It's not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.
With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.
We don't have that much luck, though.
"When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
I suspect that he is incapable of admitting to himself that he is in a hole, much less that he dug it himself.
The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem -- and a large fraction of trivial problems -- require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.
Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can't chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.
For about a century now we've had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don't get what they want.
Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.
I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.
Charlie Stross called the Singularity "the rapture for nerds".
Good luck with that -- I'm a pzombie this year for tax purposes.
Mike is a fed, yes.
So is Steve. The snack thing is left over from his previous undercover assignment at NORML. That didn't end well, but he's pretty sure he can get Mike to agree to buy explosives, which will be a good bust.
Shorter: "Let's assume that I'm a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here's how."
Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present
Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?
Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won't take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. "Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!"
That's the downside of the XKCD unlucky ten thousand.
As long as it isn't where he is, why should he care? He's retiring on Mars, anyway.
(Please, deities, send Musk and Thiel to Mars soon. Together, if possible.)