In my humble opinion, the gown-up way to think about a programming problem is to consider how it will perform (scalability, bottlenecks in network/memory/storage/etc), how it will be maintained (who will have to read and understand it, including a realistic understanding that it will look completely unfamiliar to you yourself in a year), where it will have to run (portability), how much time you have to write it, how the discoveries you make along the way will affect your collaborators, whether there will be opportunities to optimize later (and how much effort is appropriate to be prepare the ground for those efforts), etc.
There are trade-offs in balancing all these issues; there's a difference between a quick one-off to assess a problem, versus a tool that may eventually see production use but only accessed by sys-admins, versus an application, versus a proof-of-concept, versus an exploration of constraints on a solution, etc.
Pick the combination of trade-offs that will let you finish in the amount of time that you have, divided by pi, because it's going to take longer than you thought. There will be emails, meetings, surprises, changes of goals, etc.
When you start coding, try to get as quickly as possible to enough of a framework that you can explore the parts of the problem that are most challenging. In other words, answer the biggest questions first.
Try to maintain the attitude that you are a well-intentioned but fallible human who is attempting to solve the problem with the mix of trade-offs selected above, who expects to make some mistakes and is willing to make adjustments to respond to them. Expect that others will also see the problem differently, as they learn along with you about the problems you uncover.
I don't think there is a natural mechanism to force birth control on humans. I am under the impression that these people want some other entity culling billions of people somehow. Perhaps a world government or something?
No, I think s/he meant that we can limit population ourselves or have a crash forced on us. There doesn't seem to be any plausible way that humans will take on limiting population themselves. Ergo, etc. Presumably, you reject the premise. So, population keeps growing until...?
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
There are legitimate criticisms about the climate models, the interpretations of measurements, and even the very way in which certain mathematical principles are applied. Like it or not, there is a real dispute, and the side that has the support of the Taxman and the liberal Hollywood elite should really be suspect.
Widespread consensus offers a qualitative measure of how the issue is playing out amongst those who are well-informed. The "legitimate criticisms" about the models have somehow not persuaded them that the issue is still being pulled equally in opposite directions. The "interpretation of measurements" question is apparently not enough of a conundrum to confound the conclusion that the steady absoption of energy by the climate system can be roughly quantified, and that this is consistent with a range of observations, from melting ice to changing ocean chemistry. We're to understand that there is still some room for discussion on the matter of climate sensitivity, but it likely falls within a range that suggests the problem is extremely urgent and deadly serious.
Such a "consensus" doesn't settle the question, but it tells us that the scientific community has run out of alternative hypotheses that fit the data, or which cast significant doubt on which conclusions to draw regarding causes. It doesn't mean you are not allowed to pose a new hypothesis that fits the data.
Your analogy is wrong. You believe that somehow "Global" warming only impacts America? You must similarly believe that the US is the only ones that can, and need to, somehow solve the problem. I have no idea how you ignore China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, and quite frankly the majority of what we call "Developing Nations" (most of the planet)
So, your attitude is that the US should just let someone else solve the problem, and then buy the next generation of reactors, solar panels, etc, from them? Maybe we should do that with other industries, as well? After all, they take a lot of effort. Let someone else design new cell phones and computer chips. Let someone else develop new materials for insulation, energy distribution, and industrial processes. Let someone else conduct research on the terrestrial ecosystem.
... who have been increasing pollutants and industrialization over the same time the West has done the opposite.
The West has not reduced pollution, we have simply reduced the rate at which we are adding pollution.
