In terms of animal rights, do you believe that all species should be equally protected by law?

Any such law would be completely unenforceable, and unenforceable laws are “bad” IMHO. Should we really punish people for killing locus and other pests that could cause famine? Or for accidentally running over some ants or splattering other insects on the windshield?

Another factor is that law enforcement, and animal rights activists have limited resources, and thus it’s probably better to actually divert the efforts towards animals which actually need it.

Do you believe that scientific investigation is the only effective method to gain meaningful knowledge about the universe?

This is a wrongly-phrased question, as it falsely implies that the only alternative to “scientific investigation” must be faith or magic or religion or something along those lines. I have a very specific idea of what “scientific investigation” means: any such investigation must adhere to the scientific method, which means a falsifiable hypothesis must be presented, then a repeatable experiment carried out and its results compared to either falsify or support the hypothesis, followed by peer review, etc.

In contrast, consider the advancements made by theoreticians like Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Hawking, who did not actually adhere to this scientific method, but instead devised so-called “thought experiments” to further our knowledge using only introspection on already existing data, rather than taking observations on the physical world.

Therefore, there exist ways to gain meaningful universe without resorting to science. As far as I can tell, these methods instead relied on logic, math and perhaps philosophy.

Imagine that scientists create a new drug. When swallowed as a pill, it will completely and permanently eliminate feelings of guilt for prior events. Testing reveals that there are no harmful medical side effects. How should this pill be distributed?

After some though, I figured that having the drug be publicly available really doesn’t add much harm, and can do a lot of guilt. We already have sociopaths in this world, who feel guilt at nothing. The existence of this pill won’t make things any better for them, nor worst for us. But there’s plenty of kind-hearted folks who are torn apart by guilt that they don’t deserve. This pill would help them.

Here’s a short list of my current favorite albums, in case you’re looking for new music suggestion.

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You may have seen a lot of buzz about “P vs NP” floating around on the Internet, and possibly the media. If you have no idea what that’s all about, and you want to find out, this blog post is for you. As one redditor put it: “Polynomial time? fast algorithm? Huh? Let’s start off simply: What is a P, what is an NP, and why are they fighting?”

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