Simultaneously signing up for organ donation and cryonics versus only cryonics. Does having less organs decrease the likelihood of cryonics (including revival) working? Is it a good idea to have only your head frozen anyway, to save on electricity and storage? Do the benefits of organ donation outweigh any costs...
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage...
The scientific method is wonderfully simple, intuitive, and above all effective. Based on the available evidence, you formulate several hypotheses and assign prior probabilities to each one. Then, you devise an experiment which will produce new evidence to distinguish between the hypotheses. Finally, you perform the experiment, and adjust your...
There have been other sci-fi writers talking about AI and the singularity. Charles Stross, Greg Egan, arguably Cory Doctorow... I haven't seen the episode in question, so I can't say who I think they took the biggest inspiration from.
9/16ths of the people present are female Virtuists, and 2/16ths are male Virtuists. If you correctly calculate that 2/(9+2) of Virtuists are male, but mistakenly add 9 and 2 to get 12, you'd get one-sixth as your final answer. There might be other equivalent mistakes, but that seems the most likely to lead to the answer given.
Of course, it's irrelevant what the actual mistake was since the idea was to see if you'll let your biases sway you from the correct answer.
The later Ed Stories were better.
In the first scenario the answer could depend on your chance of randomly failing to resend the CD, due to tripping and breaking your leg or something. In the second scenario there doesn't seem to be enough information to pin down a unique answer, so it could depend on many small factors, like your chance of randomly deciding to send a CD even if you didn't receive anything.
Good point, but not actually answering the question. I guess what I'm asking is: given a single use of the time machine (Primer-style, you turn it on and receive an object, then later turn it off and send an object),... (read 380 more words →)
I wasn't reasoning under NSCP, just trying to pick holes in cousin_it's model.
Though I'm interested in knowing why you think that one outcome is "more likely" than any other. What determines that?
You make a surprisingly convincing argument for people not being real.
Last time I tried reasoning on this one I came up against an annoying divide-by-infinity problem.
Suppose you have a CD with infinite storage space - if this is not possible in your universe, use a normal CD with N bits of storage, it just makes the maths more complicated. Do the following:
If nothing arrives in your timeline from the future, write a 0 on the CD and send it back in time.
If a CD arrives from the future, read the number on it. Call this number X. Write X+1 on your own CD and send it back in time.
What is the probability distribution of the number on your CD? What is the... (read more)
The flaw i see is why could the super happies not make separate decisions for humanity and the baby eaters.
I don't follow. They waged a genocidal war against the babyeaters and signed an alliance with humanity. That looks like separate decisions to me.
And why meld the cultures? Humans didn't seem to care about the existence of shockingly ugly super happies.
For one, because they're symmetrists. They asked something of humanity, so it was only fair that they should give something of equal value in return. (They're annoyingly ethical in that regard.) And I do mean equal value - humans became partly superhappy, and superhappies became partly human. For two, because shared culture and psychology makes it possible to have meaningful dialogue between species: even with the Cultural Translator, everyone got headaches after five minutes. Remember that to the superhappies, meaningful communication is literally as good as sex.
I'd say it would make a better creepypasta than an SCP. Still, if you're fixed on the SCP genre, I'd try inverting it.
Say the Foundation discovers an SCP which appears to have mind-reading abilities. Nothing too outlandish so far; they deal with this sort of thing all the time. The only slightly odd part is that it's not totally accurate. Sometimes the thoughts it reads seem to come from an alternate universe, or perhaps the subject's deep subconscious. It's only after a considerable amount of testing that they determine the process by which the divergence is caused - and it's something almost totally innocuous, like going to sleep at an altitude of more than 40,000 feet.
They came impressively close considering they didn't have any giant shoulders to stand on.
Simultaneously signing up for organ donation and cryonics versus only cryonics. Does having less organs decrease the likelihood of cryonics (including revival) working? Is it a good idea to have only your head frozen anyway, to save on electricity and storage? Do the benefits of organ donation outweigh any costs it could possibly incur, since organ donation is known to work?
Discuss.
I'm an organ donor because signing up was quick and easy. I'm not signing up for cryonics, because I anticipate that my family and close friends will have a harder time overcoming their grief if my body is not actually present at the funeral.
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than... (read 206 more words →)
The scientific method is wonderfully simple, intuitive, and above all effective. Based on the available evidence, you formulate several hypotheses and assign prior probabilities to each one. Then, you devise an experiment which will produce new evidence to distinguish between the hypotheses. Finally, you perform the experiment, and adjust your probabilities accordingly.
So far, so good. But what do you do when you cannot perform any new experiments?
This may seem like a strange question, one that leans dangerously close to unprovable philosophical statements that don't have any real-world consequences. But it is in fact a serious problem facing the field of cosmology. We must learn that when there is no new evidence that will cause you to... (read 1110 more words →)
Three years late, but: there doesn't even have to be an error. The Gatekeeper still loses for letting out a Friendly AI, even if it actually is Friendly.