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[LaLight]

goverment tv channels still say that there is no war other than in Donbass and all the older generation pretty much believes it and it makes it oh so hard because everyone around you is saying nothing is happening at all and you question your own sanity

[LaLight]

i mean i think i know how propaganda works? but that doesn't help. also all my friends left abroad

[LaLight]

What's the chance for nukes being used? You could have WW3 without that.

I don't really have much of an idea about nukes, but I feel like it's very low. Multiple countries have them, so everyone is super reluctant to use any.

that is true, but there is this "if Putin feels he loses he will not hesitate to nuke everything". He's old, paranoid, delusional and probably has dementia. I wouldn't count on predictions of what a person would do here or there

[LaLight]

my biggest problem with all this happening now is that I feel that neither russian government nor (obviously) any other government cares even a little about me and mine. And it feels so devastating

[silverspawn]

Yeah. One thing the invasion is certainly not is in the interest of normal people in Russia, or Ukraine

[silverspawn]

article retweeted by Eliezer Yudkowsky; Thesis:

Specifically, the United States could, with a stroke of a pen, totally destroy the capacity of Russia to compete militarily or economically with us by offering a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States.

Such a move would destroy Russia’s technical capacity and greatly strengthen our own position against both the short-term threat from Russia and the longer-term challenge posed by China.

Similar to the claim that the best way to win the AI race against China would be to make immigration for Chinese talent as tempting as possible

[faust]

article retweeted by Eliezer Yudkowsky; Thesis:

Specifically, the United States could, with a stroke of a pen, totally destroy the capacity of Russia to compete militarily or economically with us by offering a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States.

Such a move would destroy Russia’s technical capacity and greatly strengthen our own position against both the short-term threat from Russia and the longer-term challenge posed by China.

Similar to the claim that the best way to win the AI race against China would be to make immigration for Chinese talent as tempting as possible

I know that a lot of US citizens feel like the US is like, the greatest place on earth and everyone would go there if they could. I have some doubts.

[Awaclus]

article retweeted by Eliezer Yudkowsky; Thesis:

Specifically, the United States could, with a stroke of a pen, totally destroy the capacity of Russia to compete militarily or economically with us by offering a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States.

Such a move would destroy Russia’s technical capacity and greatly strengthen our own position against both the short-term threat from Russia and the longer-term challenge posed by China.

Similar to the claim that the best way to win the AI race against China would be to make immigration for Chinese talent as tempting as possible

I know that a lot of US citizens feel like the US is like, the greatest place on earth and everyone would go there if they could. I have some doubts.

It is very clearly better than Russia or China.

[faust]

article retweeted by Eliezer Yudkowsky; Thesis:

Specifically, the United States could, with a stroke of a pen, totally destroy the capacity of Russia to compete militarily or economically with us by offering a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States.

Such a move would destroy Russia’s technical capacity and greatly strengthen our own position against both the short-term threat from Russia and the longer-term challenge posed by China.

Similar to the claim that the best way to win the AI race against China would be to make immigration for Chinese talent as tempting as possible

I know that a lot of US citizens feel like the US is like, the greatest place on earth and everyone would go there if they could. I have some doubts.

It is very clearly better than Russia or China.

Have you asked the people who live there? Because these are the ones targeted by the proposed policy. The policy only works if sufficiently many people think it's better to be unemployed in the US than to be employed in a technical field in Russia - and I think this is rather questionable.

[silverspawn]

why would they be unemployed in the US? We're talking about people with technical degrees here

[faust]

why would they be unemployed in the US? We're talking about people with technical degrees here

Because
- they might not speak very good English
- usually degrees from non-western countries are valued much lower; you can see this in Germany when you look at Syrian refugees with technical degrees
- if the strategy works out then there will be a sudden influx of labor which will upset the labor market

[silverspawn]

Well I mean if the law is passed in total isolation, those are all reasonable, but presumably it should be coupled to other changes like not valuing foreign degrees much lower

Though even if this is not possible, what you should still do is make it as attractive as possible for the extraordinarily smart people to immigrate, like the top 10% of people with a technical degree. Those won't be unemployed.

