All of paul ince's Comments + Replies

It was just legalised in Western Australia. The second Australian state to do so.

I have spent many years unintentionally dumbing myself down by not exercising my brain sufficiently. This place is somewhere I can come and flex a bit of mental muscle and get a bit of a dopamine reward for grasping a new concept or reading about how someone else worked their way through a problem and I am really glad it exists. The HPMOR series was especially useful for becoming more rational and since reading it my peers have noticed a change in the way I discuss difficult topics. I really enjoy recognising when the tools I've learnt here help me i... (read more)

The 'le' would need to be created in the language and used to mean a non-gender specific human then? Does this then follow; el jefe male boss, la jefa female boss, le jefe non gender specific boss? Would this flow onto all the gendered words in the language, la oficina (the office) becomes le oficine for example? I am guessing you would save the le for humans or you end up changing the entire language. le nine for non-gender specific child maybe?

2jefftk
You don't need to make inanimate words gender neutral, so no need for "le oficine". But yes, "le niñe".

Would words like jefe (boss) have to be changed to jefo to specify a male boss? Currently, el jefe is a male boss or a boss without their gender being specified....except that it kinda does specify because it is not la jefa, female boss.

2jefftk
I suspect it would be "le jefe" / "les jefes", with no changes to existing gendered forms.

There are not many anonymous free speech places left. I only know of one or two and they are constantly under DDOS attack (amongst others) to shut them down. All the major platforms don't allow contrarian opinions to gather momentum and the mainstream news just ignores what they don't like. This mass censorship ensures that 'those ideas' never have a chance to become popular.

3[anonymous]
I was going to bring up Red Ice TV as a counter-example but just found out they got banned from Youtube 2 weeks ago. Troubling indeed.

The experts I read don't say that. The experts I read say that none of these or similar predictions over the past 30 years have come true. Lots of times the exact opposite has occurred. 'My' experts show how the predictive models of other experts have not predicted anything of value and a lot of the time data has to be manipulated to even approach predicted outcomes. Just depends who you believe I guess. Just recently the IPCC itself poured a big bucket of cold water over the whole 'increasing devastation from weather' myth. The gu... (read more)

If we are talking a couple of degrees over century timelines I don't think anyone much is going to be worse off. Especially if, as I believe, CO2 concentration lags temperature. Greening the planet further is a good thing for most people in my opinion. And if you compare more warming to more cooling I think you will find warming is less dangerous generally.

2TAG
The experts say that +2C will lead to increases in drought, flooding and cyclones affecting 100s of millions. Are they wrong?

The prize is for refuting the findings of the university paper not a conspiracy theory. And the prize is not offered by the university but a third party. There are lesser prizes for refuting a finding but not being published. I will go ahead and assume you haven't read the paper yet.

2Matthew Barnett
I haven't read the paper, you're right. I didn't mean my own comment as a counterargument.

I read the report linked below and it confirmed my long held beliefs that there has been a major coverup of information surrounding the events of 9/11. Feel free to read and refute for yourself. BTW, if you can refute it and get published there is a $100k prize waiting!

http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

I don't deny global warming. I look forward to a few degrees of warning as do many thousands of people who lose family members every winter. I believe that CO2 concentration lags temperature change. I don't believe taxing carbon is the answer. I don't ... (read more)

1TAG
Are you saying that warming is better for somepeople (eg in colder countries) or overall?
1Matthew Barnett
Just so you know, whenever I hear that there's prize money for refuting a conspiracy theory, I immediately lower my probability that the conspiracy theory is true. I've encountered numerous such prizes from conspiracy theories in the past, and the general pattern I have seen is that the prize is being offered disingenuously, since the person offering it will never concede. I've (perhaps unconsciously) labeled anyone unaware of this pattern as either (1) purposely disingenuous, or (2) not very smart about convincing people of true things. Both (1) and (2) are evidence of a failure in their reasoning (but obviously this argument isn't airtight).

Apologies, the final sentence was an edit after the downvotes rolled in. I should have marked it as such. I was very surprised though that I met the brief and was downvoted.

World Trade Centre building 7 did not collapse at free fall into its own footprint because of office fires.


downvotes? too contrarian? hahaha.

3Bird Concept
I downvoted this even though it followed instructions, because the final sentence has a scornful tone that does not seem conducive to good-faith intellectual discourse.
-11Teerth Aloke
2Charlie Steiner
Indeed. Have a compensatory upvote.

The history of World War II has been rewritten to protect the guilty.

2Teerth Aloke
That is partially true. The extensive atrocities carried ot by the Western Allies have not been given as much spotlight as the atrocities of the Axis and now the Soviets.

This has really triggered me and I am only up to the dot points. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed the specificity articles to date I cannot continue with this one with it being based on dodgy information from the outset.

From the first sentence;

'Most people', can you define most? As a portion of the earth's population I think 'some' would be more accurate.

'agree that climate change', I will assume you mean man-made climate change because changing how cosmic rays interact with our atmosphere is very much more difficult ... (read more)

I don't know very much about AI at all however this question struck me as odd;

How should two AIs that want to merge with each other aggregate their preferences?

If they are AI wouldn't they do it however they wanted to? Or is the question "how should they be programmed to go about it?"

2Wei Dai
Yeah, I did mostly mean "How should they be programmed to go about it?" But another possibility is that some AI safety schemes specify that if the AI is unsure about something that may be highly consequential, it should ask the user or operator what to do, so how they should answer if the AI asks how to merge with another AI is also part of it.
Answer by paul ince20

I would say the best resources are the sceptic pages partly because I am one and partly because if you can understand the sceptic point of view you might be able to argue against it more competently. This one in particular has many interesting articles linked along with a daily dose; https://notrickszone.com/. Another personal favourite, among many, is https://www.thegwpf.com/

Absolutely amazing work. Thanks for writing it. I read this after the rationality series and really enjoyed how you wove those learnings into the Harry Potter story.

If albert said he possesed an unwatched video of the tree falling and then made a bet with barry about whether the video will have the sound I think it is unlikely Barry would bet on a silent video, even hypothetically.

Answer by paul ince40

Perhaps this series by Ben Hunt will help you decide if there is enough centre to support a centrist. I doubt it. https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

Does Phlogiston make the fire hot the same way CO2 makes the climate change?

31point7point4
CO2 as a cause of climate change "pays rent in anticipation". Phlogiston as a cause of fire doesn't.