Links for 2022-05-11
Brain development was mapped, from a 15-week-old fetus to a 100-year-old adult, based on a petabyte of brain scan data from over 100,000 people. https://www.braintomorrow.com/brain-development-map/
Flood Basalt Eruptions: NASA Warns That Some Volcanoes Could Warm Climate, Destroy Ozone Layer https://scitechdaily.com/flood-basalt-eruptions-nasa-warns-that-some-volcanoes-could-warm-climate-destroy-ozone-layer/
The Big Five are word vectors https://vectors.substack.com/p/the-big-five-are-word-vectors?s=r
New Test Compares AI Reasoning With Human Thinking. The novel technique can help researchers see if AIs reason as hoped and are trustworthy. https://spectrum.ieee.org/-2657216063
Psychological and Sociological Profile of Women Who Have Completed Elite Military Combat Training https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0095327X221076555
A Forth-based operating system intended to allow programming on microcontrollers and improvised systems in the case of civilizational collapse. http://collapseos.org
How We Learned, Then Forgot, About Human Intelligence... And Witnessing the Live Breakdown of Academia (podcast interview with Cactus Chu) https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/05/how-we-learned-then-forgot-about-human.html
A spatial transcriptomic method, Stereo-seq, increases spatial resolution and field of view dramatically, compared to all existing methods. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867422003993
You can be perfectly rational and believe that late-term abortion and even infanticide should be legal. You can be perfectly rational and believe that people who are culturally or even ethnically different from you should not be allowed to immigrate to your country.
That does of course not mean that people who hold those beliefs are perfectly rational; that those beliefs are their true preferences. But it means that it is possible to have those preferences without being EVIL. There is no such thing as evilness.
Disagreements about values cannot be resolved by evidence. The best you can hope for is that people who claim to have other values than you are mistaken about their values and that their true values are in alignment with yours.
To figure this out and avoid fruitless discussions it generally helps to taboo all moral terminology. Moral terminology can be very obfuscating. Its main purpose is to signal condemnation or praise. But it never helps to clarify an issue.
Consider the following. If someone says that an action is immoral, what do they ACTUALLY mean? There are various different interpretations:
- the action runs contrary to their goals;
- a powerful being dislikes the action;
- the action causes a feeling of disgust;
- there exists a set of written principles that some people agree to follow and which prescribes the action;
- there exists a mathematical theorem, economic principle, or physical theory under which the action leads to suboptimal outcomes given certain reasonable assumptions about the goals of the person taking the action.
Once you taboo moral terminology you can figure out what people are actually trying to communicate and whether a debate could help resolve a disagreement or if the disagreement is about values, i.e. subjective.
A good question to start this process is to ask people how they became to believe that an action is wrong.
Don't try to think in terms of what's good or bad but in terms of your preferences. For example, I want to live in a world in which I don't need to fear that my loved ones (or those people that are instrumentally useful in terms of satisfying my preferences) are raped or murdered. In order to accomplish this, I need to cooperate with others, make contracts and agree upon a set of behavioral rules. None of this requires any dogma but can instead be established theoretically (game theory) and empirically (social science/economics etc.).
An interesting exercise in this context is to repeatedly ask, like a child, WHY you want to achieve a certain goal.
If you are honest with yourself you will eventually arrive at one of the following two truths:
1. Achieving the goal maximizes your happiness/satisfaction.
2. Achieving the goal is instrumental in achieving #1.
Could there be another answer? Suppose your final answer would instead be that it was the morally right course of action to achieve the goal. But *why* do you care about that? If you would feel and keep feeling the same when not doing it why would you do it? The answer would most likely be along the lines that you would feel guilty (unhappy) or be less satisfied due to losing status among your peers.
The point of the exercise is to figure out the actual disagreement between people. If the disagreement truly is that action A is necessary to maximize your happiness/satisfaction while what maximizes another person's happiness/satisfaction is to prevent A then there is no point in trying to convince each other of your respective positions. If, however, one or both of you are somehow confused about what you truly want or how to achieve it then there is still hope that you might be able to cooperate after all. Outlining the whole edifice of your beliefs down to the fundamental motivation of feeling happy and satisfied will allow you to spot any confusion.