Comment author:thomblake
23 April 2009 05:16:58PM
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1 point
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Do you deny your ability to tell the difference?
Between crackpots and valid academic papers, out of context? Yes, I do deny that. Take Louis Savain (please!). I actually have a lot of the same intuitions about the nature of spacetime, and the problems involving even talking about time travel outside of a fictional context. Savain is clearly a crackpot - it's practically painted all over his site. But if I had written a paper discussing some of these intuitions, and nobody noticed that it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal nor that I'm not a physicist, then I don't think there would be a clear way to notice that I was wrong.
Of course, a physicist could happily come along and say, "No, our theory is experimentally verified, and yours doesn't even make sense. Here are references to the relevant evidence, and some engineering applications you might not have been aware of".
ETA: I admit, I had "speak of the devil" in mind when I posted this. But it had to be done!
[Someone wrote to tell me that my name was used on this forum]
Let's see now. I use irrefutable logic to show that Stephen Hawking is full of shit when he claims that time travel is a valid scientific pursuit and that it is not forbidden by General Relativity. I take the position that Sir Karl Popper was correct when he compared Einstein's spacetime to "Parmenides' block universe in which nothing happens." If nothing can move in spacetime, how can anybody claim that GR does not forbid time travel?
Now who is the crackpot, I or Hawking?
Blake, you don't have a monopoly on ad hominems, you know. I, too, am free to insult people like you as I see fit. And I admit that I rather enjoy it. You are a gutless, politically correct sycophant, in my opinion. Like most of the commenters on this forum, you are here to kiss Yudkowsky's ass. Eliezer, on his part, writes mostly to kiss the asses of those whom he considers his superiors in the scientific community. You're all a bunch of ass kissers. How about that?
You all talk about rationality as if somehow you were born with an exclusive monopoly on logic and wisdom but it remains that you are all members of the human race, with all the biases and dishonesty and cowardice that it entails. It takes guts and gigantic huevos to be rational in this world. Ass kissers don't have those things. I'd rather be a crackpot in your eyes than an ass kisser. See you around.
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Between crackpots and valid academic papers, out of context? Yes, I do deny that. Take Louis Savain (please!). I actually have a lot of the same intuitions about the nature of spacetime, and the problems involving even talking about time travel outside of a fictional context. Savain is clearly a crackpot - it's practically painted all over his site. But if I had written a paper discussing some of these intuitions, and nobody noticed that it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal nor that I'm not a physicist, then I don't think there would be a clear way to notice that I was wrong.
Of course, a physicist could happily come along and say, "No, our theory is experimentally verified, and yours doesn't even make sense. Here are references to the relevant evidence, and some engineering applications you might not have been aware of".
ETA: I admit, I had "speak of the devil" in mind when I posted this. But it had to be done!
[Someone wrote to tell me that my name was used on this forum]
Let's see now. I use irrefutable logic to show that Stephen Hawking is full of shit when he claims that time travel is a valid scientific pursuit and that it is not forbidden by General Relativity. I take the position that Sir Karl Popper was correct when he compared Einstein's spacetime to "Parmenides' block universe in which nothing happens." If nothing can move in spacetime, how can anybody claim that GR does not forbid time travel?
Now who is the crackpot, I or Hawking?
Blake, you don't have a monopoly on ad hominems, you know. I, too, am free to insult people like you as I see fit. And I admit that I rather enjoy it. You are a gutless, politically correct sycophant, in my opinion. Like most of the commenters on this forum, you are here to kiss Yudkowsky's ass. Eliezer, on his part, writes mostly to kiss the asses of those whom he considers his superiors in the scientific community. You're all a bunch of ass kissers. How about that?
You all talk about rationality as if somehow you were born with an exclusive monopoly on logic and wisdom but it remains that you are all members of the human race, with all the biases and dishonesty and cowardice that it entails. It takes guts and gigantic huevos to be rational in this world. Ass kissers don't have those things. I'd rather be a crackpot in your eyes than an ass kisser. See you around.