faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
No bio...
User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I for one would be ecstatic to have my parents around for longer, along with the rest of their generation, even if it robs my generation of its due.
I agree that greatly extending the human lifespan would cause massive societal problems. I am willing to struggle with those massive societal problems for as many centuries as it takes.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Crystallizing this further, I think particularly in the case of depression / anxiety / ADHD, what happens is that a cultural meme develops that some common facet of the human experience is caused by some specific disease, and that the appropriate way to fix this is to obtain treatment.
Examples:
-
Alice notices that she does not enjoy things that she's "supposed" to enjoy. She's heard that this can be a symptom of depression. She looks up "how to tell if you have depression", and reads that common symptoms include apathy, lack of interest, excessive sleepiness, and insomnia. Now, every time she has trouble falling asleep, she thinks "wow, this depression sucks" and not "I am having trouble falling asleep". She looks up "what to do if you have depression", and sees the usual suggestions about sunlight / therapy / medication. She thinks "well, they were definitely right about my symptoms, so they're probably right about the treatment as well", and gets a therapist and a sunlamp.
-
Bob notices that he's having a lot of trouble focusing on his job as Senior Manipulator of Boring Numbers. He has heard that trouble focusing can be indicative of ADHD. He looks up "symptoms of ADHD", sees fidgeting, absent-mindedness, difficulty focusing, and forgetfulness. Now, the next time he is introduced to a room full of people and has trouble remembering their names, he thinks "wow, ADHD sucks" and not "wow, I'm bad at names". He obtains some amphetamines, which is what you do when you have ADHD.
-
Carol notices that her heart rate is elevated and her muscles are tense before her board meeting. This has happened before the last three board meetings too. She googles "elevated heart rate tense muscles" and sees that, according to WebMD, she either has anxiety or lupus. She knows that WebMD is strangely likely to say that people have lupus, but the description of anxiety is on-point. Additionally, there are some new ones on there, like "difficulty concentrating", which she didn't think were caused by the same thing as the thing where she gets way too nervous before important meetings, but maybe it is after all. She talks to a therapist, and learns that indeed, all of her problems are because she has a disease called "Anxiety", but with the proper therapy schedule and medications, she can probably live some semblance of a normal life.
-
Dan notices that he's been having trouble with his sexual performance. He goes to the friendly neighborhood elder, who informs him that this is a common symptom of being cursed by witches. When you are cursed by witches, lots of bad things can happen, including livestock death, sudden inexplicable vomiting, and impotence, and in extreme cases, your penis sometimes even disappears! The next day, one of Dan's chickens keels over and dies for no apparent reason, and what's worse, he starts violently vomiting after eating the dead chicken. And oddly his penis feels smaller than usual. What was it that elder said he should hang above his door again?
Hypothesis if this is a usefully predictive model of the world: People who read their horoscope on a daily basis are more likely to experience chronic pain than those who don't, even when controlling for all of the obvious confounding factors. I expect that this would be the case because I expect "reads the horoscope daily" to be a reasonably good proxy for both "is searching for an overarching narrative of why things are they way things are" and also "is prone to confirmation bias", and I expect that "you have chronic pain" is one of those things you're more likely to believe if you're searching for an overarching explanation and tend to look for evidence under streetlamps.
Crackpot theory time: It would be possible to significantly reduce the burden on chronic pain by doing something like the following:
-
Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time
-
Changed something plausible about their lives
-
Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change
-
Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function
and then loudly broadcast the existence of this group of people at people who have chronic pain. I expect that this intervention would work even if people knew you were doing it, as long as you (correctly, I think) pointed out that your narrative is more plausible than the narrative of "sometime in the recent past, a phenomenon started happening where otherwise-healthy people started experiencing significant pain for no apparent reason, and found themselves unable to live their lives normally due to that pain, and found that, though the pain might sometimes temporarily improve, it always comes back". Because "I do sometimes experience pain, but it's not continuous" and "I sometimes experience a reduction in pain to the point where it's not noticeable, but the pain always comes back" in fact describe exactly the same set of experiences.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides 6 million Jews and 3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are
-
13 millionSoviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc),4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular) -
1 - 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians
-
Hundreds of thousands of Romani people (credible estimates vary widely but at least 130,000 total)
-
Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
-
Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
-
How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
-
Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
-
Okay, how about if the people you murder are people who might hypothetically be able to organize resistance to your invasion?
-
If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city.
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
I, Paul Blobel, swear, declare and state in evidence:
- I was born in Potsdam on August 13, 1894. From June 1941 to January 1942 I was the commander of Sonderkommando 4A.
