Wei Dai's ``everything'' mailing list
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998
From: Wei Dai
Subject: ANNOUNCE: the "everything" mailing list
You are invited to join a mailing list for discussion of the idea that all
possible universes exist. Some possible topics of discussion might include:
- What is the set of all possible universes?
- What is a reasonable prior/posterior distribution for the universe that I
am in?
- Why do we believe that both the past and the future are not
completely random, but the future is more random than the past?
- Before observing anything about the universe, should we expect it to have
(infinitely?) many observers?
- How can we/should we predict the future and postdict the past?
Here are some papers that can serve as a basis for the discussion:
Because this mailing list attracts people from many different academic
fields, and many posts have high technical content, it is suggested
that after joining, you post a message to the mailing list with the
subject "JOINING post". In this post, please give a brief biography of
yourself and tell us your intellectual backgrounds. What fields are
you familiar with, what relevant books/papers have you read, etc.? This
way, if you don't understand someone's post, you can look up his JOINING
post in the archive and figure out what background he is assuming.
Please use this link
to subscribe or unsubscribe to the mailing list. An archive is
available at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list,
with an alternative/backup archive at http://www.nabble.com/Everything-List-f18221.html.
[Note: The Google archive seems to be missing some early posts. Use the Nabble archive for completeness.]
Added on 3/14/2010: I'm now spending most of my time at Less Wrong. See this post for more details.