date:20150505

Re: quadratic voting

2015-05-05 Thread Telmo Menezes

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 1:12 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

  On 5/4/2015 2:54 PM, LizR wrote:

  On 5 May 2015 at 00:12, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote:

  On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 1:03 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote:

 Yes, very. I haven't read the paper yet but I hope when they say you pay
 for votes that isn't meaning a plutocracy, but from some share of equally
 distributed voting capital or something similar? So people can spend
 their voting power on whatever they're concerned about?


  The idea is very simple. You can buy x votes for (x * c)^2 dollars. In
 the end, all the money that was spent on buying votes is equally
 distributed by the voters. So the more the plutocracy spends its financial
 capital to influence policy, the more wealth equality you get. The author
 proposes a mathematical proof that such a system would stabilize on an
 equal distribution of political power.

  Of course, there are many real world details that could make this idea
 fail miserably, but it's fun to think about.

Yes, if it's real money being spent it's kind of similar to the
 current system, at least in countries where unlimited pre-election spending
 is allowed. A lot of the time the rich - who own the media and so on - buy
 the result they want, as per Mark Twain's comment.

  Where does the money go once it's bought votes?


 It's redistributed.  So after the Koch brothers spend $889,000,000 in the
 next election to cast 29,816 votes, each of the 129 million voters will get
 back $6.88 (plus the $1 they put in plus a share of whatever other big
 spenders put in).  Actually I think the Bros will be better off buying
 attack ads with their billion.


Which is a better situation than we have now, where they can just buy the
laws for much cheaper.

Telmo.



 Brent

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Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!

2015-05-05 Thread Telmo Menezes

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 8:32 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


 On 04 May 2015, at 10:23, Telmo Menezes wrote:



 On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 10:08 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 4 May 2015 at 06:45, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote:


 Of course believing in the supernatural is absurd -- what does that even
 mean? If, for example, ghosts were real, then this would just mean that
 current scientific theories are incomplete or wrong.

 That would just mean the terminology isn't very good. It would be more
 accurate to say you do (or don't) believe in ghosts.


 That's a good point.
 Of course the non-materialist deals with ontological problems. Do entities
 perceived under the influence of psychoactive drugs exist in some sense?



 At Iridia, there has been a talk and demo of Virtual Reality. I have been
 very often disappointed, but this time I have been quite impressed. They
 have solved the main problems, and the immersion feeling was quite realist,
 in all direction where you looked, without any screen border, and perfect
 real time synchronization for any type of the move of your head or eyes.


William Gibson felt the same :)
https://twitter.com/perrychen/status/579058927511334912

They did it!, said the guy who has been writing and dreaming about this
stuff for decades.


 In one demo there was a creature, was it real? Those things are relatively
 real. Like in personal nocturnal dream, or when reading a novel, and with
 comp, like with physicalism, there is a physical reality, which is a priori
 different from a machine (as it is a sum of the work of all machine)
 acting below our substitution level. In arithmetic, one virtual reality
 is less virtual than all the others, as it has the correct comp bottom.
 That define a notion of physically real, and most entities perceived in
 inebriated state are very often not physically real. But they might still
 be images of important routine operating in the brain of a large class of
 possible subject, and be entities living on alternate reality planes, but
 still there by Turing-Universal + FPI.

 Virtual reality might help people for the thought experiences, and many
 (new) things.

 But in the long run, we have to be careful, as the poor might one day not
 afford visiting a non virtual reality. If we don't think a bit, we might
 end up all in brains in vats.


Some economists are already working on this, namely Robin Hanson. He used
to be at the center of a very lively discussion about these topics. Maybe
you'd like to take a look at his blog when you have time:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/

He's an interesting guy, in any case.

Telmo.



 Bruno






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 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!

2015-05-05 Thread Telmo Menezes

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 5:59 PM, PGC multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote:



 On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 4:03:50 PM UTC+2, telmo_menezes wrote:



 On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Alberto G. Corona agoc...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Of course believing in the supernatural is absurd -- what does that even
 mean? If, for example, ghosts were real, then this would just mean that
 current scientific theories are incomplete or wrong.


