I’m mostly half-serious.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I never said we should have zero debt, that’s a strawman. Most economist recommend a moderate amount of debt due to various positive effects (some of which you mention). So the real disagreement comes here:

    It’s all connected and that’s why running a deficit, a (relatively) small one, is a good thing.

    The implication being that you think the U.S. has a (relatively) small amount of debt. Now, I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but I do not think that the U.S. currently has a small amount of debt. Our debt to GDP ratio is higher than other developed nations, which is concerning.

    I do concede that we aren’t in danger of a debt crisis on the scale of Greece or Sri Lanka. But ~$34 Trillion in debt needs to be part of the discussion when we keep praising the economy.














  • Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I’m convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.



  • Sorry, I suppose people haven’t heard of the “Simulation hypothesis” in philosophy.

    Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe “around” it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.




  • I’m agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.

    edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis.