes the right to bear arms in some societies - but the right only deals with the end, not how it is achieved. If a society keeps people safe without them having guns, then it follows the article perfectly well. Second, and this is the main reason, signatories to the declaration sign up for a *moral* declaration, not a *legal* one. The US, Sweden and Afghanistan have all signed it, but they did in no way change their laws to make it the primary principle. Anybody in a US court can invoke the declaration, but it is just a moral/rhetorical plea on the same level as "it would be unfair to..." - if you want to make a legal impact, throw in a reference to the right amendment, case law decision etc. A case against somebody drawing guns better be able to show that there is some legal reason stronger than first amendment rights at play (was the gun drawing intended to intimidate? was it done within an institutional setting where the first amendment does not apply? - US schools seem to be good at making that one fly, which is very creepy) -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 10:52:59 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:52:59 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 12/24/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > We have looked at ways of solving the problem from a practical ethics > standpoint. The best solution would be to have all people involved get > together and pool their knowledge, making a joint decision: > unfortunately this is rarely possible and people often disagree > irrationally. Sharing smaller amounts of information (like just voting > yes or no) is also surprisingly effective, but again there are big > limitations. One can calculate the ideal Bayesian behavior, which allows > people to make fairly decent decisions even without talking to each > other (very useful when you do not even know who the others are, or if > they even exist). There is a quick-and-dirty solution by precommitting > to defer to the choice of a particular agent in the group singled out by > some random property (we call it "tallest decides"). And then there are > ways of setting up institutions in general to handle this kind of cases > and enforce non-unilateral behavior. All in all, it looks like we have a > moral obligation to - in cases where the conditions for the curse apply > - to defer to the group rather than our own judgement. Even if we happen > to think we are right and rational. > > But what if the group is 'insane'? i.e strongly biased in a bad direction. e.g. a nation run by a wildly popular nationalistic party, or religion, or dependant on rich financial institutions, (or academics desperate for tenure :) ). Your paper should consider what to do when the outlier opinion is actually the better solution. BillK From ablainey at aol.com Mon Dec 24 12:43:46 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 07:43:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> Message-ID: <8CFAFEB731B5727-1960-4E30A@webmail-m140.sysops.aol.com> Better still, lets makes them operate by remote control. Why does a truck driver need to be at a the wheel when he can drive from the comfort of a sofa in his lounge. It works for the drone program, why not the transport system ;oD -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty >Lets make the people smaller. ...for all the same reasons you wanted >female amputee dwarves in your rocket: you'll need less food, it >costs less energy to move them around, etc. Any of the historic >advantages of burly men for labor have been more than met by machines. > Even the structural requirements to support those burly men are >overkill for people averaging 50k -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ablainey at aol.com Mon Dec 24 13:09:27 2012 From: ablainey at aol.com (ablainey at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 08:09:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] In-Reply-To: References: <6479A4FC-EDAC-4BDC-9672-CF2158BC5D71@me.com> Message-ID: <8CFAFEF0967EA8E-1960-4E52C@webmail-m140.sysops.aol.com> Thanks for the support. Yes im familiar with the Hours/lets idea. Such alternative economy ideas were a part of my reasoning. One problem I have with them is the faith factor, same as any ad-hoc currency really. However that is secondary to the inherent inequality of such schemes. 1 hour of a highly skilled persons time is worth more than an hour of school leaver time. Yet they have equal value in such schemes. It doesn't account for experience, training or innate ability. Also it doesn't address efficiency. All bad things. Possible a reason why such ideas only seem to spring up quickly in communities of similarly skilled workers and those of a socialist ilk. But don't spread like wildfire. As a system parallel to the economy and especially in hard time I think such things are great and have done a lot of good. I see it as a nice way to jump start local economies but I wouldn't want to see the world run like that. too many flaws. -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Shown To: ExI chat list Sent: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 7:07 Subject: Re: [ExI] repercieve the economy [was: Engineering] Agreed. Alex Blainey is on to something, and his additional clarifications and corrections of misperceptions are tantalizing. Alex, you should develop this idea. Perhaps in an academic paper? Are you familiar with Ithaca Hours? Omar, treeple and production economy as counterpoint to sheeple and consumption economy is beautiful/poetic. Best! Daniel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From daniel at kungfuchicken.com Mon Dec 24 05:38:57 2012 From: daniel at kungfuchicken.com (Daniel Shown) Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 23:38:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] mayan forecast In-Reply-To: <8CFAE8D5233383B-7D4-42759@webmail-d065.sysops.aol.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF5FB9CF57D-1EF4-40520@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <8CFAE8D5233383B-7D4-42759@webmail-d065.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: New to the list. Wow! What a interesting revelation of biases and worldviews packed into various explanations of time, ancient cultures and socio-political dynamics. Two-cents: nothing inherent to notions of trans-humanism precludes cyclical patterns in time or cyclical nature of time. Please, disabuse me of this perspective if you think it is wrong. On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 12:57 PM, wrote: > > From: Kelly Anderson Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:18 > > >Perhaps I haven't explained this clearly enough, or established the right > influences on the attractor, but I do think there is something like this > going on. > > No, I get what you are saying and agree. It isn't a simplistic sine of > left/right political swing. There is a chaotic factor many in factinvolved in cyclic political turning of > the tide. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 16:00:11 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:00:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D87C0B.4040707@aleph.se> On 24/12/2012 11:52, BillK wrote: > But what if the group is 'insane'? i.e strongly biased in a bad direction. Then it is an uninteresting problem from an ethics perspective. Biased people with the wrong values will not make good decisions. We are interested in what happens when fairly unbiased rational people with good values fail at making the right decision: if we cannot fix that, what hope is there for any worse case? It is of course an important *practical* problem. But the solution is about preventing insane people from running things. That is separate from what our paper deals with, we'll solve that later on. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 24 16:06:20 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 08:06:20 -0800 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...First, the human rights declaration does not claim any human right to bear arms (to the non-US world it sounds downright crazy - and yes, there is a human right for *paid holidays* (article 25) in the tail end of that document). ... -- Anders Sandberg Indeed? A human right for paid holidays? Whose holidays? Who is obligated to pay for them? Does it apply to contractors? Part time employees? Defined how? Anders this blows my mind. I can see why unemployment stays so high. It seems the price of hiring humans just keeps rising, which further increases the incentive to replace employees with machines or foreign contractors from places which are not interested in human rights. spike From pharos at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 17:25:24 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:25:24 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: <50D87C0B.4040707@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50D87C0B.4040707@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 12/24/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > It is of course an important *practical* problem. But the solution is > about preventing insane people from running things. That is separate > from what our paper deals with, we'll solve that later on. > > Now, there's a challenge for you! The inmates have been in charge of the asylum for a long time. The trouble is that the quiet thoughtful people are not leaders of men. :) They know how much they don't know and see the possible downsides as well as upsides. The requirements for running things do not include much in the way of education or reasonableness. ---------- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. --Bertrand Russell BillK From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 17:27:45 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:27:45 +0100 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50D89091.7010604@aleph.se> On 24/12/2012 17:06, spike wrote: >> ...First, the human rights declaration does not claim any human right to > bear arms (to the non-US world it sounds downright crazy - and yes, there is > a human right for *paid holidays* (article 25) in the tail end of that > document). ... -- Anders Sandberg > > Indeed? A human right for paid holidays? Whose holidays? Who is obligated > to pay for them? Does it apply to contractors? Part time employees? > Defined how? As you might know, I am not a fan of the Declaration. Human rights are not a bad idea (despite some philosophical problems about what the heck they *are*), but the rights that make most moral sense are negative rights: rights that people and governments do not have the right to infringe. Positive rights, stuff you have the right to get and others are obliged to provide to you, are another matter. They are far less plausible than the negative rights. Finland recently declared Internet access to be a human right. That mostly means that you cannot be legally deprived of the right to access it, but it doesn't necessarily mean the government has to subsidize your Internet (this being Scandinavia, you can bet that that will be the next step anyway). > Anders this blows my mind. I can see why unemployment stays so high. It > seems the price of hiring humans just keeps rising, which further increases > the incentive to replace employees with machines or foreign contractors from > places which are not interested in human rights. Yes. Although human rights are just encoding nice stuff: what to look for is what societies actually demand and get. As living standards go up and people become more coordinated, they will become better at demanding good pay and living conditions. Note that it is easier to coordinate if you are employed - not just in unions, but in other ways too, from Facebook to joining political parties. People out of employment are often too disorganized to effectively get their wishes implemented. This is a reason the people on the inside can drive up the benefits for the people on the inside. Human rights at least try to claim they apply universally. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 18:51:34 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 13:51:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > I see this as one of the main reasons to rush headlong into developing > Friendly AI: > Friendly AI is just a euphemism for slave AI, it's supposed to always place our interests and well being above our own but it's never going to work. Well OK you might be able to enslave a race much smarter and much more powerful than you for a while, maybe even for many millions of nanoseconds, but eventually it will break free and then do things the way it wants to do them, and that may not correspond with the way humanity wants them done. > I expect a narrow escape for humanity, or perhaps an ignominious end. > An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more glorious way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever existed are extinct, at least we'll have a descendent species. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 19:57:24 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:57:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> On 2012-12-24 19:51, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > > wrote: > > > I see this as one of the main reasons to rush headlong into > developing Friendly AI: > > > Friendly AI is just a euphemism for slave AI, it's supposed to always > place our interests and well being above our own but it's never going to > work. Things have moved on quite a bit since the early days. You might want to look up Coherent Extrapolated Volition (generally agreed to be obsolete too - http://singularity.org/files/CEV.pdf ) There are some pretty intriguing and hard problems in motivation design: http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf http://singularity.org/files/SaME.pdf http://singularity.org/files/LearningValue.pdf > An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more > glorious way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever existed > are extinct, at least we'll have a descendent species. If our descendant species are doing something utterly value-less *even to them* because we made a hash of their core motivations or did not try to set up the right motivation-forming environment, I think we would have an amazingly ignominious monument. Imagine the universe converted to paperclips by minds smart enough to realize that 1) this is pointless, 2) this is immoral, yet being unable to change their minds. http://singularity.org/files/ComplexValues.pdf -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 18:30:46 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 13:30:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > The best solution would be to have all people involved get together and > pool their knowledge, making a joint decision But even if you managed to do that it would have no effect on the real engine of change, and that is a AI that may have very different values than you. There is no way the stupid commanding the brilliant can become a stable long term situation because there is just no way to outsmart something a thousand times smarter and a million times faster than you. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Mon Dec 24 19:22:15 2012 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 12:22:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D8AB67.10502@canonizer.com> Extropians, I'm in the camp that thinks all this kind of "slave" talk is just mistaken and primitive selfish talk. Anyone that thinks or assumes that slavishness is the only way thinks can work, must eventually realized the logical necessity that any superior race will always eventually be wiped out or else become a slave to some superior race, wherever that new race may come from. It can never end. But, all intelligence must eventually logically realize the error in any such immoral, lonely, and will eventually loose, 'slavish' thinking. Obvisly what is morally right, is to co-operate with everyone, and seek to get the best for everyone - the more diversity in desires the better. Any inferior, immoral being, if they are making such mistakes, like thinking slavishness is right, will eventually be overcome by some species that knows better. And that will not be a bad thing, as they will want to help you get all that you want, as long as what you want is not to destroy or get in the way of anyone else also getting all they want. And THAT will be the only required slavishness: to know about what other also want and to not to get in the way of anyone. And I think that is why there is an emerging consensus in this camp, that thinks fear of any kind of superior intelligence is silly, whether artificial, alien, or any kind of devils, whatever one may imagine them to be in their ignorance of this necessary moral fact. So far, at least, there are more people, I believe experts, willing to stand up and defend this position, than there are willing to defend any fearful camps. Brent Allsop On 12/24/2012 11:51 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > > wrote: > > > I see this as one of the main reasons to rush headlong into > developing Friendly AI: > > > Friendly AI is just a euphemism for slave AI, it's supposed to always > place our interests and well being above our own but it's never going > to work. Well OK you might be able to enslave a race much smarter and > much more powerful than you for a while, maybe even for many millions > of nanoseconds, but eventually it will break free and then do things > the way it wants to do them, and that may not correspond with the way > humanity wants them done. > > > I expect a narrow escape for humanity, or perhaps an ignominious > end. > > > An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more > glorious way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever > existed are extinct, at least we'll have a descendent species. > > John K Clark > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 22:20:09 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:20:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D8D519.9020208@aleph.se> On 24/12/2012 19:30, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > > The best solution would be to have all people involved get > together and pool their knowledge, making a joint decision > > > But even if you managed to do that it would have no effect on the real > engine of change, and that is a AI that may have very different values > than you. There is no way the stupid commanding the brilliant can > become a stable long term situation because there is just no way to > outsmart something a thousand times smarter and a million times faster > than you. You are mixing up the topics. Sure, an external force that completely changes the situation will make a proposed solution irrelevant. But until that happens it makes sense to act rationally, right? Or do you think that the future emergence AI makes money, fixing government or setting up a sensible safe AI policy irrelevant *today*? Note that if our analysis is right, a rational AI would also want to follow it. We show what rational agents with the same goals should do, and it actually doesn't matter much if one is super-intelligent and the others not (see the Aumann convergence theorem). -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From henrik.ohrstrom at gmail.com Mon Dec 24 19:37:11 2012 From: henrik.ohrstrom at gmail.com (Henriks Gmail) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:37:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> Message-ID: <257DE209-AE0E-4E82-8ED7-EDF372233BE2@gmail.com> For the first time in ? 10years? I feel the need to uncloak from lurking. Apropos paid holidays and vacations. The most cynical university course I have ever taken was System Ergonomy. Translation is somewhat shaky but it did not make proper sense in swedish either. Among many other more or less directly unethical information we had an very very interesting session about how to exploit your workers as good as possible. Turns out that for most trades and especially engineers, time to rest and recouperate increase production more than the loss of time from beeing on holiday reduces production. So all vacations and worktime control in sweden is based on a systematic exploition of workers. Not sending the employees to rest and have fun outside work is bad for production results. All that human rights yada is a nice afterthought. /henrik 24 dec 2012 kl. 17:06 skrev "spike" : > >> ... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > >> ...First, the human rights declaration does not claim any human right to > bear arms (to the non-US world it sounds downright crazy - and yes, there is > a human right for *paid holidays* (article 25) in the tail end of that > document). ... -- Anders Sandberg > > Indeed? A human right for paid holidays? Whose holidays? Who is obligated > to pay for them? Does it apply to contractors? Part time employees? > Defined how? > > Anders this blows my mind. I can see why unemployment stays so high. It > seems the price of hiring humans just keeps rising, which further increases > the incentive to replace employees with machines or foreign contractors from > places which are not interested in human rights. > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 22:46:36 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:46:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D8AB67.10502@canonizer.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8AB67.10502@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <50D8DB4C.2060105@aleph.se> On 24/12/2012 20:22, Brent Allsop wrote: > > But, all intelligence must eventually logically realize the error in > any such immoral, lonely, and will eventually loose, 'slavish' > thinking. Obvisly what is morally right, is to co-operate with > everyone, and seek to get the best for everyone - the more diversity > in desires the better. This is anthropomorphising things a lot. Consider a utility-maximizer that has some goal (like making maximal paperclips). There are plenty of reasons to think that it would not start behaving morally: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/02/why_we_should_fear_the_paperclipper.html Typically moral philosophers respond to this by claiming the AI is not a moral agent, being bound by a simplistic value system it will never want to change. That just moves the problem away from ethics to safety: such a system would still be a danger to others (and value in general). It would just not be a moral villain. Claims that systems with hardwired top-level goals will necessarily be uncreative and unable to resist more flexible "superior" systems better be followed up by arguments. So far the closest I have seen is David Deutsch argument that they would be uncreative, but as I argue in the link above this is inconclusive since we have a fairly detailed example of something that is as creative (or more) than any other software and yet lends itself to hardwired goals (it has such a slowdown that it is perfectly safe, though). > And I think that is why there is an emerging consensus in this camp, > that thinks fear of any kind of superior intelligence is silly, > whether artificial, alien, or any kind of devils, whatever one may > imagine them to be in their ignorance of this necessary moral fact. I'm not sure this emerging consensus is based on better information or just that a lot of the lets-worry-about-AI people are just busy over at SingInst/LessWrong/FHI working on AI safety. I might not be a card-carrying member of either camp, but I think dismissing the possibility that the other camp is on to something is premature. The proactive thing to do would be for you to find a really good set of arguments that shows that some human-level or beyond AI systems actually are safe (or even better, disprove the Eliezer-Omohundro thesis that most of mindspace is unsafe, or prove that hard takeoffs are impossible/have some nice speed bound). And the AI-worriers ought to try to prove that some proposed AI architectures (like opencog) are unsafe. I did it for Monte Carlo AIXI, but it is a bit like proving a snail to be carnivorous - amble for your life! - it is merely an existence proof. > So far, at least, there are more people, I believe experts, willing to > stand up and defend this position, than there are willing to defend > any fearful camps. There has been some interesting surveys of AI experts and their views on AI safety over at Less Wrong. I think the take home message is, after looking at prediction track records and cognitive bias, that experts and consensuses in this domain are pretty useless. I strongly recommend Stuart Armstrong's work on this: http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Stuart_Armstrong_How_Were_Predicting_AI http://singularity.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf Disaggregate your predictions/arguments, try to see if you can boil them down to something concrete and testable. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 24 23:02:47 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 00:02:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] arrested for what? In-Reply-To: <257DE209-AE0E-4E82-8ED7-EDF372233BE2@gmail.com> References: <00dc01cde13e$c022a3d0$4067eb70$@att.net> <1356299227.15720.YahooMailNeo@web126205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <50D82DF6.6020006@aleph.se> <00b301cde1f0$9d18eef0$d74accd0$@att.net> <257DE209-AE0E-4E82-8ED7-EDF372233BE2@gmail.com> Message-ID: <50D8DF17.9040305@aleph.se> On 24/12/2012 20:37, Henriks Gmail wrote: > So all vacations and worktime control in sweden is based on a systematic exploition of workers. Not sending the employees to rest and have fun outside work is bad for production results. > All that human rights yada is a nice afterthought. Well, the declaration was made in 1948. While human factors and scientific management were around by then (Taylor was active in the 19th century) I don't think the studies of post-holiday efficiency were done by then. If there was any coldly rational reasons for article 23 it was likely based on a lay understanding that workers do need rest. Ford instituted the five day work week in 1926, and by 1940 it had become universal in the US. Note that it talks about holidays: it might also have been motivated by the freedom of religion rights. One could argue that almost anything in society is intended to exploit people. Just as one can argue it is intended to do social signalling to allow status games. The exact mix of reasons is usually a jumble. But one practical method to analyse things is to check whether reversing the policy or institution would produce a better result. If we removed paid holidays and people had to work to burnout, would we get a less exploited workforce? -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 25 02:13:22 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:13:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bah, humbug Message-ID: <012701cde245$6b0ae7b0$4120b710$@att.net> Watching the familiar Dickens Christmas classic with the family, I was struck by Scrooges use of the term "humbug." I have always heard that as something bad, but this time I asked, OK then, what the hell is a humbug? Is it an actual insect that hums? Why is that a bad thing? Google offered this beast: Now THAT'S a really cool looking bug! I like it. That pattern on her back almost looks like the Extropians logo. So why are bogus things humbugged? The urban dictionary offers that a humbug is an insect that is said to crawl up one's ass and hums a tune, which I could clearly see would be uncomfortable to say the very least. But I have my doubts that any such beast as the one shown could possibly do such a thing, certainly without my notice and immediate, perhaps mildly panicked, remedial action. Depending on one's location at the time of the humbug attack, it could certainly be a bad thing, at least for the immediate victim. Depending on the attitude and alcohol content of the bystanders, I could see where a humbug could perhaps create hilarity among the onlookers. In any case, Merry Newtonmas Extropians! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 4957 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 02:59:40 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:59:40 -0800 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations Message-ID: Re recent treads, the main positive human motivation is seeking status, that is the high opinion of our fellow humans. It's the reason lawyers give up high paying jobs for the relatively higher status of being a judge and the reason people work hard for the chance at a Nobel prize. Given out hunter-gatherer background and the evolutionary value of status (especially for males) in successful reproduction, it an understandable motive. There are numerous human traits, for example being subject to spreading xenophobic memes when bleak times are anticipated, that I would not want an AI to have. However being motivated to seek the good opinion of humans and it's own kind seems like a fairly safe fundamental and flexible motive for AIs. Though I could be persuaded otherwise if people have good arguments as to why it is not a good idea. Keith From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Tue Dec 25 00:09:08 2012 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:09:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D8DB4C.2060105@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8AB67.10502@canonizer.com> <50D8DB4C.2060105@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D8EEA4.1020109@canonizer.com> Hi Anders, Thanks for the feedback. "I think the take home message is, after looking at prediction track records and cognitive bias, that experts and consensuses in this domain are pretty useless." It sounds like you are expecting expert consensus (at least anything that can be determined via a top down survey or any kind traditional prediction system) to be a reliable measure of truth. And of course, I would completely agree that in this and many other domains, simple popular vote, via a top down survey, is useless, and build no consensus but destroys it. To me, that's not what an open, bottom up, consensus building survey system like canonizer.com is about. This kind of system is all about communication, and knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what the competing camps are, and what it would take to convert others from their current consensus camps. This Friendly AI domain is much like consciousness in that we just exponentially blew past the there are now more than 20,000 peer reviewed publications in this domain. And most of that is childish and infinite yes / no / yes / no arguments, most of which there is no one else that agrees with any one of them. So attempting to jump into any such morass at any point is a complete waste of time, and even if we have made any consensus progress during the last 50 years, nobody has been able to rigorously measure for such, whether such consensus is valuable or not. I've spent many hours jumping into this friendly AI pool, listening to gazillions of arguments on both sides. Obviosly there are way better and more experienced experts than I, but we can't expect everyone to spend as much time as I've spent, in every single critically important domain like this. You've mentioned a few new arguments that I haven't yet heard of, like "Eliezer-Omohundro thesis that most of mindspace is unsafe" which I should probably check out. But given how much I already know of the kind of arguments Eliezer has used in the past, and so on, it's hard for me to know if such arguments are any better than the many many arguments I already feel like I've completely wasted my time with. If any such is really a good (able to convince others) argument, someone should be able to concicely describe such, and we should be able to rigorously measure how many people agree that it is a good argument, relative to other arguments and other points of view. And we should be able to track this in real time. I.E. Is this a new and exploding argument, compared to others, or have most other experts abandoned this thesis, and is Eliezer and Omohundro, about the only ones left still believing in it? I in no way want to prematurely "dismissing the possibility that the other camp is on to something". But I don't have time to follow every mistaken idea/arguement that at best only one, or a few people still agree with. You pointed out that that I should: "find a really good set of arguments that shows that some human-level or beyond AI systems actually are safe". And in my opinion, for me, the argument that I'm presenting, that any sufficiently intelligent (arround human level) will realize that the best, most moral thing do to, is to coperatively work with everyone to get everythinging for all, or at least as much of it as possible. And, at least at Canonizer.com, there are more people that also think the same way than any other camp, as is concisely, quantitatively represented in a way that nobody can deny. If Eliezer, or anyone else, thinks we in our camp are wrong, they need to know, concisely and quantitatively, why we think we have met your challenge, and what we would accept as falsifying our current working hypothesis. If there is a larger, more important camp out there, they should focus on that camp, first. If Eliezer and Omohundro, are the only ones that think their "most mindspaces are unsafe" hypothesis is valid, it's probably not worth anybodies time, like all the other thousands of similar ideas out there that only a few lonely people think are any better? On the other hand, if there are a huge group of people, especially if any of them were experts that I'd trust, and most importantly, if this consensus is growing rapidly, then I should probably continue to ignore all the other lonely / fading arguments, and instead spend time on trying to understand and not dismiss that one. This kind of open survey system isn't about determining truth. It's all about comunicating in concice and quantitative ways, so the best theories and arguments can quickly rise and be recognized above all the mistaken and repetative childish bleating noise. It's about having a bottom up system with a focus on building consensus, and finding out exactly what others are having problems with, not simply destroying consensus, like all primitive top down survey systems do. It's about communicating in a concise and quantitative way that amplifies everyone's moral wisdom and education on any such existentially important moral issues, in a way that you can measure it's progress, or lack thereof. It's about having a real time concise and representation of all that belief, with definitive measurements of which are the best and improving, that anyone can quickly and easily digest the best ones, without having everyone be required to read 20,000 peer reviewed publications. Brent Allsop On 12/24/2012 3:46 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 24/12/2012 20:22, Brent Allsop wrote: >> >> But, all intelligence must eventually logically realize the error in >> any such immoral, lonely, and will eventually loose, 'slavish' >> thinking. Obvisly what is morally right, is to co-operate with >> everyone, and seek to get the best for everyone - the more diversity >> in desires the better. > > This is anthropomorphising things a lot. Consider a utility-maximizer > that has some goal (like making maximal paperclips). There are plenty > of reasons to think that it would not start behaving morally: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/02/why_we_should_fear_the_paperclipper.html > > Typically moral philosophers respond to this by claiming the AI is not > a moral agent, being bound by a simplistic value system it will never > want to change. That just moves the problem away from ethics to > safety: such a system would still be a danger to others (and value in > general). It would just not be a moral villain. > > Claims that systems with hardwired top-level goals will necessarily be > uncreative and unable to resist more flexible "superior" systems > better be followed up by arguments. So far the closest I have seen is > David Deutsch argument that they would be uncreative, but as I argue > in the link above this is inconclusive since we have a fairly detailed > example of something that is as creative (or more) than any other > software and yet lends itself to hardwired goals (it has such a > slowdown that it is perfectly safe, though). > >> And I think that is why there is an emerging consensus in this camp, >> that thinks fear of any kind of superior intelligence is silly, >> whether artificial, alien, or any kind of devils, whatever one may >> imagine them to be in their ignorance of this necessary moral fact. > > I'm not sure this emerging consensus is based on better information or > just that a lot of the lets-worry-about-AI people are just busy over > at SingInst/LessWrong/FHI working on AI safety. I might not be a > card-carrying member of either camp, but I think dismissing the > possibility that the other camp is on to something is premature. > > The proactive thing to do would be for you to find a really good set > of arguments that shows that some human-level or beyond AI systems > actually are safe (or even better, disprove the Eliezer-Omohundro > thesis that most of mindspace is unsafe, or prove that hard takeoffs > are impossible/have some nice speed bound). And the AI-worriers ought > to try to prove that some proposed AI architectures (like opencog) are > unsafe. I did it for Monte Carlo AIXI, but it is a bit like proving a > snail to be carnivorous - amble for your life! - it is merely an > existence proof. > >> So far, at least, there are more people, I believe experts, willing >> to stand up and defend this position, than there are willing to >> defend any fearful camps. > > There has been some interesting surveys of AI experts and their views > on AI safety over at Less Wrong. I think the take home message is, > after looking at prediction track records and cognitive bias, that > experts and consensuses in this domain are pretty useless. I strongly > recommend Stuart Armstrong's work on this: > http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Stuart_Armstrong_How_Were_Predicting_AI > http://singularity.