The Golden Age trilogy by John C Wright is excellent science fiction. Also good are the books by Greg Egan. Both authors think about what the future could be like and put interesting technology like virtual reality and nano-tech into their books. They both consider the problems of space colonization over long distances -- even once you get there communication between colonies takes a long time at light speed. They both consider putting human minds into computers instead of flesh bodies, and moral and legal issues with cloning. They both have somewhat libertarian attitudes.

One thing that makes these books especially interesting to read is to see which issues they fall into parochial misconceptions on. And on which they see something that is hard to see and weird today. For example, both authors retain roughly the modern concept of exclusive one-to-one long term marriage (even including personal fighting). But on the other hand they can imagine a world where wanting to have a physical body is just a vestige of the past, or where people converse in different languages automatically translated in real time.

One of the issues of particular interest to me is creating copies of minds. At first glance I love the idea. I could play chess against myself. That'd be awesome. Or better, I could play team games except my whole team is copies of me. We'd be so organized and coordinated. It'd let me really test out how good my strategies are.

Egan and Wright describe characters who think copying is a serious moral issue. And they have a point. At the least it's like being a parent. You are creating a new person -- a new mind. You are responsible for helping that person get started in the world and become independent. Since a copy is already an adult (doesn't need any advice or education) that might just mean giving him enough wealth to adjust to his situation (he is used to having your life and your means of income, but for most situations he'll need to find his own, at least new work doing the same tasks) and finds his place in the world.

But they take things further. Their characters have a strong distaste for copying themselves. They want immortality, so they make *inactive* copies and store them, and only wake them up if they die. They don't want two copies to run at once. They only make exceptions for rare circumstances, like sending copies to many distant planets might qualify. But even so, one of Egan's characters in Diaspora left instructions that once one of her copies arrived at a planet with life, no more should be woken up at other locations. And some people erased their Earth-copy when going to other planets, or later committed suicide once the planet expedition was a success. And another issue is one of the ships was destroyed en route (hit space debris) and people considered this a tragedy -- the 92 awake people were killed. The rest who were inactive though felt validated in their choice not to be awake -- they avoided death.

This way of thinking is wrong.

The important thing -- what people are -- is knowledge. Spreading knowledge is good. That's what we are doing when we tell parenting ideas to new people. And that's what we are doing when we build new computers -- we are putting more knowledge into more places. Having one blueprint in one place isn't good enough. It's important to spread knowledge -- copy it even -- into many locations. This makes more areas of the universe good places -- places that create knowledge, or places at least that aid knowledge creating entities. More computers embodies more knowledge -- it doesn't matter that it's a copy. It's good. Now more people can use it. More planets can have computers if we build more. More locations. More space stations. And it's just the same with minds: having more minds thinking makes the universe a better place, and it makes their particular locations better places. Being a copy isn't a waste at all. Even if you didn't diverge and have different ideas than the original, a copy means more people can have conversations with you/your-knowledge. That's great!

And this fear of death? If the knowledge is destroyed that's equally bad whether you were awake or not. This whole idea of sleeping through long flights is completely wasteful -- completely inhumane. It's horrible to have all these people pretending like they are in comas when they could be alive and awake and thinking. It's like they don't think life is worth living unless they have a planet to play with. Why not spend the time thinking? (And simulating virtual reality worlds -- you can have whatever kind of life you want, all by yourself -- except not by yourself because you can put people into your world -- your children -- but not children in the normal sense, you can make fully formed adult friends, just they are your responsibility). The only bad part of death besides the knowledge destruction -- including the prevention of completion of goals it had (which btw is prevented by not letting it wake up) -- is the suffering. But when you're going near light speed, even a human body wouldn't suffer from a collision -- completely obliterated far too fast to feel pain. And these minds in computers don't have pain nerves anyway. The only way they might suffer is if they got advanced warning of their death and that distressed them. But if that's even possible, and wouldn't allow for dodging the obstacle or solving the problem, then one could still choose not to hear about it. You don't have to watch where you're going. If you choose to be notified about impending death, and you are distressed by it, that's not rational. If you want to know you should be glad to have found out -- it doesn't make sense to want to be notified by then treat the notification as anything other than a gift -- a miracle of science -- you get to know in advance like you wanted, your preferences are more satisfied. It's good. If you don't like knowing then you should be happy not to find out. You might also say you want to know but you're suffering because you got unlucky with having an obstacle in your ship's way. But that's not rational either -- there is no reason to feel bad about luck. You didn't choose wrongly.

