The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

[HNutz]

Like you didn't know ...
Vagina!

Who said a red light saber makes you a bad guy?

Along the same lines, why do all bad guys seem to use red lightsabers?

[Benderbrau]

Along the same lines, why do all bad guys seem to use red lightsabers?

More importantly, why is it that every guy with a sword can use it to block gunfire?

[Strict31]

More importantly, why is it that every guy with a sword can use it to block gunfire?

Aragorn doesn't...

[Log-Man]

Aragorn doesn't...

... yet.

[GHERU]

what happened to all the souls of vampires in Buffy?
we know Angel got his back, but from where? Was it ripped out of heaven, did getting bit automaticlly damn it to Hell? Do the souls linger in Limbo till the vampire is killed?

[Schlemmer]

Glasses? Your disguise is to wear glasses??

[PDH]

Did your mom ever teach you to cook for yourself? Or does she always just cook your own meals for you? If you were playing a game like chess with your parents, or or something similar, would you prefer to have them allow you to win all the time? Or would you prefer them to teach you just enough that you could learn to win the game without any help?

Perhaps they wanted to create a variety of races who learned to do for themselves. Who could grow sophisticated enough on their own to discover the clues hidden in their own DNA to lead them all to the same conclusion; that they share more in common with each other than the differences. Of course, given the conflict among races in the galaxy, this could be perceived as a spectacular failure.

If I was creating a race from scratch I would skip the the stage where they're shitting themselves, yes. Especially, if the process of their creation involved billions of years of suffering and had absolutely no guarantee of producing the species I wanted it to at the end, let alone independently producing virtually the exact same species on thousands of planets throughout the galaxy.

I didn't even bring up the fact that these species, when they did finally meet, spent centuries trying to obliterate each other but now that you mention it there's no reason to go through centuries of warfare (with millions of innocent deaths) when you could just tell them what you needed them to know right from the start.

There is no benefit to learning something on your own that compensates for the deaths of millions of sentient beings. Having a good grasp of epistemology so you can work other stuff out in the future is important but if you're designing them from scratch you can give them that. You can program them to be ideal Bayesians (or as close to it as you can get). Note, that we are not ideal Bayesians. Our reasoning is shit. Look up some cognitive biases, for endless examples like the availability heuristic or scope neglect. If the aliens were trying to give us the ability to perform good reasoning, they failed, big-time. And the reason for this is that our brains evolved. That's why we're good at reasoning about situations that resemble the ancestral environment and awful at things like quantum physics. It's not biologically useful - quite the opposite - to reason accurately about large numbers of people, hence scope neglect makes us care no more about a million deaths than we do about a hundred.

For so it is written: "A fool learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

I mean, evolution isn't aiming for humans. So what would have happened if, at the end of this process, they had a planet full of silicon-based species of semi-sentient fungi? Would they have dropped a meteorite on the planet and slaughtered every living thing so that some other more humanoid species could evolve? How did they time it so that every single planet got effectively the same species of homo sapiens all at the exact same time?

Why didn't they just create a species of humanoids there and then with their obvious mastery of genetic engineering?

Still...by the end of DS9, many of the races of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants actually are united.

But this story idea cannot entirely be laid at Ron Moore's feet. From TOS, there came the concept of the Preservers, an ancient "super" race that went around the galaxy rescuing races in danger of extinction and transplanting them to distant and often terraformed worlds. This was thought to be the reason why there were so many humanoid races in the galaxy. And why there are so many "Class-M" worlds

Moore actually had the Preservers in mind when they made this episode. It's not implicitly stated that the beings in The Chase are the Preservers, but RDM claims nothing excludes them from being the Preservers.

How does this improve things?

[Strict31]

PDH, you are a confusing individual at times. But, to each his own, I suppose.

[DMM]

[PDH]

I'm just saying, if your goal is to create a humanoid species that resembles your own that has to be just about the absolute worst conceivable way of going about it.

[Jack Burton]

Why is it in the Buffy show it seems like vampires are made of jello? Buffy being able to stake one so easily makes sense given she's physically stronger than a normal human. Other humans look like they put no force into it.

[Strict31]

I'm just saying, if your goal is to create a humanoid species that resembles your own that has to be just about the absolute worst conceivable way of going about it.

If your goal is to create a species that is incapable of thinking for itself and adapting to unforeseen challenges, then I wholly agree; it would be the worst way to achieve this result.

[PDH]

If your goal is to create a species that is incapable of thinking for itself and adapting to unforeseen challenges, then I wholly agree; it would be the worst way to achieve this result.

That doesn't follow in the slightest. There's absolutely no reason that you can't design a species that can think for itself and deal with unforeseen challenges without going through billions of years of evolution first.

[Strict31]

That doesn't follow in the slightest. There's absolutely no reason that you can't design a species that can think for itself and deal with unforeseen challenges without going through billions of years of evolution first.

You figure that letting a species learn for itself does not follow. But designing something to deal with unforeseen challenges seems to fit better with the sense-making?

Okay.

[PDH]

You figure that letting a species learn for itself does not follow. But designing something to deal with unforeseen challenges seems to fit better with the sense-making?

Okay.

One way to learn that putting your head into an oven is not a good idea is to try it out for yourself. A better way is to learn from someone else.

If you're building an AI, say, from scratch you give it all the knowledge you think it will need and then you program it with good reasoning so that it can learn new things on its own. This should not take more than one generation if you have the know-how. Only an absolutely insane person would leave it up to evolution on the off-chance that billions of years later it might simultaneously produce the intended creatures on hundreds and hundreds of worlds.

If we did not have the ability to make reliable predictions about future events we would not be here. We would have no way of surviving from one moment to the next. There is such a thing as good reasoning. There is maths behind it and we know that maths. That is why we can look at human reasoning and identify things like cognitive biases, which are explicitly defined as deviations from Bayesian probability theory.

You seriously can't think of any easier way of achieving the same results that doesn't involve the suffering of trillions of innocent creatures? Even if, for some reason, you were absolutely dead set on the idea that creatures have to learn about the dangers of ovens by sticking their heads into them - even then - there's still no reason why they couldn't achieve this in one generation, instead of millions.