humor – Spencer Greenberg

Life, death, and a squirrel

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 03:01:00 +0000

One time when I was walking in Central Park, a branch fell from a really tall tree, perhaps a 50- to 60-foot drop. A squirrel was on that branch when it fell, and the branch hit the cement path with a loud thud.

The squirrel lay there on its back, quivering.

I knew it was totally screwed. Its back was probably broken, but it was clearly still alive.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Look at how much it’s suffering. Should I kill it to put it out of its misery?”

I stood there pondering the question, trying to decide if the ethical thing to do was to kill it.

It then suddenly flipped over, ran through a hole in a fence, and climbed up a tree.

That was a great reminder of why one should set the bar extremely high for harming another creature “for a greater good.” It’s disturbing to me to consider the possibility I could have killed that squirrel in a foolish attempt to prevent its suffering.

It’s also a reminder that I don’t know shit about squirrels.

If you’re wondering how a squirrel could be okay after such a drop, a quick google search suggests it’s due to their high floofiness to mass ratio, plus their amazing falling instincts (they position their body and tail so as to increase drag).

But size is also a surprisingly important factor when it comes to falls. The smaller you are, the lower your kinetic energy is when you hit the ground, and the greater your surface area is relative to your mass, which means that air resistance has more effect. If dropped from a high place, an ant lands gracefully on the ground, whereas a whale practically explodes.

So if you ever fall from the top of a tall tree, I’d recommend being an ant or at least a squirrel, and definitely not a whale.

This was first written on November 16, 2022, and first appeared on this site on November 18, 2022.

Ten weird moral theories

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 01:11:00 +0000

1. Occamism: the simpler a moral theory is, the more likely it is to be true. Hence (a priori), the most probable two moral theories are that (a) everything is permissible or that (b) nothing is.

2. Majoritarianism: an action is morally right if and only if the majority of conscious beings capable of understanding that action and its consequences think it’s right.

3. Restraintism: if you have the desire to do something, then you don’t get moral credit for doing it (since the action is satisfying your OWN desire).

So, to maximize the good you do, become the sort of person that hates everyone and doesn’t want to help – then help a lot anyway!

4. Infinitarianism: god is infinite goodness. A finite number plus an infinite number is just the same infinite number again (left unchanged). All actions humans take can only create finite good. Hence, no human action can change the total goodness in the universe.

5. Virtue ethics prime: virtue ethicists are right – being good is only about having good character. But it turns out the only character strengths that count as morally good are cleanliness and moderation.

6. Purely positive utilitarianism: the only thing that matters morally is the sum total of happy mental states (suffering is irrelevant and doesn’t impact the calculation). Hence the attempts to airdrop MDMA into the forests.

7. Qualiaism: some actions are objectively morally right, and others are objectively wrong, but the criteria determining what is right is unique to each human and inaccessible to anyone who is not that person. Hence, each of us must discover our own unique, objectively-true morality.

8. Tegmark morality: for every mathematical structure, there exists some universe for which that structure is a complete description of what’s morally right. Hence, integer addition is a complete and correct moral theory (in some universe).

9. Similaritarianism: how kind you need to behave is determined by how similar someone is to you.

Hence you should be very nice to your parents, less so to strangers, and even less so to a rock. Since you are most similar to yourself, self-kindness is most important of all.

10. Unnatural law: we’re probably living in a simulation. Whoever the simulator(s) were, they were/are vastly more intelligent than us and hence far more likely to understand morality. We must study this creation of theirs (that we call reality) to figure out what’s good!

This piece was first written on March 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on April 23, 2023.

The Maximally Cynical Glossary of Technology Terms

Spencer — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 14:50:38 +0000

Feeling cheery about technology and optimistic about the future, but still confused by what exactly “Deep Learning” and “Quantum computing” mean? Here’s your antidote: the Maximally Cynical Glossary of Technology Terms. Not to be taken too seriously

Android phones: the closest a company can get to making an iPhone while risking only a dozen lawsuits (see entry on “iPhones”)

Artificial Intelligence: the best name for Machine Learning if you’re trying to make it sound cool to people that don’t know much about it

Augmented reality: usually referred to as “Pokémon GO”

Big Data: the magical phrase you invoke when you have no idea what to do with the huge amount of data your company has been pointlessly stock piling, and you’re trying to convince management to bring in a data scientist who might have a clue

Bio-engineered viruses: something we should be way more worried about, but assume won’t actually happen because they’re the subject of so many action flicks

Bitcoin: a bunch of special numbers you can buy and sell whose prices are made up daily, invented by an unknown pseudonymous genius, stolen in large quantity with shocking frequency

Blockchain: a slow, energy inefficient, functionality limited database that you can only append to and that you don’t control, but which is genuinely really useful when nobody can agree on even a single organization to trust

Cognitive computing: see entry on “Artificial Intelligence” and append the phrase “…and you are IBM”

Cold fusion: probably still fake, but let’s all desperately hope it isn’t

CSS: the simple way to style your web app precisely the way you want it in only 50 hours (assuming you never need to vertically align blocks, have elastic containers stretch to the width of their content, put a border image around a box, or have your web app look the same on old browsers)

Chatbots: perhaps the most frustrating way to interact with an algorithm

Dark matter: god messing with us

Dark Web: simultaneously both the laziest and the nerdiest way to buy drugs

Dank Web: not actually a thing, just sounds like it

Data scientist: a word reserved for a sort of programmer who sort of knows statistics that dabbles with numpy and scikit-learn, but who still manages to use data to beat the crap out of the impulse driven ways we humans normally make decisions

