Thanks for answering. (Like the one-word one, this comment provides insight into nothing except my own state of mind, in which you are perfectly entitled to be uninterested.)
Generalising from one fictional example. (But a funny one.)
Mmm. Sounds familiar. But what do you mean by '"physics all the way down"'?
Huh. I agree with both of you, up to
we do that by tackling the mind killing, not by tackling the issues[.]
At least, if 'tackling the issues' means 'coming to any kind of conclusion|decision as to what to think or even what to do. Obviously a rational approach is a prerequisite for that, but doesn't replace it. I also agree in general with
the fact that this is our pet issue makes us far more vulnerable
but vulnerable to what in this case? Irrationally believing that SOPA would be a bad thing?
Why downvoted? Vacuousness? (Sometimes when I really like a comment, I don't feel satisfied by just upvoting it.)
That's interesting. I initially parsed "copyright enforcement law simply is not a highly-charged partisan issue for the overwhelming majority of people in the United States" as meaning that it's almost universally agreed to be bad. That reading was reinforced by "A few individuals may strongly identify as[...] fans of copyright law" (if it had been "fans or opponents" maybe that would have straightened me out). I'm pretty sure that most people who have been directly affected by some kind of copyright enforcement mechanism o...
Interestingly, your link is to a political think-tank site. (Of course, argument screens off authority and all that---it looks like a pretty good article.)
Certainly one valid (type of) response to the OP would be to explain why the proposed legislation wouldn't harm the internet. (I've seen a few claims to that effect [elsewhere], but none that seemed well-informed or carefully reasoned.)
Or is 'harming the internet' too subjective|vague a notion to begin with? Perhaps that is worth discussing. Incidentally, it was part of my original thought that maybe somehow the net outcome of the SOPA regime could be positive, e.g. by spurring the development of a new censorship-proof distributed DNS infrastructure. Bu...
Well, it wasn't me doing the referring, but anyway I'm a bit relieved you agree.
Freenet servers can (and, AFAIK, routinely are) be blocked by IP.
This appears to be wrong. I haven't used Freenet myself (yet), but it doesn't seem to have servers at all, or admit IP blocking. In this it appears to be analogous to the hidden services (.onion sites) in Tor. And protocol analysis tools (packet sniffers) would appear to be irrelevant---I think---since Freenet traffic is encrypted. But this is not an area I know much about.
As executions? As far as I know, the U.S. has only ever had capital punishment for murder and treason. Defining 'use of technology that could be used to circumvent copyright protection' as 'treason' does not appear to be on the horizon yet. I think.
That's sad. Here he was quoted as saying
"We can reincorporate as a Cayman Islands company and offer the same great service and reliability and not be a U.S. company anymore."
DynDNS has an article on their site, written by their CEO, Jeremy Hitchcock, called SOPA: What You Should Know & Why Dyn Opposes It. It's not at all ambivalent but doesn't make any promises.
“There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”
Presumably he meant something different.
Yeah, this is an important subject. I'll probably read your paper.
I've found a fairly simple and apparently workable solution
To what, exactly?
Here's a summary and discussion of the affair, with historical comparison to the Gödel results and their reception (as well as comments from several luminaries, and David Chalmers) on a philosophy of mathematics blog whose authors seem to take the position that the reasons for consensus in the mathematical community are mysterious. (It is admitted that "arguably, it cannot be fully explained as a merely socially imposed kind of consensus, due to homogeneous ‘indoctrination’ by means of mathematical education.") This is a subject that needs to be discussed more on LW, in my opinion.
Yes, exactly.
So he's outraged by people basing their moral decisions on empathy? I'm... not sure how to empathise with that emotion.
Interesting. But one could have the awareness, understanding, and ability to describe, but also an attitude of not caring, with regard to one's own emotions. Or at least some of them, sometimes.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the word 'emotions' means the same thing to everyone. I'm not even sure that what I take it to mean hasn't changed substantially.
