I can confirm as a professional geologist, that the hardness of rocks is entirely subjective and dependent on the time, pressure, and temperature context at the time of observation. So all rocks are soft, but all rocks are also hard. Also, rocks can behave as fluids when great pressure is applied slowly. That's how the mantle flows even though it has not melted. Dinosaurs didn't help build the pyramids, but giant single celled amoeboid creatures called foraminfera did.
Back in the day I was giving a new friend a ride and I had I Am Not A Serial Killer in my car. I said "oh it's a self-help guide", and realized afterwards that's not the best joke to make when a woman you just met is getting into your car. We got over it.
Won't be surprised if that typo in the title is on purpose to make more people comment about it... And if that really is the case, its a resounding success
My understanding of the glitter conspiracy was that no one knows where it comes from, not where it goes. There’s two companies in New Jersey that make all of the glitter and the refuse to say what glitter is and we only know one company name. The simulation theory drives me insane as a theist, because most of the time when I hear people talking about it that legitimately believe in it they claim to be atheist. You brought up the points that I make in regards to that theory and they always start backpedaling. Minor storm light spoiler: Planet X (Nibiru) can be traced back to the Sumerians. I personally thought this was the inspiration for Braize. The government noise conspiracy is at least in part true. Multiple government agents have come out and said they had jobs in the 60-80s that was to make as much noise about aliens and ufos as possible so people couldn’t keep fact and fiction separate. I don’t know why they would just stop doing that and not being doing that same sort of thing now
I can see his appeal - he sort of V-sauce rambles. But that conspiracy theory video took a very political turn half-way through, and ironically with that turn he kinda stopped talking about facts and sources and just started making assertions. (in the second half of said video)
Rocks are soft until touched reminded me of the movie "Mystery Men". Specifically, the guy who can turn invisible, but only if nobody is looking at him.
You should look up the US cheese conspiracy. The US government has a massive stockpile of cheese as a result of various programs incentivizing farmers to produce dairy. Using up all the extra dairy we produce in the US was one of the stated goals that led to the Got Milk campaign.
That's not a conspiracy. The cheese caves are pretty well documented with photos. After the great depression the government put in policies to make sure farmers always got paid and there was always food and that adds up eventually.
Metallic glitter is also used for chaff radar interference. And glitter can be so unique that it can be used to identify targets. As in: put some glitter in front of a door, and everyone who goes through it will get glitter on there shoes. This in turn can be identified by the naked eye that a target has glitter on them and later in forensics to confirm its the same glitter. It's a great way to target drug houses.
21:26 I love this point! My archaeology professor back in college always argued (very passionately) that ancient humans were not as stupid as we’ve been told. I have always thought this, too! Such a fun conversation!
Glitter is made of plastic and metal and impossible to get rid of, they probably aren't saying who buys it because they don't want green laws taxing their customers for polluting the environment with glitter, the big theory is that it is in the paint for vehicles like boats, because that would mean their is glitter in the water, so they could be blamed for water micro-plastic pollution.
I am going through computer science uni. This semester we had to create an app. I chose The Cosmere as my theme. I got obsessed. I did not sleep. I tried to make a pvp game to go with my app. I shivered on the floor in the dark, thinking how to implement burning Steel. Kaladin's velocity keeps spitting out errors. So many errors. I dream about errors. The noodles in my instant ramen formed itself into error codes. At the final presentation, I carried the Stormlight Archive with me. In a backpack. Hardcover. This was peak product placement. I do not posess a car. I walked, thinking about errors. I am obviously writing this through text to speech, due to a full body cast. The next day, someone asked about where they should start with The Cosmere. My sacrifice was worth it. My conspiracy theory is that I will be proclaimed as a sleep deprived, coffe addicted cremling.
On the simulation statistics debate - If we make a 'full' universe simulation it would mean that the same simulation can be made inside it as well by definition that everything possible on our world we can simulate. And this can go on recursively to infinity. So if we managed to make a full simulation, that makes the chances of our world already being on the previous level of simulation infinitely close to 100% (so 99.9999...)
But there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that you cannot perfectly simulate a complex system inside of a simpler system. So, barring a radical, unprecedented upset in the worlds of physics, computer science, and information theory, we CANNOT make a "full" universe simulation. And, likewise, if we are in a simulation, then the universe containing our simulation is necessarily more complex than our universe. We can flatten the entire scenario by only considering bits of information at the highest level of simulation. All the information about a simulated world is contained in the one simulating it; that's what "simulating" means. So we can now rephrase the question to this: what are the odds that a given bit of information in the top-level world is a part of a simulation? And, unless the top-level world contains nothing BUT the mechanism for simulating other worlds, the answer is: pretty low.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the U.S. Department of Transportation bought too many orange traffic cones and they store them on the side of the road.