1. Responding as though I meant literally causing the planet earth to cease to exist is hyperbole. A mass extinction taking major limbs of the "tree of life" is figuratively destroying the planet. Grow up. And, what do you mean by "mitigation"? You mean shoring up levees and moving out of low-lying areas? That doesn't help with the problem of collapsing economies when agricultural output starts dropping. As I undedrstand it, even the Paris scenarios for reduced emissions have a hidden assumption that we'll find a way to suck existing carbon out of the atmosphere. Or is that what you meant by mitigation -- dumping iron in the oceans, or sulphur in the atmosphere, because it's "cheaper" than making an effort to deal with the source of the problem? 2. There's "cheap" in money, and cheap in sustainability. Perhaps solar electrolysis would be the latter, for now. Seems worth it to foster some incentives to drive it towards the former, by creating a market. 3. The point of talking about hydrogen is that hydrocarbons are out. Hydrogen has some things going for it. Comparing energy density alone misses some important criteria. That's what I was getting at. If you want fission everywhere, then that would at least be another possible source of the energy for electrolysis. 4. Moving from fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels is a step forward, whether it's wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever. I agree that a cowardly retreat to fossil fuels is like saying "someone else please take over the markets of the future."
But propane requires extraction, refining, and transport, which adds to the cost. Plus, fossil fuels destroy your planet, which some consider a negative. It's at least an external cost, which a fair market would add to the price at the pump.
Meanwhile, if you generate the hydrogen electrolytically via solar or wind power, and release the oxygen byproducts into the atmosphere, the cost (after capital expenses) is low, there is zero net waste in consumption, and you might cut the transport distance considerably, or completely.
Cool, but I shouldn't have to plug in a variety of different options to see how they affect the price. What if I'm flexible on launch-date, and want to optimize for cost? What's the largest payload I can put on a short rocket in a given orbit?
after all, you'll be considered a sexist just for having (R) by your name, no matter your history, intentions, or statements.
Having an (R) next to your name implies something about your history, intentions, and statements, regarding sexism, climate, same-sex marriage, policing, immigration, taxation, etc. One could conceivablhy work around it by demonstrating repeatedly that one actually had attitudes about these things that weren't consistent with R policies, but it takes more than a binder full of women to achieve that. A binder fuill of women says that you made an effort to avoid merely the appearance of sexism, because you had no history that would speak for itself, and were willing to have an R next to your name, implying that you're fine with being assoicated with a group that typically has nothing other than empty gestures like binders full of women to offer, rather than an actual history. Statements like "nobody has more respect for women than I do" sound hollow until you demonstrate that it's true.
Maybe if you read the article, seeing as how it does not claim "all of them"
"Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines."
And since when was the BBC World News a clickbait site? Seriously you make fucking ridiculous claims for someone who obviously never even bothered to learn anything more then they think they know.
You're latching onto the word "contributed" as though it was obviously intended to mean that human activity wasn't the dominant factor. Yet the obvious premise is that human activity is the dominant factor. One would need some dramatic new information to shift the story away from humans. Looks like it's you making the fucking ridiculous claims.
What about the fact that species die out all the time? Like before we were here? Actually, some of them dying out are the reason we are here now! It happens. It will happen to us. It will suck when it is our turn, but it will still happen.
There have been long periods in evolutionary history where individual species are occassionally dying out, new ones are occasionally emerging, and the ecosystem is relatively stable.
What's being suggested here is something else. The idea is that we're looking at a mass extinction event, marked by a sudden, unstable transition in the ecosystem, where major chunks of the tree of life are wiped out. There's no reason to assume that we're on the part of the tree that survives, but if some humans do come thorugh this, they will find themselves in a world where much of what we think of as "nature" is gone -- the natural world that has sustained us, and, beyond that, which has been the essense of life, the thing in mind when we speak of "life".
Honestly, this is a good example of why we shouldn't panic about rising population levels- our farming efficiency growth exceeds our population growth.
Yeast populations face two problems as they grow: (a) running out of sugar, (b) getting poisoned by the alcohol they generate.
It was meant to sound humorous. I take it back. Though I do love California.
The point was that the market (I didn't say it was free) has somehow rated floorspace in California more highly. So, complaining about the relative cost of floorspace must miss something (not saying what) that the market has priced in.
look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California.
Sure, but you have to live in Texas. Here's another way to say it: it's worth having a house half the size to be able to live in California.
Yep sandboxed apps never break out of their sandboxes, and anything in a VM always stays inside that VM and always plays by the totally bug free rules.
So you think breaking out of a small simulation into a bigger simulation would satisfy? It would certainly be interesting, but, if there are billionaires in the bigger sim, I guess they'd soon be saying, "No... I meant break out completely." And then you'd be back to facing the original question: does it make sense to imagine a simulated entity having existence outside the simulation?
In The Matrix, the simulation was something experienced by entities outside the simulation. That's a factor on which the metaphisics of "breaking out" depends. Thus, the question is whether, if this is a simulation, are we participating from outside, or entirely simulated?
Do video-game characters have life outside the game? You could say so, in that they have life in our minds. No, it's more than that; they have animate energy in the universe. But if one of them wanted to join our world as a regular individual human, there'd be a problem. You'd want to explain to them, "here's your relationship to what we think of as The World Outside Your World." Similarly, we'd need someone in TWOOW to (start to) explain the corresponding relationship to us.
The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.
Until you hit the ground, all the evidence shows that you can fly.
The last El Nino of similar strength was 1999, from memory, which kicked off the pause. El Nino is followed by la Nina, which cools the globe, so next year we won't have these tedious articles about short term spikes in weather masquerading as climate.
"Kicked off the pause"? Seriously? What you must mean is that, if you cherry-pick the global surface temperature data to start in 1997/1998, when the oceans turned over to the atmosphere a gigantic quantity of the heat they had been storing, it almost looks like there has been some sort of "pause" in rising temperatures, since then. (As long as you also don't count the new jump in surface temperatures that have happened since the oceans again began to turn over some of the additional heat they've accumulated.)
Modern La Nina years are years times when it's almost plausible to say that there's a pause in the human-caused rise in surface temperatures. But the hypothesis that goes with that assertion is just bankrupt: "I guess all those computer models, and ocean chemistry, and satellite reflectance, etc, musta just been off or something, because, look, they predicted a steady increase." The much more plausible and well-supported hypothesis is that fluctuations in the steady rise of average global surface temperatures are due to the buffering of heat in the oceans.
It's not about visiting us, it's about producing detectable signals. To date, none of the presumed-bazillions of extraterrestrial civilizations have (demonstrably) done this. We're speculating on which factors in the Drake Equation might explain this. These folks are arguing that n_e includes no factor for duration, but that maybe n_e is only n_e for a short time, and that therefore f_l and/or f_i are small because evolution takes time. Judging from the evidence, I'd say another plausible explanation is that the variable L is small, because... well, Malthus was right. I guess that roughly falls under "blew themselves up", but takes it out of the realm of foolishness by suggesting that life is inherently self-limiting if the same features that are required to survive long enough to evolve are also lethal to those that manage to prevail in that struggle.
Then, again, maybe the rules for what constitutes intelligent life are a lot more open than we imagine, and the place is teeming with life we don't know how to detect. Does it always have to evolve? Does it always require "habitable" planets? (Does it always have to produce EM radiation? Do we just need more-sensitive instruments or more time?) Open questions.
What I find funny about this discussion is that our whole mathematical proof that extra-terrestrial life exists basically boils down to: "There's lots of places to look." Which is fine until we get to Fermi's Paradox, which reels that back in.
Fermi puts bounds on variables in Drake's equation. If L were infinite, then any such civilizations that had evolved long enough ago that their signals could have reached us by now would be in principle detectable. The fact that we haven't detected them would imply an upper limit on how many there might be. On the other hand, if all such civilizations die rapidly from a Malthusian collapse (as ours appears to be doing), then there could have been many many more such civilizations, without our necessarily being able to detect them.
Or, put another way, if you think detectable life could evolve easily, then Fermi implies L is small.
If free will is not an illusion, then where does it come from? Why do humans have it, but not chimps? Why do chimps have it, but not rabbits?
It remains an open philosphical question whether humans have free will -- whether "free will" is even a meaningful term.
If every physical mechanism in the universe is probabilistic and fuzzy, where does free will come from?
