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[Nachtswalbe]

Is anyone here a voluntarily childless adult? Zompist is. I don't want to _have_ offspring, at best designate a successor for any assets, because it just, fucking sucks at times growing up and I wouldn't wish that much parental inconsistency and frankly weird and sometimes verbally/emotionally violent bullshit on any kid. I can care for a prospective partner, I seriously believe I can't handle any offspring - or inflicting maternity leave on anyone

[Travis B.]

Is anyone here a voluntarily childless adult? Zompist is. I don't want to _have_ offspring, at best designate a successor for any assets, because it just, fucking sucks at times growing up and I wouldn't wish that much parental inconsistency and frankly weird and sometimes verbally/emotionally violent bullshit on any kid. I can care for a prospective partner, I seriously believe I can't handle any offspring - or inflicting maternity leave on anyone

You speak as if being a "voluntarily childless adult" is a weird thing (as if it even needs a term for it) - what makes you think that? Many, many people choose to not have children - there is nothing weird about it at all. (I must ask - is there something in your background where you have been convinced that there is something odd about this?)

[Nachtswalbe]

Mainly parental expectations - I know a childless aunt and uncle - and a gay uncle we dont talk about much due to homophobia , but the general expectation was to Be Normal (something dad emphasizes a lot) and on my mom's side a desire for grandkids eventually. I once raised the possibility of eunuching myself to remove a distracting sex drive and the reaction was predictably negative

[Travis B.]

Mainly parental expectations - I know a childless aunt and uncle - and a gay uncle we dont talk about much due to homophobia , but the general expectation was to Be Normal (something dad emphasizes a lot) and on my mom's side a desire for grandkids eventually. I once raised the possibility of eunuching myself to remove a distracting sex drive and the reaction was predictably negative

I have an aunt and uncle without children and three of my cousins have no children, and I have never heard any suggestion that this was anything other than normal. And don't forget all the gay and lesbian couples out there who have no children (even though I have a lesbian cousin who has children)! I think this is something particular to your family and its expectations.

Of course, wanting to eunuch yourself is an entirely different matter, and I would expect most people would react negatively for obvious reasons.

[Ares Land]

A lot of parents have Expectations about grandchildren. You don't have to meet them.
Not having kids is entirely unremarkable. It's generally bad form to openly speculate as to why people don't have kids.

That being said... Considering castration is considering self-harm. This is not a healthy thing to consider, and I think you need help.

[bradrn]

The MIRI/CFAR circles are bad news and it's generally advisable to stay far away from them.

I haven’t heard this before. What’s bad about them?

I probably can't explain this well, but their ideas (their general cultural vibe, really, more than specific ideas that they make arguments for) make people worse and less effective and dramatically increase their risk of, like, a psychotic break. And the problems are more foundational than they'd like to admit - the Zizians aren't, like, not orthodox rationalists, for example.

They don't seem capable of seriously reckoning with any of this - now that they can't just deny there's a pattern, the community consensus AFAICT is shaping up to be "blame one guy for it" (e.g. the comments here), on the argument that well-connected guys are well-connected.

It can be simultaneously true that ‘the culture of an entire community increases risk of a psychotic break’ and ‘most of the psychotic breaks were triggered by one specific person’. From reading your link, I suspect that the second is more important than the first here, but both should be looked into. (Thankfully, it sounds like this is what’s happening.)

you can get halfway to whatever mental disorder Ziz developed by just, like, reading foundational rationalist texts and taking them seriously.

How do you come to this conclusion?

[Nortaneous]

you can get halfway to whatever mental disorder Ziz developed by just, like, reading foundational rationalist texts and taking them seriously.

How do you come to this conclusion?

Personal experience, unfortunately.

[MacAnDàil]

Never mind Scott's freakout when topher brennan released a letter from him stating interest in neoreactionary stuff, and he felt his reputation was ruined so he
1) deleted his old blog
2) created a new one
3) quit his old psychiatrist job and made a private practice which only accepts previous patients.

That was the biggest rationalist "incident".

Topher Brennan is a repulsive idiot and always has been. I'm not sure why Scott would trust a guy who made a sincere attempt to break into electoral politics, to name the biggest of many red flags. But he didn't have anything to do with SSC getting shut down - that was all the New York Times.

