Thank you for that humorous insight. I am entertained by the knowledge that my car has a fuel efficiency of 0.0784 mm^2.
Theist
Karma: 250
One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means. Yet.
(Apologies to Alan Perlis etc)
...pain is far stronger than necessary as a warning sign.
It seems pretty clear to me that this was not true in our ancestral environment. It may be the case in our present artificially benign environment however.
I think it would be more clear if it included the previous sentence:
Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind.
Or perhaps just substituting “[Scientific education]” for “It”.
[context added]
Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around.
Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
-- Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett
I find a meditation-like focus on my breathing and heartbeat to be a very effective way to fall asleep when my thoughts are keeping me awake.
“I accidentally changed my mind.”
my four-year-old
I had a similar problem when I read Feynman’s QED. His explanation felt so simple and easy to understand when I read it, but when I tried to explain it to someone else I couldn’t make it make sense.
It’s bad luck to be superstitious.
Over time, wealth eventually causes the cultural changes we call “moral progress”.
This seems a non-sequitur to me. There are a number of examples where wealth and moral progress are found together, but there are also examples where they are not. China and oil-rich Arab states come to mind.
This raises an interesting question: If you received a contact of this sort, how would you make sure it wasn’t a hoax? Assuming the AI in question is roughly human-level, what could it do to convince you?
“I can’t see it, so you must be wrong.”
my four-year-old
“Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”
The Amazing Criswell
Incidentally, my favorite cameo in the all-cameo cast of dozens.
If mangled worlds is correct (and I understand it correctly), then sufficiently improbable events fail to happen at all. What kind of limit would this place on the problems you can solve with “quantum suicide voodoo”?
An important consideration is that our society has a very strong taboo against polygyny.
It’s ok. The orange juice vouched for the cereal.
Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
Fabulous story idea.
There is a simple way to rapidly disrupt any social structure. The selection pressure which made humans unable to realize this is no longer present.
Where does a ball alight,
Falling through the bright midair?
Hit it with your snout!
-- unnamed neo-dolphin poet, Uplift War by David Brin