Saw it, only because I happened to look at recent comments at the time.
AllanCrossman
Karma: 546
We’re in danger. I must tell the others...
Ugh. The horrible music is the worst thing about church. Give me sermons about fire and brimstone any day.
Again I have failed. Actually I’m not sure I know what an RPG convention is...
OK, some results of a Google image search for “RPG convention crowd”:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/88/228173741_969d7a39dd.jpg (Penny Arcade Expo, does this count as RPG?)
http://www.palladiumbooks.com/press/GCIndy2k4/crowd4.jpg (Gen Con Indy 2004)
http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb61/Ghastrian/Gen%20Con%202009/?action=view¤t=2009-08-14142434.jpg (Gen Con 2009, not the greatest shot)
Eliezer asks so I deliver (MtG conventions):
http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/magic_nationals_2008_player.jpg
http://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/events/pthon09/Players.jpg
http://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/events/usnat09/SF_AndersonGindey2.jpg
This is cherry-picked slightly—I ignored some pics with relatively low numbers of people, and some pics that looked like they weren’t in the U.S. (but these had few females in attendance too).
This might explain the maintainance of the trait better than how it came to arise in the first place… but maybe that’s good enough.
an enabler for speeding evolution
While the idea of evolving the ability to evolve faster might be made to work, it needs to be spelled out carefully, lest it attribute foresight to evolution.
Ordinarily you have trait X and you say it increases fitness and goes to fixation in a population, but it’s less obvious how this works with the trait of evolving faster… which is not to say that such a thing is impossible. But you might need to invoke differing long-term survival of large groups of species, or something...
But does it work well in any environment? Someone, I forget where, once argued that rape in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness—where everyone knows everyone—would just get the rapist’s skull bludgeoned in by the victim’s friends or relatives.
(Though to be fair, a number of possible circumstances where this wouldn’t be true could be imagined, I suppose...)
A lot of stick and stones civilizations that can read, are there?
Not yet.
I’m not sure I’m understanding properly. You talk as if my action would drastically affect society’s views of friendship. I doubt this is true for any action I could take.
Though not exactly a quantum immortality believer, I take it more seriously than most...
Objections mostly seem to come down to the idea that, if I split in two, and then one of me dies a minute later, its consciousness doesn’t magically transfer over to the other me. And so “one of me” has really died.
However, I see this case as being about as bad as losing a minute’s worth of memory. On the reductive view of personal identity, there’s no obvious difference. There is no soul flying about.
Is there a difference between these four cases:
I instantly lose a minute’s memory due to nanobot action
I am knocked unconscious and lose a minute’s memory
I die and am replaced by a stored copy of me from a minute ago
I die, but I had split into two a minute ago
I’m not seeing it...
(Well, admittedly in the final case I also “gain” a minute’s memory.)
Philosophers.
This is a common thought that seems to occur to a lot of people.
The flaw is that, when you go to sleep, you will wake up later. The situation is not analogous to quantum suicide.
Quantum immortality asks us what future experiences could plausibly be considered “mine”. In the roulette case, only worlds where I survive have such experiences.
But in the insomnia case, there are future experiences that are “mine” in both the worlds where I remain awake, and the worlds where I fall asleep. The fact that those experiences are not simultaneous is irrelevant.
I think I’m with Bostrom.
The problem seems to come about because the good effects of 18 people being correct are more than wiped out by the bad effects of 2 people being wrong.
I’m sure this imbalance in the power of the agents has something to do with it.
One suspects this is mainly because all extra whitespace is simply ignored in HTML...
I wonder if you might have seen this essay by David Brin...
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy—this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, “Oh, goody, let’s go serve an evil Dark Lord”?
Or might they instead have thought they were the “good guys,” with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring—the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return … bringing more rings.
Open Thread: September 2009
You mean without brute-forcing it by creating every conceivable person? (I’m sure I read something in Deutsch to the effect that infinite computing power might be available in certain universes...)
There’s been so much here lately on things like Newcomb and whatnot, we could do with some more normal threads...
I’m not sure stars can be called “flying objects”.