Deep learning: a technique from the late 1960’s that people just figured out how to make work like woah, by using massively more data, much greater processing power, and stupider seeming activation functions

Deep web: what Google hasn’t yet figured out how to crawl with its bots

Dinosaur: a large, traditional corporation which, despite it’s tenuous grasp on technology and lack of understanding of blockchain, still easily tramples the dozens of startups attempting to nip at its heels

Drones: a fun new trend in wedding photography

D-Wave: a company that makes quantum computers that don’t do almost any of the things that make quantum computing worth caring about

Echo: Amazon’s attempt to wage war against people named Alexa everywhere, also, the most impressive way yet to turn lights on and off (especially if you have the special LED ones with “over 16 million colors to choose from”)

Email: the socially enforced todo list that others created without your consent, which you somehow became addicted to

Face recognition: DARPA funded technology for the government to track the whereabouts of every citizen via closed caption video, which has now been rendered obsolete by smartphone GPS and Facebook

Flying cars: what we’ll probably never get to ride in, but at least we have Candy Crush Soda Saga

Gene drive: hypothetical weapon of mass extinction aimed at human’s greatest enemy (after ourselves), the mosquito

Geoengineering: the scientific name for those risky plans of desperation that we’ll inevitably need to use once we’ve completely destroyed the environment

Go: a programming language by Google engineers who hate C++, also a store designed by Amazon to take everyone’s jobs, in exchange for making your store checkout process slightly faster

GPUs: proof that the only things we care about making run faster any more are games and machine learning algorithms

Hadoop: an extremely helpful solution for working with datasets far bigger than any you’ll ever have, and one of the most painful ways you can think of to work with your actual data

Home robots: still just the Roomba

Hoverboard: a terrible disappointment for Back to the Future fans, but fortunately they are being renamed Catchonfireboards

HTML: cutting edge 1989 technology that every website will be forced to use forever

Internet explorer: what Bill Gates has been atoning for by saving millions of lives

Internet of things: how your smart toilet paper roll will alert the Amazon delivery drone fleet that you’re out of TP

iPhones: the most expensive Android phone in the world (also, see entry on “Android phones”)

Iterated embryo selection: future source of the first super human army

JavaScript: the sort of programming language you get when you trick a genius into joining your company by promising him he’ll get to work on Scheme, but instead make him build a product to compete with a rival company and give him only 10 days to do it (because that’s plenty of time to design a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE)

Lab grown meat: a conspiracy to finally get you to stop causing the death of sentient beings all the time, since prior vegan conspiracies like seitan, tempeh and Gardein Seven Grain Crispy Tenders didn’t succeed

Machine learning: perhaps the most simultaneously over and under hyped technology ever, which, depending on your perspective, will eventually (a) enable us to see what we would look like as cats, (b) predict that we want pizza before we’ve realized it ourselves, (c) diagnose cancer more effectively than a doctor, (d) enable one group to take over the world, or (e) bring about the end of human life on earth

Moore’s law: a self fulfilling prophesy used for some time by chip manufacturers to set targets for transistor density, based on the assumption that their competitors would be setting their targets using Moore’s law

Microbiome: further proof (as if we needed it) of how little we understand human nutrition

Nanotechnology: still only the 7th most likely thing to end the human race, so not worth explaining

Neural lace: a last-ditch attempt to make humans less dumb so that we’re not outcompeted by machines, with side effects that could include brain hemorrhaging and seizures

Open AI: an attempt to make the world safer from AI by accelerating its development in an epic arms race that would make fantastic television

Open Office: definitive proof that the open source movement can easily make software that’s every bit not quite as good as Microsoft’s

Petcube: impressive technology to spy on and shoot lasers at other people’s cats

Quantum computers: by far the most expensive and complicated way humans have ever invented to divide the number 512 into its prime factors

Segway: still occasionally spotted in NYC carrying tourists and police officers

Self driving cars: the replacement for what 5% of people used to call their profession, but someday when they eliminate traffic maybe they’ll make living in the suburbs cool

Social media: what you’re checking right now instead of talking to that friend who you’re out at dinner with, but it’s okay, he doesn’t notice because he just got some likes

Soylent: a moderately higher fat, higher protein, lower carb version of Ensure, mainly consumed by programmers and techies rather than grandparents (also, the worst possible name ever conceived for a food product – if it turns out to contain people we REALLY should have seen that coming)

String theory: either the ultimate theory of the universe or the biggest waste of physics talent in history, just stay tuned for a testable prediction in 2040 to find out

Technology startup: an explosively growing company that invents disruptive new ways to get you permanently addicted to your phone, increasingly involving animated gifs

Theranos: why someone needs to invent a way to buy put options for startups

Tor: a US government project to make you feel anonymous while browsing the web, as government agencies closely spy on your behavior attempting (with limited success???) to piece together who you are

3D printing: still the cheapest way to make a realistic model of your own head

Video conferencing: a great way to have conversations when you are not overly invested in seeing or hearing the other party

Virtual reality: what we’ll all be living in 25 years from now once we get over our irrational attachments to meat space, including: our love of having to move to get between two points, our preference for not being able to easily choose to look like an alligator, and our desire to be able to collide with the walls we can see (but not with the walls we can’t see)

VPN: how you use the internet in China

Xanadu: an aptly named 1960’s project that the internet still hasn’t quite caught up with, also, the record holder for longest running vaporware

Yahoo: I can’t remember, did this used to be a search engine???

Zombie networks: where email spam comes from, which thanks to Gmail is finally less annoying again than food spam, which comes from Austin, Minnesota