Douglas Adams

Article

Douglas Adams is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 11, 2022 and April 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “He quotes a Douglas Adams piece on how predicting the trajectory of a baseball”; “Douglas Adams once said that if anyone ever understood the Universe”. It most often appears alongside Aella, al-Qaeda, astral projection.

Metadata

• Category: People
• Mention count: 2
• Issue count: 2
• First seen: November 11, 2022
• Last seen: April 25, 2024

Appears In

• Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
• Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument

Related Pages

• • Aella (1 shared issues)
• • al-Qaeda (1 shared issues)
• • astral projection (1 shared issues)
• • Bayes (1 shared issues)
• • Buddhists (1 shared issues)
• • Caution On Bias Arguments (1 shared issues)
• • Chesterton’s Fence (1 shared issues)
• • Colored Halos Around Faces And Emotion-Evoked Colors: A New Form Of Synesthesia (1 shared issues)
• • Conservation Of Expected Evidence (1 shared issues)
• • Darth Vader (1 shared issues)
• • DID (1 shared issues)
• • Dr. Caroline Olvera (1 shared issues)

External Links

• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
• • https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
• • https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone/comment/5447835
• • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
• • https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
• • https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life
• • https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States

November 11, 2022 · Original source

…and then makes an argument I find pretty bizarre. He quotes a Douglas Adams piece on how predicting the trajectory of a baseball seems to require advanced physics, but many children and ignorant people can do it anyway by instinct, then concludes:

Sometimes this is nice, but at some extremes, it ends up being a lot like if someone looked at [Douglas Adams’] description of a person catching a baseball above, realized that they can’t really explain how that happens, and then concluded that baseball catching was not a skill that does or could exist.

Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument

April 25, 2024 · Original source

. . . although I have to admit, I’m a little nervous asking for this, though. Douglas Adams once said that if anyone ever understood the Universe, it would immediately disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible. I worry that if I ever understand why anti-AI-safety people think the things they say count as good arguments, the same thing might happen.

Backlinks

• Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
• Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
• Events: G
• People: D
• People: S
• Publications: C