My understanding, concerning the knowledge and capabilities of people throughout history, is that they understood a lot about the world and how it worked. What they were often extremely ignorant of is the "why". A great example is food preservation. They knew tons of different methods to keep food edible for long periods of time, but they had no understanding bacterial growth or the other factors that lead to food spoilage. Sometimes this trial and error proto-science would lead to false conclusions. Many people used to think that illness was cause by bad smells, which really isn't that silly. Many things that will cause illness will have bad smells associated with them, and many illnesses can cause bad smells in their victims.
I was thinking of Simulation Hypothesis recently, and realized that it makes sense when observer effect in double slit experiment and great expansion in astronomy. In double slit experiment, electron normally acts like wave, but when an observer is added, it acts like a particle; as if until you look at there, there is nothing, but possibilities, and when you look at there computer generates a particle. According to the great expansion theory, galaxies are moving away from each other. This can be an illusion caused by rendering of far away stuff. So when we look at them, because they are getting placed in their own places in 3D, we might be seeing them as moving away. Simulation Hypothesis also explains Fermi Paradox: they might be unncessary for the purpoeses of the simulation. Just FYI: I am not a believer of Simulation Hypothesis (I think that it provides the same result as religions about understanding universe). I like it as a mind exercise.
I side with Dan. The theory goes: if there is a possibility a system sophosticated enough to produce a life-like simulation in our reality exists, then there is an equally likely probability that the reality we are in is, in fact, simulated. That's where the 50% comes in. It is equally likely that we are in a simulation than not, if such a simulation could exist. Philosophy is awesome.
We can flatten this down by considering information, instead of objects and people. Ultimately, each "universe", whether simulated or not, can be thought of as consisting of a huge amount of information about its particles and interactions and whatnot. If it's a simulation, you can think of this data as the code doing the simulation. Now, all the information in a simulated universe is necessarily also in the universe doing the simulating; that's what it means to "simulate" something, after all. The machine running the simulation is a part of that universe, so the simulation's "code" is necessarily contained in some form within the simulating universe's "code." So, the question can be rephrased as this: given a chunk of data in the top-level, unsimulated reality, what are the odds that data is part of a simulation machine, as opposed to any other object? With that question, we see that saying "there's a 50% chance we live in a simulation" is equivalent to saying "50% of the top-level reality is composed of simulation machines." Which is possible, but there's no reason to think it likely; it's certainly not true of our world, after all.
Glitter is made of plastic and metal and it is impossible to get rid of, they probably aren't saying who buys it because they don't want green laws taxing their customers for polluting the environment. The big theory is that it is in the paint for vehicles like boats, because that would mean there is glitter in the water, so they could be blamed for water micro-plastic pollution.
The problem with Brandon's metaphor about "inside my house and outside my house" is that "inside my house" is correlated to "inside the real universe".
if anyone handling the channel sees this, could you please look into creating a playlist for Intentionally Blank? I understand if it's not a priority though. Thank you!
Agreed. You have to assume he means a simulation that is of equal complexity to the "outer" universe, which is clearly what he was going for, but Brandon wasn't picking up on. That said, I do not posit that such a thing is possible or exists or will ever exist or could ever exist.
The answer that I like best is that it's actually for boats, maybe because it's seen as cheap, but mostly because glitter is "girly", and so many of these vanity yachts are men having mid-life crises. XD Given the trend of new cars that *don't* sparkle, I think it's safe to say that they've slid down the top customer list, though it's still entirely possible that car paint was so ubiquitous that car manufacturers just aren't first by as much anymore.
News bias services track *how* news sources cover stories. They never seem to track *which* stories are being covered or how much focus it gets. They also mostly care about political bias, not about things like the records on a certain island never being followed up on, or how whistleblowers against Boeing, a company with major business deals with the U.S. government, conveniently keep ending up dead. But in more important news, can you believe the Florida Panthers almost blew the Stanley Cup Finals? That's... sure worth a lot of attention.
We're in a simulation called Earth 2, Earth 1 was considered a failure and had to be sacked. The people who wrote Earth 2 were also sacked. In Earth 1 the moon was cheese, but the writers corrected that but were sacked for not making a cheese moon.
Dan is right about the statistic in this case. Dan is positing that the universe is all we know and thus all there is. So, if there is a simulation of that universe that is indistinguishable from reality, and you are trying to decide which one you exist within, there is only two choices. Reality or simulation. Thereby allowing the statistical chance that you are in one on the other, to be 50/50. If you start to include other variables, then yes this changes, but Dan's whole point is that these are the only two variables and we are just deciding which we are likely in. Reality or Simulation? To call math in this way wrong, then act like theology makes more sense... Never been more disappointed in Brandon...
I think the glitter thing was actually fully solved and it turned out to be ship paint. Like they need large amounts of easily replaceable paint cause the salt of the sea is very harsh and one of the things they do is mix glitter into the paint.
