If we assume that (a) future discounting is potentially rational, and that (b) to be rational, the relative weightings we give to March 30 and March 31 should be the same whether it's March 29 or Jan 1, does it follow that rational future discounting would involve exponential decay? Like, a half-life?

For example, assuming the half life is a month, a day a month from now has half the weighting of today, and a month from that has half the weighting of that, and so on?

I tend to think this is the wrong question.

Here's roughly what happens: there are various signals (light, air waves, particulates in the air) that humans have the capacity to detect and translate into neural states which can then be acted on. This is useful because the generation, presence, and redirection of these signals is affected by other objects in the world. So a human can not only detect objects that generate these signals, it can also detect how other objects around it are affected by these signals, granting information that the human brain can then act upon.

All of this is occurring in reality: the brain's neural firings, the signals and their detection, the objects that generate and are affected by the signals. There is no "outside reality" that the human is looking in from.

If you break it down into other questions, you get sensible answers:

"Does the human brain have the capacity to gain information from the ball without a medium?" No.

"Is the human brain's information about the ball physically co-located with some area of the brain itself?" Sure.

"Is the signal detected by the sense-organs co-located with some area of the brain itself?" Potentially at certain points of interaction, but not for its entire history, no.

"What about the neural activity?" That's co-located with the brain.

"So are you trying to say you are only 'Directly acquainted' with the signal at the point where it interacts with your sense-organ?" I don't think calling it 'directly acquainted' picks out any particular property. If you are asking if it is co-located with some portion of my brain, the answer is no. If you are asking if it is causing a physical reaction in some sensory organ, the answer is yes.

You should link to an article that explains in more detail what direct and indirect realism are. Like, say, to Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I drew loads when I was a kid, and I must have been about 10 or 11 when I realized, had a moment of epiphany really, some of the stuff in the "How you probably draw / how you should draw" section.

I was looking at the cover of the Toy Story VHS and trying to copy it. I remember specifically I was drawing Woody's face, his right cheek to be exact (must have been this photo), and I stopped myself when I realized that what I was about to do was a result of me drawing not what I really saw, but what I thought I should see given my mental model of a face. I think I was about to draw his right cheek too wide or something like that.

That was the first time I ever truly and deeply grasped that concept. I take a certain joy in knowing that I learned it independently.

Or were judges being too nice? We know there was bias, but we still don't know when bias occurred.

I feel the need to point out that the observation does not necessarily result in a bias. We literally know nothing about the legal system's arrangments for parolees here other than this single data point.

It could be, for example, that there is an understanding that the review boards arrange cases before judges based on the boards' estimate of the potential parolee's worthiness of release; with the 'worst offenders' being later in a giving hearing bracket. This would also take the shape of a linear decline in parole-granting rates -- but would not represent any bias in the judge's reasoning.

(In case this is not clear, as I appear to sometimes have difficulty communicating with others on this site: My only positional claim here is that we do not know if this is actually a bias at all, as we have too little data to make such a definitive statement. All else is merely explanation of this stance.)

I think I came up with a solution:

to date, the vast majority of grue-like hypotheses (hypotheses that suggest new items that have always been grue before time t will continue to be found grue after time t) has failed. inductive logic, then, doesn't suggest that because emeralds have been grue to date, they will continue to be grue after time t. so far, after every time t, that's not been the case.

If it's unclear what I mean when I say grue-like hypotheses have failed, let me word it better: if time t was 1975, then the hypothesis that emeralds found after time t will be grue was incorrect. same for 1976. same for 1977. etc etc. An infinite, or at least incredibly large number, of grue-like hypotheses, then, has failed, so inductive logic doesn't tell us to predict that emeralds found after time t will be grue. Inductive logic, to the contrary, tells us that once time t comes about, new emeralds found will be bleen.

Sorry for the sloppy wording, I hope you brilliant fellows will read my post for the idea within, and not for some sloppy wording to nitpick. Some of you guys are very good at that.

Some people were talking about The Ship of Theseus -- the question "If a ship's parts are replaced one-by-one over time, after each part is replaced is it still the same ship?" First thing that came to my mind was that this was a wrong question. I saw it fundamentally as the same mistake as the Blegg/Rube problem -- they know every property about the ship that's relevant to the question, and yet still there feels like a question left unanswered.

Am I right about this?