I came to the conclusion a while back that humans are just fundamentally religious. Even most people who don't believe in "gods" seem to end up largely clinging to some over-simplified, basically religious model of the world.
As examples:
Modern liberalism = New Testament Christian ethics with the government replacing god.
"Universe is a simulation" = Gnostic/platonic belief system (our universe as a sub-creation created by a flawed sub-creator), with a technological guise.
Belief in the Singularity probably appeals to some people in the same way that an imminent Rapture or Second Coming appeals to others. Especially with the uploading consciousness to computers and living eternally ...
I don't trust the IPCC because the actual results haven't matched their models, regardless of what the "scientific consensus" is on negative feedback loops.
And again, stopping the increase of CO2 would require massive global emissions cuts, which would require a new energy infrastructure.
If my car's system had the same track record and fundamental flaws as the climate models commonly cited, I would be inclined to ignore it. By track record I mean predicting a 3 degree C increase per doubling of CO2 and experience showing only half of that. The fundamental flaw is the assumption that positive feedback effects will triple the 1 degree C per doubling CO2 greenhouse effect, when these feedback effects (clouds and water vapour) are so difficult to model correctly.
Pretty sure the time lag of decades for temperature increase is simply false. Most of these models were predicting temperature increases since 1998 which haven't happened.
Finally, I probably would consider not braking at all if I couldn't possibly come close to stopping in time to prevent a fatal impact. If you really think a 3-6 degree C temperature increase is coming, the only thing that is going to do anything is something like a 50% drop in fossil fuel consumption. The world can't even agree on a 10% cut that won't do anything. EDIT: That's why I think these are really anti-peak oil policies, because a 10% cut actually helps there.
> The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decade on average
There's been a total of approximately 0.8 degrees C increase in temperature since about 1880, at about 1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2 concentration. Although part of that increase may be due to the increase in solar activity over the period. And, it hasn't gotten any warmer since 1998.
I'm no big proponent of fracking, but in general peak oil/gas is a much more pressing issue than global warming. I'm pretty much convinced at this point global warming is just a front used to push anti-peak oil policies.
This stuff makes me laugh looking back on it. Also teachers saying stuff like, "If you do all of your homework, no matter what you will get at least a B."
Pretty much high school was an obedience test. "Monkeys, if you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, I will rate you all 'Above Average'."
I just read "Hell is the Absence of God". I just can't understand or relate at all to the "slave morality", as Nietzsche might put it, of that story, or wrap my head around why people choose to worship a creature roughly equivalent to the one imprisoned at the center of the galaxy in Star Trek V.
A lot of that is due to the strategy shift from trying to aggresively expand your business by adding as much value as possible, to trying to extract as much rent from the market as possible once you've achieved a dominant position in the market.
This is exactly the sort of problem that convinced me that consciousness/mind must be a fundamental part of the (multi/uni)verse, and not something that "emerges" from matter.
I find it terribly unconvincing that a specific arrangement of matter, or even an algorithm in software, just simply "spawns" a discrete consciousness from nothing. It might make sense if there was an underlying "consciousness field" or some such concept that the matter-arrangement tapped into in some manner.
Great post. It really comes down to morality and "cooperation" in the sense of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The more people see defectors succeed, the more likely they are to defect themselves. But once enough people are defecting, almost everyone is worse off.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks for that. I guess what I would like to see is some kind of government mandate to force social networks and the like to follow this model.
The point was really just to push for decentralization of social networks, through some kind of mandated data-sharing interface. The "DNS" thing is probably actually unnecessary I guess, it was just a random thought.
We don't let utilities just get a monopoly in an area and then just gouge everyone, and we shouldn't allow a social network to do so either.
The NSA spying, by itself, is just a symptom of larger problem, which is the ability of a smaller, more cohesive group of people to leverage larger institutions like massive governments and corporations to control and extract rents out of the less cohesive masses. I doubt there is a technological solution to this, especially with so many engineers working for the bad side as Useful Idiots or straight up Defectors.
I really would like to see Facebook broken up via the Sherman Antitrust Act, or some such legislation.
As I see it, the "network externality effect" which keeps such monopolies in business could perhaps be mitigated by creating a sort of social network "DNS", which could be created by the government or a private corporation. Facebook/Google+/etc would be clients that would make requests for someone's data via the DNS. So it would basically serve as a "Bridge" or "Facade" to use a design pattern.
Example if Suzy is on Facebook, and Lucy is on Google+, when Suzy rquests Lucy's photos, Facebook sends an API request to the DNS "request_photos('Lucy', 'Suzy')", the DNS sees Lucy is on Google+ and forwards the request there.
The purpose of the bridge/facade then is to make it not really matter where a person stores their data or what client they use to view others. You just need some sort agreed upon API for determining where the data for each person is, an for sharing data between services.
For someone with more strict privacy concerns, the DNS for such a person could simply record that the person uses this social networking service, which doesn't allow requests from outside. Again the benefit here of the API would be that to add yourself to that service would be as simple as "upload_photos(serverX, request_photos('Suzy', 'Suzy'))", etc.
I'm sure there's a million things wrong with the above, but just a random thought.
Well certainly individual preference is a matter of taste. For me, "4 pooling" and these kind of largely random rock-paper-scissors choices -- which can often be decisive, as is the case here -- put me off Starcraft and a lot of games in general, at least as anything more than casual entertainment. But I do remember enjoying the game before I yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.
I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
Yeah but this game has like 10 times as many openings so it will take much longer to learn them.
The reason why memorization is a problem in chess isn't because there aren't enough openings/endgames to remember, it's because most players need to memorize certain patterns to reach a certain level of effectiveness, because they would rarely be able to solve those problems over the board.
So the solution to the chess memorization problem isn't necessarily more openings and more complexity, which ironically could just INCREASE opening importance. Rather I think the idea is to increase the importance and depth of long term strategic factors like pawns, the sort of understanding of which grows over time and doesn't lend itself to rote memorization.
http://theloveofsports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/t...
Been looking for a Sebastian Janikowski draft picture but couldn't find one.