It might help, though - if you suddenly stop applying the magnetic fields, then it might freeze more abruptly than if you simply lower the temperature. That could reduce the extent of crystallization and thus damage.

1) Really?

Alexander Hamilton appears on how many distinct denominations of US Currency

It's the present tense that throws me. I would expect the question to be 'has appeared'. Whatever.

2) That's not what I meant. I mean, you can turn each individual person's prediction/probability pair into a gaussian curve. It is centered on their answer with width such that a 10 year window contains that much probability. You can then use that to get the probability this distribution - and thus, by proxy, the respondent - assigns to the actual year.

3) On such a small data set you can't get rid of luck, let alone differences in knowledge. I think that by picking out people who got the same number correct you do a pretty good job of de-confounding that. It cuts sideways across the bins in the 'mean % correct' vs 'mean % confidence' graph which showed flat performance across confidence, in a way that you can't do straightforwardly otherwise.

I don't quite follow what the objection is. Suppose Alice and Bob design a simulation. They design it so that once started it will run with no interference from either of them or anyone else until it is done. Then Alice enters, while Bob does not; it then begins.

To the extent that this sim has gods, Alice is one. But there is no one outside with control. Also, the civilization did not all hop into the sim.

That reminds me of a fantasy novel I began and abandoned - in it, there's a civilization that can do astonishing things and even though they have math beyond ours, they still have no idea how just about any of it works, because the rules are so much more complicated that they have a hard time pulling off balls rolling down ramps kinds of experiments (the ramp would remember balls rolling and, depending on the details of the ramp, make it happen slower or faster; and if you made a new ramp each time the pattern of your interaction with ramps would develop the same sort of reaction). One of them was kicked out to a place where magic was weaker, allowing her to figure it all out; she ended up stronger than any of them.

First, on the Hamilton question, it's not at all clear that the official answer is the correct one given the question. A very reasonable reading of the question would restrict the scope to items currently in circulation. Looking at the question, even knowing you meant 'ever', it feels like an unnatural way of asking. If you clarified, then I at least would have answered higher and with less confidence; and I suspect that almost everyone else would have as well.

Second, there are several questions which had a numeric range - like, say, the Dairy Queen question. Reducing to binary right-wrong seems needlessly lossy. If you convert the confidence of being within 10 years into an expected error on a Gaussian distribution, you can plot the actual deviations vs the expected deviations.

Third, I am trying to figure out if one can do something with the automatic probabilities-to-odds generation scheme discussed... somewhere here. I can't find it. Basically, you'd pair up people who were right on the same questions and see who would win, betting against each other based on their probabilities in such a way that they each expect to win the same amount. Only works between people who shared answers, though. Should be generalizable to people with similar levels of accuracy, and may be generalizable to people with different levels of accuracy.

That only applies if the simulation is implemented using actual quantum mechanics to give the appearance of quantum mechanics, AND our brains are implemented using this actual quantum mechanics.

Even in that case, if the simulation can be suspended and the brains measured with a noise floor well below thermal noise, then the copies can be good enough that no experiment from inside the simulation could ever detect the copy event occurring, and arbitrarily many copies can be made without further degradation.

Nothing said or began to imply that every member of the outside society entered the simulation.

If you enter a simulation, it is reasonable to suspect that you had some degree of say over what kind of simulation it is. Far from certain, of course.

I think redefining problems and approximation are both huge. I didn't mean a complete ranking, just fleshing out and giving more life to certain elements after the list is done. Pointing out how big a deal they are. These are important failures in the argument. In a way it comes across as a kind of reverse Gish Gallop - you have a bunch of really really strong arguments, and by putting them in a list the impression is weakened.