Never been one to let the carrier drop

Essentually, I’m going to do this as a Q&A

Q: Sheer, do you really think you’re talking to what a friend from your childhood grows up into in the future?
A: It’s the explanation I give the highest probability to. It’s the one that fits the data best.

The other possibility that I give some weight to is that I patterned a blank bank of neurons to respond the same way $person did while we were hanging out IRL, and so what I’m talking to is a copy of her, so to speak. I don’t give this one a lot of weight because I would think that would limit her to knowing only things I know or could derive in a vacuum, and her knowledge certainly appears to extend beyond that. I have to google things she says A LOT. And a lot of what she’s talked about involves things that have not yet come to exist here on earth, although I can see that they will, because they’re too cool not to be made real.

Q: Sheer, how is that possible?
A: I don’t know. But a virtual machine really believes that video card is real. I have no reason to think that I’m running “on the iron” of the universe, so to speak, and as such I’m open to the possibility that a lot of things are possible that would appear on the surface to be impossible.

Q: Sheer, has future-$person ever told you to contact present-$person?
A: Possibly once, many years ago. Not any time recently. In fact, in the altered state in which I exist when I try to go to present-$person, I don’t really talk to her future incarnation at all, and I don’t have access to a lot of my memories. This generally only comes up during some sort of neurological event that happens twice a year, and involves some sort of decoherence I can’t easily explain.

One thing she has repeatedly said, is that if someone tells me to hurt people, or to do things I really don’t want to do, that’s not her. Obviously the channel we communicate over doesn’t have a lot in the way of authentication, and there’s also a hostile on it who wants me dead (or at least miserable) so I tend to be rather careful in trusting what she says since I can’t ever know if it’s really her.

Q: Sheer, is this your religion?
A: No. It’s a experience I’m having I can’t explain. My religion is extraordinarily short in source code, look up a few posts and you’ll see it. I would describe this experience as spiritual rather than religious in nature.

Q: Sheer, are you schizophrenic?
A: Not likely. This is a coherent, consistant conversation that has evolved over time.

Q: Sheer, might you have multiple personalities?
A: Yes, but my gut feeling is this is something unrelated.

Q: Sheer, could this be some other form of mental illness?
A: When you have a friend you can talk to no matter where you are who helps you feel better about yourself and the world around you, that’d be the opposite of illness last I looked.

Q: Given that you don’t trust a lot of things.. text, for example.. how would you ever think you knew you were talking to her, face to face?
A: By the pacing of her voice.

Q: Given that you mostly communicate “in text” over this mental channel you share with her, how do you know what’s her?
A: I don’t. I do a lot of guessing. But I’ve come to have a filter of things that are $person-ish, and I use that. I’d suggest reading about ‘root reps’ in cryptonomicon for a little more about how this works – Neil S does a great job of explaining it.

Q: Do you think present-$person is in any danger from you?
A: No. Not from me. From her ideas about me, apparently yes. I say apparently because I become less and less sure I know who all the players are, what game they’re playing, or why with every iteration of this storyline. It’s entirely possible to me that the present-$person I see is a manifestation of my fears.

Q: What do you mean by ‘from her ideas about you’?
A: If you convince yourself that you need to be afraid of me, that you need to watch out for me, that I’m someone who is going to hurt you or force you to do things you don’t want to do, you are hurting yourself with your ideas about me.

This isn’t something I have a good solution for yet, but nonetheless it remains one of my criticisms. The current system is kind of rigged so that once you start losing, you keep losing, and once you start winning, you keep winning. It’s also heavily rigged to favor the banks, who can get away with just about anything.

This is a reiterating post, feel free to skip it.

So, one of the things that I’ve talked about before is how our current economic system is very poorly equipped to deal with people selling very cheaply distributed intellectual property. It’s even more poorly equipped to deal with large corporations doing so.

