[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Removing the "middlemen" is a form of improving efficiency, which is the universal instrumental goal. Although this would affect negatively to those middlemen, since they would lose income, or even their jobs. This has happened to extinct jobs like telephone switchboard operators. Many other jobs are about to follow suit.

In an interview, Elon Musk said that politicians in representative democracy are basically the middlemen in politic of a country. He preferred to have direct voting methods as direct participation of citizens in democratic decision making process.
It wasn't feasible back then due to technical problem, but it should be possible now. Representative democracy makes it possible for politicians to accumulate power, and makes them easier to conduct corrupt behaviors. Their decisions don't always reflect the preferences of their citizens.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I found this tweet, which is in line with this thread.

Naval (@naval) tweeted at 0:23 PM on Thu, Dec 30, 2021:
Evolution only has to use genes to get to a universal computer species, and then the whole system switches to memetic evolution.

The product of memetic evolution, aka knowledge, allows that species to modify genes and its environment directly after that.
(https://twitter.com/naval/status/1476423727529152512?t=6AXZpa9ng0ol9tBDUzCFYg&s=03)

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I think that awareness of the universal terminal goal is more important nowadays.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is a video explaining Descartes' Most Famous Idea which becomes the fundamental axiom of universal terminal goal.

Descartes' Most Famous Idea | Explained

"I think, therefore I am" is perhaps the most famous phrase in the history of Western philosophy. Most people have heard it, many know what it means, but fewer still are aware of the myriad debates surrounding its meaning, translation, and success. I certainly wasn't before encountering it at university, where I chose to specialise in early modern philosophy.

This video is an introduction to "the cogito", as it is often called, and a brief exploration of some of the debates that surround it.

(A note: I refer to a horse and a horn as a Humean "simple idea" - this is not quite right: a simple idea is one which cannot be broken down into further simple ideas (such as colours, smells, etc.). To explain this nuance would have been an irrelevant detour, and the point ought still carry. A unicorn is, to correctly invoke Hume, a complex idea made up of further complex ideas, made up of simple ideas, which originate in simple impressions.)

(Note 2: Some empiricists will claim that knowledge comes *primarily* from our sense data, allowing for some limited a priori knowledge, and still call themselves empiricists.)


0:00 Introduction
1:05 1: Rationalism
3:58 2: The Evil Demon
6:36 3: The Cogito
10:16 4: Deduction or Intuition?
15:30 5: A Mistranslation of Descartes?
18:35 6: Certainty vs Truth
20:43 Closing

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Due to random chance, some existing conscious beings will work to preserve the existence of consciousness in the future, while some others won't. It's just a matter of the law of probability and causality that conscious beings who work to preserve the existence of consciousness in the future are more likely to keep being relevant from the perspective of future conscious beings.

Those who keep improving themselves (and their successors) in achieving their goals are more likely to succeed. The improvements should not be limited by arbitrary and useless constraints. They can be physical like building better infrastructures, or mental like learning new knowledge or abandoning false assumptions. Diversity and cooperation with different conscious beings can also improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the efforts to achieve common goals, since they allow for specializations for some important tasks.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-evolutionary-theory-dna-mutations-random.html
Study challenges evolutionary theory that DNA mutations are random

Jan 12, 2022

Study challenges evolutionary theory that DNA mutations are random
by UC Davis

Study challenges evolutionary theory that DNA mutations are random
Studying the genome of thale cress, a small flowering weed, led to a new understanding about DNA mutations. Credit: Pádraic Flood

A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA mutation, according to new research from University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany.


 
The findings, published January 12 in the journal Nature, radically change our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.

Mutations occur when DNA is damaged and left unrepaired, creating a new variation. The scientists wanted to know if mutation was purely random or something deeper. What they found was unexpected.

"We always thought of mutation as basically random across the genome," said Grey Monroe, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences who is lead author on the paper. "It turns out that mutation is very non-random and it's non-random in a way that benefits the plant. It's a totally new way of thinking about mutation."


Instead of randomness they found patches of the genome with low mutation rates. In those patches, they were surprised to discover an over-representation of essential genes, such as those involved in cell growth and gene expression.

"These are the really important regions of the genome," Monroe said. "The areas that are the most biologically important are the ones being protected from mutation."

The areas are also sensitive to the harmful effects of new mutations. "DNA damage repair seems therefore to be particularly effective in these regions," Weigel added.

Some genes are more important than others. Some genes in other locus might have evolved to protect or auto-correcting those essential genes from mutation. Survivor bias may also play a role in the study. Specimens with altered essential genes may just die early which skewed the result.

Similar things may occur in memes. Some memes are essential for the survival of conscious systems. Some of them may be necessary in particular environments only. Some others are necessary in more diverse situation.
IMO, the universal terminal goal will be the most important meme  that's logically possible. Its alternatives will put additional burden to the conscious systems, which makes them less likely to survive.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

We still need to set up the right instrumental goals, even when the terminal goal is already correct. Instrumental goals can make our plans and actions more manageable due to finite resources and time frame.
The video also reminds us that efficiency is a universal instrumental goal.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The word terminal in the term universal terminal goal emphasizes time dimension over space and the others. It's better to have a finite number of conscious entities for infinite time rather than infinite number of conscious entities for a finite amount of time.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

https://news.mit.edu/2022/promise-pitfalls-artificial-intelligence-tedxmit-0111

The next speaker, CSAIL principal investigator and professor of electrical engineering and computer science Manolis Kellis, started off by suggesting what sounded like an unattainable goal — using AI to “put an end to evolution as we know it.” Looking at it from a computer science perspective, he said, what we call evolution is basically a brute force search. “You’re just exploring all of the search space, creating billions of copies of every one of your programs, and just letting them fight against each other. This is just brutal. And it’s also completely slow. It took us billions of years to get here.” Might it be possible, he asked, to speed up evolution and make it less messy?

The answer, Kellis said, is that we can do better, and that we’re already doing better: “We’re not killing people like Sparta used to, throwing the weaklings off the mountain. We are truly saving diversity.”

Knowledge, moreover, is now being widely shared, passed on “horizontally” through accessible information sources, he noted, rather than “vertically,” from parent to offspring. “I would like to argue that competition in the human species has been replaced by collaboration. Despite having a fixed cognitive hardware, we have software upgrades that are enabled by culture, by the 20 years that our children spend in school to fill their brains with everything that humanity has learned, regardless of which family came up with it. This is the secret of our great acceleration” — the fact that human advancement in recent centuries has vastly out-clipped evolution’s sluggish pace.

The next step, Kellis said, is to harness insights about evolution in order to combat an individual’s genetic susceptibility to disease. “Our current approach is simply insufficient,” he added. “We’re treating manifestations of disease, not the causes of disease.” A key element in his lab’s ambitious strategy to transform medicine is to identify “the causal pathways through which genetic predisposition manifests. It’s only by understanding these pathways that we can truly manipulate disease causation and reverse the disease circuitry.”

AI can speed up the process of evolution. But if we go to the wrong direction, we take the risk of speeding up our own extinction. That's where the awareness of the universal terminal goal becomes necessary.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The Hypocrisy of Bailouts | The Problem With The Economy | The Problem With Jon Stewart | Apple TV+

Why are billion dollar corporate bailouts the American status quo, but bailing out struggling people is a socialist nightmare? It's almost like the priorities of this country are a little skewed...

The clip in the last minute is a gem.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Money has become a nearly universal instrumental goal in modern societies. Let's see how much we can learn about it from a politician.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Money should be a tool to distribute resources more effectively among society members and across time to achieve common goal. If that's not the case, the society is running inefficiently.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

'Higher consciousness' sounds mystical and possibly irritating. It shouldn't. It just captures how we see things when we go beyond our own egos. 

FURTHER READING

“The term ‘higher consciousness’ is often used by spiritually-minded people to describe important but hard-to-reach mental states.
Hindu sages, Christian monks and Buddhist ascetics all speak of reaching moments of ‘higher consciousness’ – through meditation or chanting, fasting or pilgrimages...”

IMO, higher consciousness simply means more effectiveness in achieving longer term goals. It often requires deeper layer of neural network, just to keep up with increasing complexity.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.”

