RolfAndreassen comments on The Popularization Bias - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Wei_Dai 17 July 2009 03:43PM

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Comment author: RolfAndreassen 17 July 2009 05:59:07PM *  1 point [-]

By the time your civilisation is taking advantage of black holes, it's large enough that even a small temperature difference can scale to quite a bit of negentropy. Further, you don't have to be in orbit, you can build a Dyson shell around the hole at such a distance that the surface gravity is one g. (Or several shells, if people prefer different levels of gravity.) Then there's no orbital velocity to deal with. (And in any case, you could brake by tidal friction and extract some entropy that way.) Or to be shorter, why are you objecting to the practical details of a thought experiment? Nothing about the game theory relies on black holes or the particular exponent 2; it could just as well be mass^1.5, and the analysis would remain the same although the numbers would change a bit.