Viewing profile — jnicholasp

Amazing, Germany has radically innovated a way for people to travel throughout the country via a (logistically) complex system requiring multiple stops, transfers, waiting for vehi…

Cities don't use public transport, people do. The public transport system for a given city, as compared to the personal transport choices made by individuals, is Worse Is Better in…

Public transportation is obviously WIB: one solution "fits" all, monolithic, logistically complex, not amenable to rapid & piecemeal innovation, good enough for basic function but …

Not true in my mid-sized city in the Pacific Northwest.

Anyone riding a motorcycle who is simply blindly counting on other drivers to see them, follow all the rules of the road carefully, and never do anything unexpected, is not going t…

Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity). Which i…

Do you expect an alien species that is intelligent enough to create the technology to travel through space will understand math in a way that is at least in principle intelligible …

We're obviously not living in a best-of-all-possible-worlds simulation, but that doesn't preclude us either from being in a simulation or from being in one created by thoughtful en…

I think you forgot to write what should have been paragraph three of your comment, but from context I'm guessing that your proposed effective, ethical response to repeated nonsense…

Any more than it is begging the question to assume that there cannot be anything that is beyond physical explanation? Yes, words are symbols. But when we're talking about conscious…

Why are you trying to tell this guy what he should value? He wants to do work that interests and excites him, and he's making the tradeoffs that balance his personal set of values …

This, exactly. I don't understand why these aren't required stock equipment on all cars.

Birds? Source?

They were simply commenting that there were a couple people they especially admired, who they think are really decent (i.e., better than average at being decent). It is neither a n…

And in a similar vein, we have only very recently become able to detect (some) objects such as this one, and shortly after we gained the ability to spot things like this, we spotte…

I'm not affiliated with Optina and I don't know specifically what they're doing, but the classic symptom of Alzheimer's is the formation in the brain of amyloid plaques - and it ap…

What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state wil…

No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbol…

Is there any evidence that people who are at high risk for Alzheimer's will benefit from a regular regimen of antioxidants, then?

How many more successful, country wide, democratic movements would there have been in the history of humanity if there had been a means of communication and coordination as effecti…

For one, as kazinator said in the sibling comment, even in the best democracies this is only true of a small percentage of government jobs - there are many powerful agencies and in…

The opposite condition also exists: I don't understand how some people can be so paranoid about large corporations, and so trusting of government. They are both merely human organi…

At the very bottom of physics, if we ever reach it with our observations and theories, there will be something that simply is, and is not explained by the interactions of some sub-…

> Lets assume there is some sort of physical process involved You're begging the question. Why is "some sort of physical process" the only hypothesis space you're considering?

> Because, as far as we can tell [...] conciousness is dependent on our brains. This is neither a logical/mathematical proof, nor an empirically established fact. So how do you kno…