 So what?


 No problem, my only dogma is that reality is intelligible -- i.e. it is
 possible to discover laws that approximate how things work. Beyond the
 empirical successes of science, I choose this belief because I see no point
 in believing otherwise (if it's wrong, there is really no point in
 believing anything).

 Choosing things to disbelief a priori is unscientific, but of course we
 are mortal so we guide ourselves by some heuristic. I go in the direction
 of the things I find more likely to be true and I'm sure you do the same.


 Not necessarily. I find discovery of universal machine to be more
 unbelievable than strangeness that is cited in the esoteric-unexplained
 category, which is close in terms of content to children's fantasies and
 Star Wars. And yet the latter remains unsupported conjecture while the
 former is a number relation which exists provably as consequence of
 arithmetic. I'm not convinced by arguments like I see pattern in this
 strangeness and can categorize them; and we can see these patterns in
 science or in the work of so-and-so


I think most people, who are untrained in thinking about these topics, have
a simple heuristic guided by strangeness. You are more trained, so your
heuristic is more sophisticated. You say you find the universal machine
more unbelievable than
the Star Wars universe, and yet you give it more credence. I would say this
just means that you trained yourself to ignore biologically encoded
emotional responses when seeking truth.

The quacks, instead of encouraging people to improve their reasoning
skills, appeal to the fundamental strangeness of reality to peddle whatever
snake oil they are interested in selling at a given moment.



 I need evidence and clear algorithm. If say a Shulgin lays out how
 precisely to modify some molecule to ingest something that will result in
 mystical experience with paranormal content, than this is reasonable: If
 subject x ingest function of some molecule = fuzzy experience with
 features a,b,c, mystical union or whatever etc.


But then you respect empiricism somehow. You must, otherwise how could you
have learned to play music?



 But citing strangeness of unknown without being able to repeat the result
 or make it repeatable to skeptics is probably advertising again, which
 tries to sell itself as truth regardless whether in respected journal,
 obscure blog, TV... Advertising without being genuine about it and masking
 it as science, without properly situating it in tenable hypothesis = I can
 find interesting patterns in dog shit and the mud. Don't feel the need to
 post about it because I feel that too often basic rationality is left at
 the door for hidden reasons of self-glory of authors.


Ok.



 And I like reasoning about the craziest shit. But I'm too often
 disappointed by barrages of cheap psychological tricks playing to the
 unknown, instead of clear reasoning where somebody states a clean,
 discrete ontology clearly.


Yes, I stole this remark above, as you can see.


 That's why I think a lot of this stuff can be ignored. We're not in realm
 of explanation and basic rationality is left at the door... which is
 profitable and self-fulfilling (there will be more weird patterns in the
 mud to substantiate what I'm saying). With Shulgin type approach as
 contrast (he also carries extraordinary claim and is attacked as crackpot),
 we can verify mystical propositions for ourselves because the algorithms of
 how to get there and build such molecule are accessible and precise enough.
 PGC


But then we are back at an heuristic, and that is unavoidable. The search
for knowledge cannot operate blindly, there is just too much stuff to
explore.





 Telmo.



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 Alberto.

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Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!

2015-05-05 Thread Telmo Menezes

Hi Mitch,

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 4:00 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List 
everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote:

 Totally agree, Telmo, regarding communication. On the Bostrom concept of
 Sims and, by extension, our reality being a sim, I like the concept, but in
 a way, it seems too simple, Rather than life being an illusion, let us
 conceive that its the result of a great program running and producing us as
 a result. Moreover, our program can be either revised, copied, or both,
 etc. This is one reason professor, Eric Steinhart's work seems compelling
 to me. The following summary is available from his book, Your Digital
 Afterlives, but here is a taste, from Steinhart's website-

  http://ericsteinhart.com/FLESH/flesh-chabs.html


I will have to read this more carefully, but I think I get the gist of it.
Most of the ideas are not new to me, and correspond to things that I enjoy
thinking about myself.

