TheComedian

> Joe didn't care whether his kid was in Princeton or Harvard, > as long as it was one of them.

And oddly enough, JFK went to both Princeton and Harvard. He attended Princeton for six weeks before getting ill and withdrawing and then going to Harvard the next year.

Agreed, 1% body fat is extremely dangerous and your body does not have enough fat for it to go about its normal processes. It is certainly not sustainable for any period of time. Professional bodybuilders have trouble getting down to ~3% body-fat for their competitions and they only have to hold that level for a day or 2.

You seem to assume that the pattern of top submissions and top comments is unrelated to what users post. It seems to me that as quality of the top submissions and top comments improves, the quality of the worst submissions and comments will improve as well. When there is no longer a reward for posting "bad" material behavior will change accordingly.

My understanding is that academia is very competitive, so I don't understand how you are only going to work 9 hours a week. Further, you'll probably have classes to teach which surely take up more than 9 hours a week. Also, since tenure is largely tied to the quality of your output, you can't always work on what interests you--you have to work on what you can publish.

I think you can certainly make an argument for military spending in terms of the side benefits associated with developing any complex technology, but I don't think the societal cost of increased militarization justifies military spending.

I did not find that comment condescending, though I expected to when he mentioned that he was going to explain how the budget worked. In fact, the thing that struck me while reading the entirety of the piece was how well he advocated for his position and explained difficult ideas in an accessible way while not talking down to the nun or criticizing her for not sharing his point of view. If all scientists could write in such an effective way their politics would be much better received I'm sure.

Though I understand that you aren't denying the placebo effect, I'm confused about why you feel that a large amount of the placebo effect is due to bias. After all, most drug trials are double-blinded and placebo controlled, so surely in these trials the placebo effect is legitimate (assuming no scientific fraud).

This is actually under debate. There is disagreement among neuroscientists whether intelligence is a result of brain modularity (specific regions of the brains optimized for certain tasks), or due to brain size alone. All that said, I'm skeptical of the singularity since it assumes that a recursive process can continually improve intelligence without significant diminishing returns. The problem with this thinking is that it fails to take into account evolution. All this research into AI is based on the assumption that "intelligence" should be like human intelligence. But human intelligence has had several billion years to evolve and is highly optimized for our environment (actually our environment from several tens of thousands of years ago when we were hunter gatherers). It seems naive to me to assume that we are not nearing a local optimum in what is possible with human intelligence. I don't believe a singularity is possible because by recursively improving "intelligence" you will near the local optimum of that form of intelligence but that does not mean you can continue improving that intelligence indefinitely.

This assertion is groundless. Why would Moore's law accelerate? In fact, Moore's law is currently decelerating and gains are increasingly harder to find. Further, Moore's law says nothing about computational speed, but only the density of transistors. These two are related but not identical.

Edit: also, from my understanding, the gains in transistor density largely depend on new discoveries in physics. Before a computer can aid in accelerating Moore's law it would need to be sufficiently advanced to generate new discoveries in physics, but at this point you'd have a computer smart enough that it Moore's law wouldn't matter much. Seems like putting the cart before the horse to me.

Monier died in 1906, so I doubt it.