I want to say that the Goldwater Rule is a very good idea. Long distance diagnosis (especially of a person who is in the middle of something as emotionally charged as a mass shooting of children) is inaccurate. People tend trust authority figures and as a results psychiatrists have a duty to live up to that trust by…

Hedonism is a pink triangle? Realism is a boring slate? Methinks the designer wears his biases on his sleeve.

I notice that neither this nor the article seem to explain what the firewall is. I had thought maybe it was the "photon ring" right at the event horizon but that never gets mentioned. The explanation in the full article makes me think its not a literal "wall of fire" that is being discussed but the Alice and Bob story…

"Life" always does fine. Many living things died, however. Biomes were vastly altered during the Pliocene.

a) The Oort cloud is very diffuse in human terms. It would be more difficult to hit an object in it than miss all of them.

You appear to be assuming that a given civilization can travel at the speed of light (with nigh instantaneous acceleration at that) and can target millions or billions of potential locations with colonization ships simultaneously. You're going to need to do a lot of convince me that those assumptions are likely.

* a p of .001 is physics that should say

Physicists have to report p-values and confidence intervals just like psychologists do. A p of .001 is psychology is exactly as certain as a p or .001 is psychology, the only difference is that physicists can run millions of experiments a second so they get higher p values. If you choose to misinterpret results that's…

Research psychologists do science thus they are scientists. Physicists and chemists enjoy splitting hairs about "purity" and "hardness" to annoy people in other fields but that's all there is to it. Anthropologists, relevant to this article, are also scientists.

Beane, to be fair, is investigating a very specific type of simulation in his paper.

All known laws of physics can be worked with in a computer so we can say for certain that there are some universes which can be simulated. Currently there is no reason to believe that our universe cannot be simulated.

I don't care how good his math is the argument is flawed at a philosophical level. The simulation hypothesis is not falsifiable, you can explain any result as a limitation of the simulation and any lack of limitations as the simulation being sufficiently complex. Since it has no predictive power it is wholly…

A quote is not an argument.

I refuse to believe anything an MD says about science (especially so tangential to their specialization). If I had heart disease I'd take his advice, let him schedule surgery, whatever his experience in the field tells him is practical but I'd get a second opinion if he told me the heart pumps blood.

Hybridization is not modern.

Scientific charts aren't meant to be interpreted, they're meant to represent statistical information that is spelled out elsewhere. There is a trend that you can get a rough idea of by putting their number into Excel, its just a really shitty one with an R2 of .29

This may be the worst defense of evolution ever written. Just saying.

I'm glad he used an unrepresentative uncontrolled sample that has lots of potential for experimenter bias and an extremely short time scale and then generalized it to the entire human population, all cell phones, and all lengths of time. Sounds like good way to learn about the world. Very responsible of him.

Given that France has an overpopulation problem this isn't necessarily the kind disaster it might seem. They mention epigenetic factors in their discussion and that seems like the most interesting factor. Maybe our biology is set up to reduce fertility in the next generation under certain conditions in order to stem…