The real flaw here is that counting arguments is a poor way to make decisions.
"They don't have the ability to make said meteor strikes" is enough on its own to falsify the hypothesis unless you have evidence to the contrary.
As Einstein said about "100 Authors Against Einstein", if he was wrong, they would have only needed one.
It isn't a problem to judge things from different time periods; the Model-T might have been a decent car in 1910, but it is a lemon today.
New things are better than old things. I'd wager that the best EVERYTHING has been produced within the last few decades.
If you're judging "Which is better, X or Y," and X is much older than Y, it is very likely Y is better.
It isn't literally that for every single person, but assuming you don't have a mutation in your chronobiological genes it is pretty close to that.
People with mutations in various regulatory genes end up with significantly different sleep-wake cycles. The reason that our bodies reset ourselves under sunlight is probably to help correct for our clocks being "off" by a bit; indeed, it is probably very difficult to hit exactly 24 hours via evolution. But 24:11 plus correction lets it be off by a bit without causing a problem.
Good enough is probably b...
The more conflict avoidant the agents in an area, the more there is to gain from being an agent that seeks conflict.
This is only true if the conflict avoidance is innate and is not instead a form of reciprocal altruism.
Reciprocal altruism is an ESS where pure altruism is not because you cannot take advantage of it in this way; if you become belligerent, then everyone else turns on you and you lose. Thus, it is never to your advantage to become belligerent.
The problem is that asymmetric warfare, which is the best way to win a war, is the worst way to acquire capital. Cruise missiles and drones are excellent for winning without any risk at all, but they're not good for actually keeping the capital you are trying to take intact.
Spying, subversion, and purchasing are far cheaper, safer, and more effective means of capturing capital than violence.
As far as "never" goes - the last time any two "Western" countries were at war was World War II, which was more or less when the "West" ca...
You are starting from the premise that gray goo scenarios are likely, and trying to rationalize your belief.
Yes, we can be clever and think of humans as green goo - the ultimate in green goo, really. That isn't what we're talking about and you know it - yes, intelligent life can spread out everywhere, that isn't what we're worried about. We're worried about unintelligent things wiping out intelligent things.
The great oxygenation event is not actually an example of a green goo type scenario, though it is an interesting thing to consider - I'm not sure if th...
That's a pretty weak argument due to the mediocrity principle and the sheer scale of the universe; while we certainly don't know the values for all parts of the Drake Equation, we have a pretty good idea, at this point, that Earth-like planets are probably pretty common, and given that abiogenesis occurred very rapidly on Earth, that is weak evidence that abiogenesis isn't hard in an absolute sense.
Most likely, the Great Filter lies somewhere in the latter half of the equation - complex, multicellular life, intelligent life, civilization, or the rapid dest...
After reading through all of the comments, I think I may have failed to address your central point here.
Your central point seems to be "a rational agent should take a risk that might result in universal destruction in exchange for increased utility".
The problem here is I'm not sure that this is even a meaningful argument to begin with. Obviously universal destruction is extremely bad, but the problem is that utility probably includes all life NOT being extinguished. Or, in other words, this isn't necessarily a meaningful calculation if we assume ...
Incidentally, regarding some other things in here:
[quote]They thought that just before World War I. But that's not my final rejection. Evolutionary arguments are a more powerful reason to believe that people will continue to have conflicts. Those that avoid conflict will be out-competed by those that do not.[/quote]
There's actually a pretty good counter-argument to this, namely the fact that capital is vastly easier to destroy than it is to create, and that, thusly, an area which avoids conflict has an enormous advantage over one that doesn't because it...
Everything else is way further down the totem pole.
People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life. There are absolutely enormous amounts of bacteria and viruses and fungi and everything else all around us, and given the enormous advantage which would be conferred by being a grey goo from an evolutionary standpoint, we would expect the entire planet to have already been covered in the stuff - probably repeatedly. The fact that we see so much diversit...
I was directed here from FIMFiction.
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias we really can't know what the odds are of doing something that ends up wiping out all life on the planet; nothing we have tried thus far has even come close, or even really had the capability of doing so. Even global thermonuclear war, terrible as it would be, wouldn't end all life on Earth, and indeed probably wouldn't even manage to end human civilization (though it would be decidedly unpleasant and hundreds of millions of people would die).
Some people thought ...
While we are, in the end, meat machines, we are adaptive meat machines, and one of the major advantages of intelligence is the ability to adapt to your environment - which is to say, doing more than executing preexisting adaptations but being able to generate new ones on the fly.
So while adaptation-execution is important, the very fact that we are capable of resisting adaptation-execution means that we are more than adaptation-executors. Indeed, most higher animals are capable of learning, and many are capable of at least basic problem solving.
