I noticed that you answered a 1 or a 10 for 12 out of the 15 questions. I have a feeling you're going to win the award for the most confident out of all the respondents. I guess I did say to "choose your own interpretation" though which sort of gives you license to be superconfident. I probably should have said to leave some uncertainty there if there are multiple "reasonable interpretations" you can think of, some of which you would agree with and some of which you'd disagree with... that's more how I answered it (otherwise I would have more 1's and 10's).
Regarding telepathy, I started to write out a description of how I'd define it, but it got too long and unwieldy so I went back to just leaving it as "telepathic" and letting people interpret it themselves. For me, the key distinction between what we have now and telepathy would be whether you have to physically move your mouth to speak, or move your hands to type on a keyboard. If you can transmit thoughts just by thinking, and someone else receives them (presumably without anyone around them hearing them too), that's telepathy. The most difficult part would be decoding speechlike "subvocal" patterns in the brain and translating it to a signal that could be transmitted. That may take a long time, and maybe it will never be feasible if there is too much other noise in the brain that screws it up. The receiving end is way easier.
Regarding your 10 for manmade global warming, the IPCC only gave a 9 out of 10 for it, which was the consensus of a whole lot of people. Do you give a 10 because you think that there were people weighted into the consensus who made it come out less strong than it should have been?
Based on your "1" for ever being contacted by alien life, did you interpret this to include receiving a signal that they were just broadcasting outward in every direction (not necessarily intended for us)? I intended it to include that, but I could possibly agree with your 1 is if you are restricting it to a scenario where they were deliberately trying to get ahold of us in particular (which I suppose is a valid interpretation of "contact"). For the more general scenario (intercepting any signal that was clearly generated by intelligent life) your 1 seems way overconfident. Your 10 for negative global warming consequences also seems way overconfident.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-06-07 01:40 am (UTC)Regarding telepathy, I started to write out a description of how I'd define it, but it got too long and unwieldy so I went back to just leaving it as "telepathic" and letting people interpret it themselves. For me, the key distinction between what we have now and telepathy would be whether you have to physically move your mouth to speak, or move your hands to type on a keyboard. If you can transmit thoughts just by thinking, and someone else receives them (presumably without anyone around them hearing them too), that's telepathy. The most difficult part would be decoding speechlike "subvocal" patterns in the brain and translating it to a signal that could be transmitted. That may take a long time, and maybe it will never be feasible if there is too much other noise in the brain that screws it up. The receiving end is way easier.
Regarding your 10 for manmade global warming, the IPCC only gave a 9 out of 10 for it, which was the consensus of a whole lot of people. Do you give a 10 because you think that there were people weighted into the consensus who made it come out less strong than it should have been?
Based on your "1" for ever being contacted by alien life, did you interpret this to include receiving a signal that they were just broadcasting outward in every direction (not necessarily intended for us)? I intended it to include that, but I could possibly agree with your 1 is if you are restricting it to a scenario where they were deliberately trying to get ahold of us in particular (which I suppose is a valid interpretation of "contact"). For the more general scenario (intercepting any signal that was clearly generated by intelligent life) your 1 seems way overconfident. Your 10 for negative global warming consequences also seems way overconfident.