Oddly enough, the existence of quantum mechanics seems to make free will more likely, rather than less. In a fully Newtonian universe, you could argue that by knowing the position and vector of every atom you might predict the future, which sounds a lot like fate, where all future action is based on the past. However, the apparent fuzziness of our reality seems to leave the door open to much more complex probabilistic, entangled, and parallel behaviors.
How so? Being unpredictable doesn't make you "free".
Here's the problem: if you have a "will", then your actions follow from a principled mechanism, interacting with The World. Where's the freedom in that? If your will is not a principled mechanism, but something random, then how is it a will?
You're talking about the experience of "choosing" something in a given moment, as opposed to something else? Not much of a proof, is it? In any of those choices, have you ever chosen something other than the thing you chose? You could have chosen something else... if what?
Dennett is right: the fear about "free will" is that you would somehow be trapped if free will didn't exist. I think it goes beyond that: predictability is vulnerability, and we fear that if our choices are predictable then we could be anticipated by enemies. But, the fact that you are afraid of this is not a good argument against it (as a different philosopher said). And, anyhow, something might be predictable in principle without being predictable in practice.
In isolation, yes. On a big wet planet with lots of sources, sinks, and feedback mechanisms...it's not clear how much. Because real science with real predictive power is hard, but soundbytes and slogans are easy.
We know the sources outweigh the sinks. We know the system is accumulating energy, and we know roughly how much. The scientific consensus is driven by a convergenece of real science: changes in ocean chemistry, satellite radiance measurements, CO2 measures, thermometers, bouys, and, of course, simulations. We'd be fools not to devote a ton of effort to simulations. You want to know exactly how the weather in Des Moines will look in the afternoon 10 years from Tuesday? That's an interesting question, but not a good critique of the main conclusion. Seems like the soundbytes comes from your side. "AGW is a religion." Yeah? How so? "I'm more of a scientist thabn he is?" Really? 'Cause she sure *seems* like an bloviating gadfly.
Slashdot Mirror
In my humble opinion, the gown-up way to think about a programming problem is to consider how it will perform (scalability, bottlenecks in network/memory/storage/etc), how it will be maintained (who will have to read and understand it, including a realistic understanding that it will look completely unfamiliar to you yourself in a year), where it will have to run (portability), how much time you have to write it, how the discoveries you make along the way will affect your collaborators, whether there will be opportunities to optimize later (and how much effort is appropriate to be prepare the ground for those efforts), etc.
There are trade-offs in balancing all these issues; there's a difference between a quick one-off to assess a problem, versus a tool that may eventually see production use but only accessed by sys-admins, versus an application, versus a proof-of-concept, versus an exploration of constraints on a solution, etc.
Pick the combination of trade-offs that will let you finish in the amount of time that you have, divided by pi, because it's going to take longer than you thought. There will be emails, meetings, surprises, changes of goals, etc.
When you start coding, try to get as quickly as possible to enough of a framework that you can explore the parts of the problem that are most challenging. In other words, answer the biggest questions first.
Try to maintain the attitude that you are a well-intentioned but fallible human who is attempting to solve the problem with the mix of trade-offs selected above, who expects to make some mistakes and is willing to make adjustments to respond to them. Expect that others will also see the problem differently, as they learn along with you about the problems you uncover.
It's a lot easier when you mention that global ice volume is crashing.
It'd be a shame if sumppn was to happen to ya termastat deh, while you was streaming sumppn.
Oh, you meant bandwidth?
I don't think there is a natural mechanism to force birth control on humans. I am under the impression that these people want some other entity culling billions of people somehow. Perhaps a world government or something?
No, I think s/he meant that we can limit population ourselves or have a crash forced on us. There doesn't seem to be any plausible way that humans will take on limiting population themselves. Ergo, etc. Presumably, you reject the premise. So, population keeps growing until ...?
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
There are legitimate criticisms about the climate models, the interpretations of measurements, and even the very way in which certain mathematical principles are applied. Like it or not, there is a real dispute, and the side that has the support of the Taxman and the liberal Hollywood elite should really be suspect.
