This is just repackaging Anselm's Ontological argument for the existence of God: postulating "a being of which no greater can be conceived" would necessarily mean God exists. Just like living in a computer simulation: imagine "a computer simulation where no greater simulation can be conceived".
But it doesn't make things real. Just because you'd have to imagine a real God doesn't necessarily make it exist outside your head. Same with the simulation.
Neat thought experiment, not a proof.
I always liked the opposite argument: If we are living in a simulation, then by Zorn's Lemma there is a maximal world containing our simulation and all the simulations that contain it. Now, what is the difference between beings living in that limit universe using their physical substrate and us living in their universe on our nested physical substrate?
So what you're saying is that you are too dumb to vote your own principles, and so is everyone else. Or are you saying that candidates literally force people to vote for them, somehow using money to do that? Be specific.
It's more complicated than that because there are a lot of obstacles to voting your principles effectively.
For example, there are a lot of people talking about writing in Bernie, Jill Stein or whoever, but unless a certain amount of paperwork is filed, those write-ins will not get counted. This paperwork is usually significantly less than what is required to to have your name printed on the ballot, but it is not trivial (and sometimes not free e.g. Wyoming charges $200). Moreover, the "Bernie or Bust" crowd doesn't seem to get that unless Sanders himself files write-in paperwork, their votes will not even be tallied.
The Libertarians seem to be better positioned here because they are on all 50 ballots. But the Greens are only on about 27 (last I checked) and BoB is pretty much a non starter.
So you can vote your principles all you want, but if you are trying to (as my mother would put it) "stand up and be counted" then it is not so simple.
I think the real problem (as several other posters have commented) is not the "Skynet scenario", but the simple fact that a lot of knowledge work "is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task". And any time you come up with a subsequent job for these people to be expensively retrained for, if the job is at all lucrative, then it is worth automating. Modern techniques mean that this automation can be developed faster than training humans. How long did it take Lee Sedol to learn to play Go at world championship levels? And how long did it take the AlphaGo team to train their network?
The only stable state here is mass unemployment. In this scenario, we have more to fear from the human owners of the automation than from the automation itself.
If you are going to work your balls off, you'd better eat breakfast. If you are going to sit on ass all day, you can probably skip it, unless you're hungry. You can now skip this article, and every other article like it. Tada!
If you are going to work your balls off, you'd better have a lot of Vitamin D too...
For me, after a year of trying this, I find that it is good for weight loss, but it makes me pretty damn stupid by early afternoon. Then again, I can't abuse caffeine or other stimulants (my brain chemistry is a bit strange) so YMMV
Yeah, back in the 1960s we had the cloud, but it was called "time sharing". Over the years I've watched the "latest thing" slosh back and forth from edge to center based on where the previous paradigm had left too much compute power on the floor. Next up: Lots of browser based processing (fancy graphics etc.).
Lakeside is the most expensive/exclusive private school in Seattle. Notable alumni include Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Gates was wealthy before Microsoft - his father is a prominent local attorney.)
So this story has exactly zero to do with Bush's education initiatives.
Rockefeller Fund: Now that oil has dropped from $120 per barrel to $30/$40 per barrel and oil stocks are no longer profitable, we've suddenly developed a sense of moral courage. Our decision has nothing to do with oil investments no longer being a money-spewing spigot.
Yeah, its not like the funding of climate change denial by Exxon is recent news...
What do you mean, 'a call'? Who uses their smartphone for calling people? Absurd. People show them off, twit and twat on them, chatroulette on them, Facebook, wechat, fiber, whatsup, tinder, etc, nobody calls or picksup anymore.
My wife's car was broken into several times when she lived in Antwerp for eight months, but never in years of living in Denver, Pittsburgh, Houston or Washington DC. Maybe Belgium hasn't worked out "social peace"?
I live in a fairly desirable section of Seattle and our neighbors are reporting regular car break-ins.
Government does work; a bunch of high standard-of-living nations in western Europe have proven that.
The problem is that democratic government requires an educated, non-greedy populace to work well. When it's tried in places full of uneducated religious idiots, it doesn't work very well, and that's what we see in many places in America, especially Florida.
