tsiivola
6d ago
Noon-Is-Noon faction
Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").
[...]Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?
Don't you have this backwards? The Noon-Is-Noon argument is that 0 hours should be at the time when the point on Earth comes to a phase in the rotation of the planet where the movement component towards the Sun becomes 0 and starts to increase again. That is, the Noon-Is-Noon argument is about the rotation of the planet, not about anything human-centric, whereas the perma-DST argument is about whatever schedule the person proposing it happens to have in their current job, etc.
tsiivola
13d ago
If they truly felt guilty, then wouldn't they stop beating up Armenia? They've continued doing it to this day, they were helping Azerbaijan against Armenia in the recent war.
No. Feeling a certain way does not lead to the same behaviour in all cases. The feeling is an unpleasant stimulus and the behaviour it leads to depends on how you have learned to manage such unpleasant stimuli. Having a neighbour that constantly triggers the unpleasant feeling just by existing might well lead to holding a grudge for over a 100 years, if you are sufficiently immature as to being unable to see past the present moment. A more mature approach might be to realize that asking and receiving forgiveness resolves the issue now and forever and frees precious resources for something more useful.
If the Turks genuinely did not feel guilt they would say they drove away the Armenians and established a Turkish ethnostate, and are proud that they did, and not continue with obviously contradictory denials.
The armed burglar might say (if dragged into court or questioned by some third party) that of course he feels guilty and ashamed and it was society's fault and he was underage at the time and his friends made him do it and they had it coming anyway... But there is no sincerity in his words.
Perhaps you yourself have a somewhat immature point of view, as if playing a game of Sims or something. If the burglar says that they feel guilty, ashamed, are sorry and promise to not do it again, there is no sincer-o-meter that reveals if they "really" and "truly" mean it.
tsiivola
17d ago
Furthermore, unlike with the Holocaust, Turkey isn't going to apologize. They won't pay reparations. They won't write it in their textbooks that this was a terrible shame on their civilization - they say that patriotic Turks need to be vigilant against all national security threats. There is no 'never again'. Only whites do this. The substantive differences are more important than the rhetorical differences. Talk is cheap, actions are costly. And it's only white countries that take costly actions to uphold concepts of guilt and moral virtue - consider the British anti-slavery work amongst other things. Nobody else would even consider 'giving back' the Elgin Marbles.
This seems just a difference in coping mechanisms. When the whites do something bad, they realize it will reflect poorly on them, and then try to correct it. When the Turks act impulsively and do something bad, they also wake up sober the next morning and realize it will reflect poorly on them, but instead of correcting things they somewhat immaturely retreat into a fantasy where it never happened and it also happened and was completely justified, which is a very obvious sign of guilt and shame to any intelligent observer.
tsiivola
1mo ago
No, I "win" the argument because first you bring a source that doesn't support your argument, almost as if you hadn't read your own source, and then you bring some non sequitur about hostages and then a claim (not even a link!) that someone has at some point seen an article online that is behind a paywall. Do you think we can deduce something from the fact that in all of internet there seems to be only one single source, that you are too afraid to even post a link to, that reports about "IDF firing indiscriminantly on the music festival"?
tsiivola
1mo ago
I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.
This depends on the readers. If both the writer and readers have experience in X, then the readers can recognize things from their own experience in the written work, and thus think it is realistic. But it could also happen that the writer has experience in X and the readers have none, and the reality of X is so far removed from the readers' own experience that they find a realistic depiction of X unbelievable.
tsiivola
1mo ago
So in other words you cannot point to any source corroborating that "few drugged out hippies got blasted by the IDF firing indiscriminantly", and therefore we must conclude that user Functor was straightforwardly incorrect, right?
tsiivola
1mo ago
He's straightforwardly correct when he says "got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly"
I think the mention of "drugged out hippies getting blasted" refers to people at the Nova music festival. The source you provided does not seem to mention the Nova music festival even once. It only talks about IDF firing on vehicles retreating back towards Gaza after the attack, and a firefight between IDF and terrorists holding hostages. So it seems that the user Functor is actually straightforwardly incorrect here.
tsiivola
1mo ago
As far as I know there has not been any comprehensive examination of every single UNRWA employee, so we have no certain knowledge of how many of the rest of UNRWA employees, besides the 9 confirmed ones, are colluding with Hamas. Another way to think about it is that Israel Defence Forces claim that several hundred are terrorist operatives, and when Israel submitted evidence for 19 cases, the UN concluded that in 47% of the cases submitted there was clear evidence of the individuals being terrorists. So perhaps the true figure is 47% of the hundreds that IDF claims are terrorists, or 47% of the 10% that some sources claim have links to Hamas.
tsiivola
2mo ago
Empirical? In fiction? I'm not sure I'm getting what you are trying to say...
tsiivola
2mo ago
I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases.
Are you familiar with the concept of "password"? It is an ancient empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something.
Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling.
Many people find belief in witchcraft compelling. This perhaps tells us more about said people than about the validity of belief in witchcraft.
tsiivola
2mo ago
psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.
I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it!
Witchcraft also gives us an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she is under a witch's spell! She may not even be consciously aware of it!
