User talk:Armondikov
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| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Hey Science-Boy. | 1 | 07:44, 5 May 2013 |
| Goth hate crimes | 2 | 03:11, 29 April 2013 |
| Can you have a look at this? | 7 | 12:10, 19 March 2013 |
| Who are you? | 2 | 13:28, 1 March 2013 |
| Opera Mobile | 4 | 20:12, 24 February 2013 |
| Spherical bullshit | 3 | 12:19, 18 February 2013 |
| Your sig | 2 | 11:50, 7 January 2013 |
| Mod nod | 1 | 20:50, 18 December 2012 |
| Theatheistkilla troll | 1 | 14:27, 11 October 2012 |
| Enterprise v. Star Destoryer | 13 | 03:24, 4 October 2012 |
| Bayesian heresy | 1 | 23:41, 18 September 2012 |
| Don't think, but look | 1 | 23:15, 17 September 2012 |
| Argumentum ad dictionarium | 40 | 08:31, 12 September 2012 |
| 3 | 11:24, 11 September 2012 | |
| Die Trans-Ubermensch | 2 | 23:25, 10 September 2012 |
| Pomp | 1 | 19:09, 10 September 2012 |
| Statist shill! | 11 | 08:50, 5 September 2012 |
| Thank you | 1 | 12:01, 4 September 2012 |
| Faux Cosmo | 8 | 22:59, 28 August 2012 |
| Mod Stuff | 0 | 04:11, 28 August 2012 |
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Hey Science-Boy.
When you've got a second, can you take a look here and weigh in on "CarbShark's" position and especially his recent entries to the article? Way too technical for me. I'm a humanities guy. Thanks....
Article could probably do with being overhauled. Some of the percentages are just horrifically over-simplified and based on out-of-date information. But the actual edit itself was full of shit. It didn't really change the article except to remove the caveat that these diets only work short term and are no better than other low-calorie ones.
Goth hate crimes
Is it really so bad over there? [1]
It's precipitated entirely off the back of Sophie Lacaster's murder, that's for sure. I don't have any hard figures/evidence (indeed, without this being actively classed as a hate crime, such evidence would be extremely hard to come by - and I suppose going by the last paragraph in that article, this is almost the point), but I have no reason to suspect it's "worse" here than anywhere else in the world.
The article nails it on many levels, though.
Can you have a look at this?
It's mostly right based on Yudkowskian rationalism, which is a fairly robust approach to thinking about hypothesis testing but unfortunately suffers from too much subjectivity when trying to assign an actual, i.e., numerical, prior probability to things. Indeed, my snarkastic view of Bayes theorem is that you just fiddle with P(B) until it gives you the answer you want.
Overall, it's not the best wording of it, I must say. But the subject is worth including in the article on evidence. The example is okay. You expect to see Christians exist in the world if God exists and you expect to see Christians in the world if God doesn't exist but religion is a social phenomenon. The question is which is more likely as does this "evidence" actually tell you the difference.
"According to the tenants of Bayesian Reasoning, you should determine whether a statement is true or false by asking yourself what you would expect the world to look like in each case." That's not Bayesian reasoning, that's empiricism.
Also: "... tenants ..." → "... tenets ..." shurely. Gives me little confidence in the editor.
The author's a member of the JREF forums: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=9079247 :|
It's Bayesian if you update based on a prior idea. Hence the discussion of how probable it is God exists and whether the presence of many Christians can change that.
True, but there is other stuff thrown in with that in the edit, like the sentence I pulled out above which described empiricism rather than Bayesianism. That's the problem with relying on Yudkowsky -- he's packed a bunch of tangentially related philosophical suppositions and schools of thought into the umbrella term of "Bayesianism."
Opera Mobile
Fantastically useful and occasionally hilarious, if your idea of humour includes jokes expressed entirely in failed CSS.
It was really useful to use when I was building a responsive layout, as it does add a few bells and whistles to check if something will work on a mobile. But if you just resize the browser window (and sometimes, zoom) it should also show the responsiveness, and that works for layout. When I saw it change just on resizing the window I had to boot up the emulator as a sanity check, and yes it really does do that. I mean, wow.