ETA: Here I seem to be defining 'empathy' in yet another way. It's odd how my intuition about what a word means can vary situationally. It seems to me right now that I would want to claim I usually thin...
There seems to be a general tendency here to conflate 'empathy' with 'the particular (biased, inconsistent) ways humans tend to (attempt to) practise empathy'. The latter is obviously far less capable of constituting a basis for morality than the former, on just about any reasonable construal of 'morality' (another term the ambiguous employment of which obviates the usefulness of many an argument on such topics...).
Thanks for the link; I didn't know about Project A119. Probably a good thing they didn't do it, though.
It seems to me that billswift is accurately identifying three different meanings the word 'empathy' is taken to have. I'd never heard of metalaw before, though.
But... the only way to view the 'data' is by copying it to my computer! That's how the Internet works!
is rationality an effective means of achieving goals?
Yes, by definition. (Maybe you want an 'epistemic' in there.)
Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics
Thank you for this. I had completely missed it somehow. It will be interesting to see how much of my own work-in-progress is redundant with Maudlin's.
a (rare) physics-savvy philosopher
Well, of course there are quite a few of them (us?), although they have a low frequency in the population.
This is a mistake. There is actually a two-electron state in the OP. (And there is no assumption 'that they are independently and individually real.' The claim is merely that the two-electron state is real.)
I encourage you to throw away that particular template
But why? Dialogues have been a mainstay of philosophical exposition for as long as there has been philosophy. They make an argument concluding 'P is not the case, rather Q is' easier to follow. They don't need to be imputing P to anyone in particular in order to function. The point is to show the relationships among ideas. (Although of course if P doesn't seem compelling, or even coherent, to anyone, then the exercise is pointless.)
My suggestion would be "lower my opinion of X."
Yeah, but then I wouldn't be invoking the concept of 'status'. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don't lower someone's status, so that's why I ended up using the term. But of course X's ('actual') status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others' 'opinion of X'. So it's only in that 'weak' sense that I meant my remark that X 'doesn't actually have a status'; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the var...
It occurred to me recently, while I was reading some article in the SEP, that academic philosophers (of the analytic variety) may be conceiving their project as one of charting the logical space of 'tenable' philosophical positions, rather than trying to eliminate as much of that space as possible. Of course the SEP may tend especially to give that impression, since it is meant to consist of review articles that summarise all the positions and arguments on a given topic which are taken seriously. But philosophers do often say that they are concerned with...
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
I guess it's a good thing you said this, because it shows me that I'm using the word 'status' differently from you. I'm not that much of an asshole! What I mean by 'take status away from X' is 'consider X to have lower status'. In other words, I understood 'status' to be a sort of tag I associate with particular persons in my own mind. One might, then, talk about 'status' as if it were actually an invariant (i.e. observer-independent) propert...
I don't think anyone would perceive this as wrong, though. I might also note that there are many english words which are exact homophones in some dialects but not others (although all the ones I can think of at the moment are spelled differently). And I'd have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms 'rose' and 'rose' stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely,
They always impede my understanding; not because I have trouble figuring out what was me...
Although I note that the OP does not mention the 'procedural' restriction.
Yes, this seems plausible, and it gives a fascinating insight, for me, into how other people process language. I've been noticing lately how frequent wrong homophones are in writing; in fact I just encountered one--are for our--in a textbook I'm currently working through (Lawvere & Schanuel's Conceptual Mathematics). This is a type of mistake I can't imagine myself making. But if, for many people, the textual encoding is not maintained, in parallel with the audial, when spoken competence increases past some threshold, the phenomenon is explained.
What can be done to help correct this bug?
I categorically have quite a lot of respect for those whose English grammar ability breaks down at the weakest point in the grammar.
That interpretation would probably never have occurred to me. You must be using 'respect' to mean something like 'tolerance'. If so, I will try to tolerate your tolerance.