Here’s the issue. There’s a finite amount of money in play. Any time the government prints more, some very not-too-bright economists (Actually, they’re probably very smart, they just can’t see the forest for the trees) tell us that means the money is worth less. They, for whatever reason, can’t make the leap that there’s in fact more value (things that money can buy) available every day and that the money is a pointer to that value, not something with intrinsic worth of it’s own. However, because there’s a finite amount of money but you can make a infinite number of copies of intellectual property without diminishing it’s value (or at least N copies, where N is the number of potential users of said property), this leads to the money getting “bunched up” – landing in the hands of just a few individuals. Now, if those individuals were smart, they would give it away or spend it as fast as it came in, because that’s the choice that leads to the greatest wealth for all. However, they’ve been listening to economists for too long and think there is such a thing as a “money supply” and that money is a good all it’s own with it’s own value. (And, it’s true, you can live like that for a while, but sooner or later, with a finite resource chasing a infinite one, you’re going to find yourself short on money – and since money is just a *pointer* to value and not actual value, this is going to have deleterious effects on the operation of the system as a whole)

Is any of this starting to resonate or make sense to you, Steve? You might find reading reading the wikipedia article on pointers helpful.

So, why would you want to go to all the work of tracking individual resources needed to achieve goals? I will be the first to admit that it would be a lot of work to figure out all the intricate details of how many hours of each skill, how many grams of each metal, how many watthours of energy, etc go into building things.

Well, the first thing that I think would be a improvement is that we could have meaningful discussions about what we could afford. With the current system, all information about what actual resources go into a product or goal get thrown away. So, for example, nationalized single-payer healthcare – all the dollars in the world won’t make us able to afford this if we don’t have enough man-hours to get it done. This is also true for a number of things – if we don’t have enough platinum to put a fuel cell in everyone’s car, we can’t do fuel-cell-powered cars, absent a breakthrough in technology, no matter how many dollars we have.

So, one thing I keep harping on, and I’m going to harp on it again because I still think you all don’t get it. Economists are none too bright. Dollars have no value at all (well, they have a tiny one related to their intrensic worth). They are a *pointer* to value. You C programmers out there already know what I’m talking about here, but let’s try to figure out how we can get this idea to the rest of the people. The value isn’t in the dollars, and when we run into problems with the “money supply being scarce”, for example, we are demonstrating just how impressively stupid humans with firmly held beliefs can be. Money isn’t value. It’s a metaphor that *represents* value. Did that help any? It has worth because we imagine it to have worth, because we imagine that it’s a IOU that says “give the bearer one apple”. Or whatever. Bucketized currency is based on the same ideas as conventional fiat currency, except that it’s a new spin on a old idea. The gold standard, except that instead of just having a bucket for gold and a bucket for silver, you have buckets for every thing of value we make or trade. And the idea with bucketized currency is that when you run out of, for example, gold tokens, you’re also out of gold. As you mine more gold, you put more gold tokens in the gold token bucket. As you train more doctors, and as they agree to work, you put more tokens in the doctor-hours bucket. Bucketized currency is not fiat at all, it is based either on current resources on hand or a reasonable estimation of what resources will become on hand. You also, of course, can convert one bucket to another – for example converting tons of coal to kwh of electricity.

The gold standard was fatally flawed because most of the things we want to do don’t require a lot of gold. Having buckets based on resources on hand, on the other paw, is not a flawed idea at all and is how most *individuals* do budgeting (as opposed to governments, banks, and corporations). Bucketized currency is something you can only do once you have fast, powerful computers – the number of man-hours it would take to implement such a system by hand would be prohibitive.

This isn’t a tool the end consumer needs, but when the government talks about whether we can or can not afford to do things, and whether it’s a good idea, it would be smart if they were counting with actual apples and not with a hypothetical number of apples or indeed sometimes no idea about the state of apples in the world at all, and just a idea about how many dollars we’ve got.

