joigus

I loved the instrument, and the delivery is amazing. I can't say I like it better than Led Zeppelin's version though. This one is sweet. Led Zeppelin's is more... well, bittersweet. And I love both. Loved it! @beecee, I have a soft spot for working-class songs. One of the greatest American songs is, IMO, Sixteen Tons. So many unforgettable versions... I'm looking for a version by Merle Travis which he ends by singing, "I owe my soul to... Tennessee Ernie Ford". And the audience burst out laughing. It's taking me some time to find it. But in the meantime, here's a version by ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Vinnie Colaiuta is at the drums. He's been praised as one of the best drummers of all time.

Sorry. I hadn't noticed that the user had already been banned when I wrote my last comment.

You're right. That's what Newton did. If Kepler's laws are satisfied, what kind of distance-dependent power law do I need to reproduce them? And the answer is indeed an inverse-square law. But how do we know Kepler's laws would be satisfied in a 2D world? I don't think the gravitational law can be deduced. Your argument here is more akin to a deduction. But it still rests on a guess. If it's true that the overarching principle of gravity is that it reproduces the way field lines escape from a point in the same way that the lines representing a substance that once starts flowing away from a point, is conserved; then that would be what gravity would do in 2D. I agree. But that's a guess. Agreed. Nevertheless, one can still manage to find examples in which thinking in 2D is useful. Graphene being one example.

It has all the hallmarks of a scribal writing (very ornate, very sophisticated) that later derived in more sketchy pictographs. I would go with @Ericchiriboga's guess that it's very ancient. My rough idea is that it's one of those scribal symbols that have been found carved in bone, and going back to the birth of agriculture in China. Han civilisation? It does look like it's been carved in bone. It's perhaps interesting that the "radiating motif" on the top is strongly reminiscent of very common radicals in modern Chinese that very much look like a crown on top of the symbol. I've been trying to install Tagaini Jisho, which is an excellent Japanese dictionary, with no success, due to a problem of paths in the binary. As kanji Japanese is a simplified version of written Chinese, and this dictionary allows you to do a search by radical, it could be interesting to try to figure out what modern pictograph more closely corresponds to it. Too bad @Strange is no longer around. Maybe someone else is familiar with Chinese pictographs.

I've kind of addressed some of these questions before; to what degree of success, I don't know. We shouldn't wait for the chips to be down. A protocol should be developed when our minds are cool and can think straight. If something separates us from other primates very distinctly, it's our ability to plan for the future. I perfectly understand that most of us would act differently if we were under extreme pressure, myself including. It doesn't bear thinking. That's precisely why discussions taking place in this vein could be useful. I don't assume any of us is thinking under extreme pressure now. I also agree that for the most part, this discussion is constructive and interesting. It's a challenging problem, isn't it? Experimenting with torture is out of the question. What do we objectively know about it? Can we infer anything about it without reproducing the experiments? Somehow I can't picture the inquisitors back in the Sixteenth Century crunching numbers about the efficacy of their methods.

Google: "websites providing statistical data" Output: https://www.makeuseof.com/websites-find-statistics/ and many more. I hope that's helpful. Tell me if it works for you. I haven't checked them out.

What's the argument? How can you deduce the gravitational law?

Give us a quote from your famous avatar, that great philosopher-scientist.

I meant the child abuser or the terrorist that @beecee was talking about. Aren't those sociopaths? Maybe our wires got crossed there.

The important differential fact with respect to our case at hand is that most of us here are not sociopaths. Now, I don't know about papers corroborating this, but at least according to neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, sociopaths have a significantly higher pain threshold than socially typical individuals. I picked this from his Stanford lectures on Human Behavioural Biology. I'm searching for the references to papers that ascertain this point. Your suggestion of playing with the terrorists' mind I find much more acceptable, for many reasons. Truth serum, flooding his pituitary with oxytocin, or whatever other chemical that facilitates collaboration. Combination of use of chemicals with psychological manipulation. Have these possibilities been tried to the point that we know there is no other possibility but torture? Both Zapatos and you seem to be anchoring the bulk of your reasoning to this 'last resort' argument. I'm not sure it is to be applied here, and I would need a lot more convincing. These are not matters to be improvised in the face of a compelling case --however hypothetical it may be. A protocol should be established on the basis of maximum likelihood of producing results in a reasonable time to deploy an efficient rescue operation in the case you propose. If there were hard scientific proof that torture would lead to the desired results for the profile that we're talking about (sociopaths), that would be another matter. But I don't think that's the case. This is the most difficult aspect, I think. As to right or wrong, I don't think any of us can provide a philosophical reasoning establishing beyond any doubt whether a course of action is or isn't wrong --either irrespective of circumstances or otherwise. At some point we must adopt some kind of axiom, so to speak. I remember a conversation with a German person many years ago on reasons why bullfighting* should be banned --we both agreed that it should. Silly me, I said that torturing an animal is simply wrong. She said that she didn't think that was a reason. That the reason is that the animal doesn't have a choice in the matter. Well, I can think of thousands of ways to twist that philosophically, but I won't dwell into that. Sometimes we need principles, something that's to be considered as completely off the table. There's a reason why we call those "principles." * I'm not comparing the example with the matter at hand. The fact that both my example, and our topic here, have to do with torture is just coincidental. One is for the sake of a lesser evil; the other is for the sake of entertainment. I, of course, understand that.

No, I meant it more in relation to "how the Earth was created" or "made", "the Himalayas were created by such and such process," etc. You know what I mean. But now that you mention it, I remember there was a pseudo-religious-whatever people that played with the idea of creation and annihiliation operators as the two versions of the Hindu gods. Brahma was the creator (a+) Shiva was the destroyer (a) I assume the number operator aa++a+a was supposed to be Vishnu, "the keeper." 🤣

I agree with this. Fine-tuned seems to re-invent a concept that was already there, with much less anthropomorphic/deistic implications: ad hoc. I myself would like to see more and more people resisting the temptation to use these anthropomorphic/deistic words: created, tuned, etc.

Well, yes. As to the flatness problem, it does. Also regarding the causal paradox and the absence of monopoles. But at what price? Introducing another bunch of arbitrary parameters (number of e-foldings, hypothesis concerning the shape of an arbitrary curve!! --the inflaton field.)* It doesn't look like leading us in the direction of "naturalness" or less ad hoc, or less fine-tuned. You have to tune it too, don't you? Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favour of inflationary scenarios, and I have defended them here frequently. * Neil Turok is one of the interesting cosmologists to listen to in this respect.

Thanks for the clarification. Yes, you're right. But it's very difficult to obtain any quantitative picture from the article you provided. It's peppered with adjectivation, and adverbialisation directly derived from adjectives in almost every paragraph: cruel, brutally efficient cautiously, suspiciously ruthlessly, unhesitatingly, comprehensively, systematically, meticulously nearly certain, enough partial proofs, strong circumstantial case..., I'm aware that Hassner scarcely has any other way to qualify these procedures, their limits, compulsory character, range of applicability, etc., as the truth is we are inevitably constrained to use only historical analysis to infer these qualifications. A lot is presumably lost in "historical noise." Maybe contemporary sources were more interested in justifying their methods than really conducting a serious experimental analysis. I really don't know. I prefer to position myself among the sceptics and the cautious of the premise that torture is actually efficient in regards to obtaining information. Let me, please, insist on the particular point from the article that gave me pause: IOW: Most of the victims did not provide that information, if I understood correctly.

I'm aware of two fine-tuning problems in theoretical physics. One is related to the vacuum energy. We need something to correct for the "offset" of 120 orders of magnitude in its estimate coming from quantum field theory. The other is related to the cancellation of huge radiative corrections to the mass of the Higgs up to the order of such mass. As far as I know, they are very different. No consistent theory of quantum gravity has been formulated, so I think it's difficult to conceive of a mechanism that cancels those discrepancies while leaving a ridiculously small vacuum energy. The Higgs problem has been treated in the context of supersymmetry. No luck so far. Why that is a problem has to do with a concept that's very deeply rooted in the history of physics. Miraculous coincidences are very difficult to believe, and generally not a sound heuristic approach. It's possible that the idea of our universe being embedded in a much, much bigger multiuniverse in which the laws of Nature play with what we call universal constants (and we happen to live in a region in which they have the right value) cannot be easily dismissed. You can dismiss it only on the bases of unfalsifyability and/or (perhaps) non-simplicity. But I tend to look at the history of physics for inspiration, and when some exceedingly complicated adjustment has been necessary (think of the Ptolemaic tweakings to adjust the motion of the planets, complicated hypotheses about moving bodies before relativity), a much simpler solution always has arisen that had to do with a valiant re-thinking of the principles, rather than patching up the model.

