tbabb

under this taxonomy Star Wars is fantasy

IMO:
sci-fi = counterfactual supposed (new technology, physics, cultural setting); the story explores the consequences of it

fantasy = magic, culture, setting, technology is a backdrop over which a character story evolves; philosophical consequences are ~irrelevant

if you have figured out why it's dangerous, it's probably best not to speak of it

I ascribe meaningful probability to this being true, and also that if it were discovered and implemented we would all die ~instantly

I have kind of stopped worrying about it because I think we are just permanently in its anthropic shadow

oh, this is the first concrete rebuttal of that I've heard— I've been trying to understand why it's not accepted/considered. got any links to more info on this and/or a sketch of the reasoning?

Gravitation Without a Principle of Equivalence, R. Dicke 1957

the ubiquity of flood myths and sunken civilizations are the (correct) ancestral memory of the post-ice age sea level rise

this "refractive medium" picture produces the same observations for observers as predicted by general relativity, but the explanation for why they observe what they observe is completely inside out

Distortions to the speed of a wave also produce distortions to its direction and wavelength

relativity is what it looks like to be made of waves, and to be measuring time and space with clocks and rulers that are also made of waves

Robert Dicke wrote a (largely ignored? don't know why, Dicke is no slouch in physics) paper about this in '57 proposing exactly this. if you assume mass-energy slows the speed of light in its vicinity instead of bending space, space acts like a refractive medium for causality

basically. gas molecules are more likely to reach escape velocity if they are either light or hot. inner planets are warmer

also solar wind is stronger in the inner solar system

the big bang might not have happened

the inner planets all used to be gas giants but most of the gas evaporated off (leaving heavy CO2 and H2O). that's why Earth has so much water; it was a small fraction of a much bigger atmosphere. we're on the leftover rocky core

relativity is inside out (math is correct but ontology is backward— space is flat and c is distorted rather than constant c and distorted space)

PETA is a false flag supported by the meat industry

anti-nuclear sentiment in the 80s and 90s was astroturfed by big oil

:(

youtube link, maybe?

wait, have you had vaccinations?

but it likes to pretend it's the first thing for everything

and you gotta be careful, even in the first category. I have a recent anecdote on the other site about getting recommended unnecessary surgery for a broken bone. would have seriously worsened it

my broad impression of medicine is that for a few key pervasive ailments it's a veritable miracle that's obviously extremely good (bacterial infections, broken bones, neonatal care, trauma care, cancer); for the rest it's "lol let your body handle it and hope for the best"

when ur data lake is a lava lake

🪟☕🐈 I should go hang out at the mill valley public library

skip that whole mess and go straight to retrocausality. get yourself involved in a PSPACE-complete hypercomputer

similar thoughts on the Other Site

you're never gonna believe where the phrase "that sucks" came from

intelligent world-modelers like humans will (if they are effective) will tend to find "good" abstractions of causality

LLMs don't have access to reality, but they can find the abstractions humans have fashioned (and the patterns within/between them)

of course in reality no part is distinct. there is causal leakage between parts, causal leakage across scales of organization. but the degree of leakage is also "objective"

digital computers leak almost none of their physical substrate into to the programs they run. biology, less so

in this sense you can have a model of a more detailed system which is objectively good or bad. does it capture the structure of influence accurately or not?

"where are the parts" is something you can find objectively in the structure of what affects what; which parts are sensitive vs. insensitive