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All of sheldon's Comments + Replies

That Magical Click
sheldon20

if you wake up in the Future, it's probably going to be a nicer place to live than the Present.

How do we know this? How can we possibly think it's possible to know this? I can think of at least three scenarios that seem much more likely than this sunny view that things will just keep progressing while you're dead and when you wake up you'll slip right into a nicer society:

1) We run out of cheap energy and hence cheap food; tensions rise; most of the world turns into what Haiti looks like now.

2) Somebody sets off a nuclear weapon, leading to worldwide r... (read more)

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1Paul Crowley
Things are by and large much better for animals in captivity than wild animals. I suspect this extends to apes, though others may have better domain-specific knowledge.
6Blueberry
It seems unlikely that people would be revived in those scenarios, especially in 1 and 2. As for 3, biological evolution takes a long long time, and even then it's likely the future humans would provide a decent environment for us if they revive us. Unlike apes, we and future humans will both be capable to communicate and engage in abstract thought, so I don't think that analogy works.
0[anonymous]
(1) and (2) are fairly likely, but what isn't is that someone will bother to revive us frozen folk if civilization is doing that badly. (3) is actually the best possible scenario next to a FAI having been designed. It's not a problem if we can be made into super-humans too!
The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory
sheldon-30

Another oddity, besides the debris from Flight 93 found miles away, the second airplane that local residents saw before the crash, the lights flickering in local business and homes, etc: The C-130 -- described by one Pentagon witness as looking like a "Navy electronic warfare aircraft" -- that admittedly was on the scene of both the Pentagon crash and the Flight 93 crash. http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/2002/minneapolisstartribune091102.html

Alone this doesn't prove anything, but isn't it odd that on a day when all of these supersoni... (read more)

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The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory
sheldon60

The interviews with local residents were done on video. You'd prefer a written transcript to being able to assess the residents' believability for yourself?

And I'm not a conspiracy minded person at all; every other conspiracy re: 9/11 is absolutely idiotic, but Eliezer is right in noting that if someone did try to shoot down Flight 93 (as would have been readily feasible given the timeline), it would be more politically palatable to say that the heroic passengers did it all themselves.

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4Bo102010
Not trying to imply that you were; just noting that it's kind of a pain.
1Jack
At least in retrospect, it would have been beneficial for Bush to be able to show he was capable of ordering planes shot down. But that may not have occurred to the administration until much later.
The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory
sheldon20

There were lots of unexplained bits about Flight 93, including the many local residents who saw a fighter plane immediately before/after the crash. See this video, and don't miss the interview with John Fleegle at about 2:30 (and especially 4:30), and then the interview with Susan McIlwain at 5:08 through about 7:00: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM9CXo29syo

Yes, it's by and large a conspiracy-minded video from unreliable sources, but the interviews with local residents were real, and there's no good reason to ignore what these people say.

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6Bo102010
Why is it that conspiracy-minded types always link to videos instead of written sources?
9simpleton
Quite the opposite, under the technical definition of simplicity in the context of Occam's Razor.
Zack_M_Davis140

Hi, Sheldon. Eliezer has previously defended many worlds at length. Also, Less Wrong uses Markdown syntax: enclose text in *asterisks* to get italics.

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