> Ironically enough, no discourse is so dogmatic and blind and unable to question its own values than the American one.
This speech seems rather ... hateful. Shall we fine you? Officers! This man is screaming hateful speech in the public arena!
Or maybe you disagree with that being hate speech? In an uncivilized society, if I have the power then it doesn't really matter. You still get fined or worse.
> You can question everything, just not your own values on speech
No, you can still question that in a free society if you so choose. But you may not necessarily be able to in an unfree one.
> You've turned freedom of speech into dogmatic faith.
This is entirely disingenuous. Supporting a philosophical position is not without reason, as you well know, and is not automatically dogmatic.
> It's all just platitudes about authoritarianism and slippery slopes and ironically enough unoriginal, replicated talking points.
Perhaps, you can better explain your dogmatic devotion to your belief that freedom of speech is not an important tenant of modern civility and sophistication?
> but have in fact existed in the so called 'West' for literally centuries
Yes, and that is backwards, uncivilized, and philosophically unsophisticated. It is quite literally beneath where we should be as a modern human civilization.
We defeat people saying things we disagree
with with reason and not with fines.
There are many reasons why people fled many countries in the West to America in 1800s-1900s. One of them was to escape crony and corrupt authoritarianism in Europe and elsewhere at the time.
You did not actually prove how exactly launching criticisms of the writing style over the content is not cheap. You can hate and critique the writing style all you want, but focusing on that in your HN comments is in fact the very notion of cheap commentary.
So, would you like to try again? Are you intellectually capable of providing a proper retort?
> inability to concentrate, confusion, alertness, consciousness, memory, anxiety, social, and sleep problems
Has anyone every genuinely done any research to check if an increase in theses resulting symptoms from decreasing T levels across men over the past few decades is highly-correlated to our seeming decline in productivity and generally stagnating GDP growth?
Can it be affecting the contributions of 50% of the population? Can it be affecting scientific, industrial, cultural, community, and familial contributions from men across society more than we realize?
And what would we actually do if we did realize this?
Not really. It's just too complicated of a "debate" (it's actually a non-debate) or discussion to dive into the differentiating factors that will assume different priorities for different people. Tradeoffs are everywhere and in everything and so is nuance.
Personally, I am growing tired of chasing Windows releases every few years so I will re-prioritize almost entirely around Linux's strengths.
But, you cannot have Wall Street consolidated market winners if you do that! How dare you!
I saw this first hand growing up. The school system had a couple of programming courses a few years before I got into the high school, and then it got all new computers and magically reduced computer education to only a set of Microsoft Office courses offered.
Who needs programming? The school knew we would all only need Word and Excel at any "office job" we could possibly ever get ...
It's not grid based. But that seems like a rather pedantic differentiation to make. It does quite literally utilize the concept of "cells". [0]
I find it interesting that the project seems to have hard-coded emergence with the concept of "tokens".
So, I am much less intrigued by the simulation examples when most of what we are seeing is just a procedurally-generated video game with pre-defined game rules. Much of it is not truly emergent.
Again, it's a "oh, that's cool" kind of factor, but a far cry from contributing to anything in the way of "artificial life" research.
But, we as a community should get better at calling these companies out publicly. Especially if they show up in a comment on the monthly hiring post. Don't let your fellow engineers get burnt. More community cooperation in this regard would go a long way.
> The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic
As with everything on the internet (it sadly seems), there is a necessity for nuanced position. Perhaps, economic and cultural factors are playing a self-reinforcing and thus compounding effect on our society?
There are also the non-cultural and non-economic factors such as declining testosterone levels. This could have profound emergent economic and cultural implications that we have not even begun to calculate.
But, this is a very unaddressed point. Why focus on "simulation" when mathematical formalisms & theories could be potentially even more useful? Especially when most "simulations" are running on some arbitrary set of hard-coded assumptions?
> What you see as a criticism of this line of research
To clarify, I was in no way criticizing ALife research. Quite the opposite. I am actually trying to help ensure it does not get stuck in a rut.
> Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.
While I would like to believe you on that, one link does not seem sufficient to support the word "plenty" when the ratio of ALife projects built around CAs to not is extremely high.
> And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?
There is zero evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, so why would some random person on HN be able to have the answer to this question even if we are in a simulation or even if we simply assume that we are?
This speech seems rather ... hateful. Shall we fine you? Officers! This man is screaming hateful speech in the public arena!
Or maybe you disagree with that being hate speech? In an uncivilized society, if I have the power then it doesn't really matter. You still get fined or worse.
> You can question everything, just not your own values on speech
No, you can still question that in a free society if you so choose. But you may not necessarily be able to in an unfree one.
> You've turned freedom of speech into dogmatic faith.
This is entirely disingenuous. Supporting a philosophical position is not without reason, as you well know, and is not automatically dogmatic.
> It's all just platitudes about authoritarianism and slippery slopes and ironically enough unoriginal, replicated talking points.
Perhaps, you can better explain your dogmatic devotion to your belief that freedom of speech is not an important tenant of modern civility and sophistication?