Unicorn burgers are delicious! I like colorful food, and if not grilled through and through, they have this pink/purple core and hue, that's rally cool 😉
My favorite conspiracy theory is the Dead Internet theory, because when it was proposed it was laughably dumb, but with the rise of chat bots and AI, and with more and more people moving to semi closed spaces like Discord, it's becoming more prophecy than theory.
One conspiracy theory that I would actually believe is true is that Yuri Gagarin wasn't actually the first person in space, just the first person to come back alive. Given the secrecy in the Soviet Union and their rush to be first no matter the engineering, scientific, or human sacrifices needed, it would not shock me if it eventually came out that some unnamed cosmonaut got to space first but just didn't make it back alive.
I’ve seen a lot of data supporting the idea of how crazy miraculous the Pyramids were. The skill required leads to only one conclusion. They WERE made by humans, but with ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY LOST TO TIME.
A cool theory I heard was that the extra planet out past the Kuiper Belt is actually a really small black hole, which would help explain why we can't see it
My degree is in theology and, although I do come from a considerably different faith tradition than Brandon and Dan, I do believe in a version of simulation theory because of my theological convictions.
Inventions can also get lost to history very easily; just because someone invented it doesn't mean the way to make it gets passed along. We like to think of technology as some amorphous property of a culture but it we've lost technologies even recently that have required reverse engineering projects to figure out how some things created. The people making technology and constantly improving them over their lifetime don't always remember to write all the details and changes down
15:05 - Amazing and exactly correct. Dan is great, but is also getting the statistics wrong - it's called the "equiprobability bias." Because there are two outcomes does not mean they are equally likely no matter how "comprehensive" the possibility is. If there are 10,000 people in a simulation and 500 in the objective real world, the probability of being in a simulation is proportional to each subgroup over the total number of people, not 50% 50% because there are two options. Interestingly, Nick Bostrom made the same error. It's a common misunderstanding.
If you're going to be doing Bayesian inference to develop your best approximation, then starting from a uniform distribution is pretty standard (for finite distributions). But it's only ever the starting point - you don't say "I am assuming it's equally probable, so I can conclude that it's definitely equally probable in reality"; you say "I am in a position of total ignorance, so I'll say they're equally likely since that limits how wrong I can be, and update my guess as soon as I get any sort of information" That said, my understanding (that is to say, I was told something like this a couple of decades ago and haven't fact-checked it since) is that one of the problems that plagued mathematics in the late 19th century arose from this sort of thinking - assuming the basic outcomes of a random process to be equiprobable without really having any sort of rigorous definition for what the basic outcomes should look like. This isn't an actual example because it's too obviously wrong, but saying something like: "when you roll a standard die, you either roll a 6 or you don't, therefore the probability of either outcome is equal." As is often the case in mathematics, the problem of how to measure probabilities to determine what the basic outcomes should be for a given process was ultimately solved by defining probability completely independently of the real world - a discrete probability distribution is just a function that takes a set of all possible outcomes of a random event and maps each one to a number between 0 and 1 (inclusive), and has the total of those numbers across all possible outcomes summing to exactly 1. Continuous probability distributions have the same idea, but need a bit of care to work around the fact that the probability of any specific precise outcome is zero - instead you have to work with the probability of being close to a given outcome (where "close" gets a technical definition).
Neil Degrasse Tyson discusses the simulation theory and argues that mathematically, it is far more likely that we are living in a simulation rather than the "real" reality. He explains that if we create a simulation indistinguishable from our reality, and the simulated beings believe they are "real," they could eventually create their own simulations. This process could continue indefinitely, with each subsequent simulation creating its own. Given this scenario, the odds of us being the original reality, or the "real world," are infinitesimally small.
@@DarkMount33 There is a question of whether you can actually nest simulations that way - ultimately every single simulation in the entire tree is being run on the same root level computer. A universe-simulating computer may be too computationally complex to be simulated. There's a second question: what does a secondary reality require in order to be "real" to its inhabitants? Does it have to be a detailed computer simulation? Or do stories and dreams qualify? How real is A. Square? Or Kal El?
@@rmsgrey I do think the first question has value, but it is kind of tied to the second. “Real” only matters based on the perception of the simulated being. We could be running on a completely simplified simulation compared to our “users”, but to us it feels real. For all I know, you are an AI that is only simulated when you are typing to me. Or things out of sight are not being simulated at all until they are observed. Similar to The Sims, to us is very simplified compared to our universe, if the sims had any sentience, to them their universe would seem normal.
If I understand the simulation science stuff correctly, the theory is that any society will try to create simulation technology so there could be many many levels of simulations as each simulation reaches a level of tech to create simulations. So it's a 50-50 chance we are living in a simulation if we do not have simulation technology. That is because we are either the topmost level which created the first simulation and is real or the bottommost level which is the last of any simulations but cannot create its own simulations. If we do invent simulation technology, then it becomes nearly a 100% chance we are in a simulation because now there is only 1 option to be real which is the top level and all other levels are simulations.
