Philosophers are apparently about as vulnerable as the general population to certain cognitive biases involved in making moral decisions according to new research. Apparently, they are as susceptible to the order of presentation impacting how moral or immoral they rate various situations. See summary of research here. Actual research is unfortunately behind a paywall.
JoshuaZ
Karma: 20,212
No offense to you guys, but this is why I don’t play RPGs with other people. Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make “efficient” “overpowered” characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win.
I generally don’t play “optmized” characters, but the fact that there are some character types which are more optimal for most purposes (surviving games, making DMs cry, etc.) is well acknowledged. One can have fun discussing those issues independent of any characters one actually plays in a game.
There are however, some circumstances where it really does matter. Say for example one is playing a very high intelligence wizard in D&D 3.5. The fact is that throwing fire balls at everything is very fun, but not at all effective compared to battlefield control and buffing. So if one has a wizard who likes doing that sort of thing, you need an in game explanation for why they enjoy solving things with explosions so much.
It is also worth noting that in some games, the problem of optimal characters gets so severe that it makes it for some arrangements of characters where it is extremely difficult or impossible for a DM to match something that corresponds to the difficulty level of all the characters. A genuine threat to some characters will be the same level that makes other characters useless or dead. The 3.5 Tier list was made to try to help understand and fix this problem. So these issues do impact real game play.
For those not well-versed in DnD minutae, combining the abilities of a glass-cannon class (like a wizard) and a stealthy burst-damage class (like a rogue) tends to result in a quite overpowered character.
I think this is very edition dependent and what multiclassing rules you are using.
The situation is a bit more complicated. Wikipedia has a good summary. There’s also been more recent work which suggests that the outer end of the habitable zone around red dwarfs may be larger than than earlier estimates. See my earlier comments here on this subject.
The low luminosity of red dwarf stars makes them unsuitable for an earth-like environment, I believe. I don’t have enough information to comment on a non-earthlike environment supporting life.
Red dwarfs have a smaller habitable zone than our sun, but if you have a planet close enough to a red dwarf this isn’t an issue. This is exactly the problem: if there are some set of not so likely series of events that will occur, then one expects to find civilizations around red dwarfs. If one expects that’s not the case then the big habitable zones on somewhat bigger stars make one more likely to expect a civilization around those stars. We see the second.
The stability of red dwarves, however, could work as a filter in itself, limiting the number of global extinction events.
Possibly, but I don’t think that any of the major extinction events in Earth history are generally attributed to large solar flares or coronal mass ejections or the like. So it seems like asteroids and geological considerations are more than enough to provide extinction events.
This hypothesis is interesting and not one I’ve seen at all before. It seems to run partially afoul of the same problem that many small early filters would run into- one would be more likely to find civilizations around red dwarfs. Is there a way around that?
Essentially the second, although the first could be a problem also. The point is that the incentive structure isn’t there for them to precommit.
Each time this has lead to big changes in the polling industry. I would suggest that one important scientific improvement is for polling companies to announce the methodology of a poll and any adjustments to be made before the poll takes place, and commit to publishing all polls they carry out
This would be a great change, but if they are worried about looking silly for having an incorrect outlier it may be very hard to create an incentive structure to get them to actually do this.
Data already suggests from a number of studies that people over-estimate how much information they can glean from stereotypes. See for example the studies involving names and resumes.
This is a very interesting/amusing idea. Unfortunately, moving substantial quantities of water would be very difficult. I’m presuming you are joking about this proposal.
Can you expand on this reasoning? Water use is a planet wide issue and is even more relevant for less developed areas. This seems like something that could have very high pay off.
I’m upvoting for the sentiment but I don’t think the quote is very accurate. It doesn’t take execessive stupidity to make this mistake. It is a very common mistake made often by even very bright individuals. If it simply took excessive stupidity it wouldn’t be nearly as common a problem.
Has any science fiction writer ever announced that he or she has given up writing in that genre because technological progress has pretty much ended?
