This isn’t my field but like it shouldn’t be horrible to drink a little sip of this right? It’s just salts and amino acids and sugar, so I’d expect worst case scenario you majorly throw off your electrolyte balance and possibly give your kidneys and liver a lot of amino acids to get rid of. But that’d probably require drinking a significant amount yes?

Anyone with more bio knowledge want to correct or confirm this hypothesis?

I can tell where a laser is pointed on me without looking. Like if you blindfold me and got a laser pen and shined it on my arm, I can point to where it feels like it is with pretty good accuracy. It’s easier to detect motion than precise placement, and sensation wise it’s not touch or heat like you’d expect it’s more like raw proprioception.

Also it felt the same regardless of the color of laser we used which seems odd since you’d think higher frequency light would be easier to detect.

Tbf I haven’t done the experiment since I did it with my siblings when I was pretty young. Not sure if I can still do it, but my siblings and cousins couldn’t do it even back then.

Beautiful

We’re moving the wrong way. It needs to be clunky and made of hard tan-grey plastic and have buttons that make clicking noises when you push them in.

Where is the cassette futurism that all the sci-fi books and movies promised?

Where are the routers with visible, slowly-spinning fans and little screens that marquee diagnostic messages in dull green pixelated letters?

What happened to the sounds our computers used to speak? What happened to the sounds of motions and machinations of metal?

What happened to the soul of the machine?

I think I get what you’re saying, but if you’ve ever looked into particle life simulators, they are much less susceptible to the “going static” you talk about. The more properties that exist, even purely randomized, the more likely you’ll get extended chaotic behavior. (Also the current scientific outlook is that our universe is technically destined to “go flat” just like those scenarios you mentioned)

The real issue with your reasoning from a scientific standpoint is that we don’t know how many universes there are. Maybe there are an uncountably infinite number of universes holding every possible combination of physical rules. Then in these universes there would be infinite universes that evolve life like ours without needing a creator. You can’t say/prove/estimate the chances of a universe having life producing rules because you have no idea how many universes might exist at all.

Furthermore, the probability that we just happen to exist in one of the possible universes that is capable of harboring life like this is actually 100%. This is a fact because, if a universe couldn’t harbor life like ours, we wouldn’t exist in it.

Also on the note of random chance creating the complexity we see in life, have you heard the theory that life didn’t start on earth and actually might’ve started only a few million years after the big bang?

There was a period of time after the first stars had created the lighter elements (the ones life uses like carbon nitrogen oxygen) where the universe was much closer together, and with enough pressures/temperatures that the conditions for water to exist and remain in liquid form were prevalent.

We know from the old studies of trying to prove life could spontaneously emerge that if you add energy (like UV light from stars) to water and nitrogen and carbon, you do get organic compounds: amino acids, alcohol, ketones, etc. So the basic building blocks of life probably existed in relative abundance in parts of the universe at this time.

Now the universe would have been in this state for millions of years. A relatively dense, warm, wet universe for millions of years and have still larger than our galaxy. I’d imagine the chances of RNA forming viroid rings somewhere in a cloud that size are relatively high. And after that, well RNA + basic amino acids + energy + time is pretty much all you need to get evolution going.

That’s my favorite life starting theory, especially since it kind of fits better with our model of genome growth rate over time.

Anyway, the problem of not knowing how many universes there are/have-been/could-be is the real reason no one can actually say or “calculate the probability” of how likely a universe with life is. But I thought you might find it fascinating to learn that life could’ve started in much better conditions and a lot longer ago than you may have thought when you originally did your math.

Sidenote: if intelligent life must be created by some intelligent thing, where did that intelligent creator come from in your theory? Is there an infinite chain of creators creating universes? If not, if intelligent life can be created without needing a creator, then your main assertion must be false. If it does loop or go on forever, then the full set (universe) of these chained universes actually does either exist forever or loops indefinitely meaning it in total was not created by a creator, again contradicting your assumption that life must be created by a planned process.

I know the oc prompt was an unscientific belief that can’t be shaken, but I’m curious, what math makes you think the universe or just life was planned?

I was raised religious but when I first started programming and wrote my own evolutionary algorithm, I realized that life existing makes as much sense as entropy does. If a process can replicate itself efficiently will you have more or less of it later in time? If two replicators require the same resources, which is more likely to survive? It’s randomness that makes this process efficient.

So I thought that perhaps a god set the events in motion to create life by evolution, but then I learned about Conoways Game of Life and other cellular automata, and I wrote my own particle life simulations and I realized that life-like things can arise from almost any system of random rules. The only caveat seems to be that some form of “energy” must be conserved if you want to avoid the situations where the system dies completely or reach an unchanging equilibrium.

