QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Religions and denominations of the same religion won't even agree on the nature or existence of free will. Why everyone else is so concerned about the same, I don't understand. It's more philosophy than science in most discussions. If acting as if your actions had internal agency offers better chances of survival, that's a good enough fudge for nature.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I find this unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive of people's (willfully chosen) social responsibilities. Yes, "the wife" is a convenient excuse for many things, including why you can't go out drinking tonight, even though you're really just tired from work and don't want to admit it. But presumably, if you're a decent person who has chosen to marry in this day and age, you take that choice seriously and choose your risks carefully.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Vicious cycle / feedback loop.

I recall there being a few studies suggesting that being poor can lead to poor decision making, and I certainly agree that poor decision making reinforces negative outcomes such as credit card debt. Thus they are individually responsible for what they've done, but the impoverished middle-class as a whole shouldn't be blamed for where they're headed.

Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Even if they are accepting of you earning more, their own boss and/or Human Resources may well have a different opinion. Woe unto those whose supervisors are also underpaid.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Viable long-term survival strategies on Earth have some pretty hard limits. Even if we master famine, disease, our own worst impulses, and asteroids, there's still the expansion of the Sun. Even if we don't expand beyond our own solar system, the technological advances gained in doing so could be invaluable for maintaining our home planet.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Perfection is a particularly anthropocentric concept. Earth was clearly a local optima, but our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow. We've changed the fitness landscape like so many bulldozers in a landfill. There's no way to know what lies among the slopes beyond. Maybe we really are stuck here and defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets. That just sounds depressing, though.

I expect we won't evolve our thinking, but if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times, there's an opportunity for evolution and natural selection to operate on our societies at a galactic level. We'd buy ourselves the chance to roll the dice many, many, many more times. There will be misery and suffering along the way, sure, but that's been the cost of our existence thus far.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Assuming artificial gravity generators, who needs planets?

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

We stay on this rock, we die on this rock. Confining ourselves to Earth isn't a survival strategy, it's giving up. Rebuttals would be appreciated, though!

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

To be fair, only some do. Others just assume endless reincarnation is a thing and promise escape. Whether you see that as real distinction is something else entirely.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

From the moment those copies exist, I'm not them and they're not me. We do not share subjective experiences. If you think we're equivalent and expendable, you'd best murder me in secret and pretend it never happened. You know, like incinerating me inside a teleporter or someth... oh crap, we're going there.

Yeah, I have a few issues with that comic.

> The man was not a murderer.

This is one of a few logical leaps I can't accept. His past selves are already "dead". His future selves do not yet exist. If, for example, all my ancestors are dead and my offspring not yet conceived, how does my suicide harm them in any way? None will so much as feel the grief of losing me, but I'm supposed to feel guilty over "murdering" them? (Let's not follow up on what this would mean for topics such as abortion!)

If future and past selves are of such importance that we not murder them, how can present copies be valued any less? If destroying the original is not necessary, then that must surely be murder as well. It's worse, actually, because then it's not even hypothetical; "The Machine" would be intentionally and unnecessarily ending a life.

Why do I possess the subjective experience of me, not you, and not some other me separated by time or space? Barring notions of a soul, either those other instances are not real in some sense or else there's something phenomenologically special about each, which I can only attribute to being uniquely present at a particular point in space-time. If the teleported me is a clone, their existence ought to have nothing to do with me, thus I should not be murdered for their sake. However, if the teleported me instead can only exist as a function of my past-self ceasing to be, then that's little different than how I am from any moment to the next.

TL;DR: If it works like the movie version of "The Prestige" where one copy is murdered purely for convenience, I'm not stepping into that teleporter.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

If everyone has similar memories to conceal, problem solved. Who's ready to sign up for Total Recall style memory implants?

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.

Not enough to compete with the real deal. Has to have multiple team calendars, so it can support conflicting mandatory meetings so people can bitch at you on Google Hangouts and Slack afterward for missing the ones you didn't attend, even though you'd told everyone in advance that you couldn't make it.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

If employable programmers are as rare as brilliant young mathematicians, we have a serious problem.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

> Alcohol is a poison.

A meaningless blanket statement.

Methanol is a poison, far worse than ethanol, yet you've likely consumed it in small quantities from what you would think of as non-alcoholic sources. If there's no safe level alcohol consumption, you'd best stick to consuming your fruit unripened or avoiding them entirely. Again, relative toxicity is meaningless without also taking dose into account.

You could easily say the "correct" amount of oxygen is toxic, much more so than nitrogen even at sea level, and not be technically wrong. Change up the pressure and mixture and you might find the nitrogen causing more immediate (though not toxic) danger.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Yes, I want to be around those 20 year olds when I'm in my 40s. I want to be around a few 60 year olds as well. I don't want to just talk about diversity, I'd actually rather like to live it. Those who insist on living in bubbles can have it, even if it means I have to face unemployment after 40.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Personal anecdote here, which may mean absolutely nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

I had encountered, from time to time, a certain category of recruiters who seemed to be hunting for brogrammers. The type looking for passionate ninja rockstar hackers to work for free beer, free food, and night life in an exciting high-energy startup. These recruiters just also happened to be young blonde women in low-cut tops who were rather overplaying their ditziness. They also preferred video conference to phone calls.

My assumption is this was all quite engineered to hit their mark.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

> Recruiters typically don't want to waste their time with folks who aren't going to get selected.

My spam folder says otherwise. There are still enough bad recruiters out there (or bad recruiter spam-bots) hitting me up for positions that don't remotely match any skills I've ever listed anywhere. Not worth my time.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

> "Why not just build a faraday cage?"

Then my very next thought is, "Who is going to notice my house-sized faraday cage, who are they going to tell, and what are those people going to do in turn?"

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

For that exact reason, I am incredibly thankful my kid's interests are currently sufficiently geeky. Terrified for when those interests are dumped in favor of appeasing boys.

QuantumGravy

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

In my purely anecdotal observations, there hasn't been a great demand for entry-level work, especially so following the last recession. A college degree and no experience won't even earn you the benefit of a rejection letter. People instead find themselves "sustained" on low-paying jobs that don't count as entry level for anything but fast-food and retail management. If you're lucky to come from a family with some money, maybe you get an unpaid internship or two before landing that first entry level position.

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