garethrees

Deaths per cyclist per kilometre of road is a crazy unit of measurement. I mean, sometimes you have to report the statistic you've got rather than the statistic you'd like, but I don't see what possible practical significance this has.

The statistic we'd like to know is deaths per kilometre cycled. The average person in the UK cycles about 60 km a year (source: Department for Transport) and the population of London is about 8.5 million (source: Wikipedia), so the 19 deaths in 2006 correspond to about 3.5 deaths per 100 million kilometres cycled.

This is slig... (read more)

In Japanese, these aren't noun suffixes but number suffixes, known as counters or classifiers. You don't say, "*ninjin ga san" [three carrots], but rather, "ninjin ga sanbon" [three-cylinder-shaped carrots].

Mass nouns behave in a similar way in English: you don't say "*three breads", but rather, "three loaves of bread". Also, "head of cattle", "slices of toast", "sheets of paper", "items of cutlery", etc.

In Navajo, the classifiers are verb stems.

This proposal seems like it would run aground on the actual complexity and changeability of river systems. The River Great Ouse, to take an example that's local to me, runs in four channels between Earith and its outflow at Kings Lynn (the Old and New Bedford Rivers, the Great Ouse proper, and an unnamed flood relief channel). But this is a relatively recent configuration: the Great Ouse formerly turned west at Littleport (rather than north as at present), reaching a confluence with the River Nene before flowing into the Wash at Wisbech, while the Little Ouse flowed north to Kings Lynn.

Gung cnegvphyne nzovtenz, fher. (Vg'f nyfb qvsvphyg gb svaq zhygvcyr zrffntrf jvgu gur fnzr unfu.) Ohg Qreera Oebja hfrq guvf nzovtenz va uvf 2007 frevrf "Gevpx be Gerng" jvgu ng yrnfg gur nccrnenapr bs fhpprff (gubhtu nf nyjnlf jvgu Oebja, vg'f cbffvoyr ur jnf sbbyvat hf engure guna gur cnegvpvcnag).

Creuncf gur fyvc bs cncre ybbxrq fbzrguvat yvxr guvf. (Qrfvtavat na nzovtenz jbhyq or nanybtbhf gb svaqvat zhygvcyr zrffntrf jvgu gur fnzr unfu.)

I once attended an apologetical talk given by the Christian Union at my college. (They were offering free food.) The invited speaker presented a version of C. S. Lewis's trilemma: liar, lunatic or lord? (a kind of proof by alliteration).

I spoke to the speaker afterwards and took him to task for presenting such a silly argument, which I said was hardly likely to convince anyone not already a Christian. He freely admitted the logical flaws in the trilemma argument, and said that his own personal justifications for belief were quite different—he appealed, if ... (read more)

I have never been able to get the Socratic Method to work on the Internet. In theory the Socratic Method is effective because the student has to reason their own way to the conclusion, and so they end up knowing it more deeply and thoroughly than if they were just told the conclusion by the teacher. But somehow it never works for me.

I think part of the problem is that the Socratic Method relies on the participants agreeing to take on the appropriate roles in the discussion. In particular, the "student" has to agree to play the role of the student... (read more)

I think gwern is teasing us: there is no such quotation in Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis, or at least I cannot find it in the Google Books version. Perhaps gwern has taken the Wittgenstein/Malcolm story and swapped Britain for Germany to make a point about the universal applicability of the philosopher's rebuke.

But for what it's worth:

• The date in the Heidegger version of the story is very suspicious: in 1939 Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty; he did not become Prime Minister until May 1940 and it is only with hindsight that we see his significance (

"Biggest fan" here is hyperbole for "a very big fan".

You say that my explanations "aren't valid" because I "have to assume" various facts. Why do I have to make these assumptions? Your argument is that these tricks must be fair puzzles. But Derren is not in the business of making fair puzzles, he is in the business of entertaining television audiences. He is under no obligation to play fair, and he is quite willing to use your belief that he plays fair in order to fool you.

