Like, the idea that an entity simulating our universe wouldn't be able to do that, because they'd run out of energy doesn't pass even the basic sniff test.
I'm convinced you are not actually reading what I'm writing. I said if the universe ours is simulated in is supposed to be like our own/we are an ancestral simulation then this implies that the universe simulating ours should be like ours, and we can apply our laws of physics to it, and our laws of physics say there's entropy, or a limit to the amount of order.
I also believe that if we're a simulatio...
First, I'm not "resisting a conversion". I'm disagreeing with your position that a hidden variable is even more likely to be a mind than something else.
you are the one basically adding souls
I absolutely am not adding souls. This makes me think you didn't really read my argument. I'll present this a different way: human brains are incredibly complex. So complex, in fact, we still don't fully understand them. With a background in computer science, I know that you can't simulate something accurately without at least having a very accurate model....
You can call it 'something missing', or 'god'.
I disagree. Something missing is different than a god. A god is often not well-defined, but generally it is assumed to be some kind of intelligence, that is it can know and manipulate information, and it has infinite agency or near to it. Something missing could be a simple physical process. One is infinitely complex (god), the other is feasibly simple enough for a human to fully understand.
...The koopas are both pointing to the weirdness of their world, and the atheists are talking about randomness and the t
Sufficiently improbable stuff is evidence that there's a hidden variable you aren't seeing.
Sure, but you aren't showing what that hidden variable is. You're just concluding what you think it should be. So evidence that there's something missing isn't an opportunity to inject god, it's a new point to investigate. That, and sufficiently improbable stuff becomes probable when enough of it happens. Take a real example, like someone getting pregnant. While the probability of any given sperm reaching the egg and fertilizing it is low, the sheer number of sper...
I find the 'where are all the aliens/simulation?" argument to be pretty persuasive in terms of atheism being a bust
Why does this imply atheism is a bust? The only thing I can think of that would make atheism "a bust" would be direct evidence of a god(s).
you can fault them for not properly updating but you can't fault them for inconsistency.
They're still being inconsistent with respect to the reality they observe. Why is the self-consistency alone more important than a consistency with observation?
Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, a benevolent God is more likely than not going to exist somewhere.
I would urge you to go learn about QM more. I'm not going to assume what you do/don't know, but from what I've learned about QM there is no argument for or against any god.
were you aware that the ratio of sizes between the Sun and the Moon just happen to be exactly right for there to be total solar eclipses?
This also has to due with the distance between the moon and the earth and the earth and the sun. Either or both could be different...
I think you wrote some interesting stuff. As for your question on a meta-epistemy, I think what you said about general approaches mostly holds in this case. Maybe there's a specific way to classify sub-epistemies, but it's probably better to have some general rules of thumb that weed out the definitely wrong candidates, and let other ideas get debated on. To save community time, if that's really a concern, a group could employ a back-off scheme where ideas that have solid rebuttals get less and less time in the debate space.
I don't know that defining sub-e...
Even changing "do" to "did", my counter example holds.
Event A: At 1pm I get a cookie and I'm happy. At 10pm, I reflect on my day and am happy for the cookie I ate.
Event (not) A: At 1pm I do not get a cookie. I am not sad, because I did not expect a cookie. At 10pm, I reflect on my day and I'm happy for having eaten so healthy the entire day.
In either case, I end up happy. Not getting a cookie doesn't make me unhappy. Happiness is not a zero sum game.
If I get a cookie, then I'm happy because I got a cookie. The negation of this event is that I do not get a cookie. However, I am still happy because now I feel healthier, having not eaten a cookie today. So both the event and it's negation cause me positive utility.
The term you're looking for is "apologist".
If you have a universe of a certain complexity, then to simulate another universe of equal complexity it would have to be that universe to fully simulate it. To simulate a universe, you have to be sufficiently more complex and have sufficiently more expendable energy.
"That from power comes responsibility is a silly implication written in a comic book, but it's not true in real life (it's almost the opposite). "
Evidence? I 100% disagree with your claim. Looking at governments or business, the people with more power tend to have a lot of responsibility both to other people in the gov't/company and to the gov't/company itself. The only kind of power I can think of that doesn't come with some responsibility is gun ownership. Even Facebook's power of content distribution comes with a responsibility to monetize, which then has downstream responsibilities.
Not quite what I meant about identifying content but fair point.
As for fake news, the most reliable way to tell is whether the piece states information as verifiable fact, and if that fact is verified. Basically, there should be at least some sort of verifiable info in the article, or else it's just narrative. While one side's take may be "real" to half the world, the other side's take can be "real" to the other half of the world, but there should be some piece of actual information that both sides look at and agree is real.
I'm actually very familiar with freedom of speech and I'm getting more familiar with your dismissive and elitist tone.
Freedom of speech applies, in the US, to the relationship between the government and the people. It doesn't apply to the relationship between Facebook and users, as exemplified by their terms of use.
I'm not confusing Facebook and Google, Facebook also has a search feature and quite a lot of content can be found within Facebook itself.
But otherwise thanks for your reply, it's stunning lack of detail gave me no insight whatsoever.
Maybe this has been discussed ad absurdum, but what do people generally think about Facebook being an arbiter of truth?
Right now, Facebook does very little to identify content, only provide it. They faced criticism for allowing fake news to spread on the site, they don't push articles that have retractions, and they just now have added a "contested" flag that's less informative than Wikipedia's.
So the questions are: does Facebook have any responsibility to label/monitor content given that it can provide so much? If so, how? If not, why doesn't t...
Reality check: most liberal people? trust fund kids at expensive colleges. most conservative people? working class.
Really disagree there. Plenty of trust fund kids are conservative, plenty of scholarship students are liberal... even at the same university. I think if you want to generalize, the more apt generalization is city vs. rural areas. There are tons of "working class" liberals, they work in service industries instead of coal mines. The big difference is the proximity to actual diversity, when you work with and live with and see diverse pe...
"liberals aren't even willing to admit they made a mistake after the fact and will insist that the only reason people object to having their towns and houses completely overgrown with kudzu is irrational kudzuphobia."
I think this is a drastic overgeneralization taken in bad faith.
Yes I think that's exactly right. Scott Alexander's idea on it from the point of view of living in a zombie world makes this point really clear: do we risk becoming zombies to save someone, or no?
Could you give an actual criticism of the energy argument? "It doesn't pass the smell test" is a poor excuse for an argument.
When I assume that the external universe is similar to ours, this is because Bostrom's argument is specifically about ancestral simulations. An ancestral simulation directly implies that there is a universe trying to simulate itself. I posit this is impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics, the necessity to not allow your simulations to realize what they are, and keeping consistency in the complexity of the universe... (read more)