And now, as I’m learning about neural nets (specifically the more biologically plausible ones) and the structure of human brains, it all seems so natural that things would arise the way they have.

Given enough time and how vast the universe is, I’d be more surprised to find that sentient life hadn’t evolved naturally on at least a few of the sextillions of planets and other celestial bodies in the universe.

So I’m curious what math you’re basing your opinion on

Depends, can you print your own PCBs and microchips?

Any change is a difference in between two states. Creation implies something changed.

However, if by transformation you mean that some property is conserved between all states, only when that’s true is creation a transformation.

If energy was not conserved, and some suddenly popped into existence that would be a change and creation but not necessarily a transformation (depending on your definition of transformation).

I recently realized that the concept of “before” is an assumption we try to place on the universe without any basis that it exists outside the universe.

Like we are used to deterministic phenomena. Effect follows cause, something followed from something else. But that’s only true from our perspective inside universe.

The universe might not change at all from an outside perspective. What if every moment exists simultaneously? Only from within a moment does the concept of before and after make sense, but outside the universe there’s no concept of before. Everything just is.

Maybe it’s a ring, maybe it’s a multidimensional volume containing all the possible moments that could ever happen, maybe it’s bounded “temporally” in certain directions, maybe all the moments chain together in a crazy space filling curve such that all possible moments/worlds would eventually be reached if you started in one and kept following the curve to the next. But nothing has to actually be changing. The paths don’t need to change, they didn’t need to be created or destroyed.

Point is that the “before” of the universe might not exist at all even if the timelines within it start and stop at defined points. We feel the need for things to have a reason because that’s what we’re used to experiencing, but we’re only used to that due to the rules within our part of existence.

The concept of “change” or “creation” or “time” might not exist at all outside our experience.

Iirc some of the stoics believed in a similar idea. They thought the world was deterministic and it simply happened over and over the exact same way every time.

On the note of energy not being created or destroyed. The energy in your brain doesn’t wait till the universe ends to leave. It continues moving as heat or chemical reactions when we die just like it did before. The order of the system it’s in breaks down, but all that energy keeps existing forever.

Since you emit energy as infrared light just by being warm, and infrared is capable of leaving the atmosphere. It is possible, that just by stepping outside, some of your energy has already left the planet and made it to other astronomical bodies in our solar system.

If we assume there is life on any of the moons or planets or asteroids nearby, who knows, maybe some of the energy that used to be part of you has already become part of a new, alien, life form.

You just brought back memories of my siblings and I walking around outside barefoot to the point these things penetrated our shoes more easily than our feet.

In rural southern Utah these things are literally everywhere. If you go out with cheap foam flip-flops, the entire bottom of the shoe will embedded with dozens of these seconds after you start walking around lol

Kind of oddly satisfying to pull them out of the soles of shoes tbf

If you go with Lenovo make sure to get one with a real barrel power jack not just a USB-C. Several models with only USBC are plagued by multiple problems from possibly frying the board to mosfets literally coming unsoldered.

I bought one with those issues. It’s still a great laptop, but it stopped charging till I took it apart and did a hack soldering job shorting the mosfets lol

Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person’s estimated mental age, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person’s chronological age. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score.

“Originally” because that’s not the case for modern IQ tests because now we fit the data to a normal distribution, giving us a much more reliable and repeatable experiment.

Furthermore, even if that was quotient formula was still used, the average score of others your age is still a population parameter (something you cannot measure the true value of) that you can only sample and estimate for the possibly indefinite population. Your confidence in your estimate of the average depends on the number of samples; the actual parameter does not because it is (supposedly) an inherent quality of the class of things you’re sampling.

Please just go through a statistics crash course I don’t know how to explain this better.

The sigma 8 was for our confidence interval of the point estimate, not a score that would give you sigma 8 results.

Furthermore as your picture points out, that test was defective because it gave a standard deviation higher than it said. The modern ones normalize the distribution to avoid that problem.

There is no theoretical limit to IQ. If you gave an arbitrarily long enough test it would be possible (though incredibly unlikely) that you could get IQ values in the thousands.

I think you are getting confused by what the meaning of the score is supposed to be. It has nothing to do with the number of people in existence.

The test is assuming that humans have an IQ that follows a normal distribution. They then sample humans and normalize the scores of each sample population. This is not a “you are smarter than x people” test. It assumes that IQ is an inherent property of humanity and gives you a probability of people (any amount of them) having a lower score than you.

Sure, at a certain point that basically means you’re likely to be smarter than everyone alive currently. And yeah if we get multiple scores like that it means it is likely (though not guaranteed) that our metrics are not effective.

