Who Were the Sea Peoples?

It used to be that when people contemplated "big ideas," they asked things like "What is justice?" or "How should people live together in a political community?" But today, apparently " big ideas " means contemplating complete nonsense, like "Are we living in a simulation?" A simulation is an abstraction. Of course, there is something really going on: it is electricity moving around some circuits. But think about the proposal from that perspective: maybe we are really just living inside some electricity moving around circuits. How could someone "live inside" an electric current? The rest of the simulation is nothing more than our own interpretation of what that electric current represents. There is no thunderstorm in a weather simulation; we choose to interpret the current's movements as representing a thunderstorm. If we wish, we could instead choose to interpret it as a piece of music , or directions for firin...

Here is John Hollinger's description of how he gets his NBA playoff predictions : "As always, the output of a product is only as good as its input, so let's explain a little about how this is derived. The computer starts with the day's Hollinger Power Rankings. Then, in each of the 5,000 times it replays the season, it makes a random adjustment up or down to allow for the possibility that a team will play better or worse than it has done thus far." I've been trying to think this through: why run simulations at all? The power rankings must establish some relationship between teams, such that, say, when a 94.5 plays an 86.7 it will likely win by three points, or something like that. Now you can produce some random wiggles and determine what the likelihood 94.5 will win is. Then use similarly derived likelihoods for all remaining games to get all of the teams' final records. In other words, my first impression here is that the run of 5000 simulations ...

"First, simulation is a kind of experiment, and as such brings with it problems of creating experimental artefacts, raising questions about how to distinguish genuine characteristics of behaviour from artefeactual ones created by the technology of manipulation." -- Mary Morgan, The World in the Model , p. 331 This distinction makes perfect sense when considering something like a telescope. So, there was nothing nutty about Galileo's doubters wondering whether those little blobs that appeared near Jupiter were really up in the sky, or were just productions of the telescope itself ("the technology of manipulation"). Galileo, in fact, in one of his observations, wound up drawing a moon that wasn't there: early telescopes were not easy to use! And I believe I recall reading that one of the recent "false positives" for creating cold fusion was due to just such an instrumental artifact. But in a computer simulation, everything is a product of the ...