I’ve cared enough to live a drastically different life from most Americans (albeit, it’s a way of life I prefer and I’d live this way even if it was worse for the environment). That’s about all I’m willing to do.
Any advice for finding quality Discord servers (things like ideal member count / “red flags” etc)? I feel like I have a lot of trouble finding servers that strike a good balance of being active but not impenetrable.
I don’t have any, other than maybe look in general chat to make sure it’s active. I’ve also struggled with this, often a promising new server is disappointing after I get to know it over a couple days.
It's a mess of malignant attention whores and child predators. The servers that are good inevitably attract the bad types who, when removed, go out of their on way to take the server down. Don't waste your time.
Forgive me if this is covered in his argument since I haven’t read it yet, but does he discuss why this same argument wouldn’t apply to biological brains?
He thinks our biological brains get around it by using quantum computation.
Roger Penrose is a historical hero of the physics community and a current embarrassment from time to time. His ideas on things like computation and neurobiology are not worth taking seriously.
It’s unfortunate to see people like the one you’re responding to using his Nobel Laureate credentials to justify his nonsense.
Hello! I suppose more than anything recently I’ve really been trying to improve and increase my social relationships, which I feel like I’ve left too long by the wayside. It has been an endlessly rewarding journey so far and I feel like I still have so far to go. And I was just thinking about how social I used to be online too, so this thread really hit on something I’ve been thinking about a lot too recently. Thanks for making this, OP!
Our voice communication software isn’t even near equivalent to in-person voice communication yet, and it is rather mature technology at this point. Consider how much easier an in-person conversation with multiple people interrupting each other or even talking simultaneously goes, compared to the awkwardness of a zoom call where nobody is willing to even unmute to laugh since it draws focus away from whoever was previously talking, is inevitably poorly timed due to network delay, and in general slows everything down.
Forgive me if your comment was meant as sarcasm, but I think solving even this problem could take more than four years, and it is only a fraction of the puzzle for equivalency to in-person interactions.
> compared to the awkwardness of a zoom call where nobody is willing to even unmute to laugh since it draws focus away from whoever was previously talking
I've never noticed anyone doing that when on calls with friends. I have in meetings at work, but there people hide on mute because they don't really want to be there in the first place and are probably off aimlessly browsing the web or trying to catch up on actual work. In the scant few work meetings that are purposeful and engaging, however, I've found plenty of laughter.
I agree that the blogger doesn’t give anything close to a thoughtful or meaningful solution, but I don’t agree that it’s a pseudo-problem. Anecdotally, from every person I have spoken to around my age and above my age, it seems that something is causing socialization to not work as effectively as it did in my parents’ generation, and the data appears to support this phenomenon. It may be poorly characterized, in that the blogger may be incorrect about what’s driving it or how it manifests, but I feel like it is inarguable that something is happening, and whatever we’re currently doing to deal with it is not working.
I agree with you that the solution offered was woefully inadequate. What I meant by pseudo problem wasn't necessarily the problem itself, but the framing of it.
The author cites a statistic about when students start driving, start drinking alcohol, etc. Then the author cites a statistic about "declining trust in institutions". It's easy to put a bunch of statistics like this together and imply that they indicate a lack of socialization (a common cause) or something like that, but all they really show us is a changing culture that the author (and many others) are bothered about
It's a pseudo problem (in my view) because it outlines several different (supposedly related) sub problems and then tries to tie them together as a single problem with some implicit common cause
Gotcha, in that case I’m definitely with you there; I don’t agree with how the author tries to tie all these things together and blame them on the usual suspects of “screen time,” etc. without any real basis
The strength of light over a distance obeys an inverse square law[1], causing it to effectively lose power over long distances, since the same amount of energy is being spread over larger and larger spheres as it radiates out. For photons, I think this manifests as there being a lower rate of photons occurring in each section of the sphere since they’re “spread out”.
It still depends on their contribution right? If you said all lights are equal in strength, then being on top of one gives a strength of 1. Being x units away from it gives a some value less than 1, based on the sqrt of distance
Being close & between two lights would take the sum of their strengths, say .75 each so 1.5, giving a value greater than 1 (more light than either individually produces)
Being far from the two lights, each contributes .25 strength, so .5 total — half the light of standing on top of one
And of course if you get really far, a ridiculously large number of light sources are contributing a ridiculously small amount of light, which may still sum to something fairly small
As a sibling comment to yours says, Olbers’ paradox is that it doesn’t matter.
If we assume that the universe is homogeneous, infinite, and eternal and the density of stars (possibly averaged over a large but constant scale) is constant, then in any direction on the sky there is some (possibly very faraway) star, occupying a finite (possibly minuscule) solid angle in our field of view. The 1/r² falloff (aka conservation of energy) means that the energy received per unit of solid angle is independent of distance from the emitter, equal for example to that on its surface, so every piece of the sky containing a star means we should see stellar-surface amounts of energy shining upon us from every direction.
Assuming some sort of absorbing dust would obscure the stars doesn’t help: if the universe truly is eternal, every dust cloud, being unable to store arbitrarily large amounts of energy, will eventually heat up to the point that it radiates as much as it absorbs and so is as hot as the stars which it obscures (this is the insight behind Kirchhoff’s law and the existence of blackbody radiation).
What does help is either implementing “no point in space is special” through a device other than simply a constant stellar density (e.g. having stars distributed on a self-similar fractal of Hausdorff dimension < 3, our falloff argument having included what amounts to a definition of Hausdorff dimension) or abandoning “no point in time is special” (giving the universe a finite age or at least having no stars in the far past). Observations show the second possibility (named the “Big Bang” by its critics in what was meant to show its ridiculousness) to be true.
(Modern cosmology has much more direct arguments for a finite age of the universe, but they also require more advanced physics and/or observational technology, so the directness is in the eye of the beholder.)