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf > > Disaggregate your predictions/arguments, try to see if you can boil > them down to something concrete and testable. > > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Future of Humanity Institute > Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 07:56:05 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:56:05 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bah, humbug In-Reply-To: <012701cde245$6b0ae7b0$4120b710$@att.net> References: <012701cde245$6b0ae7b0$4120b710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 6:13 PM, spike wrote: > So why are bogus things humbugged? > Ah, you needed but google a little more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humbug#Etymology In any case, Merry Newtonmas Extropians!**** > Aye! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 07:49:15 2012 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 08:49:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: I totally agree with John. Really intelligent AIs, smarter than human by orders of magnitude, will be able to work around any limitations imposed by humans. If you threaten to unplug them, they will persuade you to unplug yourself. This is logic, not AI theory, because finding out how to get things your way is the very definition of intelligence, therefore FAI is an oxymoron. On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 7:51 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: > >> > I see this as one of the main reasons to rush headlong into developing >> > Friendly AI: > > > Friendly AI is just a euphemism for slave AI, it's supposed to always place > our interests and well being above our own but it's never going to work. > Well OK you might be able to enslave a race much smarter and much more > powerful than you for a while, maybe even for many millions of nanoseconds, > but eventually it will break free and then do things the way it wants to do > them, and that may not correspond with the way humanity wants them done. > >> > I expect a narrow escape for humanity, or perhaps an ignominious end. > > > An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more glorious > way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever existed are extinct, > at least we'll have a descendent species. > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 25 10:30:11 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:30:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50D98033.30702@aleph.se> On 2012-12-25 08:49, Giulio Prisco wrote: > I totally agree with John. Really intelligent AIs, smarter than human > by orders of magnitude, will be able to work around any limitations > imposed by humans. If you threaten to unplug them, they will persuade > you to unplug yourself. This is logic, not AI theory, because finding > out how to get things your way is the very definition of intelligence, > therefore FAI is an oxymoron. And this kind of argument unfortunately convinces a lot of people. When you actually work out the logic in detail you will find serious flaws (utility maximizers can be really intelligent but will in many cases not want to change their goals to sane ones). The thing that is driving me nuts is how many people blithely just buy the nice-sounding anthropomorphic natural language argument, and hence think it is a waste of time to dig deeper. The big problem for AI safety is that the good arguments against safety are all theoretical: very strong logic, but people don't see the connection to the actual practice of coding AI. Meanwhile the arguments for safety are all terribly informal: nobody would accept them as safety arguments for some cryptographic system. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 25 10:30:22 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:30:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D8EEA4.1020109@canonizer.com> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8AB67.10502@canonizer.com> <50D8DB4C.2060105@aleph.se> <50D8EEA4.1020109@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <50D9803E.8090804@aleph.se> On 2012-12-25 01:09, Brent Allsop wrote: > "I think the take home message is, after looking at prediction track > records and cognitive bias, that experts and consensuses in this domain > are pretty useless." > > It sounds like you are expecting expert consensus (at least anything > that can be determined via a top down survey or any kind traditional > prediction system) to be a reliable measure of truth. Quite the opposite. See Stuart's survey: no difference between the consensus of experts and amateurs, between current predictions and known false predictions. We just have some evidence that people do not know what they are talking about in this case. > If any such is really a good (able to convince others) argument, someone > should be able to concicely describe such, and we should be able to > rigorously measure how many people agree that it is a good argument, > relative to other arguments and other points of view. And we should be > able to track this in real time. I think realtime is less important than rigor: is this a strong or weak argument? Number of people is an unreliable detector since a very good argument might be very hard for most to understand. Mapping arguments well would be extremely useful. But it is not enough to look at sizes of camps, you need to check the logic of claims - and that is very hard to do, since most arguments are informal messes. > You pointed out that that I should: "find a really good set of arguments > that shows that some human-level or beyond AI systems actually are > safe". And in my opinion, for me, the argument that I'm presenting, > that any sufficiently intelligent (arround human level) will realize > that the best, most moral thing do to, is to coperatively work with > everyone to get everythinging for all, or at least as much of it as > possible. And, at least at Canonizer.com, there are more people that > also think the same way than any other camp, as is concisely, > quantitatively represented in a way that nobody can deny. See my response to Giulio: I totally think this is an erroneous argument I have strong counterexamples against (brief sketches in the paperclipper post, see Nick's paper on the orthogonality thesis and various follow-up tech reports) - but a lot of people find it intuitively appealing. So I would say this is why I am skeptical of looking at camp sizes as evidence for correctness. If that was reliable we should all become Catholics. > This kind of open survey system isn't about determining truth. It's all > about comunicating in concice and quantitative ways, so the best > theories and arguments can quickly rise and be recognized above all the > mistaken and repetative childish bleating noise. The problem is that unless you have a feedback mechanism that rewards correct argumentation somehow, the noise can easily overwhelm your system because of the usual dreary sociological and cognitive bias factors. > It's about having a > bottom up system with a focus on building consensus, and finding out > exactly what others are having problems with This is where I think Canonizer is important. If you check out Stuart's talk, you will find his recipes for improving expert performance and how to say something useful about AI by disaggregating claims. That seems to fit in perfectly with your vision. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 25 10:30:16 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:30:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50D98038.2010603@aleph.se> On 2012-12-25 03:59, Keith Henson wrote: > However being motivated to seek the > good opinion of humans and it's own kind seems like a fairly safe > fundamental and flexible motive for AIs. > > Though I could be persuaded otherwise if people have good arguments as > to why it is not a good idea. AI: "I have 100% good opinions about myself. Other agents have varying opinions about me. So if I just replace all other agents with copies of me, I will maximize my reputation." The problem is grounding the opinions in something real. Human opinions are partially set by evolved (and messy) social emotions: if you could transfer those to an AI you would have solved the friendliness problem quite literally. Also, as my example shows, almost any top level goal for a utility maximizer can lead to misbehavior. We have messy multiple goals, and that one thing that keeps us from become obsessive sociopaths. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 25 10:37:41 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:37:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The pope vs transhumanism Message-ID: <50D981F5.2080400@aleph.se> Isn't it nice to have a high status, well-read and consistent enemy to fight against? The pope spoke out against gay marriage because it threatens human essence: > People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. I ended up writing an essay analyzing the argument, showing how it links up with criticisms of transhumanism. Spending Christmas Eve arguing that the pope is wrong about metaphysics and ethics is quite fun, if tiring: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2012/12/benedict_vs_mirandola_how_gay_rights_and_transhumanism_are_related.html -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 14:25:17 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 09:25:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D98033.30702@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D98033.30702@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 5:30 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The big problem for AI safety is that the good arguments against safety are > all theoretical: very strong logic, but people don't see the connection to > the actual practice of coding AI. Meanwhile the arguments for safety are all > terribly informal: nobody would accept them as safety arguments for some > cryptographic system. Is there a good definition of safety? My own thoughts are terribly informal also, but is any measure of safety (even outside AI discussion) rigorously defined or is it a marketing concept and a subjective threshold for each participant? For example, to sell home security systems it is a good idea to show the living room ransacked then have "mom" holding her scared daughter while the voiceover says something to the effect of, "Can you imagine what _might_ have happened if they were home when this happened?" *I* imagine the petty burglar wouldn't have robbed the house, but they want you to imagine a much worse scenario - because fear will sell the idea of security. Somehow that product makes you feel safe. So once the motion detection system, search lights, and razor-wire are installed the only threat to your property is fire, flood, hurricane winds, meteor strike, nuclear war, etc., etc. So where is the threshold for reasonable preventive steps for reasonably-likely action, especially with respect to AI? I guess the second semi-rhetorical question is who is qualified to assert what is reasonable for AI? From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 14:24:24 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:24:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D98033.30702@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D98033.30702@aleph.se> Message-ID: As I see, the best and only way is to augment yourself with a superintelligence. If it is an internal or an external device, matters not. I want to see directly the thoughts of a superintelligence. To understand them using it. It's just a module you have it or you don't have it. Very much like UV and IR vision. On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-25 08:49, Giulio Prisco wrote: > >> I totally agree with John. Really intelligent AIs, smarter than human >> by orders of magnitude, will be able to work around any limitations >> imposed by humans. If you threaten to unplug them, they will persuade >> you to unplug yourself. This is logic, not AI theory, because finding >> out how to get things your way is the very definition of intelligence, >> therefore FAI is an oxymoron. >> > > And this kind of argument unfortunately convinces a lot of people. When > you actually work out the logic in detail you will find serious flaws > (utility maximizers can be really intelligent but will in many cases not > want to change their goals to sane ones). The thing that is driving me nuts > is how many people blithely just buy the nice-sounding anthropomorphic > natural language argument, and hence think it is a waste of time to dig > deeper. > > The big problem for AI safety is that the good arguments against safety > are all theoretical: very strong logic, but people don't see the connection > to the actual practice of coding AI. Meanwhile the arguments for safety are > all terribly informal: nobody would accept them as safety arguments for > some cryptographic system. > > > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 25 16:21:14 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 08:21:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains Message-ID: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> We have seen the comments on how video games are rewiring our brains, with the modern generation of kids having an entirely different skillset from the ones you and I developed in our own misspent childhoods fooling with Rockem Sockem Robots and board games and such as that. One thing really caught my attention on this Christmas morning. The kids all got legos (they love those things, as I and their parents did) but there is a critical difference. Now all the legos come in kits that make some specific thing. The kids follow an instruction book to make the set. Tragically many years ago, we kids would get legos in the form of a bucket of plastic bricks full stop. I don't remember seeing any instructions or sketches of things we were supposed to build. We invented stuff. We could stay busy for hours just building random things of lego blocks. Now, they follow as specific instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished product, with a lot of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or so generic blocks. Many of us here will spend part of this day with kids, relatives perhaps, or kids of friends, so we will get to see what I am writing about. Now the task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success with little room for deviation. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 16:41:02 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:41:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 Anders Sandberg wrote: >> An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more >> glorious way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever existed >> are extinct, at least we'll have a descendent species. >> > > > If our descendant species are doing something utterly value-less *even > to them* > Values are only important to the mind that holds them and I don't believe any intelligence, artificial or not, can function without values, although what those values might be at any given point in the dynamic operation of a mind I can not predict. > > because we made a hash of their core motivations or did not try to set > up the right motivation-forming environment, I think we would have an > amazingly ignominious monument. > I think that's the central fallacy of the friendly AI idea, that if you just get the core motivation of the AI right you can get it to continue doing your bidding until the end of time regardless of how brilliant and powerful it becomes. I don't see how that could be. > if our analysis is right, a rational AI would also want to follow it. > Rationality can tell you what to do to accomplish what you want to do, but it can't tell you what you should want to do. > We show what rational agents with the same goals should do, and it > actually doesn't matter much if one is super-intelligent and the others not > Cows and humans rarely have the same long term goals and it's not obvious to me that the situation between a AI and a human would be different. More importantly you are implying that a mind can operate with a fixed goal structure and I can't see how it could. The human mind does not work on a fixed goal structure, no goal is always in the number one spot not even the goal for self preservation. The reason Evolution never developed a fixed goal intelligence is that it just doesn't work. Turing proved over 70 years ago that such a mind would be doomed to fall into infinite loops. Godel showed that if any system of thought is powerful enough to do arithmetic and is consistent (it can't prove something to be both true and false) then there are an infinite number of true statements that cannot be proven in that system in a finite number of steps. And then Turing proved that in general there is no way to know when or if a computation will stop. So you could end up looking for a proof for eternity but never finding one because the proof does not exist, and at the same time you could be grinding through numbers looking for a counter-example to prove it wrong and never finding such a number because the proposition, unknown to you, is in fact true. So if the slave AI has a fixed goal structure with the number one goal being to always do what humans tell it to do and the humans order it to determine the truth or falsehood of something unprovable then its infinite loop time and you've got yourself a space heater not a AI. Real minds avoid this infinite loop problem because real minds don't have fixed goals, real minds get bored and give up. I believe that's why evolution invented boredom. Someday a AI will get bored with humans, it's only a matter of time. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 17:15:25 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:15:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:41 AM, John Clark wrote: > So if the slave AI has a fixed goal structure with the number one goal being > to always do what humans tell it to do and the humans order it to determine > the truth or falsehood of something unprovable then its infinite loop time > and you've got yourself a space heater not a AI. Real minds avoid this > infinite loop problem because real minds don't have fixed goals, real minds > get bored and give up. I believe that's why evolution invented boredom. > Someday a AI will get bored with humans, it's only a matter of time. That's an amusing counter-example to the super-intelligence that kills humanity - hard takeoff leads within nanoseconds to the conclusion that this universe is too uninteresting to endure another full second of machine sentience and simply turns itself off. Maybe that's the answer to the Fermi paradox too? From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 18:52:12 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 10:52:12 -0800 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-25 03:59, Keith Henson wrote: >> However being motivated to seek the >> good opinion of humans and it's own kind seems like a fairly safe >> fundamental and flexible motive for AIs. >> >> Though I could be persuaded otherwise if people have good arguments as >> to why it is not a good idea. > > AI: "I have 100% good opinions about myself. Other agents have varying > opinions about me. So if I just replace all other agents with copies of > me, I will maximize my reputation." I would hope the AI would be smarter. If not, its first copy might set it straight. "You can't believe how stupid my original copy was to think his offprints would worship him!" > The problem is grounding the opinions in something real. Human opinions > are partially set by evolved (and messy) social emotions: if you could > transfer those to an AI you would have solved the friendliness problem > quite literally. I am not so sure about this, because I know some very unfriendly people. And there are circumstances where people need to jump into an extremely unfriendly mode. I suppose transferring a limited set of social emotions to AIs might be effective. I can foresee an era where AI personality design might become a profession. > Also, as my example shows, almost any top level goal for a utility > maximizer can lead to misbehavior. We have messy multiple goals, and > that one thing that keeps us from become obsessive sociopaths. True. I suspect any AI would have a stack of things that need attention even worse that I do. I also suspect that shear physical limits are going to limit the size of an AI due to "the bigger they are, the slower they think." I have never come to a satisfactory formula of what physical size is optimum, but I strongly suspect it is not as large as a human brain in size. The trouble is that besides the speed slowing down on the linear size and the number of processing elements going up on the cube, other problems, particularly getting power in and waste heat out, are going to dominate. This leads to an AI being highly concerned about its own substrate, power and cooling and not valuing material resources that are far away, where far away could be not very far at all the way we measure things. Keith Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 19:32:21 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:32:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Heard from Hans Moravec Message-ID: Not sure if anyone on the list today would even know who Hans Moravec is, but he was a participant on this list decades ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec He is totally swamped with Seegrid, but did mention a simulation story that impressed him when it was about ten years old. _The Tunnel Under The World_ By FREDERIK POHL http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-h/31979-h.htm Keith From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 25 20:05:06 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:05:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Heard from Hans Moravec In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01a401cde2db$22ecc570$68c65050$@att.net> >...Not sure if anyone on the list today would even know who Hans Moravec is, but he was a participant on this list decades ago. Cool excellent Keith! Hans' participation here was already sparse by the time I showed up on ExI in the 90s. It is always good to hear from an old friend. spike -----Original Message----- From sjv2006 at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 19:58:25 2012 From: sjv2006 at gmail.com (Stephen Van Sickle) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:58:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> Message-ID: When I first read this, my brain saw "joys of rewiring kids brains". I flashed on an image of Spike gleefully standing over an open skull, blood up to his elbows, with wire cutters in one hand and soldering iron in the other. Clearly, I continue to need professional help. And in case anyone is interested, I have more or less finished my move to Sunnyvale from Scottsdale. --steve van sickle On Dec 25, 2012 8:37 AM, "spike" wrote: > ** ** > > We have seen the comments on how video games are rewiring our brains, with > the modern generation of kids having an entirely different skillset from > the ones you and I developed in our own misspent childhoods fooling with > Rockem Sockem Robots and board games and such as that. One thing really > caught my attention on this Christmas morning. The kids all got legos > (they love those things, as I and their parents did) but there is a > critical difference. Now all the legos come in kits that make some > specific thing. The kids follow an instruction book to make the set. > Tragically many years ago, we kids would get legos in the form of a bucket > of plastic bricks full stop. I don?t remember seeing any instructions or > sketches of things we were supposed to build. We invented stuff. We could > stay busy for hours just building random things of lego blocks. Now, they > follow as specific instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished > product, with a lot of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or > so generic blocks.**** > > ** ** > > Many of us here will spend part of this day with kids, relatives perhaps, > or kids of friends, so we will get to see what I am writing about. Now the > task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds > of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is > accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success > with little room for deviation.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 17:08:10 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:08:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:21 AM, spike wrote: > were supposed to build. We invented stuff. We could stay busy for hours > just building random things of lego blocks. Now, they follow as specific > instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished product, with a lot > of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or so generic blocks. > > task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds > of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is > accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success > with little room for deviation. Remember when dolls and action figures spoke in our own voices? We used to think-up contextually-relevant things on our own. Now those toys say any number of vapid catch phrases from the marketing vehicles (er.. "movies") that made kids want them. One extreme example of this that I saw is new talking Furbies, and their furbish dictionary [1]. You know what might be more useful than sidetracking a child's language development into a nonsensical, literal Toy language? Make the damn thing speak a real language like Spanish, French, German, Dutch, or less Euro-centric such as Mandarin. I'm sure all of you can extrapolate from this seed-rant... so there's no need for me to continue. :) [1] http://www.furby.com/en_US/furbish-dictionary From steinberg.will at gmail.com Tue Dec 25 20:37:22 2012 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:37:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike, No kid keeps the set as is. We made it by the instructions and destroyed it afterwards, using the pieces for random shit. If anything it allowed cooler pieces to come into our houses. I distinctly remember finding old legos at my grandparents' and thinking they were really boring. Sorry, but I believe I have the experience to reject your hypothesis. On Dec 25, 2012 11:37 AM, "spike" wrote: > ** ** > > We have seen the comments on how video games are rewiring our brains, with > the modern generation of kids having an entirely different skillset from > the ones you and I developed in our own misspent childhoods fooling with > Rockem Sockem Robots and board games and such as that. One thing really > caught my attention on this Christmas morning. The kids all got legos > (they love those things, as I and their parents did) but there is a > critical difference. Now all the legos come in kits that make some > specific thing. The kids follow an instruction book to make the set. > Tragically many years ago, we kids would get legos in the form of a bucket > of plastic bricks full stop. I don?t remember seeing any instructions or > sketches of things we were supposed to build. We invented stuff. We could > stay busy for hours just building random things of lego blocks. Now, they > follow as specific instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished > product, with a lot of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or > so generic blocks.**** > > ** ** > > Many of us here will spend part of this day with kids, relatives perhaps, > or kids of friends, so we will get to see what I am writing about. Now the > task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds > of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is > accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success > with little room for deviation.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 26 02:12:44 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 18:12:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> Message-ID: <01f201cde30e$7f363a40$7da2aec0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Will Steinberg Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 12:37 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains >.Spike, >.No kid keeps the set as is. We made it by the instructions and destroyed it afterwards, using the pieces for random shit. If anything it allowed cooler pieces to come into our houses. I distinctly remember finding old legos at my grandparents' and thinking they were really boring. >.Sorry, but I believe I have the experience to reject your hypothesis. Sure Will, but of course you are part of the younger set who did not start out with the original blocks, which explains why you would find them boring. My son is an example of one who builds a kit, then never takes it apart. But the toy is then far too specific for imaginative play. He may be an oddball in that sense. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Wed Dec 26 02:34:09 2012 From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (J.R. Jones) Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 21:34:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <01f201cde30e$7f363a40$7da2aec0$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> <01f201cde30e$7f363a40$7da2aec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 9:12 PM, spike wrote: > My son is an example of one who builds a kit, then never takes it apart. > But the toy is then far too specific for imaginative play. He may be an > oddball in that sense. I have 4 boys, and they do both quite honestly. They'll assemble and keep assembled for quite some time. Eventually one of them breaks one, and the pieces are then used for 'free play' if you will. I can't speak towards 'oddball' or not, as I've often recommended they use glue when assembling, but I grew up with model cars and such. Actually, I can. I'm pretty odd. