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Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-12-11T03:27:22.024Z · LW · GW

It was just legalised in Western Australia. The second Australian state to do so.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on aaq's Shortform · 2019-12-11T03:10:51.722Z · LW · GW

I have spent many years unintentionally dumbing myself down by not exercising my brain sufficiently. This place is somewhere I can come and flex a bit of mental muscle and get a bit of a dopamine reward for grasping a new concept or reading about how someone else worked their way through a problem and I am really glad it exists. The HPMOR series was especially useful for becoming more rational and since reading it my peers have noticed a change in the way I discuss difficult topics. I really enjoy recognising when the tools I've learnt here help me in my day to day stuff. In saying all that I feel I'm a rare 'right of centre' member here but because you are all rational it's not such a big deal. Rational people are so much nicer to talk to eh!

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Ungendered Spanish · 2019-12-10T22:10:28.054Z · LW · GW

The 'le' would need to be created in the language and used to mean a non-gender specific human then? Does this then follow; el jefe male boss, la jefa female boss, le jefe non gender specific boss? Would this flow onto all the gendered words in the language, la oficina (the office) becomes le oficine for example? I am guessing you would save the le for humans or you end up changing the entire language. le nine for non-gender specific child maybe?

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Ungendered Spanish · 2019-12-08T21:54:59.023Z · LW · GW

Would words like jefe (boss) have to be changed to jefo to specify a male boss? Currently, el jefe is a male boss or a boss without their gender being specified....except that it kinda does specify because it is not la jefa, female boss.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-11-03T23:55:24.285Z · LW · GW

There are not many anonymous free speech places left. I only know of one or two and they are constantly under DDOS attack (amongst others) to shut them down. All the major platforms don't allow contrarian opinions to gather momentum and the mainstream news just ignores what they don't like. This mass censorship ensures that 'those ideas' never have a chance to become popular.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-30T02:46:51.993Z · LW · GW

The experts I read don't say that. The experts I read say that none of these or similar predictions over the past 30 years have come true. Lots of times the exact opposite has occurred. 'My' experts show how the predictive models of other experts have not predicted anything of value and a lot of the time data has to be manipulated to even approach predicted outcomes. Just depends who you believe I guess. Just recently the IPCC itself poured a big bucket of cold water over the whole 'increasing devastation from weather' myth. The guys I have been following have been saying this for 10 years plus so it should be a big deal when one the biggest alarmists supports the sceptic position. Wonder why it didn't get much airtime?

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-27T21:37:20.863Z · LW · GW

If we are talking a couple of degrees over century timelines I don't think anyone much is going to be worse off. Especially if, as I believe, CO2 concentration lags temperature. Greening the planet further is a good thing for most people in my opinion. And if you compare more warming to more cooling I think you will find warming is less dangerous generally.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-25T00:19:15.753Z · LW · GW

The prize is for refuting the findings of the university paper not a conspiracy theory. And the prize is not offered by the university but a third party. There are lesser prizes for refuting a finding but not being published. I will go ahead and assume you haven't read the paper yet.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-24T22:39:23.491Z · LW · GW

I read the report linked below and it confirmed my long held beliefs that there has been a major coverup of information surrounding the events of 9/11. Feel free to read and refute for yourself. BTW, if you can refute it and get published there is a $100k prize waiting!

http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

I don't deny global warming. I look forward to a few degrees of warning as do many thousands of people who lose family members every winter. I believe that CO2 concentration lags temperature change. I don't believe taxing carbon is the answer. I don't believe the 'climate problem' has been adequately defined. I could go on but this is not the place.

I am not a hippie and I consider myself right of centre and most topics.

I didn't vote on your comment.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-24T22:30:30.109Z · LW · GW

Apologies, the final sentence was an edit after the downvotes rolled in. I should have marked it as such. I was very surprised though that I met the brief and was downvoted.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-22T21:42:24.091Z · LW · GW

World Trade Centre building 7 did not collapse at free fall into its own footprint because of office fires.


downvotes? too contrarian? hahaha.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Deleted · 2019-10-22T21:40:31.729Z · LW · GW

The history of World War II has been rewritten to protect the guilty.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on The Power to Solve Climate Change · 2019-09-13T01:23:44.105Z · LW · GW

This has really triggered me and I am only up to the dot points. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed the specificity articles to date I cannot continue with this one with it being based on dodgy information from the outset.

