TheVat

Charlie Daniels weighs in on yesterday's news...

Wondered why I was getting a notification on this thread. So there's a trend now in bots, with echoing old posts. Weird.

Yes, I didn't write clearly. I meant without the "Wheatstone" pathway. And plus one to @exchemist for that clever joke. As for the rest, I misunderstood the game theory aspect of what the driver, or we, would assume about other drivers. I will chew on this a little more. Hopefully I won't drive in circles!

We hope to see it soon. The 3:15 running time has made it a little more difficult to fit in at a busy time, but the coming week things slow down so should not be a problem. We were actually in line for the show last week when it sold out, which was surprising in this town, it's not the sort of movie that usually sells out here.

Well, minimum travel time, by any route, will still be 20.1 minutes (assuming your own vehicle counts as 1 car on the road, so t/10 will be O.1 minute for just you). A driver who starts on a t/10 road and encounters heavy traffic (where t >200) will assume they should not take the PQ instant road because that would dump them in more heavy traffic that will take more than 20 minutes. So they will continue on the 20 road. A driver who starts on a 20 road cannot predict traffic on the t/10 leg, so they will have to select the path based on past experience of it. If they anticipate heavy traffic (>200), then they would take PQ, knowing they are certain to only take 20 more minutes. If not, they would take the t/10 road, hoping to take less total time. So the optimal route really depends on the driver's knowledge of traffic conditions on those roads, it seems to me.

There are many things I would enjoy doing that I would not feel good about actually having done. Cultural forces shape us powerfully. And there are groups of humans (religious ascetics, e.g.) who studiously deny needs and feel much better about themselves. There are also arguments that many people make that we should sometimes engage in activities we do not enjoy, where those activities benefit others, express love and support, take us outside our comfort level in some character-growing way, etc. I think the relationship to alleles or groups of alleles will always be pretty murky.

I was unsure what was meant by "my index." @MSC ? Is this a specific meaning of index used in philosophy?

It is hard to change, partly owing to driving really being a group activity - goal: getting everyone safely to their destination - while many drivers want to play a zero-sum game of some kind where they "win" something. Driving should be ballet, not battle. One thing that I find mildly annoying is the way a long line of cars responds to a green light. If we were all really focused on cooperation, we would all start rolling forward when the light turns green. But, as we know, that is not what happens. Instead, each driver waits for the car in front of them to start moving before they do. (and given how tightly drivers pack themselves together at a red light, the optimal All Roll Together method would be difficult to achieve even if drivers were all attentive) IOW, most drivers don't respond to the larger situation. We're not fish, we don't coordinate our movements as a school of fish does. My overall answer, which is somewhat OT, is usually "mass transit," since I don't see most cities as really designed for huge numbers of private vehicles. We try to do that in the US, but the results are pretty awful.

Post was in jest. Was young women locked up in high towers not sufficient clue?

Absolutely! If stress is extreme, like being thrown in a dungeon in chains, follicular hair production increases tenfold. You will have a full beard in about three days. That's why dungeon dwellers in magazine cartoons always have long beards. There is a similar effect with young women who are locked up in high towers, except that it's head hair instead of facial hair. The hair grows quite long and more rope-like.

I did enjoy a good LOL at the above. A possible tack for an ethics thread might be to explore the OP question here: Is it okay to make yourself a little stupid with drugs, if it doesn't harm you, and helps you relax and enjoy activities? I lean towards yes. With the caveat that stupidity can be verrrry seductive. If you value an intellectual life, then "robotripping" (the general term I've heard for self-IQ-lowering) might be something to do in moderation. Especially where some respite is needed from possible overthinking of things.

True, and that's not the veracundiam fallacy because we are respecting the Nature author for being gatekeeper to good data and allowing peer review, not because they said so. IOW, we value authority when we believe in its integrity with evidence and honest and sound interpretation of that evidence. We value authority when it says in effect, don't value this based on my authority, just listen to the evidence and consider me a conduit for that evidence. So, with Francis Crick, we might say I will check out his claustrum hypothesis because he's brilliant and has made terrific hypotheses in the past. But we won't say, Francis, he's the authority on where consciousness comes from, so...case closed!

I think you are correct, because any proposed measurement would lead to circular logic, with no new information acquired. 5, the number, is itself a measure. Measurements, in this context, would be like saying My yardstick is 1 yard long.

Scopus is also good for citation count. Bear in mind, though, not all citations mean validation or approval of the paper in question. You could have cites that say basically James Clemens got it wrong and here's why... Which all serves to remind that Appeal to Authority (argumentum ad veracundiam) is a logical fallacy. Even someone who's a Nobel prizewinner in their field can be mistaken and fool themselves. For fun, google Francis Crick claustrum hypothesis.

Yes that could be in the mix, too. Though sad to think the kind of men who are engaged in the ultimate test of cerebral fitness and getting their kicks above the waistline (I'm grabbing phrases from the musical, Chess - credit to Tim Rice) would sink so low. Chess is not the first thing I think of when sexual harassment cultures come up. From my brushes with the chess world I would say that is not the best temperament to have for chess. Good chess comes from a fairly "zen" place. Well, that, and OCD. Just saw this. Yep. Well put, and LOL.

It's numbers. Chess used to be so dominated by men (watch the series Queen's Gambit for a taste of the early days) that it was thought that having a separate women's division would help them get past some intimidation and in the door. Gender divisions nowadays in chess are absurd. Almost all modern competitions in chess are open to all. Segregated divisions now only make sense in backward places where women are already socially segregated and a women's chess group at least prevents them from being completely locked out. The fact that women in Riyadh need a chess division is a symptom of their barbaric society, not lack of intellectual capacity. The only advantage men had was that they were more likely to be praised when very young for an interest in chess, were more encouraged to join a high school chess club, got more positive feedback for obsessing for hours over chess study and practice, etc.

I don't think it has to, if we define existence broadly. My dog is sleeping is a statement that corresponds to a process in the external world that depends on empirical verification for its truth. 2+5=7 does not. One statement corresponds to an external existence and condition. The other to a mental organization and manipulation of symbols. A unicorn, as a symbol of something magical, can also exist that way. @MSC points to hard memory as a way to locate such a process in the physical world, clearly waving goodbye to Plato. Probably a lot of debating the reality of mental states is semantic and just leads to category errors.

Would you say there is some unifying theme to your viewing? 😀 I have enjoyed shows with science themes woven in, like Breaking Bad, House MD, or the first CSI series. I mostly avoid "binge" shows where all the shows are connected in plotline so you have to watch every episode. BB was an exception. Fringe was okay, the ones I saw, except that the star always looked like she was smelling odd odors. X files was pretty uneven, but I liked the standalone episodes, sometimes referred to as MOTW episodes. The humorous ones were usually well done.

Analytic, as I understand the philosophy term, just means that we can equate all those ways of expressing a numeric value, so that we see 2+3=5 is always true. It's what Leibniz called a necessary truth, i.e. it is not contingent. It will be true in all worlds. I wasn't saying that adding two things to three things is not an operation, just that the statement about the result is analytic. Maybe it wasn't that relevant to the chat.

The old a priori. Kant and later philosphers called statements like that analytic. Analytic statements can be affirmed simply by analyzing the meanings of the terms. 2+3 is another way to say 5. They mean the same number, so the statement is analytic. It's like all bachelors are unmarried. The truth value of the statement is already to be found in the meaning of its terms. As opposed to synthetic statements, which require an empirical verification, a collecting of data from the world. Genady's dog is asleep. We can't determine the truth of that without asking Genady to go look at his dog. External conditions can change the truth value of that sentence in an instant. So the question is what sort of existence do analytic truths like those of mathematics have? Do they exist only as mental states, or is there, as Plato and his later followers suggested, some realm of ideas and forms where they exist independently of minds? Platonism hasn't done well in the past couple centuries, though I think I see echoes of it in phrases like the laws of nature. (Money has a residue of Platonism, for some people, who seem to think a twenty dollar bill has actual real value. Of course it's nothing but worthless paper - it only symbolizes an agreement between human minds to use bits of paper to represent an exchange of goods and labor. )

As someone with extensive time in rural settings, I have encountered a fair number of people who still find the bolt action rifle quite sufficient. And would view the assault style AR15 as unsuitable for a sporting hunt. A well-aimed shot from Grandpa's rifle will bring down a mule deer more effectively than an AR15. The rifle will shoot more precisely and will usually have a round that works on larger game, like a 30-06, while the .223 round that most AR series weapons use is not as good. (though its report is fine for scaring off cougars) Most pests were scared off, in my and my wife's family history of ranching and farming, by banging kitchen pots together, which saves ammunition and decreases chances of a stray round sailing through your herd...or your neighbor's kitchen a half mile away. 😀 So the computer chip analogy might need work.

Perhaps he is speaking of how people respond when another person's behavior is framed as an illness, compared to when it's framed as expressing oneself. For example, if we see someone speaking angrily as a proper response to injustice or other wrongs, we may applaud, whereas if we hear their words as paranoid ranting we may move away and even contact authorities. So perhaps how gender dysphoria is labeled makes a difference in how persons are treated, and also policies on treatments like HRT and GRA, where the person's inwardly perceived gender is affirmed by physical alterations. And, erm , also impacts that topic that SFN devoted 85 pages to, which I call The Chat That Wouldn't Die.

They might be more willing to listen to scientists, given that scientists created them. OTOH, there's also the nightmare scenario of Far Right coalitions that have AIs and feed them garbage data, the old GIGO problem. Or SkyNet scenarios, where the AIs develop very different priorities from human ones. A bit late to the party here, so I'll spare you my usual rant against profit-centered medicine. Others have pointed this out, and the gory details covered nicely. I continue to devour vegetables and walk miles every day, in hopes of depriving our healthcare system the pleasure of sinking its poisoned talons into me. Cheers.

I've heard some fields of science see five sigma as the gold standard, where the chance of that result being random would be one in a million. But you read of CERN experiments where at least six sigma is needed to be reliable. Six sigma would be something like one in a half billion. It would be good to see the SM get shaken up a little.