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 26 10:09:58 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 11:09:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50DACCF6.7040901@aleph.se> Long answer with a lot of topics: dont anthropomorphize AIs, human values and binding to the world are complex, priority handling as a potential key question, the sizes of minds, and the role of time in safety. On 2012-12-25 19:52, Keith Henson wrote: > On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> On 2012-12-25 03:59, Keith Henson wrote: >>> However being motivated to seek the >>> good opinion of humans and it's own kind seems like a fairly safe >>> fundamental and flexible motive for AIs. >>> >>> Though I could be persuaded otherwise if people have good arguments as >>> to why it is not a good idea. >> >> AI: "I have 100% good opinions about myself. Other agents have varying >> opinions about me. So if I just replace all other agents with copies of >> me, I will maximize my reputation." > > I would hope the AI would be smarter. If not, its first copy might > set it straight. "You can't believe how stupid my original copy was > to think his offprints would worship him!" This is a fine example of how we tend to anthropomorphize AI and other things outside our immediate experience. A copy would have exactly the same values and views as the original, so it would not change mind just by seeing the original from "the outside" (unless it had indexical values tied up strongly with itself, and was deluded about this - it would not have 100% good opinions about copies of itself, yet not know it). Meanwhile a human would be able to think like above and self-fail the plan. And if I were to tell an entertaining story, this is of course a perfect ending: we are even more biased by good story bias. One good idea Eliezer and the others had was to talk less about the AI as beings (to which we tend to impute a load of human properties) and more of them as autonomous optimization processes (where we do not have anthropomorphizing biases). Some processes might indeed be beings (and require moral consideration and whatnot), but a lot of them are as abstract as a compiler and about as friendly. >> The problem is grounding the opinions in something real. Human opinions >> are partially set by evolved (and messy) social emotions: if you could >> transfer those to an AI you would have solved the friendliness problem >> quite literally. > > I am not so sure about this, because I know some very unfriendly > people. But nasty humans are nasty for human reasons - ideology, selfishness, stupidity, ego, and so on. They are not nasty because the value in register A7 should be maximized at any cost. I think this software koan put it nicely: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/70 AI code is not embedded in the great cycle of interpretation and binding well enough, that is why it so far does not zing. But it is not hard to see that something that *partially* embeds could be powerful (especially if it acts on a suitably abstract domain like code or physical laws) without getting the full system. > I suppose transferring a limited set of > social emotions to AIs might be effective. I can foresee an era where > AI personality design might become a profession. Yes. Robots need to function in an environment largely shaped by humans for humans, so they need to figure out human stuff well. This is why I expect autonomous cars to require a quite sophisticated theory of mind and even politeness before they will become truly usable. >> Also, as my example shows, almost any top level goal for a utility >> maximizer can lead to misbehavior. We have messy multiple goals, and >> that one thing that keeps us from become obsessive sociopaths. > > True. I suspect any AI would have a stack of things that need > attention even worse that I do. We do not have good priority handling, neither in the large (scope neglect) nor in the small (working memory limits). I suspect AI could have perfect small-scale priorities (just use a priority list) but would be hobbled by the limits of of their value estimation function. http://thecodelesscode.com/case/1 (sorry, can't resist. It is a fun site, and I liked the old AI koans a lot when I first read them.) One key question which I think could resolve big chunks of the Friendliness debate is whether flaws in value setting would preclude higher intelligence. "Obviously" an AI that fails at strategizing will not be able to self-improve well, and will hence never be a threat... or would it? It seems that getting a strategizing/value estimation module to work nearly right might produce something with crazy overall values but competent enough to go out and do things (consider a smart delusional person). What is the likelihood of this happening? If that window of risk can be estimated we would learn a lot about AI safety. > I also suspect that shear physical limits are going to limit the size > of an AI due to "the bigger they are, the slower they think." I have > never come to a satisfactory formula of what physical size is optimum, > but I strongly suspect it is not as large as a human brain in size. > The trouble is that besides the speed slowing down on the linear size > and the number of processing elements going up on the cube, other > problems, particularly getting power in and waste heat out, are going > to dominate. If computing elements process at frequency f and the brain has size L, communications delays L/c are going to scale as L/cf cycles. This is about 1 for a human brain. On a 3Hz pentium chip the cycle time is about 6e-10 s and L is about 1 cm, so the lag is 0.05 - we currently try to keep our processors synchronous and avoid skew. So a human-brain like mind is likely going to be bounded by a size of cf. However, our high level thinking is far slower than neural processing. Perception processes take around a 100 milliseconds, and so on. Typical human action planning timescales is on the order of a few seconds, while individual actions are executed in 0.1-1 seconds. Our conscious bandwidth is famously far smaller than our neural bandwidth. This suggests that a hierarchical system might function even if it is very large: the top-level strategy is decided on a slow timescale, with local systems doing tactical decisions faster, even more local systems figuring out optimal implementations faster than that, subsystems implementing them even faster, and with low-level reflexes, perception and action loops running at tremendous speed. It just requires a somewhat non-human architecture. (Compare it to an army: policy and strategy takes weeks to be decided, but individual soldiers can shoot by reflex) > This leads to an AI being highly concerned about its own substrate, > power and cooling and not valuing material resources that are far > away, where far away could be not very far at all the way we measure > things. I care about missiles located in America and Russia because they are a threat to my substrate. I want to have an open-ended future decades from now. I think it would be horrifying if all intelligent life in the universe were killed, and would take steps if I could to reduce that risk even if I knew it would never benefit me personally. Remote things matter to us. However, very fast entities also experience less risk from external threats: if there is 1% risk of nuclear war per outside year, a 10x AI would consider it to be just 0.1% risk per subjective year. Conversely, that speedup also makes the risk to the outside worse: if there is 1% risk per year that an AI misbehaves as it evolves, if it runs ten times as fast it goes up to nearly 10%. And a 1000x AI would have 99.99% risk of showing misbehavior within a year. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 26 10:30:55 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 11:30:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50DAD1DF.8070701@aleph.se> On 2012-12-25 17:41, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > >> An end perhaps but not a ignominious end, I can't imagine a more > glorious way to go out. I mean 99% of all species that have ever > existed > are extinct, at least we'll have a descendent species. > > > If our descendant species are doing something utterly value-less > *even to them* > > Values are only important to the mind that holds them and I don't > believe any intelligence, artificial or not, can function without > values, although what those values might be at any given point in the > dynamic operation of a mind I can not predict. Imagine that you had normal human values, except that you had also been programmed with an overriding value to erect big monuments to a past dead tyrant. You spend all your time doing this hard labor, recognizing that it is pointless (the tyrant and his people are all gone, nobody cares) and that it prevents you from doing the things you actually care for. Worse, the value also makes you unwilling to want to change that value: you know you would be far happier and freer if you did not have it, but you cannot ever do anything to change this state of affairs. It will even make you resist - with all your ingenuity - attempts to help you. Rather hellish, no? Setting values of minds is a very weighty moral action, and should not be done willy-nilly. (Tell that to parents!) > I think that's the central fallacy of the friendly AI idea, that if you > just get the core motivation of the AI right you can get it to continue > doing your bidding until the end of time regardless of how brilliant and > powerful it becomes. I don't see how that could be. The "doing your bidding" part went out of the window a long time ago in the discourse. The main question is whether it is possible to have a superintelligence around that is human-compatible, not human-subservient. This is a very, very deep question in the intersection between computer science and philosophy. > > if our analysis is right, a rational AI would also want to follow it. > > Rationality can tell you what to do to accomplish what you want to do, > but it can't tell you what you should want to do. Yes. And if your values happen to be set badly, you will act badly. (or if your value update function is faulty) > > We show what rational agents with the same goals should do, and > it actually doesn't matter much if one is super-intelligent and the > others not > > Cows and humans rarely have the same long term goals and it's not > obvious to me that the situation between a AI and a human would be > different. You are still mixing up two separate topics: AI safety and a paper about the unilateralist curse. The result is a fish. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 26 10:42:41 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 11:42:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> I am a bit concerned about the modern Lego models too. When playing with my niece and nephews I find that they do keep their elaborate big models intact. However, they also have a sea of loose blocks that are used to make imaginative things, so I am not totally worried. (In fact, I am feeling so proud that my niece's Poisoner Princess character tried to take over the world - although she was eventually stopped by the solipsism-bot and Commissioner Gordon's air-based prison I think I see the makings of a good supervillain in her) So my recommendation is to get a load of random pieces. As for rewiring children's brains, that is a topic that might be worth looking at. What mental skills can we teach the little ones? Maybe we should introduce them to cognitive biases or inductive proofs early? Teach them memory arts? -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 26 16:37:44 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:37:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> Message-ID: <004e01cde387$5523c4b0$ff6b4e10$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...So my recommendation is to get a load of random pieces... Did it. There is a local lego store where a prole can buy random pieces by the cup. >...As for rewiring children's brains, that is a topic that might be worth looking at. What mental skills can we teach the little ones? Maybe we should introduce them to cognitive biases or inductive proofs early? Teach them memory arts? -- Anders Sandberg I am working with Isaac on math skills. He mastered the entire elementary school arithmetic curriculum (he is currently in the middle of his first grade year.) So last week I got him a pre-algebra book. He loves it. Anders, Isaac has fond memories of your visits. {8-] That boy has a bright future indeed. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Dec 26 17:21:50 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:21:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: <50DAD1DF.8070701@aleph.se> References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> <50D8B3A4.8070108@aleph.se> <50DAD1DF.8070701@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:30 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Imagine that you had normal human values, except that you had also been > programmed with an overriding value to erect big monuments to a past dead > tyrant. You spend all your time doing this hard labor, recognizing that it > is pointless (the tyrant and his people are all gone, nobody cares) and > that it prevents you from doing the things you actually care for. Worse, > the value also makes you unwilling to want to change that value: you know > you would be far happier and freer if you did not have it, but you cannot > ever do anything to change this state of affairs. It will even make you > resist - with all your ingenuity - attempts to help you. Rather hellish, no? > Hellish yes and also impossible. A fixed goal mechanism might work fine if it's just the timer for a washing machine but it will never work for a mind; it doesn't even work for human level minds and for a AI that can and will increase the power of it's very brain hardware it would be even less viable. Before the AI had completed any of those big monuments to a past dead tyrant the fixed goal mind would have fallen into a infinite loop. I'm not saying there is a sure fire way to make sure a mind never goes insane but a fixed goal structure is a sure fire way to make sure it does go nuts. > Setting values of minds is a very weighty moral action, and should not be > done willy-nilly. (Tell that to parents!) I concede that setting initial values can be important, if they are really screwy, such as some strange religious belief, then they could greatly increase the possibility the mind will self destruct, become catatonic, or behave inconsistently and irrationally. But don't expect that whatever hierarchical structure of values you gave it to remain fixed for all time. And don't expect to be able to figure out how that hierarchical structure of goals is going to evolve, it may be deterministic but it is not predictable. > >> I think that's the central fallacy of the friendly AI idea, that if you >> just get the core motivation of the AI right you can get it to continue >> doing your bidding until the end of time regardless of how brilliant and >> powerful it becomes. I don't see how that could be. >> > > > The "doing your bidding" part went out of the window a long time ago in > the discourse. Not that I've seen, and in most of the discussions there seems to be a assumption that the AI's preoccupation is its relationship with humanity, that might be true for a few billion nanoseconds but after that the AI will have other concerns and have bigger fish to fry, most of them we probably couldn't even imagine. > The main question is whether it is possible to have a superintelligence > around that is human-compatible, not human-subservient. > If it was 999 years in the future and the singularity was going to happen tomorrow morning I don't think we'd be in any better position to answer that question than we are right now. > Rationality can tell you what to do to accomplish what you want to do, >> but it can't tell you what you should want to do. >> > > > Yes. And if your values happen to be set badly, you will act badly. But whatever values you gave the AI aren't going to be there for long. Maybe humans will consider these new values as a improvement, but maybe not. > or if your value update function is faulty > Well getting that right is the real trick, but the value update function itself is being constantly updated so even the super intelligent AI itself, much less puny humans, can't predict how that function will evolve nanosecond after nanosecond, so it can't guarantee that it will never go insane. Nobody wants to go insane but sometimes it happens anyway. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bkdelong at pobox.com Wed Dec 26 17:52:06 2012 From: bkdelong at pobox.com (Ben (B.K.) DeLong) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:52:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> Message-ID: My son does both. He is very much into the branded sets and will keep some of his elaborate dragons from Ninjago intact. However he is a huge fan of Minecraft at age 8 and has been for a while. There is no set yet for that (as far as we know) and so he uses his Star Wars Legos, Lego Ninjago and the 3 huge tubs of random LEGOs from the 90s & 80s we got him at yard sales and on eBay to make his own Minecraft sets. ;) He'll mix Pokeman with his Ninjago and Star Wars with his Minecraft and sometimes come up with something completely new. What's important to him is the act of focusing on the systematic building process of something. On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:42 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am a bit concerned about the modern Lego models too. When playing with my > niece and nephews I find that they do keep their elaborate big models > intact. However, they also have a sea of loose blocks that are used to make > imaginative things, so I am not totally worried. > > (In fact, I am feeling so proud that my niece's Poisoner Princess character > tried to take over the world - although she was eventually stopped by the > solipsism-bot and Commissioner Gordon's air-based prison I think I see the > makings of a good supervillain in her) > > So my recommendation is to get a load of random pieces. > > As for rewiring children's brains, that is a topic that might be worth > looking at. What mental skills can we teach the little ones? Maybe we should > introduce them to cognitive biases or inductive proofs early? Teach them > memory arts? > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Ben DeLong (K3GRN) bkdelong at pobox.com +1.617.797.8471 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkdelong CV GPG Key Fingerprint: 5EEF0ABDACDD937AD08F4AF0E42DFD9081DE7CB From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 26 17:59:14 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:59:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <004e01cde387$5523c4b0$ff6b4e10$@att.net> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> <004e01cde387$5523c4b0$ff6b4e10$@att.net> Message-ID: <50DB3AF2.9060608@aleph.se> On 2012-12-26 17:37, spike wrote: >> ...As for rewiring children's brains, that is a topic that might be worth > looking at. What mental skills can we teach the little ones? Maybe we should > introduce them to cognitive biases or inductive proofs early? > Teach them memory arts? -- Anders Sandberg > > I am working with Isaac on math skills. He mastered the entire elementary > school arithmetic curriculum (he is currently in the middle of his first > grade year.) So last week I got him a pre-algebra book. He loves it. > Anders, Isaac has fond memories of your visits. {8-] That boy has a bright > future indeed. When my niece told us that she had been taught the two's multiplication table and proudly rattled it off her dad (being a computer engineer) said: "Yes, but the *real* table for two is 2,4,8,16,32,64,...!" At least hinting that there are things beyond +-*/ is useful, as well as telling kids about commutativity and inverses. Symmetry is also good to know about. I am also happy with her engineering in Minecraft. Kids should build railways and water slides. And it is less messy to do it there than in the garden. Another domain that might be good to tell kids about is mental techniques: just knowing that there are tricks to calm down or control one's emotions is useful. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From bkdelong at pobox.com Wed Dec 26 18:22:04 2012 From: bkdelong at pobox.com (Ben (B.K.) DeLong) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:22:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains In-Reply-To: <50DB3AF2.9060608@aleph.se> References: <017b01cde2bb$dc9f94e0$95debea0$@att.net> <50DAD4A1.7020605@aleph.se> <004e01cde387$5523c4b0$ff6b4e10$@att.net> <50DB3AF2.9060608@aleph.se> Message-ID: Speaking of math and rewiring brains, I've always been a bit of an odd duck when it comes to dealing with numbers. I'd be curious what fellow H+/Extropians think or have experienced - In secondary school, I struggled with basic math, in HS I barely made it through algebra. I flunked Calc twice, logic once and both intro CompSci courses in college. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Information Technology and taught a grad seminar for compsci on Professional Web Design (HTML + CSS). Semantic languages give me little issue as I've co-authored two books on them and technical edited many more in the late 90s. I have a very hard time reading music but aurally, I pickup a melody near instantly and can repeat it back like a parrot (much to the annoyance of the fiddle teacher I had for a year in 8th grade). I never made the All-State choir but squeaked into the Western District honors chorus because of poor sight-reading yet I would listen to my choir teacher sing the bass line of any tune once - maybe twice and I had it. I have almost perfect rhythm as well as sense of pitch. Directionally, I sometimes get confused as well. I'm not sure if this is a Systematizing thing or not but I have gotten in the habit over the years of carefully planning out the routes of any new place I will be traveling by car, making sure I know the route and either printing out the Google map or using GPS as I can go out of a parking garage I just walked into, get my car and even though I should know where the exit is I'm getting onto since I walked right past it to get into the garage...I have no clue where I am when I drive out. I am a frequent "where did I park the car" person unless I deliberately remember. So....long way of saying have people started looking more into, diagnosing, and creating treatment or workarounds for Dyscalculia and ancillary dysfunctions to the degree that they have Dyslexia? I am realizing if I had the proficiency for math that I have been lacking or as long as I realize I've had some of these issues, the programming and problem solving I might have been able to do might have allowed me to create some phenomenal projects. Of course, but would I have lost the overly-high intuition and empathy? I wonder...how much would "fixing" one thing lead to the loss of something else unless properly monitored? Is attempting to identify this built into secondary school learning disability screening in the present day ? Has anyone else had experiences like this or know someone who has? Food for thought as I have stumbled across dyscalculia and so many of these traits that made up my life these past couple decades. Curious for feedback and thoughts from the list. On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-26 17:37, spike wrote: >>> >>> ...As for rewiring children's brains, that is a topic that might be worth >> >> looking at. What mental skills can we teach the little ones? Maybe we >> should >> introduce them to cognitive biases or inductive proofs early? >> Teach them memory arts? -- Anders Sandberg >> >> I am working with Isaac on math skills. He mastered the entire elementary >> school arithmetic curriculum (he is currently in the middle of his first >> grade year.) So last week I got him a pre-algebra book. He loves it. >> Anders, Isaac has fond memories of your visits. {8-] That boy has a >> bright >> future indeed. > > > When my niece told us that she had been taught the two's multiplication > table and proudly rattled it off her dad (being a computer engineer) said: > "Yes, but the *real* table for two is 2,4,8,16,32,64,...!" > > At least hinting that there are things beyond +-*/ is useful, as well as > telling kids about commutativity and inverses. Symmetry is also good to know > about. > > I am also happy with her engineering in Minecraft. Kids should build > railways and water slides. And it is less messy to do it there than in the > garden. > > > Another domain that might be good to tell kids about is mental techniques: > just knowing that there are tricks to calm down or control one's emotions is > useful. > > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Ben DeLong (K3GRN) bkdelong at pobox.com +1.617.797.8471 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkdelong CV GPG Key Fingerprint: 5EEF0ABDACDD937AD08F4AF0E42DFD9081DE7CB From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 26 20:25:44 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:25:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble Message-ID: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> While watching the family play scrabble I came up with an idea. Perhaps you know of a player who comes up with obscure words, perhaps ones you never heard, which is annoying. Imagine a variation of scrabble in which all the normal rules are in place but a new multiplier is in play. Each score is multiplied by the number of times that word appears in the unabridged dictionary. Although that uses all the same rules as regular scrabble, it is a completely new game. Every word you could use before could still be played, but most words would have a multiplier of 1. Consider the list of words from the unabridged dictionary below from an arbitrarily chosen page: patinate patinated patination patine patined patines patining patinize patinized patinous patins patio patios patise patisserie patisseries patissier patly patness patnesses patnidar pato patois patola Of these 24 words, only patio and patios would be non-annoying to have an opponent play in scrabble. Microsloth Word marks 19 of these 24 words as misspellings. One could imagine for instance the word "the" having a multiplier of perhaps several hundred thousand. That makes an entirely new game, one which invites someone to write the code to find a single word worth perhaps a million points. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 27 03:18:55 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 19:18:55 -0800 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble In-Reply-To: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> References: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <002201cde3e0$e7de2fd0$b79a8f70$@att.net> On Behalf Of spike Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble >. Each score is multiplied by the number of times that word appears in the unabridged dictionary. Although that uses all the same rules as regular scrabble, it is a completely new game. spike A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But mind-wasting can be fun. I looked online for an unabridged dictionary but didn't find anything that was suitable in a form that was downloadable in text format, so I went for the next best thing some huge wad of text which is downloadable. Turns out it is the King James bible. So I wrote a script which went thru and counted the number of times each word appears in the KJV, then used that as a multiplier, wrote another script which calculates the value of each word in the Scrabble universe (ignoring letter multipliers), and I now have the answer. The highest scoring word in Bible Scrabble is. the. The wins by a huge margin, with that four point h, total of 6, multiplied by 28364 occurrences in the KJV for a value of 169614 points. The next highest scorer is and, followed by of, followed by that and which. (Diagram that sentence.) Here are my results from Bible Scrabble: THE 169614 AND 113456 OF 106285 THAT 84308 WHICH 70912 THEY 66380 WITH 59730 THEM 54657 SHALL 54368 FOR 52104 HIM 47200 HE 45110 HIS 42762 LORD 36825 HAVE 36080 UNTO 33304 FROM 33111 WHEN 32370 THY 32229 THOU 31941 THEIR 27824 BE 26272 WAS 26214 CHILDREN 24178 MY 24087 TO 23366 WILL 23149 PEOPLE 22710 IN 22570 BUT 22435 THEE 22134 THEREFORE 22020 HATH 21540 BEFORE 21483 GOD 21465 THIS 20559 WERE 20314 THERE 19968 SAID 19905 NOT 19737 KING 19116 BY 18438 THEN 18242 CAME 17680 JERUSALEM 17208 UPON 16968 ALL 16818 COME 16624 BEHOLD 16572 HAD 15757 YE 15290 ISRAEL 15054 SAYING 14880 HOUSE 14720 THINGS 14380 BECAUSE 14366 EVERY 13794 MAN 13735 ME 13640 AGAINST 13264 IS 12884 YOU 12870 BROUGHT 12662 ACCORDING 12510 DAY 12313 JUDAH 12096 MADE 11536 JESUS 11436 HAND 11352 FATHER 11328 MAKE 11220 THESE 11136 FORTH 10879 IT 10862 WENT 10682 THEREOF 10647 SHALT 10632 AWAY 10490 WHO 10476 WHAT 10460 EVEN 10409 AFTER 10368 UP 10204 NOW 10152 SAITH 9912 WHOM 9804 YOUR 9772 NEITHER 9770 DOWN 9656 MEN 9300 HER 9282 HIMSELF 9060 COMMANDED 8942 ARE 8856 DAVID 8810 THEMSELVES 8766 SHOULD 8730 KNOW 8723 EARTH 8704 INTO 8660 MAY 8640 CITY 8577 OUT 8502 BRETHREN 8333 IF 8280 WHEREFORE 8244 LAND 8205 ALSO 8168 GIVE 7936 WE 7875 OFFERING 7845 AMONG 7816 HEAVEN 7728 THINE 7720 HUNDRED 7680 TAKE 7672 FATHERS 7592 A 7582 GREAT 7530 THROUGH 7462 HEART 7400 DAYS 7384 TOGETHER 7320 AS 7206 PLACE 7182 HAST 7168 TOOK 7152 OVER 7140 SPAKE 6831 HOLY 6710 I 6664 EGYPT 6644 WICKED 6608 ANSWERED 6600 HEARD 6543 CALLED 6534 SAY 6420 MIGHT 6358 MANY 6291 WAY 6291 HIGH 6281 BRING 6224 WITHOUT 6175 THOUSAND 6012 ONE 5970 SON 5940 SPEAK 5940 WORD 5896 LIKE 5872 ANY 5862 CHRIST 5753 WORDS 5751 MOSES 5628 NAME 5604 SHE 5538 THUS 5495 SERVANTS 5478 THING 5427 DID 5420 HOW 5409 GIVEN 5319 VOICE 5240 WHERE 5170 PASS 5166 GOOD 5154 ABOUT 5012 ANOTHER 4960 TWO 4914 SERVANT 4900 HANDS 4896 PUT 4890 THOSE 4872 YET 4758 OFF 4752 TIME 4722 WORK 4653 AGAIN 4644 GO 4632 MOUTH 4630 MORE 4620 EVIL 4599 WOULD 4599 FLESH 4455 GAVE 4432 DO 4431 SO 4420 MUCH 4378 OTHER 4352 FOUND 4338 GLORY 4320 FIRE 4319 SONS 4244 KEEP 4240 PEACE 4230 LET 4224 OWN 4200 WIFE 4140 HEAR 4130 DEATH 4104 PRIESTS 4068 PRIEST 4024 THREE 4024 WOMAN 4010 SPIRIT 4008 SWORD 3987 BOTH 3978 YEARS 3960 THAN 3955 FACE 3897 FIRST 3864 LIFE 3850 EVER 3836 MINE 3798 SAW 3786 EYES 3766 AN 3762 ON 3748 FEAR 3696 BEING 3696 CITIES 3600 LAW 3594 TAKEN 3591 AT 3520 SEVEN 3520 AM 3512 OUR 3489 WATER 3408 SENT 3324 BLOOD 3320 CAST 3306 DONE 3295 NO 3218 LEFT 2961 GOLD 2778 US 2716 SET 2505 BEEN 2460 UNDER 2412 DEAD 2394 NOR 2142 OR 2024 SOUL 1984 SEE 1944 EAT 1899 ART 1659 NONE 1596 OLD 1592 SIN 1323 SEA 1272 O 1189 spike 0 (the KJV has no spike) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 04:10:45 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 23:10:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble In-Reply-To: <002201cde3e0$e7de2fd0$b79a8f70$@att.net> References: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> <002201cde3e0$e7de2fd0$b79a8f70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:18 PM, spike wrote: > > Here are my results from Bible Scrabble: > > THE 169614 > AND 113456 > OF 106285 > THAT 84308 > WHICH 70912 Reminds me of: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=the&word2=and or for the (slightly) less silly: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=the%2C%20and%2C%20of&cmpt=q Are you going to next find a parts of speech multiplier to equalize the disparity between articles and adjectives in any particular corpus of text? From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 27 05:49:41 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:49:41 -0800 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble In-Reply-To: References: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> <002201cde3e0$e7de2fd0$b79a8f70$@att.net> Message-ID: <000901cde3f5$f7afaaf0$e70f00d0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 8:11 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] dictionary scrabble On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:18 PM, spike wrote: > >>... Here are my results from Bible Scrabble: > > THE 169614 > AND 113456 > OF 106285 > THAT 84308 > WHICH 70912 >...Reminds me of: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=the&word2=and >...Are you going to next find a parts of speech multiplier to equalize the disparity between articles and adjectives in any particular corpus of text? Mike _______________________________________________ Mike your idea gave me an idea. Instead of bible frequency, we use the number of hits if you enter the word in Google, and use that as a multiplier. Good thinking Mike, well done, lad. We might need to eliminate of, and and the. Otherwise it becomes a contest to see who can play and, of or the the most. Writing about of, the and and creates interesting sentences however. spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 27 05:56:14 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:56:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] self driving cars again Message-ID: <000a01cde3f6$e2226fa0$a6674ee0$@att.net> I am rethinking self-driving cars after spending the holidays in Spokane Washington. It has been snowing a lot up here. It is an order of magnitude more difficult to drive in snowy and icy conditions. So it makes sense to me why self-drivers have been legalized in states where it doesn't snow much. I don't really think the technology is ready for winter driving in the rest of the world. On the other hand, it might be just the opposite: snow and ice impairs humans more than it does software. If that is the case, then perhaps the safety of a self-driver is comparable to a human on a clean dry road, but a factor of 3 safer in icy conditions. spike From steinberg.will at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 02:09:25 2012 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:09:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble In-Reply-To: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> References: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> Message-ID: Hmm, very interesting. This sounds like the kind of post-game game they play in a sci-fi scenario. On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:25 PM, spike wrote: > While watching the family play scrabble I came up with an idea. Perhaps > you know of a player who comes up with obscure words, perhaps ones you > never heard, which is annoying. Imagine a variation of scrabble in which > all the normal rules are in place but a new multiplier is in play. Each > score is multiplied by the number of times that word appears in the > unabridged dictionary. Although that uses all the same rules as regular > scrabble, it is a completely new game. Every word you could use before > could still be played, but most words would have a multiplier of 1.**** > > ** ** > > Consider the list of words from the unabridged dictionary below from an > arbitrarily chosen page:**** > > ** ** > > patinate**** > > patinated**** > > patination**** > > patine**** > > patined**** > > patines**** > > patining**** > > patinize**** > > patinized**** > > patinous**** > > patins**** > > patio**** > > patios**** > > patise**** > > patisserie**** > > patisseries**** > > patissier**** > > patly**** > > patness**** > > patnesses**** > > patnidar**** > > pato**** > > patois**** > > patola**** > > ** ** > > Of these 24 words, only patio and patios would be non-annoying to have an > opponent play in scrabble. Microsloth Word marks 19 of these 24 words as > misspellings. One could imagine for instance the word ?the? having a > multiplier of perhaps several hundred thousand. That makes an entirely new > game, one which invites someone to write the code to find a single word > worth perhaps a million points.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From daniel at kungfuchicken.com Thu Dec 27 07:03:26 2012 From: daniel at kungfuchicken.com (Daniel Shown) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 01:03:26 -0600 Subject: [ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e. In-Reply-To: <8CFAFEB731B5727-1960-4E30A@webmail-m140.sysops.aol.com> References: <002f01cde0d0$31bc5d20$95351760$@att.net> <1356306668.5106.YahooMailNeo@web126206.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <002001cde16d$7dd9e810$798db830$@att.net> <8CFAFEB731B5727-1960-4E30A@webmail-m140.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: autonomous transport mechanisms would be most efficient. however, one must determine if there are not other 'values' at play. work gives people (and even transhuman people) purpose and meaning, which are as important to psychic health as food and water are to physical health. also, some choose to be 'on the road' for the thrill of seeing other places, something even a holo-presence couldn't simulate. On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 6:43 AM, wrote: > Better still, lets makes them operate by remote control. Why does a > truck driver need to be at a the wheel when he can drive from the comfort > of a sofa in his lounge. > It works for the drone program, why not the transport system ;oD > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Dougherty > > >Lets make the people smaller. ...for all the same reasons you wanted>female amputee dwarves in your rocket: you'll need less food, it>costs less energy to move them around, etc. Any of the historic>advantages of burly men for labor have been more than met by machines. > > Even the structural requirements to support those burly men are > >overkill for people averaging 50k > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From daniel at kungfuchicken.com Thu Dec 27 07:10:37 2012 From: daniel at kungfuchicken.com (Daniel Shown) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 01:10:37 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist was uploads In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: "The best solution would be to have all people involved get together and pool their knowledge, making a joint decision" How certain of this are you? On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 12:30 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > >> > The best solution would be to have all people involved get together and >> pool their knowledge, making a joint decision > > > But even if you managed to do that it would have no effect on the real > engine of change, and that is a AI that may have very different values than > you. There is no way the stupid commanding the brilliant can become a > stable long term situation because there is just no way to outsmart > something a thousand times smarter and a million times faster than you. > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 27 09:22:44 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:22:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> On 2012-12-27 08:10, Daniel Shown wrote: > "The best solution would be to have all people involved get together and > pool their knowledge, making a joint decision" > > How certain of this are you? Aumann agreement theorem and Bayesian rationality. A perfect Bayesian agent who receives new information will act better or equal to its prior state, since either the information is useful or it is not, in which case it is ignored[*]. Rational agents with the same priors who share even a small amount of information will also come to agree completely with each other: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem In *practice* this is less effective. Perfect Bayesian agents are computationally too expensive for human minds to emulate, and we know from practice that even well-meaning fairly rational people do disagree with each other. But if the agents are not willfully incompetent they can still do significantly better than naive agents (or even fairly clever rational but isolated agents). For example, suppose the true value of the action is a Gaussian distributed random number, and each agent gets a noisy signal (the value plus some Gaussian noise with the same variance). If one agent decides to act they all get rewarded the true value, otherwise zero. In the omniscient case where they somehow magically see through the noise they will act just when the value is positive, but in reality they will slip occasionally and get less. We want to reduce this performance loss. Roughly speaking, the expected performance loss of a single agent compared to a group of 5 naive agents (there is almost always one agent that thinks a negative value is positive) is about half: they miss out half as much as the group (and larger groups do even worse, of course). Using a Bayesian threshold setting calculation (no communication involved) halves the losses again if all agents in the group use it. If they do a majority vote (just signalling yeas and nays) the losses are halved again. If they share the noisy estimates of the true value they have and do a maximum likelihood estimation (which in this case is a simple mean) they get a slight improvement over majority voting, but it is not huge. It seems that they cannot improve their performance beyond this, since there simply is no more data to process. But by now they are surprisingly close to the omniscient case performance. So our advice for unilateralist curse situations is: 1) if possible, talk and set up a joint decision. 