tsiivola
18d 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
21d 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
22d 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
22d 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
1mo ago
Empirical? In fiction? I'm not sure I'm getting what you are trying to say...
tsiivola
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
6mo ago
Was it Dr Ellie Phillips? https://zellies.com/collections/oral-health/products/dr-ellies-complete-mouth-care-system-kit
tsiivola
7mo 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
7mo 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
7mo 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
7mo 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.
tsiivola
7mo ago
The example about Newton was meant to illustrate your deficient understanding of Darwin. Newton did not discover that "those things fall down which fall down", just like Darwin did not discover that "those things survive which survive". Darwin discovered that the composition of a population of organisms can be affected by the environment through the mechanism of selection. Just like Newton proposed that when something pushes on an object the object will start to accelerate, Darwin proposed that when the environment changes the animals living there will start to change.
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. It's like someone drops a rock to demonstrate gravity, and you think you have a clever counterexample, so you release a helium balloon, and exclaim: "See, it goes up, so therefore gravity is disproved!", and then they respond: "No, without gravity the balloon would not rise up, so your balloon actually confirms the theory of gravity". The fact that none of your counterexamples actually disprove Darwinian natural selection just means that they are bad counterexamples. There are some real counterexamples that could disprove Darwinian natural selection, such as prayer affecting antibiotic resistance in bacteria, but those counterexamples do not exist because reality is what it is and Darwinian natural selection is true and correct.
There does not seem to be any reference to "God performing his own selection" in your source.
tsiivola
7mo ago
Again, not a prediction.
Yes, and...? It seems that it was never a great mystery what mechanism leads to bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, because scientists understood Darwinian natural selection. They knew how resistance happened, and with that knowledge they knew how to make it happen or how to prevent it from happening. If they had believed that God is making the bacteria resistant to antibiotics, or God is making the antibiotic less effective, they could have maybe tried praying, and then give up when it didn't work. It's like Richard Dawkins said: "It works, bitches!"
You seem to be saying that when all evidence in the universe confirms a theory, that makes it a tautology, but that actually just makes it true and correct. It's like you would go through every household item and drop it, and complain that you can't find a single example where the item doesn't fall down, so therefore Newton's theory of gravity is a tautology. You could try reversing antibiotic resistance by praying to God. If you succeeded then you would have disproved natural selection. If you don't succeed it just means that prayer doesn't work, but Darwinian natural selection does. It could be psychologically uncomfortable for you, but that's just reality, what can you do?
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings.
Do you have a source for this? I thought God made living beings on the sixth day and concluded that they were good and needed no further tweaking.
tsiivola
7mo ago
Alexander Fleming (the guy who discovered the first antibiotic and got the Nobel Prize for it) talked about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics already in 1945 in his Nobel Prize lecture. It seems he had done it in his lab, and presumably because he knew about Darwin he had a really clear idea about the mechanism behind it.
What comes to natural selection, the idea of selection was old at the time of Darwin. You select the trees that produce the sweetest fruit or the animals that have the most desirable features, and then you breed them to get new trees and animals that have more of what you like. The new idea was that nature, that is the environment around the organisms, could perform the selection, hence natural selection. You can put a bunch of cats on an island with a freezing climate and expect that the short haired ones will die off and the long haired ones will flourish and multiply, or alternatively you can expect that God's providence will allow all of them to prosper equally. Which one do you think will turn out?
tsiivola
8mo ago
I'm not sure whether it's a culture thing or a raw intelligence thing, but I think you could say that some people aren't capable of understanding the idea that some things are physical systems that are not governed by the whims of individuals but instead by their own sets of rules.
This reminds me of Robert Kegan's 5 stages of adult development, which I first learned about through David Chapman's blogs, for example https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence. In short, people at stage 3 are like fish in water regarding their relationships to other people ("if the judge sentences me, then the judge does not like me personally"), whereas people at stage 4 see their relationships to other people more from an outside perspective, almost like objects that can be used for specific purposes, and they know that even if they know the judge personally and could ask them for a favour when hanging out after work, they cannot ask for a favour in the courtroom ("have to put the friend-friend relationship back in the toy box and take out the defendant-judge relationship and play with that for a while").
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"?
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