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gwern comments on [Link] A superintelligent solution to the Fermi paradox - Less Wrong
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Your link isn't a stupid person, but to some extent, the lack of interest in hypercomputation says what the field thinks of it. Compare it to quantum computation, where people were avidly researching it and coming up with algorithms decades before even toy quantum computers showed up in cutting-edge labs.
Wei Dai's link is pretty controversial.
But only after it was discovered that the theory of quantum mechanics implied it was theoretically possible.
My understanding of the history is that everyone believed the extended Church-Turing thesis until someone noticed that the (already established) theory of quantum mechanics contradicted it.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone invoke the extended Church-Turing thesis by either name or substance before quantum computing came around.
People were talking about P-time before quantum computing and implicitly assuming that it applied to any computer they could build.
I don't see how one would apply "P-time" to "any computer they could build".
I meant "apply" in the sense that one applies a mathematical model to a phenomenon. Specifically, it was implicitly assumed the the notion of polynomial time captured what was actually possible to compute in polynomial time.
Not sure, but it seems that whenever I get into discussions with you it's usually about some potentially-important edge case or something. Strange.
But anyway, yeah. I just want to flag hypercomputation as a speculative thing that it might be worth taking an interest in, much like mirror matter. One or two of my default models are probably very similar to yours when it comes down to betting odds.