In any case, are you making the claim that if a neural net were able to figure out the rules of the game by examining a few million games, you would accept that it's a universal knowledge creator?

If it could figure out the rules of any game that would be remarkable. That logic would also really help to find bugs in programs or beat the stock market.

Not true. Most financial markets are prediction markets. They seem to be popular.

That may be technically true, but only in a superficial sense. Stocks prices have a very complicated relationship to real world events, except in the very long term. That's very different from markets like https://www.predictit.org which have clear connections to things like who will win elections and objective criteria.

You should add a "None of the above" option. If I saw an app with these names, I'd be hard pressed to give it a chance.

You might want to try https://www.namingforce.com ; crowd sourced names; pay the winner $100.

Sorry, but the idea that Esperanto is somehow only easy for French speakers is plainly wrong. I don't think you'll find anyone who has learned it and another language who'll disagree.

Actually Esperanto is in the same language family as many Asian ones:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm

You should better look at the wikipedia page I linked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Also it's not about being similar to French and I don't know why you think that. I've learned Esperanto and French and didn't notice any similarities. Actually the Chinese were one of the biggest supporters, though that may be trending down.

It would be easy to grow Esperanto quickly. It would require some concerted effort, but there is a solid though small base around the world and there only needs to be some push to make it happen. Becoming the official language of the EU is one plausible avenue, but another one might crop up in the next few centuries.

I think you're being too pessimistic about Esperanto:

• There are about 2 million speakers worldwide [4]. For a language only 100 years old.
• It was recently added to Duolingo [5], a great resource for learning.
• The Esperanto wikipedia is ranked #32 in terms of number of articles. [1]
• It's taught in 69 universities in 24 countries, several offering bachelors or PhD degrees. [7]
• Prominent people are fluent in Esperanto, like the president of Austria [8]
• After Britain leaves, only Ireland will speak English in the EU, giving Esperanto an opening. [11]
• Esperanto is so easy to learn:
• -> 2000 hours studying German = 1500 English = 1000 Italian = 150 Esperanto [6]
• -> you can get it for free if you learn it along the way of learning English [9][2][10]

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Wikipedias
[2] http://www.aaie.us/wordpress/?page\_id=42
[4] http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-5.html
[5] https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online
[6] http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/054000678/index.shtml
[7] https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto\_en\_universitatoj
[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/30/AR2007033000824.html
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic\_value\_of\_Esperanto
[10] 'A language teaching experiment', Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26–28
[11] http://e-d-e.org

I think you are missing the point. If I have a random variable between 0 and 10, than "random" changes will cause a regression to the mean. Thus, if the current state is bad, say 1, a many "random" changes are likely to be an improvement.

More simply, if our state is bad, we should take more risks.

The argument rests on that assumption, mostly clearly shown in the quote:

"People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists, thinking that civilization is robust, the current state is bad, ..."

If we are stuck in a locally optimal valley, then a high-variance candidate is more likely to push us out of it and into another valley. Whether that's a good idea depends on if our current state is overall good or bad.

Personally I think we should be taking more chances and trying to find a better equilibrium. That means occasionally rocking the boat, but if you never do it you're condemning yourself to stagnation.