See Reason: Looking at the World through Science and Reason

I'm Doing Darwin a Disservice Most of my days are spent at work programming. As 50% of the entire workforce and the sole programmer (though not for long - we welcome our first developer hire July 5!), I have a lot of work to do. When I program, I usually listen to punk and metal on Pandora, and today while watching a new data analysis process I was debugging cranking along in AWS, a lyric from the NOFX song " The Idiots are Taking Over " struck me: Darwin's rollin over in his coffin the fittest are surviving much less often I've listened to this song a million times, and it's always good for a whipping up a little anti-conservative, anti-religious-establishment furor in me. NOFX really nails that in some of their songs (see also Leaving Jesusland ), but that one line hit me in a new way today. I'm not very evolutionarily fit. What Do We Mean by "Fitness?" Somewhat subconsciously, I've always considered myself extremely fit (I'

It's generally useful to behave as if we all live in the same universe. Even if one agrees with quantum solipsism - the idea that one is the only person one knows exists and that the existence of the entire universe depends on you continuing to exist  - walking around acting that way makes you look crazy and you're sure to piss off everyone around you if they do in fact also exist. Life is a lot easier to live if one accepts the postulate that other people really do exist even if it can't be proven - and even if they don't exist, behaving as if they do keeps your experience of reality consistent with the expectations your mind has built up over years of experience before you started questioning the reality of other people. If one puts aside quantum solipsism, there is still a problem in knowing whether or not other people exist in the same universe as you or not. It turns out that one can only prove that other people's universe is consistent with your universe, an

Eight years went by fast! Better late than never picking back up a blog I suppose. Since I last wrote (in addition to everyone driving home getting “Internet phones” to provide them real-time traffic data which should hypothetically lead to more efficient travel times) I’ve largely maintained most of the beliefs from my posts and developed my thinking along several lines. Today, I’m going to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot recently: what will happen to society leading into and after the singularity? On one hand, the definition of the singularity is that we cannot see what the world will be like beyond its horizon, because we cannot predict what the presence of one or more intelligences far superior to our own would do with the world. However, we can project some of the current aspects of our society forward to the singularity and make some educated guesses about what will happen to them after the singularity as well. I’m going to first talk through the DM