- After I had been released from this command, I was to report to Berlin to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich and Gruppenfuhrer Muller, and in June 1942 I was entrusted by Gruppenfuhrer Muller with the task of obliterating traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were that I should report in person to the commanders of the Security Police and SD, pass on Muller's orders verbally and supervise their implementation. This order was top secret and Gruppenfuhrer Muller had given orders that owing to the need for strictest secrecy there was to be no correspondence in connection with this task. In September 1942 I reported to Dr. Thomas in Kiev and passed the order to him. The order could not be carried out immediately partly because Dr. Thomas was disinclined to carry it out, and also because the materials required for the burning of the bodies was not available. [...snip due to character limit, full text available here ...]
- According to my orders I should have extended my duties over the entire area occupied by the Einsatzgruppen, but owing to the retreat from Russia I could not carry out my orders completely....
Blobel's last words were
Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those who murder me.
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
Again, that interpretation is nice if correct. Can you point to anything in the document which supports the interpretation that saying "We have assessed that leaving this debug interface provides user benefit because the debug interface allows the user to debug" would actually be sufficient justification?
My mental model is "it's probably fine if you know people at the regulatory agency, and probably fine if you don't attract any regulatory scrutiny, and likely not to be fine if the regulator hates your guts and wants to make an example of you, or if the regulator's golf buddy is an executive at your competitor". If your legal team approves it, I expect it to be on the basis of "the regulator has not historically gone after anyone who put anything even vaguely plausible down in one of these, so just put down something vaguely plausible and we'll be fine unless the regulator has it out for us specifically". But if anything goes as long as it's a vaguely plausible answer at something resembling the question on the form, and as long as it's not a blatant lie about your product where you provably know that you're lying, I don't expect that to help very much with IoT security.
And yes, I get that "the regulator won't look at you unless something goes wrong, and if something does go wrong they'll look through your practices until they find something they don't like" is how most things work. But I think that's a bad thing and the relative rarity of that sort of thing in tech is why tech is one of the few remaining productive and relatively-pleasant-to-work-in industries. You obviously do sometimes need regulation, but I think in a lot of cases, probably including this one, the rules that are already on the books would be sufficient if they were consistently enforced, but they are in fact rarely enforced and the conclusion people come to is "the current regulations aren't working and so we need to add more regulations" rather than "we should try being more consistent at sticking to the rules that are already on the books", and so you end up with even more vague regulations that most companies make token attempts to cover their asses on but otherwise ignore, and so you end up in a state where full compliance with the rules is impractical but also generally not expected, until someone pisses off a regulator at which point their behavior becomes retroactively unacceptable.
Edit: As a concrete example of the broader thing I'm pointing at, HIPAA is an extremely strict standard, and yet in practice hospital systems are often laughably insecure. Adding even more requirements on top of HIPAA would not help.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Assuming that other consciousnesses exist does not produce better advance predictions of experiences
Sure it does! I talk about consciousness, and what I say about it is caused by how I myself experience consciousness. If consciousness exists in others, I expect them to talk similar experiences to consciousness to the ones I have, and if it doesn't exist in others, well then it's pretty weird that they'd talk about having conscious experiences that sound really similar to my conscious experiences for some reason that is not "they are experiencing the same thing I am". If others were p-zombies, then sure all of their prior utterances may have sounded like they were generated by them being conscious, but absent a deeper understanding of how exactly their p-zombification worked, I could not use that to generate useful predictions of what their future utterances about consciousness would be (because, as we've established, the p-zombies are not just reporting on their internal state, but instead doing something else which is not that).
Modeling others as experiencing the same consciousness as I do does in fact lead to better advance predictions of my observations. It doesn't do so in a very philosophically satisfying way if you want to talk about axioms and proofs, but pragmatically speaking "other people are also conscious like me" sure does seem like a useful mental model for generating predictions.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I don't think reasoned beliefs are forced by evidence; I think they're chosen. He's arguing that specific beliefs aren't a choice, any more than believing 1+1 = 2 is a choice.
The choice of term "reasoned belief" instead of simply "belief" sounds like you mean something specific and important by that term. I'm not aware of that term having any particular meaning in any philosophical tradition I know about, but I also don't know much about philosophy.
He's arguing that specific beliefs aren't a choice, any more than believing 1+1 = 2 is a choice.
That sounds like the "anticipated experiences" meaning of "belief". I also cannot change those by sheer force of will. Can you? Is this another one of those less-than-universal human experiences similar to how some people just don't have mental imagery?
The larger point I'm hoping to get back to is that the deterministic model of reason that seems to be generally assumed is a fiction
I don't think I would classify probabilistic approaches like that as "deterministic models of reason".
