Your intent seems unclear to me. The West has over the past couple hundred years loosened its restrictions on public speech regarding taboos—on atheism, racial&sexual equality, etc. This has surely caused many people mental pain.
Was this course of events then morally wrong?
Should the debaters of yore have made sure their opponents had learned ” the accompanying coping techniques — such as relaxation or imagery exercises” before proceeding towards our more pluralist world?
Everybody would feel enraged by snide remarks regarding attempted genocide of one’s ethnic group—not least because it’s very difficult not to perceive it as a veiled threat.
Not everybody would feel enraged by snide remarks of one’s cultural/religious/philosophical inspiration—not least because it’s an obvious strategy for a utility monster.
But how do I rationally make this computation without my own biases coming in?
One way is to try and compare similar countries where such offensiveness bans are enforced or not, and see which direction net migration is.
This may be difficult since countries without such bans will in all likely become more prosperous than those with them.
Another alternative might be comparing the same country before and after such laws, e.g. Pakistan.
Mine too—a bank.
We’ve launched a company-wide project to estimate the cost-benefit relationship of scanning all new documents vs. scanning all new + existing documents vs. continuing like now. Perhaps not surprisingly, scanning new documents but not old is the most cost-efficient. This obviously depends on how often one needs to retrieve the documents.
At my company, servers but not scanners exist, and many people already have two monitors.
I second this request. I am good with names of politicians or actors, but terrible with people, I meet IRL.
One crucial recommendation is to shave upwards from the bottom of your neck to the top. This takes a lot of getting used to and really gave me the willies at first, but it works much better and you miss a lot less hair.
Really? I have the exact opposite experience. I find that going against the grain, especially on the neck, gives me nicks and rashes.
After having experimented a lot, what works for me is wetshaving using any ol’ shaving cream, multi-blade razor, going with the grain.
Since facial hair grows in different directions this means you have to pay attention to it. Briefly, I shave top-down on the face and away from the chin on the neck.
For a very smooth shave, I sometimes do it with the grain, a second time against the grain and a third time with it. I read somewhere that the third time is important to avoid ingrown hair and rashes and in my case it works, but YMMV.
That makes more sense than my reading, and is more likely what he meant.
[...] you could prove that (A ⇒ B) and (B ⇒ C) and (C ⇒ D) and (D ⇒ F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A ⇒ F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?
Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.
This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.
Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.
This reminds me of a guy, having lost an argument to me fatally, who resorted to saying, “consistency is overrated”. He’d rather have two mutually exclusive ideas and acknowledge this as fact than change his mind.
I think that if SIAI were well constituted, donating to it would be much more cost effective than VillageReach.
For most realistic interest rates this statement would have made it more rational to put your previous traditional aid donation into a banking account for a year to see if your bet had come out—and then donating to SIAI.
Are you familiar with the Hansonian view of signaling?
Carbohydrates can be made from fat [...]
Not in animals including humans.
Thank you all. It seems I perhaps haven’t phrased my question the way I thought of it.
I don’t doubt the validity of the proofs underlying Bayes’ theorem, just as I don’t doubt the validity of Euclidian geometry. The question is rather if BT/probability theory hinges on assumptions that may turn out not to be necessarily true for all possible worlds, geometries, curvatures, whatever. This turned out to be the case for Euclidian geometry, as it did for Zeno. They assumed features of the world which turned out not to be the case.
It may be that my question doesn’t even make sense, but what I was trying to convey was what apriori assumptions does BT rely on which may turn out to be dodgy in the real world?
I’m not as such trying to convince people, rather trying to understand my own side’s arguments.
In an argument with a philosopher, I used Bayesian updating as an argument. Guy’s used to debating theists and was worried it wasn’t bulletproof. Somewhat akin to how, say, the sum of angles of a triangle only equals 180 in Euclidian geometry.
My question: what are the fundamental assumptions of Bayes theorem in particular and probability theory in general? Are any of these assumptions immediate candidates for worry?
In the spreadsheet, Finland has GMT +2. Does Finland not observe daylight savings time? I thought Finland wasn’t in the CET zone? If I’m correct, Finland should be GMT +3
I’ll join in. I have some vacation coming up, but no more than a week at a time. In Denmark (fat chance).
Regarding Einstein, he made the statements before becoming super famous. I understand it as a case of signaling ‘look over here!’ And he is not particularly safe against errors. One of his last actions (which I have not fact checked sufficiently so far) was to write a foreword for a book debunking the movement of the continental plates.
I didn’t intend to portray Einstein as bulletproof, but rather highlight his reasoning. Plus point to the idea of even locating the idea in idea space. Obviously, creationism is wrong, but less wrong than a random string. It at least manages to identify a problem and using cause and effect.
One variable often invoked to explain happiness in Denmark (who regularly rank #1 for happiness) is modest expectations.
ETA: the above paper seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, but as I gather, the results are solid. Full disclosure: I’m from Denmark.
Agreed.
As the OP states, idea space is humongous. The fact alone that people comprehend something sufficiently to say anything about it at all means that this something is a) noteworthy enough to be picked up by our evolutionarily derived faculties by even a bad rationalist b) expressible by same faculties c) not immediately, obviously wrong
To sum up, the fact that someone claims something is weak evidence that it’s true, cf. Einstein’s Arrogance. If this someone is Einstein, the evidence is not so weak.
Edit: just to clarify, I think this evidence is very weak, but evidence for the proposition, nonetheless. Dependent on the metric, by far most propositions must be “not even wrong”, i.e. garbled, meaningless or absurd. The ratio of “true” to {”wrong” + “not even wrong”} seems to ineluctably be larger for propositions expressed by humans than for those not expressed, which is why someone uttering the proposition counts as evidence for it. People simply never claim that apples fall upwards, sideways, green, kjO30KJ&¤k etc.
If all the members of a cult committed suicide then the local rate is 100%.
The most local rate that we so far know of is 15⁄400,000 which is 4x below baseline. If these 15 people worked at, say, the same plant of 1,000 workers you may have a point. But we don’t know.
At this point there is nothing to explain.
Libertarian white straight male here. “Our word” is the map, not the territory.
Everything is context and many people will fail miserably at using “nigger”, “queer” etc. in even marginally appropriate contexts. Moreover, probably >99% of the time whites/straights use the words they’re meant to be offensive. Which is all the more reason (for members of these groups) to avoid the use to avoid confusion.
However, that also includes members of said minorities who belive that from their merely being members of such groups they have rights or sensibilities others don’t. They don’t. It’s just that they’re pretty much guaranteed not to be denigrating their own group*.
So to me the issue is transparency. If I as a straight white male somehow could achieve the same level of transparency regarding my goals and intentions, I should be able to use such words just like black gays. My scheme allows for that; yours doesn’t.
Finally, many people take offence at “nigger” or “queer”, even when used by the in-groups. I feel pretty uncomfortable when you guys do that, so would you please stop it?**
ETA: would you yourself “use [“queer”] with carte blanche in all social situations”?
*: At least in the way of the original haters. **: Semi-tongue-in-cheek.