Europe is also more equal than the US.
That is precisely the claim being disputed. In particular, as Taleb points out in the document I quoted in the great-grandparent, when you stop trying to use static measures of inequality and instead base it on the amount of turnover at the top, you see that Europe is much more unequal (almost an oligarchy) than the US.
Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.
Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.
However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.
Disagree. Military strength was based on a bedrock of competent management.
Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?
Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that “old-style colonialism won’t work in our time” is a reasonable hypothesis.
Well, a popular solution in some circles is to declare the reminders “triggers” and insist that people avoid mentioning them in your presence. ;)
The problem with a time limit is that it encourages you to not care what happens afterwards.
The point is that Europe is more socialist than the US.
I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she’s never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE’s version of Istanbul, Bob’s model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice’s, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it “might as well” be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
The difference is that the various Emirates of the UAE (including Dubai) have far more internal autonomy then even US states to say nothing of Istanbul.
To phrase your result in terms a physicist would use: an all-time integral of a scalar function (happiness) is not Lorentz-invariant.
Yes it is, since Lorentz-transformations have determinant 1, i,e., are measure-preserving. The issue in the example is that happiness isn’t a function on all of space-time, it is a function on the world lines of being capable of experiencing it.
On the other hand, if you restrict yourself, say to situations that only last finitely long all these paradoxes go away.
If you restrict to finitely long situations, you wind up with weird effects at the cutoff window.
No, I’m saying that the people asking whether something is “ontologically basic” are arguing cartography. Also it’s funny how they only ask the question of things they don’t believe exist.
So let me get this straight? You’re trying to argue that we should avoid saying things that make people feel uncomfortable in order to prevent groupthink?
If indeed there are people who see atheism as fundamentally disconnected from general-purpose rationalism, or who don’t see the promotion of atheism as a mere corollary of the promotion of a general rationalist worldview, or who object to making the atheist movement about rationality and science rather than mere disbelief in god, then I do think those people are wrong.
The problem is that’s not what Myers was trying to do with Atheism Plus. The values he wanted to introduce were those of the “social justice” crowd, a.k.a., the people who believe that certain scientific opinions are inherently “unjust” and shouldn’t be heard, that their cause is so noble that it justifies lying and falsifying science.
As it happens I am familiar with the Gracchian riots, they certainly weren’t indicative of the fall of the Roman Empire as the Roman Empire didn’t exist then; however, the riots were most definitely indicative of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
I could do this with any other theory of physics just as easily, e.g., in Newtonian mechanics are are particles ontologically basic, or are points in the universal phase space?
Edit: Also, I never said the concrete was incoherent, I said the concept of “ontologically basic” was incoherent.
The stagnation will be visible in a dramatic way (eg. barbarians looting New York City)
That happened a while ago.
actually, I don’t think it tried any such thing anyway.
They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.
In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority.
Old-style colonialism wasn’t based on crushing military superiority, during the British Raj the number of British born troops in India was a tiny fraction the the native troops. Thus the British relied on the cooperation of large numbers of Indians and Indian troops.
Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times,
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
Attempt Harry’s trick to solve NP problems.
For certain conversations, yes. Others, no.
For conversations about the topic that don’t involve you conceding all points to him, yes.
In that case, I don’t understand the comparison you’re making in the grandparent.
Provoke them by illicitly vaccinating their children without their consent
That’s not trolling, that’s battery at least.
Once social scientists get past their taboo against genetic explanations.