= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Torgamous comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (329)
Maybe some kind of hindsight bias is at work, but I think I would have found Statement 2' a lot less crazy than Statement 2: the latter requires there being several billion male prostitutes, which (assuming that less than 20% of all males will be prostitutes and about 50% of all people will be male) would require a world population of several tens of billions.
(One of the main reasons why I would've found Statement 1' very unlikely is the “exactly 670616629.2” part, but I'm sure that was not your point: I'm sure you would assign a much lower prior to “I (army1987) generated a random 32-bit number a few minutes ago and it was 735,416,352” than to “... and it was more than 1 billion”, but you won't be shocked to know only the former is true. So I'll pretend it said “between 600 and 700 million miles per hour” instead.) I think I would've found Statement 1 crazier than 1', too: the idea that one particular colour (within the convex hull of the set of all colours I've seen before) has quasi-magical powers but an ever-so-slightly bluer or greener one has no weird properties at all sounds pretty bizarre to me (and possibly unfalsifiable, if there exist infinitely many colours), in a way that the idea that there is a speed (several orders of magnitude larger than anybody ever experienced) such that weirder and weirder things happen the closest you get to it wouldn't.
Statement 2 is more plausible than you think. Given the stated sizes of the spheres, it's highly unlikely that they exist solely as prostitute storage units. I'd suggest that they're aerial habitats, and prostitutes are just one of their many exports to the surface. They also offer really awesome bungee rides.
Alternatively, they could be organism production facilities, and the prostitutes are produced on site upon being ordered. They also offer pet velociraptors and colorful ponies.
Good points, I hadn't thought about that.
I'd still wager that there will never be more than 1,999,999,999 male prostitutes (or facilities to produce male prostitutes on demand) on Earth in the next 60 years, though. :-)
If they're not exclusively prostitutes, this just requires 2 billion males that are willing to have sex for money. We already have billions of males that are willing to have sex for free, so all this actually requires is a societal shift in which sex-for-money is considered a respectable arrangement instead of an extremely low-status one.
Alternatively they can just be consider AI generic servants, whose duties include sexual deals.
Given the color and size of the spheres, I'm guessing they use solar power and stay aloft by being mostly full of vacuum. As such, statement 2 doesn't seem particularly crazy.
People consider all sorts of wacky things evil, regardless of, or even in direct opposition to, what the previous generation thought of as evil. As such statement 3 doesn't shock me at all. There are already some pretty solid arguments circulating about how locking people up for trivial offenses and giving them little or no opportunity to socialize except with career criminals is a bad idea.
Statement 1 is on it's face inconsistent with what I know about thermodynamics, but there are some pretty big gaps in our understanding of how gravity works, so the paint could just be a way to request a lift from some orbiting tractor-beam taxi service. A stretch, but not inconceivable.
Possibly I am just numb to absurdity.