I have gone through several revisions of my belief system about these
topics, so it's likely that I can be convinced by good, new ideas.

Just in case you don't know, I really enjoyed this book at some point:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Never-Ending-Days-Being-Dead/dp/0571220568

It's mostly a sampler of theories on these topics, and some have already
been falsified (like the omega point, I believe).



 The best of these theories is Promotion, but Steinhart views his own idea
 as flawed, because he wants it to be progressive rather then regressive. I
 don't see the logical regression he seemed concerned about, He did come up
 with Revision theory, as workable, however, these are merely, *better-off
 clones* of ourselves, and miss the continuity, that infers identity.
 Promotion is better, because it does exactly this, via pipelines,
 processes, data transfers, as well as uploading and teleportation.


Ok, I have no problem with any of this stuff. I will try to summarize how
my current view of things intersects with these topics.

I think immortality is a given. I suspect we are all versions of the same
thing (as conscious entities) and that all moments are eternal. I think the
perception of a time line arises inside each eternal observer moment.

What does not appear possible, at the moment, is to have very long story
lines. I cannot be Telmo for a time span of many centuries (disregarding
Quantum Immortality issues). It would be nice if we could do that. I think
there is potentially great value in having human being that extend their
personal development way beyond our biological limitations.

So the issue becomes: how to preserve a set of memories and transfer them
to another medium, so that we can extend story lines? This could take the
form of Promotion, trans-humanism, mind uploading, who know what else...

I would just say that the story lines problem is somewhat tangencial to the
simulated reality problem.

Sorry if I'm rambling, I don't have a lot of time at the moment...


 This is one reason I want to see if Ben Goetzel has an
 afterlife-resurrection theory, because they both appeared to have come to
 the same conclusions, independently,  on several other concepts.

 Steinhart, like Goetzel, is a computationalist (digitalist) - (5 minute
 video)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfDB35y-5Z0


I am mostly ok with this video. My only objection is that time must not
exist in the maximally simple universe, so thinking about causality between
universes seems problematic. This is part of what attracts me to Platonia
and this list: the idea that everything already exists, and what is called
causality is just structure.




 Please let me know if you uncover anything concerning Ben Goetzel's views.
 Thanks.


The AGI conference is going to be in my city in the end of July. I am not
sure I will be able to attend, but if I can I will try to ask Ben in person.

Telmo.



 Mitch


  -Original Message-
 From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
 To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com
 Sent: Mon, May 4, 2015 9:08 am
 Subject: Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!



  On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 1:08 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List 
 everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote:

 I sure did, Telmo. Scroll to the bottom and you shall view my last,
 number 26th, the last one.


  Ah there you are! And you are not the only one from this list commenting
 there, it's a small world.

  My bet on computational after-lives is that we are in one already (an
 infinity of times), but this is completely transparent to us.


  This kind of thing is interesting to me. I tend toward the materialist
 stuff since it seems to have potential. The mentalist stuff seems
 unreliable because people who have NDE's or trances have not come back with
 information.


  I would say that the important distinction is between communicable and
 non-communicable stuff. Science is about communicable stuff, but there is
 personal value in exploring the internal world -- although it won't get you
 a nobel

Re: Translation in the Fourth Spatial Dimension

2015-05-05 Thread Dennis Ochei

Thanks Liz! You're awesome in every dimension :)

On Tuesday, May 5, 2015, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote:

 ana and kata if I remember correctly.

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Re: quadratic voting

2015-05-05 Thread meekerdb

On 5/5/2015 5:27 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 1:12 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net
mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

On 5/4/2015 2:54 PM, LizR wrote:

On 5 May 2015 at 00:12, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote:

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 1:03 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com
mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, very. I haven't read the paper yet but I hope when they say
you pay
for votes that isn't meaning a plutocracy, but from some share of
equally
distributed voting capital or something similar? So people can
spend
their voting power on whatever they're concerned about?