My explanations for tricks two and three don't just explain the effect, but also a number of details of the presentat... (read more)

For the record, I thought of "spade" and then "orange" (perhaps because of an association of spades with the merchant B&Q, whose logo and branded materials are orange, though of course this is post-hoc rationalization on my part).

The reason why I think concentrating on "suggestion" is often an indication that you've missed something, is that suggestion is not reliable enough for magicians to use it as the sole mechanism for an effect, especially in settings like live television where the stakes are high. Magicians prefer t... (read more)

It's an example of Derren Brown's brilliant use of misdirection. Here you're misdirected as to the whole nature of the trick, and if you start your analysis by asking yourself, "how does he manage to read the woman's mind?" then you've already swallowed the false assumption. You have to take a step back and start from the question, "how does he manage to convince me, the viewer, that he read the woman's mind?"

I'll ROT-13 my own answers to the questions, but I strongly recommend that you do your best to figure out your own answers to them before decrypting mine. Trying to figure out plausible mechanisms for magic tricks is a way of calibrating your rational thinking skills, in the presence of an adversary (the magician) who is trying to use all your perceptual biases and cognitive shortcuts against you. If you find yourself seriously considering hypotheses like micromuscle reading or subliminal suggestion, then that's probably because the magician has managed to... (read more)

I think it's worth taking a step back from the details of any one of Derren Brown's effects, and looking at the nature of stage magic. A stage magician employs a set of techniques called misdirection to mislead the audience as to how a trick is performed, to direct their attention to irrelevant aspects of the performance, or to encourage them to misinterpret relevant aspects.

An important technique in misdirection is to provide the audience with a false explanation for how the trick is done. A magician who says that a trick is done by magic encourages you w... (read more)

This is an excellent question. grouchymusicologist above has it right that "music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon", and I would like to expand on this.

Michael J. Parsons, in How we understand art: a cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience, identifies a sequence of developmental stages in the appreciation of visual art. This is of necessity a very rough and un-nuanced summary since I don't have the book to hand, but I think this sequence is: first, colour ("this painting is red"); second, subject matter ... (read more)

The paper

• David Archer & Andrey Ganopolski (2005), "A movable trigger: Fossil fuel CO2 and the onset of the next glaciation", Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 6:5.

provides evidence that periods of glaciation begin when northern hemisphere insolation (which varies due to changes in the precession, obliquity and eccentricity of Earth's orbit) falls below a "trigger" level that depends on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Archer & Ganopolski suggest that we're currently approaching a solar minimum, but we've already release... (read more)

If I can't get this study published in the traditional way, I'll "publish" it myself on the internet.

There's always the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis.

Blues understand Green arguments but aren't persuaded by them (presumably because they have counterarguments), whereas Greens don't understand Blue arguments and this makes it unlikely they have counterarguments.

This is a restatement of the hypothesis under discussion. (That inability to imitate convincingly is caused by lack of understanding.)

your third objection amounts to "sometimes the people defending the incorrect position are homogeneous, this gives them a large advantage in the test".

You've failed to imitate my position. My third o... (read more)

I find it very plausible that Christians are better able to pretend to be atheists than vice versa. But what follows from that?

Caplan claimed in his original piece:

the ability to pass ideological Turing tests—to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents—is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom.

Caplan gives little in the way of argument in support of this claim, and I'm not at all sure that it's true. "Genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom", really? My objections follow.

First, there's only one way to be rig... (read more)

"Post-utopian" is a real term, and even in the absence of examples of its use, it is straightforward to deduce its (likely) meaning, since "post-" means "subsequent to, in reaction to" and "utopian" means "believing in or aiming at the perfecting of polity or social conditions". So post-utopian texts are those which react against utopianism, express skepticism at the perfectibility of society, and so on. This doesn't seem like a particularly difficult idea and it is not difficult to identify particular text... (read more)