Is Eliezer alive and well? He’s not said anything here (or on Hacker News, for that matter) for a month...
AllanCrossman
Karma: 543
I think it’s Herreshoff.
4.2 − 1 = 3.2. Simples.
If the various species of ET are such that no particular species makes up the bulk of sentient life, then there’s no reason to be surprised at belonging to one species rather than another. You had to be some species, and human is just as likely as klingon or wookie.
“why am I me, rather than an animal?” is not obviously sillier than “why am I me, rather than a person from the far future?”.
Well, quite. Both are absurd.
I suppose. The comment could be:
“Also Crystal nights is a good story about a topic of some interest to the futurist/transhumanist element on LW, namely rfpncr sebz n fvzhyngvba.”
Reading through it now. There are two relevant words in Roko’s description, only one of which is obvious from the outset.
Still I’m not sure I fully agree with LW’s spoiler policy. I wouldn’t be reading this piece at all if not for Roko’s description of it. When the spoiler is that the text is relevant to an issue that’s actually discussed on Less Wrong (rather than mere story details, e.g. C3PO is R2D2′s father) then telling people about the spoiler is necessary...
if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now
I don’t think this argument works. Adaptive evolution has mostly been driven by DNA mutations and natural selection. DNA is transcribed to RNA and then translated into proteins. I’m not sure evolution (of Earth’s cell-based life) could produce something radically different, because this central mechanism is so fundamental and so entrenched.
Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds
I’m not sure how this affects the argument, but the very flexibility of proteins is one of the things that makes them work. A whole bunch of biological reactions involve enzymes changing shape in response to some substance.
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
Nobody bothers to make a fuss about ghostists because ghostism isn’t particularly important.
Do you also get annoyed by people who don’t believe in ghosts who criticize people who do without being aware of their own irrationality?
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can’t be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn’t seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man.
It’s not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to “a monkey gave birth to a man”.
you could try asking them
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like “Well all I know is that God is just.” Or they just say “Hmm.” What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Or reading their books
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I’m not sure how heavily it’s defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that “I do not regard Scripture as infallible [… but …] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible”. She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God’s doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
flaunting Biblical quotations [...] does not make a good argument
It’s necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
going “nyah! nyah!”
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers.
Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
Why that Culture novel, precisely? I don’t recall it as one of the better ones.
Admittedly, I’m unusual in that my favourite Culture story is The State of the Art. General Pinochet Chili Con Carne! Richard Nixon Burgers! What’s not to like?
“Small Sounds, Big Deals: Phonetic Symbolism Effects in Pricing”, DOI: 10.1086/651241
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/651241
Whether you’ll be able to access it I know not.
If the player has the SPADE:
1⁄3 of the time, he also has the HEART.
2⁄3 of the time he doesn’t, and so must choose the SPADE.
1⁄6 of the time he chooses the SPADE though he did have the HEART.
So 5⁄6 of the time he chooses the SPADE, but only 1⁄6 of the time does he choose the SPADE while having the HEART.
Thus, the chance of him having the HEART when he has chosen the SPADE is 1⁄5.
Huh, integer. I don’t know how that got past me when I wrote that.