Why computational complexity means longtermism isn't action-guiding

Someone makes a brilliant point in the comments: "Loved this post - reminds me a lot of intractability critiques of central economic planning, except now applied to consequentialism writ large."

from this thread on philosophical critiques of EA/longtermism

(8) We have been growing fast but linearly since the 1930s. Current innovations allow us to keep on adding knowledge at a good pace, but since our stock of knowledge is high, the relative changes feel small compared to the electricity revolution that too place a century ago.

— Thomas PHILIPPON (@ThomasPHI2) April 18, 2022

If this is right, innovation hasn't slowed, it just looks like it.

Use a better, more futuristic computer: a 68k Mac emulated in your browser.

Progress is a myth. KPT Bryce 4ever

"The Buddha’s teaching is aimed at liberation from suffering – the way out is through complete abandonment of clinging. Basic remedy is to pause – this is just an organic system operating, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s not personal. Don’t follow the message of mind consciousness, follow the direct experience of the body."

• Ajahn Sucitto with one of my very favorite concise summaries of the dharma.

The Khanda, me and Existence

• Near-term iin climate science usually refers to the next 1-10 (sometimes 1-20) years.
• Over the course of a single decade normal variation can overwhelm anthropogenic impacts.
• What impacts have we seen so far?
  • From 1901-2020 global average temp rose 1° C
  • Longer, more intensive heat waves (heat wave in France in 2003 killed >15,000 people) - partially due to changes in jet stream
  • More natural disasters and extreme conditions - wildfires, hurricanes, droughts
  • Impact on water supply
  • Potential impact on power generation
  • Changes in animal populations / ecosystems, which can impact food supply
• 5-20 years out
  • Massive increases in migration
  • Political instability
  • A more uncertain world
• What can we do?
  • Better ways to get information out during extreme events
  • Reality-based information provided to people
  • Market-based solutions - change incentives - eg insurance
  • Mitigation - France had another heat wave in 2019 that hit ~115F / 46C, but <1,500 people died this time - better education, planning for vulnerable populations ...

Nat Geo, NY Times, NOAA

simon freund's super minimal site

"The Hypermedia Driven Application (HDA) architecture is a new/old approach to building web applications. It combines the simplicity & flexibility of traditional Multi-Page Applications (MPAs) with the better user experience of Single-Page Applications (SPAs)."

I. Title
II. Whatever you would put in your tweet thread about the post (previous civilizations called this an introduction)
III. Poast

Probable Futures

"We started asking climate scientists practical questions about what climate change would look and feel like in different places around the world. We found the answers to be useful, intuitive, and profound. We created Probable Futures to share them with you."

The wet bulb temperature is the temperature of a bulb of mercury inside a damp cloth, in the shade. Basically, what's the temperature taking evaporative cooling into account? When the wet bulb temperature is too high, that's dangerous for human beings, since we depend on evaporative cooling - we're essentially wet bulbs. If the wet bulb temperature and the dry bulb temperature are the same, you're not getting any benefit from evaporative cooling.

Wet bulb takes a minute to grok because it's not about *heat,* per se. It's about the absorptive capacity of air. A wet bulb temperature in the mid-80s F can, and does, kill humans. Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F.

— (((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you (@mateosfo) June 29, 2021

• Less than 1% of rapes and attempted rapes end in a felony conviction
• Less than a third of rapes are reported to the police
• Between 2 and 8% of reported sexual assaults are false (does not include rapes that were not reported)

Washington Post article from 2018

Saving this because literally every victim going public leads to "we have the courts for a reason" and "but what about false rape claims".

"Manichaeism ... heresy ..."

"The belt moves on regardless of the needs of men. It gets at a man's heart. The whole rhythm of his life is chained to the machine. It's called productivity, Stephen. I've seen it. All day long the ambulances here are never still."

"No ... no! I am nothing pure. Nothing pure ... my race is mixed, my sex is mixed. I am woman and man! Light with darkness! Mixed! Mixed ... I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame!"

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, a manual and an example in one.

TextBundle

The TextBundle file format aims to provide a more seamless user experience when exchanging plain text files, like Markdown or Fountain, between sandboxed applications.

Sandboxing is required for all apps available on the Mac and iOS app store, in order to grant users a high level of data security. Sandboxed apps are only permitted access to files explicitly provided by the user - for example Markdown text files. When working with different Markdown applications, sandboxing can cause inconveniences for the user.

An example: Markdown files may contain references to external images. When sending such a file from a Markdown editor to a previewer, users will have to explicitly permit access to every single image file.

