-dsr-

The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem – and a large fraction of trivial problems – require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.

Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can’t chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.

For about a century now we’ve had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don’t get what they want.

No wristwatch, but I have glasses and without electricity I stop breathing. (While asleep.)

So, yeah, cyborg.

Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.

I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.

What would effective accounting even look like?

True, it’s too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.

This is just shit.

A bunch of youse is thinking irrationally.

It’s them what go in front of the cannon.

Charlie Stross called the Singularity “the rapture for nerds”.

Good luck with that – I’m a pzombie this year for tax purposes.

Is that actually true? Have they been audited? One problem with long-term storage is “long-term” is a thing that humans are bad at.

The main character commits rape because this isn’t a real universe anyway. You made the right choice.

It’s true, but they are still fairly easy to injure.

Try forming a fist and then hitting with the outside edge of the hand instead of your poor little fingers.

Or learn from your ancestors and become a tool-using mammal. I understand milkshakes have a distinct fondness for fascists.

Mike is a fed, yes.

So is Steve. The snack thing is left over from his previous undercover assignment at NORML. That didn’t end well, but he’s pretty sure he can get Mike to agree to buy explosives, which will be a good bust.

Shorter: “Let’s assume that I’m a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here’s how.”

My friend’s father – coincidentally named Feinman, not Feynman - used to say “They always advertise what they haven’t got.”

“Less Wrong”.

It’s not that verbing nouns weirds language so much as the regreekification.

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present

Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?

Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won’t take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. “Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!”

The thing about rationalists is that they are fully invested in irrational beliefs, which they prefer not to examine. In other words, just like most people, but with a specific terminology that, if they use it properly, identifies them as one of the elect.

I suggest that whenever your relative talks about EA, you talk about kindness. When they bring up longtermism, point out that you have to survive in the short term to reach the long term, so working on better policies now is rather important. If they start in on life extension, note that until quite recently, all the major advances in improving average human lifespan come from improving infant mortality, and be prepared to explain the demographic transition.

When they go extropian, say that it’s a nice vision of the future but your kids are unlikely to see it unless we fix the world we’re currently in.

But most of all, point out that multiplying infinitesimals by infinities to justify any course of action (a) is Pascal’s Wager and (b) justifies every course of action – so it can’t justify any.

That’s the downside of the XKCD unlucky ten thousand.

If you are in a 60 Hz electrical area (i.e. the Americas, mostly), and the power is rock-steady, and you have cheap fluorescent lighting – then anything other than 60 Hz refresh rates might improve your screen, but much more so on old CRTs than on modern LCDs and OLEDs.

These days, like most smartphone ‘features’, it is mostly but not entirely about a checkmark to induce you to feel that you are missing out on something.