There is also confusion about identity. If I copy myself, who is me? And I think this is why, really, people don't like the idea of their copies being destroyed en-route *while awake*. They have very bad ideas about consciousness (the conventional ideas are just plain magical thinking). They see being awake and conscious as critical, and this person as them, and they find the idea a bit like dying themselves. This is absurd. Putting it to sleep is nothing but a disservice that prevents it from thinking. And it's not you in the same way two copies of a book are distinct. It just has the same knowledge as you. Which is destroyed whether it's awake or not.

The whole way of thinking about identity and "me" is bad. Just don't worry about it. If you copy your mind now there is this same knowledge in two places. (And it will become different over time, but no matter, that's just a natural consequence of creating new ideas and changing unpredictably.) So what? There isn't one that's "really" you -- it's the same knowledge. That's the whole point. It's like giving special status to the first book off the printing press for being the "original".

And you know there's a zillion copies of you and your mind already in the multiverse (see The Fabric of Reality). Knowledge is a multiversal structure. Knowledge can be the same over more universes because there is a reason it is that way -- it's not arbitrary. So you get larger structures across the multiverse. People are a major one. Vast regions of the multiverse -- vast numbers of "parallel universes" have very nearly or exactly the same *you*. Because your mind is a matter of knowledge and that gives it stability. If a conclusion is a matter of logic you are going to reach it in most universes so you end up the same in a lot of places. So, lots of copies of "you". Get used to it. What's one more? This one you can meet and talk with. But so what? More of you is good. It means more knowledge in the multiverse. Simple.

Whatever "consciousness" or "self awareness" or also "qualia" is doesn't really matter to any of this. I'm sure it matters for *something* but not to these fundamental issues. It's just a detail -- a property of certain knowledge. The important thing is still that copy yourself is like making more copies of OS X and spreading them around -- a good thing. As long as they can all find happy places in the world -- as long as you take on the responsibility of a parent -- then it's all good. The important thing to think about is in terms of knowledge.

Why is killing a cat not bad? Because it didn't have any important knowledge in it. It did have knowledge, but nothing important or useful. And easy to reproduce. Exact same logic as destroying a stapler. It has knowledge. Destroying them for no reason is a bit of a waste (but a small waste, of miniscule importance beside human preferences). But we can create more staplers no problem, and more cats. The knowledge in them is fungible.

If you destroy a *unique* person that's really bad. They can't be recreated. Knowledge is gone and will have to be completely reinvented. We don't have to think about consciousness or anything like that. If they are asleep it's the same.

And this way of thinking works with a fetus too. A fetus has no unique knowledge, so it's not important. End of story.

Once people have copies, destroying one won't be murder. It will be like destroying a stapler, except that people are more complex and have more knowledge. So it will be more like destroying billions of dollars of information. Except that copying data will be cheap so it might just be a small hassle to recreate it. It's still billions of today's dollars of information, it's just that stuff will be so cheap in the future that a billion dollars of wealth today won't matter at all. The exception will be if the copy diverged from the backup -- if it has new, unique knowledge. Also you will put the person out of action while they are restored -- a bit like forcing them to take a nap. That's bad but it's not murder. (Yes, parents shouldn't do that to their kids. Ever.) If they have some unique knowledge not yet backed up and you destroy it that's bad too -- quite unfortunate -- but it's not murder. Murder is killing a person-sized amount of knowledge. You've destroyed something a lot smaller -- like murdering a couple of someone's ideas. Bad but smaller. Such things happen by accident all the time today -- people get hit on the head and forget an idea. And sometimes it's someone else's fault -- he hit a tennis ball at you by mistake when you weren't looking -- and we don't prosecute him for murder, nor even for the few ideas/neurons he knocked out of our head. We just try to be more careful next time.

Relating to marriage as mentioned earlier, one character had a break up with his partner of many years. He doesn't know why, though, because she asked him to delete his memories of her. Now he only remembers that she made that request and he agreed. That's horrible! That's killing knowledge. It's destroying part of himself. And his "loved one" wanted him to be hurt in this way. His loved one wanted all the good times they had, when they helped each other, to be destroyed. And he agreed to it -- how messed up his he? She has no right! Doesn't she have no right? How much autonomy did he voluntarily give up?

I wrote a new program for writing to my blog from the command line. I'm pleased. Now i can create, view, edit, and list posts, instead of just writing new ones. Here it is (of course I had to add a new controller to handle these requests and I changed my Post model, but here's the local part):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "optparse"
require "curi"
require 'tempfile'
require 'net/http'

BASE_URL = 'http://curi.us/remote/'
LOCA_BASE_URL = 'http://localhost:3000/remote/'

what = nil
id = nil
$local = false

opts = OptionParser.new
opts.on("-l", "--list") {|val| what=:list}
opts.on("-n", "--new") {|val| what=:new}
opts.on("-L", "--local") {|val| $local = true}
opts.on("-e VAL", "--edit VAL") {|val| what=:edit; id = val}
opts.on("-s VAL", "--show") {|val| what=:show; id = val}

rest = opts.parse(*ARGV)

def http_post(url, post="")
  if $local
    base_url = LOCA_BASE_URL
  else
    base_url = BASE_URL
  end
  res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse(base_url+url),
  {"user" => blog_username(), "password" => blog_password(), 'post' => post})
  res
end


def textmate(input)
  if input
    tf = Tempfile.new("textmateinput")
    File.open(tf.path, "w") {|f| f.write input.strip}
    result = `mate -w < #{tf.path}`
    File.delete(tf.path)
  else
    result = `mate -w < /dev/null`
  end
  result
end

case what
when :list
  puts http_post("list").body
when :show
  puts http_post("show_pretty/#{id}").body
when :new
  blank = http_post("blank").body
  post = textmate(blank)
  puts http_post("new", post).body
when :edit
  old = http_post("show_plain/#{id}").body
  post = textmate(old)
  puts http_post("edit/#{id}", post).body
end

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/us/18portland.html

A school is offering birth control pills to students without parental notification. Good. But they say something strange about it:

"It has been shown, over and over again, that this does not increase sexual activity," said Pat Patterson, the medical director of School-Based Health Centers.

The meaning is: it isn't bad to offer birth control, because it doesn't increase sexual activity, it only reduces the harm from the sexual activity that was going to happen anyway.

And the implication of that is: even people who lobby for distributing birth control pills in schools with full privacy ... think sexual activity is a bad thing for young people.

The "liberals" are conceding the *conservative, religious position* that sex is sinful and must be kept away from unmarried people.

It's a bit like how they largely won't defend abortion, "I personally don't like abortions". They concede the moral case to the religious right that abortions are a bad thing. They shouldn't. Abortions and sexual freedom are both great things that we should be proud of. They both give people more control over their lives. Opposing them is anti-human.

question: what do you wish you knew at 16 before you made various important life choices?

http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=P2aIOK19Df

Not all that much, really. I'm mostly satisfied with the decisions I made up until my 3rd year of college or so. And given that a lot of the problems that began then were related to a relationship, I'm not sure that there was anything I could have known that would have made a difference.

wait, seriously? he had relationship problems and can't think of any possible advice that would have headed them off? in other words, he cannot conceive of any advice that would have persuaded him not to get into the relationship. but, he also cannot conceive of any advice that would have made the relationship turn out more pleasant. he takes it for granted that the best life both 1) has romantic relationships that hurt people and 2) cannot be improved or made safer with knowledge, skill, or good ideas.

a lot of books start slow. even very good books. (fiction books. stories.)

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are boring for 5-10 pages, maybe more. So is Speaker for the Dead. And not a lot happens in The Fellowship of the Ring for like 50 pages.

A lot of movies start with an action scene (or something else especially cool). like The Matrix or Transformers. then they have their first more mundane scene after the action scene gets your attention.

movies have it right. if you want an audience, give them something they'll really like as fast as possible. as fast as possible is not on page 20. you don't have to introduce all your characters before you can have a scene people like. just make something cool happen that isn't fully explained yet. then the more mundane character introducing scenes will be better! b/c they will now have the added purpose of explaining parts of the first scene.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/healthy-marriage/MH00108

lol. the study talks about the health benefits of marriage. live longer, blah blah. correlation does not imply causation! for example:

maybe screwed up people have a harder time finding a spouse, *and* die younger. marriage and better health could really really easily be effects of an underlying cause, instead of one causing the other.

they don't even say it was a correlation study, or cite a source. they just try to say it's the scientific consensus, you can take it for granted that it is correct. that's disgraceful.

btw, you may be wondering: if they don't cite the study, or say how they reached the conclusion, then maybe it wasn't a correlation study? well, what else would it be? did they do a double blind trial where people don't know if they are married? :) what they will say they did is "take into account other factors" so that the only factor left is marriage/no-marriage. but how did they do that? they could control for people with similar diets, similar drug use, similar dangerous habits (sky diving, etc), and so on. but only the ones they think of. and have the budget for. not all possible things. no matter how many they control for, it still remains that they could have missed something subtle, and that correlation doesn't imply causation.

I am reading Political Justice by William Godwin. Here is a summary of his position in book 2, chapter 2, followed by my comments, criticism, and improvements.

Godwin considers the maxim "that we should love our neighbour as ourselves". He likes the sentiment, but points out men are not equally valuable. Imagine a burning building with Fenelon, the illustrious Archbishop of Cambrai, and his valet, and only time to save one person? Who would hesitate to save Fenelon? This is not an unjust decision, because Fenelon will do more good works after being saved, and make important contributions that help society. He is a more valuable person. Godwin specifically mentions two ways people can be more valuable: being further above animals (more intelligent), and being more virtuous in terms of benefitting the public good.

Godwin discusses some objections, and in each case insists on impartial justice. For example, even if I am the valet, I should prefer Fenelon be saved over myself, because he is more valuable to the world. And if the valet is my brother, my father, or my benefactor, I might be tempted to save him, but I should not. What magic is there in the pronoun "my" to change what is right? Fenelon is more valuable, and thus it is better to save him.

Another objection is that I might owe the valet a debt of gratitude. Godwin acknowledges that this gratitude is important, because it comes from some benefit the valet bestowed upon me, which shows his value. However, the valet would be equally virtuous if he had done this service for someone else, so it should make no difference that he helped me personally. What matters is how valuable each person is impartially -- without giving special status to myself. And so Fenelon should still be saved; he is owed gratitude by more people.

Next, consider that we have seen proof of the good deeds of our personal benefactor, but we are ignorant of many of the good deeds performed elsewhere. Thus we might, out of ignorance, save a person we know personally, even if in fact he is less worthy. This, Godwin says, might excuse our error, but it would not make it less of an error. The truth of which person is more virtuous and should be saved is the same even if we are ignorant of it.

Godwin does give a reason to justify helping ourselves in life. It is that helping ourselves also helps the public good: we can accomplish more good if we live a long time in mental and physical health, so it is just to put effort and resources into maintaining those.

The main idea of the chapter is to live impartially. If my neighbor needs money that I have more than I do, for a better use, then I should give it to him. His right to it is just as complete as if I owed it to him for goods purchased. There is no room in a virtuous life for personal whim or fancy, or to give our favors; we should always seek only to take actions in accordance with impartial justice.

My Commentary

First, Godwin is correct that the truth of what would be best ideally is unaffected by our ignorance. However, there is also a truth of what is the best way for people to live, which is a more interesting and useful truth. The right policies for people to live by must take into account our imperfections and ignorance; we must live in a way that works well despite our ignorance, and which can handle our mistakes. One of the ways we can minimize errors is if we each individually focus our use of resources on areas where we have the most knowledge. That means using our efforts primarily to affect our own life, our friends and family, any area of expertise we have pursued, and our vocation. This is effective because when we apply resources to those areas, we best understand which projects and causes are going to work well, and which are mistaken. And we best understand which people are virtuous, and will make best use of any aid.

