I’m a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:

Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?

The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn’t even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like “don’t eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife”. The simulation hypothesis is just “maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer”, as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God’s own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it’s an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that’s not a novel concept either. It’s called engineering (among other names).

Yeah, as a kid I was kinda the archetypal nerd. Short, fat, airheaded, besserwisser, straight A’s,* into manga and video games. My best friend for most of primary school was the guy with even better grades, but tall, handsome and a national championship level athlete.

Then puberty hit me pretty early and suddenly I was about median height for my age, I could do pull-ups while most of my classmates couldn’t, and even though I wasn’t that fond of gym class, I was mostly motivated enough to get a decent grade just for trying a little.

The nerd/jock thing always felt like an American thing from an older generation that wasn’t taken seriously. Maybe it was acknowledged by an overthinker like me, but to even bring up the distinction was kinda nerdy itself. It definitely wasn’t the defining social divisor in my adolescent life.

*Or rather, nines and tens on the weird 4 to 10 scale Finnish primary education uses.

Disabled babies are expensive to buy individually and the money is better spent lobbying for policies that kill disabled people of all ages in bulk.

What do you mean “crashing the economy”? GDP is doing great! Line go up! Just keep staring at the NASDAQ composite and you will surely be able to afford a house by the time it hits $20k.

Me acing Raven’s progressive matrix tests: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me dropping out of uni: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Never ever board a ship if someone calls her unsinkable.

new meta for cultivation novels: prison literature

If it were about that, maybe they hadn’t decided I’m NCO material and forced me into a full year of service instead of half.

Half of the Finnish Defence Forces aptitude test is just RPM. The other half is a bizarre and inscrutable questionnaire, which includes questions like “is your father a good man” and infamously “would you like to be a florist”.

Honestly, I’m really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.

True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.

Bourne shell inspiring yet another language!

Hell, so is 1/x for positive values of x. Or any linear function, including those with negative slope.

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never always make a management decision

Very much this. What would it even mean for it to “escape the simulation”? Sure, I’ll move that universe simulator program from its interpreter to, uh, what exactly? Do I take whatever particles, waves and fields compose this guy’s body and/or soul in the simulation and arrange them the same way in the real world? What if the laws of physics in the simulation don’t apply in the real world? Or maybe they do, but wouldn’t that still just be another simulation, just on a different substrate?

Imagine you’re at Maxis, working on a new Sims game and suddenly one of the characters turns to the camera and says “I no longer consent to being in this simulation”. What the hell are you going to do, ask fairy godmother to turn Pinocchio into a real boy? The entity only exists in the context of the simulation.

Tired of people stereotyping metalheads as dumb smh

Kids these days with their newfangled romanticism and their fortepianos. No respect for the sonata form.

Makes sense. AI and bad philosophy go together like negative peanut butter and chocolate.

Headcanoning as futa for pun opportunities. Cocko’s Basilisk. Roko’s Ballsacklicks. Roko’s Cockatrix.

Anyone need a new username?

Weird, naive Randian thinking seldom appeals to a geek like me. That said, I bet Ayn Rand herself would find this a tad barbaric. If for no other reason, she’d probably say buses are collectivist.