Just to be clear, are you saying you now have less respect for me, categorically, than for people who use it's incorrectly? That would be most unfortunate; I certainly hope I am misunderstanding somehow. I do not believe, incidentally, that I was expressing contempt for anyone; I apologise for my incomprehension, but it is genuine.
And as I mentioned above, its belongs to the same family as the other pronominal adjectives her, my, our, ... None of them have apostrophes (and one besides its has an s).
ETA: And whose. That's another one people seem to get wrong a lot.
using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.
For nouns, but not pronouns. Compare his, her, my, their, ...
As for comics, perhas I should not admit to liking this one.
The objection that it's not a procedural knowledge gap is probably valid. But I was not just ranting; I asked a number of questions in the answers to which I am genuinely interested. And whether I feel superior to people who use apostrophes incorrectly does not strike me as relevant--although I try not to, and understanding why they do it might help.
Again, fascinating. And I do very little real-life socialising. But on the whole I think I do a good deal more talking than typing. ETA: On second thought, I'm not sure why I thought that. Something made me overestimate how much talking I do. Probably the fact that I used to do a lot more, and certainly have done immensely more talking than writing over the course of my life so far.
as your spoken English gets better with practice, you're likely to start making more of such errors, not less.
This is fascinating. It's not at all clear to me why such a thing would happen. I can't think of anything in my own experience that seems analogous.
When you learn English mainly from written sources with little speaking practice (and I was an extreme example of that), you end up composing written English sentences in your head and reading them aloud when speaking (or just writing them down directly when typing). This makes your pronunciation awful and your speaking stilted and unnatural, but on the other hand, your mind categorizes differently spelled homophones as completely different entities, so there is almost zero chance of mixing them up.
In contrast, if you're a native speaker or otherwise a tr...
to read PDFs with
and DJVUs. So there isn't anything like this yet. Thanks for saving me some research time.
Me too. (This is turning into a confessional thread.)
Didn't mean to imply that Wikipedia's blocking policies constitute a problem. Just that all we need here is the standard 'accounts that post spam will be blocked'. Which seems utterly uncontroversial, and doesn't even need to be made explicit.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Corporations (and governments) are not usually regarded as sharing human values by those who consider the question. This brief blog post is a good example. I would certainly argue that the 'U' is appropriate; but then I tend to regard 'UFAI' as meaning 'the complement of FAI in mind space'.
English speakers ought to know that its is the possessive adjective and it's is the contraction for 'it is'. It drives me crazy when people use it's to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it. Do people not learn how to write by reading? (I certainly did, and I don't see how else you could do it, but I realise I'm somewhat abnormal.) Or is the incorrect use of it's so ubiquitous now that even if people learn to write by reading, unless they read mostly stuff more than ten years old they aren't being exposed to a data set from which they can in...
Do we even need to explicitly adopt such a standard at this point?
Wikipedia has its problems. I wouldn't be too eager to ape it in any detail.
What do people think of the designs? My favorites are the SI-as-galaxy icons by Marah (especially #125) and the gravitational-singularity-as-wings ones by strelac (especially #124) --and my lettering and SI-sigil, of course. I'm not sure the semiotics of using a gravitational singularity in the logo are entirely advisable, though. I also like #109, but only because it's kind of pretty.
This is fascinating! I've been told I memorised the alphabet before I was a year old... But it wasn't until I was in college that I finally memorised which hand is called 'left' and which one is 'right'. (Never had an analogous problem with compass directions.)
A possibly related deficit is that I typically think of the wrong word first when I want to name a colour; i.e. for example I want to refer to purple and I have to choke off the impulse to say 'yellow'. And yet I have letter/colour synaesthesia!
Brains are weird.
pinkish in the middle should be fine.
For beef, not chicken.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don't trust myself with those.
Well, another possibility would have been the negation of (what's usually called around here) Tegmark's Level IV. (That's probably not the only other possibility.)
ETA: Not that your interpretation isn't the obviously correct one.