The point is he deserved to be remembered well but due to recency bias and the severity of whatever he did during the end stages of his disease he will not be.
I personally suffered immense trauma in my early 20s when I moved to a really cheap place. My parents refused to believe me that there was a black mold and general mold problem in the place I was living and that it was causing me psychological distress and flaring up my eczema.
Despite all evidence that I had they dismissed it because I had told them I was depressed beforehand. They are not very in touch with empathy or compassion or mental health. Very old-fashioned view that these things are character flaws which are not to be spoken of.
Anyways they dismissed my concerns did not read my messages or view my pictures of personal property being destroyed and the landlord not responding to me, the whole rental was illegitimate and I had identified that early on they even ignored that I got a scalp infection which I had to take oral anti-fungal medication to get rid of. The preponderance of evidence was so overwhelming, but for whatever reason they could not admit I had been right and that they were wrong and refused to help me and actively discouraged me from taking legal action or even to move home for months.
Eventually I was blessed with an extended relative who gave me shelter.
During one of the worst parts of this period my parents even went so far as to assert that what was actually happening to me was the onset of paranoid schizophrenia.
I was close to the right age and sex for it to happen.
I knew that paranoid schizophrenics often become homeless and violent and the general awfulness of the condition. If it was not for my own investigation that there was no family history of it and a friend who believed what I was saying and told me that I needed to leave the house and then finally extended family I had a plan to no longer exist.
This was partially out of not wanting to be remembered badly, but also so many other things like; not wanting to hurt my loved ones, not wanting to hurt strangers, not wanting to slowly degrade into an unstable and potentially dangerous person and of course the median life expectancy for that condition is so low.
I lacked the constitution to allow myself to become someone who would likely damage the world and severely damage those close to me so my logical conclusion based on a false premise during those couple days was to nip it in the bud so to speak as it's a progressive condition.
My relationship with my parents has not been the same since, but how could it be. I am forever indebted to a friend and extended family... they quite literally saved my life.
The end point being that with the parents I have there was nearly a guaranteed outcome of only objectively bad things happening for me, for them, for people around me. During that state I saw my plan as honorable and wrote it down in what I was to leave to explain my actions.
You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?
My apologies but that does not sound like good leadership to me. It actually sounds like you may have deficiencies in your skills as it relates to leadership. Perhaps in a few years we will have an LLM who can provide better leadership.
You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?
You don't sound like a great lead to me, but I suppose you could be working with absolutely incompetent individuals, or perhaps your soft skills need work.
My apologies but I see only two possibilities for others not to take the time to follow your example given such strong evidence. They either actively dislike you or are totally incompetent. I find the former more often true than the latter.
You have about 50% of HN thinking LLMs are useless and you’re commenting on an article about how it’s still magical and wishful thinking, and that this is crypto all over again. But sure, the problem is me, not the people with a poor model of reality
For internet crimes? Almost none in perpetuity. I’d think you’d need to go off the grid totally for a few years and come back without any reference to a prior life.
For physical crime, my gut says quite a few people have avoided identification for decades until they were essentially caught by turning themselves in. Ted Kaczynski comes to mind, but there must be a few others.
Perfect OPSEC to me, means near total isolation from socialization. Not something most people are capable of.
If you’re a professional criminal of any kind you weigh the risks knowing that perfection is impossible. The government is a business with a monopoly on violence. The goal is to keep their ROI for catching you as low as possible. Every single man hour spent finding you is costing money and there’s a man upstairs who wants to see some results that reflect the money spent.
Once you understand that premise, it’s easy to understand the why and how criminals are caught. The ones who are caught are always the ones who don’t know when to fold. Always the ones not to cash in and retire.
The ones who get away with it, they fold they retire and society forgets about them and the ROI drops precipitously on catching them. Research statistics on cold cases.
It’s well documented how lenient the U.S. was with enforcing international law on Japans high ranking military and political leaders. The U.S. covered it up and whitewashed Hirohito’s role in WW2. It’s why Japan still has never apologized or even admitted to genociding Chinese and enslaving and raping Korea.
Open up a Japanese textbook on the early 20th century and you will find a glowing portrayal of an Imperial Japanese Empire.
I'm not talking about Hirohito, Yasukuni, the failure at regulating the zaibatsu, the occupation, or Japanese conservatism at all. I'm very familiar with Japanese history. I'm specifically talking about IT corporate culture in Japan. Not sure why you're bringing politics into this.
Amazing it’s like you’ve figured out the optimal strategy of still spending the same amount of time going to the doctors but getting as few benefits as possible.
I’m pretty sure you can decline care and get second opinions no matter what.
I don’t know your family background, but I have quite a few older male relatives who died from cancers that if caught early have high survivability. They were all suspicious of the profit incentives of the medical system and felt they knew better or were tough enough to not care. My grandfather had a heart murmur, so he used that as an excuse to never go to the doctors. “They just want my money I already know my heart will kill me soon so why bother”. He died of colon cancer. I’m sure they all regretted it.
