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I have experienced several instances where I dream that I am with some friend/colleague/etc e.h. helping him solve some problem. Upon waking up, I check my phone and then sure enough that same friend has in fact contacted with the same or similar message as in my dream.

In several instances these are people I haven't heard from in a long time, with some very hard to guess specific reason why they contacted me. (E.g. a long time friend asking me to help his dad with something).

My memory is very clear that I had the dream and processed it (with some reaction of 'huh strange, fancy dreaming about that guy) before I opened my phone and found the text/email from that person. But is that memory being rewritten somehow afterwards?

Or is there perhaps some kind of vaguely wavefunction/quantum/etc phenomena that leads some information to be transmitted back in time by a few minutes? Hard to say, but definitely food for thought

Democratic != good.

That's one way of looking at it -- another way is to look at something like the Mafia as being analogous to an early form of law and order (albeit arguably a tiny bit more openly violent, ruthless than your average developing world police force). Something still lacking today in most countries.

This.

Surprisingly enough, a human is much more likely to find oneself alive in a world in which humanity was not nearly made extinct by nuclear war.

Exponentially so, if we assume, reasonably, that even if humans survived (technically) a nuclear war, their descendants would take 100s of thousands of years or longer to recover to pre apocalypse levels, vs. non nuclear war realities where the population simply keeps increasing exponentially, leading exponentially many more humans to find themselves existing in that "timeline."

Have had very much the same thought myself.

If there were two opposing forces, always exponentially self improving towards maximum efficiency in two opposite sides: 1) ordered/creative/perfectionist/preservative/etc, 2) chaotic/destructive/disruptive/etc... suppose our universe sits roughly in the middle of these two, does that not seem to explain where we are?

Also, given the seemingly limitless propensity of the universe towards balance, and its apparently limitless capacity in both regards, it would seem natural to infer that both forces keep going in ways beyond that which we can directly observe.

Intuitively, certainly, it seems very right. Of course, it also gels very well with countless esoteric/mystical beliefs going back eons as well.

While, of course, it is technically possible, it seems very reasonable to infer that we may be in a small window in which we haven't connected to other intelligent life. In just 100 years we have gone from being barely able to fly at all, to being close to becoming a multiplanetary lifeform.

The evidence becomes more and more every day that life is not a one in a trillion miracle but a natural product of certain environments. To assume we will never have contact with other lifeforms seems like a huge jump.

I guess it would work if there is some kind of force that leads some timelines to go out of existence or converge back towards heavier nodes, something like a neural network structure.

Somewhat off topic, but I have often wondered if this sort of phenomenon could also occur within 'timelines' (as in the multiverse concept):

As the article mentions, initially our ancestry is basically linear -- one mother and father, two grandparents per parent, etc. But the further back we go, the more our lineage begins to resemble a mesh web with certain ancestors reappearing at other points.

Could the same happen with the flow of time? Say we were to go back 10 years, maybe there is only a single possible 'timeline' between now and then. But is it possible that the further we go back, there are multiple 'nodes' which cross over, much like ancestry?

Is it possible there were two, or more, say, 1900ADs, which then every e.g. 1915 was descended from, splitting again into different timelines before recombining, in much the same manner as biological descent?

Largely off topic, but an interesting thought experiment.

Within a given group value is reasonably correlated to expertise.

As much as I wouldn't give any time to sociologists valuing Alan Turings genius within mathematics, computer science, etc., I'd have equally little time for mathematicians judging his sexuality.

I'm not sure what your point is. Can you clarify what you're trying to get at here?

By which you mean he made a campaign donation.

For each of the questions you have listed, there is opposite viewpoints of some (questionable) legitimacy:

White supremacists would argue that it is multiculturalists who seek the abolition of the white race through introduction of millions of high birth rate other demographics into white countries.

Pro-conversion therapy anti gay people would argue they are saving the individuals from mental problems, social difficulties, and other negative side effects of what they believe is a consciously modifiable behaviour.

"Racists" and "sexists" would argue that being aware of mean average behavioural differences in different demographics is not a negative thing.

However invalid these arguments may, or may not, be, it is not our job to attempt to generalise our expertise and judge anyone who holds a differing view.

Simple statistics says that there is at least one or two major issues which you are extremely passionate about, but simply mistaken. Same for me, same for anyone else.

That does not matter. As long as my opinions do not measurably affect my behaviour within a specific community, then it is not relevant. People should be judged by their individual actions within a given 'organism'/community/company/etc, not their viewpoints on tangentially related subjects shared with others in other communities.

Your logic is exactly what led to the exclusion of gays, blacks, communists, non christians, and other groups, in the 1950s and before.

You risk going so far in the other direction that you become exactly what you opposed.

No more relevant than a CEO of a company that hires people of all diets being a passionate vegan who believes eating meat is immoral.

As long as his personal views don't impact his professional behaviour, the two are not connected.