That could work. Any suggestions on what to pick?
http://dirtsimple.org/2006/08/how-to-decide-what-you-want.html
2006 seems like a long time ago in Ebyworld, I don’t know if that still matches his current thoughts well.
sfb
Karma: 443
But an adult will never learn second languages faster than a child
Child → several years to fluency.
Adult → http://fluentin3months.com/ he started learning other languages in his late twenties.
Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life,
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].
Are you very interested in making more paperclips, Mr Tyler? Or should I say, Mr Tiler?
“Ten thousand trillion litres should cover it!”
“Nope”
Oops.
Because you could have more quickly raised your estimate by a large amount to make sure you got it “right”.
Why spend a long time getting 133,000Km when you could have put 133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Km?
Because, the author claims, you think “narrow range is better, looks smarter” even though that’s not what was asked for. You spent a long time making it ‘more accurate’ and consequently got it wronger wrt. to what the question was asking for.
Where you say radio and radioactivity, I expect the rate of discoveries like that to slow as we discover a larger amount of the finite “things to discover”.
But as for making use of discoveries, the middle of the 1900s saw LASERs (1960), transistors (1950s), optical fibre (1952), credit cards, barcodes, solar cells, hovercrft, superglue, tippex, hard disks, satellites. All things which are arguably game changing, and giving 1890-1905 a run for it’s money.
Also, the early 1900s are somewhat distorted with things like Jet Engines, where turbines were proposed and patented in the 1790s, but unable to be built. As soon as the ability to build more precisely and strongly was developed, a lot of queued inventions popped up.
So it seems there will be a burst of invention after similar enabling technologies become widely available—when we can reliably build “enough” kinds of nanotechnology components, there should be a corresponding burst of already waiting low hanging nanofruit harvested.
Enlightenmas is nicely pronouncable, but it doesn’t look as good as Bayesmas.
People in the 50′s were expecting space travel and flying cars, not www, wikipedia, geonome sequencing
Some people were, but not all. Buckminster Fuller was writing about the trend towards information proccessing before 1940: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherealization
The curse of visible intent. Those afflicted by this find their innermost secrets such as fear, surprise, eagerness, alarm, desire, all show up in consistent facial muscle changes for all the world to read, a betrayal by their own flesh.
St Addahad’s Symptoms. A small group of symptoms including fleshy growths, nerve clusters and neural pathways which result in a near permanent state of distraction as patterns of air pressure change are translated into thoughts and inserted into the mind with disruptively high priority. “Sounds” from all around, indoors and out, near and far, from nearby footsteps to distant thunderstorms or even one’s own bodily functions all combine to make a state of prolonged focus nearly impossible to achieve, though this ability can be regained somewhat with practise.
As with many curses, St Addahad’s sufferers describe benefits as well, such as being able to know things are happening without needing to see them, and to know which direction they are happening in, and some even report being able to balance without handholds. These trivial sounding benefits appear so addictive that most refuse to be treated. Efforts are underway to cause the onset of these symptoms by technological means, but there is debate on the moral issue of such experiments on humans as the necessary interventions cannot wait until the age of consent.
The Ultimate Affliction Unimaginable torment and suffering by subtle and cruel methods. A mind’s model of the universe is realigned so it perceives through the flaws in itself, and senses an ability to change the world however it pleases, where no such ability can exist. The state of the world is observed, interpreted into ‘events’, and compared against imaginary desired states, and with each mismatch comes suffering, every moment bringing another opportunity to suffer. Taunted by confirmation bias, such a mind can be driven insane when the outcomes it desired and the outcomes it observed match on some occasions; believing that this is proof that it’s delusion is real and if only it was better, stronger, cleverer, it could turn these incidents into a continual happening, only to keep discovering that Fate has a different plan.
Habituated into assigning labels to areas of concept space, each area is meta-tagged with “good” or “bad”, and this is the subtle yet effective twist by which the mind is turned against the very reality in which it inhabits, and by the mystical wonders of self-reflection begins to generate it’s own suffering. No other known suffering is so simply induced, so long lasting, so wide ranging and so difficult to temporarily calm completely.
Happily this most horrifying of all known curses has both a near term cure from a reworking of though processes to dismiss the “desired outcomes”, though this can be very hard to induce; and apparently a far term cure, as our universe is trending towards states that many of these minds desire it to have. We theorise that as the universe and the desires match more and more closely, suffering will be correspondingly reduced.