Widespread consensus offers a qualitative measure of how the issue is playing out amongst those who are well-informed. The "legitimate criticisms" about the models have somehow not persuaded them that the issue is still being pulled equally in opposite directions. The "interpretation of measurements" question is apparently not enough of a conundrum to confound the conclusion that the steady absoption of energy by the climate system can be roughly quantified, and that this is consistent with a range of observations, from melting ice to changing ocean chemistry. We're to understand that there is still some room for discussion on the matter of climate sensitivity, but it likely falls within a range that suggests the problem is extremely urgent and deadly serious.
Such a "consensus" doesn't settle the question, but it tells us that the scientific community has run out of alternative hypotheses that fit the data, or which cast significant doubt on which conclusions to draw regarding causes. It doesn't mean you are not allowed to pose a new hypothesis that fits the data.
Your analogy is wrong. You believe that somehow "Global" warming only impacts America? You must similarly believe that the US is the only ones that can, and need to, somehow solve the problem. I have no idea how you ignore China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, and quite frankly the majority of what we call "Developing Nations" (most of the planet)
So, your attitude is that the US should just let someone else solve the problem, and then buy the next generation of reactors, solar panels, etc, from them? Maybe we should do that with other industries, as well? After all, they take a lot of effort. Let someone else design new cell phones and computer chips. Let someone else develop new materials for insulation, energy distribution, and industrial processes. Let someone else conduct research on the terrestrial ecosystem.
... who have been increasing pollutants and industrialization over the same time the West has done the opposite.
The West has not reduced pollution, we have simply reduced the rate at which we are adding pollution.
1. Responding as though I meant literally causing the planet earth to cease to exist is hyperbole. A mass extinction taking major limbs of the "tree of life" is figuratively destroying the planet. Grow up. And, what do you mean by "mitigation"? You mean shoring up levees and moving out of low-lying areas? That doesn't help with the problem of collapsing economies when agricultural output starts dropping. As I undedrstand it, even the Paris scenarios for reduced emissions have a hidden assumption that we'll find a way to suck existing carbon out of the atmosphere. Or is that what you meant by mitigation -- dumping iron in the oceans, or sulphur in the atmosphere, because it's "cheaper" than making an effort to deal with the source of the problem?
2. There's "cheap" in money, and cheap in sustainability. Perhaps solar electrolysis would be the latter, for now. Seems worth it to foster some incentives to drive it towards the former, by creating a market.
3. The point of talking about hydrogen is that hydrocarbons are out. Hydrogen has some things going for it. Comparing energy density alone misses some important criteria. That's what I was getting at. If you want fission everywhere, then that would at least be another possible source of the energy for electrolysis.
4. Moving from fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels is a step forward, whether it's wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever. I agree that a cowardly retreat to fossil fuels is like saying "someone else please take over the markets of the future."
But propane requires extraction, refining, and transport, which adds to the cost. Plus, fossil fuels destroy your planet, which some consider a negative. It's at least an external cost, which a fair market would add to the price at the pump.
Meanwhile, if you generate the hydrogen electrolytically via solar or wind power, and release the oxygen byproducts into the atmosphere, the cost (after capital expenses) is low, there is zero net waste in consumption, and you might cut the transport distance considerably, or completely.
Cool, but I shouldn't have to plug in a variety of different options to see how they affect the price. What if I'm flexible on launch-date, and want to optimize for cost? What's the largest payload I can put on a short rocket in a given orbit?
after all, you'll be considered a sexist just for having (R) by your name, no matter your history, intentions, or statements.
Having an (R) next to your name implies something about your history, intentions, and statements, regarding sexism, climate, same-sex marriage, policing, immigration, taxation, etc. One could conceivablhy work around it by demonstrating repeatedly that one actually had attitudes about these things that weren't consistent with R policies, but it takes more than a binder full of women to achieve that. A binder fuill of women says that you made an effort to avoid merely the appearance of sexism, because you had no history that would speak for itself, and were willing to have an R next to your name, implying that you're fine with being assoicated with a group that typically has nothing other than empty gestures like binders full of women to offer, rather than an actual history. Statements like "nobody has more respect for women than I do" sound hollow until you demonstrate that it's true.
