Comment shades of Lysenkoism (Score 1) 171
Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.
Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.
Yeah.
They completely ignore panserpmia.
They just quote Isaac Asimov's writing from almost half a century ago (Europa). Ignores Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Mars; all of which have *BIOSIGNATURES* of a probability curve not too dissimilar to Europa.
They are likely a dilettante. Those folks do not do "prior art" research because they believe in the Auteur Myth.
"An auteur is a filmmaker whose personal style and thematic focus are so distinctive that they are considered the 'author' of their films, a concept known as the auteur myth."
Real science isn't that. Real science is a rational discipline. The null hypothesis -- know what that means. Prior art -- know what that means. Mental biases -- know those, too; you'll see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. Science is the discipline of mind that ensures you're not just spewing random nonsense. You verify what you think; that's the discipline.
As Isaac Newton said ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), "nani gigantum humeris insidentes."
Ignore them.
Everything seems obvious once it is explained.
Why do 12-14 steps of algebra, when calculus works in 2?
Obvious. People should know calculus.
Yet they don't.
Define Green's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- is obvious.
Everything is obvious *IN HINDSIGHT*.
Aren't most of the stories written around these three rules about ambiguities and loopholes
Yes, and the point you quoted still stands, they are a starting point.
The always relevant XKCD comic explains it well enough: those laws in that order are essential as the starting point. Different order or missing entirely is guaranteed bad. But as pointed out through all kinds of science fiction writing, there are many ways we can understand they are insufficient.
Right now I'd agree they're exactly backwards, or as the XKCD comic described, on track to become a "killbot hellscape". We need even more rules and regulations than that, but as a set of fairly obvious first steps penned 80 years ago, they're pretty blatantly an essential first draft of baseline rules that are missing today.
A lot of people behave pretty ghastly when it comes to money.
Big AI is basically making itself irrelevant with its push for "Safety" at this point.
You merely reiterate why no-one tales the left seriously any more.
The left: "Industry kills wildlife and creates waste! We must destroy it!"
Also the left: "So what if windmills kill birds and create waste? When did you ever complain about that before?"
The modern left exists to funnel billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers to billionaire oligarchs. If the left didn't exist, oligarchs would have had to create it.
Oh, wait...
If this is accurate, this suggests that abiogenesis is easy once one has a stable, watery environment, since it happened twice on Earth.
That was my first thought too. (Assuming the article is correct - all kinds of stuff gets published that doesn't hold up in the longer run.)
One potential conclusion about the Fermi paradox [...]
Remember that time is also big. Suppose that there have been 1000 interstellar civilizations in our galaxy during the past 5 billion years, and that each one lasted a million years before collapsing. How many would be active right now?
Frankly, I don't consider it a paradox at all. We've explored approximately 0% of our galaxy and found nothing. That doesn't tell us much.
It's hardly the only motivation. Many of them are death cultists who hate humans and want us all dead. Or technocrats who believe they're going to become gods... and want the rest of us dead.
It's inevitable that there will be more outbreaks of genetically-engineered disease in the future, and the kind of people with the wealth to create these kind of AI models are the last kind of people who should be allowed to use them for making new diseases.
Toxoplasma gondii infection can lead to a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions.
Waymo doesn't drive in bad weather. And you talk like it's the humans choice, but life doesn't stop because the weather is bad. People have to go out in bad weather.
If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.
If Waymo's argument is valid, then humans shouldn't be allowed to drive.
Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.
The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.