You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DaFranker comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 03:39PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (341)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DaFranker 09 December 2014 04:49:08PM 0 points [-]

[...] how do we get civilizations with a sufficiently long attention span?

I heard Ritalin has a solution. Couldn't pay attention long enough to verify. ba-dum tish

On a serious note, isn't the whole killing-the-Earth-for-our-children thing a rather interesting scenario? I've never seen it mentioned in my game theory-related reading, and I find that to be somewhat sad. I'm pretty sure a proper modeling of the game scenario would cover both climate change and eaten-by-red-giant.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 09 December 2014 05:10:01PM 0 points [-]

I don't see the connection to killing the earth for our children. Moving the earth outwards is an effort to save the earth for our far future selves and our children.

Comment author: gjm 09 December 2014 07:11:39PM 3 points [-]

I think "for our children" means "as far as our children are concerned" and failing to move the earth's orbit so it doesn't get eaten by the sun (despite being able to do it) would qualify as "killing the earth for our children". (The more usual referents being things like resource depletion and pollution with potentially disastrous long-term effects.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 09 December 2014 07:17:26PM 0 points [-]

Thanks. That makes sense.