Fangz

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• Commented on The Day After
  Charlie, you could always write near-future utopian literature for a change....
• Commented on A purely theoretical dilemma
  What if they snap their fingers and Alpha Centauri goes nova? Would people still want to fight?...
• Commented on A purely theoretical dilemma
  The distinction between an alien federation with FTL and true AI is not really like an explorer with gunpower and wooden ships meeting some native people with canoes and bows. It's more like a modern human dictating terms to an...
• Commented on A purely theoretical dilemma
  Let's see if this is derailing... The problem with this dilemma is that the issue is really in the implementation. Can anyone really make a decision for the whole of humanity to go into a group-mind, immediately? Even if 99%...
• Commented on The present in deep history
  Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history? I think a lot of what Charlie pointed out could...
• Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
  Assuming we keep the raw votes, it should be very practical, statistically, to deduct the effects of slates from things like the Hugo nominations. Just look for clusters of too-similar votes....
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  Er, the first paragraph there is a quote, I guess the QUOTE tag doesn't work the way I had hoped. [[ I've changed it to a <cite> pair for you. In future, I suggest you use the Preview option -...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  My first reaction is that many male-written female main characters are men with tits (e.g. Honor Harrington), and a fair number of female-written male main characters are women with balls (sorry, can't remember a good example offhand). Women tend to...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  The pie chart kinda shows that if you are only concerned about the proportion of female protagonists in Hugo winning novels (which is obviously untrue, but...), then it is not, in fact about the number of women winning the awards....
• Commented on The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain
  Obligatory Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri quotes: I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine - just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  You forgot: Travel in time. (!!!)...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  Psi is still pretty strongly in fashion in some circles, I think it's just a matter of the SF&F novel-writing culture moving on to other things. Why just the other day, I went to a big budget action movie with...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  I don't think stealth is a concern. A species technologically advanced enough to make beserkers would find it reasonable to assume that large proportions of galactic civilisation already knows that beserkers can exist - Especially the most threatening ones. Indeed,...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  I think the point people miss with Great Filter arguments quite often is that the Filter needs to be subtle. And a lot of proposals aren't intrinsically subtle, so that just shifts the mystery to the question of why we...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  I don't think VN Berserkers are a sufficiently good explanation for the Great Filter. Suppose a griefer exists and can implement the plan Charlie suggested. Within a cube of 100 ly on side, there are only approximately 1000 stars, and...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  The idea that using lower thresholds of p-values is a magic bullet that solves problems is a popular, and pernicious misconception. 0.0001 is no more reasonable than 0.05 or, even 0.1 - all of it flows from a failure to...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  If you have framed the question in terms of whether the tiny rich minority deserve to have 3 sports cars or 4, then you are already asking the wrong question. Ask instead whether the huge proportion of poor people deserve...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  Also you are basically asking me to read an English literature critic's review of a philosopher's book about the economics of education, and frankly I don't see why this exercise would be worth my time....
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  "One Russell group university whose accounts I'm familiar with was doing it for 3.5k/yr per undergraduate. (They would not appreciate me naming them, for reasons that should be obvious)." Reference to mysterious unsourced figures you are individually aware of is...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  Not just that, but He/She is also apparently pretending to be an entirely different guy depending on which culture and time in history you grew up in, so that whichever one turns out to be the right one, 99% of...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  Also in terms of the deaths under Stalin, we are talking here about a country with over 130 million people with the per capita PPP GDP of South Sudan, a crude birth rate that would today put it in the...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  The practice of corpse-counting is an unseemly re-occurance in online debates lately. It never adds anything to any debate, and only serves to erase anything that is important about the particular disasters or atrocities we are talking about. No, the...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  Er what? University education costed 14k pounds per student? It would be closer to 14k per year per student, if it's anything like the OECD average. Additionally you have to remember the role higher education funding has in funding university...