You can't have a public profile and draw an unrelated salary - you have to pick one or the other. It's not great, but it shouldn't be surprising that working for someone else is antithetical to freedom.

You totally can:
https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/wan ... y-job.html
This guy, for the little I know of him, doesn't seem be any Kafka or Vonnegut though. He seems to jump at the chance to shut up shop and re-open under another name.

Aleister Crowley said (to paraphrase extensively) that you shouldn't fuck with weird shit until you've mastered normal shit. He was right.

That's probably good advice, but seems like the sort of thing anyone interested in weird shit will ignore. I mean, my impression is that people go for weird shit (in several senses) because they can't master normal shit.

While that may be the case for some people, it can also be because they like weird shit, maybe because normal shit can be seen as boring and weird shit interesting, fantastic and exciting.

[Zju]

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2021/11/0 ... tors-suck/

To me, the killer consideration is data space. How much physical space does a recipe take up? We’re used to thinking of data as weightless [...] A pound of steak contains on the order of 10²⁵ atoms. We need to store the location and velocity of each one. [...] Anyway: to store the state of each atom, we have nothing smaller than an atom. The recording of the state of 10²⁵ atoms will itself be 10²⁵ atoms— a pound of computronium. [...] Fine, you say: we’ll compress the data. And I’ll say: there is no lossless compression. Every method you use will have some effect— and could change the taste. [...]

Edit: Compression can be lossless if the data is strongly patterned. E.g. an entry in the Library of Babel that consists entirely of the letter “e” can be precisely described in a few words (I just did it). But complex biological material (a.k.a. “food”) isn’t strongly patterned in that way.

Isn't it though? Isn't biological material the perfect example of patterning? Aren't tissues just repetitions of the same kind of cells over and over?
How many different kinds of tissues are there in a steak anyway? Let's be (overly) generous and posit there are 1000 kinds of tissues in a steak. And for all the sensitive tongues out there, let's allow for 100 different cell variations per tissue that can be combined in any which random way, making for 10⁵ cells weight worth of information for a steak (+ the algorithms to store, process and replicate that, but the weight of those would be negligible compared to the sheer amount of biological data). Now I don't know how many atoms there are in 10⁵ cells, but I'd wager that their order of magnitude is way less than 25. And who's to say that tissues cannot be shared between recipes anyway?

P.S. the least effort of googling stated that there are about 10¹⁴ atoms in a (human) cell, which, combined with our generous variety of tissues and tissue variation for a steak, amounts to 10¹⁹ atoms per steak - there's your 10⁶-fold reduction in weight and information. And again, why wouldn't tissues and ingredients be shareable between recipes? A cook remembers that flour is needed for all those dozens of recipes, and not that that specific species of cereal grain needs to be ground individually for each and every recipe.

[zompist]

Isn't it though? Isn't biological material the perfect example of patterning? Aren't tissues just repetitions of the same kind of cells over and over?

Uh, no? Look at a few types of biological material:

* Brains. Is your brain just "repeat this neuron 86 million times"?
* Gonads. The whole point of sexual reproduction is that minor differences between cells matter.
* Taste and smell receptors; the immune system. These all test subcellular resemblances.

Admittedly these are all far more important for the possessor of the body, not for someone eating it. But I think it's a bold move to say that it doesn't matter for taste. Some foods should be homogenous (chocolate pudding?); others should not. Something as seemingly simple as an orange is not homogenous (e.g. the sweetness is noticeably different in different parts of a single fruit).

But never mind that, let's pretend that a raw steak is highly homogenous. But a cooked steak-- a cooked anything-- is not.

Quoting Wikipedia: "In the cooking process, Maillard reactions can produce hundreds of different flavor compounds depending on the chemical constituents in the food, the temperature, the cooking time, and the presence of air. These compounds, in turn, often break down to form yet more flavor compounds."

And note, cooking is not a uniform process! There's a heat gradient, and thus a flavor gradient, in anything that's cooked.

Also, I'd appeal to your common sense. You don't have to be a raging foodie to taste a difference between a $295 Kobe filet and whatever unholy mixture goes into a Baconator. Foods differ in a way that we don't completely understand, and will not be captured by multiplying a single beef cell a billion times.

And again, why wouldn't tissues and ingredients be shareable between recipes? A cook remembers that flour is needed for all those dozens of recipes, and not that that specific species of cereal grain needs to be ground individually for each and every recipe.

