Conversation

Replying to
A mundane thought I’ve had lately is this: while playing around learning electronics and 3d printing lately, I find I’m more willing to go down debugging trees and yak-shaves with *highly uncertain cost* when it seems salient to my larger project of building a rover.
3
21
Debugs and yakshaves break cost=stakes logic because you can incur arbitrarily large costs for arbitrarily trivial things. Breaks means-end reasoning, utilitarian cost-benefit bullshit, optimizing mindsets etc. Bugs are Mulan McNugget sauce. You simply have to want them fixed.
1
14
If you want the irreducible thing itself, be it a Mars rover, a mansion, or mulan mcnugget sauce, it is effectively priceless. But something priced in pain is not worth more pain to remove. You wouldn’t endure worse pain than cancer to cure cancer. At least I wouldn’t.
1
19
And anything that you’re convinced is logically irreducible necessary, with no substitutes, to get to a priceless valued-for-itself thing is also priceless. The bug in the warp drive circuit is as priceless to resolve as warp drive is to have.
1
10
By contrast, anything that’s *not* necessary and has obvious substitutes is worth only as much debugging effort as would make the total cost less than the next-best substitute solution. It’s a commodity. Marginal stakes contribution = cost of last option you could explore.
1
10
Circling back to topic: low stakes = high strife. There’s literally nothing anyone seems to want on the other side of (say) decarbonizing that inspires the sacrifices being demanded of all. It’s cliche but “Mars settlement” actually is the best idea around and only inspires ~20%.
1
12
Let’s be clear that pain avoidance, no matter how huge, is still finite and therefore a cost, not stakes. It’s the price-to-minimize of life, not the value of living.
1
13
Let’s say worst-case climate models are correct and we’re looking at 5 gens of extreme pain for say 100b human+animal souls. Add it all up with adequate kinship-discounting. It still won’t be stakes. Just costs. Why is life worth it for any of the 100b souls in the formula?
1
6
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more