jnicholasp

Amazing, Germany has radically innovated a way for people to travel throughout the country via a (logistically) complex system requiring multiple stops, transfers, waiting for vehicles to arrive, unload & reload, where transporting large or heavy items or managing children is extra hassle & stress, where you're exposed to hundreds of strangers' behaviors & germs and the enforcedly generic environment that has to accommodate everyone by not being particularly well-suited to anyone.

Public transport is a good thing to have, but extolling it as a desirable-in-itself, convenient way to travel as compared to personal transport is simply not viable.

Cities don't use public transport,people do. The public transport system for a given city, as compared to the personal transport choices made by individuals, is Worse Is Better in all the ways I said.

Public transportation is obviously WIB: one solution "fits" all, monolithic, logistically complex, not amenable to rapid & piecemeal innovation, good enough for basic function but doesn't & can't offer excellent function either in UX or non-core use cases. Advocating for the superiority of public transport in the same comment as you're espousing the virtues of bespoke software is cognitively dissonant.

Not true in my mid-sized city in the Pacific Northwest.

Anyone riding a motorcycle who is simply blindly counting on other drivers to see them, follow all the rules of the road carefully, and never do anything unexpected, is not going to last long. Everything motorcyclists do has to be done in such a way that it will still be safe even if the other cars around them are all but actively malicious. Fortunately, motorcycles are extremely agile, quick, and small, so it's easy for the attentive, cautious rider to anticipate and avoid most hazards. The trick is just managing to always be sufficiently attentive and cautious.

Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity).

Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.

Do you expect an alien species that is intelligent enough to create the technology to travel through space will understand math in a way that is at least in principle intelligible to humans?

If yes, is it possible that there are also other ideas that all intelligences are likely to almost necessarily converge on?

We're obviously not living in a best-of-all-possible-worlds simulation, but that doesn't preclude us either from being in a simulation or from being in one created by thoughtful entities for morally good ends.

If you consider that bringing into being all possible worlds and all possible creatures whose existence is net positive in utility to themselves, is a good and desirable and interesting project, then you would end by creating an untold number of simulations, many of which would not be the, or mistakeable for the, best of all possible worlds.

And it would be possible that many creatures who grew up in and formed a unique, not otherwise achievable, identity in the not-perfect worlds could graduate/ascend/sublime into one or more of the more perfect worlds after they had lived a life in their home simulation.

And being such a creature in such a home simulation, not yet ascended or aware that there are other places to ascend to, could also be a solution to the Fermi paradox: we see no other aliens because we have been placed here at least in part to develop our specifically human nature, without the dilution of that nature via the influence of other creatures. Cf. the Star Trek policy of non-intervention, the Prime Directive [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive].

I think you forgot to write what should have been paragraph three of your comment, but from context I'm guessing that your proposed effective, ethical response to repeated nonsense is just to change the subject and see who goes with you on the new track?

Any more than it is begging the question to assume that there cannot be anything that is beyond physical explanation?

Yes, words are symbols. But when we're talking about consciousness, we're talking about the experience itself, not the association between the word and the experience. And we have no understanding of why or how the experience exists in us.

Why are you trying to tell this guy what he should value? He wants to do work that interests and excites him, and he's making the tradeoffs that balance his personal set of values - with, incidentally, far more information than you have about what those values and specific tradeoffs are.

Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.

This, exactly. I don't understand why these aren't required stock equipment on all cars.

Birds? Source?

They were simply commenting that there were a couple people they especially admired, who they think are really decent (i.e., better than average at being decent). It is neither a necessary nor a natural reading to think that means they believe everyone else is below average.

And in a similar vein, we have only very recently become able to detect (some) objects such as this one, and shortly after we gained the ability to spot things like this, we spotted this one. It at least allows the possibility that events like this are not incredibly rare, and we just haven't been able to perceive them until now.

I'm not affiliated with Optina and I don't know specifically what they're doing, but the classic symptom of Alzheimer's is the formation in the brain of amyloid plaques - and it appears to be the case that they also form on the retina, and can thus be detected by appropriate optical scans.

What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.

No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent.

There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.

Is there any evidence that people who are at high risk for Alzheimer's will benefit from a regular regimen of antioxidants, then?

How many more successful, country wide, democratic movements would there have been in the history of humanity if there had been a means of communication and coordination as effective as the internet?

"Need" is distinct from "makes far, far easier and likely". It can be done without the internet, obviously, but the circumstances in which it can be done are undoubtedly far more rare.

For one, as kazinator said in the sibling comment, even in the best democracies this is only true of a small percentage of government jobs - there are many powerful agencies and influential staff positions that are not elected and therefore not subject to the oversight of the people over whom that power is exercised.

Two, yes, many of the highest profile, and most powerful, positions are elected. And in practice, over time, this means that these positions have selected for people who are 'electable' - which has itself over time come to mean people who can raise huge amounts of campaign money. This is a deeply corruptible situation, if indeed it is not already deeply corrupted.

I agree with the idea that open public oversight is a powerful corrective, and is a major difference between private organizations and public ones with effective means for perceiving and removing corrupt officials. I think it is highly questionable to what degree the latter describes our current situation in much even of the democratized West.

The opposite condition also exists: I don't understand how some people can be so paranoid about large corporations, and so trusting of government. They are both merely human organizations with large powers, and subject to corruption. We should be wary of both of them.

At the very bottom of physics, if we ever reach it with our observations and theories, there will be something that simply is, and is not explained by the interactions of some sub-system. The foundational elements of physics are probably non-conscious (assuming the currently known particles and fields are indeed non-conscious).

What grounds do we have for asserting as certain that consciousness is not a foundational thing-that-simply-is, but must definitely be composed from sub-systems that are themselves non-conscious?

> Lets assume there is some sort of physical process involved

You're begging the question. Why is "some sort of physical process" the only hypothesis space you're considering?

> Because, as far as we can tell [...] conciousness is dependent on our brains.

This is neither a logical/mathematical proof, nor an empirically established fact. So how do you know? Why are you making statements of faith in what seems to be the scientific worldview, when the actual scientific worldview is that we should never make statements of faith?

> the process that makes conciousness is also governed by physics.

How do you know that this is true?

> Because the brain is composed of physical matter

Is consciousness?

> made a spherical chalkboard

Interesting. How? Chalkboard paint on a globe? Does it ride in/on a globe carriage?

I don't know if you've done any home wiring, but in case you haven't and it seems like something you'd have to hire an electrician for, it really isn't. Swapping light fixtures, at least, is super easy, and so are things like installing dimmer switches. You can make a big difference in your home's lighting in a couple hours, and Google and Youtube can answer any questions you might have.

Just a vote of confidence from somebody who cares about not having shitty lighting at home :)

Over millions and millions of years. A civilization that could colonize another planet could manage to mitigate or outright solve that kind of problem with that kind of time.