Consider the universe from the big bang to the moment before life started. What does it mean to say that some event happen by chance during that period?

— Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) December 17, 2018

Here’s how to make an event occur completely by chance and completely non-deterministically: take a uranium atom. Or many of them. Have it hooked up to a detector (Geiger counter). When there is a radioactive decay detected, rig the detector to trigger a switch which turns on a sign. The sign will say, “This was a non-deterministic event.”

There is absolutely no way to predict — even with perfect information — when this event will occur. None. Zero. It is a chance event. If you rewound the universe and started again, it would not happen the same way (despite what you might have been told).

This means that the event occurred by chance. Why do people have so many problems with this? Why are they so wedded to the obviously false determinism?

By the way, this doesn’t mean that there is free will. The two are not related. But it does mean two things: 1) Strict determinism is not true in this universe and 2) Causality is weak or violated in this universe because nothing caused the uranium atom(s) to decay; they just did.

The cosmic silence is sort of mysterious. We’ve seen no plausible signs at all of radio signals or other methods of communication that we can recognize emanating from an extraterrestrial origin.

I suspect it’s because we’re both early to the party (likely one of the first tech civilizations) and because technological civilizations will tend not to last very long. Also, I suspect those that do persist will recognize that there is substantial existential risk in advertising their presence.

Still, the silence is bothersome. It hints that we’re alone, or that we won’t last long. Global climate change seems to be confirming that latter hypothesis.

| Geopolitical Lesson: Social Justice is a trojan horse for corporate interest. |

— J.Sack (@JordanTSack) December 17, 2018

I wouldn’t say it’s just that, but the ideas and goals of social justice have been at least 90% co-opted and contaminated by corporatism and corporate goals. This doesn’t make it invalid — but means it, like most other areas of life, needs to be cleansed and decontaminated.

Social justice has mostly now come to mean that we should have brown and women billionaire oligarchs instead of all just white men That’s not much of an improvement, really. Etc. The Overton Window has really has been very effectively shrunk here by corporate power, messaging, and censorship.

The reason I have a problem with most SJW types is because they are of the system rather than wanting to radically alter it or destroy it, just so that’s clear.