• 4 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • There’s a lot of possibilities.

    My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

    Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

    Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.




  • I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

    I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.





  • “Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

    First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

    Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

    Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”




  • Start with a carbon tax. It’s crazy that the one thing in the world that’s free everywhere is air pollution that destroys the whole planet. And many of the activities that contribute to it are heavily subsidized. Just make things cost what they should cost, and the rest solves itself.







  • Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

    And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.