User talk:Nebuchadnezzar

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Neuro stuff! - pro'ly too vague to actually generate an answer. heh517:59, 23 May 2012
gaydar422:23, 17 May 2012
amusing revisionist academics122:24, 16 May 2012
Memetic mutation117:30, 16 May 2012
Attachment Parenting411:57, 13 May 2012
Pareidolia and mental illness417:25, 8 May 2012
Joshua Rosenau107:19, 7 May 2012
Sex with swampman123:12, 27 April 2012
Is it just me...209:32, 18 April 2012
CONGRATULATIONS216:24, 16 April 2012
another repubs are stupid study1004:53, 16 April 2012
Memes part 7 trillion and Pi208:53, 11 April 2012
"RationalWiki is a Front for Socialist Indoctrination"220:16, 8 April 2012
Quote mine115:36, 4 April 2012
Freud in France214:53, 3 April 2012
Theory of mind - on the computer. a bit funny (or not)2404:57, 3 April 2012
Fishery management403:18, 29 March 2012
A true free market?1521:06, 26 March 2012
This project205:33, 26 March 2012
''The Rational Optimist''210:43, 24 March 2012
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First page
Last page
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Neuro stuff! - pro'ly too vague to actually generate an answer. heh

My husband gave me a link to an article on the Amazon language (Pirahã) that supposedly disproves all of Chomsky, but only one person has ever learned it, and he's the one who's making the claims and being famous... It amuses me that the ONLY LANGUAGE EVER FOUND IN ALL THE EARTH THAT DOES NOT HAVE RECURRIONS!!!! is a language there is only one expert in, and anyone else who has tried to learn it, has been rebuked by the elders as not being "serious enough" students. heh. anyhow...... That led me to read more about recursion and there was a wiki article that suggests that "neurobiology is proving recursion". What things in "neurobiology" would be able to prove or disprove something like how we form sentances? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#Recursion_in_language is what I'm looking at, near the bottom of the paragraph. "Indirect proof that Everett's ideas are wrong comes from works in neurolinguistics where it appears that all human beings are endowed with the very same neurobiological structures to manage with all and only recursive languages. For a review, see Kaan et al. (2002)"

I just don't know enough about neurolinguistics and neurobiology to know what could be proving a theory like this, one way or the other.

Green mowse.pngGodot19:07, 22 May 2012

That doesn't sound right. I don't see how you could locate recursion "in" the brain. Michael Corvallis claims that recursion is made possible by an expansion of working memory capacity. That makes sense to me. (BTW, why do we always have to have these "silver bullet" theories of "what makes us human"?) The massive human frontal lobe also helps us to engage in metacognition, thinking about thinking. So a whole range of regions in the brain would be involved in recursive thinking.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)19:30, 22 May 2012

Cause we need badly, to be different (read:better) than every other animal out there. God mad us special, in his image. Oh, no god? Well fuck, what makes us special then?

Recursion is something about UG that I can't quite get my head around. In some contexts, it seems to imply simply the layering of sentences "The boy is blue", "The chair is green". "the boy sat on a chair". "the chair was sold wednesday" into THe blue boy sat in the green chair which was sold on wednesday". that some language does NOT possess this level of recursion is stupid. It would imply that the humans are limited to only one set of words in one very particular word order, and unable to expand on those ideas. I'm so damned dubious of that claim...

The other way I see recursion presented is a logical set of words or letters that form patterns into sentences. Well, if that is true, then all languages are recursive by the very idea that language is a set of words. Ironically, UG was just something we had started to really really look at, so it's still newish to me.

Green mowse.pngGodot19:42, 22 May 2012

It obviously wouldn't imply that they're limited -- it would imply that by some strange historical accident, they never made use of this recursive capacity.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)19:58, 22 May 2012

Yes, cept that recursive language is what let's us say something, differently, interestingly, and about some specific thing and not some other thing.

Bah, I dont' know. maybe I am just getting too cynical for my age, but damn these things leave me saying "yeah, right" far more often than not.

Green mowse.pngGodot02:22, 23 May 2012

There's only one guy who knows the language, right? This could easily be total nonsense.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)17:59, 23 May 2012
 
 
 
 
 

Would you read this and give me your gut reaction? huffpo on gaydar Here's mine 1) you know they only had straight/gay (you just KNOW they did), which is a 50/50 choice. so woudln't "correct guesses" be about 50% even if they were flipping a coin? 2) I suspect, (though again, don't know from the article) that these gay and straights are "out" that way. The act of being out, likely means you participate in some level of the social world that is "The Gay". affectations are learned. 3) If this is true, then we can just go ahead and "out" Wolverine and Tom cruise and be done with it!