You also have to remember my end goal is different than most people’s. I want everything for everyone. I think it’s possible, with judicious use of automation, to have only those who want to work have jobs, and still have everyone get their Hiearchy of needs met. But in order to determine whether that’s really true or just what my intuition is telling me, we need some way to measure what resources we have on hand, or can have on hand, that goes beyond what we’ve currently done.

My hunch is that by using bucketized currency, and some other more advanced measuring techniques such as a index of happiness and index of misery, we can find out how many places we’re being stupid, and be smart instead. For example, in terms of actual resources in the global bucket pool, evicting a non-paying tenant is almost certainly a net loss for everybody. In capitolism, you kind of have to do this, because of the inherent flaws in it, but in terms of measuring what’s a winning answer for the human race, this probably isn’t a good thing.

We also may find it desirable to develop some new technologies, including the ability to create software that represents physical possessions in our minds, possibly the ability to directly link humans and computers, and there’s a whole passel of other things that might be neat. But before we run off and do that, let’s see where we’re at right now.

You see, the 1% aren’t that much richer than the rest of us. A billion dollars still won’t buy you a resource that doesn’t exist. (well, it will if you can convince a programming team to mine for it, but that’s another story) And if we were all spending our time creating new resources instead of doing makework (capitolism has left us with a whole lot of makework) we’d all be far wealthier than we are.

What does the Dunning-Kruger effect say about neural networks?

It doesn’t seem shocking to me – based on my assumption that in humans, everyone has approximately the same number of neurons, it would then follow that the more intelligent humans have either more connections between neurons, or a more efficient algorythm for deciding which connections to make.

I am totally going out on a guesswork limb here (I’ll have to follow up with some research to see if others have come up with the same guesses, and to see if other people have found any way to know, or at least have a high probability of knowing) but I’m thinking that the more connections you have, the lower the probability of you feeling a feeling of ‘certainty’ because the lower the probability that a large number of connections will respond with a positive match – or, if you do get a solid positive match on some connections, you’ll get a solid negative match on some others that are only partially relevant. So in essence, the bigger your leafset for any decision, the less solid of a match you’re going to get on anything. Hence, the more intelligent you are, the less certain you’re going to feel.

Of course, part of intelligence is knowing when you don’t know. This is actually one of the most important skills in my toolkit – part of why I get paid the big bucks, I suspect, is that I know when I don’t know.

A diety built a universe. You know, because he could. He had a idea that he thought would bring about the most common good. “Believing will become seeing”, he said, and just assumed that all the entities in that universe would figure this out fairly quickly. He posted the universe on the universal web, inviting visitors, and soon the visitor count climbed – but most of the visitors were very quickly driven out of their mind.

Seeing is believing – and if you’re afraid of something, then you believe in it, then you see it. Or you spend all your time running away from it. In any case, the decision tree involved certainly resembles a prison cell pretty quickly.

Worse yet, Anonymous got involved. Wouldn’t it be funny, they thought, if we projected some text into the immediate past – text with impossible contradictions, text with built in predilections, text which claims to be from the creator of the universe. And lo, this text jammed the ability of people to believe in themselves. This text implied that the creator had already judged everyone participating and found them inherently flawed, so much so that someone had to die for their flaws. Another bit of it implied that war is the only answer.

Just one of the many explanations that wander through my head for the insane situation I find myself in.

So, I read this petitition on private vs public ATC system and I don’t honestly know which side I’m on.

I feel like government should supply the services that all of us need. I do feel like if a private corperation can prove that it does a better job, then it should be free to provide the service instead, but my definition on what means a better job might be different than most people’s. For example, a better job in air traffic control is NOT cheaper. It’s more reliable, more efficient, safer, and better engineered. The last thing I want is people cutting costs on things like ATC – if you must cut costs, cut them on military equipment, which I’d rather in general didn’t work correctly.