Charlie Stross has expressed disappointment that technological change hasn’t been as rapid as he hoped for in the mid 1990s, but that’s a very different claim. I don’t think anyone has claimed that progress has stopped completely, and it would be very strange to do so. Yes, the specific technologies involved in space travel have not progressed much but even in those areas progress is still occurring: the rise of cubesats and private rockets, the spread of highly accurate civilian GPS, the ability to send long-lived rovers to other planets—these are all advances in the last 20 years.
Outside space issues, there’s been big jumps in technology- the most obvious changes have been (and continue to be) in the computer related fields (e.g. cheap smart phones, rise of big data, general increase in computer power level, drastic reductions in bandwith cost) but there have also been major improvements in other fields.
Let’s look at medicine. HIV used to be a death sentence and now the life expectancy of people in much of the developed world with HIV is close to that of the general population. Death rates from various cancers continue to decline. Many tests are faster and more reliable. You seem implicitly to be using a 45 year time window, but in either a 45 or a 20 year time window, these advances are pretty clearcut.
I could continue with other fields but the general trend is clear: progress may be occurring slowly but technological progress is still definitely going on.
Is there a standard metric for inanity of biological claims?
Hm, Wikipedia seems a bit more pessimistic:
One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space exploration, and even the use of satellites, unfeasible for many generations.
Hmm, interesting. I have to confess I’m not at all an expert on the matter, but the general impression I get is that most serious discussions have looked at LEO becoming unusable for a few years. I’m surprised that one would think it could last for generations because the general maximum amount of time an object can stay in LEO before air resistance drags it down is generally on the order of decades at the maximum.
I wonder if there is some tradeoff where larger planets have a bigger gravity well that’s much more difficult to get out of, whereas smaller planets don’t have as much of an atmosphere, which means that space junk sticks around much longer, and also there is less surface area for it to cruise around in.
That is interesting, but I don’t think it works as a strong filter. It would mean that every single species is being incredibly reckless with their use of low-earth-orbit, and even humans are already taking serious steps to minimize space debris production. The idea that planets slightly larger than Earth would have serious inconvenience for getting out of the gravity well, especially if they have a thick atmosphere is a plausible issue: the more likely problem with smaller planets is that they may end up then more like Mars.
Either way going to space is an expensive proposition with a dubious economic payoff, and society ends up retreating in to VR/drugs/etc. “Why hasn’t your society built self-replicating spacecraft?” could be a question similar to “Why do you keep playing video games instead of doing your homework?”
That might explain some species, but is very hard to see it as filtering out everyone. It means that no alien equivalent of Richard Branson, Elon Muks or Peter Thiel decides to break through that and go spread out, and that this happens for every intelligent species. Heck, spreading out at least somewhat makes sense purely for defensive purposes, in terms of things like asteroid shields which even if one is in a VR system one wants to take care of. To continue the analogy this would be akin to every class in every school having no student completing their homework.
Has there been any discussion of space junk?
In what context? I’m not sure how space junk would be a Great Filter. There is a risk that enough space junk in orbit could create a Kessler syndrome situation which would render much of Low-Earth-Orbit unusuable, and possibly in the worst cases impassable. But the very worst cases the event lasts for a few decades so you can ride it out. What are you thinking of?
I don’t think that follows. Whether people are spread out or clustered won’t impact whether they engage in catrastrophic activities as long as the same number of people.
For many of the one’s you’ve mentioned they do stop fairly locally as long as there’s a big separation. Diseases jumping from continent to continent is much easier than jumping from planet to planet. Similarly, a grey goo scenario or a nantotech diamonding scenario isn’t going to go impact Mars.
I suspect part of the downvoting is not just due to the content but the use of the loaded word “whores” which has very negative connotations.
Edit: Nevermind. I see that Fiftytwo made the same point. Sorry for wrecking signal/noise.
By window I meant the following: you said that ” they have witnessed rapid economic progress in their own societies in their own generation, so they wouldn’t understand the appeal of Western pessimism about apocalyptic and dystopian futures.” If that is what is going on, then the next generation may not see that as much. If so, we have around a generation. I agree that if the economic progress continues at a fast pace that may not end up with some of the issues we have here, but in general developing countries have as they’ve neared parity with the developed countries had their improvement rates by many metrics slow down and come more or less into alignment with Western growth rates. Look at for example infant mortality levels and expected lifespan.
Yes. absolutely would be of interest.