How do most of these objections not apply also to computer programs? Computer programs are physical objects, and what the program actually does depends entirely on the physical machinery that runs it.
mrglwrf
Karma: 74
The assumption of the adversarial mode is that if the other person loses their temper, it’s because their position is weak.
Wouldn’t this reward trolling?
There are alternatives to monarchy, and an example of a disappointing monarch should suggest that alternatives might be worth considering, or at the very least that appointing a monarch isn’t invariably the answer. That was my only point.
Why would you believe that something is always the solution when you already have evidence that it doesn’t always work?
In the earlier period, Uruk was in fact substantially larger, thus the quibble. Marc Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City, p.37:
But many aspects of Uruk show its special status in southern Mesopotamia. Its size greatly surpasses that of contemporary cities: around 3200 it is estimated to have been about 100 hectares in size, while in the region to its north the largest city measured only 50 hectares, and in the south the only other city, Ur, covered only 10-15 hectares. … And Uruk continued to grow: around 2800 its walls encircled an area of 494 hectares and occupation outside the walls was likely.
Historical quibble- in “The First City” section, you seem to be partially confusing Ur with Uruk. Uruk is generally regarded as the first city in Sumeria, during the eponymous Uruk period (4000-3100 BC). Also generally believed to be the center of the “Uruk phenomenon” during which cuneiform writing and a number of other features of Mesopotamian civilization were developed. Ur was the capital of the Neo-Sumerian Ur III empire c.2000 BC, which built the Great Ziggurat of Ur shown in the picture.
You’re right, you didn’t “imply mass murder, theft, and enslavement are okay”, you neglected to mention them entirely, despite them being relevant to your claim that “the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing”, unlike disease. You made no argument against the claim that the suffering inflicted by the Spanish directly exceeded that caused by the Aztecs (#3 in TimS’s post). Instead you simply noted that disease caused “the main suffering”, and restated your previous position. What would you accept as a charitable interpretation of that?
Mass murder, theft, and enslavement don’t become okay just because contemporaneous plagues have a higher death toll. And yes, the former tended to justified in religious terms, for whatever you think that’s worth.
Plunder and glory?
edit: To put it another way, I’d argue the conquest of traditionally Christian territories under the Rashidun and Ummayad Caliphs was due to religion in the same way the Spanish conquests in the Americas were—enabled and justified by religion, but motivated primarily by the desire for wealth and fame. I can go into further detail if anyone wants, though I doubt that is the case.
There probably would be people complaining if D-Day had occurred four centuries after the fall of France.
How are you imagining the US government enforcing the abolition of slavery ca. 1800? Even in a much stronger relative position ca. 1865, it was extremely costly to do so. There was fair less abolitionist sentiment in earlier decades, and in relative terms, the federal government was far weaker and the southern elites far stronger. Attempting to outlaw slavery “quickly after the US started” (I’m assuming a window from about 1790-1810, please correct me if I mis-guestimated) would have been an act of suicide by the central government.
I am not calling you a liar, because I accept that you are sincere, but I don’t believe you. The claim that you determine the quality of comments without regard to the positions they express is outlandish, for at least two reasons. One, that you are human, and therefore subject to the same biases as every other human known to have ever existed, meaning that you will inevitably tend to appraise posts that agree with your views more favorably than those that disagree. Two, that if you aren’t judging comments’ quality by the positions they express, there’s little of substance left by which you could judge them. The vast majority of comments and posts are neither formal nor rigorous enough for their reasoning, when considered solely on the comments’ own merits, to hold up to any serious scrutiny. So that leaves presentation, and...?
There’s no Omega, so why not take the nanoslice of power that’s readily available, in addition to whatever you can get by trying for more? It appears to me that doing both maximizes the expected payoff in all probable contexts.
If a non-negligible number of people upvote comments expressing negative opinions of Eliezer Yudkowsky or the Sequences, what leads you to the conclusion that the best response is to label these comments “slander” and cast for roundabout ways to suppress them? If you want an echo-chamber (a reasonable thing to want), that can be easily and non-disingenuously accomplished, for instance by making it explicit policy that disagreement with local authority figures is not permitted.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
If you’re going to tap out, fair enough, but don’t do it after a three paragraph response. That’s just a chickenshit way of trying to have the last word.
Simple irrationality would be taking the implausible scenario both seriously and at face value. A priori, the likelihood of someone honestly offering you money for nothing is extremely low, as is the likelihood that they even have a million dollars to give away. If you don’t take the scenario seriously, it’s just a case of guessing the teacher’s password. If you do take it seriously, it would not be rational in most contexts take the offer at face value, in which case “$500 now” has about as a good an expected pay-off as any, and at least provides guaranteed evidence of the offer’s legitimacy.
If you really need the $500, why throw that away for a one-off, low odds chance for more? The first $500 almost certainly has greater marginal utility than the second, and possibly more than the next 1,999 put together. And that’s assuming the offer is totally legit, which is not very rational.
Only when it’s used at all, which is far less often than ‘guys’. Yes, it’s true that it’s a distaff counterpart to ‘guys’, but so is ‘dolls’, and would you seriously propose unironic usage of ‘dolls’?
Assuming “bit string” means “machine code”, this isn’t true. The same machine code will not result in the same logical operations being performed on all computers. It may not correspond to any logical operations at all on other computers. And what logical operations are carried out depends entirely on “the molecules bouncing around” in the computer. You aren’t making DNA sound different from machine code at all.