His point is that we talk of existing, as existing in this universe. But God is outside of it.

An analogy is: it would be wrong to say Tolkien exists in the Lord of the Rings universe, even though he made it, and so in a sense is a precondition for any of the characters in the lore existing.

This is actually not unusual but is the standard theological view

Disagree because it implies intent, but I also find Sephirah to be a better wrapper for this angle of the discussion.

A better analogy that comes to mind is that "God" - in this case - is a violin string, and the universe is the music.

I think you're making a category error by thinking of companies and countries as completely different.

In the global world countries can be seen as sort of quasi-companies that happen to have monopoly control on a particular area (a monopoly that is slowly dissolving with the internet) + force.

There are many ways a company can help solve problems that we tend to think of as government problems. 1. Government also buys services. 2. Startups can fix the services government does badly as an additive product, e.g. Gusto or TurboTax. 3. Startups can solve government problems directly, e.g. Fedex vs USPS.

The only real difference between the two entities is the power of force that government can apply to make you people their services. Which is sometimes useful, but doesn't make voluntary efforts at solving the same problems a bad thing. It is also not in competition. Whenever I see these arguments being made I see people who would rather limit their work on these problems to voting once a year, instead of actually trying to solve the problems themselves.

But they are completely different.

On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens.

Companies are responsible only to their shareholders, who may or may not be their customers. Their only goal is to earn money for those shareholders.

Companies get to pick their customers, governments do not.

The examples you give are instructive. Intuit spends a tremendous amount of money lobbying against improvements to the American tax system that would benefit everyone, because that would mean fewer profits for them. Fedex competes in some ways with the USPS, but USPS provides a government mandated service to every remote region of the country, which a private company would not do, because as a country we decided that service was an important function of government. Plus, Fedex actually uses USPS for a significant percentage of their deliveries.

"On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens."

In the US, the default is to appear to support citizens while doing a mix of what lobbyists pay for and actually serving citizens. The mix favors the rich folks' lobbyists whenever there is a conflict. The leaked Citigroup memos called this a plutonomy, a capitalist form of plutocracy.

You were said to be a skeptic of quantum computing company d wave. Then you started believing and then went back to skepticism. What is your current status, do you think it works? What would you like to see from them?

Also, what is your take on Max Tegmark's quantum suicide experiment. Would it work? If yes would that imply that each of us should expect to live a really long time subjectively?

My position on the technical fundamentals never changed much: namely, D-Wave is building devices that could be interesting from various engineering perspectives, but that as far as most of us can tell, are not getting speedups over existing computers that are clearly attributable to quantum computation (as opposed to building special-purpose hardware that's, essentially, very fast at simulating itself). If you want quantum computing speedups, I think you're going to need qubits of much higher quality, and ultimately error correction or at least error mitigation. In principle, D-Wave could do that, and I applaud any steps they take in that direction. However, I'm personally much more excited right now about the experimental efforts in superconducting quantum computing that are happening at Google, IBM, Intel, and Rigetti -- all of which use qubits with orders-of-magnitude better coherence times than D-Wave's qubits. In some sense, D-Wave optimized for being able to say that they had 2000 qubits as quickly as possible, rather than for the qubits actually doing what we want.

On a more sociological level, D-Wave earned a lot of bad blood with the academic QC community by making false, inflated, and overhyped claims (with a primary offender being its founder, Geordie Rose, who's since left the company). And I certainly took them to task for those sorts of things on my blog. Then the D-Wave folks met with me, John Preskill, and other academics, and pledged to improve in how they communicated, so I was nicer to them for a while. Then they went back to egregious hype about speedups that weren't real, so I criticized them again. Nothing more to it than that. :-)

Regarding quantum suicide: no, I do NOT recommend killing yourself any time anything happens in your life that makes you unhappy, on the theory that other versions of you will survive, in other branches of the quantum-mechanical wavefunction where the bad event didn't happen. This is partly because, even assuming you accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation, "your" moral concern and responsibility presumably extend only to those branches that are in "your" future -- you have no contact with the other branches! And partly it's because I take it as almost an axiom of rationality that, if a metaphysical belief leads you to do "obviously insane" things with your life, then it's probably time to look for a better metaphysical belief. :-) (I wouldn't say the same about scientific or mathematical beliefs.)

Another problem with the quantum suicide thought experiment is that there are plenty of branches where you end up alive but horribly disabled.

Yet another problem with that is no matter how small the measure of those branches is, you'll end up in them anyway.

The death of natural causes qualifies too.

Am I hearing this right, you think the whole multiverse concept is... meta-physics at best?

I think he was saying about whether you should morally care about the other branches counted as meta-physics.

Yup.

You simply can't something 'physics' if its not testable. :)

That word 'testable', is very loaded. :) But I get what you mean. Are there things that we can't test that do exist?

>Are there things that we can't test that do exist?

There's many reasons to believe that objects that exit our light cone continue to exist after they do, even though they could never have any future interaction with us to confirm that. (Say a spaceship leaves Earth at near the speed of light in a straight line, and then enough time passes that the space between the ship and Earth is expanding so fast that the spaceship or any kind of signal from the spaceship would have to travel faster than light to return to Earth, which is impossible. Believing that the spaceship disappears when it exits our light cone requires believing in unnecessarily more complicated physics.)