From the first sentence;

'Most people', can you define most? As a portion of the earth's population I think 'some' would be more accurate.

'agree that climate change', I will assume you mean man-made climate change because changing how cosmic rays interact with our atmosphere is very much more difficult to influence than how much man produced carbon goes into the atmosphere, which is hard enough on its own.

'is a big problem we should be solving,' I don't agree with this either (surprisingly). If you had said "is a big problem that requires understanding' i would have been more happy.

'but couldn't tell you what specifically "solving climate change" means', I think this mainly comes down to a poorly defined problem. A couple of degrees of warming would actually be nice for people who's farm freeze solid every year. A couple of degrees of warming would actually be nice for reducing the thousands of deaths of people who can't afford to heat their homes (off the top of my head I think it was 50 000ish in Europe last winter)

The graph you have included next is the best example of a texas sharp shooter fallacy I have ever seen. Compare 10000 years of data to a cherry picked average of 19 of those years, cmon really? Seriously, this is the foundation?

The dot points

Earth's average temperature has shot up by 1°C in the last 50 years.

How is this a problem that needs solving even if it is accurate? Which I doubt anyway due to the cherry picked nature of the information so far.

The causal link from greenhouse gas emissions to Earth's rising temperature has been well established.

This is actually the most controversial part of the whole debate. If it were established you would be able to find a model that modelled it. Best of luck with that.

On a 1M-year timescale, Earth's temperature has been fluctuating plus or minus a few degrees tops, so this 1°C change is a big fluctuation.

This is flat out wrong. I didn't even have to go to a sceptic site for this graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg

We're predicting it to be as high as a 6°C warming by 2100, so it's actually a hugefluctuation.

Oh, come on. Al Gore's hockey stick was debunked years ago.


When I get time I will probably read through. I am going to have work really hard on my biases before I do. It will be interesting, I suppose, to see how you solve a problem you have not defined/defined erroneously.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Problems in AI Alignment that philosophers could potentially contribute to · 2019-09-09T00:12:44.167Z · LW · GW

I don't know very much about AI at all however this question struck me as odd;

How should two AIs that want to merge with each other aggregate their preferences?

If they are AI wouldn't they do it however they wanted to? Or is the question "how should they be programmed to go about it?"

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on What are the best resources for examining the evidence for anthropogenic climate change? · 2019-08-07T04:00:09.744Z · LW · GW

I would say the best resources are the sceptic pages partly because I am one and partly because if you can understand the sceptic point of view you might be able to argue against it more competently. This one in particular has many interesting articles linked along with a daily dose; https://notrickszone.com/. Another personal favourite, among many, is https://www.thegwpf.com/

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Chapter 122: Something to Protect: Hermione Granger · 2019-07-25T03:10:47.271Z · LW · GW

Absolutely amazing work. Thanks for writing it. I read this after the rationality series and really enjoyed how you wove those learnings into the Harry Potter story.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Disputing Definitions · 2019-02-15T04:12:50.409Z · LW · GW

If albert said he possesed an unwatched video of the tree falling and then made a bet with barry about whether the video will have the sound I think it is unlikely Barry would bet on a silent video, even hypothetically.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on What kind of information would serve as the best evidence for resolving the debate of whether a centrist or leftist Democratic nominee is likelier to take the White House in 2020? · 2019-02-04T22:38:07.054Z · LW · GW

Perhaps this series by Ben Hunt will help you decide if there is enough centre to support a centrist. I doubt it. https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? · 2019-02-03T22:22:26.502Z · LW · GW

I'm glad this is a hypothetical example otherwise I'd feel compelled to call you out for supporting the official conspiracy theory rather than the facts of the matter. My opinion is that the people who orchestrated this event are in fact, evil, and the '19' are somewhat clueless patsies.

Comment by paul ince (paul-ince) on Fake Causality · 2019-01-31T02:41:01.970Z · LW · GW

Does Phlogiston make the fire hot the same way CO2 makes the climate change?