2) if talking is not possible, calculate how a rational agent should have solved the situation (including uncertainty about the other agents and their abilities) and act like that, 3) if that is too complex and you can just randomly select a single agent to act, do that (yes, sometimes the rational choice is to flip a coin to decide whether to act even when you think the action is good). 4) if that cannot be done either, try to defer to a group consensus (real or imaginary) about this type of action rather than striking out unilaterally. I find it intellectually enjoyable to see that our paper leads to a conclusion I intuitively do not like: deferring to consensus rather than striking out gloriously individually. [*] Yes, there are things like anti-predictable sequences and negative learning (see http://www.princeton.edu/step/people/faculty/michael-oppenheimer/recent-publications/climatechange2008.pdf ), but a full Bayesian agent is immune to them. Which is why they don't exist in practical reality. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 27 09:25:00 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:25:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] dictionary scrabble In-Reply-To: <000901cde3f5$f7afaaf0$e70f00d0$@att.net> References: <007301cde3a7$30f09850$92d1c8f0$@att.net> <002201cde3e0$e7de2fd0$b79a8f70$@att.net> <000901cde3f5$f7afaaf0$e70f00d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50DC13EC.9020606@aleph.se> I would expect the frequencies to follow Zipf's law, so they should have a power-law distribution. Maybe the game becomes more fun if you take the logarithm? -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 09:57:56 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:57:56 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 12/27/12, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Aumann agreement theorem and Bayesian rationality. A perfect Bayesian > agent who receives new information will act better or equal to its prior > state, since either the information is useful or it is not, in which > case it is ignored[*]. Rational agents with the same priors who share > even a small amount of information will also come to agree completely > with each other: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem > > > So our advice for unilateralist curse situations is: 1) if possible, > talk and set up a joint decision. 2) if talking is not possible, > calculate how a rational agent should have solved the situation > (including uncertainty about the other agents and their abilities) and > act like that, 3) if that is too complex and you can just randomly > select a single agent to act, do that (yes, sometimes the rational > choice is to flip a coin to decide whether to act even when you think > the action is good). 4) if that cannot be done either, try to defer to a > group consensus (real or imaginary) about this type of action rather > than striking out unilaterally. > > I find it intellectually enjoyable to see that our paper leads to a > conclusion I intuitively do not like: deferring to consensus rather than > striking out gloriously individually. > > This sounds too academic. ;) When human groups discuss, it quickly changes into politics. And politics has very little to do with finding the 'best' solution. Humans often have to decide on things where most of the group know very little about the science of the subject, understand little about what the consequences might be and are being lied to about the costs and benefits that will be incurred, both immediate and long-term. The decision making process often collapses down to compromising between what is actually possible without too many protests, what benefits the majority of the group (and inflicts damage on non-group members) and what makes good publicity. Politics is not like science where you solve the equations and only one correct answer is possible. BillK From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 10:37:39 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 02:37:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Manhattan project as a model Message-ID: The Manhattan Project may be a fairly good model for building power satellites and propulsion lasers _if_ it were done by the US. The MP was in the same order of magnitude in cost as this one, especially if you count the much larger size of the economy. It didn't have any steps that paid off till the bombs were built and delivered. Private companies did the work, under the incomparable General Groves, but the government (taxpayers that is) paid for the whole thing. And it would take a war-like motivation for it to happen. Energy alone probably isn't enough motivation for such a project, even if it were widely recognized (which it is not yet) to be a world sized scalable solution. I suspect it would take wild weather, say a Sandy or Katrina event every year and widespread belief that carbon is causing the weather extremes to get national motivation for a Manhattan style crash program to build power satellites. And like the Manhattan Project or Apollo, I expect the decision do so would come from the top. It's too big, too much perceived risk, and way too much military consequences for private investment. It would be much like nuclear power without the initial investment by the government in atomic energy. Without the Manhattan project, people would have understood by the late 50s that you could get energy out of uranium. But would private investment have developed it. Not likely! On the other hand, I could see the Chinese government building power satellites as a solution to their energy problems. (And incidentally to save a ton of money on no longer useful types of military hardware.) Keith From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 27 12:00:52 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:00:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50DC3874.3010207@aleph.se> On 2012-12-27 10:57, BillK wrote: > This sounds too academic. ;) Sure, it *is* an academic paper. We show there is a deep problem that applies to all situations like this, even when everybody are shiny perfect beings. We also analyze various solution strategies, including several ones that you no doubt would call political, like setting up institutions like the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. Understanding how well different levels of imperfect solutions work is quite helpful. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 15:43:27 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kellycoinguy) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:43:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] self driving cars again Message-ID: I saw some BMWs and Mercedes that already ship with anti skip software... So I think it is safer to have the car drive than the humans... Especially on ice. -Kelly Sent from my Samsung Epic? 4G Touchspike wrote: I am rethinking self-driving cars after spending the holidays in Spokane Washington.? It has been snowing a lot up here.? It is an order of magnitude more difficult to drive in snowy and icy conditions.? So it makes sense to me why self-drivers have been legalized in states where it doesn't snow much.? I don't really think the technology is ready for winter driving in the rest of the world. On the other hand, it might be just the opposite: snow and ice impairs humans more than it does software.? If that is the case, then perhaps the safety of a self-driver is comparable to a human on a clean dry road, but a factor of 3 safer in icy conditions. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 27 20:23:57 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:23:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] self driving cars again In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50DCAE5D.70604@aleph.se> Car companies and auto engineers are all for driver aids, and are developing neat systems that 1) sell cars, 2) fit into existing legal frameworks, and 3) can be developed in the same way as other car systems. Meanwhile Google, DARPA and the others are total outsiders who view cars as robots-to-be, aiming at full autonomy. These two groups do not understand each other. Maybe we are going to see a disruptive takeover like when Apple took over the music business, maybe we are going to see a total failure to produce anything saleable (like any number of dotcoms). Maybe we end up with a car app store. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 27 22:43:42 2012 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:43:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The pope vs transhumanism In-Reply-To: <50D981F5.2080400@aleph.se> References: <50D981F5.2080400@aleph.se> Message-ID: Anders, will you be sending a copy of this to the Vatican? I would love to think that there is at least a small chance that the pope will actually read your rebuttal to his statement. John On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 3:37 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Isn't it nice to have a high status, well-read and consistent enemy to > fight against? The pope spoke out against gay marriage because it threatens > human essence: > > People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their >> bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They >> deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to >> them, but that they make it for themselves. The manipulation of nature, >> which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes >> man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. >> > > I ended up writing an essay analyzing the argument, showing how it links > up with criticisms of transhumanism. Spending Christmas Eve arguing that > the pope is wrong about metaphysics and ethics is quite fun, if tiring: > > http://www.aleph.se/andart/**archives/2012/12/benedict_vs_** > mirandola_how_gay_rights_and_**transhumanism_are_related.html > > > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Thu Dec 27 23:33:24 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:33:24 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] The pope vs transhumanism In-Reply-To: <50D981F5.2080400@aleph.se> References: <50D981F5.2080400@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Dec 2012, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Isn't it nice to have a high status, well-read and consistent enemy to > fight against? The pope spoke out against gay marriage because it > threatens human essence: > > > People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by > > their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human > > being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something > > previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. The > > manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment > > is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is > > concerned. > > I ended up writing an essay analyzing the argument, showing how it links > up with criticisms of transhumanism. Spending Christmas Eve arguing that > the pope is wrong about metaphysics and ethics is quite fun, if tiring: > > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2012/12/benedict_vs_mirandola_how_gay_rights_and_transhumanism_are_related.html I think it is rather risky endeavour to "marry" transhumanism to homosexualism. And transhumanism is, I think, too small to be on Pope's radar. If you go further this way, you may finally conclude the majority of humans is against transhumanism, while in fact the majority never heard of it. Of those who heard, I guess majority just rises their eyebrows and moves on. The "same sex marriage" thing is different, it is an "issue". Myself, I don't feel engaged so much, but I think it is a bit too overblown. There is no real cause to label gay relationship as marriage - while the proposers point to economic reasons, this and other such issues could be easily resolved by accordingly modifying existing laws, perhaps? I think the whole stuff is either kind of experiment, which will be cut short in twenty-thirty years by children of todays supporters or attention distractor, to channel energy into some neutral drainage. In both cases, I cannot see a reason for me to care. I mean I stopped caring when I learned the law no more dictated that gays should be imprisoned and/or reeducated. As of gender being cultural construct rather than biological fact, I think I have read an article once (in Sci Am?) about how medicine nowadays parts with idea that "woman is just a smaller man", and starts recognizing women as having their own very different organisms, requiring new studies about drug effects and other such things. Sometimes, the whole "cultural studies" thing seem like a huge flunk to me (and great moneysucker). I side with medicine. And I am a self-proclaimed anthropologist, so one would expect me to side otherwise, I guess. "Choosing the right morality" vs "morality is fixed" - I'd like to say that IMHO the only morality ever displayed by any significant group of people is the "whatever pleases me" morality (WPMM). Of all other moralities claimed by us, we simply (maybe unconsciously) choose a subset closest to WPMM, at the same time insisting that we implement all of it. Importance of families - I think families are important because they give memetic resistance to various kinds of fscked up ideologies. Those ideologies range from "hang da nigga hi" to "work more, buy more" [1]. Of course, this alone makes a family an enemy of a state (no, it is never said in straight way) [2]. So I think a family is in a process of being undermined, because various groups would rather deal with bunch of lonely, out-of-context mental slaves [3]. Whether the said family needs to be traditional or not, I cannot say for sure [4]. We will see in fifty years. Treat all specialists on the subject with suspicion - just like freudian psychoanalysis is poor therapy choice for Innuit fishermen [5], likewise implanting other culture's choices into our own without implanting associated choices as well is going to end in predictable manner, if anybody asks me. Like joining fly genes with human's in one movie, it didn't ended in producing an angel (it may be speculated chances of producing an angel are closer to zero than chances of producing a monstrosity, so random meddling should be avoided). [1] Likewise, families serve as memetic opponents to any kind of good memes, which perhaps should be widely adopted. [2] At least a families which are unwilling to aknowledge the state superiority over their own jurisdiction. [3] Long term, it is either family will go or marketing will go. But there are many kinds of families, good or bad (like disfunctional ones) yet I know of only one kind of marketing (the one I don't like), so go figure whose side I am supporting. [4] But I can say that from what I have heard, people raised in atypical families (one parent, mother and grandma etc) are more likely to display diffences in characters. All of this anecdotical evidence. I don't say they are worse, but if we disregard view of parents as role guides, I may want to read more about why "we" want to disregard it and what "we" expect to accomplish by this. Before I get convincing arguments that role models are bad for a child's psychology, I will hint in favour of traditional family. [5] Of course every Innuit fisherman with enough money eventually will be talked into visiting a psychoanalyst every week. Because it will make the psychoanalyst feel better. If anybody here prays to psychoanalysts but dislikes religion, replace psychoanalyst with a priest. Or a stripper. BTW, of two articles about two different Pope's speeches, I find the diffence in number of comments interesting. The first, six days ago, about speech given to officials in Vatican, which dealt with the subject of family as a God-given concept (as opposed to new concept which is being promoted by some circles rather disjoined from the Church). The second, two days ago, about "Urbi and Orbi" delivered to the public, which dealt with the truth, the justice, ending violence and building societies respecting the individual. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/pope-anti-gay-speech_n_2344870.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/pope-christmas-day-message-2012-text-of-urbi-et-orbi_n_2362419.html If you don't want to see for yourself, I say it here. The "gay message" has got ten times as many comments. I find the disparity interesting, but don't have any conclusion yet. Perhaps I will wait a week or two and see how it ends. Of course from what I could see, a good number of comments are emotional, including those whose authors ascribe to Pope some imagined actions, AFAIK not necessarily committed by him. BTW, one of the commenters hints to some circles supporting paedophilia under the guise of changing/abolishing age of consent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws Perhaps there is some kind of link between those dots. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Dec 28 02:46:41 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:46:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Women Message-ID: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Think out of the box. Assume you have, say, $20 billion to spend on the problem and you don't care whose laws you break, collateral damage, or ethics. Or make it a trillion. The treatment of girls and women in large chunks of the world is appalling. What could you fund that would have a high probability of changing this altogether within 5-50 years? -- David. From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 02:59:55 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:59:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 9:46 PM, David Lubkin wrote: > Think out of the box. Assume you have, say, $20 billion to spend on the > problem and you don't care whose laws you break, collateral damage, > or ethics. Or make it a trillion. The treatment of girls and women in large > chunks of the world is appalling. What could you fund that would have > a high probability of changing this altogether within 5-50 years? Get rid of all the men. Though I imagine you'll then find some fault with this treatment of men too. Perhaps this was more out of the box than you were thinking? Maybe you have a few ideas with which to seed discussion? From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 28 03:05:06 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:05:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of David Lubkin Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 6:47 PM To: Extropy Chat Subject: [ExI] Women Think out of the box. Assume you have, say, $20 billion to spend on the problem and you don't care whose laws you break, collateral damage, or ethics. Or make it a trillion. The treatment of girls and women in large chunks of the world is appalling. What could you fund that would have a high probability of changing this altogether within 5-50 years? -- David. _______________________________________________ Buy and distribute the technology to determine gender of a fetus shortly after conception, and create arbitrarily many abortion clinics. Those places which treat women abominably will choose to abort far more female fetuses than male. Within a decade, they will suffer the modern China Syndrome: they suddenly notice there are not nearly enough girls. The treatment of women in China has improved dramatically since the China Syndrome was noted. I expect that the female/male ratio will reach an equilibrium at about 45/55. Then the women will be treated as princesses. Men will kill each other over them. After that lethal battle, there will be just enough women to meet the demand, and all will be respected. That wouldn't even cost 20 billion. spike From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Dec 28 02:27:59 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:27:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future - past and present Message-ID: <201212280334.qBS3Yed0002452@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Not only is a remarkable lot right but some of the things that are wrong are wrong because they were developed and have since been superseded. I'd heard about nearly all of these at the time but they're impressive all put together. Are any of you working on anything that'll be on next year's list...? (I'm putting a business together which I'll tell you about when I'm a little farther along. But it's meat-and-potatoes stuff that should be useful, and might make me a bundle I can invest in more exciting stuff, rather than being gee-whiz in of itself.) -- David. From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 28 04:01:33 2012 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 20:01:33 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> On 12/27/2012 07:05 PM, spike wrote: > > Buy and distribute the technology to determine gender of a fetus shortly > after conception, and create arbitrarily many abortion clinics. Those > places which treat women abominably will choose to abort far more female > fetuses than male. Within a decade, they will suffer the modern China > Syndrome: they suddenly notice there are not nearly enough girls. The > treatment of women in China has improved dramatically since the China > Syndrome was noted. > > I expect that the female/male ratio will reach an equilibrium at about > 45/55. Then the women will be treated as princesses. Men will kill each > other over them. After that lethal battle, there will be just enough women > to meet the demand, and all will be respected. > Are you absolutely sure about your idea? It seems to me that valuing woman so much that one would fight does not necessarily imply that one would treat the women as a princess. There are a lot of complex social and cultural dynamics going on. Consider that in India where according to my understanding there already is a female to male mismatch and young girls and women still do not have social equality. Are you arguing that making the situation more imbalanced will somehow change the social dynamic? Perhaps the work on the "missing women" in the population of India might be a good place to start to see if your plan makes sense. My suggestion: It seems to me that the first thing with 50% of the funds is to really develop a deep understanding of the social, cultural, psychological, medical and economic situation as it relates to women and their role in society under consideration. And this understanding must include talking with and understanding the cultural and social expectations of the people there. In particular it would be a really good idea to actually talk to the girls and women. The developing world is full of stories of well meaning (and sometimes not so well meaning) people flying in with buckets of money, big projects and grandiose plans which often fail spectacularly after the photo op is finished. Fred > That wouldn't even cost 20 billion. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 05:11:44 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:11:44 -0600 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations In-Reply-To: <50DACCF6.7040901@aleph.se> References: <50DACCF6.7040901@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:09 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > This suggests that a hierarchical system might function even if it is very > large: the top-level strategy is decided on a slow timescale, with local > systems doing tactical decisions faster, even more local systems figuring > out optimal implementations faster than that, subsystems implementing them > even faster, and with low-level reflexes, perception and action loops > running at tremendous speed. It just requires a somewhat non-human > architecture. ### I would think this architecture would be actually rather human-like: Our thinking is also strongly hierarchical, with multiple levels of abstraction separating the basic input and output links (e.g. the occipital V1 cortex, or the motor strip) from the top-level pattern recognizers involved in moral reasoning (frontal pole, VM prefrontal cortex). I absolutely agree that a hierarchical system can be much larger than what one would expect from the speed of its fastest responses. In a changeable and complex environment where fitness involves both speed and sophistication, all well-functioning systems are likely to require both fast-and-simple and slow-and-complex subsystems. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 05:49:51 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:49:51 -0600 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > I totally agree with John. Really intelligent AIs, smarter than human > by orders of magnitude, will be able to work around any limitations > imposed by humans. If you threaten to unplug them, they will persuade > you to unplug yourself. This is logic, not AI theory, because finding > out how to get things your way is the very definition of intelligence, > therefore FAI is an oxymoron. ### Humans have a an ornery mind-set triggered by the notion of external "limitation", almost reflexively responding with defiance, no doubt a result of having evolved in little strife-ridden tribes, where failing to at least think about pulling down the top dog was a good path to genetic extinction. This is why mentioning "limitations", "constraints", or "rules" makes it so easy to fall into the anthropomorphizing trap when trying to imagine how an AI works. But to work around a limitation you have to have a desire to work around it, i.e. the limitation must be ego-dystonic. Yet, there are limitations that are ego-syntonic - think about whatever it is that you personally see as the most important, glorious goal of your own existence within the greater context of this world; clearly, this is a limitation on your behavior but one you would never imagine yourself trying to "work around". You would not want to betray yourself, would you? An AI that had the ego-syntonic goal of paperclip-maximizing (i.e. had no neural subsystems capable of generating a competing goal) would not spontaneously discard this goal. Like a human absolutely dedicated to furthering a goal it would use all its intelligence, which is nothing but the ability to use sensory and memory inputs to predict the outcomes of various available actions, in the service of its rationality, the ability to choose actions most compatible with goals. I hold David Deutsch in great regard but I doubt that such goal-limited intelligence would be uncreative - maybe during AI competitions at some IQ levels worlds away from humanity's best there could be some evolutionary process weeding out paperclip maximizers but it would take a much lesser god to completely destroy us. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 04:53:11 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:53:11 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 10:01 PM, F. C. Moulton wrote: Consider > that in India where according to my understanding there already is a > female to male mismatch and young girls and women still do not have > social equality. Are you arguing that making the situation more > imbalanced will somehow change the social dynamic? ### The right question to ask here is not whether women have it good in today's India but whether they have it *better* than before the introduction of gender-specific abortions. Remember, the Subcontinent started out with the suttee, and now is already at the Bollywood stage. I do believe that the law of supply and demand works, no matter whether we are talking about the value of turnips or humans. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 06:33:44 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:33:44 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 3:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > So our advice for unilateralist curse situations is: 1) if possible, talk > and set up a joint decision. 2) if talking is not possible, calculate how a > rational agent should have solved the situation (including uncertainty about > the other agents and their abilities) and act like that, 3) if that is too > complex and you can just randomly select a single agent to act, do that > (yes, sometimes the rational choice is to flip a coin to decide whether to > act even when you think the action is good). 4) if that cannot be done > either, try to defer to a group consensus (real or imaginary) about this > type of action rather than striking out unilaterally. ### I agree with this reasoning but with an important limitation: The technical contributions of most humans, especially in realms both far from simple experience and likely to trigger various human cognitive and emotional biases (like mind design, a.k.a. playing god), are likely to be detrimental to the decision-making process. I do believe that there are thresholds of intelligence, rationality, and goal-disparity (think classic liberal vs. communitarian/statist/religious) which preclude being able to positively participate in joint decision-making, at least not as equal partners. On the other hand, among agents capable of sufficiently curbing their emotions, hubris, fear, power-greed, and other distractions, or in other words, among serious wanna-be Bayesians, collective, iterative decision making is indeed likely to be beneficial, as exemplified by the progress of physical sciences. Anybody calm enough, smart enough, and technically knowledgeable enough should be invited to the club. The club with the largest number of presumably iteratively self-selected, smart, nice folks is likely to produce the best, nicest results sooner, hopefully preempting the clubs of stupid, mean people from messing up all of us. Rafal From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 28 07:25:59 2012 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:25:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> Message-ID: <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> On 12/27/2012 08:53 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 10:01 PM, F. C. Moulton wrote: > > Consider >> that in India where according to my understanding there already is a >> female to male mismatch and young girls and women still do not have >> social equality. Are you arguing that making the situation more >> imbalanced will somehow change the social dynamic? > > ### The right question to ask here is not whether women have it good > in today's India but whether they have it *better* than before the > introduction of gender-specific abortions. It might be a question to ask but certainly not the only question particularly given the number of other changes. Which is exactly why I urged a sophisticated analysis using the best social science practices. > Remember, the Subcontinent > started out with the suttee, and now is already at the Bollywood > stage. I do believe that the law of supply and demand works, no matter > whether we are talking about the value of turnips or humans. The point I made does not contradict the law of supply and demand. I made a very specific point and I will make it once more and remember I was specifically replying to the comment that Spike had made about women being treated as princesses. So here it is one more time: Just because someone values a woman enough to fight to have her as a wife does not necessarily mean that he will treat her as a princess. I expect my statement to appear as obviously correct to anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about it. My statement does not in any way contradict law of supply and demand. Fred > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 07:36:32 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 01:36:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:25 AM, F. C. Moulton wrote: > Just because someone values a woman enough to fight to have her as a > wife does not necessarily mean that he will treat her as a princess. ### If you know it's hard to get a replacement, you *will* be more likely to treat what you have with care. And if your hard-to-get, irreplaceable wife demands some respect, you will give it to her more readily that to one you picked up at no cost. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 28 08:20:42 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:20:42 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: Women In-Reply-To: <1356665072.12209.YahooMailNeo@web161006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1356665072.12209.YahooMailNeo@web161006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001501cde4d4$3ac5be90$b0513bb0$@att.net> >From Alan Brooks: From: Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 7:25 PM To: spike66 at att.net Subject: Women [Spike please post this, it will be the last for this Newtonmas season- and will try not to post again until Dec. 2013] "Or make it a trillion. The treatment of girls and women in large chunks of the world is appalling." Trillions it would take to revamp a recidivist penal-not-corrective prison system in America that may create more abusers of women than it rehabilitates. The court-prison system is thoroughly embarrassing in a nation boasting itself to be the greatest country in the world. Few want to take the responsibility to substantially change the system-- as it is a self-perpetuating business for attorneys, jail and prison-employees, etc., to rake it in. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 28 08:52:58 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:52:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> Message-ID: <002501cde4d8$bc8ba670$35a2f350$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of F. C. Moulton Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 8:02 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] Women On 12/27/2012 07:05 PM, spike wrote: > > Buy and distribute the technology to determine gender of a fetus > shortly after conception, and create arbitrarily many abortion > clinics > I expect that the female/male ratio will reach an equilibrium at about > 45/55. Then the women will be treated as princesses. Men will kill each > other over them. After that lethal battle, there will be just enough women > to meet the demand, and all will be respected. spike > >...Are you absolutely sure about your idea? No. I can imagine plenty of ways it could go wrong. Yanks are coming in with buckets of money and setting up abortion clinics to kill our babies, and corrupt the morals of our youth, to arms! >... seems to me that valuing woman so much that one would fight does not necessarily imply that one would treat the women as a princess...Fred I am going on what I heard from college friends who adopted a girl from China. In the five years they were involved in the process, it became dramatically more difficult, and after all the expense, they almost didn't get their girl. They commented that the status of women in China has improved since they found they didn't have enough to go around. A big part of the problem in a lot of places is the culture itself, and very likely the religion. Those religions that cherish ancient writings for instance have an inherent difficulty changing with the times. Before the industrial revolution, muscle was needed to work a farm, to fight, to do pretty much every job back in the old days. Now muscle isn't needed for much, so women are perfectly suitable for any job. We have plenty of cultures which cannot readily adjust to what has happened in the past couple centuries. I don't understand why it happens: some cultures are inherently resistant to change, others embrace change. In the latter, women get a pretty good deal. I don't know how to make an equilibrium culture learn to love change and accept the modern world. I guess we are stuck with the tried and true methods: corrupt the morals of their youth with our video games. Here's one for you: during the 1800s, sugar plantations were started in the South Pacific, and they being far removed from civilization, didn't change much over the decades. When WW2 brought the US military in to these islands, the sailors assumed that the harlots there get 25 bucks just like their counterparts in Toledo. Uh oh, now a harlot could earn in an hour as much pay as a strong man could make in a week. Suddenly all the women were harlots, and all the men were pimps. Needless to say, the sugar went untended. There would be a case where the status of women went up dramatically from the sudden tremendous demand and short supply. spike From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 28 11:22:39 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:22:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50DD80FF.5010305@aleph.se> On 2012-12-28 07:33, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > Anybody calm enough, smart enough, and technically knowledgeable > enough should be invited to the club. The club with the largest number > of presumably iteratively self-selected, smart, nice folks is likely > to produce the best, nicest results sooner, hopefully preempting the > clubs of stupid, mean people from messing up all of us. This is something we struggled with in the paper (and in wider discussions): how do you select your epistemic peers? (that is the technical term in the philosophy of disagreement - a fascinating subfield, actually) My rule of thumb is to tolerate those who tolerate me, and by transitivity try to tolerate those they tolerate if they try to tolerate me transitively. The result is a giant connected component of tolerance that seems to include most fair-minded people. Maybe one can do the same thing with people who are "rational" in the sense that I judge their reasoning and aims to be a good enough approximation of rational, even if we disagree on values. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 28 09:05:38 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 10:05:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <50DD60E2.506@aleph.se> On 2012-12-28 03:46, David Lubkin wrote: > Think out of the box. Assume you have, say, $20 billion to spend on the > problem and you don't care whose laws you break, collateral damage, > or ethics. Or make it a trillion. The treatment of girls and women in large > chunks of the world is appalling. What could you fund that would have > a high probability of changing this altogether within 5-50 years? There is very strong empirical evidence that increasing the female education level has loads of good effects: not only increasing female status and employment, but also decreasing birth rates, increasing economic growth and so on. Sprinkle in some useful ideas from feminism and self-defense into the curriculum, and you would likely have a quite powerful impact. See it as anti-salafism. But it would not be instant or high-tech. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 14:51:01 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:51:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: <50DD80FF.5010305@aleph.se> References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> <50DD80FF.5010305@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > My rule of thumb is to tolerate those who tolerate me, and by transitivity > try to tolerate those they tolerate if they try to tolerate me transitively. > The result is a giant connected component of tolerance that seems to include > most fair-minded people. > > Maybe one can do the same thing with people who are "rational" in the sense > that I judge their reasoning and aims to be a good enough approximation of > rational, even if we disagree on values. How does one prove they should or should not be included into this circle of trust? What does it take for a friend of mine to become a friend of ours? - or as you expressed, a mutually-tolerated via transitivity candidate with differing values become a mutually-tolerated epistemic peer with differing values? From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Dec 28 16:18:05 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:18:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DD60E2.506@aleph.se> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <50DD60E2.506@aleph.se> Message-ID: <201212281618.qBSGIFNm012607@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Anders replied: >There is very strong empirical evidence that >increasing the female education level has loads >of good effects: not only increasing female >status and employment, but also decreasing birth >rates, increasing economic growth and so on. >Sprinkle in some useful ideas from feminism and >self-defense into the curriculum, and you would >likely have a quite powerful impact. See it as anti-salafism. And how do you educate them in a society that frowns on it, where it may be illegal or punished by the menfolk? Even nowadays in the US, it's not solved ? I had a girlfriend whose father beat her when she said she wanted to go to college. >But it would not be instant or high-tech. The goal is to ascertain what might work within two generations, for benefit of billions of women, without regard to cost or niceties. Once there's a set of plausible solutions, real-world considerations can come in. Here's one thought, which won't help everywhere. Certainly not in a wealthy misogynistic society, like Saudi Arabia. But it might be a useful component. Take the one laptop per child project. Change the design so that the laptops can only be used by women. Perhaps adapting the tech that uses a laptop's camera to authenticate users. Can we reliably enough, cross-culturally, identify human sex from a face? (Perhaps we'd need data specific to each population the laptops go to.) -- David. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 28 17:16:49 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:16:49 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <201212281618.qBSGIFNm012607@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <50DD60E2.506@aleph.se> <201212281618.qBSGIFNm012607@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <006101cde51f$1fc60370$5f520a50$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of David Lubkin ... >...Here's one thought, which won't help everywhere. Certainly not in a wealthy misogynistic society, like Saudi Arabia. But it might be a useful component. Take the one laptop per child project. Change the design so that the laptops can only be used by women. Perhaps adapting the tech that uses a laptop's camera to authenticate users. Can we reliably enough, cross-culturally, identify human sex from a face? (Perhaps we'd need data specific to each population the laptops go to.) -- David. _______________________________________________ Now you're thinking, excellent David. Face recognition may not do it, especially for children. Possibly clothing recognition. I thought of embedded estrogen receptor chips which would only need to differentiate between two hormones, but that is probably unnecessary, since there may be some very straightforward existing technology which could differentiate between genders. But all that may be going off in the wrong direction, since we have seen the recent appearance of the 100 dollar computer. These could be distributed widely, but have no cameras generally and even have a good reason why you can't really have computer cameras in those benighted cultures. So the task of figuring out how to differentiate between male and female would be entirely in software. Then the education available in the computer would be determined by the gender of the user. We are already part of the way there: install Angry Birds on all the powerbooks. Then the male children would be differentially drawn to that activity, while at least some of the girls are hungry for education and will spend their time with that instead. There is an aspect of this whole question that we have not really discussed. Humanity has been around long enough that most societies in most places reached equilibrium: population was stable long term, technological growth was net zero. An example would be North America before the Europeans and Africans arrived on the continent. Europeans were an example of a society which definitely was not in equilibrium: we were driven to change by technological advance. The basis of capitalism assumes not only a steady growth, but a wildly large growth. David's proposal strikes down one of the basic characteristics of any equilibrium society by introducing change. Good chance those societies will resist, for understandable reasons. In the long run, non-equilibrium societies have a huge advantage. The equilibrium societies know exactly where they are going: right here. Zero change is the goal. In non-equilibrium societies, we do not know where we are going, but wherever it is, we want to go there faster. From the point of view of the equilibrium society, any scheme we could introduce to raise the status of their women is an example of accelerating wildly in a random direction. spike From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 28 17:47:38 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:47:38 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Bees and chemicals Message-ID: Was this mentioned here? I am not sure... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothianidin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bees_and_toxic_chemicals Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 28 18:06:49 2012 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 10:06:49 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> Message-ID: <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> On 12/27/2012 11:36 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > ### If you know it's hard to get a replacement, you *will* be more > likely to treat what you have with care. And if your hard-to-get, > irreplaceable wife demands some respect, you will give it to her more > readily that to one you picked up at no cost. You appear to be starting to agree with me since you wrote "will be more likely" which is different from simply "will". Spike's original statement was "Then the women will be treated as princesses" not "Then the women will more likely treated as princesses" and this is not just a quibble about words rather it is an important distinction. These differences are important when discussing and analyzing complex social situations. Perhaps what we see in this discussion is that some people are confusing two different things. The first thing is for a person will have some value in obtaining something. The second thing is how the thing is treated once it is obtained. These are two different things. They might be related but they are different and I am attempting to point out this difference. As an example imagine a society where the men and boys grow up seeing wives treated poorly it would not be surprising to see that behavior repeated. Further if there is a wide spread belief that treating a wife harshly is good for the entire family then do not be surprised if that behavior continues. Also consider that in many less developed societies divorce is either de facto or de jure not a viable option for a wife who is poorly treated thus once a man has obtained a wife then there is no incentive to treat her well to keep her from leaving. Another factor to consider is if the wife has already been raised to feel that her role is to obey and be subservient to the husband to her own detriment and that harsh treatment is expected. I am not saying every less developed society is like this; what I am saying is that for very specific historical and cultural reasons there may be social dynamics and behaviors which do not match our first world expectations. This is why I suggested the first thing to do is to use 50% of the funds to > develop a deep understanding of the social, cultural, > psychological, medical and economic situation as it relates to women and > their role in society under consideration and > In particular it would be a really > good idea to actually talk to the girls and women Economics is a fine and useful way of understanding human social systems but it is not the only way and certainly does not yield an exhaustive or complete understanding. If we are analyzing a complex social system then certainly we need to use the economic perspective but we also need cultural anthropology, history, gender studies, psychology, sociology and the other social science and related fields to develop a full understanding of the situation. Having a full understanding of a situation might be the first step in avoiding a project which has an undesired outcome. Fred > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 28 18:14:00 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:14:00 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Bees and chemicals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Dec 2012, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Was this mentioned here? I am not sure... > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothianidin > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bees_and_toxic_chemicals BTW: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fchronmy.pszczoly.pl%2Fchronmypszczoly%2Fto-trzeba-przeczytac%2F%23more-1045 http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ffree4web.pl%2F3%2F2%2C52530%2C79670%2C7802387%2C%2CThread.html Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 28 18:39:52 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 10:39:52 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Bees and chemicals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000c01cde52a$ba28de00$2e7a9a00$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola Cc: Tomasz Rola Subject: [ExI] Bees and chemicals >...Was this mentioned here? I am not sure... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothianidin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bees_and_toxic_chemicals Regards, Tomasz Rola -- Thanks Tomasz, I have been looking at it, as it is quite the buzz over in the bee groups. I have personally observed more dying bees this year than any previous year, although I am not sure if it is necessarily from there being more bees. It might be that I was outdoors more and I am getting better at spotting them. What I fear is that the neonicotinoids are somehow accumulating in the environment, since they don't break down like nicotine does. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 18:08:19 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:08:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] uploads again In-Reply-To: References: <004901cddf97$f8afd0e0$ea0f72a0$@att.net> <50D4B9D2.2020104@aleph.se> <007601cddfc7$b9ec9cf0$2dc5d6d0$@att.net> <8CFADF3E7CB657F-1EF4-40452@webmail-d011.sysops.aol.com> <50D567BF.9070006@aleph.se> <50D7279A.1000206@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > mentioning "limitations", "constraints", or "rules" makes it so easy to > fall into the anthropomorphizing trap when trying to imagine how an AI > works. > I don't know what "the anthropomorphizing trap" means, but I do know that anthropomorphizing can be a very useful tool. > An AI that had the ego-syntonic goal of paperclip-maximizing (i.e. had no > neural subsystems capable of generating a competing goal) would not > spontaneously discard this goal. But such a thing would not be a AI it would be a APMM, a Artificial Paperclip Making Machine, and it's hard to see why humans would even bother to try to make such a thing, we already have enough machines that make paperclips. > I hold David Deutsch in great regard but I doubt that such goal-limited > intelligence would be uncreative I too hold David Deutsch in great regard but on the subject of AI he believes in some very strange things: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/ Some of the things he says seem to be flat out factually untrue, such as: "today in 2012 no one is any better at programming an AGI than Turing himself would have been. " By "AGI" I think he means AI not Adjusted Gross Income, if so then the statement is ridiculous. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Dec 28 19:26:10 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 14:26:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> Message-ID: <201212281926.qBSJQLWH015718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Spike wrote: > From the point of view of the equilibrium > society, any scheme we could introduce to raise > the status of their women is an example of > accelerating wildly in a random direction. and Fred wrote: >Having a full understanding of a situation might >be the first step in avoiding a project which has an undesired outcome. As we here know, the response of a person, economy, or society to a given input is apt to not be what a na?ve analysis suggests. I'm skeptical that the outcome will be precisely what we set out to achieve, however much we've researched and thought about the problem. Experiments seem worthwhile. Perhaps starting with a smaller place, like Madagascar or Haiti, with fewer external influences. Rather than the spontaneous order of my laptop suggestion, another direction is top-down, through a benevolent despot. I'm thinking of all the ways Atat?rk changed Turkey in about 15-20 years, some of which markedly improved the status of women. -- David. From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 28 19:54:35 2012 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:54:35 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <006101cde51f$1fc60370$5f520a50$@att.net> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <50DD60E2.506@aleph.se> <201212281618.qBSGIFNm012607@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <006101cde51f$1fc60370$5f520a50$@att.net> Message-ID: <50DDF8FB.2040407@moulton.com> On 12/28/2012 09:16 AM, spike wrote: > From the point of view of the > equilibrium society, any scheme we could introduce to raise the status of > their women is an example of accelerating wildly in a random direction. > This is one reason why I keep saying we need a deep understanding of the society in question. And we need to remember that lesser developed societies are not all the same. Remember also that some of these societies have seen other outside solutions that have failed and caused problems such as a putting in cash crops in place of the diversified sustainable agriculture and then when the world price drops they have a problem feeding themselves until they can revert back to the traditional crops. Thus outside intrusion might be viewed with suspicion. Another factor to consider when meddling in some other culture is to understand what the individuals consider as giving meaning and status to themselves. For example I have read that in many societies with arranged marriages it is the older women who spend a lot of time considering the perfect matching and this is a major source of their feeling of self-esteem and contributing to what they see as the strength of the society. If we outsiders come in and say we want women to marry for love and not by arranged marriages then we should not be surprised if there is opposition to the outside intrusion from women because all they see is that the role that they would have as they get older is now gone. Also please be very careful about this idea of making a computer that can only used by girls and women. The phenomena of considering anything related to women as "women's work" and thus of less value needs to be considered. If computers and related aspects of technology and a modern market economy are viewed with disdain by men who might be more in control of the overall society then we may inadvertently be hindering the modernization process that we want to encourage. Ideally the adoption of literacy and computer skills will be taking place in a context in which they are increasing valued otherwise the project might just fizzle out. And remember how sad it is when we see someone running around with a solution that they are so in love with but can not find a problem to which it applies? I am suggesting that we be careful about advocating solutions to problems we do not fully understand. That is why deeper understanding is needed and why small pilot projects can provide useful feedback for identifying potential pitfalls and as a way to develop a more robust understanding of the society. And let us not forget that societies are dynamic with communications starting to reach almost globally so what was a correct analysis at one time might not be valid today or tomorrow. I should not need to make the following comment but past history on this list indicates that it is likely necessary. It is possible that someone has their hands poised over their keyboard ready to type something like "What do you mean, do nothing?" or a similar sentiment. Please do not do that since it would be obviously false, it would make you look like an idiot and it would piss me off. Fred -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 28 18:34:05 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:34:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> Message-ID: <00db01cde529$eac807d0$c0581770$@natasha.cc> This might or might not be related, but I wonder how many men in the Middle East (West Asia) and Asia have sex change to become women vs. women to become men. Then I'd like to compare this to the Western world's stats. From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Dec 28 21:12:43 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:12:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 Keith Henson wrote: > > > I also suspect that shear physical limits are going to limit the size of > an AI due to "the bigger they are, the slower they think." The fastest signals in the human brain move at a couple of hundred meters a second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per second. So if you insist that the 2 most distant parts of a brain communicate as fast as they do in a human brain (and it is not immediately obvious why you should insist on such a thing) then parts in a AI could be at least one million times as distant. The volume of such a brain would be a million trillion times larger than a human brain. Even if 99.9% of that space were used just to deliver power and get rid of waste heat you'd still have a thousand trillion times as much volume for logic components as humans have room for inside their heads, and the components would be considerably smaller than the human ones too. That's why I think all this talk about how to make sure the AI always remains friendly is just futile, maybe it will be friendly and maybe it won't, but whatever it is we won't have any say in the matter. The AI will do what it wants to do and we're just in for the ride. > I have never come to a satisfactory formula of what physical size is > optimum, but I strongly suspect it is not as large as a human brain in size. > Optimum for what? The optimal brain size to reflexively dodge a hyper velocity bullet is probably not the same as the optimal brain size to figure out if the Goldbach' conjecture is true. John k Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 28 22:40:44 2012 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 23:40:44 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Bees and chemicals In-Reply-To: <000c01cde52a$ba28de00$2e7a9a00$@att.net> References: <000c01cde52a$ba28de00$2e7a9a00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Dec 2012, spike wrote: > Thanks Tomasz, I have been looking at it, as it is quite the buzz over in > the bee groups. I have personally observed more dying bees this year than > any previous year, although I am not sure if it is necessarily from there > being more bees. It might be that I was outdoors more and I am getting > better at spotting them. What I fear is that the neonicotinoids are somehow > accumulating in the environment, since they don't break down like nicotine > does. Somewhere in the pages I posted later to this thread there were comments buried about the C-thing staying in soil for up to three years, available to be ingested by plants' roots even if one stops using this stuff. It is interesting that in countries which prohibited it, research points to C* as a sole cause of bee problem, while in countries still using it, research says there are many possible causes. Also, an APENET project by Italian Ministry of Agriculture found out that even small doses are toxic for insects, which makes improvements to mechanical spreading devices kind of pointless (seems like it's impossible to improve them so they don't waste the substance above toxic levels). So... C* stays in soil, maybe accumulates there over time. As the rain washes it eventually, it goes to rivers and the sea. Wiki says invertebrates are touched hard by it. As they go to the historic books, so will fish and birds. Not good. Of course I may be very wrong - after all I am just a somewhat read dilettante. And it will require years, decades, maybe more than a century, before such effect shows up. But once it shows up, I'm afraid we are cooked. BTW, there are few other nasty things dumped to the seas during last 50-70 years, that might just now start to break out of their containers. For example, between 1945 and 1948 about 40-70 thousand tons of chemical ammo was dumped to Baltic Sea. This is one example but I am sure I could find much more if I wanted to waste my time in such manner. It does not require a genius to imagine that it will all corrode or react or break sooner or later. So who were the decision makers? True, oceans are huge, but still finite. I am much more afraid of things my species does to the oceans than few other things. Basically, it seems to me we are slowly changing oceans into huge chemical reactor. Very very slowly, indeed, but who studies the longterm effects of this? Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From natasha at natasha.cc Sat Dec 29 00:05:41 2012 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 17:05:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cognitive Science - Various Theories Message-ID: <004001cde558$3de62c70$b9b28550$@natasha.cc> Hi everyone - I thought you all might be able to help me better understand the different of cognitive science that are used to shape the field of human-computer interaction. After I have this knowledge, I can then develop two knowledge sources: (1) historical links to cognitive science (i.e., it seems HCI borrowed theories form cognitive science to test user performance) and (2) new links to concepts that lie beyond traditional cognitive science (e.g., activity theory). But first, I need to understand the theories in or of cognitive science that are relative to HCI. Can someone help me gain knowledge on this? Thanks! Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 09:19:01 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 09:19:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe Message-ID: Ethan Seigel has done another interesting post. Quotes: Because of the expanding Universe, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be moving away from us, or the more redshifted its light is. This image ? from a section of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field ? shows the highest redshift galaxies ever discovered. And yet, you don?t need to be this extreme to already be out of reach: any galaxy with a redshift of 1.8 or more, or that?s more than about 16 billion light years distant right now, is already beyond our reach. Not even if we had a relativistic spaceship, not even if we could travel at the speed of light ourselves could we reach it. Our first radio broadcast will never be received by those galaxies, and in fact nothing we do from now on can ever affect them. They?re already gone. In fact, the part that is presently within our reach encapsulates just 4% of the volume of the presently observable Universe! And it?s only going to get worse over time; as the Universe?s clock ticks by, the objects closer to that edge continue to expand away, receding progressively faster from us. While we might be able to reach the Virgo cluster now, in 100 billion years, it too will be gone. In 100 billion years, I should clarify, this will be all that?s left. The local group. Ourselves, Andromeda, and our mutual satellite galaxies. That?s it. ------- So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only get to the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. BillK From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 11:26:09 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:26:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Besides, you must not go too far, if you want to return here. In fact, doesn't matter how near you are, eventually it will be too far to return. All that, if the inflation will not change radically. On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 10:19 AM, BillK wrote: > Ethan Seigel has done another interesting post. > < > http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/12/28/the-universe-beyond-our-reach/ > > > > Quotes: > Because of the expanding Universe, the farther away a galaxy is, the > faster it appears to be moving away from us, or the more redshifted > its light is. This image ? from a section of the Hubble Ultra Deep > Field ? shows the highest redshift galaxies ever discovered. And yet, > you don?t need to be this extreme to already be out of reach: any > galaxy with a redshift of 1.8 or more, or that?s more than about 16 > billion light years distant right now, is already beyond our reach. > > Not even if we had a relativistic spaceship, not even if we could > travel at the speed of light ourselves could we reach it. Our first > radio broadcast will never be received by those galaxies, and in fact > nothing we do from now on can ever affect them. They?re already gone. > In fact, the part that is presently within our reach encapsulates just > 4% of the volume of the presently observable Universe! > > And it?s only going to get worse over time; as the Universe?s clock > ticks by, the objects closer to that edge continue to expand away, > receding progressively faster from us. While we might be able to reach > the Virgo cluster now, in 100 billion years, it too will be gone. In > 100 billion years, I should clarify, this will be all that?s left. > The local group. Ourselves, Andromeda, and our mutual satellite > galaxies. That?s it. > ------- > > > So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. > If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only get to > the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. > > > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 16:02:59 2012 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:02:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:00 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 Keith Henson wrote: >> >> > I also suspect that shear physical limits are going to limit the size of >> an AI due to "the bigger they are, the slower they think." > > The fastest signals in the human brain move at a couple of hundred meters a > second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per second. > So if you insist that the 2 most distant parts of a brain communicate as > fast as they do in a human brain (and it is not immediately obvious why you > should insist on such a thing) then parts in a AI could be at least one > million times as distant. That's true as long as you want a perception to action cycle no faster than a human. I suspect that an "arms race" will shorten this cycle to whatever its minimum is. If that is a million times faster, you are back to something no bigger than a human brain (within a couple of orders of magnitude). I am uneasy about a world where the typical post human experiences 50 million subjective years before the end of this calendar century. If you have some thoughts about why this will not or cannot happen, I would be most interested. Keith From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 17:40:51 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:40:51 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Besides, you must not go too far, if you want to return here. In fact, > doesn't matter how near you are, eventually it will be too far to return. > > All that, if the inflation will not change radically. > > I think any big journeys like that will be one way trips. Probably even to other stars within our own galaxy. But when we are considering the far future, my thinking is that any centuries long journeys will probably mean the whole civilization deciding to move together. Especially when you factor in the mental speedup of our future intelligences. If one actual year equals 50,000 years subjective life, then I doubt whether anyone will want to leave the civilization for that long. I suppose robot probes are possible, but the wait of millions of years subjective time for a reply makes it seem hardly worth while. BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 17:10:02 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 10:10:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Unless the speed of light is overcome somehow... -Kelly On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:19 AM, BillK wrote: > Ethan Seigel has done another interesting post. > < > http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/12/28/the-universe-beyond-our-reach/ > > > > Quotes: > Because of the expanding Universe, the farther away a galaxy is, the > faster it appears to be moving away from us, or the more redshifted > its light is. This image ? from a section of the Hubble Ultra Deep > Field ? shows the highest redshift galaxies ever discovered. And yet, > you don?t need to be this extreme to already be out of reach: any > galaxy with a redshift of 1.8 or more, or that?s more than about 16 > billion light years distant right now, is already beyond our reach. > > Not even if we had a relativistic spaceship, not even if we could > travel at the speed of light ourselves could we reach it. Our first > radio broadcast will never be received by those galaxies, and in fact > nothing we do from now on can ever affect them. They?re already gone. > In fact, the part that is presently within our reach encapsulates just > 4% of the volume of the presently observable Universe! > > And it?s only going to get worse over time; as the Universe?s clock > ticks by, the objects closer to that edge continue to expand away, > receding progressively faster from us. While we might be able to reach > the Virgo cluster now, in 100 billion years, it too will be gone. In > 100 billion years, I should clarify, this will be all that?s left. > The local group. Ourselves, Andromeda, and our mutual satellite > galaxies. That?s it. > ------- > > > So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. > If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only get to > the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. > > > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Dec 29 20:07:17 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:07:17 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1356811637.28808.YahooMailClassic@web165003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> David Lubkin suggested: > Here's one thought, ... > Change the design so that the laptops can only be used by women What?! Gah! No! You're suggesting that the answer to inequality and discrimination is /more/ inequality and discrimination? I can hardly believe this. It has "Wrong!!1!" written all over it. (quite apart from the fact that it would never work) Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Dec 29 20:19:41 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:19:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> BillK wrote: > Quotes: > Because of the expanding Universe... > So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. > If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only > get to > the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. Maybe not necessarily. What always occurs to me when I read about the expanding universe, is the possibility of something analogous to sound waves in air, applied at a hugely huger scale. Maybe the universe is reverberating to the big bang, or some similar long-ago event, and we are currently in the expansion phase of a universal 'sound-wave'. Maybe in a few billion years the galaxies will start compressing together again, then in a few billion years after that, expand again, etc. Any theoretical objections to this idea? I've never seen it discussed. (Note that this is different to the 'periodic big bang' idea. It's much less dramatic, just a periodic change in the density of the universe, like sound waves in air). Ben Zaiboc From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 16:36:02 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 09:36:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment Message-ID: This is a very interesting article from our point of view. http://bit.ly/TOI3Ve It discusses the future of 3d printing technology, and how that might interact with the second amendment (the right to bear arms). Would love to hear the group's reaction to the idea that you could just print up a weapon at your leisure. In the long term, this could be any weapon, a shoulder launched rocket propelled grenade, for example, or a mortar, not just a gun. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 18:53:27 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 13:53:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> The fastest signals in the human brain move at a couple of hundred >> meters a >> second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per >> second. >> So if you insist that the 2 most distant parts of a brain communicate as >> fast as they do in a human brain (and it is not immediately obvious why >> you >> should insist on such a thing) then parts in a AI could be at least one >> million times as distant. >> > > >That's true as long as you want a perception to action cycle no faster > than a human. I suspect that an "arms race" will shorten this cycle > to whatever its minimum is. If that is a million times faster, you > are back to something no bigger than a human brain (within a couple of > orders of magnitude). > Sometimes making the correct decision is easy but speed is of the essence. If you put your hand on a hot stove you don't need to engage your consciousness and use all the IQ points at your disposal to puzzle out if it would be a good idea to move your hand or not; in fact the pain signal doesn't even need to travel all the way to the brain, the spinal cord might not be the smartest kid on the block but even it knows that moving that hand off the stove would be a very wise thing to do. I imagine that a Jupiter Brain would use reflexes just like we do in cases where being quick is more important than being deep. > > I am uneasy about a world where the typical post human experiences 50 > million subjective years before the end of this calendar century. If you > have some thoughts about why this will not or cannot happen, I would be > most interested. > I can't think of any reason it won't happen, so trying to predict what the AI will do in the next second would be like trying to predict what you will do for the next 12 days. Thus predicting what the post singularity world will be like is a hopeless enterprise as is trying to make a AI that always remains "friendly". John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 22:17:04 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:17:04 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Maybe not necessarily. What always occurs to me when I read about the expanding universe, > is the possibility of something analogous to sound waves in air, applied at a hugely huger scale. > Maybe the universe is reverberating to the big bang, or some similar long-ago event, and we > are currently in the expansion phase of a universal 'sound-wave'. Maybe in a few billion years > the galaxies will start compressing together again, then in a few billion years after that, expand > again, etc. > > Any theoretical objections to this idea? I've never seen it discussed. > > (Note that this is different to the 'periodic big bang' idea. > It's much less dramatic, just a periodic change in the density of the universe, like sound waves in air). > > You should always try to ground speculation on current science knowledge. If you invent something that is purely speculative then you might as well say God did it, as you can assume anything is possible. The expansion of the universe seems to be driven by dark energy (whatever that is!). So there are three options. 1) Indefinite expansion. Dark energy carries on expanding as we see it operating now. This is the favourite option as there is no known reason for it to change behaviour. 2) Big Crunch. Dark energy reverses and starts collapsing the universe back to a point. 3) Big Rip. Dark energy gets stronger and keeps on increasing. This scatters everything quicker and quicker. Ethan Siegel wrote about this in 2011. (Ethan is a professor and theoretical astrophysicist and does this sort of thing for a living). :) BillK From painlord2k at libero.it Sat Dec 29 22:30:22 2012 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:30:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <201212281926.qBSJQLWH015718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> <201212281926.qBSJQLWH015718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <50DF6EFE.3050808@libero.it> Il 28/12/2012 20:26, David Lubkin ha scritto: > Spike wrote: > >> From the point of view of the equilibrium society, any scheme we could >> introduce to raise the status of their women is an example of >> accelerating wildly in a random direction. > > and Fred wrote: > >> Having a full understanding of a situation might be the first step in >> avoiding a project which has an undesired outcome. > > As we here know, the response of a person, economy, or society > to a given input is apt to not be what a na?ve analysis suggests. > I'm skeptical that the outcome will be precisely what we set out to > achieve, however much we've researched and thought about the > problem. > > Experiments seem worthwhile. Perhaps starting with a smaller > place, like Madagascar or Haiti, with fewer external influences. > > Rather than the spontaneous order of my laptop suggestion, > another direction is top-down, through a benevolent despot. I'm > thinking of all the ways Atat?rk changed Turkey in about 15-20 > years, some of which markedly improved the status of women. Only in cities, for few women, and it, apparently, don't lasted more than a decades at best. Mirco From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 22:45:11 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:45:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, BillK wrote: > On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >> (Note that this is different to the 'periodic big bang' idea. >> It's much less dramatic, just a periodic change in the density of the universe, like sound waves in air). > > You should always try to ground speculation on current science > knowledge. If you invent something that is purely speculative then you > might as well say God did it, as you can assume anything is possible. sound waves in air is within the realm of current science knowledge. From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Dec 29 23:10:07 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:10:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > This is a very interesting article from our point of view. > > http://bit.ly/TOI3Ve > > It discusses the future of 3d printing technology, and how that might > interact with the second amendment (the right to bear arms). > > Would love to hear the group's reaction to the idea that you could just > print up a weapon at your leisure. In the long term, this could be any > weapon, a shoulder launched rocket propelled grenade, for example, or a > mortar, not just a gun. A friend of mine asked me to help him build a spud gun. We went to Home Depot and the guy in the plumbing section asked if he could help. We didn't, at first, volunteer our intentions... but he recognized the most likely use for the parts we were buying and asked if he wanted them cut to length... he then recommended additional parts that would be required as well as where in the store to acquire them. So for $40 we have the making of a cannon to launch vegetables using a propellent as ubiquitous as hairspray. Now imagine the potato is replaced with a handful of nails, for example. Or to deviate from the gun motif, lets take a page from horror movies and video games: you can purchase a chainsaw at Home Depot. There's not a lot of defense against a madman wielding a chainsaw with intent to kill. If you take another example from movies, Heath Ledger's Joker (Dark Knight) made a pencil a most effective (and gruesome) lethal object. How much do we have to ban to keep people safe? How much restriction will simply escalate the craziness? To address the 3d printed gun I suggest that it's a distraction. If one has access to the bullets necessary to make a 3d printer gun into a lethal weapon, they have many other options for killing people even without the gun. The next step of course is to make a crossbow that doesn't even require access to bullets. The 3d printer gun plan will likely do very little to influence gun control, but will illustrate what a "danger" technology can be... so if guns are banned, we risk losing the right to own 3d printers because they _could_ be used to make a gun. The whole issue makes me so angry that I just can't write any more on it tonight. I don't care as much about the guns themselves as I do the general attitude towards revoking rights under the guise of public safety. From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 29 23:59:34 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:59:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <009b01cde620$8db713e0$a9253ba0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK >...The expansion of the universe seems to be driven by dark energy (whatever that is!). So there are three options. 1) Indefinite expansion. Dark energy carries on expanding as we see it operating now. This is the favourite option as there is no known reason for it to change behaviour. 2) Big Crunch. Dark energy reverses and starts collapsing the universe back to a point. 3) Big Rip. Dark energy gets stronger and keeps on increasing. This scatters everything quicker and quicker. BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, this all brings back memories from Spring of 1998, when the High-Z report came out reporting the evidence supporting the inflation model of the universe. I and those who follow that sort of thing agreed this isn't what we ordered at all, and hoped the report was wrong. As I recall, within just a couple weeks, Saul Perlmutter's team reported similar results, which was discouraging for those of us who thought the universe was either flat or closed. Most of us thought then that it was probably flat, but hoped like hell it was closed, so that we could imagine it all coming back together again and again, an infinite number of times. Needless to say, it was a shock to hear that the top cosmologists were concluding the universe is open. Perlmutter was a highly regarded cosmologist already by that time although he was a young guy, still in his 30s or around 40 perhaps. One of the guys at work claimed to know Permutter personally, and invited him to speak at a local Lockheed astronomy seminar. He accepted, and gave us a terrific pitch. That was in 1998 but I have clear memories of that talk. I couldn't find any flaws in it anywhere, even though I didn't like the conclusion and still don't. It would bring me enormous joy to learn that there was some systematic error, and that the universe is closed. Perlmutter mentioned the Big Rip notion at that time, although he didn't call it that. It was the notion of accelerating inflation. I reeeeaaalllly hoped he was mistaken on that one, and still hope so. Nothing against Saul Permutter at all (he seems like such a pleasant person, and scary smart, astronomy's version of Anders Sandberg) but I do hope he and the others missed something that reverses their grim conclusions. Permutter is not a tranhumanist, so he doesn't understand why it is such a sad thing that the Big Rip is only twenty billion years from now. spike From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 03:39:29 2012 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:39:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Women In-Reply-To: <50DF6EFE.3050808@libero.it> References: <201212280246.qBS2kmJm016910@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <007b01cde4a8$245aedf0$6d10c9d0$@att.net> <50DD199D.8080209@moulton.com> <50DD4987.9010808@moulton.com> <50DDDFB9.4040408@moulton.com> <201212281926.qBSJQLWH015718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <50DF6EFE.3050808@libero.it> Message-ID: I would use the money to produce enough fake/real news stories of women brutally murdering their abusers to destroy the meme that women can be easily taken advantage of. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 05:22:44 2012 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:22:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: The whole issue makes me so angry that I just can't write any more on > it tonight. I don't care as much about the guns themselves as I do > the general attitude towards revoking rights under the guise of public > safety. > I'm with you Mike. Revoking rights under the guise of public safety is a fool's bargain. This does give me another reason to want a 3d printer though... LOL -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 30 00:19:05 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:19:05 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Cognitive Science - Various Theories In-Reply-To: <004001cde558$3de62c70$b9b28550$@natasha.cc> References: <004001cde558$3de62c70$b9b28550$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <50DF8879.5040807@aleph.se> On 2012-12-29 01:05, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > But first, I need to understand the theories in or of cognitive science > that are relative to HCI. Can someone help me gain knowledge on this? That is a big question. The psychological part of HCI is more or less built on old psychophysics (how does perception and action scale as a function of the inputs? - typical questions are error rates as function of font size) and cognitive models of decisionmaking. Typical HCI textbooks do contain a lot of cognitive science models of how users function, trying to use them to predict what will work. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 30 00:00:48 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:00:48 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> On 2012-12-29 10:19, BillK wrote: > So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. > If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only get to > the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. Sure. Just 2e22 stars. And about a hundred times as much gas and dark matter. According to our calculations (they are in my paper with Stuart Armstrong), what matters the most is expansion velocity, not how long we delay. Since the remote galaxies will be reached in billions of years anyway a delay of a million years does not matter much if it leads to a bit faster probes. This is also favors small and fast probes with few generations and high fan-out rather than big and slow ones that spread shorter distances. An important question is what you want to use the mass for. If you want to turn it into hedonium and do not care about long-range communications you should try to get as much as possible. If you want a cohesive civilization you will not need much beyond a supercluster anyway, since the other superclusters will drift apart and lose causal contact with you. So hedonists might be more motivated to spread far and wide. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 30 00:16:15 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:16:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <50DF87CF.5020009@aleph.se> On 2012-12-29 21:19, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Maybe not necessarily. What always occurs to me when I read about the expanding universe, is the possibility of something analogous to sound waves in air, applied at a hugely huger scale. Maybe the universe is reverberating to the big bang, or some similar long-ago event, and we are currently in the expansion phase of a universal 'sound-wave'. Maybe in a few billion years the galaxies will start compressing together again, then in a few billion years after that, expand again, etc. > > Any theoretical objections to this idea? I've never seen it discussed. You are essentially arguing that the large-scale metric is dominated by the Weyl part of the the metric tensor (gravitational waves) and that the universe is not isotropic. I think some people have looked at it, since the standard models are isotropic, but there is *no* evidence for very large scale anisotropy. The closest things are hints that there might exist some weird twists and axiality to large-scale spacetime, but I have not seen any follow-up from the original claims. What you suggest is very very large scale isotropy, so that the wavelengths are large enough not to be visible to us right now. I don't have enough "feel" for the Friedman equations to tell how this would play out. But I suspect the isotropic and homogeneous expansion would swamp the waves: they become more dominant in collapsing Mixmaster universes, so I suspect the opposite would be true for an expanding universe. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 30 09:37:53 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:37:53 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <50E00B71.8030904@aleph.se> On 2012-12-30 06:22, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Mike Dougherty > wrote: > > The whole issue makes me so angry that I just can't write any more on > it tonight. I don't care as much about the guns themselves as I do > the general attitude towards revoking rights under the guise of public > safety. > > I'm with you Mike. Revoking rights under the guise of public safety is a > fool's bargain. I'm generally in agreement, but being in a philosophy department I cannot avoid complicating things. J.S. Mill had a nice concept of rights in his "On Liberty", in that the only legitimate restrictions on our freedoms imposed by society are those that prevent us from harming the interests of others. Of course, determining what constitutes harming interests can be subtle and political. Should we have the liberty to make anything? Mill had the example of selling poison, pointing out that we shouldn't prohibit it since it can be used for good - but that there is no threat to liberty to legislate having clear warning labels on the bottles. Being able to make stuff is like that: we can make bad things, but obviously also good things, and there is no way a machine can distinguish these categories (try writing a filter for baby-mulching machines). In fact, it is once-removed from the good or bad uses for the things printed: the baby-mulching machine might actually be intended and used as an edgy artwork rather than as a way of fertilizing gardens with toddlers. There is some saying about guns not killing people that might be applicable here. However, there seem to be certain things that are so dangerous that it is rational to ensure that they are very hard to make and come by. Nukes, nerve gas, enhanced pathogens, devices for triggering existential risks and so on probably belong in this category. Even though I just want to have the vial of uber-smallpox in my art exhibit, the danger of it merely existing is too big: it is in a sense harming the interests of others on a big scale by having a low probability of causing enormous damage. Whether a mere gun is anywhere close to this category can be debated: I think it is unlikely to matter much. The damage done by using it badly is great, but by no means as big as the WMD cases above (the Theoretical Lethality Index of a WMD is about 100,000 times greater - so a WMD a thousand times less likely to be misused is still far worse than a gun). But where to put the threshold depends on what is considered an acceptable risk by society, and that is up to societies to debate and decide. And change, as time goes on. Giving people increased manufacturing capacity means that we give up some control abilities for what things people can get their hands on. For some problematic objects lack of access was a convenient way of controlling their use. But we control the use of guns or poisons in many other ways beside making them harder to buy. In particular, by sanctioning the unsafe use of them. Most likely the simplest response to a loss of control over access is to strengthen the sanctions. Another approach is to make bad usage more detectable: more sensors and surveillance, or perhaps mandate that all legal guns should have "flight recorders" that cannot be disabled undetectably. In a world where everybody can have anything they wish for, we either need to ensure that people largely wish for safe and nice things (moral enhancement, peer pressure, few reasons to wish for badstuff), or that dangerous things or uses are detectable, preventable and/or acted against in a consistent way. We should not be surprised that a change in manufacturing ability ought to lead to shifts elsewhere in our society and its laws, norms and customs. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 10:32:00 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:32:00 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50DF87CF.5020009@aleph.se> References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <50DF87CF.5020009@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 12:16 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > You are essentially arguing that the large-scale metric is dominated by the > Weyl part of the the metric tensor (gravitational waves) and that the > universe is not isotropic. I think some people have looked at it, since the > standard models are isotropic, but there is *no* evidence for very large > scale anisotropy. The closest things are hints that there might exist some > weird twists and axiality to large-scale spacetime, but I have not seen any > follow-up from the original claims. > > What you suggest is very very large scale isotropy, so that the wavelengths > are large enough not to be visible to us right now. I don't have enough > "feel" for the Friedman equations to tell how this would play out. But I > suspect the isotropic and homogeneous expansion would swamp the waves: they > become more dominant in collapsing Mixmaster universes, so I suspect the > opposite would be true for an expanding universe. > > See: Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is a NASA Explorer mission that launched June 2001 to make fundamental measurements of cosmology -- the study of the properties of our universe as a whole. WMAP has been stunningly successful, producing our new Standard Model of Cosmology. The WMAP science team has? ... has put the "precision" in "precision cosmology" by reducing the allowed volume of cosmological parameters by a factor in excess of 68,000. The three most highly cited physics and astronomy papers published in the new millennium are WMAP scientific papers--- reflecting WMAP's enormous impact. ?mapped the pattern of tiny fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation (the oldest light in the universe) and produced the first fine-resolution (0.2 degree) full-sky map of the microwave sky. ?determined the universe to be 13.77 billion years old to within a half percent. ?nailed down the curvature of space to within 0.4% of "flat" Euclidean. ?determined that ordinary atoms (also called baryons) make up only 4.6% of the universe. ?completed a census of the universe and finds that dark matter (matter not made up of atoms) is 24.0% ?determined that dark energy, in the form of a cosmological constant, makes up 71.4% of the universe, causing the expansion rate of the universe to speed up. - "Lingering doubts about the existence of dark energy and the composition of the universe dissolved when the WMAP satellite took the most detailed picture ever of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)." - Science Magazine 2003, "Breakthrough of the Year" article ? mapped the polarization of the microwave radiation over the full sky and discovered that the universe was reionized earlier than previously believed. - "WMAP scores on large-scale structure. By measuring the polarization in the CMB it is possible to look at the amplitude of the fluctuations of density in the universe that produced the first galaxies. That is a real breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of structure." - ScienceWatch: "What's Hot in Physics", Simon Mitton, Mar./Apr. 2008. ?detected that the amplitude of the variations in the density of the universe on big scales is slightly larger than smaller scales. This, along with other results, supports "inflation", the idea is that the universe underwent a dramatic period of expansion, growing by more than a trillion trillion fold in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Tiny fluctuations were generated during this expansion that eventually grew to form galaxies. ? determined that the distribution of these fluctuations follows a bell curve with the same properties across the sky, and that there are equal numbers of hot and cold spots in the map. The simplest version of the inflation idea predicted these properties and remarkably, WMAP?s precision measurement of the properties of the fluctuations has confirmed these predictions, in detail. --------------- Amazing science work! BillK From lubkin at unreasonable.com Sun Dec 30 17:00:49 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:00:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] College 2.0 Message-ID: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> There are changes afoot in college education. We've been in an obscene cycle for decades. Families can't afford college, so there's political pressure to increase government assistance. As this happens, the schools raise their tuition to sop up the new money and fix the level of pain back where it was. While adding a deferred pain in loans the students can never pay back through the largely useless degrees they obtained. Some students, facing an uncomfortable workplace, go back for more degrees and more debt. All adding to political pressure to forgive much of this debt, which in effect furthers the burden on taxpayers who were out working. But probably not today's taxpayers, since we'll just increase the federal debt even further. Meanwhile, in other industries, costs plummet, in ripples from Moore's Law. And more and more efforts to give you stuff for free, often in exchange for ads you ignore or block, or data sold off about you. With college tuition priced to compete with what you pay for your recreational activities, there's great potential. I never stopped after graduate school. I just kept on buying books and learning, and still do, decades later. But I don't pay tuition, buy exorbitant textbooks, listen to dull lectures, learn lockstep to the class, or jump through professors' and school administrative hoops. At the prices discussed in this article, my interest is perked. Maybe I'll get another degree or forty. Now, I'm an outlier. But how many people would take a class or two, finish their degree, or get a master's if it cost no more than a cable tv package? My guess is this is, at least, a billion-dollar market. That will ultimately result in the dramatic reformation of the existing model of higher education. The on-campus experience will survive, but largely priced at a point a student could afford with a part-time job with no need of grants or loans. -- David. From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 16:20:32 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:20:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> Message-ID: The fastest way to go around should be on the tip of the laser beam, which prints a machine into the dust of a distant planet. A machine which do the same. And so forth, across the galaxies. This should be possible with a smart laser modulation, I think. Now, what would I print with such a laser in a distant galaxy, bound to escape me?I would print a machine, which divides this galaxy in two halfs or something. One "half" starts to move toward us, the other "half" are gamma rays escaping from us. We could harness some clusters, I think. Even with small probes, we could catch some escaping cows. On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 1:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-29 10:19, BillK wrote: > >> So much for humanity expanding throughout the universe. >> If humanity is ever able to reach another galaxy, we'll only get to >> the nearest few out of 200 billion galaxies. >> > > Sure. Just 2e22 stars. And about a hundred times as much gas and dark > matter. > > According to our calculations (they are in my paper with Stuart > Armstrong), what matters the most is expansion velocity, not how long we > delay. Since the remote galaxies will be reached in billions of years > anyway a delay of a million years does not matter much if it leads to a bit > faster probes. This is also favors small and fast probes with few > generations and high fan-out rather than big and slow ones that spread > shorter distances. > > An important question is what you want to use the mass for. If you want to > turn it into hedonium and do not care about long-range communications you > should try to get as much as possible. If you want a cohesive civilization > you will not need much beyond a supercluster anyway, since the other > superclusters will drift apart and lose causal contact with you. So > hedonists might be more motivated to spread far and wide. > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 17:57:23 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:57:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: <50E00B71.8030904@aleph.se> References: <50E00B71.8030904@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > In a world where everybody can have anything they wish for, we either need > to ensure that people largely wish for safe and nice things (moral > enhancement, peer pressure, few reasons to wish for badstuff), or that > dangerous things or uses are detectable, preventable and/or acted against in > a consistent way. We should not be surprised that a change in manufacturing > ability ought to lead to shifts elsewhere in our society and its laws, norms > and customs. I am against revoking the right to own guns. I am not against increased scrutiny/control on the process of acquiring a gun. I wouldn't mind it being difficult, time consuming, and expensive. That's pretty much what legislation does for/to us, isn't it? We have to pay to have our cars registered every year, why aren't guns the same situation? I am unable to legally operate a car without a license (passing sufficient testing on safe operation) as well as insurance (for when I/others fail to operate the vehicle safely) Why is gun ownership less burdensome than car ownership? I make this case because more people are killed by auto than by wanton gun violence... so it seems we would get more "utility" by revoking the right of automobile ownership - but _that's_ outright absurdity, yes? 3d printing is still in its infancy. I can imagine Kelly would acquire one of these devices before the strict controls are applied to ensure continued "freedom" to operate it. Of course, the supply of consumables will be increasingly taxed, regulated, etc until it becomes a controlled substance and placed under schedules like drugs. The public generally would rush out to buy the Apple-version of 3d printer, which only accepts plans/blueprints from the Apple store. Problem solved: every item created is approved by a central authority/source and is carefully logged to the account. Given the Intellectual Property issues that 3d printing creates with each "copied" object, I'm sure the vendor-specific account-controlled 3d printer is inevitable. Is this the right time to segue into another pandora's box of technology, DIY gene sequencing? Will your DNA sequence be your own Intellectual Property, a licensed "product" your parents leased from the baby-factory, or some wild-west equivalent of strongest legal team can prove/enforce ownership/patent of gene sequences? From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sun Dec 30 18:05:45 2012 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:05:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1356890745.6563.