• Here are three possible worlds, and within each possible world three different planets are shown on the X axis, while three different times are shown on the Y axis. The three worlds correspond to three different times when the great filter might occur: 1) before any life, 2) before intelligent life, or 3) before space colonization.

    After at first thinking you are in a random box, you update on the fact that your planet recently acquired intelligence, and conclude you are somewhere in the middle row. Then you update on self-indication, i.e., that you exist, and so are in an orange box. You conclude you likely live in world 3. (It has 3/5 of the orange boxes.) Doom awaits!

    (via Overcoming Bias : Very Bad News)

  • On the radio recently some guy said he didn’t want his new kid to have electronic toys, so he looked up his old favorite, Legos, on the web. He was horrified to see websites for obsessive adult male hobbyists, who devoted decades and huge sums to develop lego masterpieces. He worried his kid might grow up like that.

    Me, I worry my kids will grow up to be the opposite: sophisticated. While such folks can be very smart and capable, they are uninteresting.

  • Little remains of the rule of law precept to treat people equally. The exact same chemical combinations which are fine to serve rich old folks at cocktail receptions, are banned in cheap cans from convenience store coolers. Clearly the goal is to target particular vaguely-imagined classes of people, and regulators would be fine with having the law specify the color of the cans, the geographic locations, time of purchase, form of financing, whatever it took to get to “them” without overly bothering “us.”

    And this is where the slippery slope of paternalism leads: naked classism. When we the good people notice that those distrusted others do things that don’t seem proper to us, well we should just pass whatever laws it takes to make them toe our line. Surely it wouldn’t be responsible to just let them do stuff we wouldn’t, right?