I'll keep this short.
Thoughts?
I meant extrapolating developments in the future.
Paying the (ongoing, repeated) pirate-game blackmail ("pay us or we'll impose a wealth tax") IS a form of wealth tax. You probably need to be more specific about what kinds and levels of wealth tax could happen with various counterfactual assumptions (without those assumptions, there's no reason to believe anything is possible except what actually exists).
This is a pilot post for a future sequence. I'm posting to get feedback on what's here so far; I like the argument, but I'm unsure about the presentation, so there's a chance I'll totally rewrite this for the final product.
We moderns think of philosophy and science as sharply distinct disciplines. However, the term 'science' didn't really start getting its modern sense until sometime in the last few centuries. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin root scire, which just means "to know". According to Etymonline, it wasn't until around or the time of the Enlightenment that the term slowly started referring to the movement we know today, the one that systematically studies the physical world by close observation and careful modeling.
Indeed, some of the earliest work...
What do you think avout the core concept of Explanatory Fog, that is secrecy leading to distrust leading to a viral mental breakdown? Possibly leading eventually to the end of civlisation. Happy to rework it if the core concept is good.
Many contra dances have tried a "first-time free" policy, but I think "second-time free" is usually a better choice. Most first-timers show up expecting to pay something, so you might as well take their money. Many first-timers don't end up coming back, so better to reserve your incentive for the ones that do. And it filters out people who are only interested in free experiences. BIDA switched in 2022 and I think this has gone very well.
I think the main case where first-time free would be a better fit is a community where you're having a lot of trouble getting people to come out and try the dance but you're pretty sure that if they do they'll stick around. But while contra can be pretty addictive I don't think it's that addictive.
(This isn't something we came up with; for example, here's Tucson in 2008.)
Good call! I have a use for this idea :)
There's something intuitively intriguing about the concept of shoes with spring elements, something that made many kids excited about getting "moon shoes", but they found the actual item rather disappointing. Using springs somehow with legged movement also makes some logical sense: walking and running involve cyclic energy changes, and the Achilles tendon stores some elastic energy. Is that perspective missing something?
In a sense, spring elements in shoes are standard: sneakers have elastic foam in the soles, and maximizing the sole bounciness does slightly improve running performance. Jumping stilts are the modern version of spring shoes. They actually work, which also means they're quite dangerous - if what the kids who wanted moon shoes imagined was accurate, their parents wouldn't have bought that for them. The concept...
This was a quick and short post, but some people ended up liking it a lot. In retrospect I should've written a bit more, maybe gone into the design of recent running shoes. For example, this Nike Alphafly has a somewhat thick heel made of springy foam that sticks out behind the heel of the foot, and in the front, there's a "carbon plate" (a thin sheet of carbon fiber composite) which also acts like a spring. In the future, there might be gradual evolution towards more extreme versions of the same concept, as recent designs become accepted. Running shoes wi...
In a recent essay, Euan McLean suggested that a cluster of thought experiments “viscerally capture” part of the argument against computational functionalism. Without presenting an opinion about the underlying claim about consciousness, I will explain why these arguments fail as a matter of computational complexity. Which, parenthetically, is something that philosophers should care about.
To explain the question, McLean summarizes part of Brian Tomasik’s essay "How to Interpret a Physical System as a Mind." There, Tomasik discusses the challenge of attributing consciousness to physical systems, drawing on Hilary Putnam's "Putnam's Rock" thought experiment. Putnam suggests that any physical system, such as a rock, can be interpreted as implementing any computation. This is meant to challenge the idea that computation alone defines consciousness. It challenges computational functionalism by implying that...
The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.
The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.
You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that rea...
I believe about Sacks views comes from regularly listening to the All-In Podcast where he regularly talks about AI.
Do you have any quotes or any particular podcast episodes you recommend?
if you would ask the Department of Homeland security for their justification there's a good chance that they would say "national security".
Yeah, I agree that one needs to have a pretty narrow conception of national security. In the absence of that, there's concept creep in which you can justify pretty much anything under a broad conception of national security. (Indeed, I ...