Any politics that claims to be on the side of rational discussion without ideological zealotry needs a clause "Manifesto-writers see yourselves out." Despite this particular new crop popping up online, no, it doesn't count if your manifesto is about how bad people who reduce things to manifestos are. You don't get points when your unsubstantiated, simplistic essay is about how we should be on the team that substantiates arguments and isn't so simplistic. Practicing what you preach is hard, but man, at least make an effort.
To be fair, these aren't random people off the street; it's crowdsourcing from a pool of interesting people chosen by a fairly proven editor. (That, and a policy of answering questions by finding the single person who can grant absolute truth is surely worse.)
Do people visit the pyramids to appreciate their unexplored parts? You can think about the mysteries of the pyramids from anywhere in the world; people visit just to see something impressive in person.
What's interesting about that problem is that (for me, at least) knowing that that is enough information to solve it makes solving it a lot easier. If I was just told to make as much headway as I could, I'd get stuck on some tricky geometry, but once you're told that the answer is a single number, not in terms of any variables, the method of solution became clear.
Say they're "organizationally independent but philosophically aligned" with the Long Now foundation; I assume they at least have some formal arrangement with the original?
Curiosity: how much Mencken have you read? It's odd to say someone who thinks he was racist (he really, really was) has only read his Wikipedia page, and then post a wall of text from a different single source.
I think this flowchart is addressing some commonly asked questions as well as providing a guide. There's more information in the links below; basically, even if you think you saw it fall from the sky, you actually didn't, and that isn't a reason to discount the flowchart and think you saw a meteorite.
Co-signed, especially the idea that studying the humanities is useful even though (in fact because) the conclusion they give is often that these problems are hard and complicated. The most common reason I find myself wishing people approaching these problems in tech formally studied humanities is not because the humanities have "the answer" but because if you think you have an answer, it's almost certainly been thought of before, and analyzed for decades.
Not reading admittedly boring and often inane philosophical books and instead trying to build your philosophy from first principles... tends to lead to whatever philosophy was created 50 years ago and has now permeated culture. Like how for a while, every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy ended up at utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments had been made a long time ago; these days, people thinking about the internet, social pressure, and the nature of reality seem to be slowly re-inventing Foucault and Baudrillard without daring to touch the confusing French texts.
There's nothing supernatural going on, except that the film is a very obvious and self-aware pastiche of, uh, pulp fiction plots. The Ezekiel quote is borrowed from an old martial arts movie, and the characters fully admit they just say it because it sounds cool before killing someone.
At the point where you think China's doing better on an issue than California, you're not talking about free speech anymore. People getting mad at you for saying things they don't like is not "shutting down speech," it's... speech.
I guess technically I'm one of those people whose been involved in bitcoin over the past 8 years, so the general take is that people who've been interested in bitcoin for a long time generally care about the idea of decentralizing power and allowing truly free exchange more than any particular currency, should recognize that wild speculating on bitcoin can only hurt its effectiveness in achieving these goals (and probably indicates that bitcoin itself isn't the right tool for this in the long run), and should be keeping their head down until the overvaluation passes and we can go back to valuing bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies on their actual merits, rather than because we think we can trick someone in the future into caring about them even more than we do. Thanks for the question!
Last night in a restaurant I overheard the table next to us getting excited about Bitcoin, based on the rumors of friends of friends. At the point when one quizzically said "But you only use it on the Internet? You can't see a broker in person?" we all started recalling that line about when the taxi driver starts giving you stock tips...
I know this is for a casual audience, but claiming that because bears and dogs are both caniforms, "bears are, in essence, massive, really distantly related dogs," is just... frustrating. It's fine to simplify, but it's so easy to avoid blunt inaccuracy in this case.
Actually, after that sentence they do a completely straight explanation of an interesting research project, and don't mention the potential analogy until the end, where they again go out of their way to say that isn't the point.