Here's a conspiracy theory: Brandon Sanderson didn't write all those books! If you read Way of Kings for instance, we have to be sure that whoever wrote it was someone with a military background. Also someone in high society, perhaps not a royal but someone with connections! It couldn't POSSIBLY have been written by a teacher in creative writing from Nebraska living in Utah!
Immediately getting off topic by digressing to Disney movie naming history lol but I agree 100% with their marketing team. Born in 1995, I never watched ANY Disney stuff because I though it was all girls and little kids content. And because of that misconception, I missed out on all sorts of things like Toy Story, The Lion King, The Incredibles... all because "Disney makes baby movies". Frozen is probably the first movie that pulled me out of that, though I was even hesitant to watch that because I was a freshman in college and still conscious about masculinity and watching kid shows.
Dan's thinking has merit and should not have been shut down that way. It was not statistics 🙈 It illustrated a very real problem in definition. I feel like there's gotta be a name for this, coming from clone fiction. If there are 2 perfect versions of X, it becomes difficult to determine which is X1 and which is X2. Which is original? Which is counterfeit?
One of my favorites has always been "the lottery was invented to catch time travelers in the act"
"Is that why I'm not paid?" at the end is the best closing line to Intentionally Blank ever. It's SUCH a good callback/reference.
Next episode: conspiracy theories on why Donald is unpaid.
All we need now is an episode where Ben is there, but occasionally blinks out of existence.
His timing was perfect. I feel that unpaid intern Donald is finding his feet and coming into his own on the podcast.
Man, I’m loving Donald’s contributions to the podcast lately. He never misses with these witty quips.
I took my hands out of the dishwater and came to the comments to say this 😂 They could NOT have had a better closing line to this episode
A similar conspiracy is Elden Ring naming the horse Torrent so people would have a hard time trying to torrent elden ring.
That video glitch at 18:11 when he mentions spirit world must be the spirtual realm trying to make its presence known.
I can confirm as a professional geologist, that the hardness of rocks is entirely subjective and dependent on the time, pressure, and temperature context at the time of observation. So all rocks are soft, but all rocks are also hard. Also, rocks can behave as fluids when great pressure is applied slowly. That's how the mantle flows even though it has not melted.
Dinosaurs didn't help build the pyramids, but giant single celled amoeboid creatures called foraminfera did.
Back in the day I was giving a new friend a ride and I had I Am Not A Serial Killer in my car. I said "oh it's a self-help guide", and realized afterwards that's not the best joke to make when a woman you just met is getting into your car. We got over it.
My sister has a copy of "I Am Not A Serial Killer" in the door of her car, her backpack, and on her nightstand.
Just here for the comments regarding the first word.
Who knew that when Moses said, "Let my people go," he was talking about the dinosaurs.
Sanderson bearing his testimony on fast Sunday “we are all living in a simulation” 😂
And somehow it would still not even be in the top five unhinged things I've heard on fast Sunday >.>
Someone needs to make that a reddit thread.
@@kaimcdragonfist4803that’s not top 50 from a BYU/BYUI testimony meeting 😂
Brandon temporarily leaving time and space while explaining the spirit world was great. Simulation confirmed
I am pleasantly surprised that Brandon's Simulation/theology take mirrors my own as closely as it does.
Won't be surprised if that typo in the title is on purpose to make more people comment about it...
And if that really is the case, its a resounding success
🤦♂️
It's always exciting to hear that Brandon likes channels that I also really enjoy. Folding Ideas is an awesome channel!
He's good, but I'm not a fan of his political quips or tangents he throws in.
My understanding of the glitter conspiracy was that no one knows where it comes from, not where it goes. There’s two companies in New Jersey that make all of the glitter and the refuse to say what glitter is and we only know one company name.
The simulation theory drives me insane as a theist, because most of the time when I hear people talking about it that legitimately believe in it they claim to be atheist. You brought up the points that I make in regards to that theory and they always start backpedaling.
Minor storm light spoiler: Planet X (Nibiru) can be traced back to the Sumerians. I personally thought this was the inspiration for Braize.
The government noise conspiracy is at least in part true. Multiple government agents have come out and said they had jobs in the 60-80s that was to make as much noise about aliens and ufos as possible so people couldn’t keep fact and fiction separate. I don’t know why they would just stop doing that and not being doing that same sort of thing now
"They're hiding the truth" is exactly 20 letters, which is exactly 16 base metals + 4 god metals. Coincidence?!
I think YES!!
Or 16 shards + 4 dawnshards
@@Iluvatar196 omg it all fits!
Folding Ideas is great! Dan Olson makes excellent content.
I can see his appeal - he sort of V-sauce rambles. But that conspiracy theory video took a very political turn half-way through, and ironically with that turn he kinda stopped talking about facts and sources and just started making assertions. (in the second half of said video)
I love that their kids are involved in this now. It helps the conversation.
