The signal sent by Trump is that he will take a call from whomever he wants; the Chinese don’t get to dictate with whom he speaks. The idea that it makes China more likely to attack Taiwan is ridiculous.
knb
Karma: 5,366
Another aspect to consider is that Hitler had spent the decades leading up to the war declaring the Soviet Union to be an existential threat and noisily pre-committed to a massive seizure of Eastern European land. He dedicated an entire chapter to the topic in Mein Kampf. So Hitler had perhaps already tied his own hands before he even came to power.
I immediately thought of this.
I agree, but that isn’t what Adams did. Adams first claimed Trump is a master persuader who was virtually certain to win. When Trump was way down in the polls with only weeks left, Adams then switched to predicting a Clinton win, using the Trump controversy du jour as a rationale.
Updating on the evidence would have involved conceding that Trump isn’t actually an expert persuader (or conceding that persuasion skills don’t actually carry that much weight). In other words, he would have had to admit he was wrong. Instead, he acted like the Trump controversy of the time was something completely shocking and that was the only reason Trump was going to lose.
Adams also frequently hedged his bets and even changed his prediction once the odds for Trump appeared too long to overcome. This is pretty much what you would expect from a charlatan.
The idea here is that humanity had started forming true civilizations before 10,000 BC, and a comet impact or airburst over one of the ice sheets caused a huge fireball and flood that led to mass extinctions and the annihilation of civilization
There’s no mystery about what caused the quaternary mass extinction—humans reached the Americas and wiped out the ecologically naive megafauna.
Hypothesized to be pushing off the quantum foam.
I’m pretty sure this does not make any sense.
I don’t really see how this could be helpful. The biographer would have to be able to discern which qualities made the person successful and translate them into actionable specifics. In practice, it’s pretty hard for highly successful people to explain their own success in an actionable way even when they seem to be sincerely trying (e.g. Warren Buffet.)
I’ve played around with the Playstation VR demo at Best Buy and tried a Galaxy Gear VR at the mall, but was pretty underwhelmed by both. Are the high-end products like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive really that much better?
Yudkowsky showed laughable naivete (or he was just playing dark arts) by citing a bunch of “foreign policy experts” who were against Trump. They were against Trump because they were neocons who might have a spot in a Clinton administration but certainly not in Trump’s. (People who describe themselves as “experts” implying impartiality should never be taken at face value—most of the times they are advocates rather than experts.)
Hillary Clinton’s state department pushed the “Arab Spring” policies which turned the middle east and north Africa into a total slaughterhouse and caused hundreds of thousands of people to die and displaced millions, causing a huge increase in tensions and threatening EU integration. I don’t really see why anyone would want to trust the “expertise” of the people responsible for this. Of course, Scott Alexander supported the Libya intervention (and moralized about it obnoxiously). Has he ever admitted he was wrong?
Part of the reason I estimated the chance being that high was because I thought (at that time) we were fairly likely to have a recession or major terror attack, which would swing the election to Trump. Neither of those happened, but Trump still won. More recently, II did think the big media company polls were systemically biased by at least a few points in Clinton’s favor, so I give myself some credit for that.
I too was wrong. I gave him a 45% chance on this site several months ago and my estimate had hardly changed by yesterday (in fact my estimate got slightly worse, down to 40%.)
Agreed, that’s pretty much why I think he’s crazy. He appears to have devoted an insane amount of effort to a fundamentally pointless activity.
He’s probably just crazy.
I don’t think so; different types of car are bought by different people and driven differently. E.g. a person who buys a Lamborghini or Ferrari probably likes to drive fast and show off; a person who buys a Volvo probably drives a lot more carefully.
The driver also erred in failing to brake, probably because he was inappropriately relying on the algorithm.
Yep, according to the truck driver, the Model S driver was watching Harry Potter, and it was still playing even after the car came to a stop. He probably had his eyes completely off the road.
The truck pulled in front of the Model S. The Model S had enough time to break and stop but didn’t recognize the truck against the brightly lit sky.
What do you think are good ideas for moonshot projects that have not yet been adequately researched or funded?
I think apples-to-apples comparison is tricky here. Things like the age structure of the population can matter a lot here. A country with an average age of 50 should have a higher level of net worth than one with an average age of 30.
In any case I’m not sure net worth is the valid way to think about “how rich we are” compared to income or consumption or quality of life or whatever.
If true that’s mainly an argument against making pointless precommitments you can’t possibly enforce. As it happens, I doubt Chinese pay all that much attention to these kinds of diplomatic bugbears.