Green mowse.pngGodot20:48, 17 May 2012

Another one of these silly gaydar studies? I've seen a couple of them before and they usually report something like 4-10% above chance. This one isn't much better. (#1 is right, they usually just give you two buttons for gay and straight.) File this next to all those parapsychology/ESP studies. The cult of the p-value lives on!

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:20, 17 May 2012

They claim it's 7% higher than "guessing". Of course, there were roughly 1/2 gays and 1/2 straights in the pile of photos. I asked "where is the rigged deck, with 10 gays and 90 straights" or the other way around. I suspect that then, you'd see very different error rates. ;-)

Green mowse.pngGodot21:22, 17 May 2012

Damn straight. (See what I did there?) Judging by the number of pictures, they must have run a huge number of trials as well. That's another great way to get a nice shiny p<0.05.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:31, 17 May 2012
 
 

But what about a kink-dar?

Scarlet A.pngtheist22:23, 17 May 2012
 

amusing revisionist academics

So I'm watching this "documentary" on Gobekli Tepe, and the scientists interviewed are all somewhat rational, respected folk. Its' how the stuff is put together to sell the idea that Abraham comes from Ab Ra Him, and Brahma all the same roots, don't you know... ANNNYYYHOOOO, one scene, they are "interviewing" Prof Mehmet Ozdogan, from Turkey, i guess, and they leave him speaking - UNTRANSLATED. then say "well said, Profesor, but might we add...." ummmmmmm what the fuck?? :-) I'll do this article soon. :-)

Green mowse.pngGodot21:26, 16 May 2012

You can use this if you need it -- apparently JSTOR has ungated articles.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:24, 16 May 2012
 

Memetic mutation

It is, on occasion, quite obvious.

Scarlet A.pngnarchist16:55, 16 May 2012

I thought that was going to be some kind of new Rickroll.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)17:30, 16 May 2012
 

Attachment Parenting

Oh.My.God. on my list of things I'd never really looked into, but "guessed" they were bunk, i had AP. Now that i've read about it, frome their own damn website, for that matter... WHAT FUCKING BUNK. No wonder feminists talk about it being an impossible measure of motherhood and women doomed to failure. It's an entire world where nothing but baby and child come first, and you and anything else you could want or need come well down the line. "do not let baby cry if at all possible. be mindful of him, so you notice his distress at is begins, before it culminates into actual distress". "do not let the child have prolonged crying, for it alters the chemistry of the brain and can cause future mental issues". "let the child decide to stop breast feeding (they mean age, not in the moment), removing food is removing love and is confusing for the child." "let the child decide when he or she wants their own room". and on and on.

Green mowse.pngGodot03:48, 13 May 2012

Parenting "advice" is one of those genres of bullshit that's self-perpetuating because it's the kind of thing most people have to do but is in practice extremely difficult to study scientifically. Typically, you just run a shitload of tests on a shitload of data until you get a spurious correlation, which you are guaranteed to get doing this sort of thing, then you've got your p<0.05 and you're ready to publish!

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)04:32, 13 May 2012

Surely, if you've survived long enough to have children and care about their upbringing enough to look for advice on how to do it properly, you've turned out fine. So therefore just copy what your own parents did and let natural selection figure out the best method.

Scarlet A.pngd hominem11:48, 13 May 2012

Hahahahahahahaha

With one notable exception.

Scarlet A.pngtheist11:57, 13 May 2012
 
 
 
 

Pareidolia and mental illness

Is there a mental illness/disorder associated with heightened tendency towards pareidolia or strange interpretations of pareidolia? I'm asking because of cases like Andrew Basiago, this guy and his "sick people on Phobos" and videos like this one. Compared to these, believing that the Face on Mars is artificial looks sane. (Basiago was able to see "two hooded figures abducting a human female" in this. He may need to get laid.)

ZooGuard (talk)18:44, 7 May 2012

Usually schizophrenia, but people can find anything they want if they look (and squint) hard enough.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)18:57, 7 May 2012
It sounds to me as if you want someone to explain things to you.