Cooking is not replicating! To defend the magic replicator, you can't simultaneously insist that it's a molecule-by-molecule re-creation, and a highly simplified and analyzed recipe. The replicator knows nothing about "flour", any more than a 3-D printer used to create sculptures knows about "feet".

I'll grant you that you compress the recipe to any degree. Almost all food, after all, could be "replicated" as a sludge of nutrient paste. What I won't grant is that the compression never has any effect on taste.

Edit and disclaimer: none of this is a debate about real things or actually matters. It's fun to nerd out on this stuff sometimes. But there was a serious bit of conworlding advice in my post: unlimited magic to save an idea is not great conworlding. Flaws and limitations are more realistic and are better storytelling. A replicator or transporter that never fails and can't be detected: yawn. A replicator that glitches out sometimes: not only is that more fun, it can provide a plot.

[Richard W]

* Gonads. The whole point of sexual reproduction is that minor differences between cells matter.

Presumably you're thinking of base pair sequences. A list of base pair sequences would be highly compressible, because a sequence is mostly composed of long parts of sequences already encountered.

[zompist]

* Gonads. The whole point of sexual reproduction is that minor differences between cells matter.

Presumably you're thinking of base pair sequences. A list of base pair sequences would be highly compressible, because a sequence is mostly composed of long parts of sequences already encountered.

Well, one, I'm not sure that the differences between sperm cells are just a matter of their DNA. Sperm motility is pretty complex; the fact that it can be affected by various chemicals is suggestive-- sperm cell #2934428 had the same DNA before and after the treatment.

And two, I was responding to the idea that all we need to do is describe a very limited number of cells and just replicate those cells as units. If you want to go down to the actual DNA sequence-- fine, but then you agree that intracellular details are important.

[Richard W]

And two, I was responding to the idea that all we need to do is describe a very limited number of cells and just replicate those cells as units. If you want to go down to the actual DNA sequence-- fine, but then you agree that intracellular details are important.

Well, the idea has to be to store a common description and then the pertinent differences for each cell. Thinking specifically of a food replicator though, you'd probably ideally have a statistical distribution and reproduce a population, rather than store all the details and produce exactly the same output each time.

[Zju]

You make good points, though overall I'm not convinced.

* Brains. Is your brain just "repeat this neuron 86 million times"?
* Gonads. The whole point of sexual reproduction is that minor differences between cells matter.
* Taste and smell receptors; the immune system. These all test subcellular resemblances.

Admittedly these are all far more important for the possessor of the body, not for someone eating it.

Some of it you said it yourself. There're several points intertwined here. Sure, let's posit 80% of best alien dishes all require gonads of different species.
* Firstly, that argument pertains to alien cuisine only, not human cuisine. There's the odd liver here and there, but overall it's mostly veggies, fruit, meat and derivatives thereof.
* Secondly, for that Jabberwocky soup that calls for 20 Jabberwocky gonads, you wouldn't store information for a Jabberwocky gonad 20 times over, would you?
* Thirdly, is there all that much difference in taste between a Jabberwocky brain that had remembered a bunch of poems and a Jabberwocky brain that consists of the same 100 neurons repeated in a random pattern?

And note, cooking is not a uniform process! There's a heat gradient, and thus a flavor gradient, in anything that's cooked. [...] Foods differ in a way that we don't completely understand, and will not be captured by multiplying a single beef cell a billion times.

Alright then, replicator recipe writers will need to store the information about several thin vertical bars of a cooked dish, just enough to have a bunch of samples from all its constituent parts. Cooked dishes still have structure and repeated information and are not just random aggregations of atoms. It's only truly random data that is incompressible.

Cooking is not replicating! To defend the magic replicator, you can't simultaneously insist that it's a molecule-by-molecule re-creation, and a highly simplified and analyzed recipe. The replicator knows nothing about "flour", any more than a 3-D printer used to create sculptures knows about "feet".

The replicator itself maybe not, but why wouldn't 22nd (or was it 23rd?) century people have algorithms and databases that can provide that data to replicators? We already have some non trivial procedural generation and biological knowledge.

unlimited magic to save an idea is not great conworlding. Flaws and limitations are more realistic and are better storytelling.

Agreed on that.

