joycian

What does "indirectly" include legally?

Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raising troops in support of Sulla's invasion force. Of course, legitimacy is a bit strange in the Sulla-Marius years.

But can you distinguish those states reliably?

But how do you know space isn't filled with a network of probes to detect just that? It seems to me you need to be confident you're first on the scene, or at least that the Precursors don't have such a huge lead on you that your diversions are useless.

Edit: Also it seems that by a strange argument combining 1) any civilization earlier than you is likely to be massively more technologically advanced and you cannot hide and 2) you exist, that any civilization could assume they are either first or first enough, which also seems to break the dark forest.

I don't understand something about this: how would the civilization that destroys another one know that they don't expose themselves to some even more hidden civilization? Isn't the best option to sit still and hope the Precursors don't notice you?

I like that you're asking for the mechanics. Many people just repeat their mantras.

If QE led to inflation quickly and in a simple way, we could have known that long ago. We didn't even have to do it ourselves: Japan did the experiment long before we did.

If you know, please explain it to me.

Balance of payments.

Not that uncharted, perhaps. You can look up the Amsterdam banking crisis of 1763.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_banking_crisis_of_...

Exactly, you give the government a way to replicate your insight, in return you get x years of monopoly. With the first part being non-existent (didn't inventors even have to supply physical prototypes etc.?) the patent system is easy to abuse.

Are there no widely used flak/AoE weapons that heavily punish tight formations?

If it's only that it would be pretty hard. Aggregated data would (probably?) be relatively safe.

Well even if you know that nobody can be identified from your data alone, if everyone releases data, it will become easier and easier to cross-reference and still identify people.

Yes, I think you're right, I should've written increased. Thanks for the correction :).

There's some evidence that around 2B years ago microbes decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere so much by overpopulation that 99% of the biosphere died.

No, that was already patched before Erastothenes. Some simple branch predictions based on behavior patterns of the Bronze Age civilizations were enough to get the change through management.

I looked this up and it seems very cool. Do you (or anybody else) know any more of these games or environments that can be controlled by code?

What's with the bimodal distributions for German there?

Could you recommend more like that?

If only they could be read by robots! Their formulation is actually quite unwieldy and wasteful:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/bigness-part...

Indeed, Arrhenius definitely had a 'slight clue' in 1896. It is probably comfortable to think that we really could not have known, but I think the reality is that it is often so much easier to kick the can down the road than to be careful in the present moment.

I don't know if it's useful to see it as a zero sum game. The sun is beaming practically unlimited energy out towards us (and a whole lot more that doesn't reach Earth but is still available eventually).

Even if it is zero sum: if we all stopped eating meat, we could pretty easily sustain ourselves. Putting it on population size instead of how that population behaves is not useful and frankly fatalist.

I never got that feeling from Dawkins? Could you explain?

Zero-K

A neuron contains thousands if not millions of transistor-equivalents in the form of gene level and ion level switches. I'm not saying that you couldn't do it with 100 transistors, or that everything in a neuron is needed for this application, but I just wanted to clarify.

I think it's more Freelancer

Someday, this line of argument is going to conclude that humans are not intelligent.

To be fair, our brain is also split into two halves that have limited bandwidth to communicate. It's not clear how much bandwidth is needed to "feel" like a single entity.

3) I think their point is that when you are at 10%, it's not probable that it will reverse at that point.