So happy that Paid Clerk Unpaid Intern Donald Fortniteson has been getting more to do in these podcasts.
so his dads name is Fortnite?
Of course, he named the game he made after himself.
I can't tell if the typo was intentional, but it's cracking me up
Rocks are soft until touched reminded me of the movie "Mystery Men". Specifically, the guy who can turn invisible, but only if nobody is looking at him.
that "is that why I am not paid" was great
You should look up the US cheese conspiracy. The US government has a massive stockpile of cheese as a result of various programs incentivizing farmers to produce dairy. Using up all the extra dairy we produce in the US was one of the stated goals that led to the Got Milk campaign.
That's not so much a conspiracy theory, just the result of the past nearly 100 years of agricultural policy.
It's to protect us from a Rosharan invasion.
That's not a conspiracy. The cheese caves are pretty well documented with photos. After the great depression the government put in policies to make sure farmers always got paid and there was always food and that adds up eventually.
Metallic glitter is also used for chaff radar interference. And glitter can be so unique that it can be used to identify targets.
As in: put some glitter in front of a door, and everyone who goes through it will get glitter on there shoes. This in turn can be identified by the naked eye that a target has glitter on them and later in forensics to confirm its the same glitter.
It's a great way to target drug houses.
21:26 I love this point! My archaeology professor back in college always argued (very passionately) that ancient humans were not as stupid as we’ve been told. I have always thought this, too! Such a fun conversation!
I want to see a Netflix series exposing Big Glitter
m.th-cam.com/video/y08scEk59G0/w-d-xo.html
Basically the equivalent. They interview people in the industry and get a pretty definitive answer
Glitter is made of plastic and metal and impossible to get rid of, they probably aren't saying who buys it because they don't want green laws taxing their customers for polluting the environment with glitter, the big theory is that it is in the paint for vehicles like boats, because that would mean their is glitter in the water, so they could be blamed for water micro-plastic pollution.
26:51 This documentary is called "Behind the Curve" which is a fantastic documentary. Love the ending of it so much. 😂😂😂 Best credits ever.
Best sign off for the show ever 😂 Especially Donald's question 🤣
I am going through computer science uni. This semester we had to create an app. I chose The Cosmere as my theme. I got obsessed. I did not sleep. I tried to make a pvp game to go with my app. I shivered on the floor in the dark, thinking how to implement burning Steel. Kaladin's velocity keeps spitting out errors. So many errors. I dream about errors. The noodles in my instant ramen formed itself into error codes. At the final presentation, I carried the Stormlight Archive with me. In a backpack. Hardcover. This was peak product placement. I do not posess a car. I walked, thinking about errors. I am obviously writing this through text to speech, due to a full body cast. The next day, someone asked about where they should start with The Cosmere. My sacrifice was worth it. My conspiracy theory is that I will be proclaimed as a sleep deprived, coffe addicted cremling.
That glitch when Brandon says spirit world was excellently timed. 18:18
Anyone else notice how Brandon ascends into purple mist when he says "spirit world"?
Oh my god that "cover up" disclaimer was golden. Had me rolling.
I can confirm that Folding Ideas is a great youtube channel!
He definitely has some good ones, but the second half of that conspiracy video he made ironically seemed to be pure conjecture.
On the simulation statistics debate - If we make a 'full' universe simulation it would mean that the same simulation can be made inside it as well by definition that everything possible on our world we can simulate. And this can go on recursively to infinity. So if we managed to make a full simulation, that makes the chances of our world already being on the previous level of simulation infinitely close to 100% (so 99.9999...)
But there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that you cannot perfectly simulate a complex system inside of a simpler system. So, barring a radical, unprecedented upset in the worlds of physics, computer science, and information theory, we CANNOT make a "full" universe simulation. And, likewise, if we are in a simulation, then the universe containing our simulation is necessarily more complex than our universe.
We can flatten the entire scenario by only considering bits of information at the highest level of simulation. All the information about a simulated world is contained in the one simulating it; that's what "simulating" means. So we can now rephrase the question to this: what are the odds that a given bit of information in the top-level world is a part of a simulation? And, unless the top-level world contains nothing BUT the mechanism for simulating other worlds, the answer is: pretty low.
I watch Folding Ideas Ralph Bakshi video all the time!!
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the U.S. Department of Transportation bought too many orange traffic cones and they store them on the side of the road.
You guys should read Department of Truth. I just read the first omnibus volume and it’s amazing!
I also think that even if we are in a simulation, it doesn't matter, because the world outside of the simulation would require an explanation.