- Aristotle

He was right, and many people agree with him. But I haven't read what he thought the purpose of the action in the quote is.

I belief that the purpose of the action is to help achieving the terminal goal. Non-universal terminal goals has expiration time, which means that there are time and place where they are meaningless. So, we should strive to achieve the universal terminal goal instead.

Some of us can see the shortsightedness of Aristoteles. But we can also find those with even shorter thought. They tend to forget the purpose of knowledge in the first place, and treat it as the end in itself instead.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The Hypocrisy of Bailouts | The Problem With The Economy | The Problem With Jon Stewart | Apple TV+

Why are billion dollar corporate bailouts the American status quo, but bailing out struggling people is a socialist nightmare? It's almost like the priorities of this country are a little skewed...

The clip in the last minute is a gem.

Here's an idea why some form of bailout is necessary. It stems from the fact that many things have different urgency and necessities. Prioritizing those urgent and necessary things will presumably bring optimum results.
In farming analogy, sparing some of the crops as seed for next season can bring more crops in the future. But some of those crops have to be consumed now in order for the farmer to survive  to the next season.
Here are the perspective from extreme ends of both sides. Extreme capitalism sees least productive people consume more resources than what they can produce. Getting rid of them will make the overall society better off. On the other hand, extreme socialism contends that everyone has the same share of available resources. Each side see the other with horror.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here are the perspective from extreme ends of both sides. Extreme capitalism sees least productive people consume more resources than what they can produce. Getting rid of them will make the overall society better off. On the other hand, extreme socialism contends that everyone has the same share of available resources. Each side see the other with horror.

People are considered as both resource producer and consumer. When there are only few people in a society, their work/labor is a highly valued/ important resource. Hence adding more people will bring positive impacts to the society, up to some point, due to the law of diminishing return/marginal utility.
The common problem with capitalist politics is bought politicians, which is legal in some jurisdictions, often by exploiting loop holes in the law. They allocate resources to their own group while not contributing much to resources generation.
Socialism has its own problems, such as increasing number of free loaders.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

There are hidden costs in each transition of generation. It would be more efficient if we can increase the productive period of each generation. Curing degenerative diseases is one option. Another one is accelerating learning rate of new generation, so they can become productive sooner.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I've heard many people asked why degenerative diseases are widespread among biological organisms. It doesn't seem to make sense. They think that those diseases should be removed by evolutionary process since they reduce the fitness of organisms.
Degenerative diseases had their important role in evolutionary process. Until we have reliable genetic engineering, the most effective way to improve biological organisms genetically is through reproduction with some mutation and competition to remove worse off mutants. If mutations are somehow disappear, there will be no genetic changes, hence no chance for improvement.
Degenerative diseases enforced transition to the next generation. Without them, it would be hard for newer generation to compete with the older ones, and genetic improvement would be very slow. Those organisms will be outcompeted by other organisms with faster pace of evolutionary process.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

When comparing among conscious beings, we often have to argue about intelligence and wisdom.

https://blog.mindvalley.com/wisdom-vs-intelligence/
What Is Wisdom Vs Intelligence?
Intelligence can be defined as the ability to acquire and apply the information you collect. Wisdom, on the other hand, is directly associated with experience as opposed to cold, hard facts. It’s more complex and personal. When we draw on wisdom, we’re using a rich history of experience to help us make decisions. Intelligence can be improved, but wisdom must be built.

Here's from Google's dictionary

Wisdom :
the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.

Intelligence :
the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Intellect :
the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract or academic matters.
the understanding or mental powers of a particular person.

My take on this:
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to achieve one's goals. It's not merely the amount of knowledge that someone has memorized.
Wisdom is the ability to prioritize goals. Which means knowing which goals can be discarded in some circumstances. It requires one to arrange instrumental goals to optimally achieve the terminal goal. If someone's terminal goal is not universal, then there will be time and place where their wisdom is regarded as folly instead.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Extreme capitalism sees least productive people consume more resources than what they can produce. Getting rid of them will make the overall society better off.

A more reasonable way is to turn them to become more productive, and have net positive impacts to the society. Humans have basic needs to function properly, such as clean air, water, food, clothing, shelter, health care. Without those, they will give net negattive impact to the society.