Uhuhreally

but Neanderthals were short and stupid.

I think the Nephilim, given the way they were described as tall "sons of God" who were "heros" and "warriors of renown" were an African people

to what extent is this Smalltalk all the way down ? Can I replace the drivers with Smalltalk code ?

- The projections were wrong

+ some of the projections were correct

- The fatality rate is lower than feared

+ higher in some countries

- Other diseases kill people too

+ like smallpox and ebola

- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu

+ it's only just started

- Lockdowns can harm people too

+ less than killing and permanently injuring people

and often people answer not to help the questioner (and future readers) but to show off the little knowledge they have

there have been immediate shortages for basic sundry goods

He devoted a whole lecture to explaining his belief in free will, going in depth into the philosphical history of the concept and his personal reasons which come across as entirely genuine. He also speculates as to how he thinks the limited free will of particles could result in our free will. It's six lectures and a lot of hard work with highly respected physicists by a mathematician who's old, accomplished and distinguished.

by "sleight of hand" of are implying Conway isn't being honest ? I think he was entirely sincere.

aren't you mixing models of reality here ? You're describing a universe in which there's free will and determinism, somehow combined with many-worlds. It's hard to follow such hypercounterfactual logic

and I reply that I just record the "fresh" random roll ahead of time and you look that up. Doesn't make any difference. I think you're confusing random with pseudorandom.

What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.

AFAIUI by noting that the dice could have been thrown ahead of time and then looked up, we can treat it as a function of time and then it becomes as though another part of the information in the past light cone which doesn't explain the behaviour of particles, as exemplified by FIN, MIN & TWIN

maybe in that case you can help me see why Conway et al are wrong in this ? Because I'm only quoting here, and the paper is beyond me.

That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean.

one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.

Have you watched the lectures ?

Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part of its state. One implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will. This doesn't imply that particles are conscious or aware, it only means that certain degrees of freedom evolve according to computations performed by the particles independently.

In one of the lectures Conway goes in depth into the philosophy of free will, which he believed in at a time when it was (and still is) almost universally unfashionable.

easy. Imagine twin brothers each with identical wealth and then one of them steals the other one's money. Now one has twice the wealth of the other.

Along with health workers and delivery drivers they're the people society actually depends on

I've completely given up on giving advice and persuading people because it doesn't work and often people do the opposite. People are going to do what they want anyway. Doesn't stop me having my opinions though.

are you posing your counter-advice as a question in an attempt to fly it under the radar ?

All of us are in hundreds of people's photos & videos every time we travel through a city and then FB/Apple/Google will recognize us anyway

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...

completely agree. Silence is the only way to code

there will definitely be bacteria living there

err, that's not on the same level to compare

and there you have hit the nail on the head

no that would not be cool. Not at all

yep

from Earth there's only one way: telescopes

he said it was understandable why it was the way it was but implied that it "would be better" if it went directly - his tone was scoffing

the view of the night sky is about to be destroyed by companies

and they will be replaced after that

there are other ways to deliver internet