tlhonmey

Placing it on an empirical foundation would be an enormously difficult task, but fortunately it's not particularly necessary since, like geometry, you can put it on an a priori foundation stemming from some basic observations about human nature.

Human beings tend to prioritize according to some simple, general rules, and natural selection ensures that those few who throw too big a curveball don't propagate.  So you can take those rules and extrapolate them into a description of how a group of human beings will react to various economic pressures.

"Man, ... (read more)

Indeed!  The question is, "How do you tell?"  The "how do neurons work" research has gotten down to the level where the decision-making seems to involve quantum phenomena where we can't take the lid off and peek inside.  Theoretical physicists wonder if there are more than just four dimensions, but haven't nailed down anything concrete.  We can sort of see back to the beginning of our universe, but not into anything that may have been before it or beside it or anything like that.

You can definitely say it's "not outside our universe," wh... (read more)

There are indeed multiple ways it could work.  And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries.  Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area?  Or is it something that's simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it's tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it?  We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find.  But we're almost certainly going to have proble... (read more)

Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not.  If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things?  Or might there be variation?  There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn't get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.

Actually running that test though would be...  difficult.  We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to ... (read more)

Thing is, there are quite a few questions about our universe which simply cannot be definitively answered using only information from within our universe.

Take "free will" for example.  Does our thinking arise entirely from natural phenomenon, or is there some extra-universal component to it?  Well, if it is the latter, then the only way for us to find out from inside the universe is if the universe is built in a way to make it obvious.  If there's some discontinuity between cause and effect with regard to thinking or similar.

But if there is ... (read more)

Why?  If the answer is "no" then applying a proper punishment causes the nebulous whatsit in charge of the person's free will to change their future behaviour.

If the answer is "yes" then applying a proper punishment adjusts the programming of their brain in a way that will change their future behaviour.

The only way a "yes" makes it harder to justify punishing someone is if you overexpand a lack of "free will" to imply "incapable of learning".

As far as we know, there has been not one single violation of conservation of momentum from the uttermost dawn of time up until now.

And because we know that, any unusual reports that would seem to imply such a violation may have happened are obviously false...  Ties up the loose ends.
 

The chemical stuff could be explained by alterations to thermal expansion.  Less expansion would cause less pressure, and spiking pressure is a critical part of getting an actual detonation.  Would also reduce the amount of wind though, so the climate would possibly change substantially.

Electronic stuff failing is rather more difficult to figure out without wrecking people's brains, compasses, etc.  He probably should have left that alone and just let the electronics fade away since without gas expansion generating electricity to run them would be impractically expensive.

It may well be a "tightly-laced reality".  It's just not this one. Perhaps the answer to a match not working in the world the hero is transported to is that the fundamental chemistry of the universe is different and our protagonist's body has obviously been modified to match.  Or else the difference is some specific alteration where human metabolism can still work, and yet phosphorous can't generate a high enough temperature to ignite cellulose.  The fact that he still has a match after transportation to such a different world where probably... (read more)

If you interpret it strictly, an answer of "yes" puts you in the space of "I used to beat my wife, but I have stopped."  An answer of "no" puts you in the ambiguous space of "Either I used to beat her, and I still do, or I never have and therefore can't have stopped."

The question is which of those two possibilities people will assume.  Which will depend on the context and what they already think of both you and the person asking.

There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning.  Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.  

High extraction ratios aren't inherently problematic economically speaking since it's not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone's willing to do the job for.  But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.

From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most "command economies" tend to run into.

I'm afraid I haven't collected a definite list.  I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read.  For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion.  You'll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual.  And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why microm... (read more)

Such a low-ranking solution as "Everyone have as many kids as possible, then cannibalize the girls" would not be generated in your search process.

Like...  "A Modest Proposal"?  I would suggest that low-ranking solutions are very often generated and are simply discarded without comment in the vast majority of cases.  The only way "efficiency" enters into it comes from the way we start our search for solutions by considering how to adapt already known solutions to similar problems.

This does, in fact, show up in evolution as well.  Adaptin... (read more)

Try "The Two Faces of Tomorrow", by James P. Hogan.  Fictional evidence, to be sure, but well thought out fiction that demonstrates the problem well.

Personally I think I actually tend to anthropomorphize more as a result of my ability to guess what others are thinking being learned rather than instinctive.  Because I really am using the same circuitry for comprehending people as I do for comprehending car engines and computers and using it in essentially the same way.

But I may not be typical.  Best guess is that my particular quirks are mostly the result of a childhood head injury rather than anything genetic.

A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.

If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it.  You don't have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is.  People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them.  The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.

There are two failure modes to watch out for.

The f... (read more)

If there weren't people who had a strong desire, not just for sex, but to actually have a child, and a willingness to go to extreme measures to do so, then sperm banks wouldn't be a thing.

Given the number of people who specifically, and openly desire to make babies, postulating a subconscious desire that might push them to "forget" their contraception isn't unreasonable.  Especially given that cycle timing and coitus interruptus have been staples of human sexual behaviour since...  Well...  At least as far back as we have any records about s... (read more)

Alternatively, consider the various sects in history which have thought that the world was evil and therefore bringing children into it was doing them great harm.  Needless to say, the majority of them seem to have died out...

I would submit that most other species on the planet, were they to rise to our level of intelligence, would not bother inventing condoms.  In most other species, the females generally have no particular interest in sex unless they want babies.

Humans though, are weird.  Because of our long phase of immaturity, and the massive amount of work involved in raising a child, we need really strong social bonds.  Evolution, being a big fan of "The first thing I stumble across that gets the job done is the solution" repurposed sex into a pair-bonding ... (read more)