There is pre...
I will note that this is one of the fundamental failings of utilitarianism, the "mere addition" paradox. Basically, take a billion people who are miserable, and one million people who are very happy. If you "add up" the happiness of the billion people, they are "happier" on the whole than the million people; therefore, the billion are a better solution to use of natural resources.
The problem is that it always assumes some incorrect things:
1) It assumes all people are equal 2) It assumes that happiness is transitive 3) It assum...
I think you're wrong about an important point here, actually, which is that not all things are as exciting as other things. Not all things are equally exciting.
Riding a dragon is actually way cooler than hang gliding for any number of reasons. Riding animals is cool in and of itself, but riding a dragon is actually flying, rather than hang gliding, which is "falling with style". You get the benefits of hang-gliding - you can see the landscape, for instance - but you have something which natively can fly beneath you. You need to worry less about c...
By the way, a benchmark I've found useful in discussing factual matters or matters with a long pre-existing literature is number of citations and hyperlinks per comment. You're still batting a zero.
So that means your comment is worthless, and thus can be safely ignored, given your only "citations" do not support yourself in any way and is merely meant to insult me?
In any case, citations are mostly unimportant. I use google and find various articles to support my stances; you can do the same to support yours, but I don't go REF Fahy et. al. &qu...
I understood Dunning-Kruger quite well. Dunning-Kruger suggests that, barring outside influence, people will believe themselves to be of above-average ability. Incompetent people will greatly overestimate their capability and understanding, and the ability to judge talent in others was proportional to ability in the skill itself - in other words, people who are incompetent are not only incompetent, but also incapable of judging competence in other people.
Competent people, conversely, overestimate the competence of the incompetent; however, they do have the...
You can't make an educated guess that a combination of multiple factors is no greater than the sum of their individual effects, and indeed, when you're talking about disease states, this is the OPPOSITE of what you should assume. The harm done to your body taxes its ability to deal with harm; the more harm you apply to it, whatever the source, the worse things get. Your body only has so much ability to fight off bad things happening to it, so if you add two bad things on top of each other, you're actually likely to see harm which is worse than the sum of t...
[quote]1) If we e.g. make an AI literally assign a probability 0 on scenarios that are too unlikely, then it wouldn't be able to update on additional evidence based on the simple Bayesian formula. So an actual Matrix Lord wouldn't be able to convince the AI he/she was a Matrix Lord even if he/she reversed gravity, or made it snow indoors, etc.[/quote]
Neither of those feats are even particularly impressive, though. Humans can make it snow indoors, and likewise an apparent reversal in gravity can be achieved via numerous routes, ranging from inverting the ro...
Dunning-Kruger and experience with similar religious movements suggests otherwise.
It takes someone who really thinks about most things very little time to come up with very obvious objections to most religious doctrine, and given the overall resemblance of cryonics to religion (belief in future resurrection, belief that donating to the church/cyronics institution will bring tangible rewards to yourself and others in the future, belief in eternal life) its not really invalid to suggest something like that.
Which is more likely - that people are deluding them...
You're thinking about this too hard.
There are, in fact, three solutions, and two of them are fairly obvious ones.
1) We have observed 0 such things in existence. Ergo, when someone comes up to me and says that they are someone who will torture people I have no way of ever knowing existing unless I give them $5, I can simply assign them the probability of 0 that they are telling the truth. Seeing as the vast, vast majority of things I have observed 0 of do not exist, and we can construct an infinite number of things, assigning a probability of 0 to any part...
The problem is that the choice to eat differently itself is potentially a confounding factor (people who pick particular diets may not be like people who do not do so in very important ways), and any time you have to deal with, say, 10 factors, and try to smooth them out, you have to question whether any signal you find is even meaningful at all, especially when it is relatively small.
The study in particular notes:
[quote]Men and women in the top categories of red or processed meat intake in general consumed fewer fruits and vegetables than those with low i...
People like my mother (who occasionally go to the casino with $40 in their pocket, betting it all in 5-cent slot machines a nickel at a time, then taking back whatever she gets back) go to the casino in order to have fun/relax, and playing casino games is an enjoyable past time to them. Thus while they lose money, they acknowledge that it is more likely than not that it will happen, and are not distressed when they leave with less money than they enter with because their goal was to enjoy themselves, not to end up with more money - getting more money is ju...
I will note that I went through the mental exercise of cars in a much simpler (and I would say better) way: I took the number of cars in the US (300 million was my guess for this, which is actually fairly close to the actual figure of 254 million claimed by the same article that you referenced) and guessed about how long cars typically ended up lasting before they went away (my estimate range was 10-30 years on average). To have 300 million cars, that would suggest that we would have to purchase new cars at a sufficiently high rate to maintain that number ...
