Thanks for your explanations of what likely is the issue regarding disagreement here. I appreciate it that you spent some time to shed light here, because feedback is important to me.
I knew about Isaac Arthur, I’m trying to reach out to him and his community as we speak.
I’d try to add some clarrifications, hoping I adress the concerns of those people that seemed to be in disagreement with my idea.
I find it quite surprising that people concerned with the long-term welfare of humanity seem to be against my idea.
If there are genuine arguments against my position, I’d totally be open to hear it—maybe indeed there’s something wrong with my idea.
However I can’t find a way to get rid of these points (I think this is philosophy)
Sure, investing more than 0 effort into this initiative, takes away from other efforts
The faster we reach this goal, the faster we can make tremendous improvements in peoples’ lives
If we delay this for long enough, society might not be in such a state as to afford doing this kind of research (society might also be in a better position, but I’m more concerned about
Regarding viability:
I don’t know how much effort must be invested into this initiative, in order to achieve its goals
I don’t know if this is possible (Though through my own expertise, and the expertise of 11 physicists out of which at least 4 are physics professors, this goal does not seem impossible to reach)
Framing in “What we owe the future” terms:
Contingency: I’d give it 3⁄5 because
1 would be something obvious to everyone
2 would be obvious to experts
3 would be obvious to experts, but there would be cultural forces against it. William MacAskill talks about “cultural lock-in”. I think science is in such kind of a situation today. You might have heard of issues such as “publish or perish” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish ). There’s also the taboo created because of similarities with “perpetual motion machines”.
Persistence: 5⁄5. It’s realistic we could lose access to this, but if we don’t, then this in conceivably the most persistent thing possible (comparable to the death of all sentient beings, this is the other extreme)
Significance: 5⁄5 - Hard to imagine something more significant than the ability to literally give everyone every thing they want or need (not “everything” but “every thing”, because you can’t give them human slaves, or make other people their friends, if those other people disagree)
So if my points are correct, we basically have a tradeoff between:
Invest less in more concrete initiatives and
Risk losing eternal bliss for an infinity of people
This is a genuine dylema, I don’t have the answer to it, but my intuition tells me that we should invest more than 0 effort in this goal.
@Erin, or others:
Do you have any other idea where I should take this problem? As said, I’m trying to reach out to Isaac Arthur and many other people. Do you think this would be interesting for William MacAskill?
I don’t think I stated my core point clearly. I will be blunt for the purpose of clarity. Pursing this is not useful because, even if you could make a discovery, it would not possibly be useful until literally 100 quintillion years from now, if not much longer. To think that you could transmit this knowledge that far into future doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps you wish to pursue this as a purely theoretical question. I’m not a physicist, so I can not comment on whether your ideas are reasonable from that perspective. You say that physicists have told you that they are, but do not discount the possibility that they were simply being polite, or that your questions were misinterpreted.
Additionally, the reality is that people without PhDs in a given field rarely make significant contributions these days—if you seek to do so, your ideas must be exceptionally well communicated and grounded in the current literature (e.g., you must demonstrate an understanding of the orthodox paradigm even if your ideas are heterodox). Otherwise, your ideas will be lumped in with perpetual motion machines and ignored.
I genuinely think it would be a mistake to pursue this idea at all, even from a theoretical perspective, because there is essentially no chance that you are onto something real, that you can make progress on it with the tools available to you, and that you can communicate it so clearly that you will be taken seriously.
A better route to pursue might be writing science fiction. There is always demand for imaginative sci-fi with a clear grounding in real science or highly plausible imagined science. There is also a real need for sci-fi that imagines positive/desirable futures (e.g. solarpunk).
Hi @Erin , thanks for your continued interest in this topic.
Thanks for being blunt. Bluntness is good for saving time.
Let me address some things you said:
Pursing this is not useful because, even if you could make a discovery, it would not possibly be useful until literally 100 quintillion years from now
That is simply just not true. If we had infinite energy tomorrow, very soon after that, we could solve all problems solvable using resources. Let me present a list of stuff we could do very very soon (likely <10 years, extremely likely <100 years):
solve climate change (trivially even!)
solve all basic necesities of people (food, water, clothing, shelter)
solve all non-basic necesities: cars, airplanes, mobile phones, laptops—you name it, we got it
interstellar travel: Yes, people would already be flying to Alpha centauri and lots of other places. They would even reach them in “a few years/months” (a few years for them, but lots of years for us back on Earth)
There is lots of potential here, but I found that if I start talking about all the things that could be done, people are actually
To think that you could transmit this knowledge that far into future doesn’t make any sense.
