In response to comment by DittoDevolved on Burch's Law
Comment author: entirelyuseless 06 October 2016 01:54:18AM 1 point [-]

Lottery income is most definitely taxed, although this likely makes little difference to your point.

Comment author: DittoDevolved 06 October 2016 04:29:56PM 0 points [-]

In the UK it's tax free, anyway.

In response to Burch's Law
Comment author: Caledonian2 13 November 2007 01:25:19AM 1 point [-]

Purchasing lottery tickets is unlikely ever to be profitable, because when the jackpot increases in size to the point where it might be theoretically worthwhile to buy a ticket, so many people buy a ticket that the rules for having multiple winners come into play, which effectively reduces the jackpot significantly.

It's never a good idea.

I will also note that you can dream of yachts and diamonds just as easily, and as plausibly, by not buying a lottery ticket as by buying one. But it's slightly cheaper not to.

In response to comment by Caledonian2 on Burch's Law
Comment author: DittoDevolved 05 October 2016 09:40:15PM 0 points [-]

Never a good idea. Unless you win. Ask the recipient of $100m tax-free whether or not it was a good idea to buy a ticket.

I don't buy lottery tickets, but as much as the chance is so ridiculously small that you might as well burn the ticket as soon as you buy it, that doesn't stop people from winning.

Comment author: see 03 September 2011 08:49:58PM 6 points [-]

Taken out of context, my statement is too general, yes, and does look like the dismissing-theists-as-idiots thing, yes.

What I was saying was intended to be understood as "Those who accept theism can't be trusted to have correctly reasoned about the specific nature of the theos, because the very same influences that caused them to be theists are going to be inducing them to defend a specific theos whether it makes more or less sense than the alternative."

Given the tendency of people to put things in domains, I will, in fact, (reasonably) trust what a Vatican astronomer says about the Andromeda Galaxy, or a Creationist nuclear engineer says about Three Mile Island, et cetera. But the existence of a theistic deity and the nature of a theistic deity seem closely-enough related, domain-wise, that I won't trust a theist to tell me he's rationally evaluated whether God is One or Three, rather than rationalized it.

And, from my outsider perspective, I'm just not going to guess whether trinitarianism is more complicated, or if it just seems more complicated when you don't know what problems it solves. In physics, I trust that if the more-complicated-seeming answer of relativity didn't give better answers than the simpler-seeming Newton, physicists wouldn't use relativity. In theistic theology, I can't trust either proponents or opponents of trinitarianism to be giving me a rational evaluation as to whether the Trinity is an overcomplication or, overall, simplifies things.

Comment author: DittoDevolved 05 October 2016 11:40:46AM 0 points [-]

Wouldn't having three deities instead of one be more complex by their interactions with one another? Even if they existed on separate planes of existence, they would have to all be exerting some kind of influence for them to be gods, no? And in their shared application of influence, would they not be interacting?

Comment author: DittoDevolved 02 October 2016 04:13:27PM *  0 points [-]

Hi, new here.

I was wondering if I've interpreted this correctly:

'For a true Bayesian, it is impossible to seek evidence that confirms a theory. There is no possible plan you can devise, no clever strategy, no cunning device, by which you can legitimately expect your confidence in a fixed proposition to be higher (on average) than before. You can only ever seek evidence to test a theory, not to confirm it.'

Does this mean that it is impossible to prove the truth of a theory? Because the only evidence that can exist is evidence that falsifies the theory, or supports it?

For example, something people know about gravity and objects under it's influence, is that on Earth objects will accelerate at something like 9.81ms^-2. If we dropped a thousand different objects and observed their acceleration, and found it to be 9.81ms^-2, we would have a thousand pieces of evidence supporting the theory, and zero pieces to falsify the theory. We all believe that 9.81 is correct, and we teach that it is the truth, but we can never really know, because new evidence could someday appear that challenges the theory, correct?

Thanks

Comment author: hairyfigment 05 September 2016 03:18:11AM -1 points [-]

I believe you're missing the point. Saying "He is going to pay his debt to society," does not tell you much of anything unless you know all the context. Because the person who says it often does not want to inform you so much as they want to influence you or someone else.

Comment author: DittoDevolved 19 September 2016 11:13:42PM 1 point [-]

I think I understand. The facts should be told because no one would really take the facts at face value, and not draw any conclusions from them. Using the original example, if they say 'they are going to cut off his head' then whoever hears the message will be allowed to work out for themselves whether or not the 'debt to society' was paid. But if they tell us from the start how to think about the events, then we are prejudiced, or at least an attempt has been made to prejudice us.

In this specific example of prison/execution, we already think that the justice system is fair, and that it would be good and proper to only tell people that a debt has been paid, but in other scenarios, including executions in certain other countries, it would be in the best interests of democracy for only the facts to be told. If the general populace decides that a debt has been paid, then the system works, and if people decide that the punishment was unfair, then the system would be adjusted by public opinion (in a perfect world of course).

The idea 'they are going to lock him away and feed and house him for free for the next ten years' could perhaps be seen as a positive, but only within a vacuum. I think that the kind of person who would see a ten year jail sentence as a positive would not be likely to be swayed by platitudes such as the repayment of a debt to society. If anything, stating the facts may remove some air of romanticism or abstraction from the core concept at hand, and serve as a better deterrent than an allusion to a balance within society. ("If you do this, we will kill you" seems to be a rather powerful motivator to me, at least.)