The comments here seem to treat it as basically saying "boo team individuality, go team collectivism", and push back against it. But if I interpret it correctly, the message here is closer to "don't strawman yourself", i.e. don't aspire to nail down your essence, because you're likely to declare success prematurely, and then you'll serve that model of yourself that you have built rather than your true self.

If the 140 hours have been rendered wasted by the deletion of the save file, they were already being wasted while he was playing the game.

Playing a game is not labor or an artistic endeavour. The only purpose of gaming is to enjoy the moment. The feeling of progress and gradual collection of badges is an illusion that exists to serve the momentary enjoyment.

Your BF lost nothing of value. By weaning him off this game, you did him a favor.

The higher level doesn't need to be able to explain the physical level in order to be useful. If substrate independence applies, it really is unable to. A calculator built correctly is like a window into the platonic world of arithmetics.

The analogy doesn't decisively prove that people have free will. It's point is to show that determinism doesn't contradict it.

It's too "I'm this and this, and I believe in such and such" for my tastes. I like the early long serious ones.

Then the calculator's functionality is not isomorphic to arithmetic, and only the physical explanation is true.

Compatibilism clicked for me once I realized it's basically talking about emergence. When you input "2+5=" into your calculator and it displays "7", is it because 2+5=7, or because the buttons changed the pattern of electric current in the calculator's circuits and caused a chain reaction resulting in the digit appearing on the display? Both answers are true, but the former one operates on a higher level than the latter. The same works for the question of whether you do what you do due to your soul's desire or due to neurons firing - both are true, but work on different levels. (This line of thought is used in Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop)

A different way to look at it - free will, in Berlinesque terms, is a form of negative freedom - an absence of constraints. Since the freedom worth talking about is the one that affects our lived experience, the only constraints that matter are those we actively feel, or know about. Free will can therefore be violated only when the levels cross, e.g. the Oracle of Delphi tells you your fate and you want to change it but unable to; a company targets you with effective subliminal advertising, and so on. As long as the level where determinism is located is untouched by the level where you live, your freedom is intact. This is why randomness, chaos and fuzzyness feel liberating.

Here I should mention the best Existential Comic in years (almost on par with SMBC at its best), according to which an AGI would see randomness as more detrimental to freedom than determinism, because it hinders its ability to have control over its environment.

Musk is a dumpster fire, but I can sympathize with this bit of poetic waxing (relevant XKCD). Trying to fix the world in the conventional way is a monstrously difficult, counterintuitive, dirty and depressing task. Trying to do this without having half of humanity hating your guts is downright impossible. Meanwhile, making space travel more accessible is a low-hanging fruit, fun and relatively uncontroversial (other than the argument from the aforementioned XKCD).

The "we" here refers to humanity in general. Not that every human will get the opportunity to go to other planets, but that some will. I don't know what goes own in Musk's head, but I think that most of his fans accept that they will not go to Mars, and are simply glad that some humans will eventually do. It takes a certain kind of egolessness to look at these promises and not ask "but what about my share?"

If Moore's law applies here (i.e. every 18 months a laughter maximizer gets twice as funny), it might be a decade or two before AI humor reaches superhuman levels and starts posing a real existential risk.

8.9% percent of malnourished people in the world is not a lot in a historical perspective (though I agree it should be 0%). Certainly not compared to the famous failures of central planning.

> Markets should be seen as tools

This is my point in this discussion - markets are useful tools. Even if your goal is communism, ideas that come from capitalism can be a valuable part in getting there, if only for being tested extensively in both mathematical theory and real life and their strengths and weaknesses being known. Like, even if you somehow get the smartest and most compassionate people in the country to run it, Project Cybersyn-style, they may decide that the best way to get fast feedback to their policies from experts and the public is a prediction market with play money. The amount of play money they earned could be a useful parameter to evaluate their performance (alongside holistic considerations perhaps).

Shutting out capitalism deprives you of the most efficient method of decentralized resource allocation known to man. (It also means to actively ignore the will and worldview of a vast chunk of humanity, and the working class in particular.)

