Search Ideas

Did you know you can type em dashes (on Mac) by hitting alt + shift + hyphen?

Greater causal power, of which differential survival is a subset.

Discussions have an ‘Archive’ button for top-level posts. It looks like a box you’d put on a shelf in an archive.

Top-level profile posts could have such a button, too. And I could add an ‘Archived’ tab.

Would that help you achieve what you’re looking for?

… OP only generally responds to the latest version of a criticism …

I’m not sure that’s generally true. But regardless, OP should address all pending versions of a criticism.

I’m open to letting people contact me for serious cases (like accidentally posting their password or credit-card details). And then I can delete that content manually in the database.

Aside from that, we’d need to identify a case where simply criticizing a post isn’t enough. The criticism can state the reasons one would otherwise have for deleting a post.

Another problem with letting people delete posts is that others may have written a comment in the meantime, which they then can’t submit.

It can still mess up the continuity of discussions when the post to be deleted has parents.

Another choice: criticize one for being a duplicate. In the criticism, link to the original and instruct people to ignore the duplicate.

It does, but it has no universal way to semantically check why a criticism was generated this way. All it knows is that the criticism was generated as part of a superseding revision, but it doesn’t know the meaning of the contents of that revision.

Yep. Was going to say this, too. The system has no semantic way to check the content of a criticism. So it has to assume that every unaddressed criticism is substantive.

The criticism "this is replicating less" should be generalized to "this allele/information has less causal power than an alternative." That has tremendous weight.

There is a natural preference for the one with more causal power, it is naturally selected over alternatives.

However, it is not clear to me how you are "weighing" these criticisms. So maybe my weighing isn't relevant to your weighing.

But sometimes revisions can be substantive, and OP could defend against one version, and in that case it should count toward the battle-tested badge!

Deleting posts can really mess up the continuity of discussions, and allow for dishonesty.

My profile shows my revision to #5126 under Wall and under Activity, but not the post itself under the Wall. The revision is a jumble of red and green highlighted text (in this case, because the revision was significant), hard to read. Wall should only show latest versions of posts, not edits to them. Edits should go under Activity. And/or have the previous post versions viewable with the little arrows, as usual (and as done in the idea-focused view, after you click on the idea itself). Always show latest versions of ideas on the Wall so it's clear and easy to read.

The change in population of a replicator is non-specific to its content?

The capital allocated to a business is non-specific to its content? Conflating with the prices of a good?

But the extinction of a replicator by destroying its last instance does seem absolute, unlike the change in its population, which I suggest is non-specific to the content in #5133.

Yes, the quantity variable is instantiated in the collective physical substrate comprising all of the replicator instances.

None of the replicators have that information. If that quantity variable exists, it's instantiated somewhere else.

Why aren't mutations made to DNA a form of conjecture? I think of conjecture as being a pretty general term -- isn't all knowledge conjectural, ours or otherwise? Maybe semantics. Agreed that criticism is a subset of selection: selection that is a function of the knowledge in the target, perhaps? Whereas differential replication is how selection proceeds without referring to the specific knowledge in the target..? [Overall idea stands despite my concession above]

No, my thinking here is that any given set of knowledge can only do inference: apply what transformations it has to whatever data it has, and that's it. It can't output things that are not already implicit in it, so cannot grow, in any epistemic sense. Even if running some kind of evolutionary procedure. An external source of novelty is required for growth, with respect to any given set of knowledge.

Unassailable argument for property rights?:
Does my body belong to anyone? Who? What about the knowledge in its brain, or the computations that it's carrying out? Or its sense of self? Ownership does not apply to these things? Anyone has as much of a claim to them as me? If not, and I do own these things, then ownership is indeed an unrefuted theory with respect to them. Then, why are these things a different case from other objects and processes, such as those in the room around me, and onward (per explanations, as the case may be)?

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an extreme form of differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Any relation in all this to entanglement and decoherence? In the picture laid out here, the non-specificity of feedback seems to be preventing decoherence of a sort...

I.e., information caused (if only partially) by some source can be "content independent" w.r.t. that source in a similar sense to how information itself is substrate independent.