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[silverspawn]

That probably works in principle but I don't know how that works. (I think I've mentioned before that i knew ~0 about databases before, and the part on databases hasn't started yet, so I still only know a little.) I will probably be able to figure it out though.

[silverspawn]

Imagine a guy with the power to affect certain materials mentally. And then he gets into a gunfight and... stops the bullets with his powers

My brain thought this was an super mind bending idea. While I was asleep, anyway. Recently, more of my dreams have the character of not "I experience something" but "I'm watching something about other people". And when it got to that part, that was like woah. What an incredible plot twist.

[silverspawn]

Now, when children have a guardian, the guardian makes them do chores, so it follows that you Baudelaires will do all the chores for the entire village. Beginning tomorrow, you three children will be responsible for anything that anyone asks you to do.

[silverspawn]

 It may take a village to raise a child, but that doesn't mean that our homes have to be disturbed by noisy children, does it?"
"Yes," agreed Mrs. Morrow. "I'm all for the orphans doing our chores, but I don't want them cluttering up my house."

[silverspawn]

I'm sure you have some concerns of your own. It's too bad you're not allowed to speak right now, otherwise you  could tell us what they were.

[silverspawn]

So last night, my subconscious projection of my brother talked to me about this cool observation he had

namely, if you spend more people (?) trying to transport stuff around, you only have logarithmic gains. However, he has "done the math", and it turns out the distance grows linearly, so it's not that the people walk slower, but that they need to walk further.

This is of course not true, but I'm nonetheless impressed with my brain for coming up with it in my sleep because it's based on a real principle, and I've never thought about it before. Namely, suppose you have a hundred people walking on some narrow and curvy road, and for some reason they all have to walk in a horizontal line at all times. In this case, only the people in the middle can turn corners efficiently; the others have to walk further. best explained with a picture



i.e., just the connection between radius and circumference of the circle, but applied to a new context. Incorrectly applied since people could just not walk in a horizontal line, but nonetheless a logically coherent application. Also it's not logarithmic, of course.

And his proposed solution was that we should basically parkour to make ways as straight as possible. There was a part where he made me jump over a car and then told me that, given the straight line I've now taken, I've only had an efficiency loss of 6% or something.

Not making this up.

[Jimmmmm]

Not making this up.

Well, kind of.

[silverspawn]

Not making this up.

Well, kind of.

lol yeah

I think this was the second coolest exportable idea my brain has ever produced during sleep (and then not forgotten). The first is probably an idea for a prismata card that rebuilds all units lost to a breach last round upon being built. I've posted this online and people didn't like it very much, but for a literal dream creation, being sort of only meh is pretty amazing.

[silverspawn]

Got massively side tracked there with annoying things like school and covid and my paper

back to rereading the entire sequences, book 4/6

On the plausibility of the Copenhagen interpretation (the most widely held 'single world' view of quantum physics):

Well, first: Does any collapse theory have any experimental support? No.

With that out of the way…

If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:

    The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
    The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
    The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
    The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
    The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
    The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville’s Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
    The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
    The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.

[silverspawn]

Random starcraft sidetrack

In one of the missions of Campaign VII playing Raynor, you get hired by a guy who wants you to steal a specific kind of gas. It's guarded by protoss who think the gas is sacred. You take it anyway and kill the protoss who don't like it. the protoss later turn out to be fanatics who imprison other protoss not in line with their views

I'm sure you can see where this is going -- what if it hadn't been this way? worth noting here that raynor as a reputation of being protoss friendly. What if the protoss we have to fight do not conveniently turn out to be evil?

Which is like every other protoss you fight in the entire campaign, too. They're all from the same evil taldarim tribe. In the last mission where they're involved, you destroy their mothership

This generalizes to a lesson about writing: people have this instinct to avoid difficulty, but difficulty is the most interesting thing. Don't shrink away from genuinely difficult moral decisions like 'what if we have to kill these good guys to do the thing we need'? embrace them. explore the uncomfortable.

[silverspawn]

imagine thinking it's okay to steal a substance that has been sacred to the natives for thousands of years on the grounds that they might later turn out to be evil. Even reading the bible as your guide for moral reasoning will give you better advice

[silverspawn]

For it is written: to be straight in a round world is straight up roundiculous

[silverspawn]

The incoming vaccine mandates turn the vaccine question from a purely theoretical thing into an extremely pressing practical question.

What do you do if you think vaccines are a tool of the intellectual elite to control the population -- if not a poisoned death shot that kills everyone in two years -- but your country mandates vaccines to be able to work

One possible answer would be "go live in Paris" seeing as my sister talks fluent french; the problem with that is that France also has vaccine mandates

[silverspawn]

I'm still unsure to what degree she has belief vs belief in belief. The facts seem to point toward a belief that is nonzero but not as strong as her belief in her belief, i.e., she's willing to go through nontrivial trouble to avoid vaccines, but probably not as much trouble as a full belief would imply.

I thus expect her to get vaccinated

[silverspawn]

There's also a separate question about whether vaccine mandates are a good idea, which I am currently very uncertain about. Selfishly, for it is very rare to have a selfish reason to prefer one policy over another but this is one such case, I like vaccine mandates as they may be an alternative to school closures.

