Viewing profile — joycian

What does "indirectly" include legally?

Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raisi…

But can you distinguish those states reliably?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

But how do you know space isn't filled with a network of probes to detect just that? It seems to me you need to be confident you're first on the scene, or at least that the Precurs…

I don't understand something about this: how would the civilization that destroys another one know that they don't expose themselves to some even more hidden civilization? Isn't th…

I like that you're asking for the mechanics. Many people just repeat their mantras. If QE led to inflation quickly and in a simple way, we could have known that long ago. We didn't…

Balance of payments.

Not that uncharted, perhaps. You can look up the Amsterdam banking crisis of 1763. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_banking_crisis_of_...

Exactly, you give the government a way to replicate your insight, in return you get x years of monopoly. With the first part being non-existent (didn't inventors even have to suppl…

Are there no widely used flak/AoE weapons that heavily punish tight formations?

If it's only that it would be pretty hard. Aggregated data would (probably?) be relatively safe.

Well even if you know that nobody can be identified from your data alone, if everyone releases data, it will become easier and easier to cross-reference and still identify people.

Yes, I think you're right, I should've written increased. Thanks for the correction :).

There's some evidence that around 2B years ago microbes decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere so much by overpopulation that 99% of the biosphere died.

No, that was already patched before Erastothenes. Some simple branch predictions based on behavior patterns of the Bronze Age civilizations were enough to get the change through ma…

I looked this up and it seems very cool. Do you (or anybody else) know any more of these games or environments that can be controlled by code?

What's with the bimodal distributions for German there?

Could you recommend more like that?

If only they could be read by robots! Their formulation is actually quite unwieldy and wasteful: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/bigness-part...

Indeed, Arrhenius definitely had a 'slight clue' in 1896. It is probably comfortable to think that we really could not have known, but I think the reality is that it is often so mu…

I don't know if it's useful to see it as a zero sum game. The sun is beaming practically unlimited energy out towards us (and a whole lot more that doesn't reach Earth but is still…

I never got that feeling from Dawkins? Could you explain?

Zero-K