#[0]​

What do you think of Mike McCulloch’s theory of quantized inertia?

Why is it wrong?

What does it not predict?

The absolute reality is non-dual (Advaita ) according to the Hindu philosophy. The duality of evil and good exists only in the mind . Beyond the mind only the mystical pure substance remains

Why does it have to be utopian to fix incentives? Obviously fixing incentives goes a long way to creating a less bad world. Perfect worlds cannot and will not ever exist.

I think one of the most dangerous ways to think of the future is to assume that human nature is fundamentally good, peaceful and cooperative. And that the only reason there's evil, war and competitive behaviors is due to perverse incentives and corrupt institutions.

There's literally no reason to believe this is true. It's seductive to think it true, because then you can simply focus on fixing those incentives and tearing down corrupt institutions. But it's a false promise to think there's this tied-up box of goodness waiting to escape on the other side.

Some people think this is cynical. I just thinks it's realistic. There is no destination for us. There's only the journey.

I love Nostr and it's ability to connect us in an uncensorable way. But it's still a form of addicting social media and that is slowly stealing our humanity.

Do you find it hard not to pick up your cell phone or other distraction?

What does that achieve exactly?

Brazilians are now discussing if I am a communist or a libertarian to decide if they want to use Amethyst or not.

Should I tell them that I ate a CUBAN sandwich at Bitcoin 2023?

Greetings from sunny Lols Angeles. ☁️

If you think about it, all science and technology provides is an extension to our anemic human senses.

The Espionage Act of 1917, allows for secret trials and secret evidence. Such things have no place in an open society.

The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees a right to a *public* trial. This, the law is unconstitutional on its face, and should be struck down.

The world itself is not capable of showing itself visually in any other way.

So true, but then again we do know some stuff really well.

We build airplanes and they fly.

Yep, I was guessing energy use would be on there. I agree with that for sure. And I agree while N=1 is better than 0, it’s a whole lot worse than any other value.

In both his calculation of the nominator and the denominator of his anthropic reasoning. The nominator requires a definition of an "ordinary observer" of which humans supposedly count. But it's not clear what the boundaries of an ordinary observer are in the definition. I don't really have enough time before bedtime to write ten paragraphs on the problem. But to summarize it seems very humanistically chauvinist. (Maybe paste that into Bard or ChatGPT and I'm sure it will know where I'm going with this).

The second problem deals with the assumed boundedness of the number of simulations, which I find problematic. Mainly because Bostrom doesn't seem to be very careful about thinking about how conservation laws will place significant energy constraints on nested simulations.

I don't think a top-level universe lacking conservation laws would be the kind of universe that would permit the minds of physics for life to evolve and build computers with simulations makes any sense, either.

But basically, if you were simulating entire universes within universes, in an ad infinitum nesting as Bostrom suggests, you'd quickly run out of energy to advance the nested simulations in anything resembling an economical way. We're talking about simulating entire universes down to sub-atomic particles, here. There's a real upper bound on the computation-energy budget here.

It turns out, when you take conservation laws into account, we're actually most likely to be living in a universe where no further simulations are possible. And the likelihood we are living in a top-level universe is far higher than in Bostrom (and Musk's) formulation.

That's all assuming we get over the ordinary observer problem.