(indeed, historically around half of children ever born died before the age of 15, so if a 50% chance of them not surviving to adulthood were a good reason not to have children then no-one "should" have had children until industrial times)
Huh, even assuming business as usual I'd guess the baseline probability of someone's family dying is not <<0.05%/year (assuming the standard meaning of "<<" as "at least around an order of magnitude less")
(at least in the US -- though guessing from his name Nikola Jurkovic might live somewhere less car-dependent than that)
Yep, a proper explanation of the 2nd law such as ET Jaynes' makes it feel like an obvious consequence of Liouville's theorem plus (the continuum analog of) the pigeonhole principle.
[ETA: Without following the link,] I have no idea whether you agree with them and "serious adults" is supposed to imply Eliezer isn't one, or you agree with Eliezer and mean "serious adults" sarcastically
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1(as for me, I read it because I woke up one hour before my alarm clock, spent half of that unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep, didn't feel like getting up, and my phone was already on my nightstand)
The main issue with this is that the only people who will actually finish reading this are the ones who already agree with your points (or, at least, disagree with them for reasons other than not being familiar with them), and hence don't need to read this (except for the sake of reading fiction as leisure). Everybody else is going to stop reading a few paragraphs in.
By the way, I seem to remember a series of polls (on Twitter by Zvi, IIRC) about various scenarios asking the readers whether they'd consider them "doom", "bloom", "gloom" or something (one of them involved all currently living humans being allowed to live happy lives and die of old age but no more human babies being born). Can any of you remember where this was?
FWIW, TIL that the antifungal I'm taking is racemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itraconazole#Chemistry
Some human languages have untranslatable 4, e.g. Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quotus
Ouch!
(I regularly use that as an excus...ehm...rationale for starting working on stuff right before the deadline.)