My understanding, concerning the knowledge and capabilities of people throughout history, is that they understood a lot about the world and how it worked. What they were often extremely ignorant of is the "why". A great example is food preservation. They knew tons of different methods to keep food edible for long periods of time, but they had no understanding bacterial growth or the other factors that lead to food spoilage. Sometimes this trial and error proto-science would lead to false conclusions. Many people used to think that illness was cause by bad smells, which really isn't that silly. Many things that will cause illness will have bad smells associated with them, and many illnesses can cause bad smells in their victims.
I can’t believe their is a typo in the title.
They're isn't. It's a conspiracy.
😂
I can't believe it's not butter.
7:18 Dan could have a 2nd career as Voldemort’s personal chef.
I was thinking of Simulation Hypothesis recently, and realized that it makes sense when observer effect in double slit experiment and great expansion in astronomy.
In double slit experiment, electron normally acts like wave, but when an observer is added, it acts like a particle; as if until you look at there, there is nothing, but possibilities, and when you look at there computer generates a particle.
According to the great expansion theory, galaxies are moving away from each other. This can be an illusion caused by rendering of far away stuff. So when we look at them, because they are getting placed in their own places in 3D, we might be seeing them as moving away.
Simulation Hypothesis also explains Fermi Paradox: they might be unncessary for the purpoeses of the simulation.
Just FYI: I am not a believer of Simulation Hypothesis (I think that it provides the same result as religions about understanding universe). I like it as a mind exercise.
I side with Dan. The theory goes: if there is a possibility a system sophosticated enough to produce a life-like simulation in our reality exists, then there is an equally likely probability that the reality we are in is, in fact, simulated. That's where the 50% comes in. It is equally likely that we are in a simulation than not, if such a simulation could exist. Philosophy is awesome.
I get that philosophically, but that's one hell of a large IF to base your theory around.
If such a simulation could exist, why is there only one other?
We can flatten this down by considering information, instead of objects and people. Ultimately, each "universe", whether simulated or not, can be thought of as consisting of a huge amount of information about its particles and interactions and whatnot. If it's a simulation, you can think of this data as the code doing the simulation.
Now, all the information in a simulated universe is necessarily also in the universe doing the simulating; that's what it means to "simulate" something, after all. The machine running the simulation is a part of that universe, so the simulation's "code" is necessarily contained in some form within the simulating universe's "code."
So, the question can be rephrased as this: given a chunk of data in the top-level, unsimulated reality, what are the odds that data is part of a simulation machine, as opposed to any other object?
With that question, we see that saying "there's a 50% chance we live in a simulation" is equivalent to saying "50% of the top-level reality is composed of simulation machines." Which is possible, but there's no reason to think it likely; it's certainly not true of our world, after all.
Naming the Elden Ring horse "Torrent" can not be a coincidence, they sabotaged the pirating community with this ingenious move!!1!
Glitter is made of plastic and metal and it is impossible to get rid of, they probably aren't saying who buys it because they don't want green laws taxing their customers for polluting the environment. The big theory is that it is in the paint for vehicles like boats, because that would mean there is glitter in the water, so they could be blamed for water micro-plastic pollution.
Best final line of the podcast ever!!!!😂🤣
I need a 16 hour podcast where you guys react to Wendigoon's conspiracy theory iceberg
The problem with Brandon's metaphor about "inside my house and outside my house" is that "inside my house" is correlated to "inside the real universe".
Okay, but Dan's shout about Big Glitter's top customer's being sex related is a good shout
if anyone handling the channel sees this, could you please look into creating a playlist for Intentionally Blank?
I understand if it's not a priority though.
Thank you!
That typo in the title makes me unreasonably upset
*reasonably upset lol
Me too friend
All part of the conspiracy
I like to imagine it as "They're over THERE, hiding the truth from you!"
They'res no reason to get upset
Dan is right on the simulation probabilities!
Agreed. You have to assume he means a simulation that is of equal complexity to the "outer" universe, which is clearly what he was going for, but Brandon wasn't picking up on.
That said, I do not posit that such a thing is possible or exists or will ever exist or could ever exist.
Soup, I can't believe you didn't cover the mega conspiracy... SOUP!!!
The answer to the glitter conspiracy are car manufacturers for painting cars, but glitter is seen as cheap, so they do not want folks to know.
The answer that I like best is that it's actually for boats, maybe because it's seen as cheap, but mostly because glitter is "girly", and so many of these vanity yachts are men having mid-life crises. XD
Given the trend of new cars that *don't* sparkle, I think it's safe to say that they've slid down the top customer list, though it's still entirely possible that car paint was so ubiquitous that car manufacturers just aren't first by as much anymore.
Sanderson is a time traveler and brings his finished books back in time to publish them. No paradox at all...
34:00 The kernel of truth there is making media focus on a different story when an inconvenient story is being covered.
News bias services track *how* news sources cover stories. They never seem to track *which* stories are being covered or how much focus it gets. They also mostly care about political bias, not about things like the records on a certain island never being followed up on, or how whistleblowers against Boeing, a company with major business deals with the U.S. government, conveniently keep ending up dead.
