jrd259

I'm so out of the loop. What is the new, special sense of Rationalist over what it might have meant to e.g. Descarte?

In his book Cows, Pugs, Wars and Witches the anthropologist Marvin Harris tries to ground the pig taboo as a protection against the tragedy of the commons. As per Harris, pigs require excessive water, a scarce resource in the region. A flat ban on consuming pigs reduces the chance that people will divert water to pigs. The article hints at this where it calls the pig "an animal unfit for the harsh terrain and dry climate".

This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer research center because he put more value on helping to cure cancer than making more money. There actually are people out there who value service to the community more than fame or fortune. They deserve praise, not scorn.

The ability to search the code base is one reason I insist on correct spelling even in comments when doing code reviews, and also keep adding to my IDE's dictionary so it will catch my spelling errors.

The example of low and high data-ink (from Tufte) is switched. I wrote the author to suggest it be fixed

You might also want to discuss Fitt’s law. Difference between a diagram (Tufte) and a GUI is that we only look at a diagram, but a GUI we interact with, which means we need to ensure people can actually click/tap/select the element of interest. Higher density makes that harder.

All fair points about zero. Sorry, I acknowledge now I was overly influenced my metrics dashboards I use for alerting. I've seen people panic at a seeming steep rise in error rate or increase in latency because the chart was not showing the full range (0 to 1 for rates, or 0 to 2x SLA for latency). I was only thinking of operational alerting dashboards.

I'd argue that the zero value should always be shown. Otherwise you get different impressions of the rate depending how you scale and subset the Y axis.

I'm disappointed by the somewhat ad-hominem attack on Silverbook for being a porn producer: "Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and porn producer, decided to recreate Hillman’s work." Previous work experience is irrelevant, and besides, don't at least some of aspire to being polymaths?

Indeed, what's up with the "mad scientist" bit?

John Varley had a short story with that idea, too. A spacefaring race that is only conscious when needed. Good sarcastic lecture about how consciousness is overrated by those who have it.

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate, to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-term profit.

Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel.

Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose?

We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?)

I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.

based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.