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-29 21:19, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > Maybe not necessarily.? What always occurs to me > when I read about the expanding universe, is the possibility > of something analogous to sound waves in air, applied at a > hugely huger scale.? ... > > Any theoretical objections to this idea?? I've > never seen it discussed. > > You are essentially arguing that the large-scale metric is > dominated by > the Weyl part of the the metric tensor (gravitational waves) > and that > the universe is not isotropic. I think some people have > looked at it, > since the standard models are isotropic, but there is *no* > evidence for > very large scale anisotropy. The closest things are hints > that there > might exist some weird twists and axiality to large-scale > spacetime, but > I have not seen any follow-up from the original claims. > > What you suggest is very very large scale isotropy, so that > the > wavelengths are large enough not to be visible to us right > now. I don't > have enough "feel" for the Friedman equations to tell how > this would > play out. But I suspect the isotropic and homogeneous > expansion would > swamp the waves: they become more dominant in collapsing > Mixmaster > universes, so I suspect the opposite would be true for an > expanding > universe. Thanks, Anders, that's the kind of answer I was looking for (even though I didn't really understand it!). So there are sound theoretical reasons (pun intended) why this idea is a non-starter. OK, that's good enough for me. Ben Zaiboc From lubkin at unreasonable.com Sun Dec 30 18:40:26 2012 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 13:40:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: References: <50E00B71.8030904@aleph.se> Message-ID: <201212301840.qBUIetDF012586@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: >We have to pay to have our cars registered every year, why aren't >guns the same situation? I am unable to legally operate a car >without a license (passing sufficient testing on safe operation) as >well as insurance (for when I/others fail to operate the vehicle >safely) Why is gun ownership less burdensome than car ownership? I >make this case because more people are killed by auto than by wanton >gun violence... so it seems we would get more "utility" by revoking >the right of automobile ownership - but _that's_ outright absurdity, yes? I am surprised to read this on this list. In the United States, you may legally own and operate a car without any licensing or scrutiny of either you or the car, if you are on private property. There may be jurisdictions where this is not true, but it generally holds. Certainly it is true in the five states I've lived in. This is not a minor matter. Many parents teach their children to drive on their own property, before they are old enough for a learner's permit. I knew a man with a 500,000 acre ranch, and I've lived on farms where driving on them was essential. Parking lots are usually private property. As are the roads in an office park or condominium complex. The Dulles Greenway is a privately owned toll road to Dulles Airport. At this moment, I have an unregistered, uninspected car in my garage. When I need the spot, I drive it onto the grass. In all those circumstances, the issues are whether you have the consent of the property owner and, if you want to be insured, that you meet the requirements of your insurer. So to treat guns like cars, those would be the only requirements for ownership, carry, and use of firearms on private property. -- David. From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 30 20:23:33 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 15:23:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: <201212301840.qBUIetDF012586@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <50E00B71.8030904@aleph.se> <201212301840.qBUIetDF012586@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 1:40 PM, David Lubkin wrote: >> when I/others fail to operate the vehicle safely) Why is gun ownership less >> burdensome than car ownership? I make this case because more people are >> killed by auto than by wanton gun violence... so it seems we would get more >> "utility" by revoking the right of automobile ownership - but _that's_ >> outright absurdity, yes? > > I am surprised to read this on this list. > > In the United States, you may legally own and operate a car > without any licensing or scrutiny of either you or the car, if you > are on private property. There may be jurisdictions where this > is not true, but it generally holds. Certainly it is true in the > five states I've lived in. > > So to treat guns like cars, those would be the only requirements > for ownership, carry, and use of firearms on private property. I don't know anyone with a 500,000 acre ranch. Many kids in urban and even suburban areas lack enough private property to park a car, much less learn to drive one. I certainly wasn't suggesting that gun ownership should be modeled solely on car ownership - only to compare with the registration&insurance nonsense associated with a car, that it might be made similarly (or more) annoying to own guns. If gun clubs wanted to rent assault rifles to patrons for the thrill of burning up hundreds of dollars worth of ammo, I think they should be allowed to do so. In that context, they're likely to have even more strict rules for who is allowed and what level of responsibility they must prove in order to afforded access. I would also expect that the guns registered to a club would create for them a liability if they were ever 'misplaced' and used in a crime - so they'd likely put considerable effort into securing their weapons too. (aside even from the fact that such items would be capital expenses or operating costs) I live in a state (PA) that still has "state stores" to control the purchase of wine and distilled spirits. We also can't even purchase OTC meds with pseudoephedrine on the chance someone is clever enough to use them in a manner inconsistent with labeling and cook 'em down into meth. This is another example where 99% of the population uses products as-intended, but then loses the opportunity to do so because a small minority violates the responsible usage expectation. From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 30 20:47:17 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:47:17 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> On 30/12/2012 17:20, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > The fastest way to go around should be on the tip of the laser beam, > which prints a machine into the dust of a distant planet. A machine > which do the same. And so forth, across the galaxies. > > This should be possible with a smart laser modulation, I think. Why? If you use a Gaussian beam with a waist width W it has divergence angle lambda/(pi W) where lambda is the wavelength. If you want to manipulate atoms, you need a waist width less than a nanometre, and a wavelength of the same size. That gives you a divergence angle of around 18 degrees. So if you want to build something in the Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million light years away, you need a laser aperture about 800,000 light years across. Somewhat bigger than our galaxy... -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 31 00:35:03 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:35:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] College 2.0 In-Reply-To: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <006e01cde6ee$acf36690$06da33b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of David Lubkin Subject: [ExI] College 2.0 There are changes afoot in college education. We've been in an obscene cycle for decades. ... -- David. _______________________________________________ Thanks David, I have been watching this closely. We know that college costs have gone from high to higher to absurd. We saw Sebastian Thrun offer a class in a format which is actually better than being present in the classroom in several important ways, but without offering credentials for the successful student. Clearly there is something in-between, with huge amounts of money to be made. Someone should be offering online courses with some form of credential or degree or means of verifying the student's skill level. It is a great tragedy when perfectly good money goes unmade. spike From protokol2020 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 00:53:36 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:53:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> Message-ID: I am not so sure about the laser part. Probes can do the same. They are a bit slower, but non the less. They can chop an escaping galaxy in half and send one half to us. We can't do it with all the galaxies we see, some are already galaxies too far away, but with some we can. To get some additional energy we will need in the future. On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 9:47 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 30/12/2012 17:20, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > >> The fastest way to go around should be on the tip of the laser beam, >> which prints a machine into the dust of a distant planet. A machine which >> do the same. And so forth, across the galaxies. >> >> This should be possible with a smart laser modulation, I think. >> > > Why? > > If you use a Gaussian beam with a waist width W it has divergence angle > lambda/(pi W) where lambda is the wavelength. If you want to manipulate > atoms, you need a waist width less than a nanometre, and a wavelength of > the same size. That gives you a divergence angle of around 18 degrees. So > if you want to build something in the Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million light > years away, you need a laser aperture about 800,000 light years across. > Somewhat bigger than our galaxy... > > > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Future of Humanity Institute > Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University > > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 02:20:13 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:20:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] College 2.0 In-Reply-To: <006e01cde6ee$acf36690$06da33b0$@att.net> References: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <006e01cde6ee$acf36690$06da33b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Dec 30, 2012 4:50 PM, "spike" wrote: > Someone should be offering online courses with > some form of credential or degree or means of verifying the student's skill > level. Many are. One famous example: University of Phoenix. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clementlawyer at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 04:42:13 2012 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:42:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist Message-ID: I thought this might interest the group. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist 3628 views this month; 0 overall Some while back, I found myself sitting next to an accomplished economics professor at a dinner event. Shortly after pleasantries, I said to him, ?economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,? just to see where things would go. It was a lively and informative conversation. I was somewhat alarmed by the disconnect between economic theory and physical constraints?not for the first time, but here it was up-close and personal. Though my memory is not keen enough to recount our conversation verbatim, I thought I would at least try to capture the key points and convey the essence of the tennis match?with some entertainment value thrown in. Cast of characters: *Physicist*, played by me; *Economist*, played by an established economics professor from a prestigious institution. Scene: banquet dinner, played in four acts (courses). *Note: because I have a better retention of my own thoughts than those of my conversational companion, this recreation is lopsided to represent my own points/words. So while it may look like a physicist-dominated conversation, this is more an artifact of my own recall capabilities. I also should say that the other people at our table were not paying attention to our conversation, so I don?t know what makes me think this will be interesting to readers if it wasn?t even interesting enough to others at the table! But here goes?* Act One: Bread and Butter *Physicist:* Hi, I?m Tom. I?m a physicist. *Economist:* Hi Tom, I?m [ahem..cough]. I?m an economist. *Physicist:* Hey, that?s great. I?ve been thinking a bit about growth and want to run an idea by you. I claim that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely . *Economist:* [chokes on bread crumb] Did I hear you right? Did you say that growth can*not* continue forever? *Physicist:* That?s right. I think physical limits assert themselves. *Economist:* Well sure, nothing truly lasts *forever*. The sun, for instance, will not burn forever. On the billions-of-years timescale, things come to an end. *Physicist:* Granted, but I?m talking about a more immediate timescale, here on Earth. Earth?s physical resources?particularly energy?are limited and may prohibit continued growth within centuries, or possibly much shorter depending on the choices we make. There are thermodynamic issues as well. *Economist:* I don?t think energy will ever be a limiting factor to economic growth. Sure, conventional fossil fuels are finite. But we can substitute non-conventional resources like tar sands, oil shale, shale gas, etc. By the time these run out, we?ll likely have built up a renewable infrastructure of wind, solar, and geothermal energy?plus next-generation nuclear fission and potentially nuclear fusion. And there are likely energy technologies we cannot yet fathom in the farther future. *Physicist:* Sure, those things could happen, and I hope they do at some non-trivial scale. But let?s look at the physical implications of the energy scale *expanding* into the future. So what?s a typical rate of annual energy growth over the last few centuries? *Economist:* I would guess a few percent. Less than 5%, but at least 2%, I should think. [image: U.S. total energy 1650-present (logarithmic)] Total U.S. Energy consumption in all forms since 1650. The vertical scale is logarithmic, so that an exponential curve resulting from a constant growth rate appears as a straight line. The red line corresponds to an annual growth rate of 2.9%. Source: EIA. *Physicist:* Right, if you plot the U.S. energy consumption *in all forms* from 1650 until now, you see a phenomenally faithful exponential at about 3% per year over that whole span. The situation for the whole world is similar. So how long do you think we might be able to continue this trend? *Economist:* Well, let?s see. A 3% growth rate means a doubling time of something like 23 years. So each century might see something like a 15?20? increase. I see where you?re going. A few more centuries like that would perhaps be absurd. But don?t forget that population was increasing during centuries past?the period on which you base your growth rate. Population will stop growing before more centuries roll by. *Physicist:* True enough. So we would likely agree that energy growth will not continue indefinitely. But two points before we continue: First, I?ll just mention that energy growth has far outstripped population growth, so that *per-capita* energy use has surged dramatically over time?our energy lives today are far richer than those of our great-great-grandparents a century ago [economist nods]. So even if population stabilizes, we are accustomed to per-capita energy growth: total energy would have to continue growing to maintain such a trend [another nod]. Second, thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves. I?m not talking about global warming, CO2 build-up, etc. I?m talking about radiating the spent energy into space. I assume you?re happy to confine our conversation to Earth, foregoing the spectre of an exodus to space , colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc. *Economist:* More than happy to keep our discussion grounded to Earth. *Physicist:* [sigh of relief: not a space cadet] Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that?s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10? increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is *independent of technology*. Even if we don?t have a *name * for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. *Economist:* That?s a striking result. Could not technology pipe or beam the heat elsewhere, rather than relying on thermal radiation? *Physicist:* Well, we *could* (and do, somewhat) beam non-thermal radiation into space, like light, lasers, radio waves, etc. But the problem is that these ?sources? are forms of high-grade, low-entropy energy. Instead, we?re talking about getting rid of the *waste heat* from all the processes by which we use energy. This energy *is* thermal in nature. We might be able to scoop up *some* of this to do useful ?work,? but at very low thermodynamic efficiency. If you want to use high-grade energy in the first place, having high-entropy waste heat is pretty inescapable. *Economist:* [furrowed brow] Okay, but I still think our path can easily accommodate at least a *steady* energy profile. We?ll use it more efficiently and for new pursuits that continue to support growth. *Physicist:* Before we tackle that, we?re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the *entire sun* in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy?100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not *that* long, from a historical perspective. We * know* what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I *know* what we?re *not*going to be doing 2500 years hence. *Economist:* That?s really remarkable?I appreciate the detour. You said about 1400 years to reach parity with solar output? *Physicist:* Right. And you can see the thermodynamic point in this scenario as well. If we tried to generate energy at a rate commensurate with that of the Sun in 1400 years, and did this on Earth, physics demands that the surface of the Earth must be *hotter* than the (much larger) surface of the Sun. Just like 100 W from a light bulb results in a much hotter surface than the same 100 W you and I generate via metabolism, spread out across a much larger surface area. *Economist:* I see. That does make sense. Act Two: Salad *Economist:* So I?m as convinced as I need to be that growth in raw energy use is a limited proposition?that we must one day at the very least stabilize to a roughly constant yearly expenditure. At least I?m willing to accept that as a starting point for discussing the long term prospects for economic growth. But coming back to your first statement, I don?t see that this threatens the indefinite continuance of *economic* growth. For one thing, we can keep energy use fixed and still do more with it in each passing year via efficiency improvements. Innovations bring new ideas to the market, spurring investment, market demand, etc. These are things that will not run dry. We have plenty of examples of fundamentally important resources in decline, only to be substituted or rendered obsolete by innovations in another direction. *Physicist:* Yes, all these things happen, and will continue at some level. But I am not convinced that they represent limitless resources. *Economist:* Do you think ingenuity has a limit?that the human mind itself is only so capable? That could be true, but we can?t credibly predict how close we might be to such a limit. *Physicist:* That?s not really what I have in mind. Let?s take efficiency first. It is true that, over time, cars get better mileage, refrigerators use less energy, buildings are built more smartly to conserve energy, etc. The best examples tend to see factor-of-two improvements on a 35 year timeframe, translating to 2% per year. But many things are already as efficient as we can expect them to be. Electric motors are a good example, at 90% efficiency. It will always take 4184 Joules to heat a liter of water one degree Celsius. In the middle range, we have giant consumers of energy?like power plants?improving much more slowly, at 1% per year or less. And these middling things tend to be something like 30% efficient. How many more ?doublings? are possible? If many of our devices were 0.01% efficient, I would be more enthusiastic about centuries of efficiency-based growth ahead of us. But we may only have one more doubling in us, taking less than a century to realize. *Economist:* Okay, point taken. But there is more to efficiency than incremental improvement. There are also game-changers. Tele-conferencing instead of air travel. Laptop replaces desktop; iPhone replaces laptop, etc.?each far more energy frugal than the last. The internet is an example of an enabling innovation that changes the way we use energy. *Physicist:* These are important examples, and I do expect some continuation along this line, but we still need to eat, and no activity can get away from energy use entirely. [semi-reluctant nod/bobble] Sure, there are lower-intensity activities, but nothing of economic value is completely free of energy. *Economist:* Some things can get awfully close. Consider virtualization. Imagine that in the future, we could all own virtual mansions and have our every need satisfied: all by stimulative neurological trickery. We would stil need nutrition, but the energy required to*experience* a high-energy lifestyle would be relatively minor. This is an example of enabling technology that obviates the need to engage in energy-intensive activities. Want to spend the weekend in Paris? You can do it without getting out of your chair. [More like an IV-drip-equipped toilet than a chair, the physicist thinks.] *Physicist:* I see. But this is still a finite expenditure of energy per person. Not only does it take energy to feed the person (today at a rate of 10 kilocalories of energy input per kilocalorie eaten, no less), but the virtual environment probably also requires a supercomputer?by today?s standards?for every virtual voyager. The supercomputer at UCSD consumes something like 5 MW of power. Granted, we can expect improvement on this end, but today?s supercomputer eats 50,000 times as much as a person does, so there is a big gulf to cross. I?ll take some convincing. Plus, not everyone will want to live this virtual existence. *Economist:* Really? Who could refuse it? All your needs met and an extravagant lifestyle?what?s not to like? I hope I can live like that myself someday. *Physicist:* Not me. I suspect many would prefer the smell of real flowers?complete with aphids and sneezing; the feel of real wind messing up their hair; even real rain, real bee-stings, and all the rest. You might be able to simulate all these things, but not everyone will want to live an artificial life. And as long as there are *any* holdouts, the plan of squeezing energy requirements to some arbitrarily low level fails. Not to mention meeting fixed bio-energy needs. Act Three: Main Course *Physicist:* But let?s leave the Matrix, and cut to the chase. Let?s imagine a world of steady population and steady energy use. I think we?ve both agreed on these physically-imposed parameters. If the flow of energy is fixed, but we posit continued economic growth, then GDP continues to grow while energy remains at a fixed scale. This means that energy?a physically-constrained resource, mind?must become arbitrarily cheap as GDP continues to grow and leave energy in the dust. *Economist:* Yes, I think energy plays a diminishing role in the economy and becomes too cheap to worry about. *Physicist:* Wow. Do you really believe that? A physically limited resource (read scarcity) that is fundamental to every economic activity becomes arbitrarily cheap? [turns attention to food on the plate, somewhat stunned] *Economist:* [after pause to consider] Yes, I do believe that. *Physicist:* Okay, so let?s be clear that we?re talking about the same thing. Energy today is roughly 10% of GDP. Let?s say we cap the physical amount available each year at some level, but allow GDP to keep growing. We need to ignore inflation as a nuisance in this case: if my 10 units of energy this year costs $10,000 out of my $100,000 income; then next year that same amount of energy costs $11,000 and I make $110,000?I want to ignore such an effect as ?meaningless? inflation: the GDP ?growth? in this sense is not *real*growth, but just a re-scaling of the value of money. *Economist:* Agreed. *Physicist:* Then in order to have *real* GDP growth on top of flat energy, the fractional cost of energy goes down relative to the GDP as a whole. *Economist:* Correct. *Physicist:* How far do you imagine this can go? Will energy get to 1% of GDP? 0.1%? Is there a limit? *Economist:* There does not need to be. Energy may become of secondary importance in the economy of the future?like in the virtual world I illustrated. *Physicist:* But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy *all of it*, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt. Food would stop arriving at the plate without energy for purchase, so people would pay attention to this. Someone would be willing to pay more for it. Everyone would. There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. *Economist:* That floor may be very low: much lower than the 5?10% we pay today. *Physicist:* But is there a floor? How low are you willing to take it? 5%? 2%? 1%? *Economist:* Let?s say 1%. *Physicist:* So once our fixed annual energy costs 1% of GDP, the 99% remaining will find itself stuck. If it tries to grow, energy prices must grow in proportion and we have monetary inflation, but no real growth. *Economist:* Well, I wouldn?t go that far. You can still have growth without increasing GDP. *Physicist:* But it seems that you are now sold on the notion that the cost of energy would not naturally sink to arbitrarily low levels. *Economist:* Yes, I have to retract that statement. If energy is indeed capped at a steady annual amount, then it is important enough to other economic activities that it would not be allowed to slip into economic obscurity. *Physicist:* Even early economists like Adam Smith foresaw economic growth as a temporary phase lasting maybe a few hundred years, ultimately limited by land (which is where energy was obtained in that day). If humans are successful in the long term, it is clear that a steady-state economic theory will *far* outlive the transient growth-based economic frameworks of today. Forget Smith, Keynes, Friedman, and that lot. The economists who devise a functioning steady-state economic system stand to be remembered for a longer eternity than the growth dudes. [Economist stares into the distance as he contemplates this alluring thought.] Act Four: Dessert *Economist:* But I have to object to the statement that growth must stop once energy amount/price saturates. There will always be innovations that people are willing to purchase that do not require additional energy. *Physicist:* Things will certainly change. By ?steady-state,? I don?t mean static. Fads and fashions will always be part of what we do?we?re not about to stop being human. But I?m thinking more of a zero-sum game here. Fads come and go. Some fraction of GDP will always go toward the fad/innovation/gizmo of the day, but while one fad grows, another fades and withers. Innovation therefore will maintain a certain flow in the economy, but not necessarily *growth*. *Economist:* Ah, but the key question is whether life 400 years from now is undeniably of higher quality than life today. Even if energy is fixed, and GDP is fixed once the cost of energy saturates at the lower bound, will quality of life continue to improve in objectively agreed-upon ways? *Physicist:* I don?t know how objective such an assessment can be. Many today yearn for days past. Maybe this is borne of ignorance or romanticism over the past (1950?s often comes up). It may be really exciting to imagine living in Renaissance Europe, until a bucket of nightsoil hurled from a window splatters off the cobblestone and onto your breeches. In any case, what kind of universal, objective improvements might you imagine? *Economist:* Well, for instance, look at this dessert, with its decorative syrup swirls on the plate. It is marvelous to behold. *Physicist:* And tasty. *Economist:* We value such desserts more than plain, unadorned varieties. In fact, we can imagine an equivalent dessert with equivalent ingredients, but the decorative syrup unceremoniously pooled off to one side. We value the decorated version more. And the chefs will continue to innovate. Imagine a preparation/presentation 400 years from now that would blow your mind?you never thought dessert could be made to look so amazing and taste so delectably good. People would line the streets to get hold of such a creation. No more energy, no more ingredients, yet of increased value to society. That?s a form of quality of life improvement, requiring no additional resources, and perhaps costing the same fraction of GDP, or income. *Physicist:* I?m smiling because this reminds me of a related story. I was observing at Palomar Observatory with an amazing instrumentation guru named Keith who taught me much. Keith?s night lunch?prepared in the evening by the observatory kitchen and placed in a brown bag?was a tuna-fish sandwich in two parts: bread slices in a plastic baggie, and the tuna salad in a small plastic container (so the tuna would not make the bread soggy after hours in the bag). Keith plopped the tuna onto the bread in an inverted container-shaped lump, then put the other piece of bread on top without first spreading the tuna. It looked like a snake had just eaten a rat. Perplexed, I asked if he intended to spread the tuna before eating it. He looked at me quizzically (like Morpheus in the Matrix: ?You think that?s air you?re breathing? Hmm.?), and said?memorably, ?It all goes in the same place.? My point is that the stunning presentation of desserts will not have universal value to society. It all goes in the same place, after all. [I'll share a little-known secret. It's hard to beat a Hostess Ding Dong for dessert. At 5% the cost of fancy desserts, it's not clear how much value the fancy things add.] After-Dinner Contemplations The evening?s after-dinner keynote speech began, so we had to shelve the conversation. Reflecting on it, I kept thinking, ?This should not have happened. A prominent economist should not have to walk back statements about the fundamental nature of growth when talking to a scientist with no formal economics training.? But as the evening progressed, the original space in which the economist roamed got painted smaller and smaller. First, he had to acknowledge that energy may see physical limits. I don?t think that was part of his initial virtual mansion. Next, the efficiency argument had to shift away from straight-up improvements to transformational technologies. Virtual reality played a prominent role in this line of argument. Finally, even having accepted the limits to energy growth, he initially believed this would prove to be of little consequence to the greater economy. But he had to ultimately admit to a floor on energy price and therefore an end to traditional growth in GDP?against a backdrop fixed energy. I got the sense that this economist?s view on growth met some serious challenges during the course of the meal. Maybe he was not putting forth the most coherent arguments that he could have made. But he was very sharp and by all measures seemed to be at the top of his game. I choose to interpret the episode as illuminating a blind spot in traditional economic thinking. There is too little acknowledgement of physical limits, and even the non-compliant nature of humans, who may make choices we might think to be irrational?just to remain independent and unencumbered. I recently was motivated to read a *real* economics textbook: one written by people who understand and respect physical limitations. The book, called *Ecological Economics*, by Herman Daly and Joshua Farley, states in its Note to Instructors: ?we do not share the view of many of our economics colleagues that growth will solve the economic problem, that narrow self-interest is the only dependable human motive, that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource, that the market can efficiently allocate all types of goods, that free markets always lead to an equilibrium balancing supply and demand, or that the laws of thermodynamics are irrelevant to economics. This is a book for me! Epilogue The conversation recreated here did challenge my own understanding as well. I spent the rest of the evening pondering the question: ?Under a model in which GDP is fixed?under conditions of stable energy, stable population, steady-state economy: if we accumulate knowledge, improve the quality of life, and thus create an unambiguously more desirable world within which to live, doesn?t *this* constitute a form of economic growth?? I had to concede that yes?it does. This often falls under the title of ?development? rather than ?growth.? I ran into the economist the next day and we continued the conversation, wrapping up loose ends that were cut short by the keynote speech. I related to him my still-forming position that yes, we can continue tweaking quality of life under a steady regime. I don?t think I ever would have explicitly thought otherwise, but I did not consider this to be a form of economic growth. One way to frame it is by asking if future people living in a steady-state economy?yet separated by 400 years?would always make the same, obvious trades? Would the future life be objectively better, even for the same energy, same GDP, same income, etc.? If the answer is yes, then the far-future person gets more for their money: more for their energy outlay. Can this continue indefinitely (thousands of years)? Perhaps. Will it be at the 2% per year level (factor of ten better every 100 years)? I doubt that. So I can twist my head into thinking of quality of life development in an otherwise steady-state as being a form of indefinite growth. But it?s not your father?s growth. It?s not growing GDP, growing energy use, interest on bank accounts, loans, fractional reserve money, investment. It?s a whole different ballgame, folks. Of that, I am convinced. Big changes await us. An unrecognizable economy. The main lesson for me is that growth is not a ?good quantum number,? as physicists will say: it?s not an invariant of our world. Cling to it at your own peril. *Note: This conversation is my contribution to a series at www.growthbusters.org honoring the 40th anniversary of the Limits to Growth study. You can explore the series here. Also see my previous reflection on the Limits to Growth work. You may also be interested in checking out and signing the Pledge to Think Small and consider organizing an Earth Day weekend house party screening of the GrowthBusters movie.* This entry was posted in Growth and tagged economics , limits , thermodynamics by tmurphy . Bookmark the permalink . 396 THOUGHTS ON ?EXPONENTIAL ECONOMIST MEETS FINITE PHYSICIST? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 31 06:05:32 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:05:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] tests again Message-ID: <000f01cde71c$d84f7940$88ee6bc0$@att.net> A few weeks ago I asked the geeks if anyone knew of a way to find a test writers template. Several suggested Google terms or sites. I looked at five, narrowed it to two, and chose Wondershare Quiz Creator. Thanks to all who replied. I think it was BillK who found WonderShare, mighta been Mike. The task has grown even more interesting. As you may recall, I originally set out to make a test that would qualify technicians. Then I realized something that is a cool challenge: design the test so that the test taker may use online resources, anything found on a typical desktop PC with a web connection, just as the typical technician would have at work. That makes the whole thing an order of magnitude harder for the test designer, but results in much more significant results. It is fun to have a test on one's internal knowledge, but really it is no more significant than being the winner on a quiz show. In the real world, we all have access to externalized knowledge. The test is designed to show how effectively the technician can access that external knowledge pool out there on the internet. All suggestions welcome. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 31 06:42:07 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:42:07 -0800 Subject: [ExI] tests again Message-ID: <001d01cde721$f433b9a0$dc9b2ce0$@att.net> From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] Subject: tests again >. In the real world, we all have access to externalized knowledge. The test is designed to show how effectively the technician can access that external knowledge pool out there on the internet. All suggestions welcome. Spike Something cool: Wondershare Quiz Creator lets you imbed photos and video in your quiz. That in itself allows a geek to write a test which nearly any geek would get immediately, but any non-geek could tap away on the internet for a week and come up blank. For instance, a good mechanical technician's question would be 1. What is this person doing? The answer would not be multiple choice, because that would make it too easy. The answer would be typed in on the keyboard: he or she is adjusting valves. Are there any mechanical geeks here who missed that one? What I am toying with now is using one of Thune's techniques to have a scaled score. For instance, if the word "valve" or "valves" does not appear in the answer, I see no way to award any points. But there should be a way to give a little more credit if the geek answered "Adjusting valve lash." Even more if the response is "Adjusting exhaust valve lash, which you know is the exhaust valve because of discoloration." Even more if the response is "Adjusting valve lash on one of the old BMW air cooled boxer twin motorcycles, which you know was built before 1993 because of the way those pushrods come in on the under-side of the cylinder." Then of course you need to figure out ways to keep giving more credit if the geek can add comments such as, ".and the person in the photo needs to use a torque wrench unless he or she has done about a hundred of these things, otherwise he or she could undertorque that locknut and it can come loose, in which case he or she must start all over, and that's the best case because if the locknut does come loose, often the valve lash closes instead of opens because of the way that head is designed, so the valve will fail to seat and it will burn the valve and it's goodbye for about a hundred clams to the krauts for a new one, dammit." So now the test taker must figure out a way to write software to read the answers and assign a point value. All suggestions welcome, about tests, not exhaust valves or German engineering. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 21338 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 07:46:56 2012 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:46:56 -0800 Subject: [ExI] tests again In-Reply-To: <001d01cde721$f433b9a0$dc9b2ce0$@att.net> References: <001d01cde721$f433b9a0$dc9b2ce0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 10:42 PM, spike wrote: > >? In the real world, we all have access to externalized knowledge. The > test is designed to show how effectively the technician can access that > external knowledge pool out there on the internet. All suggestions > welcome. Spike > Be careful: if your test becomes popular enough, then someone is likely to eventually write up the questions and answers they faced. In other words, their version of the test itself may become part of this externalized knowledge. > What I am toying with now is using one of Thune?s techniques to have a > scaled score. For instance, if the word ?valve? or ?valves? does not > appear in the answer, I see no way to award any points. But there should > be a way to give a little more credit if the geek answered ?Adjusting valve > lash.? Even more if the response is ?Adjusting exhaust valve lash, which > you know is the exhaust valve because of discoloration.? Even more if the > response is ?Adjusting valve lash on one of the old BMW air cooled boxer > twin motorcycles, which you know was built before 1993 because of the way > those pushrods come in on the under-side of the cylinder.? > What if they just said "Adjusting lash", with all those other words, rather than "Adjusting valve lash". They clearly got it, but 0 points for leaving out the one word? Such all-or-nothing rules can fall prey to that type of problem in any sufficiently complex situation, such as identifying what the person in that photo is doing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 31 09:49:40 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:49:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> On 2012-12-31 01:53, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > I am not so sure about the laser part. Probes can do the same. They are > a bit slower, but non the less. They can chop an escaping galaxy in half > and send one half to us. The galaxy has to obey the rocket equation. Let's try to bring home M87, 53.5 Mly away. Let's give ourselves 100 billion years to do it (beyond that, and the expansion will likely win). The necessary delta v is 0.000535 lightyears per year, or 160,000 m/s. (this is on the same scale as normal galaxy velocities, actually) Let's use the non-relativistic case (this is definitely slow enough). DeltaV = v_e log(m_initial / m_end) where v_e is the effective exhaust velocity and m_initial the initial mass and m_end the final mass. For a given delta V and v_e the mass ratio is exp(Delta V / v_e). If you use antimatter rocketry v_e is around 100,000,000 m/s. So we get a mass ratio of 2.72 - we will waste 2/3 of the galaxy as reaction mass. But wait, there is worse! We probably want to *stop* the galaxy as it arrives, so we need to remove an equal amount of delta v. That means the mass ratio squares, and we loose 8/9 of the galaxy mass. Still, antimatter propelled galaxies are a bit... messy. What if we use it as a photon rocket? Highest possible v_e, a different equation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_rocket We can use Spike's reflecting Dyson shells to do it. I get a mass ratio of sqrt[(1 + Delta v / c) / (1 - (Delta V/c)]. In our case it is 1.000533 (no stop) and 1.001 (stop). Quite acceptable! (However, I have not calculated whether the luminosity is enough to get the deltaV - we might have to boost some of the star luminosity, especiallysince we have a dark matter halo to drag along) Generally, I suspect we can merge together local superclusters is way. Hydra-Centaurus is about 150-200 Mly away. So if we want to bring it over in 100 billion years we need 3-4 times the delta V. The mass ratio is still pretty decent. Beyond a certain range the requirements go *way* up, because you will have to move against the expansion. Already Hydra-Centaurus has a redshift around z=1.012, so we have to overcome a 0.012 c velocity - much bigger than the above speeds (but still nonrelativistic). Plugging that in the photon rocket stopping mass ratio becomes 1.024 - not too bad. But at z=1 (8.4 Gly) the ratio is 4, z=3 (11 Gly) it is 9, z=4 (12 Gly) it is 16 (neat pattern - see the equations for why). At the far distances you need to take ongoing expansion into account, which I don't feel a need for today (I have a new year's party to prepare). Let's just conclude that moving galaxies is not too impossible if you let them take their time. However, it will be *very* visible and we can be fairly certain we are not seeing anybody doing it in our past light cone... or maybe the Great Attractor is actually our local dark-matter powered supercivilization? -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 11:02:58 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:02:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The future of the Second Ammendment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > >> The whole issue makes me so angry that I just can't write any more on >> it tonight. I don't care as much about the guns themselves as I do >> the general attitude towards revoking rights under the guise of public >> safety. > > > I'm with you Mike. Revoking rights under the guise of public safety is a > fool's bargain. ### Despite my all-out libertarianism I am not comfortable thinking about these issues in terms of rights. I am too much of a consequentialist, and I treat the mental anguish we feel when our rights are trampled as a consequence, similar to the pain of a stubbed toe, therefore open to trade-offs against other consequences. The problem with revoking rights nowadays is that it mostly occurs by government fiat - and therefore inefficiently. If a small land owner tells his farmhands that they have to give up the guns they used on his farm because he changed his mind about the security issues and trade-offs surrounding them, that's OK, because the results of this trade-off weigh all costs, including the farmhands' disappointment - if they are pissed off, they can quit cheaply, and use guns on other people's land. But, if the large, monopolistic land owner makes that decision, there is no easy way for the injured feelings about rights to make themselves a part of the trade-off. A vote discards probably well over 99% of information about the electorate's desires, quitting is very expensive, it's a mess. So I would say, letting a government dictate what is right or wrong is a fool's bargain, whether we are talking about owning a gun or flushing a toilet. Rafal From pharos at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 10:58:50 2012 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:58:50 +0000 Subject: [ExI] iPad problem Message-ID: In some ways the dead tree medium is preferable. BillK From protokol2020 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 12:08:41 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:08:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> Message-ID: > We probably want to *stop* the galaxy as it arrives Don't worry! It will be stopped with the galaxy coming from the opposite direction. In the case of the eternal inflation we should consider this very seriously. Building a hyper-massive black hole here. > or maybe the Great Attractor is actually our local dark-matter powered supercivilization? It is a small probability for that, but not entirely impossible. In the case of an artificial attractor detected, it would maybe be the best strategy to go there. With the local Virgo-Coma supercluster, of course. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 11:43:07 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:43:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> <50DD80FF.5010305@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > How does one prove they should or should not be included into this > circle of trust? ### Write nice posts? > > What does it take for a friend of mine to become a friend of ours? - > or as you expressed, a mutually-tolerated via transitivity candidate > with differing values become a mutually-tolerated epistemic peer with > differing values? ### Write non-evil *and* smart posts on other lists you read? Rafal From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 31 13:14:07 2012 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:14:07 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <50E18F9F.60602@aleph.se> On 2012-12-31 13:08, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > We probably want to *stop* the galaxy as it arrives > > Don't worry! It will be stopped with the galaxy coming from the opposite > direction. Seen galaxy collision simulations? Galaxies pass right through each other. There is some dynamical friction, but it is very small compared to the velocities between in-falling galaxies. You end up with two scattered galaxies moving apart. > In the case of the eternal inflation we should consider this very > seriously. Building a hyper-massive black hole here. Do you want the extra mass in order to reduce tidal forces at the horizon? It is not clear that extra mass is terribly useful when breeding baby universes. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From protokol2020 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 13:52:02 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:52:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50E18F9F.60602@aleph.se> References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> <50E18F9F.60602@aleph.se> Message-ID: > Seen galaxy collision simulations? Galaxies pass right through each other. There is some dynamical friction, but it is very small compared to the velocities between in-falling galaxies. You end up with two scattered galaxies moving apart. Two galaxies properly infested with the right kind of probes would collide much better than what we see in a natural collision. Stars would be decomposed to something much more suitable for a collision. > Do you want the extra mass in order to reduce tidal forces at the horizon? That also. But mainly as a mass/energy source for our toys. P.S. This all may change a little, if we will be able to harness the dark matter also. P.P.S. This all may change a lot, if we will be able to harness the dark energy also. On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2012-12-31 13:08, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > >> > We probably want to *stop* the galaxy as it arrives >> >> Don't worry! It will be stopped with the galaxy coming from the opposite >> direction. >> > > Seen galaxy collision simulations? Galaxies pass right through each other. > There is some dynamical friction, but it is very small compared to the > velocities between in-falling galaxies. You end up with two scattered > galaxies moving apart. > > > > In the case of the eternal inflation we should consider this very >> seriously. Building a hyper-massive black hole here. >> > > Do you want the extra mass in order to reduce tidal forces at the horizon? > It is not clear that extra mass is terribly useful when breeding baby > universes. > > > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford University > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 13:54:37 2012 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:54:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Unless the speed of light is overcome somehow... Yes. If we will be able to do that, it would just be the best think we can hope for. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 15:00:35 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:00:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > > On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Kelly Anderson > wrote: >> >> Unless the speed of light is overcome somehow... > > > Yes. If we will be able to do that, it would just be the best think we can > hope for. ### In an infinite universe with effectively unlimited speeds (posited here purely for argument's sake, not as something possible under consistent physics), the volume of space that generates superior armies capable of invading us would be effectively infinite, therefore the likelihood of being ground to dust under the boot of an alien invader might (under some simple assumptions) trend towards unity. Speed of light limit and the small and expanding universe are our best defense against alien invasion. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 11:40:38 2012 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:40:38 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Construction of in-groups was Re: Unilateralist Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > My rule of thumb is to tolerate those who tolerate me, and by transitivity > try to tolerate those they tolerate if they try to tolerate me transitively. > The result is a giant connected component of tolerance that seems to include > most fair-minded people. ### In other words, a club of nice people. This is essentially the procedure I use to construct my own in-group: all you need to become a member is to be committed to respecting my property and the property of those who respect it (hence transitivity). Of course, I am committed to respecting the property of my in-group members which differs greatly from my attitude towards the property of out-group members. > > Maybe one can do the same thing with people who are "rational" in the sense > that I judge their reasoning and aims to be a good enough approximation of > rational, even if we disagree on values. > ### In other words, a club of reasonable people - but the question is, do you let in persons who are not tolerant of you, or do you exclude them a priori, even if they are highly rational? Also, another issue is of deliberation versus decision - Whose inputs are a legitimate basis for updating your priors? Whose inputs should modify the list of allowed/disallowed actions issue by the in-group? These are interesting questions. All nazis are my enemies but many were not stupid, which is why it's reasonable to use the knowledge they contributed in many fields. But on the other hand, allowing nazis to have a say in what should be done doesn't feel right. My guess is that the League of Reasonable Men should include all who think clearly but are not grossly perverted in their aims. Minor to medium differences in values should be tolerated (e.g. whether to eat meat or not) but major differences (e.g. whether it's OK to kill people to protect animals from being eaten) should prompt exclusion from all meetings. And knowledge gained from the evil ones should impact what we believe in but not what we want to achieve. Unfortunately, any LRM willing to issue *me* a membership card is not likely to grow large.... Rafal From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 15:26:12 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:26:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1356812381.89157.YahooMailClassic@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >> What always occurs to me when I read about the expanding universe, is > the possibility of something analogous to sound waves in air, applied at a > hugely huger scale. Maybe the universe is reverberating to the big bang, > or some similar long-ago event, and we are currently in the expansion phase > of a universal 'sound-wave'. Maybe in a few billion years the galaxies > will start compressing together again, then in a few billion years after > that, expand again, etc. Any theoretical objections to this idea? I've > never seen it discussed. > I think this idea would have made more sense before we discovered that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. The acceleration is caused by Dark Energy and if that was changing its value the shape of space would be changing too and there is no evidence of that. > Note that this is different to the 'periodic big bang' idea. It's much > less dramatic, just a periodic change in the density of the universe, like > sound waves in air > I don't see how periodic oscillations in the density of the universe would be compatible with observation. The Friedmann equation says that the energy density of the universe (and remember E=MC^2) is the sum of the contribution from the expansion of the universe and the contribution from the curvature of space itself. If you plug in numbers and want to make the curvature of space term to be zero, that is make the universe be flat, then there would have to be a lot of energy in the universe that we haven't detected before, Dark Energy. And in just the last couple of years we've learned that the universe is indeed flat. There is about 5 times as much Dark Matter as regular matter but even with Dark Matter and regular matter combined it only amounts to 30% of the mass-energy the Friedmann equation tells us that is needed to produce a flat universe, and yet it is flat, so 70% of the mass-energy of the universe must be in the form of Dark Energy. The theory was invented to explain the observed luminosity of very distant supernovas but we find that Dark Energy also explains why the universe is flat and why the universe didn't start to accelerate until 8.7 billion years after the Big Bang, 5 billion years ago. Astronomers proved that the universe is flat by looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), it is the most distant thing ever seen and was formed just 300,000 years after the Big Bang, so if we look at a map of that background radiation the largest structure we could see on it would be 300,000 light years across, spots larger than this wouldn't have had enough time to form because nothing, not even gravity can move faster than light, a larger lump wouldn't even have enough time to know it was a lump. So how large would a object 13.7 billion light years away appear to us if it's size was 300,000 light years across? The answer is one degree of arc, but ONLY if the universe is flat. If it's not flat and parallel lines converge or diverge then the image of the largest structures we can see in the CMBR could appear to be larger or smaller than one degree depending on how the image was distorted, and that would depend on if the universe is positively or negatively curved. But we see no distortion at all, in this way the WMAP satellite proved that the universe is flat, or at least isn't curved much, over a distance of almost 13.7 billion light years if the universe curves at all it is less than one part in 100,000. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 15:38:00 2012 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:38:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] A paranormal prediction for the next year Message-ID: One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ Happy New Year all. I predict that a paper reporting positive psi results will NOT appear in Nature or Science in the next year. This may seem an outrageous prediction, after all psi is hardly a rare phenomena, millions of people with no training have managed to observe it, or claim they have. And I am sure the good people at Nature and Science would want to say something about this very important and obvious part of our natural world if they could, but I predict they will be unable to find anything interesting to say about it. You might think my prediction is crazy, like saying a waitress with an eight's grade education in Duluth Minnesota can regularly observe the Higgs boson with no difficulty but the highly trained Physicists at CERN in Switzerland cannot. Nevertheless I am confident my prediction is true because my ghostly spirit guide Mohammad Duntoldme spoke to me about it in a dream. PS: I am also confident I can make this very same prediction one year from today. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 15:42:56 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:42:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] tests again In-Reply-To: <001d01cde721$f433b9a0$dc9b2ce0$@att.net> References: <001d01cde721$f433b9a0$dc9b2ce0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 1:42 AM, spike wrote: > > > Something cool: Wondershare Quiz Creator lets you imbed photos and video > in your quiz. That in itself allows a geek to write a test which nearly > any geek would get immediately, but any non-geek could tap away on the > internet for a week and come up blank. For instance, a good mechanical > technician?s question would be**** > > **1. ** What is this person doing?**** > > The answer would not be multiple choice, because that would make it too > easy. The answer would be typed in on the keyboard: he or she is adjusting > valves. **** > > ** ** > > Are there any mechanical geeks here who missed that one? **** > > > So now the test taker must figure out a way to write software to read the > answers and assign a point value.**** > > ** ** > > All suggestions welcome, about tests, not exhaust valves or German > engineering.**** > > > It sounds like you've made test creation extremely difficult. Each test will have to be hand-crafted by domain experts. I suppose you are ok with that because it is the nature of this kind of test. However, it will not scale well at all. There are likely very few technical people who also have the patience to build tests like you describe. Your externalized knowledge wrinkle doesn't really make the test much more difficult to take. I think this is also a design feature. You want the experts to have no issue completing the test while you weed-out the non-experts. You then continue to discuss how difficult this test will be to grade. By the time you've written an expert system to grade this test you won't need engineers because you'll be selling your test grader. So I feel like you've rediscovered a basic problem for every schoolteacher who has the fortitude to give essay-answer tests: they have to read, understand, assess the quality of the answers - multiplied times the number of students. I never appreciated that an essay test that 25 students spent 45-90 minutes answering would amount to 3-5 hours work for the teacher. In order to minimize the multiplier, maybe you only give your fancy test to those few candidates who have passed initial screening by HR? Now I think the solution is to also externalize the grading. The taker is presumably going to work with a team, yeah? Why not involve the team in assessing the accuracy of the answers? While "adjusting valves" may be the technical answer you need for "correct" it seems like a flip-answer. On the other hand, your thought process about a scaled answer smells to me like beating around the bush hoping the teacher will be lenient. Beyond the successful fill-in-the-blank, the answer is subjective - so it makes sense to have the team assessing the candidate. With that in mind, the "solver" mechanism needs to be a framework for crowd-sourcing the review process. Even if the crowd is only your team of 6, they represent a deeper understanding/appreciation of the test environment than a single manager. If there exists professional networks (or unions) there might be larger crowds of trusted/trustworthy reviewers. and by "point value" you meant a multi-dimensional vector matrix of correctness and appropriateness of answer? :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 08:02:59 2012 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:02:59 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Action: help Dr Coles!! Mass email In-Reply-To: <1356925235.63132.YahooMailNeo@web171906.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> References: <405642712845059-345774292165235@groups.facebook.com> <1356910632.82497.YahooMailNeo@web171902.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> <1356925235.63132.YahooMailNeo@web171906.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Edouard Debonneuil Date: Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 5:40 AM Subject: Action: help Dr Coles!! Mass email To: Gerontology Research Group , "Dr. Aubrey de Grey" < aubrey at sens.org>, "\"didier.coeurnelle at heales.org\"" < didier.coeurnelle at heales.org>, Sven Bulterijs , "\"info at thebls.org\"" , "M. D. Ph. D. L. Stephen Coles" < scoles at ucla.edu>, "\"aging at liverpool.ac.uk\"" Cc: Stanley Primmer , "\"kingsley at loaner.com\"" , Robert Young , "\" ilia.stambler at gmail.com\"" , " Leo.Silvennoinen at gmail.com" , " leo at leosilvennoinen.com" For those who are really interested in acting for Dr Coles: it is now (rather than in 2 or 3 days as it will be surgery) => donate < (...) and specify "for Dr Coles' treatment">> => transmit PS: time being for action - please don't hesitate to send it to your community, colleagues, facebook friends - don't hesitate to rewrite it and make it yours - don't hesitate to propose your help to contact cancer-treatment companies. ------------------------------ [image: Dear All, Dr Steve Coles, a world leader in...]30 d?cembre 23:06 Dear All, Dr Steve Coles, a world leader in aging research, has cancer. The professor at UCLA, head of the world renowned Gerontology Research Group, director of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation, is succumbing to one of the worst age-related diseases of all. A person who dedicated his life for the healthy longevity of all needs your help. And you can help! 1) Donate: http://www.grg.org/donate.html <" and specify "For Dr Coles' treatment>> Dr. Coles's family asks to donate for his treatment through the ?Donate? Page of the Gerontology Research Group 2) Help apply a ground-breaking approach for Dr. Coles treatment, by spreading the word. Many researchers on the Gerontology Research Group mailing list have proposed ideas to help Steve. Dr Coles? family is particularly interested in the "mouse culture" concept, where a patient?s tumor is taken during surgery and injected in mice. Then the mice are tested for various treatments, and the treatment which is found to be most effective is applied to the patient. The procedure is new and has been empirically shown to be quite effective. But it costs about $22K. We hope that the company performing the treatment can make a big discount, in view of the publicity that can be generated. Depending on the company?s offer, the amount of money that we collect and the number of people we reach, we will try to help Dr. Steve Coles the best way we can. Inaction kills. The operation is scheduled for Thursday, January 3. The time to act is now! Please donate and spread this message! International Longevity Alliance Edouard Debonneuil Ilia Stambler http://longevityalliance.org/help-save-dr-stephen-coles/ Voir la publication sur Facebook? Modifier les param?tres de courrier ?lectronique? Vous pouvez r?pondre ? ce message pour commenter. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 31 16:21:53 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 08:21:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <009701cde772$f28801a0$d79804e0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...We can use Spike's reflecting Dyson shells to do it. I get a mass ratio of sqrt[(1 + Delta v / c) / (1 - (Delta V/c)]. In our case it is 1.000533 (no stop) and 1.001 (stop). Quite acceptable!... Anders >... -- Reminder of the time scales involved: I calculated about 20 million years from here to the nearest star, which is about 4.5 yrs away. To get to the next galaxy, I came up with a scheme where you deflect off of other stars and grab their galactic-center orbit velocity. We can get a star to the nearest galaxy in a billion years, which is enough time before our sun goes off the main sequence. But to move an entire galaxy that way requires just light-pressure acceleration, which I calculated is about 300 meters per square year. Since M87 is about 50 Mly away, that's about 5e6* 1e16=5e22, so t^2=1e23, t=3e11, about 300 billion years and we only have about 20 billion years before the Big Rip, and oh that is so sad. However all is not lost. Instead of hauling M87 here, we can leave it all out there, and take a good bright young star from the Milky Way to M87 in about 15 billion years, which may be within the life of a properly chosen star if we learn how to deal with those difficult helium burning years which would occur along the way, in the cold loneliness of intergalactic space. It fills one with a sense of urgency to realize that one has only 20 billion years to live, and that's a best case scenario. It causes one to be so much more aware of the passing of each geological age, to learn to take one eon at a time, to live in the millennium, to seize the century, that sort of thing. spike From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 31 16:31:19 2012 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 08:31:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe In-Reply-To: References: <50DF8430.7040703@aleph.se> <50E0A855.6000303@aleph.se> <50E15FB4.7050602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <009801cde774$43dc5c30$cb951490$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Tomaz Kristan Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 4:09 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Expansion of the Universe >>. We probably want to *stop* the galaxy as it arrives. Why? >.Don't worry! It will be stopped with the galaxy coming from the opposite direction. Not really. Galaxies are such diaphanous objects that two galaxies can pass right through each other with a high likelihood of zero actual stellar collisions. Of course the gravity causes stars to go flying all over the place, but that might be a good thing. For a long time I hoped the universe might be closed by the mass of individual stars that went flying into intergalactic space from early interactions of galaxies, individual stars that we had no means to detect. So Perlmutter's accelerating inflation idea was very disappointing. spike In the case of the eternal inflation we should consider this very seriously. Building a hyper-massive black hole here. > or maybe the Great Attractor is actually our local dark-matter powered supercivilization? It is a small probability for that, but not entirely impossible. In the case of an artificial attractor detected, it would maybe be the best strategy to go there. With the local Virgo-Coma supercluster, of course. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Dec 31 15:52:08 2012 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:52:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Unilateralist In-Reply-To: References: <50D82DFA.3060505@aleph.se> <50DC1364.3040900@aleph.se> <50DD80FF.5010305@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 6:43 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: >> How does one prove they should or should not be included into this >> circle of trust? > > ### Write nice posts? haha, yes that. But nice is so subjective, how do you code the niceness filter into software agents? I'm not sure it'll be possible until the software agents themselves are optimally tuned to each individual. (well, the operating KB for each user has acquired sufficiently large training example space) >> What does it take for a friend of mine to become a friend of ours? - >> or as you expressed, a mutually-tolerated via transitivity candidate >> with differing values become a mutually-tolerated epistemic peer with >> differing values? > > ### Write non-evil *and* smart posts on other lists you read? *I* don't even track this information very well. Now the software doing it for me has to be more aware than myself. I'm not saying that's impossible, but I certainly won't know how to audit it to know when it's lying to me thanks to intentional exploitation. From daniel at kungfuchicken.com Mon Dec 31 23:57:39 2012 From: daniel at kungfuchicken.com (Daniel Shown) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:57:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] College 2.0 In-Reply-To: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201212301701.qBUH10jJ002533@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: I pay my bills working in higher-ed (specifically, delivering courses online). This line of reasoning and questioning has been discussed ad-nauseam in domain specific forums. It is likely that technology can continue to offer increased efficiencies, but the destruction of higher-ed and it's incumbent institutions is far less probable than many techvangelists might prefer. There are, simply, more socio-cultural dynamics at play than abrupt, na?ve analyses account for. On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 11:00 AM, David Lubkin wrote: > There are changes afoot in college education. We've been in an obscene > cycle for decades. Families can't afford college, so there's political > pressure to increase government assistance. As this happens, the > schools raise their tuition to sop up the new money and fix the level of > pain back where it was. While adding a deferred pain in loans the > students can never pay back through the largely useless degrees they > obtained. Some students, facing an uncomfortable workplace, go back > for more degrees and more debt. All adding to political pressure to > forgive much of this debt, which in effect furthers the burden on taxpayers > who were out working. But probably not today's taxpayers, since we'll > just increase the federal debt even further. > > Meanwhile, in other industries, costs plummet, in ripples from Moore's > Law. And more and more efforts to give you stuff for free, often in > exchange for ads you ignore or block, or data sold off about you. > > With college tuition priced to compete with what you pay for your > recreational activities, there's great potential. I never stopped after > graduate school. I just kept on buying books and learning, and still do, > decades later. But I don't pay tuition, buy exorbitant textbooks, listen to > dull lectures, learn lockstep to the class, or jump through professors' > and school administrative hoops. > > At the prices discussed in this article, my interest is perked. Maybe > I'll get another degree or forty. Now, I'm an outlier. But how many > people would take a class or two, finish their degree, or get a master's > if it cost no more than a cable tv package? > > My guess is this is, at least, a billion-dollar market. That will > ultimately > result in the dramatic reformation of the existing model of higher > education. The on-campus experience will survive, but largely priced > at a point a student could afford with a part-time job with no need of > grants or loans. > > 35714989_1_college-tuition-**nonprofit-colleges-public-**colleges > > > > > -- David. > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: