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Ah, shoot. Finally a meet up at a time I could ordinarily attend, and it happens to be the night I have dinner reservations at SCC Culinary Arts Department dining room. They're not so easy to get, so it's not something I could easily reschedule.
Most are ASU students, but some are not. What day/time would work better for you?
I work Monday through Friday, and am generally off between 5:30 and 6:00 PM. I work up in North Scottsdale, so it tends to take half an hour or so to get down to Tempe during rush hour. There are other social events I attend after work most Wednesdays and every other Thursday, but I'm usually free on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday evenings.
In response to
Meetup : Tempe, AZ: How to Measure Anything I
Does your group ever meet later in the evening? I'd be interested in attending a Less Wrong meetup here in the valley, but I work full-time, so Friday afternoon is no good for me. Would I be right in inferring from the location and time that most of your members are ASU students?
The idea that the utility should be continuous is mathematically equivalent to the idea that an infinitesimal change on the discomfort/pain scale should give an infinitesimal change in utility. If you don't use that axiom to derive your utility funciton, you can have sharp jumps at arbitrary pain thresholds. That's perfectly OK - but then you have to choose where the jumps are.
I think that's probably more practical than trying to make it continuous, considering that our nervous systems are incapable of perceiving infinitesimal changes.
It was a good movie, but it wasn't really an adaptation of the novel. It combined several scenes from two different novels in the series, and out of necessity imposed by the format, it wove them into a very straightforward plot with far less complex characters than in the books. I enjoyed the movie, but I enjoyed the books far far more.
Thanks! I'll have to get hold of the first book and see how I like it -- unless there's a better place to begin reading the series? Does the publication order match the internal chronology?
I continue re-reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series of nautical historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars in early 19th century. These are probably the best historical novels ever written, and I see them as one of the great achievements of 20th century literature.
I read three of these last month, finishing with The Far Side of the World. Every page brings delight, and instills a fuller, richer sense of life than almost any other book I've read in years.
I have not yet read any of the novels in that series, but I did see Peter Weir's film of The Far Side of the World during its theatrical run. If you've seen it, would you say it was a good adaptation of the novel?
It would be if it were true.
Those three groups do not tend to cluster, nor do they have the record on human rights that you ascribe to them.
I think it's pretty obvious that evand mean "abortion opponents," not "abortion proponents." Make that correction and the rest of the comment is accurate.
In other words, it follows that 1 person being tortured for 50 years is better than 3^^^3 people being tortured for a millisecond.
You're well on your way to the dark side.
I might have to bring it up to a minute or two before I'd give you that -- I perceive the exponential growth in disutility for extreme pain over time during the first few minutes/hours/days as very, very steep. Now, if we posit that the people involved are immortal, that would change the equation quite a bit, because fifty years isn't proportionally that much more than fifty seconds in a life that lasts for billions of years; but assuming the present human lifespan, fifty years is the bulk of a person's life. What duration of torture qualifies as a literal fate worse than (immediate) death, for a human with a life expectancy of eighty years? I'll posit that it's more than five years and less than fifty, but beyond that I wouldn't care to try to choose.
Let's step away from outright torture and look at something different: solitary confinement. How long does a person have to be locked in a room against his or her will before it rises to a level that would have a non-zero disutility you could multiply by 3^^^3 to get a higher disutility than that of a single person (with a typical, present-day human lifespan) locked up that way for fifty years? I'm thinking, off the top of my head, that non-zero disutility on that scale would arise somewhere between 12 and 24 hours.
If getting hit by a dust speck has u = 0, then air pressure great enough to crush you has u = 0.
Nope, that doesn't follow; multiplication isn't the only possible operation that can be applied to this scale.
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The guy is criticizing them. Lots of liberals are uncomfortable with SJWs. I'm looking for a steelmanning, for someone to explain why they are doing the right thing (bonus points for linking it to Christianity or UU specifically).
In case you're still looking, I think you might find Chris Brecheen's "Social Justice Bard" blog edifying, though he doesn't connect social justice ideas to Christianity that I've seen. For that, some of the blogs on the Progressive Christian Channel at Patheos.com might help (Slacktivist is particularly social-justice-oriented), as well as some of the ones on the Atheist Channel whose authors are ex-Christians and still draw inspiration from what they see as Christianity's good points (e.g. Love Joy Feminism, Roll to Disbelieve and An Atheist in Dixie).