https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/?commentId=wgjFKkGu6QkM5hyjL
” The year is 2022.
My smoke alarm chirps in the middle of the night, waking me up, because it’s running low on battery.
It could have been designed with a built-in clock that, when it’s first getting slightly low on battery, waits until the next morning, say 11am, and then starts emitting a soft purring noise, which only escalates to piercing loud chirps over time and if you ignore it.
And I do have a model of how this comes about; the basic smoke alarm design is made in the 1950s or 1960s or something, in a time when engineering design runs on a much more authoritarian paradigm of “yes wake them up the user-peon needs to change the battery”, clock circuits aren’t as cheap; and then in modern times if you propose changing anything, somebody somewhere will claim it’s less safe. Of course it’s much less safe if you build smoke alarms that hurt people, and the people quite reasonably remove the batteries and take them out of their bedrooms, and then you try to compensate for that by passing a law so that you can say any harm is their fault for ignoring that law. But that’s the paradigm for how it is, and now if you try to design a smoke alarm that’s gentler or slower-escalating about how it lets you know that it’s running out of battery, people will - on a purely intuitive level - assume that the damage the smoke alarm does to you must be buying something, and that a smoke alarm which tries harder not to hurt you must be less safe. There’s probably a law mandating those chirps; it’s probably illegal to build a better-designed smoke alarm. Just guessing, there, partially because the better product doesn’t seem to exist, and partially because Earthlings just fucking love passing laws about everything.
Every day, in every way, I’m reminded that this is not my world. The world of eliezera wouldn’t design smoke alarms like that, nor larger societies in a way that lets those larger societies fail like that.
It doesn’t bug me in the same way and structure that it bugs Duncan, or so I model him and me; and I think that’s because I genuinely deeply know, including in my emotions, that I am not wrong, Earth is wrong. There’s a correct way to design a smoke alarm, and Earth’s way is not it.
I wish I could give Duncan the mental motion of what it is to have the sense of your own world about you and its sensibility, by which this world of Earth cannot press in on you; so that if among their many other errors the Earthlings think you don’t exist, that genuinely doesn’t feel like you being wrong, it feels like them being wrong. But that’s probably something in the brains of eliezera that maybe isn’t native to the brains of duncanni, and so the thought is useless in the end.
Even so: Earthlings be weird, but that’s a them problem, not a you problem. Maybe your System 1 never quite believes it, but let your System 2 never lose track of the difference.”
In my entire life i think i’ve had to deal with a smoke detector beeping in the night like once or twice. Are their really people whose response to this incredibly minor inconvenience is to rip the batteries out and not have this modern marvel of lifesaving equipment active where they sleep? That is the emotional response of a tantruming child.
If my smoke detector is getting low on juice I want to know about it right away, and I certainly don’t act like the people making them are attacking me if they don’t needlessly complicate their machine with some weird timer for only warning me about the low batteries at a certain time-if that clock has an issue maybe it never warns me at all and the smoke detector just turns silently off. And listen to him huffing about ThE lAwS as if regulations aren’t written in blood. Smoke detectors have saved an enormous number of people’s lives, but since they made him slightly uncomfortable once they’re demonic symbols of our wicked oppressive society.
How do people take this guy seriously?
neil degrasse tyson disease
Join us next week for the thrilling demonstration of the conspiracy behind having to clean the lint out of the dryer lint trap.
Wait, there’s a planet where people need to set the clock on their smoke detectors?
What if I’m napping at 11 AM? Are you telling me that in this day and age of cheap Bluetooth radio chips, my smoke detector still doesn’t sync with my Fitbit to determine if I’m awake?
how many math pets does it take to change a battery yud
I want a book or a short story or something about a society like that, except it reflects how these people’s ideal societies would actually go. Like a technocracy run by people who are convinced they’re infallible because they’re kind of good at coding, where great pains are taken to “optimize” everything according to metrics that don’t actually matter but were chosen because they’re quantifiable. They’re sure they can solve poverty once they’re done perfecting the user interface of every household appliance, which they’re doing first because their morality algorithm told them it was more important for reasons involving the assumption that humans will someday be an intergalactic species.
I mean… I don’t own a business. Well, I do, but it doesn’t make things with atoms. That being said, there is a question here (1) would people buy the advertised smoke alarms at the price it would cost to make them? (2) would they more successfully encourage people to change the batteries? (3) Are any of these legal assumptions true? (4) the last stand-alone smoke alarm I bought has a 10 year battery in it, and when it’s done you replace the smoke detector.
It’s literally just a club for people who feel alienated by the fact that they feel better than everyone else
” it’s probably illegal to build a better-designed smoke alarm. ”
Sure dude, it’s the regulation.
And people were surprised he was an Ayn Rand fan
smoke and co detectors have a wider design space than “dont make yud mad”. While I also hate the loud noises and such, the design space has to include things such as:
- reliability
- cheap - if everyone doesnt have one, then what’s the point?
- low battery usage (internal clocks sound power expensive)
- accurate
Nailing all of this is tough. The nest co/smoke detector is a good example - yes they solve the UX issues, but their product is literally, LITERALLY 20x more expensive than the cheapest thing ( vs 19). So you get what you want, you pay for what you want.
I need like I dunno a half dozen or more of each of these bad boys, so I will not be spending 20x on them thank youuuuuu
I read this fuckwit in probably america talk about how smoke alarms are authoritarian, meanwhile my girlfriend cannot leave her home country because she took part in democratic organizing for an opposition party.
My smoke detector has a lot of false positives, which are all the more annoying because they are by definition unpredictable
If your smoke detector chirping triggers these types of thoughts, you should probably check yourself into your nearest in-patient mental health facility.
My dude, it has a name and it’s called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.
Gotta confess that’s what I did.. Tho I have a high ceiling and no sufficiently high ladder so when it woke me up I had to perform a sort of dangerous maneuver of climbing on a wobbly wardrobe to get it to shut up which I don’t want to repeat
I stopped reading because I wanted to avoid getting an aneurysm in my engineer brain… Seriously, no one will set a clock on a smoke alarm. The piezo that’s used to sound the alarm is not great for making soft, calm noises, and doing all of those ridiculous requests would increase the price. Yes, that nonsense is doable, but who’s going to pay extra? The current design doesn’t come from authoritarianism. It comes from optimization, cost reduction, and a desire to keep things simple…
He really is a moron. You’re supposed to replace batteries yearly without waiting for the chirps. That clock hes talking about, it’s called a “calendar”.
Theres also alarms where you only replace the whole alarm after 5 or 10 years or something (you’re supposed to replace alarms every 10 years).
Edit: i figured it out. He’s an idiot who’s pretending to be a moderately bright but extremely arrogant person. This way he gets to convince some people that he’s a genius, and most people that he isn’t an idiot.
I’m sorry I really don’t understand. Can someone explain?
Look, as a working man who’s been fucked by his smoke detector in a non consensual manner at 2 am more than once… I actually gotta side with Yud on this one.
Still think he’s a twat though.