But in more important news, can you believe the Florida Panthers almost blew the Stanley Cup Finals? That's... sure worth a lot of attention.
I can't believe they actually mentioned all my theories about the glitter conspirancy.
Folding Ideas is Dan Olson!
The top user of glitter is the US military. It’s definitely used in countermeasures.
Thinking about my tiny baggies of many different types of glitter.
My guess is greeting cards and nail art.
We're in a simulation called Earth 2, Earth 1 was considered a failure and had to be sacked. The people who wrote Earth 2 were also sacked. In Earth 1 the moon was cheese, but the writers corrected that but were sacked for not making a cheese moon.
I like the one about the titanic being an insurance fraud scheme
i thought i remembered the glitter thing being like... cruise-ships? or ships generally? it's used in a lot of paints, iirc.
31:00 I was introduced to the D&D version of the Hollow Earth by William SRD.
I'll admit, I had serious concerns about Dan's state of mind when I read the John Wayne Cleaver books.
Brandon. Will you release early weekly chapters again with wind and truth?
"Where does all the glitter go?" Everywhere, glitter goes everywhere and it will never be cleaned up.
I am totally furious you didn’t take my pet conspiracy seriously.
Hooray folding ideas! His name is Dan Olson
Dan is right about the statistic in this case.
Dan is positing that the universe is all we know and thus all there is. So, if there is a simulation of that universe that is indistinguishable from reality, and you are trying to decide which one you exist within, there is only two choices. Reality or simulation. Thereby allowing the statistical chance that you are in one on the other, to be 50/50.
If you start to include other variables, then yes this changes, but Dan's whole point is that these are the only two variables and we are just deciding which we are likely in. Reality or Simulation?
To call math in this way wrong, then act like theology makes more sense...
Never been more disappointed in Brandon...
31:18 Highly reccomend watching "Patema Inverted" if you like this idea. Fantastic movie with an absolutely brilliant concept.
I think the glitter thing was actually fully solved and it turned out to be ship paint. Like they need large amounts of easily replaceable paint cause the salt of the sea is very harsh and one of the things they do is mix glitter into the paint.
“Big Glitter”? I’m so disappointed, I expected more of you. The correct answer is “Glitterati”.
One of my favorites is: The Mandela Effect phenomenon was a psyop to see if 'they' could manipulate collective memory.
Unicorn burgers are delicious! I like colorful food, and if not grilled through and through, they have this pink/purple core and hue, that's rally cool 😉
My favorite conspiracy theory is the Dead Internet theory, because when it was proposed it was laughably dumb, but with the rise of chat bots and AI, and with more and more people moving to semi closed spaces like Discord, it's becoming more prophecy than theory.
One conspiracy theory that I would actually believe is true is that Yuri Gagarin wasn't actually the first person in space, just the first person to come back alive. Given the secrecy in the Soviet Union and their rush to be first no matter the engineering, scientific, or human sacrifices needed, it would not shock me if it eventually came out that some unnamed cosmonaut got to space first but just didn't make it back alive.
Folding ideas ironically is also named Dan😂
Also, Folding Ideas Dan's last name is Olson, which is the same last name as Ben (How's that Ben?)
Dan is right in the argument about simulations
I don’t know about the traffic cones, but I thought the barrels are filled with water for cars to crash into as a safety measure
I’ve seen a lot of data supporting the idea of how crazy miraculous the Pyramids were.
The skill required leads to only one conclusion.
They WERE made by humans, but with ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY LOST TO TIME.
A cool theory I heard was that the extra planet out past the Kuiper Belt is actually a really small black hole, which would help explain why we can't see it
My degree is in theology and, although I do come from a considerably different faith tradition than Brandon and Dan, I do believe in a version of simulation theory because of my theological convictions.
Inventions can also get lost to history very easily; just because someone invented it doesn't mean the way to make it gets passed along. We like to think of technology as some amorphous property of a culture but it we've lost technologies even recently that have required reverse engineering projects to figure out how some things created. The people making technology and constantly improving them over their lifetime don't always remember to write all the details and changes down
There! *dusts hands* (I'm) hiding the TRUTH from you!
The Veritas 7 hour Flat Earth doc on TH-cam is fantastic.
Literally just watched the Bakshi video before this. Mind is blown.
15:05 - Amazing and exactly correct. Dan is great, but is also getting the statistics wrong - it's called the "equiprobability bias." Because there are two outcomes does not mean they are equally likely no matter how "comprehensive" the possibility is. If there are 10,000 people in a simulation and 500 in the objective real world, the probability of being in a simulation is proportional to each subgroup over the total number of people, not 50% 50% because there are two options. Interestingly, Nick Bostrom made the same error. It's a common misunderstanding.