[silverspawn]

Apologies for inserting a philosophical rant when the Ukraine thing is still ongoing but

The main alternative to caring about continuity is caring about level of similarity - identifying with a successor if they are sufficiently psychologically similar to you. This might leave you identifying with many successors, or ones that are very disconnected from you in time or space. However, it’s also consistent with identifying only with successors with a level of similarity that, in practice, will only be achievable by copying or uploading you[2] (although I expect that really buying into the similarity theory of personal identity will make most people more altruistic, like it did for Parfit).

what in the name of god compels people to make up such utterly absurd theories when "i am everyone" is a billion times simpler and has no philosophical issues? (Not to mention that if any two points in a metric space with distance at most x for x > 0 are identical,  then all points are identical, and I would bet all ETH I have that the person who wrote this could figure out how to prove that in 10 seconds.) There is some psychological mechanism here that I don't understand, and I really would like to since part of my project is a sequence on identity. A **THRESHOLD FUNCTION OF SIMILARITY** I can't even. This is like the reductio ad absurdum of Closed Individualism, and the guy is pointing to it explicitly as "the main alternative"

Also casually misrepresents Derek Parfit who of course believed no such thing.

On literally every other topic, this level of WTF would be given zero credit, but not here.

[silverspawn]

I literally just realized for the first time ever that "computer" is nothing but "compute-er" i.e., something that computes something. Realized this while writing "when your computer computes something..."

[silverspawn]

This is similar to how it took me years to realize that cosinus is just co-sinus

[silverspawn]

It feels extremely different in my mental representation to say "computer" as in the familiar concept, and "compute-er", as in the thing that computes.

[silverspawn]

A computer is not just a compute-er! Except it kind of is.

[Jimmmmm]

I literally just realized for the first time ever that "computer" is nothing but "compute-er" i.e., something that computes something. Realized this while writing "when your computer computes something..."

The original computers were people who computed things.

[faust]

(Not to mention that if any two points in a metric space with distance at most x for x > 0 are identical,  then all points are identical

Not to be pedantic, but this is true only if the metric space is connected.

[Awaclus]

It is very clearly better than Russia or China.

Have you asked the people who live there? Because these are the ones targeted by the proposed policy. The policy only works if sufficiently many people think it's better to be unemployed in the US than to be employed in a technical field in Russia - and I think this is rather questionable.

The World Happiness Report takes into account metrics based on asking the people who live in each country, and both Russia and China rank substantially lower than the US. The report obviously can't answer if it's worth it to move to a different country though, that's something that depends on the individual.

[silverspawn]

(Not to mention that if any two points in a metric space with distance at most x for x > 0 are identical,  then all points are identical

Not to be pedantic, but this is true only if the metric space is connected.

Indeed; I realized this before I posted this on a reddit thread 

But the relevant metric space *is* connected because obviously personalities exist on a totally smooth continuum.

[silverspawn]

I literally just realized for the first time ever that "computer" is nothing but "compute-er" i.e., something that computes something. Realized this while writing "when your computer computes something..."

The original computers were people who computed things.

Hi, I'm Alex, I head this office. This is Corin, my computer.

[silverspawn]

maybe computers can be conscious after all

[faust]

(Not to mention that if any two points in a metric space with distance at most x for x > 0 are identical,  then all points are identical

Not to be pedantic, but this is true only if the metric space is connected.

Indeed; I realized this before I posted this on a reddit thread 

But the relevant metric space *is* connected because obviously personalities exist on a totally smooth continuum.

I think you can make the argument that the space of potential personalities is connected this way, but there is no reason to believe that the same is true for the space of actually realized personalities. After all, at least at a given point in time the set is finite, thus discrete.

[silverspawn]

Well, yes. But if your theory cares about realized personalities, then Anna and Alice start off insufficiently similar to be identical; then when Corey is born, she's in the middle of  Anna and Alice and your threshold function declares that Anna=Corey and Corey=Alice and then transitivity snaps into place...

Or more even more humorously, you can start of with all three alive, but as soon as someone shoots Corey, Anna and Alice separate into ontologically distinct entities.