Based on the refutation above, this point does not stand anymore.
You say that physicists have told you that they are, but do not discount the possibility that they were simply being polite, or that your questions were misinterpreted.
This is an awkward argument to address. Sure, everybody I ever met could be lying, and there’s always solipsism. Same argument applies to everyone. I don’t think this is a healthy way to continue a conversation—throwing doubt into what people say. It’s not healthy compared to an alternative that fortunately enough, we have:
I am currently reaching out to more and more physicists, and asking them for their opinion on this. I am posting updates regularly on the discord server that you can find on http://infiniteenergy.org . If you are interested, you’ll find there how much physicists are interested in this.
If you have any idea of what I would need to show you, so you consider there’s enough interest from the science community, I’m all ears.
Please however let’s avoid distrust-based arguments in the future, and let’s replace them with data-based arguments.
I’d avoid them first of all because, being from Eastern Europe, I am not aware of the existence of people who would not call an idea “stupid” right off the bat, instead of being polite, if they had the slightest distrust in it. Am I wrong? Not sure. Am I lying? You can’t be sure. So let’s let experiments decide :)
I genuinely think it would be a mistake to pursue this idea at all, even from a theoretical perspective, because there is essentially no chance that you are onto something real, that you can make progress on it with the tools available to you, and that you can communicate it so clearly that you will be taken seriously.
@Erin, I can’t fight belief. If you believe this idea is wrong, there’s not much point in talking.
Sure, you said “think”, not “believe”—taken, however thinking and reason means explanations, justifications, models, and logic. Do you care to justify:
Why you think there’s essentially no chance that I’m onto something real
How I would not be able to make progress on it with the tools available to me (the internet is my preffered tool)
That I wouldn’t be able to communicate it well enough to be taken seriously
That I won’t find other people more capable than me in any of the points above
I understand that this might be a deep emotional backlash. Humans have emotions, yes, unfortunately at times.
I’m however looking for supporters, and there will be only so much time I will spend on arguing with non-supporters. If you don’t want to believe that people are interested in this, feel free. If you want to see what actually is happening, check out http://infiniteenergy.org
It kind of feels like all I have so far was said. I don’t have more data at this point to get you more toward “omg, this might be possible after all”, but I am eager to hear your arguments, that might get me more toward “omg, this might actually not be possible”—as they say in startups: “negative feedback is the best kind of feeback”.
Hi Erin,
Thanks for your explanations of what likely is the issue regarding disagreement here. I appreciate it that you spent some time to shed light here, because feedback is important to me.
I knew about Isaac Arthur, I’m trying to reach out to him and his community as we speak.
I’d try to add some clarrifications, hoping I adress the concerns of those people that seemed to be in disagreement with my idea.
I find it quite surprising that people concerned with the long-term welfare of humanity seem to be against my idea.
If there are genuine arguments against my position, I’d totally be open to hear it—maybe indeed there’s something wrong with my idea.
However I can’t find a way to get rid of these points (I think this is philosophy)
Sure, investing more than 0 effort into this initiative, takes away from other efforts
The faster we reach this goal, the faster we can make tremendous improvements in peoples’ lives
If we delay this for long enough, society might not be in such a state as to afford doing this kind of research (society might also be in a better position, but I’m more concerned about
Regarding viability:
I don’t know how much effort must be invested into this initiative, in order to achieve its goals
I don’t know if this is possible (Though through my own expertise, and the expertise of 11 physicists out of which at least 4 are physics professors, this goal does not seem impossible to reach)
Framing in “What we owe the future” terms:
Contingency: I’d give it 3⁄5 because
1 would be something obvious to everyone
2 would be obvious to experts
3 would be obvious to experts, but there would be cultural forces against it. William MacAskill talks about “cultural lock-in”. I think science is in such kind of a situation today. You might have heard of issues such as “publish or perish” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish ). There’s also the taboo created because of similarities with “perpetual motion machines”.
Persistence: 5⁄5. It’s realistic we could lose access to this, but if we don’t, then this in conceivably the most persistent thing possible (comparable to the death of all sentient beings, this is the other extreme)
Significance: 5⁄5 - Hard to imagine something more significant than the ability to literally give everyone every thing they want or need (not “everything” but “every thing”, because you can’t give them human slaves, or make other people their friends, if those other people disagree)
So if my points are correct, we basically have a tradeoff between:
Invest less in more concrete initiatives and
Risk losing eternal bliss for an infinity of people
This is a genuine dylema, I don’t have the answer to it, but my intuition tells me that we should invest more than 0 effort in this goal.
