My knowledge of women's history in the high middle ages wouldn't be very good. However, as an Irish archaeologist, I can tell you that the chattel slavery of women in early medieval Ireland was so abundant that a female slave or cumal was treated as a unit of currency, being equivalent to 6 to 8 séoit (one of which is equal to the value of a three-year-old heifer). If I were still a student I would be able to find you more academic sources, but I've lost access to most of the journals I used to use. From what I remember, this practice did fall into decline...
Ah. I see what my mistake was now. It was just a recommendation by AngryParsley. It wasn't anything official. As I'm still something of a newbie here, I figured it was said by someone with a bit more clout.
Wasn't a temporary moratorium called on smac quotes recently? I have to admit this was one of my favourites from it though.
Interesting point, but I would say there are areas of politics that don't really come under "ethics". "What is currently the largest political party in the USA?" is a question about politics and demographics, but I wouldn't call it a question of population ethics. I'd say that you could probably put anything from the subset of "population ethics" into the broad umbrella of "politics" though.
I just noticed how poorly written part of my above comment was. I think I've fixed it now. I'm glad to see a positive response to it at least, since it shows that people care more about substance than the clarity of writing, which seems more than a little apt when talking about Wittgenstein. It also indicates that I haven't been entirely misled in my interpretation of a notoriously difficult philosopher.
As much as it might be fun to pretend that my strange writing style was intended as a way of reaching people with "similar thoughts" in a truly Wittgensteinian sense, it was not. It was a boring old mistype. I am nowhere near smart enough to pull that off.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I was under the impression that Wittgenstein meant that language was an insufficient tool to express the "things we must pass over in silence", e.g. metaphysics, religion, ethics etc., but that he nevertheless believed that these were the only things worth talking about. My understanding was that he believed that language is only good for dealing with the world of hard facts and the natural sciences and, while we cannot use it to express certain things, some of these things might be "shown" by diff...
When you put it like that, it actually sounds a lot like the Kantian notion of heteronomy versus autonomy.
If you were looking for a physics forum, this is probably more along the lines of what you were looking for.
This prompted a memory of something I read in one of my undergrad psychology books a few years ago, which is probably referencing the same study, though using two different examples and one the same as the above example (though the phrasing is slightly different). Here is the extract:
...Hindsight (After-the-Fact understanding)
Many people erroneously believe that psychology is nothing more than common sense. "I knew that all along!" or "They had to do a study to find that out?" are common responses to some psychological research. For exa
The full entry for November 8th is shown on pages 120-123 here. The real entry is much longer than that small excerpt would suggest.
Edit: But the quote is there alright. Clear as day (page 123).
Given the timeframe involved, I think it's likely we were typing at the same time...
I got the impression that Dave was asking what is the response that you get if you simply say "I reject the premise that all laws are constructed by some intelligence?". Was that not the case?
Sorry. I probably should have linked happy and sexy. I was saying that the "happy" component fit well with the topic. Sexy was just an added bonus.
To summarize:
If you take a number, sum the squares of its digits to make a new number, then do the same with the next number and it eventually reaches one through that process, it is a "happy" number. "Happy prime" just refers to those prime numbers which are happy.
Demonstration: 3^2+1^2=10 and 1^2+0^2=1
a sexy prime differs from another prime by 6 (in this case; 37).
Upvoting to 31, which is quite a fantastic number, since it is both (aptly) a "happy" prime, as well as a "sexy" prime.
(1) has come out of my mouth on a few occasions, albeit not in those exact words. It's normally after a few beers and I feel like playing the extreme skeptic a la David Hume, just to annoy everyone. I think the best way around it is to resort to the empirical argument and say that, in our experience, it is always right: Essentially the same thing Yudkowsky does with PA arithmetic here. Trying to find an argument against it which is truly "rationalist" in the continental sense has been a dead end in my experience.
(2) sort of depends on the pragma...
Data accumulated using the scientific method perhaps? Once you have the data, you can make inferences to the best explanation. If the theory held to be the best explanation is falsified, that becomes part of the data. It then ceases to be the be the best explanation.
But only liberals and those who think like them seem prone to thinking "Everyone is full of EVIL PREJUDICE except my tribe"
When I saw this, I could not help but think what an apt demonstration it was of a green accusing the blues of holding a uniquely prejudiced point of view because they are blues, while he, being a green, is of course immune to any such sentiment.
I'll take a wild stab in the dark and say that he probably meant that the method of reasoning was not as sophisticated back then. You could call the Aristotelean method of reasoning from empirical observation a "strengthening" of science. Nevertheless you could still say that "science" was much weaker back then compared to Popper's critical rationalism, with its emphasis on falsification.
Nevertheless, I'm sure I will be informed if this interpretation is wrong, which will hopefully help me be less wrong in the future.
"Just as language and auditory centers must work together to understand the significance of speech sounds, so both deductive and inductive centers must work together to construct and evaluate complex inferences".
I have to ask. Am I the only one who really liked this footnote?
"One needs to somehow gauge the 'fallaciousness' of opposite fallacies."
Isn't that exactly what the Hahn-Oaksford paper does? I doubt I'm as intelligent as most people on this site, but I was under the impression that this was all about using Bayesian methods to measure the probable "fallaciousness" of certain informal fallacies.
There are certainly many cases where Aristotle's definition of envy would adequately describe instances of zero-sum biases. In particular, when one observes the suffering of others in contrast to those with immense wealth. This can often be seen in comparisons to the west and the third world, as well as in the concepts of "core" and "periphery" in world systems theory. The problem with using the word envy, as I see it, is that the word in its currently accepted form leads people to assume that dissatisfaction is on behalf of the agent alone and not on the behalf of others. It would only reduce the clarity of language surrounding the subject.
An old psychology professor of mine once gave an anecdote of a tiger that was kept in a cylindrical room during its early phases of development. It grew up to have a warped sense of spatial awareness and was unable to function properly for the most part. I don't know the details surrounding the story, so I can't confirm it right now, but I'll see if I can find the study (assuming it does exist).