Yep, yep! I saw it do that with EvoLve (which is responsive, it just gets it stupidly wrong and that header fouls up everything) and with Twenty Twelve. The quick way is just to switch from portrait to landscape and watch it reflow. I need to learn how to do that to 2012.
And then just remember that pixel density also fucks over your media queries as you try desperately to see everything on a retina display...
Yeah, yeah. At least there's the work iPad to test this stuff on.
Spherical bullshit
Any relation to spherical cows?
Curiosity led me to investigate four-dimensional cows. Sadly, no one has ever discussed such a thing, but I did stumble upon this page:
“”A four dimensional woman would have many more interesting hairstyle opportunities available to her.
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Oh, you silly mathematicians.
Mod nod
This is a courtesy call to let you know that someone has nominated you for moderator. Please go here to accept or reject the nomination. Cheers.
Enterprise v. Star Destoryer
Bayesian heresy
Haven't got around to reading this yet, but from the title I gather it might result in excommunication from the Church of Bayes.
Don't think, but look
Somebody at New Statesman likes Wittgenstein.
Occasionally if I need to think really fast I purposefully skip over the inner monologue and just think about it. You'd be amazed how much you can get done that way.
Of course, then communicating it to someone else is a pain in the arse, as you haven't rehearsed the ability to get it into a less subjcetive medium, but what the hell, it's okay to just be right and not tell anyone about it.
Argumentum ad dictionarium
It needs a page. (Yes, someone did hit me with this argumentum today in particularly annoying way. How did you guess?)
Put in a subpage as it was turning into too much of an extended rant for the mainspace.
Heh. So is it an essay now instead of an article?
I want to make an article, I just didn't think it was quite mainspace material in that form.
Perfect page quote: "Many people routinely make the mistake of thinking that all words can be consistently applied as logical categories (an issue often intensified by strong faith in dictionaries)."
Oh, look, an example in the wild!
WTF? We have a RationalWikiWikiWiki now?
Always had one, this is something that I think cropped up following the Tisane affair.
It really does need a page. Yesterday I was arguing with this guy pulling the same old 'we can never be certain of anything we can only be reasonably sure of it' spiel, except then he demanded we not use the words 'to be' and 'exists' because according to him no one could define them. By his own logic.
So basically we could not make the argument that we can be certain of existence because he banned the word and concept of existence itself.
It's a really cheap way to cut off the other side of an argument.
There is a school of thought to that effect with "to be". See E-Prime, and also Rationalist taboo. Though these are best used as critical thinking exercises that get you to think about what those terms mean without being lazy about it. You constantly use a ton of inferences whenever you say a single word, so in order to be clear you either need to a) unpack it thoroughly to say what you mean by it in very exhaustive and comprehensive terms (traditional philosophical discourse) or b) avoid its use so that the inferences don't creep in even subconsciously (E-Prime and Rationalist Taboo methods).
What does "exist" mean? Saying "it exists because it is" depends on both "exists" as "is" - and those are often defined circularly. BUT, If you take "exist" to mean something that constrains your expectation of what you will experience, then that's something more concrete. See, for instance, The Dragon in My Garage for an example where this becomes quite important - how can you say the dragon still "exists" when it has no meaningful interaction with the world? Indeed, the dragon is often defined as having no meaningful interaction with the world. But it still "exists"? I expect not to be able to leave the house if the door is closed, therefore the door is solid and exists. I don't expect to be able to sit down on this invisible chair that exerts no force, and if I park my arse there I'll just fall down - so the chair doesn't exist. This seems all grand and sensible until you tack the phrase "this is how scientific observation works" onto it, at which point people shy away and say "ah, but you can't prove it with science!" - As if this magically changes things.
If you try to define "to be" as a verb, you might run into serious trouble. Mostly, we use it to mean "has properties similar to this grouping". Aka, Socrates has a dick, therefore he is (read, "shares similar properties of the group") a man. But if you take it a little further, you could start thinking of "to be" as being some sort of essentialist quality. Now, if you want to play an essentialist card that's fine, but I don't see it being particularly useful in arguing or discussing anything. "Existence" being some essentialist "state of being" doesn't really help us at all. In fact, it's a complete non-explanation.