Maybe if you read the article, seeing as how it does not claim "all of them"
"Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines."
And since when was the BBC World News a clickbait site? Seriously you make fucking ridiculous claims for someone who obviously never even bothered to learn anything more then they think they know.
You're latching onto the word "contributed" as though it was obviously intended to mean that human activity wasn't the dominant factor. Yet the obvious premise is that human activity is the dominant factor. One would need some dramatic new information to shift the story away from humans. Looks like it's you making the fucking ridiculous claims.
What about the fact that species die out all the time? Like before we were here? Actually, some of them dying out are the reason we are here now! It happens. It will happen to us. It will suck when it is our turn, but it will still happen.
There have been long periods in evolutionary history where individual species are occassionally dying out, new ones are occasionally emerging, and the ecosystem is relatively stable.
What's being suggested here is something else. The idea is that we're looking at a mass extinction event, marked by a sudden, unstable transition in the ecosystem, where major chunks of the tree of life are wiped out. There's no reason to assume that we're on the part of the tree that survives, but if some humans do come thorugh this, they will find themselves in a world where much of what we think of as "nature" is gone -- the natural world that has sustained us, and, beyond that, which has been the essense of life, the thing in mind when we speak of "life".
Honestly, this is a good example of why we shouldn't panic about rising population levels- our farming efficiency growth exceeds our population growth.
Yeast populations face two problems as they grow: (a) running out of sugar, (b) getting poisoned by the alcohol they generate.
It was meant to sound humorous. I take it back. Though I do love California.
The point was that the market (I didn't say it was free) has somehow rated floorspace in California more highly. So, complaining about the relative cost of floorspace must miss something (not saying what) that the market has priced in.
look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California.
Sure, but you have to live in Texas. Here's another way to say it: it's worth having a house half the size to be able to live in California.
Yep sandboxed apps never break out of their sandboxes, and anything in a VM always stays inside that VM and always plays by the totally bug free rules.
So you think breaking out of a small simulation into a bigger simulation would satisfy? It would certainly be interesting, but, if there are billionaires in the bigger sim, I guess they'd soon be saying, "No ... I meant break out completely." And then you'd be back to facing the original question: does it make sense to imagine a simulated entity having existence outside the simulation?
In The Matrix, the simulation was something experienced by entities outside the simulation. That's a factor on which the metaphisics of "breaking out" depends. Thus, the question is whether, if this is a simulation, are we participating from outside, or entirely simulated?
Do video-game characters have life outside the game? You could say so, in that they have life in our minds. No, it's more than that; they have animate energy in the universe. But if one of them wanted to join our world as a regular individual human, there'd be a problem. You'd want to explain to them, "here's your relationship to what we think of as The World Outside Your World." Similarly, we'd need someone in TWOOW to (start to) explain the corresponding relationship to us.
Maybe it's simulations all the way up?
[blah blah blah ...] Moxie Marlinspike
The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.
Until you hit the ground, all the evidence shows that you can fly.
The last El Nino of similar strength was 1999, from memory, which kicked off the pause. El Nino is followed by la Nina, which cools the globe, so next year we won't have these tedious articles about short term spikes in weather masquerading as climate.
"Kicked off the pause"? Seriously? What you must mean is that, if you cherry-pick the global surface temperature data to start in 1997/1998, when the oceans turned over to the atmosphere a gigantic quantity of the heat they had been storing, it almost looks like there has been some sort of "pause" in rising temperatures, since then. (As long as you also don't count the new jump in surface temperatures that have happened since the oceans again began to turn over some of the additional heat they've accumulated.)
Modern La Nina years are years times when it's almost plausible to say that there's a pause in the human-caused rise in surface temperatures. But the hypothesis that goes with that assertion is just bankrupt: "I guess all those computer models, and ocean chemistry, and satellite reflectance, etc, musta just been off or something, because, look, they predicted a steady increase." The much more plausible and well-supported hypothesis is that fluctuations in the steady rise of average global surface temperatures are due to the buffering of heat in the oceans.