Uh, yeah. The reason for that is that sickly animals carry parasites. It is logical that we wouldn't want to eat parasite-ridden or diseased animals, because then WE get the parasites. If the animal is not parasite-ridden, there's no good reason to believe it would be unhealthy to eat.
My personal suspicion for the cause is underlying SES factors (wealthy people tend to eat better, fresher food than the poor) as well as the simple issue of dietary selection - people who watch what they eat are also more likely to exercise and generally have healthier habits than those who are willing to eat anything.
I have never actually seen any sort of cogent response to this issue. Ever. I see it being brushed aside constantly, along with the magical brain restoration technology necessary for this, but I've never actually seen someone go into why, exactly, anyone would bother to thaw them out and revive them, even if it WAS possible to do. They are, all for all intents and purposes, dead, from a legal, moral, and ethical standpoint. Not only that, but defrosting them has little actual practical benefit - while there is obvious value to the possible cryopreservation...
There's a lot of good reasons to believe that cyronics is highly infeasible. I agree that P(B|A) is low, and P(D|A,B,C) is also absurdly low. We don't care about starving people in Africa today; what is the likelihood that we care about dead frozen people in the future, especially if we have to spend millions of dollars resurrecting them (as is more than likely the case), especially given how difficult it would be to do so? And that's assuming we can even fix whatever caused the problem in the first place; if they die of brain cancer, how are we supposed t...
You assume that economists are actually an expert on the economy. They aren't. That's the problem.
Economics only really has a good understanding of very low level effects, and even there things are very difficult to truly deal with. The law of supply and demand, for instance, is really less of a law and more of a guideline - the only way to actually determine real world behavior is experimentation, as there is no single equation you can plug things into to get a result out of. And that's something SIMPLE. Ask them how to fix the economy? They have no abili...
What matters is not knowledge but probability. Is it likely that something as complicated as our Universe would be simulated?
Is it likely that they would simulate something with vastly different rules than their own universe with such a high level of complexity?
It is possible that the Universe is a simulation, but it is highly improbable due to the difficulty and complexity inherent to doing so. Creating something of this level of complexity for non-simulation purposes is unlikely.
It is of course impossible to disprove it absolutely, but it doesn't really ...
We have no way to even measure intelligence, let alone determine how close to capacity we're at. We could be 90% there, or 1%, and we have no way, presently, of distinguishing between the two.
We are the smartest creatures ever to have lived on the planet Earth as far as we can tell, and given that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial civilization, we could very well be the most intelligent creatures in the galaxy for all we know.
As for shoving out humans, isn't the simplest solution to that simply growing them in artificial wombs?
It won't be any smarter at all actually, it will just have more relative time.
Basically, if you take someone, and give them 100 days to do something, they will have 100 times as much time to do it as they would if it takes 1 day, but if it is beyond their capabilities, then it will remain beyond their capabilities, and running at 100x speed is only helpful for projects for which mental time is the major factor - if you have to run experiments and wait for results, all you're really doing is decreasing the lag time between experiments, and even then only po...
Is it? Or do we simply not call some such organizations terrorist organizations out of politeness?
I suppose one could argue that the proper definition is "A non-state entity who commits criminal acts for the purpose of invoking terror to coerce actions from others", which will capture almost all groups that we consider to be terrorist groups, though it really depends - is a group who creates fear about the food supply for their own ends a terrorist group? I would argue yes (though one could also argue that this is equivalent to crying fire in a crowded theater, and thus a criminal act).
I think they assume that intending to kill someone is ALWAYS malicious in the US, regardless of your personal convictions on the matter. But yes, you are correct that you could be charged with murder without actual malice on your part (not that it is really inappropriate - the fact that you're being dumb doesn't excuse you for your crime).
By the US definitions, assisted suicide is potentially murder due to your intent to kill, unless your state has an exception, though it is more likely to be voluntary manslaughter. Involuntary euthanasia is a whole different kettle of fish, though.
Are the blacks ever going to give up the right to being selected over whites, now that they have the majority of votes in the country? Or is it just going to be a permanent bias?
I think we all know the answer to this in our heart of hearts. They will always claim that they need it to combat bias against them, and because they "deserve" it because their parents/grandparents/whatever were disadvantaged.
As time goes on, the whites will feel that they are being punished for things that their parents or grandparents did, and will grow bitter and racis...
