What makes you think he's trying to kill JGL? I think it's just JGL trying to kill him, while Willis tries to escape and maybe injure JGL to keep him from getting a chance to shoot him (that's my guess about what was going on in the diner scene).

If you want to organize them, you could just have a scrollable page of comments like before, but with the default viewing option being that the comments appear in order of how attention-worthy the system judges them to be (with whatever algorithm kinja uses to order them), and people would only see them in…

Basically we wanted to make it easier for people to find discussions, vs. having to scroll through a bunch of randomness.

Most of the new features you mention—being able to dismiss comments from your own thread, getting rid of stars, giving each thread its own url—are A-OK with me, but how come the post has no discussion of the one change that renders the whole commenting system absolutely sucktastic? Namely: no more ability to scroll…

George, why do you say "relatively quickly"? This evidence is still from a little less than 3 billion years after life is thought to have arisen (possibly a little over 3 billion years, if life arose pretty much as soon as the period of heavy bombardment ended 3.8 billion years ago), and maybe just about 1 billion…

And then, 3 billion years later (555 million years ago), animal life emerged. By all accounts, that's not a terribly long expanse of time in cosmological terms, an indication that the environmental conditions required for the development of complex life emerges fairly quickly after a planet's formation.

I wasn't making a slippery-slope argument that we should extend the ban to semi-autonomous machines, to drones, etc. I'm just saying that I'm troubled by what the future of warfare might look like with these new technologies, I don't have any solutions to suggest. Would it not trouble you at all if wars ended up being…

I'm all for banning autonomous killing machines, but wouldn't such a ban still leave open the possibility of semi-autonomous machines which move around and search for targets on their own, but once they have a target in their sights they require a distant human operator to give them authorization to fire? If so, I…

Actually, I did a little research about this for a discussion I had a while ago, and it turns out most reconstructions by scientists suggest oxygen levels were lower in the Jurassic, not higher, and reconstructions differ about whether they were higher or lower in the Cretaceous (for example, see this graph from a…

This would be relevant only if these low-probability events would be crucial for the development of complex life, which, of course, you'd have a hard time to prove.

I doubt many movie-makers wanted to emulate Watchmen since it didn't do so well profit-wise (according to this article the rule of thumb is that a movie needs to make double its production costs in theaters to be considered financially successful, which Watchmen didn't). And personally I didn't think it was "so good",…

Interesting article on rabies, but the framing device seems pretty doubtful:

True enough, but I don't see the relevance of this. With the same argument you could discredit every bit of knowledge we claim to have.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, an observation is an observation, regardless of prevailing theory, at least it should be, under proper scientific procedure. Maybe you could elaborate?

But if you say there is "observational data" to suggest it, that would be "evidence" in the hypothetico-deductive sense that the observations are more likely to occur in a world governed by one theory than another, no? So, this is not an argument for why anyone should find the "principle of mediocrity" plausible. I…

Well, as long as you agree there is no evidence favoring either, and that the "principle of mediocrity" is more like a philosophical principle, then I think we should just agree to disagree on the rest. I don't personally think that the "principle of mediocrity" makes sense as a rational principle—I think it makes…

Well, no, not unless it was a baby Engineer to begin with. My point presupposes two species with identical genetics evolving separately in different environments over eons. I'm not sure if I made it clear, so feel free to point out if I didn't.

Is it farfetched to imagine that, despite an exact genetic match, two species would evolve to look different if their environments were completely different?

Yeah, I was mostly assuming AI is feasible. Even if it's not, though, a scientifically curious species might want to send them out just so they could send info about other star systems back to the home planet. Also, if interstellar traveler were possible but it was very slow (requiring a multigenerational ship, say),…

I acknowledge that, given our sample of exactly one intelligent species, there is no way to calculate the probability of such a species evolving on other planets. But that goes for your side of the argument as well, so assuming a probability of 1 in 400 billion for our galaxy is just as baseless as any other random…