Scientifically speaking, no. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, and to be falsifiable it must be testable. I guess in some sense you could claim that there are hypothesis that are testable, but which we do not have the capacity to test. But then, is the claim that "one day in the future, we will be able to test this other claim" itself falsifiable? I'd argue not (it's a recognizable, not decidable claim, in the computational sense, and I think that for a claim to be falsifiable, it must be decidable).

> A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable

This is certainly one understanding about what science should be (although not a scientific one interestingly enough). Personally I prefer Thomas Kuhn's demarcation, which by my understanding concentrates more on whether a scientific program is producing interesting predictions which turn out to be true.

I'm not speaking about science as a whole or a scientific program, but a scientific claim. CERN is certainly not falsifiable, but it produces predictions which (often) turn out to be true. It does so by devising falsifiable claims and then testing those claims.

In other words, the method to create interesting predictions which turn out to be true is to create interesting predictions, then test those predictions, and update your understanding of the world based on them. Once your world-model is good enough, your predictions will often be true. And, perhaps, eventually your predictions will be so often true that they become uninteresting, so you must move on to other questions.

Fair enough, I think Kuhn was referring to things like the world-models and you're referring to finding out if the predictions of the model matches reality.

The heliocentric model of the solar system made less accurate predictions than the geocentric model for years, because the geocentric model was mature and had had lots of tweaks applied to it. In that time, you could have asked the heliocentric model to make a prediction, and shown that it was wrong compared to the geocentric model. You would have been wrong to conclude that heliocentrism was wrong though, it just hadn't matured as a theory enough yet.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

> Are there things that we can't test that do exist?

Lots of people think so (e.g. unmeasurable things predicted by theory like parallel universes, but also things like evil or God or the color purple), but by definition it's hard to be very sure, or to transfer your own confidence in such things to others.

Lots of these kinds of questions reduce to quibbling about definitons; and also by definition, if we can't test the thing then the universe isn't going to punish us either way for believing or not.

> if we can't test the thing then the universe isn't going to punish us either way for believing or not.

If we can’t test the thing then what we are discussing is faith, not science.

Nothing wrong with faith and beliefs but I think it’s important to differentiate between these things and science because often times science is used as a basis for untestable beliefs and then people really start to think that those untestable beliefs are actually backed by scientific research.

Do you have any empirical evidence for any particular QM interpretation? If not, does that make them unscientific?

I think the various interpretations of QM, until one is proven (or we otherwise come to one definition)... they all lie within philosophy.

Despite the scientific method giving rise to the fact-based ever-improving test-able body of work we call Science.. that doesn’t stop people from creating their own religions and beliefs based on it.

No, I wouldn't recommend that either. :-)

> No preventative coverage seems nonsensical.

I understand where you're coming from, but consider this: for things you know you are going to do, a subscription is the right product - not an insurance. Insurance is better for unforseen large costs, instead of predictable small costs. And we are in fact planning to add a global primary care subscription to address that. In the Nordic countries where we're from, most of healthcare is delivered (by the government) in something closer to a subscription than insurance.

> random bold words

I agree with this being unnecessary formatting, we will look into and fix this.

> lost checked luggage coverage excludes literally everything of value

It is true that our lost checked luggage coverage has too many exclusions and is not good enough. This is something we are working on improving, and will release and add-on that fixes it, and give people the option of a genuine stuff-insurance.

We'll work on getting this better, would appreciate if you have time for a call with us at one point. Would really appreciate getting feedback on how we can not just remove the bad, but also maybe add some good.

(If you want to, in addition to helping us build something useful, we can like throw in a $25 airbnb gift card, my email is [email protected])

This is I suppose a quite wise choice given the preferences you have. Our insurance has lower deductible than yours ($250 for coverage period (not per instance), and lower max limit ($250k). We went with this after asking digital nomads what they would choose among a series of options. We have priced and might need to consider adding a higher max limit option though, thanks for letting us know.

250 is still a figure low enough to feel compelled to keep track of all expenses in a year. And the next step is trying to get a return for that effort by declaring anything higher ;-)

I never reach 1000 / yr so I do not even think of keeping track.

But for an insurance company the human emotion part ('my insurance should cover everything') is probably where the first profit is ?

One big difference is time-limit. If you go with their single voyage option, it's max 6 months, and 12 months for the other one. While we offer an ongoing monthly subscription-like service. Another big difference is that Geo-Blue requires I believe that you have a primary health plan.

Geo-Blue has options for people with or without primary insurance. We actually just switched our company over to their more expensive plan that offers full health insurance globally.

Wouldn't most people need some kind of primary health plan, regardless, for standard healthcare visits?

I very much agree with your sentiment. We have made efforts to put the price for most users straight on the home page, for example. We also try to say all that's included, and give a specimen of the actual policy document. But we can improve this a lot in terms of figuring out what is the most relevant information.

In order to get to the stage one can do an actual purchase, we do need a few pieces of information though. We have tried minimising this, but we'll take a look at how we can reduce it further. Any specific suggestions you would have for what we should put before registration and after?

Cool, thanks. Well, next time! Would be cool if you find something specific we can avoid/improve if you do end up having to use it.

Yes there are country-specific ones that do at least, for expats, like Cigna global.

Yes the second biggest problems nomads cited in our surveys was loneliness / being disconnected from relationships when moving often. One thing we are doing to address this now is to build a community, with social events for our users. I think it sounds like an interesting idea to consider adding counseling services though. We haven't considered it before, but we will take a look at it. Thanks.

That is correct. You're right though, we should have this. We will add a pricing table and get it up on the page next week.