edna314

I think he didn't quite understand the depth of Girard's thought. It's not like that you can really fight mimetic desire, especially not by following any kind of tactics. Reproducing behavior in a certain way is nothing but mimesis.

What if it is not artificial and only human level ai in a sense that it's run by mechanical Turks which answer the prompts ?

I mean yes, but there is a rather specific window where they make sense: at ~1-80% of c. Lower speeds it doesn't make sense to engage in interstellar travel at all, because even travelling 100s of years won't get you anywhere. At higher speeds it doesn't make sense because of time dilation.

I wasn't referring to the author in the article, but rather an unspecified collection of 'popular' SciFi, where this aspect is not explained. It is true that, even if you reach speeds of 0.5c you only get a ~15% time dilation.

What came to my mind immediately was 'Passengers'. But, reading up the plot on Wikipedia, it is possible that it never actually was mentioned how far away the destination was or how fast they were going. So, maybe it wasn't a misconception on the sci-fi side, but on my side. For sure, any light speed travel shouldn't take any time and infinite amount of time should pass for the rest of the universe.

I'm sure it has been, but I'm mainly talking about popular sci-fi movies. I'm sure you have at least one in mind where they have these 'sleep' devices.

The time dilation aspect in space travel is the most neglected in popular sci-fi. In many of these, there are intricate installations of some sort cryogenic sleep devices because the script authors assume that it takes you 150 years of travel at light speed to get to a place that is 150 light years away.

> Probably no reasonable human being would assume that Quantum Mechanic as we know it is the "holy grail" of physics.

Fully agreed. This, however, rests on the assumption that there is a 'holy grail' in physics (aka a theory of everything). It's a matter of taste, but I don't like that idea that there is a theory of everything because it doesn't seem reasonable that every last bit of our universe is explainable by a single theory. Why would that be? Seems like a conspiracy, if this was the case. To me, it's rather quite comforting to assume that there is something (be it the position and momentum of an electron) which we won't ever be able to understand because it just seams realistic. If this wasn't the case and we could show that there is a theory of everything I would immediately start my quest to find Morpheus to ask him to give me the right pill to wake up.

Depends on what other people do. If no one takes it I’ll take it. If everyone takes it I won’t take it. We need 50-80% vaccination rate overall. So, if I take the values of this survey which is at 70% vaccination rate at the moment, I would take it to be on the safe side.

> Does the reading of your multimeter depend on the digits of Arnold Schwarzenegger's phone number? Do you have to repeat the experiment if his phone number changes? Indeed, we assume that this is not an "experimental condition" to take into account. There is no way to determine this a-priori, and one could conceive of a universe with an arbitrary amount of such strange influences. But we do not appear to live in such a universe, which is why we get to apply Occam's Razor.

I think this is not true for every experiment. For example if you measure the polarization of a photon it will have the same polarization in any subsequent experiment, no matter how hard you try to reduce complexity.

Also, my comment was rather directed at the fact that any experiment has a unique outcome. In that sense we we can’t have perfect control over an experiment, since at least time must have passed between subsequent measurements, such that the experimental conditions are different.

Because others already questioned the first part, I’ll question this:

> the set of observations it offers is vast

Actually, in an experiment there is always only one observation at a time. That we group multiple observations together is kind of arbitrary and relies on the hope that the experimental conditions are the same and therefore one experiment is analogous to the next.

> Why are there irrational numbers?

Because, a line doesn’t have any holes and a fraction just gives you a point, such that no matter how close you are to another number there will always be gap.

No, I haven’t read this one, maybe it’s worth a try. The issue is, even when you are at a stage where you realize what works and what doesn’t, you still wouldn’t know what to write exactly. The only option you have is to write up sentences, then check whether you made a mistake and, if so, write up a different sentence and reiterate. I would need a book which would tell me how to construct sentences which are in accordance with all the rules and concepts. But, it doesn’t seem to be possible to write such a book, since writing really is an art. After all, there also isn’t any book which teaches you how to paint like Da Vinci, but only those which tell you which rules you can apply to his paintings.

Seems like one should write how the people who read your text would expect you to write. This is my main problem with writing, since I have a very hard time to figure out what people expect. I also read a lot of books about writing, but none really helped. They always use these very abstract concepts which if you apply them blindly will also lead to an incomprehensible text anyways. What helped a lot was to just take a similar text which seemingly fulfills expectations, and, almost short of plagiarism, just exchange the messages which are conveyed. This is where AI could help a lot, because I would think that it should be able to exactly this task, if you provide it the message you would like to write up. Anyways, I don’t know anybody (at least in science) who likes writing and I really hope that there will be a more practical solution than spending hours and hours of refining a text in the future. This time could better be spent on research.

Yes, it is mostly semantics but the question really is what you think the space-time metric is. In order to attribute the prefactor to time you would need to argue that the space-time metric really is Euclidean, but because time is different from space there is this negative prefactor showing up in the metric. But you can also claim that time and space are the same and the space time metric is hyperbolic. Since there is there is no good argument why metrics necessarily need to be Euclidean, I find the second option more convincing.