This approach does not guarantee a good distribution of wealth, resources, and effort. A poor distribution could result if a great many people know a lot about unimportant things, and don't know enough about important things. What they care about is skewed; their lives and knowledge focus on less valuable or significant things than they should. If that is the case, the solution is persuasion: persuade people to devote more thought and attention and resources to the most important areas. Show them why those areas are best. Demonstrate their merits with vigor and zeal. And then those areas will receive more attention, and projects in those areas will have more resources.

Second, I appreciate Godwin's strict adherence to impartiality. He takes it very seriously, and this is a great thing. However, there is perhaps an important reason to favor ourselves. It is that people are not set in stone: they can change and improve. And this will happen most if they have an optimistic attitude, and believe in themselves. So, I want to see people support their own dreams and aspirations. Consider a sport like baseball. None of the great players started at the top. And none of them got to the top by finding the best players and saying, "You are more valuable than me. I will do anything to help you." Instead they had self-respect. They worked to improve their own skill.

Third, the idea of their existing an objective, impartial, public good, which everyone should work towards, has a flaw. The flaw is: people disagree. This is related to the earlier comments about ignorance. While there is a truth of the matter about what would be best for everyone, we don't know it. We have to work with the knowledge that exists.

This leads to the question: what is a rational and just system for resolving disagreement and deciding which ideas are correct and which people are most deserving of resources for their projects?

The important issue here is that we do not suppress unpopular ideas. No one should be under pressure to abandon their idea -- which many consider bad and wasteful -- and to instead support a popular idea most people consider best. Instead they should be cheered on for trying out a new idea which might bear fruit. Or at least fully tolerated in their disagreement with popular opinion. The only reason projects should be ended is that everyone involved changes their mind -- either because they are presented with powerful arguments, or because in pursuing the project they learn more about it and decide it's a mistake.

This still leaves us to consider how resources be distributed. We don't want everyone working on bad ideas all the time, and we don't want any more resources than necessary wasted on mistakes. We want people with good ideas to have the most influence and choice over what the next projects are. In other words, we want a self-correcting system that distributes resources to the best projects while simultaneously allowing for unpopular ones.

We have a system like that! It's called the free market, or capitalism. The way it works is: people fund their own projects using their own resources. When they fail, they have less resources to use on future projects. When they succeed, they end up with more resources for future projects.

Who succeeds or fails isn't determined by some appointed judges (who might be biased). Instead, it is determined by the entire market which makes use of knowledge distributed among many, many people. And the market is able to produce an impartial answer even if each participating individual is biased. The way the market can do this is using a very good criterion for which projects succeed or fail, and thus which project participants have more resources for future projects.

The criterion is: do people want the results? If you make something people want (goods or knowledge) the market rewards you, and if you don't, it doesn't.

The market is not perfect. It can only operate using the knowledge people have, and not based on the ultimate truth of the matter. And worse, every project contains many different ideas. The author of an excellent book might end up poor because he choose an incompetent publisher. His lack of skill at choosing a publisher has nothing to do with how good his book is, but the market lumps them together.

Fortunately, there are solutions. If he believes the book is good despite its initial failure, he can try again: the market lets people try things as many times as they want to. And if he has good reasons to believe this, he can say them, and other people who agree can help him correct the error. And this brings us to the general solution: do the wrong people and projects have a lot of resources? Educate them, and they will redistribute those resources themselves to something better. All you have to do is spread knowledge of what is best -- share the truth -- and the world will reorganize itself accordingly.

In closing, I realize the idea that people can be persuaded of good ideas over personal self-interest is controversial. However, the possibility of doing so is one of the major themes of Political Justice. So Godwin, at least, would agree with me. And if you read his book, perhaps you will too.

Some assume that the purpose or goal of reading something is to read every word, in order. This may even be taken to mean subvocalizing every word. This view stinks of propriety and blind obedience. It has no use but to satisfy an external standard of what constitutes reading.

The true goal of reading something is to learn what ideas are in the document. How to best accomplish this should be approached with an open mind. In many cases, some of the words are not important. At times, some parts are best read more than once; even though that is not necessary in order to be able to say one has read it, it may be necessary in order for one to *understand* it.

Sometimes parts should be read out of order, or parts should be skipped. Sometimes it is most important to stop reading any words for a moment and recollect what the purpose of this section is, to better understand what one is reading.

Please read thoughtfully.