I think some of the fear of crashes comes from the Great Depression. The magnitude and unpleasantness of that makes a great deal of fear seem quite a rational response.
It's probably better to resist the temptation to ascribe meaning to models. The model is the meaning, nothing more or less. If we observe these artifacts, it means that's a property of our universe. Really, we're completely locked within that system and can't say that it means anything else.
But, I'd argue that if we can be a simulation, we're ignoring the qualia of consciousness issue. So I'd say that if we can be a simulation, we can just be one of those mathematical entities in Platonic space. The universe seems to be written in math, perhaps all of this is just what it's like to be one of those Platonic ideals.
There's not much use in speculating in that which cannot be falsified.
A woman can have 13 or more children in her reproductive lifecycle. I think you'd have to call this a large family, or at most a very large family, or else I have to call a family with 13 children super extremely large, which is just getting silly. ;)
Windows can't open a raw socket. I find that really irks me for some reason. Overall, I find Windows superior after using Macs for a couple of years. The UI of Windows feels much better for getting things done, there's more third party software, and Apple's software engineering is amateurish compared to Microsoft. But then I remember, you can't open a raw socket. I'm also steeped in Linux from the olden days, and the win32 meets Linux ports get to be a bit of a pain... cygwin path conventions, DOS path conventions, emacs port path conventions... use a backslash here, forward slash there.. that stuff can get to be a serious pain if you bring a lot of UNIX style stuff to your Windows work. Even though OS X doesn't hold a candle to Debian for well-packaged open-source software, big plus marks for not hitting this UNIX-meets-Windows compatibility nightmare.
90% of your peers using a Mac is a good reason to use a Mac. But I have to admit people feeling superior for using a Mac is ridiculous.
I believe his experience was authentic. I don't think he's any kind of con man. Sometimes I don't like some of the details of his writing, or the spin he puts on things. I think the Zen traditions have the most highly developed methods of teaching along the lines he's talking about. Talking about deep spiritual truth in a direct manner doesn't really work. Explaining how to fly a hang glider will get you very little traction when it comes time to actually fly a hang glider. So, to me, there's this huge separation between spiritual truth and the ability and methods of teaching it. Tolle's right, and paying attention to your body and such is good, but it just falls short.
I'd recommend the Zen Teaching of Huang Po, and the practices of Zen in general, Rinzai zen in particular, especially koans, which are easy to neglect and were a brilliant stroke of insight. That's really skillful teaching. If you can wrap your head around Huang Po, you'll be closer to what Tolle is talking about. Huang Po is dead-on like nothing else I ever read, but it didn't make any real sense to me until I didn't need it anymore. And I believe Hakuin was right in his belief that the most effective way for a student to achieve insight is through koan practice. Rinzai zen is most on the mark.
The main problem with Zen is that it's not well packaged for a modern Western audience, but it's the best we've got.
I think that depends on your attitude toward it. People who are self-consciously smart and think it's worth something are irritating, like beautiful people who feel like they don't need to have a good personality. It can develop into a complex if you are not careful to balance it with real emotional intelligence, just like any unbalanced thing. (Unbalanced things are unstable. Consider how many lottery winners lose all of their money. The money is a new, unbalanced influence in their life. It hasn't always been there, so it's not a balanced part of that life, and may just evaporate as things do come back into balance.)
It's best to just forget about being smart, and assume you're smart enough to do anything. The best way to be smart is just that it removes "I'm not smart enough to do X" from the way you think. If it does anything else, it's probably not good. It shouldn't make you think you don't have to try, it shouldn't raise your expectations, only just take "I'm not smart enough" off of the table. In fact, there's always someone smarter anyway. I find that, while keeping any sense of self-congratulation in check, without developing a superiority complex, I do need to keep in mind to a limited extent that I actually am smarter than a lot of people, so I do need to sometimes review their decisions and that some of the rules really don't apply to me. It's a fine line between that and hubris or narcissism, and it did take me sometime to come to that balance, going through "I'm better" to "I'm no better" to simply "I'm different, not really better or worse, but uniquely capable and in a position where I'll have to keep in mind that sometimes I'm wrong, but sometimes, the world is wrong." In the judicial system, you're judged by a jury of your peers. But there is an added responsibility if you are without peer. No one really has the insight to act as a check on your thinking, so you can be alone the way a pilot can be in a cabin full of passengers. They're not any less valuable than you, but they're really not in any position to review your decisions.