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Just a friendly reminder that morality is just a little human social construct associated with the pain-pleasure mechanism that evolved to guide intelligent machines toward evoluti…

Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with burning cat paws being unarguably immoral, unless you're talking about a completely fabricated, cognitive, social definition of mora…

I'm glad. They are disturbing thoughts at first but then they become profoundly liberating. The "self" or "ego" is an illusion. It's very challenging to see beyond it when you're r…

I think it's obvious that there's also nothing wrong with thinking that nonexistent things are fundamental aspects of reality. You (not you specifically) can have mental models tha…

It's NOT objectively wrong to hurt people on a whim! I concede this very easily. It's not dubious whatever. It might be illegal or make you unhappy, but please let me know why this…

It's not wrong to stick a gun in someone's face. It's fine to pull the trigger too, if you're not considering the laws our civilization invented. It's all just opinion: You might n…

A class on moral philosophy screwed me up for a while early in college. All the critical thinking and fancy vocabulary about the topic made me think morality was in some way real -…

Remind me how the correlation between openness to experience and IQ test scores suggests that seeking novelty might possibly increase your cognitive potential. I think I missed tha…

What? Why doesn't it work like this: Cell phones have SIM cards with an ID and a secret key. Cell service providers have a database of these SIM associations. Cell phones encrypt I…

I find this deeply disturbing, particularly because there has never been a better time in recent history to NOT give a damn about how you perform in traditional school systems, if …

By the time kids who are taught to program in K-12 enter the workforce, knowing syntax, computer details, and data structures will be a thing of the past or a thing for really hard…

I hope he gets out of this rut and finds a way to be happy and do more good things. It's a little painful to watch a smart guy with billions spend his time making gimmicky video ga…

Thanks for the warning. I was really hoping to see Halo or Quake or something, because in my experience practicing these games in a casual-competitive way, I hit a performance ceil…

Actually, most algebraic tricks in calculus, which are what make it challenging, are pretty unnecessary to know if you can program a computer or use existing math software. Concept…

I don't know what a gerund is, and I've never needed to except in 8th grade grammar tests, which I failed. Yet I got a 79/80 on the writing section of the SAT because my grammar is…

First, these are all exaggerated cases, inspired by experience. I appreciate the infrastructure a great deal, but I'm saying that there's a tremendous amount you can do if you focu…

It's really sad, but in one way kind of laughable, to see so many ostensibly bright students wasting their time cramming useless crap into their brains for AP history and calculus …

Isn't this obvious to anyone who takes a little time to think about evolution and biodiversity? Yes, little changes caused by chance persist if they don't hinder the creature's abi…

Kinda lame and not in line with what made PageRank so successful. Google should "not be evil" and have the decency to be as neutral as possible, allowing legitimate clicks and back…

I would occasionally copy my college papers into a text file and use my Mac's say command say -f paper.txt

This is kind of gimmicky. Most people are probably better off going to a 4-year university and studying CS/engineering/math/physics or something, and the few who want to learn in a…

Maybe if they saw blatant, copycat visuals (ehem, Bing), but not name-wise: I've never seen someone try to start a search engine called something like "The Better Google"

Does he not have legal grounds to sue for trademark infringement if he so desired? Just because it's not a registered trademark doesn't mean it's not a trademark. It's not like it'…