Maybe some kind of hindsight bias is at work, but I think I would have found Statement 2′ a lot less crazy than Statement 2: the latter requires there being several billion male prostitutes, which (assuming that less than 20% of all males will be prostitutes and about 50% of all people will be male) would require a world population of several tens of billions.
(One of the main reasons why I would’ve found Statement 1′ very unlikely is the “exactly 670616629.2” part, but I’m sure that was not your point: I’m sure you would assign a much lower prior to “I (army1987) generated a random 32-bit number a few minutes ago and it was 735,416,352” than to “… and it was more than 1 billion”, but you won’t be shocked to know only the former is true. So I’ll pretend it said “between 600 and 700 million miles per hour” instead.) I think I would’ve found Statement 1 crazier than 1′, too: the idea that one particular colour (within the convex hull of the set of all colours I’ve seen before) has quasi-magical powers but an ever-so-slightly bluer or greener one has no weird properties at all sounds pretty bizarre to me (and possibly unfalsifiable, if there exist infinitely many colours), in a way that the idea that there is a speed (several orders of magnitude larger than anybody ever experienced) such that weirder and weirder things happen the closest you get to it wouldn’t.
Statement 2 is more plausible than you think. Given the stated sizes of the spheres, it’s highly unlikely that they exist solely as prostitute storage units. I’d suggest that they’re aerial habitats, and prostitutes are just one of their many exports to the surface. They also offer really awesome bungee rides.
Alternatively, they could be organism production facilities, and the prostitutes are produced on site upon being ordered. They also offer pet velociraptors and colorful ponies.
Given the color and size of the spheres, I’m guessing they use solar power and stay aloft by being mostly full of vacuum. As such, statement 2 doesn’t seem particularly crazy.
People consider all sorts of wacky things evil, regardless of, or even in direct opposition to, what the previous generation thought of as evil. As such statement 3 doesn’t shock me at all. There are already some pretty solid arguments circulating about how locking people up for trivial offenses and giving them little or no opportunity to socialize except with career criminals is a bad idea.
Statement 1 is on it’s face inconsistent with what I know about thermodynamics, but there are some pretty big gaps in our understanding of how gravity works, so the paint could just be a way to request a lift from some orbiting tractor-beam taxi service. A stretch, but not inconceivable.
I’d still wager that there will never be more than 1,999,999,999 male prostitutes (or facilities to produce male prostitutes on demand) on Earth in the next 60 years, though. :-)
If they’re not exclusively prostitutes, this just requires 2 billion males that are willing to have sex for money. We already have billions of males that are willing to have sex for free, so all this actually requires is a societal shift in which sex-for-money is considered a respectable arrangement instead of an extremely low-status one.
Alternatively they can just be consider AI generic servants, whose duties include sexual deals.
You do realize that what you’re saying is classic hindsight bias, right? Saying that “Weird happens when you go a certain speed” is just as crazy as saying “Weird stuff happens when you’re a certain color”. There’s no real difference in strangeness between the statements.
Read my post again. It’s not a matter of speed vs colour, it’s a matter of “there is a maximum possible value of [quantity], much greater than almost all values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, and weirder and weirder things happen the closer you get to it” vs “there is one particular value of [quantity], well within the range of values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, at which weird things happens, though nothing weird happens at even very slightly smaller or larger values of [quantity]”.
Anyway, I think the post would be more effective at getting the point across if the true statements were clearly weirder (even factoring in hindsight bias) than the false ones, whereas here the intention appears to be making them approximately equally as weird.
That seems reasonable. For comparison, consider the following statement, which is the Color equivalent of the first type of statement:
If you get light that’s too blue, first it becomes invisible, then it becomes mildly harmful to humans, more harmful the bluer it gets and if it gets really, really, really blue it can pass through solid objects. In the future,doctors will use devices that emit small amounts of this very blue light to look at bones under the skin, and the most destructive weapon ever created by humanity will be a device that emits enormous amounts of incredibly blue light.
...OK, that started out as saying “that’s how light actually works [i.e. extreme ranges do weird things], so it makes sense”, and turned into me talking about how the way light works is also super weird. Oh well.