Alternately, Western ‘word salad’ Philosophy might benefit from a bit of reinventing:
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy’s flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
[..] There’s a market for writing that sounds impressive and can’t be disproven.
CronoDAS’s Brother’s Co-worker tried to sabotage CronoDAS’s Brother’s work.
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” -Oscar Wilde
I don’t think it’s worth a quick read as she doesn’t discuss the arguments, just trots them out, but let me try for some karma with a summary:
Science wants to reverse ageing but that has drawbacks says Joan Bakewell.
Ageing process reversed in elderly mice, but no reason for excitement.
Anti-aging for looking young deludes people, bodies age, get used to it.
Years ago people were crippled by disease, this is the proper field for what medicine should do.
Cryogenicists are ‘frantic’ for eternal life, but the world might be different, and why bother trying if revival is uncertain? Who would revive damp and out of date people to add to population problems? Some deluded people get only heads frozen—creepy.
Most don’t want immortality but living longer is good, but also planet should stay same which gives a resources problem. We can’t eat sand, science proposes flights to Mars.
We must consider benefits of anti aging against costs even though it’s distasteful to calculate like that, but China’s one child family rules do that.
Author is too old to benefit from anti-ageing future, but isn’t worried.
Benefits of current longevity: grandchildren marrying, lifestyle pleasures.
Negatives: isolation, lack of employment, rejected by mainstream, indifferent/distant family, inept carers, entropy.
Life is about family, friends, memories; the young are too busy and dismiss these so we old people have to set patterns for their old age.
OK, simulating time travel for the hell of it sounds good, I still question the buffer limit idea:
“Simulated time travel now working, but what should we set the Horological Constant value to?”
“Dunno. Three years? A thousand years? Just enough time to undo saying something rude? MAX_INT seconds? AVAILABLE_MEM? User configurable?”
“Oh whatever, it’s time to go home, I’ll just put six simulated hours and be done with it. Shall I start locking up?”
That would be a disappointing reason for the 6 hour limit, and an unconvincing way to make the universe work so that the plot works. I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
I suddenly really hope Harry doesn’t “Where did all you zombies come from” travel back to himself as an infant to destroy You-Know-Who for the second-first-only time as the end of the book, leading to his obliviated-adult-in-the-form-of-a-child brain as the cause of his “childhood” genius.
Also, Merlin in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King lives his life backwards in time, from old age to youth—is that canon!Merlin, and does that property carry over to the Merlin to whom the characters refer in HP:MOR?
(fixed simulation resources / increasing population) = less magic per person
(fixed simulation resources for magic / increasing population using magic simultaneously) = less spare magic at any given moment
Were the sort of ideas I was thinking. But, if it’s a simulation it needn’t compute in realtime, so it is a weak suggestion.
Either that, or that’s the size of the simulation’s event buffer. ;-)
Assume they are in a simulation—why would it have an event buffer created able to compute time travel at all, and why pick 6 human hours (equivalent) as the magic number constant for it?
Presumably simulating a human brain is harder than simulating the same mass/volume/atom count of solid metal, so as the population increases has the time-turner interval shrunk correspondingly? Seems unlikely it would settle on such a round number if it was changing with population. (Or is that why magic is getting weaker—as the simulation computer fills up?)
For the record he says 3 months to fluency is his personal goal, not what he guarantees/claims is always possible.
There are videos of him speaking on his various blogs, but since I don’t speak any non-English languages I can’t judge his fluency, but I expect he is conversationally competent and not indistinguishable from a native, and yes he has to work hard at it so it’s not the same kind of easy learning as children have, which seems to be what your links support, so no argument from me there.
However, he still seems to learn a useful conversational ability in a language in months whereas children take years to do that, so I still think your statement “but an adult will never learn second languages faster than a child” is a strange claim, unless you specifically mean “like a native”, which seems a much stricter test than necessary.
From your links:
Yet the results of child language learning are not equal or always total fluency—plenty of adults barely seem to know what they are saying, cannot express themselves clearly, do not finish sentences ‘properly’, don’t notice the difference between similar words and sentences with different meanings, and people cannot orate without learning to be orators, cannot write without learning to write (I mean author well written texts instead of drivel), cannot tell stories captivatingly without practise, cannot follow official formal documents, and other linguistic things which you might lump in with fluency or might not, leading to potentially very different expectations of a fluent person.
The second link makes several comments including adult lack of opportunity (limited classroom time) which is interestingly mentioned here: http://www.fluentin3months.com/hours-not-years/