Having more alternative explanations does not necessarily give you clarity and insight. Having more alternative explanations to choose from could just as well confuse you, and having more explanations that are wrong can lead you away from insight.
tsiivola
3mo ago
It's probably good that you're not trying to flex too much about how smart you are due to finding the solution to this problem incredibly obvious, because it seems that you got the answer correct the same way that a broken clock gets the time correct twice every day. ;)
tsiivola
3mo ago
You cannot look into the box, you cannot weigh the boxes, or shake them, or anything like that, so the situation is not equivalent to a gameshow host looking into the box and deliberately rummaging through and picking the one gold coin that is there.
Let's turn up the amount of silver coins. Imagine there are 1000 silver coins and one gold coin in the third box. You pick one coin out of a box and it turns out to be gold. Which is more probable, a) that you happened to pick the one and only gold coin from a 1001 coins, or b) that you picked one gold coin from a box that contains only two gold coins?
Remember, there are a 1000 ways to pick a silver coin from the third box, in which case we don't end up in the scenario where we are picking a second coin. It is only the very rare occurrence when we happen to pick the third box and pick the one gold coin out of a 1001 coins that we are in the scenario where picking a second silver coin is possible.
tsiivola
3mo ago
Why 2/3?
OP's intuition says that once you pick one gold coin, you know that you have one of two boxes, and that there are exactly 12 coins in those two boxes combined, two of which are gold, so that would put the probability of getting another gold coin at 2/12.
tsiivola
3mo ago
So what would you say is your probability of withdrawing a gold coin if everything else is the same, but the third box has one gold coin and 10 silver coins, instead of just one gold and one silver coin?
tsiivola
5mo ago
Naomi Osaka seems to be a tennis player who has an Instagram account with 2,8 million followers, where she last posted a short video of herself 4 days ago. From what I can gather with some quick googling, her problem with the press conferences did not really have much (if anything) to do with being famous, just being contractually obligated to attend an event where she was subjected to questions that made her uncomfortable.
The plane tracking autism kid seems to be someone who poses for press photographs and gives interviews to various parties, probably anyone who will have him, trying to promote his various business ventures or social media projects. Or did you bring that up as an example of Elon Musk trying to be less famous? Because that does not seem plausible at all.
From a quick glance at Wikipedia, it seems that J.D. Salinger did not like to give interviews, but was giving one as soon as there was some copyright dispute that he was trying to influence.
The anecdote about emperor Augustus does not seem to be about him being famous, but about common people being silly.
There can be endeavours where being famous is required in order to succeed, and it can be an unpleasant surprise if you did not know it before hand, or you find out that you do not like being famous. But then it should be simple to just give up the thing, and anyone who does not probably has calculated that pursuing it is a net positive, despite having to be famous.
tsiivola
5mo ago
I have heard that being famous is something you have to actively maintain, and it is not just something that happens without you being able to do anything about it. I think if you already are famous, and systematically begin to refuse every request to appear on TV, or attend a public event, or be interviewed for a newspaper, etc., then you will become not famous relatively quickly. So it would then follow that people who are famous are actively trying to be so, and that would indicate that they have made the calculation and decided that it is worth it for them.
tsiivola
6mo ago
The 0.82g figure seems to be per pound, which is about 2g per kilogram, so 140g of protein would be what a 70kg person needs.
tsiivola
7mo ago
Was it Dr Ellie Phillips? https://zellies.com/collections/oral-health/products/dr-ellies-complete-mouth-care-system-kit
tsiivola
8mo ago
If you wanted to prevent overfishing of shellfish, what would be the test that costs a couple hundred, takes a couple hours to administer, and screens out people who are likely to harvest shellfish beyond the legal limit? Apparently simply not letting Cambodians in the country takes care of 99% of the problem. Maybe it's genetics, or more likely some cultural thing, or perhaps a combination of both, but my guess is that few people know for sure why the Cambodians are like that. And there could be a lot of other things the Cambodians are doing that have an effect on society, but few people know about it, because when they are not picking shellfish there are no officers watching with binoculars.
Perhaps the reason why many people who express opinions about IQ being heritable also have other questionable opinions is that expressing opinions against progressive viewpoints tends to provoke in some people a hostile and aggressive response, and so only people with a certain fearlessness are ready to express such opinions, and this fearlessness allows them to disregard other people's disapproval in other matters also.
And perhaps the reason why some people holding progressive viewpoints respond in a hostile and aggressive manner when these viewpoints are contested is because they see themselves as being on the "right side", and the idea of them "being the baddies" is unbearable to even think about, and so an aggressive lashing out is the way to distract from these uncomfortable thoughts. This could mean that just asking for evidence will also put you in their eyes in the category of "punchable nazi", even if you don't bring up differences between racial groups.
tsiivola
8mo ago
In any case, it doesn't get much clearer than this: The theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
I gave you a counterexample, and if a counterexample exists then logically it cannot be a tautology. This seems to be what you think also, because you were arguing that tautologies do not have counterexamples.
You now admit that natural selection is more useful as a theory than for example the doctrines of Saint Augustine, because it makes it possible to predict resistance to antibiotics. This means that natural selection cannot be a tautology in the sense that it provides no useful information.
