interolivary @ interolivary @beehaw.org

Currently between olives

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Captain Buzzkill here, but an infinite number of universes wouldn't necessarily guarantee that every possible scenario happens.

As an analogy, there's an infinite amount of integers, but you're not going to find 1.5 in them.

Affordable and available housing has everything to do with homelessness though, it's one of the best ways to actually keep people from becoming homeless in the first place. If more people can afford a place to live, less people will be homeless. Won't fix all of it but a huge chunk anyhow

I have no idea if or how much old Eastern Bloc countries lied about the number of homeless. I wouldn't be surprised at all, but I haven't seen any studies or statistics about this so I can't assume they were all lying or that the situation was universally worse than in Western countries.

Ohhhh right, you meant in that way. In that way absolutey yeah. Well depending on one's position on the AP anyhow 😄 Partially it sort of is a truism (although I'd argue that the "fine tuning problem" trips up a lot of people and the AP doesn't seem to be obvious to everybody) and more of a philosophical thing than necessarily just straight-up physics, but I think there's interesting points there. I'm not very good at explaining the general principle so it might sound dumber than it is, and there's a lot of different versions of it as well

That was well said. Recontextualization is exactly the thing; it's not that I think the Soviet Union was absolute evil with zero redeeming features. They got more right during the early years although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of that period either, and to a large extent it was Stalin who fucked them up pretty severely with the frankly sociopathic system that the Union turned into.

Russian political culture has been outright brutal for a long time. Eg. these KGB-like secret police organizations have been around for a while and have invariably had brutal methods of dealing with politically displeasing individuals or just who-the-hell-ever in many cases. This, coupled with the cultural ethos that Russia and Russians – and specifically meaning ethnic Russians – are superior to anyone outside their borders and a tendency for imperialism, means that Russian rule has nearly invariably been a shitty time, with Finland being one of the few exceptions as we mostly faced little repression or cultural erasure compared to other Russian "colonies" and this was done intentionally; most of the Russian Emperors during our time as a Grand Duchy in some ways thought of Finland as way to show the European powers that they can run things in a "western" way, and to work as a kind of window to the West. For the last 20 or so years they did try to Russify us, which we – being stubborn fucks – did not take well. We also kept our previous Parliament for the most part even though even starting from Alexander I the Emperors wanted to have autocratic rule, but – again in parts thanks to us being stubborn fucks – it took something like 4 emperors for it to happen. Their other historical or the currently existing colonies (nobody seems to think of Russia as a colonialist empire because their colonies are inside contiguous borders) weren't quite so lucky, as Russification and "Russian supremacy" has been the standard.

This political culture played a large part in the problems with the Union. It was nominally multicultural (and korenization was briefly a thing until they went back to Russification as usual) but it wasn't exactly unclear who were ultimately in charge.

And before some smartass barges in asking me why it's OK if the US/UK/France/whoever does this stuff: I don't like imperialism any more regardless of who's doing it.

Mach/BSD 🤓

The actual kernel of XNU (ie. what's under the hood in macOS, originally by NeXT) is Mach which is a microkernel, and a chunk of FreeBSD is used to provide userland(ish) stuff like POSIX APIs, a UNIX process model on top of Mach, protocol stacks 'n shit.

I'm a leftist but I'm not much of a fan of the Soviet Union. I'm Finnish and middle-aged so I know a bunch of people who had to escape from there and I've heard first-hand stories about the shit that went on, and I've visited Soviet Estonia who got the short end of the stick with Russian imperialism compared to us. At least we stayed independent although had to grant a lot of power over eg. our foreign policy to the Russians – ie. Soviets, but it's not like it wasn't essentially a Russian project since they pretty quickly forgot about korenization and went for Russification instead – to keep them from invading (again…)

Interesting. How are things in the year 2033? Could you tell us about the technology you're using to communicate with us?

More likely outcome: he takes a person in strange clothing appearing from thin air only to set his book on fire with a magical implement as clear proof of witchcraft existing and posing a huge danger. Get ready for turbo witch hunts on crack

Heh, an optimist here assuming Chrome will work with 8Gb RAM in 2033

So, what was the problem with posting it to !politics@beehaw.org?

