Additionally there’d be a much more obvious and earlier warning than for a “conventional” tsunami, allowing more people to reach safety in time.
bramflakes
Global effects come from an impact roughly every 500,000 years, so the odds are about 20 percent for a catastrophic, civilisation-threatening impact within 100,000 years.
That doesn’t reassure me.
There’s no reason to expect the Machines to care about human suffering.
Also I don’t see why creating a simulation requires that you start flashing messages at its inhabitants.
Forgive my ignorance, but is introducing penicillin such a good idea? It would provide a considerable advantage in the short-term, but once the cat gets out of the bag and the knowledge spreads to the rest of the Empire (I assume it’s not that difficult to manufacture), you’d have antibiotic resistance everywhere, and no international medical community to clamp down on over-prescription.
Additionally, showing off what biodiesel can do might kickstart general fossil fuel extraction before the technology exists to monitor pollution and greenhouse gas levels.
What is the most recent time period in which one could be transported to (with full 2012 knowledge), and still have a high chance of taking over the world, or at least a powerful country or nation-state?
Would disseminating germ theory really help all that much? Rome itself might have been a fairly literate society, but in the time it would take to overcome all the inferential distances in just the educated classes, the drug would have spread like wildfire through the rest of Europe and the Near East by merchants hoping to make a quick sesterce from selling the “miracle cure” to the peasantry.
But in order for them to even give a meaningful probability estimate, they’ll need to spend years actually studying the relevant physics and mathematics. It doesn’t matter how eloquently you explain MW—the Universe doesn’t run on rhetoric.
If you ask people about MW versus CI, from their perspective it’s no different from asking “does the glibbleflop spriel or does it just florl?”
When understanding is forgotten, education remains.
Though I don’t remember who said it.
This is contingent on whether the duel would last for 15-20 minutes. To my (admittedly leaky) memory, we haven’t seen a proper duel in MoR yet, and I don’t believe that any duel in canon lasted for that long either.
My first thought when reading that was that they were simply falsified records.
But it’s pretty well established that having Power User status is genetic.
I’m disturbed that you’re considering rejecting something just because it was written by a Social Democrat, and at the same time talking about politics being the mindkiller.
Orwell might have been right about doublethink.
Thanks for the clarification.
Well Draco’s not coming back now.
Hopefully Eliezer will throw us a short section from Draco’s point of view as he extends the Bayesian Conspiracy to Durmstrang or wherever.
I’m sorry I might have missed it, but where did the notion of humans being turned into house elves come from?
It would be difficult to separate cause and effect here. A culture where interrupting people was taboo in the first place might develop a similar syntax.
Speaking of rigor, I’ve come to love Spanish’s subjunctive mood because I can inject doubt into a statement by changing a single syllable, whereas in English I need to mess about with cumbersome disclaimers to say the same thing. Also, if I’m making a subjective value judgment, I can clearly indicate that it’s a fact about me, not a fact about the world.
Aren’t national anthems designed from the ground-up to trigger this sort of emotional reaction anyway?
Your family cleans up the mess and puts leftovers into a refrigerator.
Was this part intentionally disturbing?
Hello, I’m 16 years old and from the UK. I found this blog via MoR and I’vebeen lurking for a few months now (this is my first post I think), and I’m slowly but surely working my way through the sequences. I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can identify a lot of the biases and irrational thoughts as they form in my brain, but unfortunately I’m not well-versed enough in rationality to know how to tackle them properly yet.