A small correction: The Society for Venturism has been around for quite a while, although I have a vague impression they’ve been more active in the last year than in the past. I had a look at their site to see when they were founded (1986), and noticed they’re currently raising funds for someone else, Aaron Winborn.
Nic_Smith
Karma: 855
So… does that mean that Phil saw what he was expecting to in the reactions he got? ;)
Meetup : Chicago Organizational Meeting and Open Discussion
I have mixed feelings about Casshern Sins, which I watched over the weekend. It has an excellent soundtrack, kind of neat figure-it-out plot, and a surreal dreamlike quality that reminds me (a lot!) of Squall’s Dead. That said, the resolution to the puzzles don’t really make any sense (it seems halfway plausible at the end that, in-universe, eating Casshern really would grant immortality—it’s certainly no stranger than the ruin being caused by nyy gur qrngu rfpncvat sebz Yhan jura fur jnf xvyyrq), and characters and perhaps the series over all are engure rkcyvpvgyl qrnguvfg, bs gur fvyyvrfg “qrngu tvirf zrnavat gb yvsr” glcr.
Meetup : Zendo in the West Loop
I was hoping the mode would be 2147483647 (my answer) to at least provide some humor, but 0 has it beat handily.
Tomorrow will most likely be the last Chicago meetup on a weekly basis; I’ve created a calendar for us on Meetup. The Google groups mailing list also remains active.
Meetup : Predictions Chi September 15 (September 8 -- cancelled)
Yes.
A dramatic understatement—I found this to be far superior to WAitW, as it’s more concrete and offers reasonable advice to its readers. By being more systematic, it strikes me as a better illustration of WAitA than the actual WAitA article.
I am reminded of a particular SMBC involving Superman.
Somewhat more seriously, I can’t help but think that this post starts with far-mode idealization: would it really be difficult to turn people away for personal reasons if you had magical healing powers? Or is it merely uncomfortable, and perhaps usually bad signalling, to admit you would?
The Census Bureau has projects that they do between decades, even though “The” Census is only every decade.
The Good Future Research Center
A wink to the earlier I.J. Good Institute idea, it matches the tone of the current logo while being unconfining in scope.
Do you mean theists rather than deists about halfway through?
B&N Nook version is also currently free.
And I trust it has been explained here that non-scientists are best off not trying to second guess the science, but relying on the expert opinion.
Not saying anything directly about the immediate topic, argument screens off authority and we really do have examples of experts getting things terribly off. Even if that weren’t the case, “trust the experts” would still be a terrible heuristic as it’s likely to be gamed.
Sapir-Whorf , Savings, and Discount Rates [Link]
The palaeolithic humans did not seem to do any really insane religious stuff
Why? The first thing I checked has one anthropologist speculating cannibalism might have occurred during the paleolithic for religious reasons, and on the whole doesn’t look very encouraging.
Ideas are not rival in consumption and are therefore not private goods, nor does the implementation of an idea prevent re-implementation of it by someone else. They are also of questionable excludability.
There’s something to that, but it’s not as if Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis is going to have the cover of Spice and Wolf 1.