But yeah I'm starting to lean towards "there's literally some bit of mental machinery for intentionally believing something that some people have".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I suspect that "belief", rather than "choice", is the word that you two are using differently. You can't choose your "beliefs(1)" in the sense of "what you anticipate what your future experiences will be contingent on taking some specific course of action", but you can choose your "beliefs(2)" in the sense of "which operating hypothesis you use to determine your actions".
I might be wrong though. It is conceivable to me that some people can change their beliefs(1) by sheer force of will.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
If you do figure it out, I expect at least a LW post or two about it 🙏
If I do, I will definitely make an LW post or two about it. May or may not happen, I have quite a lot going on in the next two months (and then more going on after that, because a lot of the stuff going on is "baby in 2 months").
I agree that this is how it'll likely work out (and it does in smart humans), but isn't that tantamount to enforcing internal consistency, just under adversarial stimulus?
I think the disagreement is more about how often the adversarial stimulus comes about. I expect that in most cases, it's not worth it to generate such an adversarial stimulus (i.e. it costs more than 0.01 A for an adversary to find that trade cycle, so if they can only expect to run the cycle once it's not worth it). So such an agent would trend towards an internally consistent equilibrium, given a bunch of stimuli like that, but probably not very quickly and the returns on becoming more coherent likely diminish very steeply (because the cost of incoherence decreases as the magnitude decreases, and also the frequency of exploitation should decrease as the payoff for exploitation decreases, so the rate of convergence should slow down more than linearly over time).
Ah, would that I had enough money to throw at a housefly and hope to stun it, but at least you're putting yours to noble ends haha.
That'll change with the officially becoming a doctor thing, I expect. And also becoming a doctor helps rather more directly with the whole pandemic preparedness thing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.
I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.
But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.
There's gotta be something else going on.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.
I claim that doesn't work either, if your environment is adversarial, because the difference between your model of the expected consequences of your actions and the actual realized consequences of your actions can be exploited. This doesn't even require an adversary that is generally more intelligent than you, just an adversary that notes a specific blind spot you have (see how humans can beat the wildly superhuman Go engine KataGo by exploiting a very specific blind spot it has in its world model).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
The majority of both plant's products work. If you have applications that need only a few working chips of a certain type, or individual working chips, you can use chips from either company without much bother.
But say you need 10 working chips of the same type, from the same factory. A single failure means the product is worthless. 0.97 x 0.97... = 0.74
0.94 x 0.94... = 0.54
On the flip side, if you have a test for chip quality which can diagnose bad chips with sensitivity and specificity of 75%, you can use that test to get from a 6% bad chip rate to a 2% bad chip rate if you're willing to throw away a little over a quarter of your chips. (Math: out of 1000 chips, there will be 705 good chips the test says are good, 235 good chips the test says are bad, 15 bad chips the test says are good, and 45 bad chips the test says are bad).
Even pretty crappy tests (0.75 is a terrible number for both sensitivity and specificity) can get you massive advantages over just relying on base rates.
So, by that thought process
Do you want a huge population of Afghans, Ethiopians and Sub-Saharan Africans coming to your country?
If we are capable of having the sort of process that is capable of predicting, not necessarily very well, just a bit better than chance, which particular applicants have an elevated risk of being a problem, and we're willing to use that process even if it unfairly rejects a significant fraction of applicants, then yes, I do want a huge (selected) population of immigrants from those countries coming here.
That said, I live in a country where the vast vast majority of residents have immigrant ancestors within the last 10 generations, and a solid quarter of them within the past generation (i.e. they are either themselves immigrants or their parents were). The "the country has a strong sense of solidarity because everyone belongs to the ethnic group that's always lived here" ship has not sailed, because that ship never arrived in the first place.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
There are a number of pro-bodily-autonomy-including-trans people on this site, myself included. There are a lot more people here who hold the position "body dysmorphia is bad" than "body dysmorphia is good", but that's because "body dysmorphia is good" is the straw "pro-trans" position [1]. I actually suspect that the following is a scissor statement here:
If medical technology advanced to the point that it was possible to functionally and reversibly change your sex, that would be a good thing. People changing their sex in that situation would be perfectly fine.
[1] Yes, I know that it is possible to find people who say something that approximates this. This is because, for any position, particularly about something political, it is possible to find at least one person who will support that position.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Have you ever seen a comatose patient with eczema? If the answer is "yes" that pretty firmly disproves this hypothesis, if "no" that means maybe there's something interesting going on there? Unless the reason the answer is "no" is "I don't see many comatose patients".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Per this, pigeon brains consume about 18 million glucose molecules per neuron per second.
We found that neural tissue in the pigeon consumes 27.29 ± 1.57 μmol glucose per 100 g per min in an awake state, which translates into a surprisingly low neuronal energy budget of 1.86 × 10-9 ± 0.2 × 10-9 μmol glucose per neuron per minute. This is approximately 3 times lower than the rate in the average mammalian neuron.
