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[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (10 children)

Raised my ambient paranoia level by ~1.5 on a ten-point scale. Paradigm shifts will do that.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

ha, sorry about that! i was just thinking about making a devoted sub like 'communismwatch'. there is a lot of dystopian news coming out of especially china lately.

[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (8 children)

My hard drive is named DYSTOPIAN, really. Maybe it's just me but I don't want to look back, because something might be gaining on me. Strange thing is my own calmness about it. It's only a simulation. Not real. And is our simulation maker in someone else's simulation?

I will have to deal later with your assertion that a simulation would not be this high-res. Hmmm.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

i think life is too high definition to be a simulation. i read somewhere that there is not enough material / atoms in the universe to build a computer that can successfully run a simulation of the universe... and we cant cheat the laws of nature like in a video game, and, i, at least, have never experienced anything like a 'glitch in a matrix'. reality seems real.

oh, but i made that sub, feel free to contribute! s/communismwatch is the babys name

[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

You know, it's not true that 500, or whatever number of monkeys given typewriters (in fact I hate this story.) would ever write all of Shakespeare, because the probability against this ever happening is a larger number that the number of molecules in the universe.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

poor monkeys. imagine, an unlucky one writing war and peace or the encyclopaedia britannica. and the other monkeys would go like, you idiot, you are supposed to type shakespeare! go back and try again!

but seriously, if we consider, how humanity produces idk how many petabytes of new data each year, those monkeys are facing a big backlog.

[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

The worst part would be getting them to concentrate on the typewriters. Sure they would wonder about what it was, why it was there, how it would improve their lives. I think a short-term, intermittent reward system. So they would get food and one electric jolt hitting the pleasure centers of their brains when they start writing and more randomly during the writing session. Yes, Shakespeare is too long by far. We could say any work between a short story and novel would do as a winner. It could take centuries but we must know if it can be done.

Our next project would be: if a man speaks in the wilderness but there is no woman there to hear him— is he still wrong? Easy experimental design, for one.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

oh no thats a lose-lose situation :-)

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

yeah, what if we, humans are those 'monkeys'? what if someone is already running a big experiment, trying to get us do all kinds of things for them? i mean one of us did produce shakepeare already!

[–]exPFCwintergreen 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Francis Bacon?

[–]useless_aether[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

mmmmm bacon. the original 007?

http://www.sirbacon.org/links/dblohseven.html