It's apparently not enough for you, that I have raised questions about the validity of certain data.

I'm sorry to say, I'm not in the business of spoon-feeding.

I love this guy, where can I get one?

Scarlet A.pnggnostic15:39, 8 May 2012

You can probably find a few at the bottom of YouTube.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)15:47, 8 May 2012

It is impossible to underestimate the bottom half of the Internet.

Scarlet A.pngtheist17:25, 8 May 2012
 
 
 
 

Joshua Rosenau

Question: What does, "formerly a doctoral candidate" mean? Does that mean, "flunked out"? Thanks.

Maybe "all but dissertation"? I've got no idea, why don't you ask him?

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)07:19, 7 May 2012
 

Sex with swampman

Let's face it, what good is answering "who you are" if you can't fuck it afterwards?

Scarlet A.pngpathetic15:29, 25 April 2012

That was egregious even for SMBC.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)23:12, 27 April 2012
 

Is it just me...

...or is this post you put into transhumanism really fucking weird??

Scarlet A.pngtheist20:53, 17 April 2012

It's really a hub page for all the linked essays. Probably doesn't make sense unless you've read the links.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:02, 17 April 2012

Going through them, makes some sense. But there are a few words it really likes.

Scarlet A.pngnarchist09:32, 18 April 2012
 
 

CONGRATULATIONS

Two weeks ago, you made the millionth edit to RationalWiki!

This absolutely arbitrary milestone that has no special meaning beyond being an unusually large and round number must make you very proud! You must be happy! Be oh so happy because you made the millionth edit! It is a very good thing and it will be with you forever. You are so lucky and must cherish it. CHERISH IT FOREVER AND KEEP IT CLOSE TO YOU AND IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT WHEN THERE IS NO NOISE AND YOU WONDER IF YOU WILL EVER BREATHE AGAIN THEN YOU CAN RELAX AS YOUR HEART FAILS BECAUSE YOU KNOW YOU MADE THE MILLIONTH EDIT OH MY GOD I SEE THE DARK I SEE IT I SEE IT

Congrats!

ADtalkModerator09:54, 16 April 2012

Now we just need to wait until it ticks over to 1,048,576 for a nice, round number.

Scarlet A.pngpostate10:29, 16 April 2012
 

What, no confetti?

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)16:24, 16 April 2012
 

another repubs are stupid study

A second one. they are not just stupid, but apparently lazy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/07/conservative-politics-low-effort-thinking_n_1410448.html?ref=mostpopular

Pink mowse.pngGodot On a perdu le contrôle02:35, 12 April 2012

It does say that "Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking." Which makes a little more sense.

Peter tanquam ex ungue leonem02:40, 12 April 2012

Peter has it right. This was also a series of multiple studies. Those things make me more inclined to take this seriously than yet another "Look, we found a minute correlation between IQ scores and political ideology!" study. If correct, this would also go a long way in explaining the number of liberal melt-down cases re: 9/11.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:42, 12 April 2012

what do you mean liberal melt down re: 9-11?

Pink mowse.pngGodot On a perdu le contrôle23:11, 12 April 2012

This.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)23:28, 12 April 2012

Ahhh

Pink mowse.pngGodot On a perdu le contrôle04:41, 13 April 2012
 
 
 
 
 

Memes part 7 trillion and Pi

Since the chaos has died down, I can now send you this crit if you haven't yet seen it. Mentions your scientific mysticism essay as "awful" if you're interested. It might help either clarify it or improve it. Although I don't hold up much hope of that.

Scarlet A.pngnarchist07:48, 11 April 2012

Must be citing an older revision of the meme article. Apparently, he missed the "This is an essay" header at the top of my essay page. He is right that memetics doesn't ignore gene-culture co-evolution, though, I worded that poorly. It ignores the fact that research in gene-culture co-evolution has gotten on perfectly fine by itself with no need from memetics, which has desperately tried to ride its coattails in hopes of gaining some legitimacy. The favorable reference to Kurzweil is icing on the cake.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)08:24, 11 April 2012

Glad you enjoyed.

Scarlet A.pngsshole08:53, 11 April 2012
 
 

"RationalWiki is a Front for Socialist Indoctrination"

...sez some guy who doesn't like the Austrian article. :)

ZooGuard (talk)18:10, 8 April 2012

Frankly, that post is a little tl;dr.

