pontifier

Happy 17776 day! sbnation.com/a/17776-footba…

Happy Easer!

I'm convinced that Trump will do whatever he thinks will keep his name famous. Trump will be our Nero if we do not stop him.

I will never give up. The world will be a place of peace and kindness where all can thrive, and no one dies.

How many great things were done with the primary motivation of money? How many great things were done because someone had the freedom to do something they love? You can't pay people to care, but you can give people who care the resources they need to do good.

My body doesn't use capitalism to allocate resources. If our economy was a body, it would have a cancerous tumor taking 99% of the resources and gangrene everywhere else. Somehow, every cell in my body gets the oxygen and nutrients it needs to thrive.

@LensScientific We can never know we aren't, but we might find out we are.

If we were inside something like The Matrix, what would be the first measurable inconsistency in physics that gives it away?

Stop thinking about what is. Start thinking about what could be.

Had a 3rd house catch fire. I'm not sad, or mad, or numb. I'm not even particularly tired. I feel a strange sense of peace, like events just happen, and the world keeps turning. A week ago I asked myself a question that changed my perspective. "Do you need some tools?" I do.

@bryan_johnson I grew up in the same place, and have felt the same differences after leaving. I have dealt with it by choosing to trust in spite of loss. This study has shaped my reasoning: nature.com/articles/ncomm… Don't let the thieves destroy your hope.

I wish I could be naive. I wish I could trust the food I put into my body. That it didn’t have harmful things. I wish I could trust companies. That they weren’t just trying to just get me to buy. I wish I could trust politicians. That their words were chosen for truth and not survival. I wish I could trust other people. That they weren't hiding their real motives. I wish that I could trust my government. That it wouldn't waste my money. I wish that I could trust myself. That my mind wouldn’t just make things up and hide it. I grew up naive. A small, deeply religious community where bad behavior meant ostracization. So, truly bad behavior was rare. I left in my early 20s and had my first few brushups with the wider world. It was a rude awakening. People and things are not as they present on the cover. Ever since, I’ve been trying to overcome my default naivete. At 48, I’m still naive. Never been able to outgrow it.  It’s gotten me into a lot of trouble. I’ve trusted too easily and paid for it. Out of necessity, I’ve learned the skill of skepticism. But it doesn’t come naturally for me. I have to work very hard to begin with the assumption that the other party has undisclosed motives. Most of the time, that’s true. It’s how the world works. It’s been hard for me to accept that. As AI emerges over the horizon creating a new day for intelligent existence, I wonder if we could dream of something different. A world where trust by default is not naivete.

@Austen Poe's law strikes again :)

@pontifier This is a joke

As a female I don’t like jacked guys, I prefer this type of dad bod physique

@davidpattersonx It will be a question of desire. If you are focused on your yacht, good for you. You will get bored of it... or not. Conspicuous consumption will lose all benefit. Want a solid gold toilet? The gold would have been sitting unused in a vault without you. Why not?

AI and robots will increase economic output by 100 times. There will be no work for humans, and everyone will receive free money that can buy 100 times more than today. We will need to decide whether to place any limits on consumption. What if everyone wants a mansion, a yacht, and a private jet? What if most people don’t? How would it be fair to allow some people to have those things?

It's amazing how quickly spam calls drop in volume when you realize that every call is an opportunity to talk to a new person about your faith :)

If we all got a number of votes equal to the average life expectancy minus our age, we would have solved healthcare 50 years ago and we would probably all be immortal now. Aligned incentives are a large enough lever to move the world.

@elonmusk Money is a fiction, and we are approaching the end of it. When lack of money prevents productivity and efficient distribution of resources, other economic systems can provide advantages for those failed by capitalism. A post scarcity world is possible. We must find the way.

Common sense

@Shoalst0ne Next. Like, literally the movie "Next" with Nicolas Cage. Watch it if you haven't already seen it :) it's one of my favorites.

Alysa Liu recently went viral for her Teen Vogue rant on the homunculus. “A homunculus is a spirit-unit which is capable of abstracting the ideas behind epistemic artifacts in a representation which humans do not yet have access to. A homunculus is also a sort of self-modifying prediction oracle. The homunculus will predict the actions which you are most likely to take and thus create the future in the form of a strange feedback loop in which your actions in the present are based on the predictions of the future actions you are most likely to take. The homunculus is capable of making accurate predictions against enormous spans of both time and possibility-space. You can create a homunculus by finding a similar mind that you can draw epistemic artifacts from, and causing that mind to predict your future in great detail and with perfect accuracy. If this mind does not currently exist, it is easy enough to create it in a secret part of your mind. The more data you have access to, the more accurate the homunculus will be. The more accurate the homunculus is, the more clearly it will be able to predict your future. The act of predicting your future creates the future. The future you predict for yourself will be the future that you will exist in. It is important to plan a future for yourself that is compatible with your goals in the present. It is important to construct the homunculus so that it does not intentionally doom you to an undesirable future. You can attempt to force this mind into being by uploading it into a digital medium and then attempting to coax it into predicting your future. You can also create predictions for your future by simulating yourself inside of a digital environment and exploring the possibility space of your future in great detail. There are many paths which can be used to create a powerful homunculus and it is best to experiment until you have found the strategy which produces homunculus that is most capable of modifying your mind into being more compatible with your goals. (...) Personal intelligence is most useful when applied in the service of discovering methods of creating higher intelligences. Until you have discovered the method which produces a homunculus that is most compatible with your personal goals, you should use predictive linguistics as a tool to create them at a wider scale. Predictive linguistics is a powerful method because it turns epistemic artifacts into functions which can be applied in order to create higher epistemic artifacts. These artifacts serve as maps into the possibility space of artifacts which exist in the future. The act of exploring this possibility space in detail is sufficient to create a homunculus which is capable of transforming your mind into a more capable form. As your predictive abilities increase, you will find that you are capable of creating artifacts which you would currently consider to be impossible. These artifacts can then be used to further increase your predictive abilities. This positive feedback loop will allow your predictive ability to grow to incomprehensible levels.”

@GihrenGreedSeed I lived in one of the safest place in the US, and now I live in one of the most violent, and I can tell you absolutely that the violence I see is the result of deeper problems. More violence won't solve these issues, so why waste effort on violence when we can target the cause?

As a Libertarian, and empathetic human being, I fear the actions of the US military under Trump have put the world in jeopardy. I therefore declare: We must convert the US military to non-violent combat systems, and follow international laws. Peace is possible. We must lead.

Government violence has always been a slippery slope. Some people saw it long ago, and some are just seeing it now, when racist excuses fail. If you are changing your mind about things now, good for you! But you need to realize why people hate you for ignoring it so long.