It is literally true that a computer is a machine and that it adds, but “adding machine” brings to mind a host of specific attributes that are not true for computers. “Floating black spheres” doesn’t similarly imply other attributes.
Also, “adding machine” is a noncentral description of computers because it omits important attributes that computers have. If that was likewise true for floating black spheres, then the example isn’t crazy at all—for instance, perhaps the spheres are nanobot swarms that can do almost anything, and being able to lower a male prostitute on a bungee cord is just a specific example of “anything”, and whoever described the spheres to me is being dishonest (although literally accurate) by failing to tell me that.
I think the idea is that “adding machine” is supposed to be the closest equivalent that a person from 1901 can understand, and that excuses the noncentral, misleading, description. It really isn’t, so it doesn’t.
Also, X-rays aren’t more blue than regular light. We often say that, but it’s shorthand for “x-rays have more of one particular trait that blue light has” and we normally say it to people to whom we can explain exactly which trait we are talking about and thus avoid misleading them. We wouldn’t say that the planet Venus is “very, very, Arizona” just because it’s hot, and especially not to someone who is likely to conclude that you mean it has even more cacti in it than Arizona.
Yes, if given a choice to believe one or the other, we’d all probably choose the speed one. But the person in 1901 is not being given the color option as a counterpoint, they’re just being told “if you go really, really fast, reality turns into an Escher painting.” I don’t know about you, but had I been born in 1901, I’m pretty sure I’d sooner believe in Scientology.
(Of course, someone in 1901 would answer “Who the hell is Escher?” :-))
ETA: And “What the hell is Scientology?”, too. Jokes aside, I would probably agree if I was a randomly chosen person in 1901, but I’m not sure I would if I was a randomly chosen physics graduate student in 1901. I mean, If there’s a reason why only four years later the Annalen der Physik published an article proposing special relativity but none proposing Scientology. (I’d probably still consider quantum mechanics less plausible than Scientology, though.)
Maybe some kind of hindsight bias is at work, but I think I would have found Statement 2′ a lot less crazy than Statement 2: the latter requires there being several billion male prostitutes, which (assuming that less than 20% of all males will be prostitutes and about 50% of all people will be male) would require a world population of several tens of billions.
(One of the main reasons why I would’ve found Statement 1′ very unlikely is the “exactly 670616629.2” part, but I’m sure that was not your point: I’m sure you would assign a much lower prior to “I (army1987) generated a random 32-bit number a few minutes ago and it was 735,416,352” than to “… and it was more than 1 billion”, but you won’t be shocked to know only the former is true. So I’ll pretend it said “between 600 and 700 million miles per hour” instead.) I think I would’ve found Statement 1 crazier than 1′, too: the idea that one particular colour (within the convex hull of the set of all colours I’ve seen before) has quasi-magical powers but an ever-so-slightly bluer or greener one has no weird properties at all sounds pretty bizarre to me (and possibly unfalsifiable, if there exist infinitely many colours), in a way that the idea that there is a speed (several orders of magnitude larger than anybody ever experienced) such that weirder and weirder things happen the closest you get to it wouldn’t.
Statement 2 is more plausible than you think. Given the stated sizes of the spheres, it’s highly unlikely that they exist solely as prostitute storage units. I’d suggest that they’re aerial habitats, and prostitutes are just one of their many exports to the surface. They also offer really awesome bungee rides.
Alternatively, they could be organism production facilities, and the prostitutes are produced on site upon being ordered. They also offer pet velociraptors and colorful ponies.
Given the color and size of the spheres, I’m guessing they use solar power and stay aloft by being mostly full of vacuum. As such, statement 2 doesn’t seem particularly crazy.
People consider all sorts of wacky things evil, regardless of, or even in direct opposition to, what the previous generation thought of as evil. As such statement 3 doesn’t shock me at all. There are already some pretty solid arguments circulating about how locking people up for trivial offenses and giving them little or no opportunity to socialize except with career criminals is a bad idea.
Statement 1 is on it’s face inconsistent with what I know about thermodynamics, but there are some pretty big gaps in our understanding of how gravity works, so the paint could just be a way to request a lift from some orbiting tractor-beam taxi service. A stretch, but not inconceivable.
Possibly I am just numb to absurdity.
Good points, I hadn’t thought about that.
I’d still wager that there will never be more than 1,999,999,999 male prostitutes (or facilities to produce male prostitutes on demand) on Earth in the next 60 years, though. :-)
If they’re not exclusively prostitutes, this just requires 2 billion males that are willing to have sex for money. We already have billions of males that are willing to have sex for free, so all this actually requires is a societal shift in which sex-for-money is considered a respectable arrangement instead of an extremely low-status one.
Alternatively they can just be consider AI generic servants, whose duties include sexual deals.
You do realize that what you’re saying is classic hindsight bias, right? Saying that “Weird happens when you go a certain speed” is just as crazy as saying “Weird stuff happens when you’re a certain color”. There’s no real difference in strangeness between the statements.
Read my post again. It’s not a matter of speed vs colour, it’s a matter of “there is a maximum possible value of [quantity], much greater than almost all values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, and weirder and weirder things happen the closer you get to it” vs “there is one particular value of [quantity], well within the range of values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, at which weird things happens, though nothing weird happens at even very slightly smaller or larger values of [quantity]”.
Anyway, I think the post would be more effective at getting the point across if the true statements were clearly weirder (even factoring in hindsight bias) than the false ones, whereas here the intention appears to be making them approximately equally as weird.
That seems reasonable. For comparison, consider the following statement, which is the Color equivalent of the first type of statement: If you get light that’s too blue, first it becomes invisible, then it becomes mildly harmful to humans, more harmful the bluer it gets and if it gets really, really, really blue it can pass through solid objects. In the future,doctors will use devices that emit small amounts of this very blue light to look at bones under the skin, and the most destructive weapon ever created by humanity will be a device that emits enormous amounts of incredibly blue light.
...OK, that started out as saying “that’s how light actually works [i.e. extreme ranges do weird things], so it makes sense”, and turned into me talking about how the way light works is also super weird. Oh well.
It is literally true that a computer is a machine and that it adds, but “adding machine” brings to mind a host of specific attributes that are not true for computers. “Floating black spheres” doesn’t similarly imply other attributes.
Also, “adding machine” is a noncentral description of computers because it omits important attributes that computers have. If that was likewise true for floating black spheres, then the example isn’t crazy at all—for instance, perhaps the spheres are nanobot swarms that can do almost anything, and being able to lower a male prostitute on a bungee cord is just a specific example of “anything”, and whoever described the spheres to me is being dishonest (although literally accurate) by failing to tell me that.
I think the idea is that “adding machine” is supposed to be the closest equivalent that a person from 1901 can understand, and that excuses the noncentral, misleading, description. It really isn’t, so it doesn’t.
Also, X-rays aren’t more blue than regular light. We often say that, but it’s shorthand for “x-rays have more of one particular trait that blue light has” and we normally say it to people to whom we can explain exactly which trait we are talking about and thus avoid misleading them. We wouldn’t say that the planet Venus is “very, very, Arizona” just because it’s hot, and especially not to someone who is likely to conclude that you mean it has even more cacti in it than Arizona.
Yes, if given a choice to believe one or the other, we’d all probably choose the speed one. But the person in 1901 is not being given the color option as a counterpoint, they’re just being told “if you go really, really fast, reality turns into an Escher painting.” I don’t know about you, but had I been born in 1901, I’m pretty sure I’d sooner believe in Scientology.
(Of course, someone in 1901 would answer “Who the hell is Escher?” :-))
ETA: And “What the hell is Scientology?”, too. Jokes aside, I would probably agree if I was a randomly chosen person in 1901, but I’m not sure I would if I was a randomly chosen physics graduate student in 1901. I mean, If there’s a reason why only four years later the Annalen der Physik published an article proposing special relativity but none proposing Scientology. (I’d probably still consider quantum mechanics less plausible than Scientology, though.)