So, the guy you're speaking to is actually right. If you remove the cheap and lazy words from your linguistic space, you can explore them more deeply from the point of view of your conceptual space. You haven't banned the concept of existence by banning the word, you just force a more critical evaluation of what it really means "to exist".
Well yeah. But the most crushing part of this kind of debate with me is agreeing with the concept but having a 'but...' about the argument itself, which leads the other person to keep fighting when you aren't really warring with him.
It's not, of course, an excuse to simply define away your problems. Proving something is a linguistic illusion doesn't make it a conceptual illusion (and vice versa).
That's why I'm an ontological pluralist. (Yes, I did write that just to shoehorn in Wittgenstein.)
Email, discussing graphic designs of great importance.
Die Trans-Ubermensch
Is transhumanism ripping off Nietzsche? Philosophers with too much time on their hands ask probing questions.
Amused by this comment:
Something we can say for sure:
if Nietzsche had been able to foresee transhumanism way back when, he would have been a transhumanist. |
Is this not a little like saying "if Isaac Newton had been able to foresee quantum dynamics..."?
Yeah, it's an anachronism. I think these people are confusing the question of "Did Nietzsche influence transhumanism?" with "Would Nietzsche have been a transhumanist?" Check out this paper, though -- once you get past the fluff at the beginning, it's a searing take-down of transhumanism:
“”This second self might count as the transhuman but this is not usually what we mean by it. And Kurzweil, like most rich men, simply would rather not give up the riches of his life, not now, not ever. The technological singularity is about not dying. Transhumanism is about not dying. Hence when we argue on behalf of transhumanism we argue as very dedicated devotees of a cargo cult that has yet to deliver the goods—which is why it is a cult. Just because, as the old New York City cum Eastern European Jewish joke argues on behalf of the neurosis of a relative who thinks he is a chicken: “we need the eggs.” We need, we want what transhumanism promises, and surely it will soon come to pass and inasmuch as we are persuaded that the only thing that holds science back from this windfall of technological add-ons and upgrades is some ethical aversion to, say, stem cell research, we argue for the “value” of transhumanism, just to quell such objections.
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Statist shill!
Anarcho-capitalists don't propose no law, but a shared body of law reached by consensus, or competing legal systems if you read your David D. Friedman. This law will be enforced by PDAs, like the ever-so-trustworthy Pinkertons and Baldwin-Felts. (Who wouldn't trust those guys?) But you're the one bringing men with guns into this! Taxation is theft! Free baby markets for everyone!
People of Quahog, I have something to say. Now that we’ve freed ourselves from the terrible shackles of government, it’s time to replace it with something better. The first thing we need is a system of rules that everyone must live by. Got to have rules. And since we can’t spend all our time making rules, I think that we should elect some people to represent us, and they should make rules and choices on our behalf. That’s probably a good idea. Now, this may be kind of expensive, so I got a plan: everyone should have to give some money from their salaries each year. Poor people will give a little bit of money and rich people will give a larger amount of money, and our representatives will use all that money to hire some people who will then provide us with social order and basic services. Now, it won’t be perfect. Some of our representatives may end up being bastards. But you know what? That’s okay, 'cause later we’re going to have more elections, and we can use those elections to get rid of the bad guys and replace ‘em with good guys, and then the system will just keep going on and on just like that. So who’s with me? Will you join me in trying this new crazy thing? Then let’s do it. Yeah, and we did it all without government.
Speaking of anarcho-capitalism, I saw an amusing Rothbard poster put up by the local glibertarian club.
I have seen it used as an avatar by some special people, and I wondered who it was. 'Thought it would be something like this.
In an anarcho-capitalist society, if a bunch of people decide to get together and function as a unit, electing/appointing people to represent them because doing so individually takes too much time, doing so because they're perfectly free to, is it still anarcho-capitalist?
Thank you
Thanks for fixing that rollback -I've got this stupid habit of highlighting text and clicking. I'll do my best to not be an idjit in the future.
Faux Cosmo
I'd say someone should do one mocking the weekly gossip rags, but to be honest they're beyond parody.
'Cuz you need MOAR COSMO!!!11!!!
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