So I guess this is game over for you, as there is nothing left of your claim. Thanks for playing, try again sometime.
tsiivola
8mo ago
Why don't you focus on what I actually said?
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, but it's difficult because sometimes what you say is unclear and sometimes it's nonsensical.
Newton says...
No he does not.
Yes he does. Newton's second law of motion, does it sound familiar? F=ma? I don't understand why you would deny a basic fact like this.
I'm only stating that there's no counterexample to a tautology. Because I'm trying to explain that the theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
Here's a simple counterexample: God protects all animals and won't allow any of them to suffer due to effects from their environment, and therefore there is no difference in survival or reproduction rates based on the traits of the animals.
Yes, St. Augustine is not the same as Darwin. But in practical terms, Divine Selection and Natural selection have the same explanatory value. That is, none at all.
You develop a miracle drug that kills harmful bacteria, but then you discover that your miracle drug is becoming less effective. What do you do? Divine Selection tells you that "God selects". What are you gonna do with that? Natural selection tells you that if you change the environment where a population of organisms live, the change in the environment can affect the prevalence of traits over generations. This allows you to explain why your drug is becoming less effective, and the explanation allows you to know how you could develop bacteria that are resistant to your drug, or how to prevent bacteria from developing resistance. So as we can see, it is exactly in practical terms that Natural selection has much more explanatory value than Divine selection.
And yes, the Wikipedia article says that Flemming "predicted" antimicrobial resistance, but he "predicted" it in 1945, that is, 17 years after he discovered antibiotics.
No, I'm talking about for example this mention on Alexander Fleming's Wikipedia page:
Almroth Wright had predicted antibiotic resistance even before it was noticed during experiments
tsiivola
8mo ago
I would say that things like the idea of a circle or the idea of a dog exist in some sense, even though ideas are not material things that you can touch. Maybe it's a feature of the human brain that it tries to find patterns with commonalities in everything that it perceives, and you can only mentally process physical things as representations of these patterns. If you see a rock that is approximately the shape of a circle, you can see and remember it as a rock shaped like a circle, but if you see a rock with a random shape then it's kind of like looking at something that's in the blind spot of your retina, it's right there, but it's difficult to remember what the shape is or to draw it on paper, etc. If you analyze your subjective experience further along these lines you may come to think that there is some other reality of pure ideas that is parallel to physical reality, because that's what it feels like from a subjective point of view.
The mechanism of selection is:
slight modifications, which in any way favoured the individuals of any species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved
You seem to be saying that since any definition works both ways (a coward is a person lacking courage, and a person lacking courage is a coward), then all definitions are tautologies. If that is what you are saying, then you really don't understand what a tautology is.
What Darwin actually said is that a change in the environment will cause changes in the organisms living in the environment, through the mechanism of selection. This is a very useful idea. It is so useful that it allowed the people who discovered and produced the first antibiotics to immediately understand what causes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and how to cause it in the laboratory and also how to prevent it. You claim that people were not able to predict that resistance would happen before they observed it, even though they knew about Darwin already, but for example Wikipedia seems to disagree with you there.
Newton says that when you push left, it will accelerate to the left, and when you push right, it will accelerate to the right. Similarly Darwin says that when nature metaphorically "pushes" for dark fur to provide better camouflage from predators, then eventually prey animals will tend to have dark fur, and when it "pushes" for light fur to provide better camouflage, then eventually prey animals will tend to have light fur.
Your complaint seems to be that whenever you come up with a clever counterexample to Darwinian natural selection, it turns out that it wasn't a counterexample after all
No it isn't. My complaint is what I said it is, it's in the title of the post.
I mean you literally wrote:
But now that resistant bacteria exists, you tell me that's proof of Natural Selection? You see how it works? No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation
It does seem that you are complaining about how all the counterexamples turn out not to be counterexamples after all.
And did you read the quote I cited?
Yes I did. We can go through it again. Here it is: "species emerged sequentially in historical time rather than all at once". Notice first that the words "select" or "selection" are nowhere to be seen. Then remember that when we talk about selection we are talking about it in the sense of selective breeding, about which animals procreate more and which animals procreate less. We are not talking about choosing which dress to wear to a wedding. You asked:
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings. How does this differ from Darwin's explanation?
You could argue that if "species emerging sequentially" is a result of God's will, then in some abstract sense God has "selected" how and when this emergence happens, but still we cannot find in your quote anything about animals with certain traits procreating more than others. If the people who discovered antibiotics only had Saint Augustine's doctrines they may have never understood how to prevent antibiotic resistance in bacteria. So that is how it differs from Darwin's explanation.
I think the problem here is that since science has historically provided many obviously good things, a lot of people think that the word 'science' just means 'good things', so if you say that something is not science, to a lot of people it sounds like you are saying that it is not good. However, you don't need science to decide that you want your society to have public parks, sports stadiums, museums or hospitals. This is also probably the issue with social sciences. As long as people can claim that what social sciences are doing is science, it will sound to a lot of people that what they are doing is good. If you start asking what is it actually good for, people might stop to think and realize that the answer is "not much".
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