You would be surprised how much traction you can get by just actually taking the first step.

E.g. I’m a geek and, after moving, wanted to join a local makerspace. Unfortunately there wasn’t one. I could have lamented the lack of one. Instead, I put the call out to see if anyone else wanted to start one. The task looked daunting and overwhelming. It was amazing how much effort others were willing to join me in applying to the problem. We’ve been going strong for a decade now, and it’s provided a positive outlet to many.

Break it down. What about the Epstein class is actually the problem. What solutions could be applied. How would you break down going about it?

Break it down further into useful goals, then create actionable steps you can take to tackle the various sub points.

It sounds like you’ve failed with breaking the problem down stage. That is a massive, unsolvable task.

It’s like the question “How do you eat an elephant?”, A: “One bite at a time”. You can’t just shove the elephant in your mouth and hope not to choke.

There are 3 parts to the process. It sounds like you got stuck between 1 and 2.

1. Identify what is actually going on. Feeling shit is a compound feeling breaking it down into subsections helps a lot. E.g. I’m crap and socialising and miss people. Or I’m anxious about money.

2. Identify what needs to be done, internally to alter the behaviour/feeling.

3. Implementing that in your day to day life.

I’ve had a few attempts at CBT over the years (ADHD). 2 were completely useless, the 3rd helped a lot. We managed to chunk some of my issues down into small enough pieces I could crush them.

The sea doesn’t make the sky blue. The sky simply is blue for most of the day.

The sky is blue due to differential scattering. Blue light scatters more than red. That’s also why sunsets are red. It’s the remaining light passing through the atmosphere.

Water is often blue due to reflecting the sky. It also has a slight blue tint. This is only obvious in large, deep bodies. It’s why the sea around some tropical islands looks so blue. They are volcanoes, so the water drops off rapidly. That much water has a significant blue colour. The sky then adds to it.

I’ve found a significantly atypical response to caffeine is a massive indicator of ADHD. It’s not 100%, but well passed 80%, based on my completely anecdotal experiences.

Sidenote:

People with ADHD tend to be friends with people with ADHD

My wife was sure she didn’t have ADHD, and nor did I. After we were both diagnosed, over half her friends are now either diagnosed, or fairly sure on also being Autistic/ADHD.

They do invest (reluctantly) when grid stability becomes compromised. That’s the point where regulators and politicians start taking a strong interest. That’s why they bitch and moan about anything that can upset the balance in the grid.

Unfortunately, the upgrades can take time, so we not only need to bully them into them, but also give them time to actually do them. Fuck knows how we pull that off however, so we might as well go full steam for solar!

Outside is better, but inside is often a lot easier and almost as effective. Most glass blocks IR (heat). If you reflect it back out before it gets converted, it will exit fine. In practice it’s a few % difference, depending on the foil.

As well as the risks of shoddy kit, there is also a grid stability issue.

Basically, solar can go off an on at a fairly rapid rate, compared to what the grid is designed for. This can lead to instabilities. Either brownouts or spikes in voltage. This can panic some grid equipment and force a shutdown.

What they should do is invest in their infrastructure and make it better able to cope with a distributed supply, distributed load setup. We all know how they feel about investments however!

Margaret Thatcher was an absolute bitch. However, at least she had a spine.

Apparently, after the Falklands war, she personally wrote a personalised apology letter to the family of every UK soldier killed.

There are arsehole leaders who I can at least respect. Trump is not one of them.

It wasn’t deliberate. It was more likely scientists being overly cautious about overstating their case. The end results pushed the normal agreed values closer to best case predictions rather than middle.

This was back when the main models needed weeks of super computer time, so only a few were run, and everyone else analysed the shared results.

The point was to test for human bias in the data. The initial complaint was that scientists were cherry picking the data to make it look worse than it was. By looking at the spread, it showed they were minorly cherry picking to understate the problem. A fact that is now more and more obvious as it plays out.

I personally suspect it’s autism related. Social effort gets downgraded whether I want it to be or not. It doesn’t seem to track with my own fight or flight reflexes. We might have different variants.

I know our brains deal with faces separately. That’s why we see them everywhere e.g. face in the moon. It then makes sense that face memory is done separately.

It’s weird. It’s almost like someone took a video of an event, but replaced the face and body with a generic placeholder, and a pointer to more information. That extra info promptly gets dropped, leaving the pointer hanging.

I once found myself completely unable to describe someone, less than 5 minutes after talking to them, knowing I might need to describe them. The fact they had a nose piercing, and neon blue hair just got dumped from memory.

I feel you on that!

I’m not face blind, I can recognise particular faces fine. What seems to be screwed for me is face memory. Without a face to anchor to, names are then an absolute bitch.

I’ve yet to find even an actual name for the phenomenon, let alone a fix.

About a decade ago a group did a study on it.

They first created a simplified model. That model was still a fairly good match with the fully featured models. They then varied the parameters around reasonable possible values. If scientists were using most likely assumptions, you would expect a 50/50 split of better/worse predictions.

In practice it was 93% worse. Scientists were (unconsciously) using a lot of best case figures, not expected case.

When I read about that, and the complete lack of follow-up coverage, I knew we were fucked.

That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.

Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

We are not there yet. Some of the theories put the energy requirements within reach of the LHC. They were at the extremes of possibilities however, and none have been detected so far.

It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.

It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.

In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.

I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.

My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.

Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.

If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.

The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?