Back, and I Missed Me

Busy the past few months.

Reading Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias, Econlog (esp. Kling, who's tone is perfect for me), a little Seth Roberts (he is kind of a nut), some Marginal Revolution.

Thinking that so much more of life than I would have guessed when young is about recognizing inequalities and deciding how we can talk about them and what we should do about them.

Then thinking, wait, school from agest 6-18 and later was also all about inequalties. But they were so much more immediate then. Now many of them are farther away.

Key things:

1. Far versus near. Hanson's pet right now.

2. The new-ness of a world that has 'far' issues. For how long were everyone single person's worries all near? How can we possibly manage in a far world? Until when was the only 'far' the stars and some of the gods?

3. Status, pride, envy, shame. And how all groups of people do and must try to tame and shape them through institutions.

4. Living in a Simulation. Boy I wonder about that sometimes. And so has everyone, from the beginning.

And why the Matrix was wrong--the battery thing was ridiculous and the better and realistic idea is that there is nothing but the Matrix. In fact, I'd end the movies with evidence that the 'real' humans and the entire war were just another part of the simulation. I don't think that was the real end of the series, was it?

And allowing evil and suffering: OF COURSE you have suffering if you are making a simulation. There must be a gradient, there must be incentives, there must be room for choices. I remember how struck I was at the old old XTC song Dear God where it's so clear to the singer that of course there's no god because there is suffering. And the Anglican church head after the tsunami or something saying that the disaster raised real questions about how god could allow it. Nuts! The first rule of making a simulation is that you must make it interesting. From this, there must be differences, consequences, desires. And the second rule of simulations is that your simulatees cannot know it's a simulation.

Good movie premise in the idea of a group of guys who discover we are all in a simulation and don't know what to do about it. That's why Matrix was a copout--we had real bodies and abilities that were being hijacked. What do you do when you figure out there are no bodies? Tron was a copout too because it should have been from the perspective of the simulated world members who want to be 'free' to act at the level of the world of which their creator is a member. Same with Terminator when it's about the created intelligence of computers functioning in an evil way when it does break through to the level of acting upon its creators' world. We need the simulatees to be the good guys!

Of course, all of what I'm saying has played out from the beginning of stories, with the gods inter-fering/--vening/-acting in human life and the people not wanting to be controlled by the gods. Plus people and gods mating! We want to know who is behind the curtain, we want there to be a curtain?

Second good movie premise: microbiologists discover a pattern in some pieces of DNA that makes sense only as evidence of design, and in a comical way Like it's a set of coordinates identifying a particular location in the galaxy as the trademark holder of everything living on Earth. But this would not involve our world being a simulation, it would only involve our creation being a less-than-virgin birth. I'm sure this is in a dozen scifi stories.

Follow-up question: if this is a simulation, do simulation thinkers think it's more likely that it's a game played with pieces that are real at the level of the creators (like regular chess with hard pieces) or a game played with simulated pieces (like computer chess). Are there significant costs to the simulator creator to making changes to the simulation or is it as easy as God and a thunderbolt. Is the simulation too big to be controlled once created?

Deus ex machina, the desire of the author that authorship work at all levels.

5. Institutionalization of Everything. The idea that there is a huge gap between the judgments of highly capable people on a small scale and the requirements of predictability in anything that operates on a large scale. The idea of 'best' size for any organization.

6. The idea of earning and deserving. Best Bible story is about this--Prodigal Son.