Scarlet A.pngtheist19:01, 8 April 2012

SPOV seems to go over a lot of people's heads. I think they did catch a typo, though.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)20:16, 8 April 2012
 
 

Which article do you claim was quote mined and in which way?

Proxima Centauri (talk)11:10, 4 April 2012

Freud in France

Have at

ТyAhoy!13:15, 3 April 2012

I guess in the US, clinical psychiatry's problem is Big Pharma, but in France, it's Big Freud.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)14:51, 3 April 2012

That was a fun mental image there.

Тyrant14:53, 3 April 2012
 
 

Theory of mind - on the computer. a bit funny (or not)

So we've talked before about "uploading your brain", as if the brain itself is "where" you reside.

I own a laptop that i use for work and pleasure. when I'm working, i'm down here (as now) on a 19 inch screen. when i'm having fun, i'm on the laptop itself. But in my mind, without thinking about it, they are *different* computers, cause i think of the monitor as the computer some how.

So I was looking at some, um... well... "risque" stuff and said to myself. "oh, it's ok, that was upstairs on the other computer". All because we are as accustomed to thinking about the monitor as "the" computer as we are to thinking about the brain as "the" self.

I just find it funny that my first instinct is always that i'm using different puters.

Pink mowse.pngGodot What do cats dream about?23:44, 29 March 2012

"All because we are as accustomed to thinking about the monitor as "the" computer as we are to thinking about the brain as "the" self." Speak for yourself -- can't say I was ever accustomed to thinking that way. All right, now off to create a computerized facsimile of my mind before the Singularity!

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)00:18, 30 March 2012

My other/better half did work in an office where IT would come into the main floor and say "sorry everyone, we've had a server crash so you'll all have to restart your computers" and half the office just pressed the button on the monitor.

But I think we seem to think of "us" as being a minute speck inside the brain. Not a homunculous, exactly, but not distributed. Hence why it's easy to talk of "my visual cortex is telling me" and "my pre-frontal lobe is saying..." and so on. When really, these are you, and if you really want to push a more distributed idea of you, then your nervous system is, your senses are. I mean, you stab yourself in the arm, you feel pain in your arm right? Even thought that's juts an illusion and it's all your brain telling you (see how easy it is to do this?) that it's in your arm. Or is it? As nerves do actually connect there and it's all physically wired up...

This way, madness lies.

Scarlet A.pngd hominem09:39, 30 March 2012

Though... this has bugged me recently about mind uploading. How, exactly, do the expect to scan the brain thoroughly enough to do this? In Caprica they get around it by reconstructing people's personalities and memories basically from their presence on the internet and download that into a conscious entity, but do people expect magic to do this? We're talking about a highly detailed and highly dynamic system here - which is why I doubt cryonics will ever work, you can keep some of the information, but you completely lose that dynamic aspect by freezing people. Now, I don't doubt that we'll have the computational power to simulate enough neurons to theoretically make the piece of digital meat needed, but uploading someone else into it? Do people honestly think CT and MRI are going to be able to do that? I suppose that's the magic step, and I'm not talking Clarke's Third Law magic, either.

Scarlet A.pngbomination10:11, 30 March 2012

This type of stuff fucks up my mind when I try to think about it for too long. I guess that we just won't know until we advance far enough to know.

Nihilist13:14, 30 March 2012
 

That's what Dennett called the Cartesian theater. And mind uploading (whatever that means) is definitely not going to be done with fMRI or CT -- what we need is a form of single neuron imaging (SNI) that doesn't damage the brain in the process of scanning it.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)15:43, 30 March 2012

I was goign to say what Nebby said - but without the knowledge base. You would have to understand each and every neuron AND each chemical process in place to "upload" a brain. WE don't know what memories are, where they are, how they are made, how they are retrieved, why they get lost, if they are "really lost" or just "touch point access lost". The amount of information we would have to "decode" to actually make ADK feel anything like ADK when we "turned him on" is unbelievably complex.

And, i'm still dubious that you could upload your brain onto a robot and think "i am still me", cause it would FEEL wrong. On the other hand, I bump my fat butt into things, cause i "fell" like i did 50 lbs ago.

perception is a strange critter...

Pink mowse.pngGodot What do cats dream about?15:49, 30 March 2012
 

Magic.

Scarlet A.pngbomination16:16, 30 March 2012
 
 
 
 
 

Fishery management

In a lecture right now and oh is it depressing. The Prof has taken time out to debunk the "Cornucopian view".

