It's honestly pretty sloppy. The maze has a bunch of smeared lines on it. I think the only "doubt" is coming from journalists using cliche phrasing.

If they overpower the humanity trying to stop them from doing those things, yes.

It was meddling by both D and R in our economy, both were scared of invisible boogiemen of "something bad might happen".

Fear is a great motivator. Courage is standing in the face of danger understanding the risks might be worse doing nothing than doing something. This is a calculated risk and ought to be rewarded in the marketplace if it is correct.

Conglomerates are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. The good is they offer efficiencies in the marketplace. The bad is they take advantage of those efficiencies and often get "too big to fail" (a lie).

People guessing who have no stake in the market are making bad choices, because of other reasons. Both D and R do this. I call it the "There ought to be a law" reactions. Nobody stops long enough to say "no there shouldn't be".

Do Two parent families vs single parent families.

Making it in this world is about making good choices consistently. Constantly telling people the world is stacked against them (it's true, but for almost everyone) and that trying is a waste (it isn't) is a huge mistake. Citing your skin color for success or failure is simply a crutch.

Do 4 things, consistently leads to above average outcomes, on average because most people can't do those four things. Life does not have guarantees but it does reward good choices over time.

See Poker (and not sports betting) for example. Also, Poker doesn't care what color your skin is.

You'd be amazed at how little effect firing execs actually has over the option of firing a bunch of low level worker bees .

Fire 1 exec for 12 Million salary
OR
Layoff 250 worker bees and save 25 million in salary expenses .

Nobody cares about workers at the level where these decisions are made.

Filed Under: "One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Stalin (allegedly)

I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!

"even one time"

Unless you never use a password, in which case, you log in via all the other available options BUT password. You don't notice it missing. Passwords are so 1980s, get with the program.

I don't use biometrics because .. lets just say they are their own version of compromised. You cannot be compelled to give up your Password (legally) (hammer method is still valid) but a fingerprint, face ID etc that doesn't require you to speak can be compelled. I have no idea why people think it is "more secure" to use biometrics.

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

How does one discern the difference between someone hurling an epithet randomly based on topical knowledge versus someone wanting to discuss actual Nazi doctrine from 1930s?

How much influence do you think FDR had on Nazi politics before the bad stuff started? Most Americans have no clue how closely FDR aligned with Adolf before it went sideways.

Calling everyone a Nazi doesn't work any longer, except in the crowds that don't care about diminishing the horrors of 1930's Germany. But you don't care about history, so you hurl epithets all around hoping something sticks.

See: Boy who cried wolf parable.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.

Alright. Let me take the gloves off and be serious, since your other new response was a shitpost beyond reckoning.

Trivialism will not help you: the generation of consciousness is undecidable because we do not have a concrete definition of it.

The intended meaning of my comment was that the subjective experience of consciousness, like the Internal Revenue Service, is probably an emergent phenomenon built upon an immensely complex framework. "Missing the forest for the trees" comes to mind—if you're looking at the fundamental interactions that enable the atoms of the trees to exist, you'll never figure out that the trees were planted to spell out a message when viewed from orbit.

This gene, HAR1, is a non-coding RNA that we have known for decades is the smoking gun for human intelligence. It is key to the development of our language skills and absent from chimpanzees. If the authors of the paper were serious about studying the emergence of subjective consciousness, they would throw all their energy into deciphering how this gene influences brain development, then walk backward up the taxonomic tree, repeating the same diff-and-analyze operation until they reached nematodes, which have only a handful of neurons and are so simple that the average person can memorize all of the possible interactions and behaviors of those cells.

There is no room for a God of the Gaps when it comes to nematodes. They can be emulated by a Turing machine with perfect fidelity. They have no subjective experiences beyond those experienced by the billions of macrophages inside of you or a simple paramecium.

Interestingly all of these things thrash around wildly when they receive a fatal injury, ostensibly for the same reason we do—the pain is overwhelming and movement is an efficient way to introduce a competing signal that dilutes the misery. To the layperson seeing this through a microscope for the first time may be a bit horrifying as it seems rather relatable. But it isn't part of consciousness—resisting it is. It's just instinct, the result of a web of signalling molecules and proteins trying to minimize feedback loops caused by negative stimuli.

With all that said—the Simulationist argument is almost always made in bad faith, or as a result of someone acting in bad faith trying to plant seeds in the minds of others. It has long been a thought-terminating cliche wielded by nihilists and eschatologists to justify apathy and other actions that devalue life on this planet. Deciding whether the universe was constructed or not does not matter, because there are no tangible consequences of simply possessing a yes/no answer to that question. Belief will not tell us how to find bugs to exploit, nor will it give us proof we could ever escape from it. To do either, we would need actual direct evidence of artificiality that rules out all alternatives, and even that may not yield any utility.

However, advocates of nihilism do have something to gain from disseminating Simulationism—they get to push narratives about how it is fine to abandon social responsibility. In milder cases of internet-poisoned solipsism, they think it's fine to screw up (because nothing is "real"); more severely, Millerite cultists believe that a completely antisocial value system (donate all your money to the church and wait for the Rapture) is the optimal approach to life. Most dangerous are the oligarchs pushing this narrative: if you do not care about the universe, then you probably don't care about politics and won't stand in their way when they shred public institutions. This is basically what happened in post-Soviet Russia, though they didn't have to work nearly so hard to achieve it.

Because of these manipulative ideologies, anyone who promulgates or advocates a belief in Simulationism needs to be dealt with harshly and cynically to discourage them from openly proselytizing to the public. Unfortunately the battle is, in the main, very much lost for now, but so long as we know how to recognize the enemy we stand a chance of outliving them.