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I can certainly understand your dissatisfaction with medieval depictions of heaven. However, your description of fun theory reminds me of the Garden of Eden. i.e. in Genesis 1-2, God basically says:

"I've created the two of you, perfectly suited for one another physically and emotionally, although the differences will be a world to explore in itself. You're immortal and I've placed you in a beautiful garden, but now I'm going to tell you to go out and be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over all living things; meaning build, create, procreate, invent, explore, and enjoy what I've created, which by the way is really really big and awesome. I'll always be here beside you, and you'll learn to live in perfect communion with me, for I have made you in my own image to love the process of creation as I do. But if you ever decide that you don't want that, and that you want to go it alone, rejecting my presence and very existence, then there's this fruit you can take and eat. But don't do it, because if you do, you will surely die."

It seems that the point of disagreement is that your utopia doesn't have an apple. The basic argument of theodicy is that Eden with the apple is better than Eden sans apple. To the extent that free will is good, a utopia must have an escape option.

Or, to put it another way, obedience to the good is a virtue. Obedience to the good without the physical possibility evil is a farce.

It's easy to look around and say, "How could a good God create THIS." But the real question is, "How could a good God create a world in which there is a non-zero probability of THIS."

Sure this isn't a utopia for someone who wants to preserve "suboptimal" portions of his/her history because they hold some individual significance. But it seems a pretty darn good utopia for a pair of newly created beings. A sort of Garden of Eden scenario.

Sure this isn't a utopia for someone who wants to preserve "suboptimal" portions of his/her history because they hold some individual significance. But it seems a pretty darn good utopia for a pair of newly created beings. A sort of Garden of Eden scenario.

Generic,

The y appears on both sides of the equation, so these are differential equations. To avoid confusion, re-write as:

(1) (d/dt) F(t) = A*F(t) (2) (d/dt) F(t) = e^F(t)

Now plug e^At into (1) and -ln(C-t) into (2), and verify that they satisfy the condition.

Chris, I'm not sure that endogenous growth models are less precise than models of nuclear fission relative to the amount of noise in the available data.

By the way, when are Elie and Robin going to start talking in terms of precise probabilities of general AI scenarios? Or did I miss that? It just seems that they've mostly been adding detail to their predictions to make them seem more believable, which goes against everything I've read on this blog (No offense intended).

There is an extensive endogenous growth literature, albeit much of it quite recent.

I think you're mis-characterizing Christian morality. The Bible makes a clear distinction between merely obeying laws, and internalizing good behaviors. It even acknowledges that the former can be quite dangerous, i.e. from Romans 7:

"For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code."

Your calculation neglects the issue of timeliness. You assume that all the expected damage to firm profitability took place as a result of the movement of p(passage by Oct 31) from 1 to 0.85.

I don't think that this is the relevant event. The flow of credit is frozen now, and every day that this blockage remains in place causes further damage to the Economy and increases the odds of a Keynesian Death Spiral.

The bailout's defeat shifted p(Passage in the next few days) from something pretty high to 0, while decreasing p(passage by Oct 31) by a little. In my view, the markets were primarily reacting to the former adjustment.