I think OP is thinking about covering the sphere of directions in 3D space, not just directions in a 2D plane. No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area, so any finite amount you draw will cover zero percent of the area of the two-dimensional sphere surface.
> No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area
The object doesn’t matter, using pencil as the example was what threw you off - it’s not about what the pencil “draws”. Consider a thin cylinder, or rectangular prism, or just a stick - if you spin it around, its endpoints trace out a circle whose diameter is the length of the stick. You can move and spin such an object in another way where the shape traced out by its endpoints has smaller area than that circle.
> They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.
Static site generation and Github pages. Start with the Jekyll generator Github supports out of the box and roll your own if you need something it doesn't provide.
So you're saying that it's naive to suppose that everybody being much smarter than they are now would transform society, because any wide-scale societal change requires ongoing social cooperation between the many average-intelligence people society currently consists of?
Here’s a simpler way to put it: intelligence and social cooperation are not the same thing. Being good at math or science doesn’t mean you understand how to organize complex political groups, and never has.
People tend to think their special gift is what the world needs, and academically-minded smart people (by that I mean people that define their self-worth by intelligence level) are no different.
Yes, because you need to spend a lot of time doing social organization and thinking about it to get very good at it, just like you need to spend a lot of time doing math or science and thinking about it to get very good at it. And then you need to pick up patterns, respond well to unexpected situations and come up with creative solutions on top of that, which requires intelligence. If you look at the people who are the best at doing complex political organization, they'll probably all have above-average intelligence.
I don’t agree at all. Charismatic leaders tend to have both “in born” talent and experience gained over time. It’s not something that comes from sitting in a room and thinking about how to be a good leader.
Sure, some level of intelligence is required, which may be above average. But that is a necessary requirement, not a sufficient one. Raw intelligence is only useful to a certain extent here, and exceeding certain limits may actually be detrimental.
When it comes to "charismatic leaders" I like this quote from Frank Herbert:
"“I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: "May be dangerous to your health." One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said "Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?" and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example.”
Edit: Maybe what we really need to worry about is an AI developing charisma....
> Edit: Maybe what we really need to worry about is an AI developing charisma....
That is the most immediate worry, by a wide margin. It seems to be dangerously charismatic even before it got any recognizable amount of "intelligence".
Not really a good example, honestly. Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam was the culmination of the previous two decades of events (Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Taiwan standoff, etc.), and not just a crusade he charismatically fooled everyone into joining. If anything, had Nixon won in 1960 (and defeated Kennedy), it’s possible that the war would have escalated more quickly.
Yeah - I really meant to only copy the first part of the quote - I agree that it is a bit unfair to Kennedy who I think did as much as anyone to stop the Cuban Missile Crisis becoming a hot war.
Someone with IQ 160 might have trouble empathizing with what IQ 100 people find convincing or compelling and not do that well with an average IQ 100 population. What if they were dealing with an average IQ 145 population that might be much closer to being on the same wavelength with them to begin with and tried to do social coordination now?
I guess it’s possible, but again I don’t think empathy and intelligence are correlated. Extremely intelligent people don’t seem any better at navigating the social spheres of high-intelligence spaces than regular people do in regular social spaces. If anything, they’re worse.
All of this is just an overvaluation of intelligence, in my opinion, and largely comes from arrogance.
The prisoner's dilemma is a well known example of how rationality fails. To overcome requires something more than intelligence, it requires a predisposition to cooperation, to trust, in faith. Some might say that is what seperates Wisdon from Knowledge.
Why will it never be? If the adequate intelligence is what something like 0.1 % of the populace naturally has, seems like there's a pretty big difference between that level of intelligence being stuck at 0.1 % of the populace and it being available from virtual assistants that can be mass-produced and distributed to literally everyone on Earth.
Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Stephen King's stuff up until the early 90s (I later found out the point where the books turned boring was when he'd stopped using drugs), short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and The Destroyer pulp novels, particularly after Will Murray started writing them.
You could call it an incorrect answer if there was a correct answer to division by zero, but it's undefined instead with no correct answer. Sounds pedantic, but in math pedantic stuff matters, and apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math, https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
> apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math,
You really can't though.
> If x/0 is a value, then the theorem should extend to c=0, too.” This is wrong. The problem is not that 1/0 was undefined. The problem was that our proof uses the multiplicative inverse, and there is no multiplicative inverse of 0. Under our modified definition of division, we still don’t have 0⁻, which means our proof still does not work for dividing by zero. We still need the condition. So it is not a theorem that a * (b / 0) = b * (a / 0).
This is like saying there's nothing wrong with defining 2 + 2 = 5, and addition will still be associative because (a + b) + c still = a + (b + c) unless b = 2. Like, sure, you can redefine division to not have the normal properties that it does, and then argue that your redefinition is sound because the theorems only apply to things that have the normal properties of added numbers. But that's not what + means!
If these people really believed the arguments they're making, they would actually define x/0 = 5, or 19, or something on those lines.
Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning? You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero". Then everyone just goes on to do math as usual, unless there's something inconsistent in the new formalism that makes mathematical reasoning break down.
> Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning?
I'm saying that's a false distinction, because as soon as you have that deviation from expected meaning, you have valid theorems that silently stop being valid and your formal system quickly breaks down. And while you can redefine your way out of each individual instance of this, everything you redefine just means more and more theorems that don't have their normal meaning which in turn means more things that you have to redefine.
> You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero".
This would be a much better approach, because then existing theorems that use or refer to division are obviously not necessarily true of zivision and if you want to use those theorems to talk about zivision then you have to check (and prove) that they're actually valid first.
It's more "nobody else is interested" than "it's not out in the open", but I've made my own structured data format implemented as a Rust serializer https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm and am using it for a growing collection of command-line tools for managing personal notes written as outline files https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm-tools and to run a static site generator https://github.com/rsaarelm/blog-engine . I'm also writing a game that uses IDM as the data serialization format.
Idea for the format was that you can write structured data with a really minimal syntax if you have an external type schema running the parsing, and the syntax emerged from the line-and-indentation based outline note files I'd started writing for myself. It took some months of work and planning and a couple rewrites to get the core IDM library working right. The tools and site generator were simple and straightforward in comparison.
I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things.
Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.
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