This is where TextBundle comes in. TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file. Supporting applications can just exchange TextBundles without asking for additional permissions. Beyond being a simple container, TextBundle includes a standard to transfer additional information - to open up new possibilites for future integration.

Hmmmm

Recognize that in an uncertain contest against Nature your instinct is wrong. Bigger potential rewards are not correlated with more risk. If you are pursuing a truly uncertain endeavor, like a startup, there is no way of knowing if the larger or smaller possible outcome is more likely to succeed, so the only rational course is to pursue the biggest possible outcome you can imagine.

Uncertain decision-making and the maxi-max criterion

Of course there are other reasons you might want to not pursue "the biggest possible outcome you can imagine" ... maybe you want to pursue the best outcome you can imagine, not just the biggest; maybe you have other constraints, like resources or your desired lifestyle.

Still an important insight - more ambitious goals are not necessarily correlated with more risk.

0data

AFAICT these are webapps that work with localStorage or can sync with your cloud storage service.

Probability that I already posted this link ~51%.

Asser's Life of King Alfred
"... he was so harassed by daily and nightly sadness that he complained and made moan to the Lord, and to all who were admitted to his familiarity and affection, that Almighty God had made him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the liberal arts ..."

In Asser's account Alfred is obsessed with learning, despite (?) not learning to read until after being crowned. Interesting given Alfred's position in English history, and with this essay on oral vs written culture banging around my head.

Fighting Fantasy project
I would have loved these back in my D&D days. Choose Your Own Adventure + dice combat.

West Wind, 8
The young, tall English poet–soon to die, soon to sail on his small boat into the blue haze and then the storm and then under the gray waves’ spinning threshold–went over to Pisa to meet a friend; met him; spent with him a sunny afternoon. I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart. So my love is a gift to myself. And I think of him, on that July afternoon in Pisa, while his friend Hunt told him stories pithy and humorous, of their friends in England, so that he began to laugh, so that his tall, lean body shook, and his long legs couldn’t hold him, and he had to lean up against the building, seized with laughter, abundant and unstoppable; and so he leaned in the wild sun, against the stones of the building, with the tears flying from his eyes–full of foolishness, howling, hanging on to the stones, crawling with laughter, clasping his own body as it began to fly apart in the nonsense, the sweetness, the intelligence, the bright happiness falling, like tiny gold flowers, like the sunlight itself, the lilt of Hunt’s voice, on this simple afternoon, with a friend, in Pisa.

• Mary Oliver

The manga

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

A Left-Handed Commencement Address by Ursula K. LeGuin

Gone

• Cities founded in the fire-prone frontier by anti-government types that didn't want to be told how to build (proper infrastructure, firebreaks etc.)
• Real estate has been the main wealth generator for a while, "Selling out to a developer was the only retirement plan most farmers knew."
• "What was once sparse is now densely packed with pine, fir, cedar, and manzanita. A forest that supported 64 trees an acre in pre-settlement times now boasted 160 trees an acre ... 'I don't think we could have managed the forests any worse.'"
• "as Wilson and his staff studied the fires more closely, he could see that their oddly linear pattern of ignition clusters corresponded to major electrical power lines."
• “These weren’t outlier events,” Wilson said. “These same spots had a history of fire. They had burned before and were destined to burn again. If you charted it out, we weren’t having far more wildfires than in the past. But the wildfires we were experiencing were far more deadly and destructive, and that had to do with mismanaging the forest and building communities in the wildland-urban interface. The state’s population was exploding in the very areas most susceptible to wildfires.”
• Forestry management and fire prevention - prescribed burns, reducing fuel load - curtailed in favor of military-style firefighting.
• "To justify its high costs, [Cal Fire] had to figure out a way to make itself essential throughout the year. This was how it evolved into a 24/7 provider of emergency services to the sprawling mountain communities ... instead of trying to slow down the suburbanization of forestlands, Wilson said, the department served the growth — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in funding."
• "In their filings, each attorney traced the historic blazes to a culture of mismanagement, corruption, and cover-up that had taken hold inside PG&E decades before. A pattern of venality, they argued, began in the company’s early years and became more recalcitrant in the 1980s and 1990s, when PG&E, with the connivance of the California Public Utilities Commission, its watchdog, made a decision to place profits and bonuses to top executives — and dividends to shareholders — over safety."
• "It was fiction that the California Public Utilities Commission exercised any watchdog role over PG&E, he said. “They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the trained personnel or mindset, to monitor and audit PG&E’s compliance with safety regulations. PG&E can literally get away with murder.”"

Awesome reading list with special focus on techno as black music.

See also this talk from DeForrest Brown Jr.

"It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users."

Maybe look into this. And hey yeah, there is an Android app.

EVERYONE HAS ONCE READ, for it comes up many times in literature, of that pilot in the reign of Tiberius, who, as he was sailing along in the Aegean on a quiet evening, heard a loud voice announcing that "Great Pan was dead." This engaging myth was interpreted in two contradictory ways.

Part of a larger work that locates creation myths with a change about 6,500 years ago when the position of the sun during the equinoxes stopped lining up with the Milky Way.

The rest of the site ... lotta wild stuff there.

19hz.info wow how did I not know about this

edmtrain also has some good stuff on the more mainstream tip as you might have guessed

Beautiful old footage of San Francisco, much of it home movies.

interactive fiction in 2019 is wild

I just won a game by getting broken up with and then crying. Which ... I play games to escape from real life, not to recapitulate it.

The number of cheap Kindle editions of Ulysses continues to grow. None of them are perfect: so far the editions generally accepted to be most free of errors (like the Gabler edition) aren't available, and the typesetting and layout are often amateurish. On the other hand, you can get a copy of a marvelous and strange book for the price of a candy bar and carry it anywhere.

• 2019 update: there is now a Penguin edition on Kindle, based on the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which would seem to be the obvious choice. However, it looks like it was poorly digitized and is riddled with errors.
• The Shmoop study version seems to be the only one that breaks the book up into 18 episodes. It adds Cliff's Notes-style commentary, for good or ill. Typesetting is pretty basic.
• The free Kindle edition is free, has the most reviews by far, but is apparently missing text (The Ballad of Joking Jesus and any other verse printed centered on the page.) Might be badly scanned. No idea what printed edition this is based on.
• Ulysses Unabridged (Illustrated) has the text the other version lacks. It's $2.99. Has only has one review, which makes me a little uneasy. No idea what printed edition this is based on. (Update: I ended up buying this one. It doesn't have chapter breaks. Despite what the one review says, it is actually illustrated. "Proteus" has a modern-day photo of Sandymount strand.)
• Project Gutenberg has a Kindle version up that lacks chapter breaks, although it keeps the three-part structure. Based on the 1922 edition.
• epubBooks also has a Kindle edition. Good luck finding out anything about it. It's probably fine. Why do I have to do this? Why isn't the answer obvious?

Recommendation: get the Project Gutenberg edition. Free, better than the "free Kindle edition", as good as the paid editions.

If you thought that was nitpicking, Google "gabler kidd".

tfw the best explanation of the labor theory of value in Marx you've seen is in a ten-year-old blog comment.

And this, surely, is what Shakespeare also felt, because in one of his comedies there is a soldier, a cowardly soldier, the Miles Gloriosus of the Latin comedy. The man is a show-off, he makes people believe that he has acted bravely, and they promote him and he becomes a captain. Then they discover his trick, and in front of the entire troop they pull off his medals; they humiliate him. And then he is left alone and says: “Captain I’ll be no more; / But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.” “No seré capitán.” He says simply, “the thing I am shall make me live.” That is, he feels that above and beyond the circumstances, beyond his cowardice, his humiliation, he is something else, a kind of strength we all have within us, what Spinoza called “God,” what Schopenhauer called “will,” what Bernard Shaw called “life force,” and Bergson called “vital impulse.” I think this is also what was going on with Boswell.

Borges on Boswell

Oh man it's been WAY too long since I've read Shakes

Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this, for it will come to pass
that every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword? cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live
Safest in shame! being fool'd, by foolery thrive!
There's place and means for every man alive.
I'll after them.

"There's something here that really, I'd like to twist round a little bit ... because, narcissism, is a very sort of pronounced way of stating a relationship to the world, whether it's a man or a woman, isn't it. But this other question, which is contained within it, doesn't go as far as it as an idea - is this sort of self-delight of a person, whether it's a man or a woman, in life, in what they'e doing, in their relationships with men or women. And it's a thing that matters tremendously. And it's not only a sort of inner thing, by which you live, but it's a very outer thing by which you gain relationships with your own context in the world that you can't gain any other way. That it's when you have somehow been made so unconscious of yourself that you easily, naturally sort of compulsively go out to whatever is going on around you. Now, when [inaudible] a child, that tends, more than people, to be other things, doesn't it. Mountains, streams, wherever you go. And then, only gradually, as you go on, you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people. But I do think that the sort of essence of self-delight as a kind of possible thing in the modern world, and something which fewer woman have than men, and want, and must have ... is the power, the compulsion, not the power, the compulsion to make contact with the world as you are living in it. And when I say that I don't just mean the people next door, or your friends, I simply mean what is going on."

I don't buy what she says about the differences between women and men here, but