You ever see that video of the women paying a thousand dollars to skip to the front of the release day line to buy one of the first generation iPhones?
Then when she did and the employees told her they limited customers to buying one or two iPhones per person she becomes incredibly flustered. The guy who sold his spot in the line celebrates with a free phone.
What you’re describing is analogous and there’s a reason that went viral on the internet and was reported on in the mainstream, but I won’t spell it out for you.
What are the theoretical risks to sending out these beacons… our we at all, as a species, significantly increasing the chance of another life form more advanced than us discovering us by doing this?
If we come into contact with a significantly advanced life form it would certainly lead to ineffable destruction.
Deep space probing without the ability to exert any sort of defense if discovered seems risky. I know the chances are low but what’s the ROI on sending this stuff out without being remotely prepared for contact. I think another comment was saying the data we’ve collected has mostly just been used to confirm preexisting theories. If that’s all we’re getting out of it I’m apprehensive.
I’m just a layman but I’d feel much better if we can establish control, knowledge and dominance of our solar system and its celestial bodies first.
If an alien species can spot something as tiny as Voyager but doesn't notice our activity on Earth which is just a stone's throw away, I doubt they're a threat.
If an alien species finds Voyager in 10,000 years and tracks it back to our planet, they'll find some interesting remains of our civilization.
More like 10,000,000,000 years at least. The closest star is 4.26 light years away. At current speeds (~65000 km/h) it’ll take 40,767,123 years to reach. _IF_ it’s going in the right direction.
It’s doubtful they’ll even find the sun in its current phase
That suggests aliens won't find Voyager until it reaches their star system. If that's the case they probably aren't an interstellar species, and they'll never find us, or visit us. I was assuming they'd detect it while travelling through space.
> If we come into contact with a significantly advanced life form it would certainly lead to ineffable destruction.
This is such a very human thing to say. Why are you humans always projecting your own insecurities onto others like that? We've been among you for millennia now and the only ones destroying your species are you yourselves.
Most cosmic neighbors have evolved to enjoy a good firm anal probe by way of introduction. We are the weird ones, yet again, in our distaste for getting thoroughly probed.
The chance of another live form discovering us due to the Voyager probes is ~0. Atmospheric changes and EM emissions from Earth are both detectable from far longer ranges.
One of the theories floated is if an advanced civilisation made it to us, they would most likely be so advanced they would see us no differently as we would view ants and not even consider us if they needed any resources from our planet.
Another thought is the fact that no advanced civilisation has ever made it to earth is proof that any intelligent species is destined to destroy itself before it can evolve far enough to travel the stars.
> Another thought is the fact that no advanced civilisation has ever made it to earth is proof that any intelligent species is destined to destroy itself before it can evolve far enough to travel the stars.
Looking like our planet might prove this one to be pretty close to accurate at least in our case, within the next hundred years or so. If not from nuclear war then from running extremely low of key resources on the planet and suffering a massive conventional war over the remaining resources.
Freshwater alone seems like it can cause it. We already have major cities almost entirely running out of fresh water (see Mexico City this year). Western US came worrying close with Lake Mead's water level a couple years ago too, but thankfully it eventually started raining enough to replenish it again.
> Looking like our planet might prove this one to be pretty close to accurate at least in our case
Sorry, but modern Doomerism needs at least a dozen more orders of magnitude on its confidence that we'll all die before it can claim any part in Fermi's paradox.
Or it could be that inflation never ended and there’s a rapidly increasing number of vacuum collapse bubbles inside it, like ours, in which case approximately every civilisation is the first to exist in their bubble.
From what I understand space is full of errant radio signals that are not generated by us, the beacons we send to voyager or it to us is most likely indistinguishable from the multitude of others in the same region.
I think the idea of an alien race attacking us is sort of a catch 22 because if they’re able to attack us (technologically speaking), then they wouldn’t perceive us as a threat because we would be insignificant in comparison to their power.
If the could decode it, the Golden Record [1] onboard Voyager will point them directly at us, if anyone ever finds it. I doubt that's going to happen, simply because of how small the spacecraft is and how insanely large the universe is.
Your species is really just waiting to find out what caused that extinction.
That cause, almost certainly, will have been its own actions in its own local environment.
Essentially, your species will almost certainly have shit in its own backyard, and eventually its mouth, to death.
It will likely do so within the next 100,000 years.
The odds of Voyager, or any, emission or artifact made by your species being encountered by another life form capable of all of receiving it, recognizing it, understanding it, and responding to it in any manner within that timeframe is, essentially, zero. Not precisely zero, but near enough.
The odds of that species having malevolent intent and arriving in time to do anything but engage in archaeology? Now you’re reaching actual zero.
Worrying about this particular existential risk isn’t just premature, it’s prenatal.
Species go extinct but also evolve. In 100000 years today’s civilizations might fall but there would still be some carbon based lifeforms. Perhaps tiny, furry humans; maybe with a dislike for digging up fossil fuels.
