TheStevenator

• TheStevenatorAug 1, 2011, 3:27 AM

  3 points

  on: Say Not “Com­plex­ity”

  I’ve been working my way through the sequences in order for the last few weeks and trying to read all of the links. I love this blog and tell people about whenever I can.

  Reading these entries has helped me realize some of the ways in which I tend to think incorrectly, and I hope I am taking it slow enough to reflect enough and make myself think better. :)

  I suppose I should comment about at least one thing relevant to this article in particular. Posted at 4:22 am?! When do you sleep, Eliezer?

• TheStevenatorJul 31, 2011, 7:24 PM

  0 points

  on: Is Molec­u­lar Nan­otech­nol­ogy “Scien­tific”?

  I forget who this commonly used quote is taken from, but I find it useful when discussing potential future technologies with people. “If a celebrated scientist says something is possible he [unfortunately the quote does use only ‘he’] is almost certainly right. If he says something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.”

  I, as a lowly college student, would hesitate to call almost anything impossible. Speaking with the benefit of reading lots of dead smart people saying how impossible things that are trivial to us now are, I feel comfortable saying that future technology will likely surprise a lot of us. How surprised we’ll be, however, depends on how much we underestimate ourselves and how much we constrain our imaginations.

• TheStevenatorJul 27, 2011, 11:59 PM

  10 points

  on: A Fable of Science and Politics

  Is it just me, or did Ferris have the best reaction? It seems to me that if everyone reacted this way to learning something so exciting, the world would be a much better place. it doesn’t say what Ferris believed earlier, but perhaps the point is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is the magic of the reality, not how it relates to prior conceptions.