One thing that does need to be done is that states need to (in defiance of the Federal government if necessary) prevent Floridians and other southerners from moving out when they start getting impacted by climate change. They need to suffer the consequences for their voting choices, instead of just being able to move to states where the people are smarter and screw things up there too like they did in their home states.
Up here in Seattle we have a bit of a homelessness catastrophe caused in part by the (relatively) generous support programs and a functioning high-tech economy that holds out the promise of gainful employment. While I don't begrudge desperate people a better life, it does annoy me that all these "State's Rights" morans can implement their punitive social policies and expect us to clean up the mess. You can't have state's rights like that without border controls. Either we have national policies for problems that affect us all or we need to break up the union. Anything else is dysfunctional.
To me it's also obvious, but judging from the conversations with colleagues in the field (who are chemists, not evolutionary biologists), destruction of replicators is generally neglected. The challenge has been to just make molecules which can replicate and it is even more difficult to make them evolve because you need at least one bit of information that can assume 0 or 1 state, translated into chemical structures. Such error-prone replication process is enough to generate diversity of replicators but without extinction, the only selection pressure is on the replication efficiency and not survival.
This has also been brought up as a critique of cosmological natural selection.
At least he cited a source. Do you have a link to nasa.gov which explains the difference?
Sure. Not hard to find. Took me about 30 seconds with Google.
Now how about you supply some evidence of your own for the massive ad hominem conspiracy theory you regurgitated into the thread? Things like documents from the world wide alarmist conspiracy? Protip: if you don't see my name in the transcript, it's fake.
That's a mistatement. The problem is that controversy and conflict drives page hits and viewership. so their is a strong economic incentive to present sensational headline, not inciteful journalism.
Speaking of misstatements, I think you meant "insightful". Inciteful journalism is the problem you are pointing out!
As for Kaupthing, the executives actually did intend to deceive investors in the al-Thani case. And guess what? We threw them in jail for it. What more do you want, should we rip their toenails out with pliers?
Well, since we are discussing corrupt bankers and moral questions around sentience, then yes please.
The Reds were a terrorist group in the books, but weren't exactly the bad guys. I wonder how the show's writers and executives are going to portray that in today's environment.
Come to think of it, most of the characters in the book were "terrorists," at least from the point of view of the UN organization that governed the project. It has massive infrastructure destruction (don't want to spoil it), guerilla warfare, cultural sectarianism, etc.
I doubt the network execs are going to allow that on the TV show without some major editing.
I dunno. I used to think that, but after watching Daredevil and some of GoT, there seems to be a lot of moral ambiguity in TV shows these days. Not to mention a lot of what we used to call "ultra violence"...
I see this and his age, and I can only think, "does he realize that, while Obama can make some action, the majority of such a thing has to come from Congress?"
I can only see him as being a brat trying to make a name for himself targeting a well targeted person.
The biggest thing on his table politically about climate change recently, might have been Keystone, which he didn't let go through
WTF does the Keystone pipeline have to do with climate change? The Canadians are selling the oil to China, anyway, it'll just take a different route.
Not if those different routes are blocked too. The next choice is across tribal land in BC, and the tribes are opposing it.
Go ahead and tax the hell out of me. I'm okay with that. Just spend the money for something meaningful. I didn't get to where I am on my own. It's my JOB to give back. Well, more my responsibility. Life's short, do what you can with the time you have.
Totally.
I have kids, and the question I ask myself is: What sort of society do I want to leave for them? This is a bit different from the usual "better world" stuff (although a habitable planet would also be a nice legacy!) I mean, I could just set them up for life or something, but I'd much rather leave them a functioning society where they can rely on their fellows (and vice versa) than one where they (and the other descendants of lucky bastards like myself) are insulated from communal life by a fortress built of money that has no empathy and may let them down at some point (didn't somebody once describe wealth being vulnerable to moth, rust and thieves?)
My kids have plenty of advantages already, but a more important one would be a society built on empathy and compassion, not on fear. And that is something we can give to everyone.
As a fellow member of the 1% who is also a Sanders backer for much the same reasone, let me just say to you and the WSJ editorial page (people read that without grunting?) that you are not alone.