[silverspawn]

I'm still unsure to what degree she has belief vs belief in belief. The facts seem to point toward a belief that is nonzero but not as strong as her belief in her belief, i.e., she's willing to go through nontrivial trouble to avoid vaccines, but probably not as much trouble as a full belief would imply.

I thus expect her to get vaccinated

another way to put this is that I have yet seen her do really extreme things for any reason. I generally never see other people do things that I classify as very extreme. The only person in my social circle who truly acts as though they believe what they claim to belief, and draws extreme conclusions where appropriate is myself

E.g., if I tell people I expect the world to end in 30 years, that is one thing, but I then need to separately explain why I don't support building a city train that takes 40 years to pay off in terms of co2. not taking your professed beliefs seriously is culturally expected

[silverspawn]

Loosely related (but very interesting in any case)

[Awaclus]

The incoming vaccine mandates turn the vaccine question from a purely theoretical thing into an extremely pressing practical question.

What do you do if you think vaccines are a tool of the intellectual elite to control the population -- if not a poisoned death shot that kills everyone in two years -- but your country mandates vaccines to be able to work

One possible answer would be "go live in Paris" seeing as my sister talks fluent french; the problem with that is that France also has vaccine mandates

Seems like the easiest thing to do is simply refusing to take the vaccine and accepting whatever penalty there might be. If you have to find a different job you can do remotely, that doesn't seem like much of a disaster compared to being controlled by the (presumably malevolent) intellectual elite.

[silverspawn]

I would however still classify that as very extreme because she's right now studying how to become a midwive -- in Germany, this is something you do at a University -- and this cannot be done remotely.

Also she's about to have her second kid, and though German safety nets are impressive, you do at some point need to earn money. (Although as a counter point to that, she certainly has the ability to work as a translator or editor.)

[silverspawn]

Random brag: I appear well-calibrated so far

What is the ~100% question I've lost? I'm so glad you asked! it's that the Queen of England will be killed by terrorists. I predicted 0% and the person who made the prediction resolved it as correct. I cannot resolve it as incorrect or unresolved because the site is bugged. This is the only one. My actual empirical accuracy is 100%.

[silverspawn]

Still very salty about that

[Awaclus]

I would however still classify that as very extreme because she's right now studying how to become a midwive -- in Germany, this is something you do at a University -- and this cannot be done remotely.

Also she's about to have her second kid, and though German safety nets are impressive, you do at some point need to earn money. (Although as a counter point to that, she certainly has the ability to work as a translator or editor.)

Is the vaccine mandate not supposed to be temporary? If you can work as a translator or editor for a few months, or even a few years, before you can start working as a midwife, that sounds reasonable to do just in case even if you estimate the chances of the vaccines containing distortion pedals to be very low. Like, I'd much rather spend let's say three years doing translation than take a 5% chance that a malevolent entity could take control over me.

There's also a separate question about whether vaccine mandates are a good idea, which I am currently very uncertain about. Selfishly, for it is very rare to have a selfish reason to prefer one policy over another but this is one such case, I like vaccine mandates as they may be an alternative to school closures.

I think school closures are inherently a good thing and we should be doing them as much as possible even if there wasn't a pandemic around. The only problem is that in practice, schools don't actually get closed, but just moved to students' homes where they still have to learn the same materials (that were designed for classroom learning) with the same schedule, and that only has some of the less important benefits of not going to school and makes some of the bigger problems of going to school worse for many students.

In my opinion, giving people some kind of a gift in exchange for getting vaccinated > school closures > vaccine mandates > COVID passports. We had influenza vaccines in the military that we had to take voluntarily (because the law allowing for mandatory vaccines was not in effect, the vaccines were of course completely voluntary to take, but we also didn't have any other choice but to take them in practice, and even the people who tried to hide to avoid taking the vaccine were eventually found and took the vaccine totally voluntarily afterwards), and practically speaking it was fine — nothing disastrous happened to anyone, and even if some people did have some side effects, they were obviously not as bad as having an influenza epidemic affect the entire military base. The right to bodily autonomy is very important in my opinion, so I'd rather not have mandatory vaccines if we can handle the problem in a different way, but a vaccine is such an incredibly minor violation of said autonomy that I'd still rather do that than take the privacy concerns with COVID passes, which in turn are relatively minor privacy concerns and still better than letting the virus spread uncontrollably.

[silverspawn]

I obviously agree that getting rid of schools would be a good idea

[silverspawn]

Is the vaccine mandate not supposed to be temporary? If you can work as a translator or editor for a few months, or even a few years, before you can start working as a midwife, that sounds reasonable to do just in case even if you estimate the chances of the vaccines containing distortion pedals to be very low. Like, I'd much rather spend let's say three years doing translation than take a 5% chance that a malevolent entity could take control over me.

I believe there is a rather predictable problem suggesting this to her?

[Awaclus]

Is the vaccine mandate not supposed to be temporary? If you can work as a translator or editor for a few months, or even a few years, before you can start working as a midwife, that sounds reasonable to do just in case even if you estimate the chances of the vaccines containing distortion pedals to be very low. Like, I'd much rather spend let's say three years doing translation than take a 5% chance that a malevolent entity could take control over me.

I believe there is a rather predictable problem suggesting this to her?

Is the problem that she won't believe the mandate is temporary, or that she will agree with the logic and actually do it even though it's a bad idea?