I'm not sure I like Q2. Cold fusion that would generate power seems much less likely than "there's interesting chemistry going on in the setups that is a real phenomenon and isn't well understood." As written it lumps a variety of distinct questions together in a way that may not be helpful. Note also that Rossi's apparatus is in general pretty different from what most versions of cold fusion setups have done, so I'm confused as to how anyone can conclude much from this paper strongly in the negative direction.

In a stark change from the usual, Lubos Motl is right about something.

Motl is rude, has some strong political beliefs, and personalizes absolutely everything. But when it comes to physics, he generally knows what he's talking about.

Average temperature is relevant in this context, as average temp goes up we should expect the maximum to go up as well.

The problem is more serious than that, in that not only is our universe computationally expensive, it is set up in a way such that it would (apparently) have a lot of trouble doing universe simulations. You cannot simulate n+1 arbitrary bits with just n qubits. This means that a simulation computer needs to be at least as effectively large as what it is simulating. You can assume that some aspects are more coarse grained (so you don't do a perfect simulation of most of Earth, just say the few kilometers near the surface that humans and other life are likely to be), but this is still a lot of stuff.

Ah ok. Yes, you're right, fallout should be covered for purposes of the original comment then.

Yes, I'm not sure what your point is. Can you expand?

Yeah, I'm a grad student now and we get a note about once a year from the school telling people not to do this.

A more popular book may definitely be in order. Also, the organization of "Global Catastrophic Risks" struck me as a little tonedeaf: There's a chapter in it (by Eliezer I think?) talking about how people shut down when talking about very large scale events like full on extinction. But the book starts off talking about how we expect the entire universe to fall apart in trillions of years, so it automatically starts by getting people to have all the bad reactions to existential risk up to 11. I'm optimistic that this book won't make that mistake.

Possible, but given that all your comments are on only a small number of threads and arguing for the same basic points, it is also plausible that someone just went through those threads an downvoted most of your comments while upvoting others. I for example got about +20 karma from what as far as I can tell is primarily upvotes on my replies to you.

There's a valid point to this quote, about the problem of using statistics and other data to support a bottom line. But that's not to say that "stats" themselves are stupid, and I suspect that's why this is being downvoted.