The people who believe that they are grown-ups who can eyeball their data and claim results which fly in the face of statistical rigor are almost invariably the people who are unable to do so. I have seen this time and again, and Dunning-Kruger suggests the same - the least able are very likely to do this based on the idea that they are better able to do it than most, whereas the most able people will look at it and then try to figure out why they're wrong, and consider redoing the study if they feel that there might be a hidden effect which their present ...
A terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to coerce a reaction out of people.
PETA's propaganda's purpose is to horrify people into not eating meat.
PETA's funding and relationship with ALF has the purpose of terrorizing scientists, agribusiness, and other groups that they want to cause harm to by threatening to or actually destroying research, burning down buildings, destroying crops, freeing animals, ect. They give people who have engaged in such activities leadership positions, portray it as a reasonable response, give them money, recruit members fo...
If the Flying Spaghetti Monster is running the simulation, it is non-falsifiable, but also not worth considering because he can just stick his noodley appendage in and undo any results he doesn't like anyway retroactively. Its not like we would know the difference.
For us to break the fourth wall, either our creators would have to desire it or be pretty bad at running simulations.
It is extremely unlikely that the Universe is a simulation for a wide variety of reasons, foremost amongst them being expense. The level of simulation present in the Universe is sufficiently high that the only purpose of it would BE simulation, meaning that our physical laws would necessarily be quite close to the laws of whatever universe overlies us. However, this implies that building an Earth simulator with the level of fine-grained reality present here would be insanely expensive.
Ergo, it is highly unlikely that we are in a simulation because the amount of matter-energy necessary to generate said simulation is far in excess of any possible benefit for doing so.
[1] The level of simulation present in the Universe is sufficiently high that the only purpose of it would BE simulation, meaning that [2] our physical laws would necessarily be quite close to the laws of whatever universe overlies us.
[2] does not follow from [1]. The REAL real world might be sufficiently more complex than ours and it can be running thousand of simulations for a variety of reasons. I'm really not sure why you think that our level of simulation or physical laws are as complex as it gets but this is not a valid argument.
For a quick example of what I mean I would like you to think about us full-on simulating a 2 dimnesions(+time) environment.
PETA is without question a terrorist organization. They act as a front for recruitment for terrorist groups such as ALF, they give money to such groups, they support their activities, they send out large amounts of propaganda, they have significant overlap in membership with said terrorist groups and put terrorists in leadership roles... the list goes on. They DO, in fact, go around burning stuff down, commit arson, and I know on at least one of those occaisions left their dog locked up in their truck on a hot day while they were out "liberating' rabb...
95% is an arbitrarily chosen number which is a rule of thumb. Very frequently you will see people doing further investigation into things where p>0.10, or if they simply feel like there was something interesting worth monitoring. This is, of course, a major cause of publication bias, but it is not unreasonable or irrational behavior.
If the effect is really so minor it is going to be extremely difficult to measure in the first place, especially if there is background noise.
Fanfiction inherently limits the number of people who will ever look at it; an independent work stands on its own merits, but a fanfiction stands on both its own merits and the merits of the continuity to which it is attached. Write the best fanfic ever about Harry Potter, and most people still will never read it because your audience is restricted to Harry Potter fans who read fanfiction - a doubly restricted group.
While it is undeniable that it can act to promote your material, you are forever constrained in audience size by the above factors, as well as the composition of said audience by said people who consume fanfiction of fandom X.
Write an original work, and unless you are both very lucky and very good, the number of people who see it is more or less zero.
If you write an original work, then I am very sorry, but I probably will not read it. There is a barrier to diving into a new world, a trivial inconvenience, but nonetheless, a cost to high for the expected return, which by Sturgeon's Law is near zero. On the other hand, in fanfiction I already know the world, and that makes it easier to jump in.
Yes, for fanfiction there is an upper bound to the readership numbers, but in practice,...
This is why you never eyeball data. Humans are terrible at understanding randomness. This is why statistical analysis is so important.
Something that is at 84% is not at 95%, which is a low level of confidence to begin with - it is a nice rule of thumb, but really if you're doing studies like this you want to crank it up even further to deal with problems with publication bias. publish regardless of whether you find an effect or not, and encourage others to do the same.
Publication bias (positive results are much more likely to be reported than negative res...
Art is part of everything, so yes.
Photoshop allows artists to practice and produce works vastly more rapidly, correct errors quite easily, and otherwise do a ton of things they couldn't do before. Other such programs can do many of the same things.
More artists, plus better tools, plus faster production of art, plus better understanding of the technology of art, probably means that the best piece of art ever made was made in the last few decades.
Indeed, it is possible that more art will be produced in the first few decades of this century than were produced by all of humankind for the first several thousand years of our existence.