Тyrannis20:34, 28 March 2012

Prof's not a hard green, are they? The Cornucopian view is fairly easy to debunk because it usually involves denialism or severe minimization of some sort.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:02, 29 March 2012

Nah, a few people in the class are though. But he apparently had been accosted by someone who claimed we could feed the world through fishing and thus overpopulation isn't a problem.

ТyYes?03:06, 29 March 2012

You sure this wasn't in a religion class?

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:07, 29 March 2012

The lines tend to blur sometimes.

ТyComplaints03:18, 29 March 2012
 
 
 
 

A true free market?

Whether such a thing is desirable or not because of many reasons, is it even possible to dispense with government and just have everything bartered privately? Obviously, the fact is that we'd still need the same things; water, power, transport infrastructure and so on. The difference is that we just wouldn't pay for it in tax (the money would churn through the economy one way or another, it's not like the government takes your cash and burns it). And of course, competition would drive down costs - although in practice this would mean choosing a water supplier that gave best value for money but with the lowest level of AIDS floating around in the product.

Scarlet A.pngmoral21:38, 25 March 2012

See Somalia (see also the external links section for unintentionally comedic defenses of Somali anarchy from the always unintentionally comedic Ludwig von Mises Institute).

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:13, 26 March 2012

All you need to do is drill your own well and have your own power generator. I know some people (cough immediate family cough) who have done/are doing it.

ТyNo03:16, 26 March 2012

Sounds like a nice operation they got there. Would be terrible if something should, you know, happen to it. Fortunately, I offer a free market "security" service.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:22, 26 March 2012

Given the one whose finished has a AK-47 collection and the ones who aren't finished are slightly less well armed you have no market ;}

ТyTalk03:24, 26 March 2012

He who has the biggest guns has the biggest market.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:35, 26 March 2012
 
 
 

Somalia is an example of warlordism, not anarchy. A powerful warlord coerces others and declares the territory under his influence as a quasi-state with the warlord himself being a quasi-king. Anarcho-capitalism, on the other hand, is based on the non-aggression axiom.

SupernovaExplosion (talk)11:00, 26 March 2012

(Sorry to butt in, Neb)

Is there an example of anarchy that is not specially disqualified from being evidence against that particular system?

ADtalkModerator11:15, 26 March 2012

Anarchists, I feel, are the type of people who say that by definition anarchy must work. When it doesn't, it's not "true" anarchy. I've had to beat this problem out of a self-confessed anarchist before, he's almost about to grow out of it.

Scarlet A.pngd hominem12:39, 26 March 2012
 

Depends on how you define "government." Somalia is stateless, but not "true" anarchy. However, there is similarly a big problem with describing anarcho-capitalism as anarchy. If you want, you can go back to pre-historic hunter-gatherer groups, but they weren't very capitalistic, plus they lived in (obviously) massively different cultural circumstances and a significantly different biosphere with much lower population levels.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:06, 26 March 2012
 

Watching this documentary by Jeremy Paxman on the British Empire makes me think that the Empire was almost founded on this. If you look at how powerful the East India Company was, and then how most of Africa was just a bunch of people acting like lunatics and then letting others sort out the mess they left behind them. And all in the name of Victorian ideals of free and open trade.

Scarlet A.pnggnostic20:42, 26 March 2012
 
 

I thought that collaboration is one of features of this and many more wiki project. But You undo my contributions only because spelling!? Isn't easier for to correct spelling and grammar?

Max Sterling (talk)04:16, 26 March 2012

I should have said "Make this into a coherent thought," because as it stood, it was also factually incorrect as I pointed out with the bit about the Protocols.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)04:34, 26 March 2012

OK. I do not understand what you refer as incoherent thought. Can You do instead of me (if You agree that there were/are large number of cranks who actually believe that there is some hidden agenda in communism)?

Max Sterling (talk)05:33, 26 March 2012
 
 

''The Rational Optimist''

Will try to reveiw this weekend.

ТyAhoy!00:37, 24 March 2012

Skeptical Science has some debunking of the climate "facts" in The Irrational Denialist if you want.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)03:12, 24 March 2012

Sounds like this is the sort of thing your hardcore libertarians could get behind. Remove government + Let people do what they want = unrestricted progress.

Scarlet A.pngsshole10:43, 24 March 2012
 
 
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