Last month the EU officially approved mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future. In order to produce a kilogram of bug-based food, you need ~10k bugs. On the one hand, bugs probably don’t matter much morally. On the other hand, 10k is a lot. Do bugs have moral value? What about the other limit? Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian, would be to eat the largest animal there is. And according to the Talmud the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan, which suffices to feed all of them forever. Hypothesis confirmed!
Tag: philosophy
Don’t Fear The Simulators
don’t worry if we happen to live in a simulation.
That means it knows these experiments are going to happen. If it cares about the results, it can fake them. Assuming for some reason that it made a mistake in designing the cosmic background radiation (why are we assuming this, again?), it can correct that mistake now, or cause the experimental apparatus to report the wrong data, or do one of a million other things that would prevent us from learning we are in a simulation. The Times’ argument requires that simulators are so powerful that they can create entire universes, so on-top-of-things that they will know the moment we figure out their game – but also so incompetent that they can’t react to a warning published several years in advance in America’s largest newspaper. There’s another argument for the same conclusion: the premises of the simulation argument suggest this isn’t the simulators’ first rodeo. Each simulator civilization must simulate 1000s or millions of universes. Presumably we’re not the first to think of checking the cosmic background radiation. Do you think the simulators just destroy all of them when they reach radio-wave-technology, and never think about fixing the background radiation mismatch or adding in some fail-safe to make sure the experiments return the wrong results?
Emotional reasoning
People are often unmoved by dispassionate logic, peer-reviewed research and statistics, but in fact are swayed by ego, emotion, self-interest and identity. If we want our public discourse to succeed in changing attitudes, Gordon-Smith insists, we have to ditch our idealized, sterile picture of persuasion and be more sensitive to how people behave in real life. Gordon-Smith’s silence on what rationality requires of us – might seem like a shortcoming, but in the end it is strategic. She debunks easy answers while shrewdly adopting a position of intellectual humility. She thinks we are ignorant of rationality’s demands, and “very close to the edge of what we know how to talk about at all sensibly”. It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are.
Kolmogorov Complexity
Now our understanding of our search for meaning is starting to come together. We abhor randomness and love patterns. We are biologically programmed to find some patterns that explain what they see. But we can never be certain that the pattern we’ve identified is the right one. Even if we could somehow be assured that we haven’t made a mistake, and we are exhibiting a computer-like perfection, there may always still be a deeper truth to unearth. This tension helps drive our love of literature, theater, and the cinema. When we read a novel, or watch a play, the author or director is presenting us with a sequence of events that has a common theme, pattern, or moral. Literature, plays, and the cinema offer us a delightful escape from the usual unintelligible, meaningless chaos that we find in the real world around us. Really good literature goes further, and leaves us with the possibility of many interpretations. We come face to face with the incomputability of the Kolmogorov complexity.
Since time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is computable, a natural next question is how hard it is to compute. And this is the question that Liu and Pass proved holds the key to whether one-way functions exist. Suppose you’ve set your sights on a less lofty goal than calculating the exact time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of every possible string — suppose you’re content to calculate it approximately, and just for most strings. If there’s an efficient way to do this, then true 1-way functions cannot exist. In that case, all our candidate 1-way functions would be instantly breakable, not just in theory but in practice. “Bye-bye to cryptography”.
Conversely, if calculating the approximate time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is too hard to solve efficiently for many strings, then true 1-way functions must exist. If that’s the case, their paper even provides a specific way to make one. The 1-way function that they describe in their paper is too complicated to use in real-world applications, but in cryptography, practical constructions often quickly follow a theoretical breakthrough. And if their function can be made practical, it should be used in preference to the candidate 1-way functions based on multiplication and other mathematical operations.
Value Heuristics
We need to navigate complicated philosophical questions in order to decide how to act, what to do, what behaviors to incentivize, what behaviors to punish, what signals to send, and even how to have a society at all. Sometimes we can use theories from science and mathematics to explicitly model how a system works and what we want from it. But even the scholars who understand these insights rarely know exactly how to objectively apply them in the real world. Yet anyone who lives with others needs to be able to do these things; not just scholars but ordinary people, children, and even chimpanzees. So sometimes we use heuristics and approximations. Evolution has given us some of them as instincts. Children learn others as practically-innate hyperpriors before they’re old enough to think about what they’re doing. And cultural evolution creates others alongside the institutions that encourage and enforce them. In the simplest case, we just feel some kind of emotional attraction or aversion to something. In other cases, the emotions are so compelling that we crystallize them into a sort of metaphysical essence that explains them. And in the most complicated cases, we endorse the values implied by those metaphysical essences above and beyond whatever values we were trying to model in the first place.
Mental Models
A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are 10k of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.
There is a much smaller set of concepts, however, that come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”
This post is my attempt to enumerate the mental models that are repeatedly useful to me. This set is clearly biased from my own experience and surely incomplete. I hope to continue to revise it as I remember and learn more.
Surveillance Philosopher
ARE YOU THE SOCRATES of the National Security Agency? That was the question the NSA asked its workforce in a memo soliciting applications for an in-house ethicist who would write a philosophically minded column about signals intelligence. The column, which would be posted on a classified network at the NSA, should be absorbing and original, asking applicants to submit a sample to show they had what it takes to be the “Socrates of SIGINT.”
After religion
Polls and studies show that people in the developed world are increasingly moving away from religion. Given the rapid trend towards more secular societies in parts of Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, it’s possible that in just a few decades, many cultures will have no central religious tradition at all. But where will that leave us? Happily in pursuit of romantic love and material wealth, or still desiring a deeper form of fulfillment? In What Comes After Religion?, the UK-based author and philosopher Alain de Botton argues that the human needs which religion has fulfilled for centuries – community, a longing for transcendent beauty, a deeper sense of purpose – will still exist in the absence of religious belief. How we replace it will be an ongoing challenge in the brave new secular world.
Suffering in fundamental physics?
a really fun paper, mind expandingly strange:
This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations — atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc. — could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I’m personally doubtful about this, I suggest reasons to keep an open mind on the topic. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if numerically, simple physics-based suffering dominates. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what distribution of “experiences” it entails. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 