Yes

See Bell's theorem. Basically we know that quantum mechanics is truly random, not just pseudorandom, unless you posit non-locality.

I did also like the Ascension story. It did a very good job of imitating 1960s sci fi magazine stories. In a way it shows off his talent as an author more than the main story does!

Your review actually makes me more curious about the book. 

Looks like I did a bad job then 😂. I'm interested as to why? If it's the physics bit, it's 2 pages out of a thousand pages book and then basically not mentioned again.

Their unconsumed wealth is purely deflationary, allowing the government to print money for 'free'. Presumably that is less useful to society than e.g. giving it to an effective charity.

Their consumed wealth is sometimes used usefully - I buy that for Bill Gates for example. Sometimes it's frittered away on personal consumption. And sometimes it's given away to pointless/actively harmful charities like Mackenzie Scott.

The facts are many billionaires choose to either use their money for private consumption or waste it on pointless charities. That doesn't in any way imply that their having this money in unfair - they've earned it, and taking it away would make the world worse by discouraging excellence. It does however imply we should encourage them to pursue better uses for their money.

Both of these options sound wrong to me. I think the actual case is kind of obvious when you think about it:

Wealth is the reward people get for doing useful things.

Jeff Bezos is rich because he found away to easily provide people with cheap goods. That benefited everyone. It is good that he is rich as a result, because that's what gave him the incentive to do so.

That does not in any way imply that now that he has that money he'd be able to use it more usefully than anyone else. It's possible he will, but also possible he'll waste it all on gigantic superyachts or a 2000 metre high statue of himself.

Given that's the case it seems perfectly reasonable to try to push him towards giving some of his wealth to effective charities which will likely do more good for the world than his default next best use.

I don't really see how? A frequentist would just run this a few times and see that the outcome is 1/2.

In practice, for obvious reasons, frequentists and bayesians always agree on the probability of anything that can be measured experimentally. I think the disagreements are more philosophical about when it's appropriate to apply probability to something at all, though I can hardly claim to be an expert in non-bayesian epistemology.

Consider two realistic scenarios:

A) I'm talking to someone and they tell me they have two children. "Oh, do you have any boys?" I ask, "I love boys!". They nod.

B) I'm talking to someone and they tell me they have two children. One of the children then runs up to the parent. It's a boy.

The chance of two boys is clearly 1/3 in the first scenario, and a half in the second.

The scenario in the question as asked is almost impossible to answer. Nobody would ever state "I have two children, at least one of whom is a boy." in real life, so there's no way to update in that situation. We have no way to generate good priors. Instead people make up a scenario that sounds similar but is more realistic, and because everyone does that differently they'll all have different answers.

I think Harberger taxes are inherently incompatible with Georgian taxes as Georgian taxes want to tax only the land and Harberger taxes inherently have to tax everything.

That said see my somewhat maverickal attempt to combine them here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MjBQ8S5tLNGLizACB/combining-the-best-of-georgian-and-harberger-taxes. Under that proposal we would deal with this case by saying that if anyone outbid me for the land they would not be allowed to extract the oil until the arranged a separate deal with me, but could use the land for any other purpose.