Mitchell Porter

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Commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
Except for an indirect acknowledgement by anonemouse, no-one chided me for saying "dollar" rather than "pound", so I'd better do it. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I fail at cosmopolitanism....
Commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
I find that I don't trust the survey data or the official data. For example, according to the survey details, 1% of respondents think that over 90% of the British population is "black or Asian". And it defies belief that...
Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
Speaking of continuity errors... are there any glaring continuity errors in our reality?...
Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
But if you believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (as Roko and Eliezer do), then there is no single future. You're being simulated by diverse possible future AIs. And in fact Roko's banned post did touch on this...
Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
Here is what he told Roko: "You do not think in sufficient detail about superintelligences considering whether or not to blackmail you. That is the only possible thing which gives them a motive to follow through on the blackmail." These...
Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
Charlie wrote "The screaming vapours over Roko's Basilisk tell us more about the existential outlook of the folks doing the fainting than it does about the deep future." This applies, not just to the people who took it seriously in...
Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
Calling this "extropian" is like confusing the Reformation and the Counter-reformation....

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Greg. Tingey commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
zochaka @ 120 In which case something has gorn horribly worng with the dit &/or cut-&-paste process .... Jay @ 121 The usual Brit method was to enrol the help of one of the local rulers (Divde & rule, in fact) if they possibly could. It's why large chunks of India were never directly ruled by Britain, for instance .......
Trottelreiner commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
Actually, the high number of inhabitants and the urbanized terrain makes it even easier; there is high consumption of food etc. and less production. For weapons, this is somewhat the other way around, actually the Polish Underground managed to do some in the factories at hand, but still, you need materials....
Sasquatch commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
Benefit Fraud. Here in the US, the same 1% figure is the assertion (by officialdom) for welfare and "Food Stamp" "fraud". What is astonishing/disgusting is the whinging on the right about people buying groceries with their Food Stamp benefits. What they don't understand is, you can only buy groceries with SNAP (Food Stamps); Toilet Paper, Toothpaste, ammo, you have to pay cash for those. But you can buy anything defined as food with them, so people do buy potato chips (crisps) and other junk foods part of the standard American Diet, which many seem to resent or want to control....
paws4thot commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
"Are Twinkies food?" - From memory, and borrowing heavily from "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" (Season 2, episode "Inca Mummy Girl") Xander says of Twinkies something like "Since they contain no ingredients that any human can pronounce, they don't fill you up like actual food does*". The details don't matter as long as the point is correct....
Greg. Tingey commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
Update This article re-visits the Kelly affair from another viewpoint. Interesting. However, please remember Charlie's strictures ( @ 73 )about what biases the writer may have - in this case, Andrew Gilligan..........

Responses to Comments from Mitchell Porter

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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