Kind of definitionally if it goes extinct it’s done evolving. And sure, plenty of carbon-based life forms — currently all known life forms — will survive, and hopefully whatever does is smart enough to learn from our own-goals. It may even be another primate or another hominid… what it won’t be is us.
Note that on a cosmic scale, hominid, primate, or even carbon based might count as us. On a human scale, after 100000 years it wouldn’t be us in any case.
Get our reproduction cycle to be based on advanced tech. Then let society collapse so it doesn't have the tech anymore. Will take a few generations still.
I think we're vastly more likely to destroy ourselves with resource depletion as opposed to the paranoid "dark forest" outcome from three body problem. I wouldn't be surprised if we get to "oh, hey. What's up?" as far as alien communication and that's it.
My way of thinking about it is that a civilization capable of interstellar travel has enough energy and resources (which is probably the same) to terraform any “free” planet to their liking. For all we know, space is mostly devoid of any life. So you can build intergalactic empire for 100,000 years and still not encounter anyone. I see no point for such advanced species to conquer someone. The Dark Forest is an interesting concept but seems unlikely.
I'd also expect an advanced form of life to have discovered game theory and analyzed potential interaction with other civilizations as a sequential game with imperfect information (I'm assuming no FTL so nobody has current knowledge of anyone else's capabilities).
The results are pretty scary. PBS Space Time had an episode on this recently [1] which goes into more detail. Briefly, if you put survival of your planet over all else, "destroy aliens as soon as you become aware of them" has a better outcome for you than "contact them" or "ignore them".
It's the speed of light limit that is the problem with the "contact them" option. If they are not nice and go for destroying you, which they do by sending some heavy masses at you at relativistic speeds, you don't find out about until it is too late to launch a counter attack so there's no "mutual assured destruction" deterrent like the one that has kept us from using civilization ending weapons on Earth.
The Space Time episode does go into possible reasons that advanced aliens might not value their own survival so highly that the risk of them being destroyed by not picking "destroy" is outweighed by the benefits of contact or ignoring others.
> I'd also expect an advanced form of life to have discovered game theory and analyzed potential interaction with other civilizations as a sequential game with imperfect information
Noteworthy: all that is known is not necessarily utilized (optimally, and often ~at all).
> PBS Space Time had an episode on this recently [1] which goes into more detail. Briefly, if you put survival of your planet over all else, "destroy aliens as soon as you become aware of them" has a better outcome for you than "contact them" or "ignore them".
This demonstrates how inescapable faith is, as a cognitive & cultural phenomenon - science is absolutely overflowing with it, but cannot see it due to ideological blindness.
> It's the speed of light limit that is the problem with the "contact them" option.
The speed of light limit that is problem with the "contact them" option.
FTFY
> If they are not nice and go for destroying you, which they do by sending some heavy masses at you at relativistic speeds, you don't find out about until it is too late to launch a counter attack so there's no "mutual assured destruction" deterrent like the one that has kept us from using civilization ending weapons on Earth.
This seems fine, but it is but one theory among many theoretical possibilities. I do not disagree at all that we should put more thought into whether advertising our presence is a good idea.
Imho, humanity would be well served by allocating a larger percentage of our compute to these sorts of conversations!
It’s funny you chose Socrates for this example because I believe he isn’t confirmed to have been a real person but rather a rhetorical character created by Plato.
Might be getting this wrong or new evidence has come to light, but I remember reading that theory years ago.
Memories deceive; it happens to me and I'm guessing to everyone. Odd that Aristophanes would have written a comedy about this character whom Plato would only invent years later, and so also that Xenophon, a student of Socrates like Plato, also wrote about him. Indeed Socrates lived and breathed just like you and I do; he drank water and wine and took dumps in the morning, and especially asked questions. But your memory was correct in the sense that we can't know how similar Plato's Socrates as written in the dialogues was to the real man, and often in the middle and later works it becomes clear that Plato's Socrates has become almost entirely a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. In that sense, Plato's Socrates, especially after the early dialogues, was a indeed fictitious rendering of a real man. Most of the named characters in Plato were (largely fictitious?) renderings of real people.
Personally, I like to remind myself of the fact -- kind of meditate on it to get it into me -- that the long gone people of distant eras were indeed just as real then as you and I are now. Of course we know this consciously but I find it's easy to neglect and stop feeling. Ancient Egyptians or Song Dynasty Chinese or even 5th and 4th century BCE Athenians become flat just-so stories, and when that happens I lose touch of the deep and pregnant mystery that lives in the gulf between historical record, popular imagination, and whatever it was that the people of the past actually experienced, however they actually thought and related. When I (authentically) reconnect with that mysterious reality it lights up a sense of awe in me, and reconditions and renews my relationship with the present, myself and others. I guess, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder.
From Theodore Alois Buckley's introduction to Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad:
"When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant."
Plato recounts the moments of Socrates' death in Phaedo.
I'd suggest giving that a read, and then ponder the consequence of angering the state. Your very existence may be questioned by future generations. Your motives relegated to insanity or a fiction by those who remain.
