Related: my favorite HN comment ever from a similar submission a year ago:
> There's lots of very exciting work going on around the fully mapped fruit fly connectome. For example, I'm a CTO of a stealth startup that aims to do for utilitarianism what carbon credits did for environmentalism. We are selling 'utility credits' which translates directly into us simulating trillions and trillions of fruit fly brains in a state of constant orgasmic bliss, which you can then buy to offset any actions your company has undertaken that damage global happiness or well-being. We've seen a lot of interest from some pretty large industry players.
Curious if you could elaborate? It seems like the issue isn’t carbon credits, but the lack of a regulated level of carbon that would make them effective. Market incentives work best with dollar incentives, not virtue points.
I am no specialist, but carbon credits seem like they can work to me. The problem is they need to be very carefully analyzed. Here in Brazil there have been cases of people illegally seizing protected forests (far off in Amazon regions) and making huge amounts of money selling off carbon credits simply for 'not taking the forest down' (it could be even worse: taking down the forest for even more 'reforestation credits'). Usually most of those 'pay someone not to pollute' can be very problematic, because in principle anyone can declare (misleading) intent to pollute any amount and thus could get infinite credits.
So this kind of scenario has to be carefully taken into account in favor of scenarios which lead to actual emission reductions. It's not a simple fungible asset or commodity as some (naively) assume.
> A Shell-operated plant reported millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place but were used by Canada’s largest oil sands companies
That seems to point to a problem with administration than the mechanism itself. It's like pointing to the fraud surrounding PPP loans and concluding the government shouldn't provide assistance in an emergency.
I interviewed with a company a few years ago that offers people the ability to certify their carbon free generation in countries where there isn’t a regulated market (I.e. outside of the US, EU, etc.). I was pretty shocked by the low standards of proof required, and it’s fairly obvious that someone can seek accreditation from multiple competing certifying agencies.
These unregulated credits get bought by heavy consumers in greenwashing
Carbon credits are useless for the same reason that non-proportional fines are also useless; for the incredibly wealthy the cost of speeding is the cost of the ticket. Some nations do a proportional speeding fine based on income - but that still doesn't affect the 1-0.1% whose wealth is more asset than income based.
That was effectively my point. There aren't appropriate dollar incentives to make the "market solution" work. It's really just a feel-good or virtue-signaling apparatus, not a financial market solution.
"We apologize for any negative connotations brought forward by our unfortunate naming of the Karma Kredits Klub and their ceremonial white peaked hats. As compensation we will simulate 50,000 more orgasmic fruit flies. Thank you we will not be taking questions."
I think this is probably a riff on something that happens in /Venomous Lumpsucker/ by Ned Beauman. I won't give it away but do highly recommend the book.
Why do you actually need to simulate them? The mapping between the state of the computer and the simulated state it represents exists only in our heads. You might as well say that any reality you can vaguely conceive of, exists and has moral weight.
Depending on which article you look at, you can see things such as the stunning, vivid rotating 3D model showing the optic lobes, or elaborations on what the model captures: it has mapped 139,000 neurons and 130 million synapses. I don't think that quietly picturing a fruit fly in your head executes a true simulation of those details.
I do think, in some cases, there is such a thing as thinking being equivalent to simulating (e.g. a calculator) but this isn't one of those.
It's a joke about utilitarianism which has had it's ups and downs but is a philosophy that has some pretty powerful adherents in the tech CEO world, notably the whole effective altruist crowd that SBF came out of. There's the Parable of Felix from SMBC [0] coming at it from the other angle of one incredibly happy person skewing the utility equation to do awful things.
> There's lots of very exciting work going on around the fully mapped fruit fly connectome. For example, I'm a CTO of a stealth startup that aims to do for utilitarianism what carbon credits did for environmentalism. We are selling 'utility credits' which translates directly into us simulating trillions and trillions of fruit fly brains in a state of constant orgasmic bliss, which you can then buy to offset any actions your company has undertaken that damage global happiness or well-being. We've seen a lot of interest from some pretty large industry players.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584130