How so? At no point does the Bible state that God only created humans nor does it exclude the idea that he created beings not in his image. I'm no biblical scholar nor a Christian but I don't see where it is incompatible or anything. It doesn't even extend to beyond the Earth so far as I know, except for the heavens which can be defined in a variety of ways. I have read the entire Bible but I didn't really understand all of it so I may be missing something. I should probably read it in a format other than the KJV.
A hairdresser isn't an engineer. She's an artist. There's no equations for getting your hair to behave. Well, I'm sure there are, but they're not teaching them in beautician college.
Actually, no. The cause is not enough exercise/work. You can eat as many calories as you want as long as you expend enough energy to compensate, anything less makes you fat.
See how easy it is too justify the exact opposite. I can actually say that my version is more accurate to real life because you eventually reach a point where you are spending so much time expending energy that you cannot consume more calories and the system can reach equilibrium. You cannot go the other direction and expend so little energy that you can eat nothing. Besides, sitting on your ass all day and eating almost nothing will have its own consequences (poor circulation, bed sores, atrophied muscles, etc) whereas leading an active lifestyle generally prevents those problems.
While your rhetoric is impeccable, the reality is that it is difficult to burn enough calories through exercise. (The may have been your point, but it is hard to tell.) If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less than you burn (which is the point the GP was trying to make in an abbreviated fashion.) I have been training in tae-kwon-do for about 30 years now, and the caloric burn for my weight is about 800/hour, which is pretty high up on this list. In spite of this, I found it far more effective for weight loss to simply reduce snacks and meals,, swap carbs for protein and fat, and reduce sugar than to try to add more workouts. You get a lot more weight loss for your time and willpower. I mean think about it - a couple of doughnuts, vs an hour's workout plus travel time? If you have a life outside of the gym, it's a no brainer.
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This is just repackaging Anselm's Ontological argument for the existence of God: postulating "a being of which no greater can be conceived" would necessarily mean God exists. Just like living in a computer simulation: imagine "a computer simulation where no greater simulation can be conceived".
But it doesn't make things real. Just because you'd have to imagine a real God doesn't necessarily make it exist outside your head. Same with the simulation.
Neat thought experiment, not a proof.
I always liked the opposite argument: If we are living in a simulation, then by Zorn's Lemma there is a maximal world containing our simulation and all the simulations that contain it. Now, what is the difference between beings living in that limit universe using their physical substrate and us living in their universe on our nested physical substrate?
So what you're saying is that you are too dumb to vote your own principles, and so is everyone else. Or are you saying that candidates literally force people to vote for them, somehow using money to do that? Be specific.
It's more complicated than that because there are a lot of obstacles to voting your principles effectively.
For example, there are a lot of people talking about writing in Bernie, Jill Stein or whoever, but unless a certain amount of paperwork is filed, those write-ins will not get counted. This paperwork is usually significantly less than what is required to to have your name printed on the ballot, but it is not trivial (and sometimes not free e.g. Wyoming charges $200). Moreover, the "Bernie or Bust" crowd doesn't seem to get that unless Sanders himself files write-in paperwork, their votes will not even be tallied.
The Libertarians seem to be better positioned here because they are on all 50 ballots. But the Greens are only on about 27 (last I checked) and BoB is pretty much a non starter.
So you can vote your principles all you want, but if you are trying to (as my mother would put it) "stand up and be counted" then it is not so simple.
So when do the armed people take to the streets and use their guns to take back power?
After missing three meals.
Unfortunately, that usually doesn't prevent anyone from shooting. It just prevents them from aiming.
I think the real problem (as several other posters have commented) is not the "Skynet scenario", but the simple fact that a lot of knowledge work "is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task". And any time you come up with a subsequent job for these people to be expensively retrained for, if the job is at all lucrative, then it is worth automating. Modern techniques mean that this automation can be developed faster than training humans. How long did it take Lee Sedol to learn to play Go at world championship levels? And how long did it take the AlphaGo team to train their network?
The only stable state here is mass unemployment. In this scenario, we have more to fear from the human owners of the automation than from the automation itself.
If you are going to work your balls off, you'd better eat breakfast. If you are going to sit on ass all day, you can probably skip it, unless you're hungry. You can now skip this article, and every other article like it. Tada!
If you are going to work your balls off, you'd better have a lot of Vitamin D too...
