Antistone

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• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I don't know how many convictions it would get, but there are 3000 counties and 50 states. Cut that about in half, assume each trial takes a month, and that's 127 years dealing with each case right there. You...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  And you're distorting what I said. Badly. You were the one you started talking about values (which I notice do not figure at all in your revised explanation). The solution is what humans have done for the last 300,000...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I don't think covid-19 is a hoax. I said "hypothetically" twice, once in ALL CAPS. What the heck kind of disclaimer do you want? I voted for Biden. I socialize almost exclusively with liberals. I suspect I broadly agree with...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I think you may be conflating questions of value with questions of fact. Whether or not it is worth killing 90% of humans to stop other animals from going extinct is a question of values. Whether or not covid19 is...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  You don't have to be on site to look for facts: you can find pics, for example, of Obama in church. Ask for ONE non-fake of him at Muslim prayers. That might be generalized as "look for evidence that...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I am looking for a general, principled strategy for deciding which side deserves your support. Something that I could use if I was raised a Democrat but I want to do my due diligence, or if I'm a world-walker visiting...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  OK, serious question: Suppose you are born into a large country where half the population believes lies concocted by a handful of immoral politicians who are using them to hold onto power. As a child, you believe the same things...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  You don't need all 50 states; just enough to control a majority of the electoral votes. There's already an effort to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Another angle on Apple, the usable lifetime can be quite long, in effect, more economical than buying inexpensive hardware more frequently. A few years ago, I was forced to throw away my perfectly-functional 4-year-old iPhone and buy a replacement,...
• Commented on Editorial Entanglements
  That "slight concern" in paragraph 2 is weirdly phrased. You are usually forced to reject 99%, but I would have thought that's because you only have space to publish 1%, NOT because those 99% are unpublishable? That is, I would...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  Only skimmed the comments, but from the OP I am not clear whether you are asking about a campaign where the characters are in the Laundryverse or where the players are in the Laundryverse (with the characters in a somewhat-traditional...
• Commented on COVID-19
  What stops every legislative term from beginning with a single vote to extend ALL existing legislation by another term? (If someone doesn't think it's worth the time to single out a law for explicit repeal, I have difficulty imagining why...
• Commented on A serious question
  If hiding indoors doesn't prevent the transformation, but the moon being below the horizon on earth DOES, that seems to suggest the transformation must be caused by some sort of emanation from the moon that can be blocked by a...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  I think Heteromeles is taking the perspective that it's OK for paradoxes to happen occasionally by accident as long as humans don't have a rational motive for routinely creating them on purpose..? I can't figure out any other way to...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Depending on the actual rules of what happens when you create a paradox, a 0.1 second head-start might be significant even out in deep space. Suppose you station a ship out at an appropriate jump point, and it waits there...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  If you restrict the relative velocities then you probably need longer jumps to cause problems. So then you can put a restriction on how far the FTL drive can jump... but what about making multiple jumps to travel long...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Perhaps you could construct a universe where the only FTL mechanism is by naturally occuring wormholes, and all of those happen to lie in the same frame of reference. That could be a way to have your cake and...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  I'm not sure you understand what is meant by the term "reference frame". Your reference frame isn't WHERE you are, it's HOW FAST you are. Objects with different velocities are in different reference frames. (Technically, ANY difference in velocity is...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  what my late wife and I decided we wanted, back in the early/mid-nineties, was an artificial stupid. "I know what to do with this, I know what to do with that, um, hey, boss, I don't know what to...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  An amusing list of examples of learning machines that satisfied their "goals" in unintended ways: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  It has come as a big awful surprise to most of these companies that people assumed them to be responsible for solving, or at least mitigating very, very hard problems, such as recognizing propaganda, preventing or disrupting mass-psycoses... It...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  You know your circumstances better than I do, but the most common explanation for that sort of thing is that the hits are more memorable than the misses, so in retrospective you overestimate how common they were (per the availability...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  One issue with testing in a natural landscape is that you can't control what information the tester might already have about that landscape. Hypothetically, people could have found water (or probable locations for water) by unrelated means some time in...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  How did we get from "I hypothesize that the laws of physics are being rewritten by massed belief" to "no no my point is that the world contains a noticeable number of biased scientists"? Yes, the world does contain a...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  The main evidence is the number of phenomena reported by highly respected scientists that are not now repeatable, and were regarded as possible at the time and are not now - such as storm calling. This is just a...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  And why are you assuming that the phenomena that led to astrophysics existed before, say, 1800? Because much of the light by which we observe them takes considerably longer than that to reach us (or at least appears to),...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  I fully agree that the apparent fact that the physical universe obeys a few extremely simple laws, and everything can be built up from those, is totally baffling. I have previously posted that one speculation about the reason is...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  I've always read there are 20? 200? words for snow in Eskimo. This is a dubious and imprecise claim that seems to get repeated as an urban legend without regard for evidence. "Eskimo" is not a single language, and...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  Re: Heteromeles @264 - the argument isn't that math is astonishing because it has solved every problem ever, but that if you view math as simply the exploration of the consequences of arbitrary axioms, then it is astonishing that it...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  If the rewrite of Kerbal Space Programme uses Quaternions then I will accept that they are numbers. I don't know anything about a rewrite, but the original Kerbal Space Program already uses quaternions. In fact, it's a good bet...