Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
If they’ve read enough about the subject then they’ll realize that they’re not drowning. You don’t drown simply from being in water, the actions required to let you float with your face in the air is almost trivial. Knowing what those actions are is enough to get you to the “okay, now how do I go somewhere?” Step.
The point of this post is to ask whether reading about techniques is enough to “at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning.”
And yes, yes it is. It’s not going to make you a good swimmer but it will certainly allow you to accomplish that.
Someone who is able to walk around and control their breathing already has those prerequisite motor skills.
Yeah, this is more of a camp. A camp where they can concentrate a specific sub-population of people into.
Don’t know if there’s a specific word for that.
All these “absolutely not” responses are silly, IMO. I speak as someone who’s quite a good swimmer. Practical experience is important to get good, certainly. But if your main objective is simply to not sink and to have a basic ability to propel yourself, I think that’s stuff you can manage quite easily starting from pure book learning. The “not sink” part is key, because that will give you the time to actually experience what it’s like moving around in the water and clarify what that book learning told you.
You probably don’t need 6 months of study, at that point your time would be better spent finding an actual pool. The sorts of basics I’m talking about here that would be useful is stuff like how to float with your face in the air so you can breathe, and once you’ve got that part down how to efficiently kick your legs to propel you rather than just flailing around uselessly. Learn those key tidbits, drill on just that, and then if you find yourself unexpectedly tossed in water you’ll know what to do to not die and get yourself back to the edge.
Reading will nevertheless help. It’s not going to give you perfect form on your breast stroke, but that’s not what OP is going for here. He wants to not die if he suddenly finds himself in deep water. There’s plenty of benefit from reading about how to go about not dying under those sorts of circumstances.
Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.
I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”
I don’t see what it’s going to conclude that we haven’t already.
Well, that’s the point of trying to build ASI. To have it think of things that we haven’t been able to think of.
I really, really, can’t picture a scenario where we actually listen.
Of course not, you’re not an ASI.
That’s fine, I’m just correcting the misrepresentation of the view that was in the headline.
Nobody’s expecting a “machine that can’t think straight” to do it. Some people are hoping that a more competent machine will be developed.
Geoengineering is a field dedicated to exactly that - mitigating climate change by modifying solar input and so forth.
Basically, the Republicans have been shooting the environment and now want to ban tourniquets and sutures.
Next headline up: Taliban sends troops to Kursk to support Russian defenders there.
This timeline just keeps getting weirder.
Israel: “Hang on, we’re not done killing everyone first.”
Okay, but not sure what that has to do with my point. It still supports the notion that giving weapons and similar supplies to a party fighting a war involves you in that war.
Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are made of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.
Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It’s myopic to focus solely on that.
I don’t care about what international law says, this is what world war means as I understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn’t really a universal framework for adjudicating it.
I’d be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:
I think you’ve got an overly narrow view of “direct involvement.” If I’m in a war with someone and a country tells me “here, take these weapons” and I say “you know I’m going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I’m at war with” and they say “yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them” then I’d call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation’s military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.
I think we’re already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it’s easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.
This is nothing remotely like the scenario OP is talking about.