AQuantized

Who is the one who is experiencing 'one consciousness'?

Generally it's interesting when almost all of that type of software isn't written in the advertised language.

This is the sort of thing that seems like it makes sense, but assigning a time period or ownership to a lack of existence doesn't follow. We can talk about something not existing but it's only a convention.

Disagree totally with this. My psychometric IQ has been stable for a long time, yet my problem solving ability has increased significantly.

Some ways to modulate it might be reading material such as George Polya's "How to Solve It," taking your own notes on heuristics and techniques you've found useful and continuously reapplying and iterating them, and simply delving deep into many hard problems (be they directly coding related or not).

Vitamin D has a half life of about a month. However, your actual ability to maintain vitamin D levels is probably proportional to how fair your skin is, much like absorption.

This isn't a fair analogy since sunlight has many well documented positive effects. Vitamin D production being obvious, but also many understudied effects like nitric oxide release. It's difficult to fully root out confounding effects, but typically people with more sun exposure live for longer, despite having higher rates of skin cancer.

When methane is oxidized it produces carbon dioxide

I think there has been a reasonably large amount of inflation in terms of the real value of many assets at a national level. It has been counterbalanced in part by the deflationary pressure of the US being the global reserve currency that everyone wants to have their money stored in during trying times, and reduced spending.

However, I think that national inflation often doesn't give a complete picture, and the more significant effects of inflation are often localized closer to the money. A lot of the insane COL in the Bay Area is an example of this. Exactly where is closest to the money in this instance is difficult to say.

What's wrong with 'population control' through easy access to birth control and lowering infant mortality? Do you think he was planning on mass killings before he realized he should be more subtle?

He's not a superhero, but it's definitely better to devote your capital to helping others rather than simply accruing more.

That doesn't seem to be a matter of "not enough time" but "not going to read many books."

This advice might seem too simple, but the solution is to just start doing a ton of physics problems rather than trying to resolve any of these issues. Your heuristics for real world physics will probably change faster than you think, and it's very satisfying to feel like you really understand a common phenomenon in depth.

It does sound more like you want to study engineering from your latter paragraphs, but I'd argue a lot of that stuff is just industry knowledge you'd gather over time actually building things. Physics gives you the ability to do some back of the napkin maths to see if something seems to be the realm of feasibility though.

It's not a tiny amount, probably about 40% of what most adults should be getting optimally, and significantly better than having almost no intake, which is the case for a lot of people who rarely go outside and don't eat any fatty fish.

Do you not think the institutions of justice are systems? Not sure I get what you're trying to communicate.

You get exercise and some level of mind-body training. That raises it above the most frivolous of time wasting at least. I think you can get a lot out of most media as well, but it doesn't necessarily have the same default utility as physical activity.

The night sky isn't only available to some elite group of people. Although it's certainly difficult to see in cities due to the extremely high levels of light pollution. I recall an anecdote about power going out in a major city and residents calling the police up to report bright lights in the sky they had never seen before.

We should be trying to control our light pollution and space litter instead of increasing it, however. Seeing the galaxy with naked eyes shouldn't be alien to everyday people.

The reality is even quite poor countries are able to secure high quality internet for reasonable cost with appropriate policy. This isn't an otherwise unsolvable problem.

It's not hard to get into a university in the UK. It is quite hard to get into a 'top' university, and Oxbridge typically requires a fair bit of luck in addition to being very hard.

There are pretty decent apprenticeships, but only so many people want to work trades regardless. It's not exactly a ticket to wealth or status like a degree might still be perceived.

About 15 years ago my physics professor told me fusion would always be 20 years away, so at least we're getting progressively shorter times away.

I don't think people would be surprised for the Netherlands to be associated with drugs, but would be more so for violent crime.

The problem is you need capital to begin with, and the median American barely has enough on hand to cover an emergency, nevermind build significant investments.

Many of us might be fortunate to have well paid jobs, and the ability and capital to invest, but it's understandable how someone could view the ability of those with capital to generate further capital without any labour to be unfair.

Those attributes stem from them being a monopoly, they don't create it in the first place. He's questioning the implication that being less competitive and slower growing would allow you to obtain more of a monopoly.

Musk was born in South Africa, so isn't eligible for the presidency.

Edit: Must have only skimmed this thread before commenting because the parent mentions this, oops

This is basically how the Open University currently works. They send you the materials for the module, you submit a bunch of assignments that are marked by tutors throughout the year, then sit an externally invigilated and marked exam at the end.

It seems to work well apart from people losing motivation, but there could be unexploited network effects in large numbers of people supporting each other more informally if it became the norm.

Do you think that the lockdown actually makes the virus more prevalent? Seems like a strange analogy

If it could be guaranteed to be limited to the Alex Joneses of the world, I would wholly agree with this.

However, now that a strong majority of the influential communication that takes place in society is divided across perhaps 5 tech platforms, with 1 tech company controlling the ability to search for other platforms, it's hard to say getting booted off all platforms isn't functionally restricting freedom of speech.

At what point do we concede that allowing a small set of 'private companies' carte blanche over public discourse is a restriction of public freedom?

I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.

Sunnier countries can still have large vitamin D deficient populations. I read a study regarding the correlation between mental illness and vitamin D deficiency a few years ago, and Italian patients were still often very deficient. If people don't go out in the sun enough, or wear too much sun cream, it doesn't matter how sunny it is.

Why not stop allowing registration except by manual whitelist? At least until the spammer lost interest.

What sort of opportunities are available for someone with little experience/qualifications in a poorer country?

A lot of the book is going through various types of specific bias (e.g. anchoring, sunk-cost), and going over the way in which it was studied and shown to exist. I see this as valuable as because, as you say, accounting for irrationality is important, and having an indepth account of exactly how bias arises is key to internalizing the reality that we are all prone to succumbing to these errors.

It's interesting that despite Hofstadter having negative interest in computing himself, he inspired so many people in the field.