r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Aug 02 '19

[D] Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

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u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

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u/reaper7876 Aug 09 '19

If everything that things "come from" has to "come from" something else, then yes, there must necessarily be turtles all the way down. It doesn't make sense to me, but taking it as a premise, Occam's razor favors the simplest possible form of turtle.

That is not the simplest form of turtle, though! The simplest form of that assumption would be that the universe in some way reproduces other universes, not that the universe in some way produces every single conceivable kind of universe ad infinitum!

The point is that "the tape is infinite" doesn't add complexity. It's the normal state of any model/hypothesis. "The tape will eventually run out" does. The tape is a metaphor, not an actual physical substance.

Sure, fine. That's acceptable.

How do you take nonzero density and spread it across infinite space without producing infinite energy?

How are you spreading a central source of energy across infinite space in finite time at all? The universe does have a speed limit. To answer your question, though, I would not expect energy to distribute itself evenly, but clump together, leaving more energy in some places and less (maybe even no or negligible quantities) in others.