Open Thread 2008!

[packbat]

Buoyed by the terrific success of last year's, I offer you: another open thread! Post! Question! Answer! Flame! (Not too much flame, though - the extinguisher hasn't been recharged in a while.) Anything doesn't reply to regular posts can go here.

Comments

[somerled.livejournal.com]

It's a meme from the future! Tell me, what is the world of the very near future like? Are the memes and flame wars different from December, 2008?

[packbat.livejournal.com]

For the most part, no, sadly not - many of them are the same old memes from months ago drifting back out again. On the flame war front, though, I was quite surprised by CONNECTION LOST

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Actually, though, the recent public conversation on Overcoming Bias (http://www.overcomingbias.com/) between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky (it starts on November 18th with this (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/setting-the-sta.html), but there are a lot of intermediate posts) is one strange sort of flamewar - what with all the commenters are only posting once a day, and the posts are thousand-plus word educated and thoughtful New-York-Times-Magazine-like essays.