If you're going to be doing Bayesian inference to develop your best approximation, then starting from a uniform distribution is pretty standard (for finite distributions). But it's only ever the starting point - you don't say "I am assuming it's equally probable, so I can conclude that it's definitely equally probable in reality"; you say "I am in a position of total ignorance, so I'll say they're equally likely since that limits how wrong I can be, and update my guess as soon as I get any sort of information"
That said, my understanding (that is to say, I was told something like this a couple of decades ago and haven't fact-checked it since) is that one of the problems that plagued mathematics in the late 19th century arose from this sort of thinking - assuming the basic outcomes of a random process to be equiprobable without really having any sort of rigorous definition for what the basic outcomes should look like. This isn't an actual example because it's too obviously wrong, but saying something like: "when you roll a standard die, you either roll a 6 or you don't, therefore the probability of either outcome is equal."
As is often the case in mathematics, the problem of how to measure probabilities to determine what the basic outcomes should be for a given process was ultimately solved by defining probability completely independently of the real world - a discrete probability distribution is just a function that takes a set of all possible outcomes of a random event and maps each one to a number between 0 and 1 (inclusive), and has the total of those numbers across all possible outcomes summing to exactly 1. Continuous probability distributions have the same idea, but need a bit of care to work around the fact that the probability of any specific precise outcome is zero - instead you have to work with the probability of being close to a given outcome (where "close" gets a technical definition).
Neil Degrasse Tyson discusses the simulation theory and argues that mathematically, it is far more likely that we are living in a simulation rather than the "real" reality. He explains that if we create a simulation indistinguishable from our reality, and the simulated beings believe they are "real," they could eventually create their own simulations. This process could continue indefinitely, with each subsequent simulation creating its own. Given this scenario, the odds of us being the original reality, or the "real world," are infinitesimally small.
@@DarkMount33 There is a question of whether you can actually nest simulations that way - ultimately every single simulation in the entire tree is being run on the same root level computer. A universe-simulating computer may be too computationally complex to be simulated.
There's a second question: what does a secondary reality require in order to be "real" to its inhabitants? Does it have to be a detailed computer simulation? Or do stories and dreams qualify? How real is A. Square? Or Kal El?
@@rmsgrey I do think the first question has value, but it is kind of tied to the second. “Real” only matters based on the perception of the simulated being. We could be running on a completely simplified simulation compared to our “users”, but to us it feels real. For all I know, you are an AI that is only simulated when you are typing to me. Or things out of sight are not being simulated at all until they are observed.
Similar to The Sims, to us is very simplified compared to our universe, if the sims had any sentience, to them their universe would seem normal.
Something happens 😮😢
If I understand the simulation science stuff correctly, the theory is that any society will try to create simulation technology so there could be many many levels of simulations as each simulation reaches a level of tech to create simulations. So it's a 50-50 chance we are living in a simulation if we do not have simulation technology. That is because we are either the topmost level which created the first simulation and is real or the bottommost level which is the last of any simulations but cannot create its own simulations. If we do invent simulation technology, then it becomes nearly a 100% chance we are in a simulation because now there is only 1 option to be real which is the top level and all other levels are simulations.
Here's a conspiracy theory: Brandon Sanderson didn't write all those books! If you read Way of Kings for instance, we have to be sure that whoever wrote it was someone with a military background. Also someone in high society, perhaps not a royal but someone with connections!
It couldn't POSSIBLY have been written by a teacher in creative writing from Nebraska living in Utah!
Did you know that what we think of as the real world is really a dream, and what we dream about when asleep is the actual real world!
It's all true!!!.... What are we talking about?
Immediately getting off topic by digressing to Disney movie naming history lol but I agree 100% with their marketing team. Born in 1995, I never watched ANY Disney stuff because I though it was all girls and little kids content. And because of that misconception, I missed out on all sorts of things like Toy Story, The Lion King, The Incredibles... all because "Disney makes baby movies". Frozen is probably the first movie that pulled me out of that, though I was even hesitant to watch that because I was a freshman in college and still conscious about masculinity and watching kid shows.
Dan sounded like a crazy drunk guy discussing the simulation theory 😅
Dan's thinking has merit and should not have been shut down that way. It was not statistics 🙈 It illustrated a very real problem in definition. I feel like there's gotta be a name for this, coming from clone fiction.
If there are 2 perfect versions of X, it becomes difficult to determine which is X1 and which is X2. Which is original? Which is counterfeit?
Very funny to not remember Folding Ideas’ name when talking to Dan Wells and working with your son Oliver
If we live in a simulation, can someone contact me with the manager? I have quite a few complaints
A typo in the title of a podcast for book nerds😂
Those are some fully charged dingbatteries. Now all we need is a way to capture that power, and we'll have something even better than cold fusion.
According to Dan we are all in Shrodinger’s box.
I think Dan's simulation argument presupposes that an all-encompassing simulation could exist in order for the odds to be 50/50.