Having all resources and means of production shared by the public is wonderful, but if you run a silver mine and there are twenty enterprises asking you for silver the total amount of which is ten times what you can provide, and you can't just get all of them to sit down and agree how much each should get, then a monetary economic system and a stock market could save everyone involved a lot of headache.

If we're only looking at it as analytic philosophy vs. Marxism, I don't see the dominance of the former as a bad thing, since its scope is wider than that of Marxism. Marxist philosophy lives in a very human world of power relations and identity politics. it’s motivated not by increasing wisdom but by a grand ethical goal, and is profoundly indifferent to anything not related to said goal (such as questions of qualia or interpretations of QM). Analytic philosophy abstracts the humanity away, so it’s more low-level and general. Moreover, analytical philosophy allows for self-criticism, while Marxism doesn’t. If Marxist philosophy is valid, it’s possible to derive it from analytical philosophy; the same can’t be said in the other direction.

McCarthysm was horrible, but in itself it’s not a good enough reason to reinstate the dominance of Marxism, kinda like how the persecution of religion in the Soviet bloc is not a good enough reason to reinstate religiousness in Eastern Europe.

Why? Because I'm a progressive. I want to stay on the pulse of social progress, which means not waiting for society to force me to adapt. New society-shaping technologies will almost certainly appear and will force us to reexamine our values. Those who refuse to do so are doomed to become conservatives.

Science fiction (and fiction in general) has always been a useful tool for social progress. The hypothetical scenarios allow readers to stress-test their beliefs and moral instincts, and to resolve internal contradictions that familiar real world scenarios couldn't.

"Disregard dangers from technologies that do not yet exist" is a heuristic with a rather poor track record, when you consider the costs and benefits. In particular, anyone who followed it in 1930 would have told you that bombs strong enough to pose an existential risk to humanity are impossible. And indeed, at that time it wasn't obvious they aren't.

You can't be confident that the technologies of the following century won't redefine the meaning of being a person, and a century is not much by historical timescales. Even if there's only a 5% chance, it's something worth preparing for.

(The army of clones comes from Robin Hanson's Age of Em, by the way)

I don't see it as unintelligible at all. Must be a cultural difference between me and this sub's general users. I see people trying to relate it to social justice, which is probably the area they're more comfortable in, kinda like I often try to parse philosophical arguments in terms of systems and mathematical models.

As they say, when all you have is a hammer, a screw is an ugly nail with a helix that makes it needlessly difficult to hammer.

What form would justice and equality take in a world where minds span the entire spectrum from lizard to chimp to human to superhuman, or where people can create an army of clones of themselves? Social theories formulated in the 19th century are not ready for this.

In the list of the seven dominants, the author has neglected the eighth - society. Nepotism, tribalism, old boy network, cliques, cults, and coolness all figure into it. This force exists in institutions (usually regarded as an undesirable aberration), but it's exposed in its raw form when the other forces are absent, at times when, according to the author, anarchism really shines through - in gathering of friends, in the workplace when the boss is absent, in a high-school recess. This force allows some people to undeservedly have more influence and garner more sympathy than others, for reasons that can't be squarely pinned down like wealth, race or gender.

The author clamors for a natural organization, but "natural" in this case means only what people consider natural; a natural leader is basically just the most charismatic person around. He condemns civilization's aspiration to make everything under the sun legible, but illegibility is the best friend of social power, which runs unopposed when the legible forces of domination are dismantled.

I suspect anarchists don't see raw social power as a problem because they're the kind of people who navigate smoothly through it and use it as their primary mean of understanding and interacting with the world, kinda like how right-libertarians don't see raw economic power as oppressive.

The longer you live, the more chance you have to undergo subsequent life extension procedures. Aubrey de Grey called it "longevity escape velocity".

Explaining a joke is cringe. If someone kills a joke, they're being annoying, but if someone is forced to kill a joke then they are the one being humiliated.