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I deem this a very strong entry

Should I clean my apartment or read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary? Clearly the latter

@Yellow are you sure they didn't take any of your clothes? I mean, maybe they just wanted to change into some clean ones.

So you're a female? I've always been convinced you are a dude. Unless you mean you're a dude who sometimes does the girly thing – I ain't judging

That sentence made my head hurt

We should start a fundraiser for putting up a prime-time TV ad for the forum

Aren't blogs just a slightly more elaborate form of spam? Or the text-version of art therapy

Meaning is a feeling, a simulacrum. It's the sensation of living in line with one's values and purpose. @higs I see the biological-God thing is still going strong even after the high subsided. Must have been some good shit :smoker:

Yea I dunno. I play poker in casinos. Most of it revolves around real-time decisions based on gut-feeling. One can do some calculations off the table but it's of quite limited use. I don't really get chess as it's pure strategy and thus quite one-dimensional. I definitely need the component of...

@higs some of us are not content with merely having values descend on us from above. Your conclusion should come at the end of a deep insight, not assumed a-priori. But yes, there is definitely a time and place for drunken inspiration.

Existentialism treats "inherent value" in the context of human freedom. If there would be a singular purpose for every human at the outset, then we would all just be prisoners. Sartre conceived of the concept of bad faith which is when people tell themselves they have to live a certain way, that...

Not bad. Singer sounds kinda like the guy from Depeche-Mode. 5.5/10

I see, so E=mc^2 is only for mass at rest. Pretty good explanation of how particles without mass can have momentum: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2229/if-photons-have-no-mass-how-can-they-have-momentum

If one wants to, one can have endless illuminating and engaging discussions here, on a very wide range of topics. Gotta echo Happy here and say I don't see this forum in any way depressing at all.

What about E = mc^2. Wouldn't it imply that if there is no mass then there is no energy?

The idea of ending death also brings tears to my eyes - but mostly because of how fucking over-populated the planet would get. Anyways - hey and welcome. You seem like an interesting specimen

Well, we have a TED talk here where they are talking about it, so we know quite explicitly what they are doing. I think in the future, people will be even more informed about such things, for reasons mentioned above. One has to remember: google is one of the first large search-engine companies...

Yeah, it's the natural progression. You start out thinking there are absolute, universal values. Then you realize there are no such things, and become nihilist. And finally, if you're lucky, you realize it's up to you to define values and you become existentialist.

What a legend

But why would they start hiding fora in general from search results? And even if they did, that would make their seach engine useless and thus giving people an incentive to start using alternative ones. My prediction is somewhat the opposite. As big data and heavy computation becomes cheaper...

Well, one thing is influencing the masses by selectively showing them information satifying certain criteria - another is to delete websites from the internet. They cannot really do the latter. Another thing is that google certainly doesn't have a monopoly on search results. I for one stopped...

Are you going to tap that ass, Manipulator?

Atmospheric, compex rythms, mix of synthesized and organic sounds. Pretty much everything I love. 10/10.

I've used Khan Academy sometimes

Who is this guy Mozart? Never heard of him. Nah, you're right, it is objectively beautiful. There's something about it that speaks to the soul. Full score on this one.

A good production, somewhat interesting Trent-Reznor inspired intro (initial 13 secs or so). Other than that, perhaps due my untrained ear is unable to hear to nuances of this style of music, it sounds to me somewhat generic and very similar to a multitude of Linkin-Park style copies. I get the...

The most general principal I can think of is: Don't set goals. Develop habits.

Would be even easier if they accepted monopoly money

Some predictions fail, others come true. That doesn't mean we should abstain from reasoning about whether an idea is good or bad. Currently most people are abstaining from that and instead go with "just throw money at it and then Science will happen"

I'm more of a classical-liberalist Martian, actually

Hey, I'm from somewhere on earth too! Small world, this is. Cheerful hello to you too, sir/madame

I'm in Scandinavia, dude. I have never even seen a gun.

The problem here is that this exact philosophy is what lead to the current situation in the first place. When you give a centralized authority the power to enforce far-reaching regulations and dictate economic activity, you create an incentive for corporations and politics to become entangeled...

@Auburn I guess that gives a more nuanced view on the topic. I'm out of cynical counter arguments (for now)

Just figure out the geometry of the space (e.g. Euclidean) and take measurements along its dimensions. Don't really see the problem.

@Auburn First of all, it's not really reasonable to compare the total spending of US to what one guy receives. The comperatively small size notwithstanding this is 5 billion that goes to one particular entrepreneur. Secondly, I'm not against spending on science. I'm criticising Musk's project...

Haven't worked in retail but as a customer, I can add add that if you are taking like 3 minutes to figure out which carton of milk you want to buy, at least look around to see if other people are waiting to get to the milk too.

The very problem with the contemporary "liberalism" is that it turned into an aggressive closed-minded religion, mostly originated in academic ivory towers. Another problem is that it became some strange mixture of Marxism and Liberalism, as is evident from the narrative in OP. True Liberalism...

We need the like feature for democracy of opinion

Nothing like the smell of a new forum interface

Sorry dude but you seem to not understand what currency even is. The reason you are not talking about the CDN/USD rate in Canada is that on any given day, you can safely assume that the number of CDN you have to pay up for, say, a gallon of milk, is the same that day as it was the day before. If...

Definitely not me

I would never in my right mind claim IQ is a sufficient measure of human intelligence. It's a statistical predictor which explains only some of the variation in outcomes, and which is useful in some specific scenarios and useless in others.

Maybe, but it gets complicated. One doesn't pick one's spouse randomly from the general population. It's more likely one picks from some subset like one's coworkers, and those will probably have IQs close to one's own.

no It just means people are pairing off across similar levels of intelligence. A similar thing happens within tranches of genetic quality in general. High-quality genes try to pair off with other high-quality genes and so on down the ladder. That way, low-quality genes can survive over many...

You mentioned this somewhere else earlier – this thing about the supposed fallacy of denominating it in USD. I don't understand what you mean. It's just one out of many denominators. You can quote it in USD, GBP, the P/E of S&P500, or the current price of gummy bears. It's just a matter of...

I don't see the problem with that situation at all. And perhaps the people who are not as sympathetic to your experience as you hope for are neither. When you are in this subculture coming from a different background, you can use that to synthesize your own style. No one is on a perfect path to...

Studies have shown that there is generally a high correlation between IQ's of spouses. It is even higher than the correlation between IQ's of siblings. So most men, just like most women, simply prefer people similar to themselves.