Human brains consume about 20 watts. Oxidizing 1 mol of glucose yields about 2.8 MJ, so the human brain as a whole consumes about 7.1e-6 mol of glucose per second, which is 4.3e+18 molecules per second. There are 8.6e10 neurons in the human brain, which implies that the human brain consumes about 5 million glucose molecules per neuron per second -- more than 3x more efficient than bird neurons (and more like 10x as efficient as typical mammalian neurons). Which says to me that there was very strong evolutionary pressure for human (and primate in general) neurons to be as small and energy efficient as they could be, and there is probably not a ton of obvious low-hanging fruit in terms of building brains that can compute more within the size, energy, and heat dissipation constraints that human brains operate under.
Of course, GPUs don't operate under the same size, energy and heat dissipation constraints - notably, we can throw orders of magnitude more energy at GPU clusters, nobody needs to pass a GPU cluster through their birth canal, and we can do some pretty crazy and biologically implausible stuff with cooling.
I'm pretty confident you've already read it, but on the off chance that you haven't, Brain Efficiency - Much More Than You Wanted To Know goes into quite a bit more detail.
I very much expect that was one of the planned-for contingencies, yes. I would not be shocked if she had explicitly put numbers on the probability it would come to that, and already made a decision on what she would do in that contingency.
I think you're modeling her as "typical 36-year-old woman who happens to exist in bay area rationalist circles" and I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".
See her post stating that is not just true, but too obvious to say that you should cryonically freeze yourself when you die, on the off-chance that you may be revived in the future. I think the set of people who can earnestly write that post and the set of people who object to having another woman carry their baby to term, on a deep enough level to not even consider the question, have very little intersection.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Perhaps this is my "thing-manipulator"-ness talking, but it seems intuitively obvious to me that if a teacher or professor is grading on a curve, they are not grading you on your capability or knowledge of the subject.
And if you look at the actual content of the test, you will note that you are entirely correct that it's not a test of "how well have you internalized the principles of economics", it's a test of "do you agree with Bryan Caplan's politics".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Convince them that their opinions are boring and low status. [...] Of course, this only works if you yourself are popular and high status. [...] Work on being high status.
This implies that there is a second viable strategy, which is "be as visibly woke, and also as visibly low-status, as possible".
I do not endorse alternative this strategy, despite expecting that it probably would work.
sneering at democrats and academics is not [the accepted norm here].
Er. What? One of the highest voted comments ever on this site is this one, which is basically "look at the ridiculous thing this progressive academic did", let's all sneer at the people who enable such nonsense. The key point, though, was that the sneering was at a specific bad action by a member of that group.
If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, and the condemnation was related to them being a childless killjoy, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".
ETA: also TW's comment was in the CW thread
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Scott wrote a bunch because he was responding to a bunch, and he was responding to a bunch because a meta analysis just genuinely is a bunch, and a meta analysis was necessary to draw any conclusions at all because there was, at the time, no single RCT with solid enough procedures and a sufficiently large sample size to draw reliable conclusions from that alone.
I don't know that I'd use "gish gallop" to describe someone dropping a meta-analysis of dubious quality into the discussion, despite the structural similarity.
That said, I do think an adversarial collaboration would have been a better way at making their argument legible to everyone else than a series of blog posts sniping at each other.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Why can't it be real? The Haber-Bosch process is at least as impactful of an "air + energy + water -> bulk useful material" process, and it's real and cost-effective.
Anyone who comes up with some process that
- Has low infrastructure costs
- Produces some industrially valuable product
- Spins up and down quickly, and tolerates long idle periods (i.e. starts producing the product as soon as you feed it power, stops when you stop feeding it power, and doesn't have issues if it doesn't start again for a long time)
has a license to print money when power costs dip to zero or below. Which they already do from time to time, and if solar power continues to be deployed more and more, that situation will happen more often.
Terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.
I drove a corolla until it started giving me trouble (around 300,000 km), followed by a prius until that started giving me trouble (around 400,000 km), both were IMO quite good cars. I think you should be able to get a lightly used one that is <10 years old within your budget in Scotland, and that should have all the creature comforts you want.
That said, for bluetooth specifically, for $20, you can get a thing which plugs into the cigarette lighter of a car and does bluetooth pairing and then broadcasts to a radio frequency (choose a dead channel), which you can then tune your car radio to. In my experience they work well enough that you never think about them once you've done the initial 2 minutes of setup - your phone just automatically pairs when you get in the car, and the car speakers play what your phone is playing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.
You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying
A possible critique might look like
Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
More options
Context Copy link