@Erin, or others:
Do you have any other idea where I should take this problem? As said, I’m trying to reach out to Isaac Arthur and many other people. Do you think this would be interesting for William MacAskill?
Thanks a lot,
Vlad A.
I don’t think I stated my core point clearly. I will be blunt for the purpose of clarity. Pursing this is not useful because, even if you could make a discovery, it would not possibly be useful until literally 100 quintillion years from now, if not much longer. To think that you could transmit this knowledge that far into future doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps you wish to pursue this as a purely theoretical question. I’m not a physicist, so I can not comment on whether your ideas are reasonable from that perspective. You say that physicists have told you that they are, but do not discount the possibility that they were simply being polite, or that your questions were misinterpreted.
Additionally, the reality is that people without PhDs in a given field rarely make significant contributions these days—if you seek to do so, your ideas must be exceptionally well communicated and grounded in the current literature (e.g., you must demonstrate an understanding of the orthodox paradigm even if your ideas are heterodox). Otherwise, your ideas will be lumped in with perpetual motion machines and ignored.
I genuinely think it would be a mistake to pursue this idea at all, even from a theoretical perspective, because there is essentially no chance that you are onto something real, that you can make progress on it with the tools available to you, and that you can communicate it so clearly that you will be taken seriously.
A better route to pursue might be writing science fiction. There is always demand for imaginative sci-fi with a clear grounding in real science or highly plausible imagined science. There is also a real need for sci-fi that imagines positive/desirable futures (e.g. solarpunk).
Hi @Erin , thanks for your continued interest in this topic.
Thanks for being blunt. Bluntness is good for saving time.
Let me address some things you said:
That is simply just not true. If we had infinite energy tomorrow, very soon after that, we could solve all problems solvable using resources. Let me present a list of stuff we could do very very soon (likely <10 years, extremely likely <100 years):
solve climate change (trivially even!)
solve all basic necesities of people (food, water, clothing, shelter)
solve all non-basic necesities: cars, airplanes, mobile phones, laptops—you name it, we got it
interstellar travel: Yes, people would already be flying to Alpha centauri and lots of other places. They would even reach them in “a few years/months” (a few years for them, but lots of years for us back on Earth)
There is lots of potential here, but I found that if I start talking about all the things that could be done, people are actually
Based on the refutation above, this point does not stand anymore.
This is an awkward argument to address. Sure, everybody I ever met could be lying, and there’s always solipsism. Same argument applies to everyone. I don’t think this is a healthy way to continue a conversation—throwing doubt into what people say. It’s not healthy compared to an alternative that fortunately enough, we have:
I am currently reaching out to more and more physicists, and asking them for their opinion on this. I am posting updates regularly on the discord server that you can find on http://infiniteenergy.org . If you are interested, you’ll find there how much physicists are interested in this.
If you have any idea of what I would need to show you, so you consider there’s enough interest from the science community, I’m all ears.
Please however let’s avoid distrust-based arguments in the future, and let’s replace them with data-based arguments.
I’d avoid them first of all because, being from Eastern Europe, I am not aware of the existence of people who would not call an idea “stupid” right off the bat, instead of being polite, if they had the slightest distrust in it. Am I wrong? Not sure. Am I lying? You can’t be sure. So let’s let experiments decide :)
@Erin, I can’t fight belief. If you believe this idea is wrong, there’s not much point in talking.
Sure, you said “think”, not “believe”—taken, however thinking and reason means explanations, justifications, models, and logic. Do you care to justify:
Why you think there’s essentially no chance that I’m onto something real
How I would not be able to make progress on it with the tools available to me (the internet is my preffered tool)
That I wouldn’t be able to communicate it well enough to be taken seriously
That I won’t find other people more capable than me in any of the points above
I understand that this might be a deep emotional backlash. Humans have emotions, yes, unfortunately at times.
I’m however looking for supporters, and there will be only so much time I will spend on arguing with non-supporters. If you don’t want to believe that people are interested in this, feel free. If you want to see what actually is happening, check out http://infiniteenergy.org
It kind of feels like all I have so far was said. I don’t have more data at this point to get you more toward “omg, this might be possible after all”, but I am eager to hear your arguments, that might get me more toward “omg, this might actually not be possible”—as they say in startups: “negative feedback is the best kind of feeback”.
Thanks for your feedback!