Comment by layla5alive
13 hours ago
This is the first time I've seen one of these proposals which highlights a future potential harm and then makes the healthy proposal for radical open COOPERATION and mutual self-restraint instead of a surveillance panopticon and tyrannical oppression as the solution. Bravo!
Recommendations:
* In a first line of effort, the United States should engage scientific superpowers, especially China, to build the foundation for collective restraint. Policymakers and the scientific community should prioritize transparent scientific collaboration, shared risk assessments, and early norm-setting.
* For the second line of effort, the United States should promote collective restraint across domestic, allied, and global scientific communities. This involves combining incentive-reducing measures with monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.
* The United States should take great caution with actions or statements that could foster mistrust or spur strategic competition in the field of mirror life or its enabling technologies.
* The United States must commit clearly to not developing mirror life, even if other actors are suspected of pursuing it.
* U.S. policymakers should advance actions that require long lead times, such as legislation, treaties, and international engagement, in parallel.
* U.S. policymakers should also treat countermeasures and resilience as constrained contingencies.
I’m sure smart and well intentioned American leaders will act for the global collective good, since that’s totally the way things work now.
It's not something that's in the US's hands now.
Much of the bleeding edge research around mirror life is occuring at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
> It's not something that's in the US's hands now.
Why not? Have anyone tried to negotiate with the Chinese about that, without tariffs, sanctions and other threats?
> Much of the bleeding edge research around mirror life is occuring at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
Good that they aren't hiding it. As for other countries, the lack of information doesn't mean lack of research, it's all hush-hush secrecy. Again, the current bio-treaties are a bad joke, negotiating new ones requires good will and peace, not trying to choke the oil supply to China.
Great! I’m sure nothing but good will come out of a Chinese laboratory.
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I'm curious what solutions to Future threats you think qualify as a panopticon, and why the following set of words in this context don't make you worried about the same:
>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.
off topic but I've noticed this CAPITALIZATION more and more in online discourse. I don't like it, but if you're using it can you maybe explain where it comes from?
It definitely seems like a zoomer thing.
Every time I see it I think of those YouTube videos people used to make: Ben Shapiro OWNS feminist with FACTS and LOGIC. Definitely sets the bozo bit.
It is for this reason that I like people doing it. I refer to it as setting "the evil bit". Go ahead and let me know that you only spout garbage before I even click the link.
One could argue that it's just what's old becoming new again. In older English capitalization of words was often used to add emphasis or imply meaning beyond what could be conveyed in a sentence by itself. For instance from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I don't actually know why this faded and got gradually replaced by our quite specific rules. It seems like a nice way for an author to be able to express much more meaning in the exact same number of characters.
Those were leading capital letters words. This is ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, which is different. As others pointed out, it’s used extensively in the click bait arena.
> It seems like a nice way for an author to be able to express much more meaning in the exact same number of characters.
Quite the opposite: It damages beyond repair the ability to pick out proper names at speed.
English has a horrid habit of re-using common nouns as names. The miller John becomes John miller, not John Miller.
Worse, the proliferation of brand names means that readers depend on capitalization to know if they are talking about, e.g., google, a common generic term for searching, or Google, the Alphabet (not alphabet!) subsidiary.
So, under the new regime, authors get to be more precious at the expense of their audience's time and concentration.
That's a Nope from Me, Dawg.
In "old-school" Internet "netiquette" it used to be considered digital SHOUTING. Nowadays it still is in some circles, but it may just be considered emphasis by some of the younger crowd?
I think it's just shouting. The 'netiquette' nerds [1] noticed that all-caps comes across as shouting. For once they got something right.
[1] bless their hearts
It's a type of emphasis.
I am no Zoomer and use it, so the casual age discrimination is seemingly poor pattern recognition.
Further, I used to run a hefty BNET(SCBW) swarm (to give you a better reference for how much text from online users I have come across) and it's use was common then as well.
The best solution to text bothering you is to tell yourself that giving silly things such power is, also, a silly thing.
The preceding 'also' could be all-capped.
I don't get it though. If you want to create emphasis why not use asterisks?
Ha! HN makes it italic. I forgot that.
You can use two to make keep asterisks like *this*
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I have been seeing this online since the 00s. No one likes it but I don't think there is a generational divide. Sometimes people just want to shout words at your face.
It’s against the guidelines because it’s been used for emphasis (with varying degrees of classiness) since before the beginning of the Internet.
El presidente does this a lot. Maybe it’s leaking out.
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The proposal tries to go against the current trend of US isolationism which burned a lot of good will with the rest of the world, and gain a bit of soft power back. Noble goal, but I’m not sure who wants to align behind the US today and risk getting dumped tomorrow.
On the topic of mirror life, doesn’t it need mirror food? I was under the impression that they couldn’t consume natural sugars for example, and so on. They’re talking about mirror life that uses non-mirrored molecules to propagate? How is mirror life building itself without mirror-everything-else?
One could design a mirror life form that uses mirrored amino-acids to build its proteins and also mirrored carbohydrates as building components, but which would nonetheless also have enzymes for the hydrolysis of normal proteins and carbohydrates and for their oxidation in order to produce energy, so it could eat non-mirrored food as a source of energy, even if it would need to synthesize for its growth mirrored molecules.
Mirrored amino-acids and carbohydrates are not completely missing in nature, some of them are produced by certain living beings for various purposes, but they are not used for building proteins or other macromolecules, i.e. they are not usable for growth.
If this interests you, you may enjoy the book Permutation City by Egan.
The raw materials for photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation (water, carbon dioxide, and nitrate) are achiral. Maybe mirror lives can start from scratch like our ancestors.
I think the catch is there's no money to be made in mirror molecules / life... YET! If that changes, say mirror molecules some how extend life or have a therapeutic use then we're like to see the tune change.
Why do you think such an approach would work, but something equivalent to try to prevent mass shootings / school shooter type gun violence wouldn't? Or would you say that radical open cooperation and mutual self restraint led by governments could stop the American problem of mass shootings like the Las Vegas shooter?
I don't see how you stop terrorism (of the school shooter type, not the Islamic/political type) with inter-government cooperation. Mirror life is just another vector for school shooters but with PHDs.
Mirror life is a serious risk that could be recognized by our leaders. For example, the natural SARS-COV2 virus killed a million people in the USA alone.
Mass shootings, on the other hand, is a shocking but tiny problem that only kills about 350 people a year in the USA.
Managing 1000 biology PhDs is easier than managing 10,000,000 middle school students.