Murphy

Murphy

  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    That sucks, I know terminal care basically never has a good outcome... but I hope it involves as little pain as possible. Take care....
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    It's easy to find people who are well educated and economically well off who want/desire a large family. It doesn't even matter if 90%+ of the population detest children and want to have as few as possible, after a few...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    I've already named a few hyperfecundity meme's. People have just waved them away, apparently feeling certain that they'll disappear entirely based on very weak evidence. It's weird how people are perfectly happy to accept the possibility of genetic variants that...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    This still seems to be dodging. It is inherently not a safe assumption to rely on the idea that everyone will do what's convenient/nice. Look in any society and you'll find some people who aren't oppressed or forced, people who...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    One caution: a lot of the cross-generation epigenetics stuff has been failing to replicate very well and seems to have much smaller effects than initially claimed. Also, distribution of height related alleles across populations doesn't seem to be uniform. Some...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    There are some people who are just natalists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalism There are some people who just seem to have a hyped-up urge to have children. Some mutation dialing up the urge to have kids to 11 in some individuals when faced...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    "and ask why men are, on average, taller than women" no.... really, no. Sexual dimorphism is a real thing in humans, it's not just an artifact culture. In a large fraction of the western world feel free to sample...
  • Commented on "I doubt me an it be commercial."
    A bunch of the stories I'm following right now are web serials. Most of them, when the started, were just the authors hobby and some have morphed into a full time paying job for the author as they've gathered success....
  • Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
    My only other hypothesis was that near the end he was just intentionally trolling his readers, actively trying to find plotlines that would shock them or sacred cows they would get upset about. in support of this I submit his...
  • Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
    I also have some vague memories of the internal dialog of the main character in one of his stories re: the appeal of another adolescent character, if I remember right his main character turned down that other character (only to...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    Those "made-up numbers" aka money tends to be a fairly real representation of real resource allocation and the relative values of the various resources. The prices of fuel, the opportunity costs of land uses etc etc etc. Further those made...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR — because it provoked the rude comment at #708 by being basically shit-headed about basic humanity. ]...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    People who have money and who want to make more money have a very straightforward incentive to stock up. It does not depend on just one single penniless individual. @Trottelreiner Businesses stocking up in advance of an expected shortage is...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    I'm gonna argue with some of the economic predictions. Not long term but at least what would happen on the day vs gradually in the weeks coming up to it. As a general rule, if a prediction posits that people...
  • Commented on SF For Nothing, Stories For Free
    Reddit writingprompts can occasionally have some surprisingly good short stories and is often worth a browse. https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/top/?t=all...
  • Commented on SF For Nothing, Stories For Free
    To be fair, he's fairly open about it being an author tract. That was basically the point of writing it and the story was substantially improved when he revised some of the early sections to make it more clear that...
  • Commented on SF For Nothing, Stories For Free
    Also, forgot one. http://unsongbook.com/ "So for two minutes on Christmas Eve, while a billion people listened, three astronauts read the Book of Genesis from a tiny metal can a hundred miles above the surface of the moon. Then, mid-sentence, they...
  • Commented on SF For Nothing, Stories For Free
    I agree, Worm was something else. The superhero story I realized I always wanted. Pact fell flat, I think, because he was trying to get away from the almost mechanical aspects of the system in Worm and was trying for...
  • Commented on The Pivot
    My only issue with this article is that it seems to only pick confirmatory items. And while it hinges on collusion, many of the things like shorting British stock are options open to anyone with money at short notice. For...
  • Commented on Happy 21st Century!
    "To get a mass audience it really needs to go TV/film ... which in turn means it can't interrogate the corporate values of its financial backers too directly." I'm not so sure about this. Capitalism long ago successfully monetized anti-capitalism....
  • Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
    "what if the end-state, or even the middle-state of global warming is an environment where Balinese-style rice-farming is the ideal way to grow food." What if the ideal housing is old-irish peat houses? I'm reminded of a talk years ago...
  • Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
    Are you sure you're thinking about the right episode? The various synopsis mention nothing of genocide. Rather a disease became religiously associated with immorality such that nobody was willing to admit when family members caught it and since some believed...
  • Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
    damn, my attempt at quote tags didn't work. This should be in a quote in my above comment: We are still trying to untangle the twisting references of emotion by which humans might prefer pleasure to pain, and yet endorse...
  • Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
    re: fascist time traveler alien thing. Honestly I don't think that's weird enough. For either time travelers or aliens. People read history books, see coherent narratives, and think that's how Time works. Underestimating the surprise of the present, they overestimate...
  • Commented on Test Case
    I'm pretty sure fault and criminal responsibility are 2 different things. A child or someone in the middle of a severe psychotic episode doing something that would normally be a criminal offense may lack any culpability or criminal responsibility for...
  • Commented on Test Case
    Sorry, left off the end of a line in the second paragraph. If it can't legally drive on the roads on it's own then all the crap with phone apps seems superfluous since you can't guarantee signal and presumably you'd...
  • Commented on Test Case
    Can we request that this not end up getting turned into another boring trolly problem. The world does not need yet another inane "but what if the car has the choice of sacrificing a baby inside the car for 5...
  • Commented on The crazy years
    Re: the oxfam papers claims. I've grown to not trust oxfams papers. I'm starting to think of how they do their math as "oxfam accounting" There tends to be a lot of tricks in their wording and methods. They'll also...
  • Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
    Those are some mighty mighty broad brushes you're using there. It's like the claim that there's only N stories in the world where N is small... if you simplify it to the level where the story description is "bad thing...
  • Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
    Re:target and pregnancy. That story appears to be a myth based on a hypothetical: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnancy-inside-story.html Where a journalist was proposing a scenario that never actually happened. Also another example for the pile re: social media optimizing for emotion. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ "So...
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