Does something technical in the Boston (MA, US) area. He/him.
“Rationalism” is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist’s mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don’t want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas – the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful – and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.
When their experimental subjects aren’t moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers – superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a ‘scream’ or ‘song’ that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.
Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.
Sure, but then you have to generate all that crap and store it with them. Preumably Github will eventually decide that you are wasting their space and bandwidth and… no, never mind, they’re Microsoft now. Competence isn’t in their vocabulary.
As long as it isn’t where he is, why should he care? He’s retiring on Mars, anyway.
(Please, deities, send Musk and Thiel to Mars soon. Together, if possible.)
You must prove yourself in the Outer Circle before being granted leave to study the Inner Mysteries. Or at least attend the right parties.
Tchah! Decker does not go far enough!
It is clear that there must be people better suited to raise children than a dimwit like him! He should arrange for his genetic superiors to breed, then give the babies to the perfect parents, and he should give them the one thing he has of value: money!
(and please have nothing else to do with children ever again, k thx bye)
It’s not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.
With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.
We don’t have that much luck, though.
I have seen some controversy about whether white-passing people of Jewish ancestry count as “white”
Let me clear that up: the people who ask if someone is actually white are racists.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
I suspect that he is incapable of admitting to himself that he is in a hole, much less that he dug it himself.
The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem – and a large fraction of trivial problems – require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.
Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can’t chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.
For about a century now we’ve had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don’t get what they want.
No wristwatch, but I have glasses and without electricity I stop breathing. (While asleep.)
So, yeah, cyborg.
Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.
I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.
What would effective accounting even look like?
True, it’s too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.
This is just shit.
A bunch of youse is thinking irrationally.
It’s them what go in front of the cannon.
Charlie Stross called the Singularity “the rapture for nerds”.
Good luck with that – I’m a pzombie this year for tax purposes.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.