So, you support making contraception widely available.
It's not about visiting us, it's about producing detectable signals. To date, none of the presumed-bazillions of extraterrestrial civilizations have (demonstrably) done this. We're speculating on which factors in the Drake Equation might explain this. These folks are arguing that n_e includes no factor for duration, but that maybe n_e is only n_e for a short time, and that therefore f_l and/or f_i are small because evolution takes time. Judging from the evidence, I'd say another plausible explanation is that the variable L is small, because ... well, Malthus was right. I guess that roughly falls under "blew themselves up", but takes it out of the realm of foolishness by suggesting that life is inherently self-limiting if the same features that are required to survive long enough to evolve are also lethal to those that manage to prevail in that struggle.
Then, again, maybe the rules for what constitutes intelligent life are a lot more open than we imagine, and the place is teeming with life we don't know how to detect. Does it always have to evolve? Does it always require "habitable" planets? (Does it always have to produce EM radiation? Do we just need more-sensitive instruments or more time?) Open questions.
What I find funny about this discussion is that our whole mathematical proof that extra-terrestrial life exists basically boils down to: "There's lots of places to look." Which is fine until we get to Fermi's Paradox, which reels that back in.
Fermi puts bounds on variables in Drake's equation. If L were infinite, then any such civilizations that had evolved long enough ago that their signals could have reached us by now would be in principle detectable. The fact that we haven't detected them would imply an upper limit on how many there might be. On the other hand, if all such civilizations die rapidly from a Malthusian collapse (as ours appears to be doing), then there could have been many many more such civilizations, without our necessarily being able to detect them.
Or, put another way, if you think detectable life could evolve easily, then Fermi implies L is small.
If free will is not an illusion, then where does it come from? Why do humans have it, but not chimps? Why do chimps have it, but not rabbits?
It remains an open philosphical question whether humans have free will -- whether "free will" is even a meaningful term.
If every physical mechanism in the universe is probabilistic and fuzzy, where does free will come from?
Oddly enough, the existence of quantum mechanics seems to make free will more likely, rather than less. In a fully Newtonian universe, you could argue that by knowing the position and vector of every atom you might predict the future, which sounds a lot like fate, where all future action is based on the past. However, the apparent fuzziness of our reality seems to leave the door open to much more complex probabilistic, entangled, and parallel behaviors.
How so? Being unpredictable doesn't make you "free".
Here's the problem: if you have a "will", then your actions follow from a principled mechanism, interacting with The World. Where's the freedom in that? If your will is not a principled mechanism, but something random, then how is it a will?
You're talking about the experience of "choosing" something in a given moment, as opposed to something else? Not much of a proof, is it? In any of those choices, have you ever chosen something other than the thing you chose? You could have chosen something else ... if what?
Dennett is right: the fear about "free will" is that you would somehow be trapped if free will didn't exist. I think it goes beyond that: predictability is vulnerability, and we fear that if our choices are predictable then we could be anticipated by enemies. But, the fact that you are afraid of this is not a good argument against it (as a different philosopher said). And, anyhow, something might be predictable in principle without being predictable in practice.
Free will and determinism are not opposites.
In isolation, yes. On a big wet planet with lots of sources, sinks, and feedback mechanisms...it's not clear how much. Because real science with real predictive power is hard, but soundbytes and slogans are easy.
We know the sources outweigh the sinks. We know the system is accumulating energy, and we know roughly how much. The scientific consensus is driven by a convergenece of real science: changes in ocean chemistry, satellite radiance measurements, CO2 measures, thermometers, bouys, and, of course, simulations. We'd be fools not to devote a ton of effort to simulations. You want to know exactly how the weather in Des Moines will look in the afternoon 10 years from Tuesday? That's an interesting question, but not a good critique of the main conclusion. Seems like the soundbytes comes from your side. "AGW is a religion." Yeah? How so? "I'm more of a scientist thabn he is?" Really? 'Cause she sure *seems* like an bloviating gadfly.