VISITOR: Okay, suppose there had been a large enough study to satisfy your world’s take on “scientists.” What else would likely go wrong after that?
CECIE: Several things. For example, doctors wouldn’t necessarily be aware of the experimental results.
VISITOR: Hold on, I think my cultural translator is broken. You used that word “doctor” and my translator spit out a long sequence of words for Examiner plus Diagnostician plus Treatment Planner plus Surgeon plus Outcome Evaluator plus Student Trainer plus Business Manager. Maybe it’s stuck and spitting out the names of all the professions associated with medicine[?]
Monday, May 14, 2018
Great Excerpt From Inadequate Equilibrium
Inadequate Equilibrium by Eliezer Yudkowski is a great book. It's a really fun read. A very long section of the book is a conversation between two earthlings (one named Cecie) and a Visitor from another dimension that never gets stuck in bad equilibria. The confused Visitor keeps reacting to descriptions of earth with responses like "Why would you all choose to live this way?" and Cecie calmly explains to Visitor the logic of a bad equilibrium. This passage just about made me laugh out loud:
And what follows is a discussion of why in the hell would you mix all of these functions into one job performed by one person?
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