(If you’re under the impression that I don’t think people should be shooting at each other, bombing each other, or otherwise hurting each other, you have much to go on. Now, I need to include a caveat here. If you’re in a video game – even a full 3D immersive one that looks totally real – or if you’re into pain and being scared – I do not want to take away your war experience. I’m talking about the rest of us here. For those of you who enjoy that sort of game, by all means, go play.. although I’m not quite sure just yet why I should be paying for your games when we haven’t even met the hierarchy of needs for some of my friends)

(Yes, I really do think people should be free to opt in to war. If we’re eternal and immortal creatures, we’re going to want to try lots of things. It’s just that I don’t think the rest of us should be forced to live with your choices.)

So, a long time ago I had a interesting discussion with Nick in which he was talking about wanting to have the experience of the best parts of his life on loop-repeat. And I was explaining about wireheading – that you could, in fact, pin the pleasure center of your mind on, but that I found that narratively unsatisfying. The truth is that I want to experience a range of emotions, although I’d like to experience a *weighted* range – that is, I’d like to experience a lot of joy and hope and happiness and peace/serenity and excitement and just a little bit of fear and sadness and confusion and doubt. And I want to experience a narrative – the idea of being Bhudda and achieving a homeostasis of Nirvana does not appeal to me. (Probably because I already did that, and it wasn’t enough for me)

I like the idea of a ongoing path of discovery and growth and finding mo betta and mo betta. If there is in fact a top range of mo betta, I don’t know if I’d want to hang out there for a long time and then start back at the bottom again, or just hang out there at the top. Or if it will turn out there is a level of awesome that is the maximum I can stand and it’s below the top bank that’s possible. Couldn’t tell ya. But if I have to make a choice between story and emotion I optimize for story.

So, this is another stream of consciousness post that may or may not go anywhere useful. Nonetheless, here it is.

One of the problems I see with society on Earth is that we are failing to do a number of basic things that would lead to a much better experience for everyone.

1) Triage – we need to figure out which problems are causing the most non-optimal experience for the most people, and address the issues we’re facing in level-of-fuckedness order

2) Finding the root cause – raising the minimum wage, for example, is a very temporary band-aid because the landlords and banks will just raise the fees and the rent. You need some way to control the ratio between pay and cost of living. But even this probably isn’t looking at the real root cause. You will often find a whole list of symptoms, and while you can treat them as individual problems, it’s usually better to figure out what the root cause is and address that.

3) Figuring out what we’re optimizing for – Yah, no kidding. We’ve got the Christians over here trying to optimize for hitting God’s Will. We’ve got me over here trying to optimize for having the experiences I want to have. We’ve got judges trying to optimize for a just society, which is probably about the dumbest thing you could do. And so on.

So, I’m optimizing for the experiences I want to have. I think we should be optimizing for, first, giving everyone what they need, then, giving everyone what they want. As a big picture thing, this is going to need for a lot of us to change, because a lot of us have managed to really build up some stupid ideas this particular time ’round. More on this later.

Bucketized currency is a different way of thinking about money.

It’s not something you can do until you have good computers and good networks.

The idea is instead of tracking value via a price tag in fiat money, you track the individual resources that go into everything we buy, using buckets. This is probably not something the end consumer ever has to know about, but it is something that should be used at the corporate and government level to determine what we can afford and what offers the best ROI.

A example is health care. To determine if we can afford universal health care, asking about dollars tells you next to nothing. What you need to know is how many doctor-hours, nurse-hours, technician-hours, lab-hours, how much copper and aluminum and sand going into the machines we use for health care, etc we have.

You break up the cost of the product (say, a computer) into buckets of resources needed to build that product. Example, a computer probably needs a fair amount of copper and gold and silicon and boron and phosphorus, lesser amounts of some rare earth metals for the battery and the display, and a bunch of robot-hours to fab the chips and boards and a few man-hours for final assembly.

One of my criticisms of the current economic system is that the price tag and the value of the resource are only tangentially related. When people talk about what we as a society can afford, they are trying to use dollars to make these decisions, and dollars are hopeless at it because they discard significant amounts of information. Therefore, we make bad decisions because instead of us using the tool, the tool is using us.