The idea is very simple. You can buy x votes for (x * c)^2 dollars. In
the end,
all the money that was spent on buying votes is equally distributed by
the
voters. So the more the plutocracy spends its financial capital to
influence
policy, the more wealth equality you get. The author proposes a
mathematical
proof that such a system would stabilize on an equal distribution of
political
power.

Of course, there are many real world details that could make this idea
fail
miserably, but it's fun to think about.

Yes, if it's real money being spent it's kind of similar to the current
system, at
least in countries where unlimited pre-election spending is allowed. A lot
of the
time the rich - who own the media and so on - buy the result they want, as
per Mark
Twain's comment.

Where does the money go once it's bought votes?

It's redistributed. So after the Koch brothers spend $889,000,000 in the
next
election to cast 29,816 votes, each of the 129 million voters will get back
$6.88
(plus the $1 they put in plus a share of whatever other big spenders put in).
Actually I think the Bros will be better off buying attack ads with their billion.

Which is a better situation than we have now, where they can just buy the laws for much
cheaper.

I'm not sure that's much cheaper. One way they buy votes is by funding attack ads against
opponents of legislators they want a vote from. But if you're interested in quadratic
voting you should read this

http://rangevoting.org/MonetizedRV.html

by a Warren D. Smith.

Brent

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Re: quadratic voting

2015-05-05 Thread LizR

On 5 May 2015 at 11:12, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

  Where does the money go once it's bought votes?


 It's redistributed.  So after the Koch brothers spend $889,000,000 in the
 next election to cast 29,816 votes, each of the 129 million voters will get
 back $6.88 (plus the $1 they put in plus a share of whatever other big
 spenders put in).  Actually I think the Bros will be better off buying
 attack ads with their billion.


Ah, I see. Since the various interest groups already spend millions on
spreading their views via various media, presumably one caveat with QV
would be that any form of political advertising or support for parties or
editorialising outside the system would be illegal, and heavily penailsed
if it occurred - otherwise the current system is far more efficient from
the viewpoint of the 1%, and they will just stick with using their
newspapers and TV channels to support their chosen candidates.

Or am I missing the point?

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Re: quadratic voting

2015-05-05 Thread meekerdb


On 5/5/2015 5:34 PM, LizR wrote:

On 5 May 2015 at 11:12, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net 
mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote:


Where does the money go once it's bought votes?


It's redistributed.  So after the Koch brothers spend $889,000,000 in the 
next
election to cast 29,816 votes, each of the 129 million voters will get back 
$6.88
(plus the $1 they put in plus a share of whatever other big spenders put in). 
Actually I think the Bros will be better off buying attack ads with their billion.



Ah, I see. Since the various interest groups already spend millions on spreading their 
views via various media, presumably one caveat with QV would be that any form of 
political advertising or support for parties or editorialising outside the system 
would be illegal, and heavily penailsed if it occurred - otherwise the current system is 
far more efficient from the viewpoint of the 1%, and they will just stick with using 
their newspapers and TV channels to support their chosen candidates.


I think you're right that such a restriction would be needed; but I don't know whether 
it's actually proposed that way.  I've never studied voting systems much beyond Arrow's 
theorem, but I know a mathematician who's writing a book about various systems.  He's not 
impressed by quadratic voting:


http://rangevoting.org/MonetizedRV.html

Brent



Or am I missing the point?
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Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!

2015-05-05 Thread LizR

On 6 May 2015 at 14:34, spudboy100 via Everything List 
everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote:

 Much of the nobel committees even for physics and chemistry seem biased,
 and subjective. Templeton, is for scientists with intellectual and
 spiritual leanings, Nobel is best left to academic scientists who tow the
 socialist line, and are nicely rewarded. Are all career academics like
 that? No, but not making waves while obtaining government grants, goes a
 long way to get along, and go along career wise.

 So you're saying Templeton is less biased and subjective?

I'm not disagreeing, I just want to know what you think. I don't know much
about either of them.

(And what was that about 100F summers?)

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