As a counter example of why multiple crazy high scores don’t necessarily mean the scales are broken here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine you did this test over a million years or just that you actually sampled an absurd number of people like 4quadrillion. There are going to be people who ranked the highest on that set. So the chance of a person being in the top 4 is about 1 in a quadrillion.

Now if we make the assumption that IQ is unaffected by time, it is entirely possible that two of those people might be alive at the same time or even all 4 of them.

These people would have IQ scores placing them wayyy above the population of their current time period, but that wouldn’t change the fact those scores are still in fact accurate.

The scores have nothing to do with the current living population of humanity; those scores are supposed to be relative to general human intelligence regardless of time or place. Ergo, if we assume intelligence is not limited and that humanity survives indefinitely (and that IQ tests actually mean something) then there is a nonzero chance of getting any arbitrary score in the natural numbers. 400, 8000, 10^23, who cares.

As long as you can write tests long enough and you keep testing humans long enough you’ll eventually find someone who scores at those levels without your test being defective. That’s how probability works.

If you still don’t get what I’m saying or what a normal distribution is, I suggest you go to YouTube or peertube to look it up. Chances are they’ll be able to explain it better than me lol

The cardinality of the two intervals [0,1] and [0,2] are equivalent. E.g. for every number in the former you could map it to a unique number in the latter and vice versa. (Multiply or divide by two)

However in statistics, if you have a continuous variable with a uniform distribution on the interval [0, 2] and you want to know what the chances are of that value being between [0,1] then you do what you normally would for a discrete set and divide 1 by 2 because there are twice as many elements in the total than there are in half the range.

In other words, for weird theoretical math the amount of numbers in the reals is equivalent to the amount of any elements in a subset of the reals, but other than those weird cases, you should treat it as though they are different sizes.

My example may have been idealized, but it doesn’t apparently matter. Looks like the raw scores for modern IQ tests are transformed to fit a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. (Meaning they basically subtract the average score from raw scores, divide by the deviation of the raw score, multiply by 15, and add 100. Basically they just scale the data from every test so number of questions doesn’t really matter. This also might reduce bias from people in a given location or who took a specific test if those are the groups for normalization).

The only real question for confidence in the scale is then the number of people who have taken the test. So let’s say we want to be 8sigma sure (likelyhood were wrong is about 1x10^-15) that a person’s IQ is correct to ±1 point.

For this confidence interval we have 8 as the critical z value and 15 as the standard deviation. A 1 point error in score means we’d only need a sample size of 14,400 people.

In other words, you only need to have 14,400 people take the test (or an equivalent one with the same normalization) in order to dettermine with ~99.999999999999999% confidence that someone’s score is between 200 and 202.

I’d imagine that’s not an unreasonable number of samples for MENSA or WAIS. Ergo IQ scores of extraordinarily high values are not necessarily signs of defects in the math of the test.

if it’s based on an approximated normal distribution, then it is entirely possible to have people well into the tail ends. Regardless of the current population of humanity.

Say you have a test with 100 questions and the mean score is 76, but the standard deviation is super low like 3, then getting a perfect score would put you at a z-score of 8, which would be roughly a 1 in 803.7 Trillion rarity.

You don’t need 803.7 Trillion people to take the test to reach this conclusion. In fact (if I’ve done my math correctly) you would only need a sample size of 65 people (including the outlier), to get this though that’s under perfect conditions assuming everyone else got exactly 76. (You’d need a lot more samples in different places to be confident in that result)

Anyway, that’s a super idealized example, but the principle of the Central Limit Theorem is sound and does allow for crazy seeming probabilities. It’s not comparing your score to everyone who has taken the test for quartiles, it’s telling you how you’d compare to everyone who could possibly ever take the test.

The statistical approach is sound; however the test and sampling is not. IQ score tests are just biased, inaccurate, not really scientific, not useful and typically only serve to give people ego boosts.

“The tabloid’s CEO wants to sell your data but it can’t. You’re not helping.”

“What do you mean I’m not helping?”

“I mean you’re not helping Leon. Why is that?”

Hang on didn’t the Japanese government only like last year decide to stop using floppies?

Honestly the movie just pissed me off. Not scary at all. Like bro y’all had it coming because you’re all just annoying whiny assholes who’d rather scream at each other than actually try to help the situation.

It’s literally an “idiot plot”—story that only moves forwards due to the complete incompetence of the characters—except that not only are they stupid, they’re fucking annoying and shitty people to boot.

“But It’s a classic because it was one of the first found-footage genres and people actually thought it was real” bro if anyone thought the acting in that movie was real, we shouldn’t let them define what is a classic or not