One more point, though: it's not certain that we can easily tell what future flaws and limitations would be. We can now print just about any image perceivable to human eye on a piece of paper, with data availability being the only constraint - how many people in the middle ages would have thought that would be a trivial task in the future?

[zompist]

Alright then, replicator recipe writers will need to store the information about several thin vertical bars of a cooked dish, just enough to have a bunch of samples from all its constituent parts.

Vertical strips might do in the case of a steak. For a potato you want radial strips (i.e. distance from the center is most important). For a stir fry, each bit of meat is oriented in a different direction both in the wok and on the plate. As I mentioned, an orange varies internally, and not in a way that's easily captured by slices in a particular direction.

And maybe this could be handled if recipes are created by chefs. But then you can't posit that a dish has thousands of variants and can be tweaked to individual taste.

To me, the replicator is plausible precisely because it's a tedious but mindlessly simple process. Scan the molecules, store everything; reproduce it all layer by layer. (Well, I do have questions about how you "scan" something like a soup. I guess the process has to be extremely fast (so the food doesn't have time to change), and destructive (as it's barely plausible that you can "scan" a surface, less so that you can scan the insides of something).)

I'll grant you that more analysis may allow you to compress the data more. But then the taste depends heavily on your analysis! The idea that highly massaged data is undetectable is another form of engineer's disease. I could write a whole book on errors software engineers make because they think they understand a problem but don't— but that book has been written already, several times over. And frankly, after 70 years, the idea that the engineers eventually improve their analyses is hard to swallow. Engineers always want to throw out the current system (with all its accumulated but quirkily difficult knowledge) and start over.

One more point, though: it's not certain that we can easily tell what future flaws and limitations would be. We can now print just about any image perceivable to human eye on a piece of paper, with data availability being the only constraint - how many people in the middle ages would have thought that would be a trivial task in the future?

Um, trompe-l'œil dates back to ancient times.

I'm repeating myself by this time and should let it drop, but fooling the eyes is easy! Fooling the sense of smell is harder: we detect molecules. Fooling the intestines is way harder— we don't merely require individual proteins, we require that they be right-handed.

[rotting bones]

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2021/11/0 ... tors-suck/

I think what's wrong with this rant is that a lot of this data is mutually independent. For example, you don't need to store temperature data for food molecules if the computer understands how to pattern molecules to assemble any substance at a given temperature. Similarly, you don't need to store information about each atom separately if you have information about the protein and other molecules that are present, and the computer knows how to assemble the specified molecules. Like Richard W said, you can then generate a substance with those molecules with predetermined distributions. You can vary the molecules and distributions at different points in the meal.

[Nachtswalbe]

What is the best Karmic punishment for a crime? Could courts sentence using poetic justice - theives being stripped naked and thrown in the middle of the street, murderers and rapists being forced to listen to recordings of their crimes etc.

[Nachtswalbe]

Is it possible to acknowledge you have done something utterly horrible, not demand that others forgive you and believe that anything bad that happens to you thereafter is karma/God's justice?

[zompist]

I think what's wrong with this rant is that a lot of this data is mutually independent. For example, you don't need to store temperature data for food molecules if the computer understands how to pattern molecules to assemble any substance at a given temperature.

I don't know what that means. You realize that temperature is not homogenous in a meal?

Similarly, you don't need to store information about each atom separately if you have information about the protein and other molecules that are present, and the computer knows how to assemble the specified molecules.

The original quote claimed that replicators worked at the "subatomic level". You can make a fake technology do anything if you keep changing the parameters every time a point is questioned. The replication isn't precise enough? It's subatomic! The replication takes too much data storage? It's compressed a trillion-fold!

FWIW I'm happy to let the replicator store thing at the molecular level. The average number of atoms in an amino acid, as an example, is 19. That saves you an order of magnitude. Out of 25. That does not make the problem go away, especially if people insist that every possible variation and every possible ingredient is also accounted for.

[rotting bones]

Nachtswalbe: There are two kinds of criminals: rational criminals and lunatics. For example, petty theft decreases in affluent neighborhoods because crime increases the price of goods. This rationale doesn't move those who are too poor to afford them.

The way to decrease rational crime is to build a more just society. The appropriate way to deal with insanity is treatment.

Karmic irony presupposes an objectivity that transcends subjective reactions to crime. Nothing of the kind exists.