For me, after a year of trying this, I find that it is good for weight loss, but it makes me pretty damn stupid by early afternoon. Then again, I can't abuse caffeine or other stimulants (my brain chemistry is a bit strange) so YMMV
Yeah, back in the 1960s we had the cloud, but it was called "time sharing". Over the years I've watched the "latest thing" slosh back and forth from edge to center based on where the previous paradigm had left too much compute power on the floor. Next up: Lots of browser based processing (fancy graphics etc.).
Lakeside is the most expensive/exclusive private school in Seattle. Notable alumni include Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Gates was wealthy before Microsoft - his father is a prominent local attorney.)
So this story has exactly zero to do with Bush's education initiatives.
Rockefeller Fund: Now that oil has dropped from $120 per barrel to $30/$40 per barrel and oil stocks are no longer profitable, we've suddenly developed a sense of moral courage. Our decision has nothing to do with oil investments no longer being a money-spewing spigot.
Yeah, its not like the funding of climate change denial by Exxon is recent news...
What do you mean, 'a call'? Who uses their smartphone for calling people? Absurd. People show them off, twit and twat on them, chatroulette on them, Facebook, wechat, fiber, whatsup, tinder, etc, nobody calls or picksup anymore.
Especially my darn kids!
My wife's car was broken into several times when she lived in Antwerp for eight months, but never in years of living in Denver, Pittsburgh, Houston or Washington DC. Maybe Belgium hasn't worked out "social peace"?
I live in a fairly desirable section of Seattle and our neighbors are reporting regular car break-ins.
Anecdotes are not data.
Government does work; a bunch of high standard-of-living nations in western Europe have proven that.
The problem is that democratic government requires an educated, non-greedy populace to work well. When it's tried in places full of uneducated religious idiots, it doesn't work very well, and that's what we see in many places in America, especially Florida.
One thing that does need to be done is that states need to (in defiance of the Federal government if necessary) prevent Floridians and other southerners from moving out when they start getting impacted by climate change. They need to suffer the consequences for their voting choices, instead of just being able to move to states where the people are smarter and screw things up there too like they did in their home states.
Up here in Seattle we have a bit of a homelessness catastrophe caused in part by the (relatively) generous support programs and a functioning high-tech economy that holds out the promise of gainful employment. While I don't begrudge desperate people a better life, it does annoy me that all these "State's Rights" morans can implement their punitive social policies and expect us to clean up the mess. You can't have state's rights like that without border controls. Either we have national policies for problems that affect us all or we need to break up the union. Anything else is dysfunctional.
To me it's also obvious, but judging from the conversations with colleagues in the field (who are chemists, not evolutionary biologists), destruction of replicators is generally neglected. The challenge has been to just make molecules which can replicate and it is even more difficult to make them evolve because you need at least one bit of information that can assume 0 or 1 state, translated into chemical structures. Such error-prone replication process is enough to generate diversity of replicators but without extinction, the only selection pressure is on the replication efficiency and not survival.
This has also been brought up as a critique of cosmological natural selection.
At least he cited a source. Do you have a link to nasa.gov which explains the difference?
Sure. Not hard to find. Took me about 30 seconds with Google.
Now how about you supply some evidence of your own for the massive ad hominem conspiracy theory you regurgitated into the thread? Things like documents from the world wide alarmist conspiracy? Protip: if you don't see my name in the transcript, it's fake.
The US has done plenty of domestic development. A helluva lot of work in the computer sciences; not just theory but R&D, happens in the US.
People like Richard Feynman, Elizabeth Blackburn, Donald Knuth and Michael Stonebraker (just to name a few off the top of my head...)
That's a mistatement. The problem is that controversy and conflict drives page hits and viewership. so their is a strong economic incentive to present sensational headline, not inciteful journalism.
Speaking of misstatements, I think you meant "insightful". Inciteful journalism is the problem you are pointing out!
As for Kaupthing, the executives actually did intend to deceive investors in the al-Thani case. And guess what? We threw them in jail for it. What more do you want, should we rip their toenails out with pliers?
Well, since we are discussing corrupt bankers and moral questions around sentience, then yes please.
The Reds were a terrorist group in the books, but weren't exactly the bad guys. I wonder how the show's writers and executives are going to portray that in today's environment.
