simondw

8 ms·

31.
by simondw 4y ago
That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke. I doubt anyone who enjoys karaoke would reject a track recorded by the original artist because it wasn't a cover by someone they'd never heard of.
32.
by simondw 4y ago
I think a valid meaning might be "better at drawing what I want to draw." This is absolutely a skill that can be improved, even if the aesthetic quality of the output can't be evaluated objectively.
33.
by simondw 4y ago
Do you have evidence to support that?
34.
by simondw 4y ago
The Mandela Effect is named for that false memory, yes, but it's more general. From Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect ): > Other examples include memories of the title of the B
35.
by simondw 4y ago
Fortunately, bicycles are not responsible for 100x more injuries and deaths than cars, too. To me, that suggests that "number of moving violations per mile" may not be the most important metric.
36.
by simondw 4y ago
But how does this "uncaused cause" add anything to our understanding of the cosmos, beyond adding one more entity? Why not say that God was created by God_1, who just already existed?
37.
by simondw 4y ago
Lots of things, but I'm not sure why you're asking that. Could you connect that back to the point you're making?
38.
by simondw 4y ago
> they would need an explanation that you’re looking for whatever pops into their head Of course. And the equivalent of that explanation is baked into DALL-E, in the form of its programming to always generate an image. > but DALLE can
39.
by simondw 4y ago
But that's kind of the point -- the orientation of the image on the retina is irrelevant, unless it's being looked at by a little man sitting right-side-up inside your head.
40.
by simondw 4y ago
> Is it really the same consciousness though? And to push it further, in what sense is each moment's consciousness the same as the previous?
41.
by simondw 4y ago
The idea is appealing, I think, because it feels like a step toward what is surely the ultimate goal: flawless natural language generation from some semantic encoding. If you squint, these functions and arguments are the semantic encoding,
42.
by simondw 4y ago
Great question. Most people would probably say no, panpsychism is unfalsifiable. On the other hand, brains certainly do seem to function like qualia detectors (as evidenced by everyone talking about qualia). So, who knows, maybe there'
43.
by simondw 4y ago
Panpsychism doesn't claim that everything has complex sensory perception, higher reasoning, memory, etc. The hard problem isn't about any of those things, which indeed have clear neuronal correlates and can easily be turned off. T
44.
by simondw 4y ago
Well, to me part of your point seemed to be that a lot of what we call racism has roots in classism, rather than in beliefs about inherent differences between races. My point is that the resulting behaviors and discrimination can still be
45.
by simondw 4y ago
> people of race A will get treated as if I think you've just described racism.
46.
by simondw 4y ago
You're still conflating "pregnancy" with "pregnancy that you're forced to carry to term." The former is necessarily a potential consequence of having sex; the latter is not. I'm still curious what principl
47.
by simondw 4y ago
> people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable I think you've gone a little too broad with that principle. If I ask a taxi to take me somewhere, I can get out if I notice the
48.
by simondw 4y ago
It's a loss of bodily autonomy because, well, that's what bodily autonomy is. The government is compelling you to use (and risk) your body for a particular purpose. That's a separate question from whether that loss of bodily
49.
by simondw 4y ago
We can sit here and ask different questions all day, but let's at least recognize that they're different questions. Originally we were talking about many people forced to give up privacy in order to possibly prevent some potential
50.
by simondw 4y ago
> one clearly dominates Even if we agreed that life begins at conception, it's not at all clear to me that the bodily autonomy and privacy issues would go away. > it would be better if the states wrote legislation that clearly de
51.
by simondw 4y ago
> Perhaps I'm missing something How is the government going to know which people have fetuses in them, and how long they've been there, without some loss of privacy? (Do you think menstrual cycles are private information, for e
52.
by simondw 4y ago
You're conveniently leaving out one major concern of the pro-choice side: the bodily autonomy of lives that are uncontroversially people. I also think you're dismissing privacy too quickly. How much privacy would you give up in th
53.
by simondw 4y ago
It also turns out masks are not made of burning cigarettes. How many more of these do we have to do?
54.
by simondw 4y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht , the English spelling comes via Yiddish "borsht".
55.
by simondw 4y ago
> would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've
56.
by simondw 5y ago
I think the problem is that (at least for now), we don't have good mental models of AI drivers and what their failure modes might be. Dangerous human drivers are likely to be consistently erratic (e.g., drunk), or distracted and oblivi
57.
by simondw 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand. Why would someone dismiss a plan that they think is generally solid and doesn't have a large cost, just because it fails in a few edge cases (bathroom, etc.)? Seems like this is strictly about getting ac
58.
by simondw 5y ago
Do you perhaps mean abundance instead of paucity?
59.
by simondw 5y ago
Imagine a pill that completely cures cancer, 100% of the time. But maybe one in a million pills gets stuck in someone's throat and they choke to death. So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10
60.
by simondw 5y ago
That's potentially misleading in a couple ways: * By default, years before 2019 aren't turned on. 2016 in particular looks fairly close to 2021. * At first glance, it looks like 2021 is plunging straight toward 0 -- but wait, the

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