(as for me, I read it because I woke up one hour before my alarm clock, spent half of that unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep, didn’t feel like getting up, and my phone was already on my nightstand)
A1987dM
Karma: 15,285
The main issue with this is that the only people who will actually finish reading this are the ones who already agree with your points (or, at least, disagree with them for reasons other than not being familiar with them), and hence don’t need to read this (except for the sake of reading fiction as leisure). Everybody else is going to stop reading a few paragraphs in.
By the way, I seem to remember a series of polls (on Twitter by Zvi, IIRC) about various scenarios asking the readers whether they’d consider them “doom”, “bloom”, “gloom” or something (one of them involved all currently living humans being allowed to live happy lives and die of old age but no more human babies being born). Can any of you remember where this was?
FWIW, TIL that the antifungal I’m taking is racemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itraconazole#Chemistry
Some human languages have untranslatable 4, e.g. Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quotus
80% of those are things I semi-regularly do in my own prose, FWIW
For what it’s worth, I’m a human and yet when I read the title of this before reading the post itself I guessed that “December” referred to December 2016 not December 2024 (and the post would be arguing that lame ducks can’t actually be said to be still “serving” in some sense, or something like that).
Huh, apparently someone still understood enough of my comment to upvote it despite the automatic conversion from the original LW markdown source to the current HTML having been completely botched.
[Fixed it by hand now]
Another example of the bottom-end exception: if you book a hotel or B&B at the last possible week, it’s possible that it will both be expensive and suck, because both the mediocre but reasonably-priced ones and the pricey but decent ones will have been fully booked for weeks.
As he says, the standard advice of allowing 2 hours before a domestic flight makes absolutely no sense in today’s world.
The worst part of hearing that advice over and over again is that the rare times they are right you will still ignore them. (I once got an email from Lufthansa to that effect, ignored it as usual and proceeded to arrive at the airport one hour before takeoff as I usually do for within-Schengen flights with no luggage to check in, found out there was some kind of strike at the airport and much much slower queues than usual, and missed my flight.)
But most of the 85% of people who don’t run couldn’t run a quarter mile at any speed
Any speed? I’d be rather surprised if anywhere near 42.5% of the population (especially if also counting people outside the US) would be unable to “run” a quarter mile in 10 minutes if they tried to.
How come B&N can ship to a ton of different countries including San Marino and the Vatican but not Italy???
How come B&N can ship to a ton of different countries including San Marino and the Vatican but not Italy???
Wait, is “throw spaghetti against a wall and see if it sticks” something you Americans actually say? (I hope not actually do.) I always thought it was something we Italians made up to mock Americans for eating overcooked pasta.
(and “not negligible” is not a terribly high bar: if one kid in a million is like that, you only need 20 bits of evidence to know a particular kid is one of them)
It’s tautological it the number of such minors is allowed to be zero, so by the maxim of relevance he probably meant to suggest it is not negligible—but not necessarily also that it is close to 50%, especially not 50% among the general population rather than just 50% among the children of the kind of people he is talking to and/or about.
But OP said “sufficiently talented” not “median”...
1 is irrelevant to autotrophs (e.g. cyanobacteria), who can synthesize their own food from achiral CO2 using sunlight; 2 is pretty much guaranteed if it’s the only mirror life form in the ecosystem; 3 is obvious if it’s the mirror image of an already existing life form; and it doesn’t have to do 4 and 5 to achieve 6 (even a mirror cyanobacterium not otherwise interacting with non-mirror life would keep replicating and replicating exponentially until the biosphere runs out of CO2 or whichever other achiral nutrient turns out to be the limiting factor)
[ETA: Without following the link,] I have no idea whether you agree with them and “serious adults” is supposed to imply Eliezer isn’t one, or you agree with Eliezer and mean “serious adults” sarcastically