Come to think of it, most of the characters in the book were "terrorists," at least from the point of view of the UN organization that governed the project. It has massive infrastructure destruction (don't want to spoil it), guerilla warfare, cultural sectarianism, etc.
I doubt the network execs are going to allow that on the TV show without some major editing.
I dunno. I used to think that, but after watching Daredevil and some of GoT, there seems to be a lot of moral ambiguity in TV shows these days. Not to mention a lot of what we used to call "ultra violence"...
I see this and his age, and I can only think, "does he realize that, while Obama can make some action, the majority of such a thing has to come from Congress?"
I can only see him as being a brat trying to make a name for himself targeting a well targeted person.
The biggest thing on his table politically about climate change recently, might have been Keystone, which he didn't let go through
WTF does the Keystone pipeline have to do with climate change? The Canadians are selling the oil to China, anyway, it'll just take a different route.
Not if those different routes are blocked too. The next choice is across tribal land in BC, and the tribes are opposing it.
Go ahead and tax the hell out of me. I'm okay with that. Just spend the money for something meaningful. I didn't get to where I am on my own. It's my JOB to give back. Well, more my responsibility. Life's short, do what you can with the time you have.
Totally.
I have kids, and the question I ask myself is: What sort of society do I want to leave for them? This is a bit different from the usual "better world" stuff (although a habitable planet would also be a nice legacy!) I mean, I could just set them up for life or something, but I'd much rather leave them a functioning society where they can rely on their fellows (and vice versa) than one where they (and the other descendants of lucky bastards like myself) are insulated from communal life by a fortress built of money that has no empathy and may let them down at some point (didn't somebody once describe wealth being vulnerable to moth, rust and thieves?)
My kids have plenty of advantages already, but a more important one would be a society built on empathy and compassion, not on fear. And that is something we can give to everyone.
Thanks for this.
As a fellow member of the 1% who is also a Sanders backer for much the same reasone, let me just say to you and the WSJ editorial page (people read that without grunting?) that you are not alone.
How so? At no point does the Bible state that God only created humans nor does it exclude the idea that he created beings not in his image. I'm no biblical scholar nor a Christian but I don't see where it is incompatible or anything. It doesn't even extend to beyond the Earth so far as I know, except for the heavens which can be defined in a variety of ways. I have read the entire Bible but I didn't really understand all of it so I may be missing something. I should probably read it in a format other than the KJV.
Indeed. C.S.Lewis' Space Trilogy is a good fictional example, and his essay Religion and Rocketry is his take in an apologetic vein.
(Not to mention Jesus' I have sheep that are not of this fold remark.)
A hairdresser isn't an engineer. She's an artist. There's no equations for getting your hair to behave. Well, I'm sure there are, but they're not teaching them in beautician college.
Citation needed. A selfie will do.
Actually, no. The cause is not enough exercise/work. You can eat as many calories as you want as long as you expend enough energy to compensate, anything less makes you fat.
See how easy it is too justify the exact opposite. I can actually say that my version is more accurate to real life because you eventually reach a point where you are spending so much time expending energy that you cannot consume more calories and the system can reach equilibrium. You cannot go the other direction and expend so little energy that you can eat nothing. Besides, sitting on your ass all day and eating almost nothing will have its own consequences (poor circulation, bed sores, atrophied muscles, etc) whereas leading an active lifestyle generally prevents those problems.
While your rhetoric is impeccable, the reality is that it is difficult to burn enough calories through exercise. (The may have been your point, but it is hard to tell.) If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less than you burn (which is the point the GP was trying to make in an abbreviated fashion.) I have been training in tae-kwon-do for about 30 years now, and the caloric burn for my weight is about 800/hour, which is pretty high up on this list. In spite of this, I found it far more effective for weight loss to simply reduce snacks and meals,, swap carbs for protein and fat, and reduce sugar than to try to add more workouts. You get a lot more weight loss for your time and willpower. I mean think about it - a couple of doughnuts, vs an hour's workout plus travel time? If you have a life outside of the gym, it's a no brainer.
Would the family have to emigrate?
Now consider that IVF fertility technology increases the number of multiple births. Would this become illegal under the new rules?
Only if you are raising the twins for meat...