I don't think the hypothesis was supposed to have a benefit

No duh, they were built to be very affordable so you wouldn't have as many homeless people. It's incredible that you thought that answer was somehow insightful

Oh neat. That definitely qualifies under infinite curiosity.

But the anthropic principle doesn't imply an intention either, though. Much the opposite: it's all just dumb luck, but for us to be here right now observing it, some of that luck had to go a certain way (eg some physical constants had to get the values they have or matter wouldn't exist etc).

In some ways this really isn't even in question, an example being the apparent "fine-tuning" of physical constants so that there's stable matter than can form more complex compounds, and that stars can exist, etc. That "fine-tuning" itself is pretty clear, ie we can calculate that if this or that constant was 0.000004% off then everything would go to shit.

But it's only apparent tuning: it just boils down to the fact that those constants have to be the way they are, or we wouldn't be able to be here as observers: if even one thing was slightly different then eg hydrogen would be the most complex chemical in the universe or something like that. Ain't no observers emerging out of nearly perfectly homogenous hydrogen soup. Or a universe that collapsed into a singularity and disappeared into whatever the hell is on the other "end" of black holes a Planck time after the big bang, because instead of bonds being too hard to form they were too easy.

Now the AP just then takes that idea and runs off with it, with the strong principle ending up with the conclusion (and this is much simplified) that we're the only ones out here due to the amount of "fine tuning" required, and the weak being less, well, chauvinistic 😁

Some people think that the "fine-tuning" of physical constants means the universe was made for us, when the truth is closer to the opposite of that, with us sort of being made for the universe. Again without intention or a Maker, but simply meaning that with these "universe settings / seed", something similar to our current universe is what you get

edit: this Douglas Adams quote on rationalwiki is a great distillation of the AP but in a humorous way:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

But he likely had paranoia or something like that, education won't much help you there 😁 even the smartest person can suddenly start believing pretty weird things

Yeah same, I thought it was long gone. Seems a bit like it was more undead than alive

I mean, your criticism here isn't all that far from many of the common criticisms of AP from scientists, and personally I think those are all very valid points. But at the same time, there's a lot of good arguments on the AP side too, so it's a bit of a ¯(ツ)/¯ It's not like it's a hypothesis that you can necessarily ever prove or disprove due to its nature, so it does veer more towards philosophy

I didn’t find the text on the anthropic principle or rather the principle itself very convincing. But nonetheless, I think you might have misunderstood what the article you linked is arguing for. They say that “the idea that physical laws must be the way they are because otherwise we could not be here to measure them is called the anthropic principle”. However, you talked about a universe that is “tuned” to us? Isn’t the anthropic principle actually more likely to cause life in general, not only life on earth? That is, if the conditions are just right to cause us, why wouldn’t this significantly increase the chances of creating life somewhere else?

Sorry that's just my terrible wording, I can't English today so I just used the first word I could reach for and tried to explain that it doesn't imply any sort of intention. You're exactly right! But there's different versions of the principle (usually divided into "weak" and "strong") and they imply slightly different things, but I think that page doesn't go that "deep" since it's more of a general intro. "Stronger" versions of the AP basically… err, can make that "tuning" (again, I'm sorry for using that term I know it's bad but English hard 😅) stricter or more restricted in a sense so that instead of this universe being like it is "because" of its suitability for carbon-based life which might then sort of pop up anywhere, it might be just us here.

edit: re the "worst case", I just think it'd be sad if the only life in the whole universe got snuffed out because we do something stupid. Not that I necessarily believe or don't believe in the AP or the likelihood of us being totally alone here, I'm not qualified to have an actual opinion

Heh, you're welcome. It's one of those things that can cause either an existential crisis or some sort of "enlightenment", depending on the day, or at least is for me.

Remember that it's a pretty controversial hypothesis for, well, probably obvious reasons, but it's not a tinfoil hat fringe thing either

Ha yeah I think I've read something to that effect. Fun idea at least, but holy shit would living in a floating Venusian city be scary; would you trust systems built by the lowest bidder to keep the city in the air so it doesn't fall down into the Venusian hellscape? Also, better have great handrails 😄