(My emphasis.) From the same article. I'm still not convinced that torture is an efficient method to obtain information. In particular, I'm not satisfied with such inaccurate statements that contrast many against most. I tend to interpret most as a lot more than many. In that case, and if the author is to be believed, most didn't provide information. I rest my case.

Albert, huh. I happen to know him. His mechanics are Ludwig and Rudolf, and they always set the entropy on the dashboard to zero.

I'm not ignoring this. I'll answer ASAP. But I think @iNow has addressed it already. I meant my comments mostly in that spirit.

This is a very eloquent phrasing of what I meant to say when I wrote, I totally agree with the first part. I'm not totally sure that we can Bentham our way through this though. With this I concede that the problem is a difficult one. These arguments of counter-weighing the lesser evil against the far worse danger make me cringe. I always see the emotional/primitive-primate creeping in there. We all have that. @beecee: Putting the hulking brute father in the same cell as the criminal doesn't sound like a well thought-out method if what we want is to get the information that would lead to saving the child. I'm interested in proposals that would lead to saving the child. Beating the criminal to within an inch of his life, reducing his body to a pulp and watching his agony, having the father be the "expert" to be called in to perfom the operation, doesn't sound to me as driven by the urgency to solve the case. I want to make it very clear that I'm perfectly aware that I'm not talking from any high moral ground. If something like that happened to me, I would probably succumb to similar feelings. But it wouldn't be my frontal cortex speaking; it would be my amygdala. We all have that switch. So we're back to what is right. Good point. Let me get back to it later, please. Last night I was thinking about that same question, but I have to finesse my argument, because the way I thought about it, it might sound as if I mean something else.

Peterkin and Swansont have brought up the argument of uncertainty. Exchemist has brought up the argument of efficiency. Prometheus has brought up (and insisted on, to no apparent effect) the argument of experimental evidence to support such alleged efficiency, so in some sense strongly complements Exchemist’s argument. Those are all arguments I was thinking about myself before I started reading the comments. It’s taken me some time to start catching up. I’m not finished catching up yet. Weighing the dubiousness of an extreme procedure against the urgency or compulsory character of an extreme case doesn't seem to meet the standards of a rational setup to discuss the ethical basis for a course of action. It more looks like trying to motivate loopholes for an inexcusable, unjustifiable procedure. This last point has been dealt with by Phi for All. I can only add some aspects to why I agree with the previous opinions. The least I can say is that torture(* Definition), as a system to extract information from an individual, strikes me as an extremely unimaginative, unscientific way to deal with this hypothetical problem. Main arguments that resonate with my thinking: Uncertainty 1) Are you sure this person did it? 100 % sure? Then: Are you sure they didn’t do it out of coertion? 100 % sure?…, etc. I can go on forever to argue about how the “method” could be at least disproportionate based on uncertainty. Uncertainty, I hate to break the news to some of you respected and respectable members, is universal. It's always there in some degree. Efficiency 2) Would torture lead to information that's accurate enough, sure enough? Doesn’t seem like it would work. And not because it’s not been tried. History is rife with cases of false confessions under torture that lead nowhere useful to ascertain the facts. Evidence 3) Where is the experimental evidence that shows that torturing a person will lead to obtaining useful information? Irrespective of the psychological profile of the tortured person? (Taken from history, of course, because we would find many an ethical problem with actually conducting the experiments.) Alternatives: Why not more imaginative strategies based in game theory (the prisoner’s dilemma comes to mind), use of computing power, biotechnologies, even linguistics, or combination of those? (I know of a kidnapping case in Spain that was solved because the expression “bolo”, used in a particular way, appeared in the background in a telephone conversation, an it narrowed down the possibilities to a cluster of small villages.) It sometimes surprises me how much our imagination is silenced when the visceral comes into play. No, torture is never justified. It's never an intelligent solution. It's been tried to death --literally-- with no significant results to my knowledge. And worst of all, we know its realm is a part of the darkest recesses of the human mind that somehow still lurks there and we'd be much better off without, for good. Summarising: Not very imaginative! Prompted by the emotional, primitive, retributional mind, rather than the rational/empirical. Not experimentally borne out in any way that I know of. What about some science instead? * Definition: The act of causing somebody severe pain in order to punish them or make them say or do something.

But Danijel, aren't all definitions limiting? By definition?

Ok. Yes, I left out the Milankovitch cycles precisely because of that. Dan Britt does mention them in his talk at some point, but does not include them in the couple of graphs that I pasted there for reasons I guessed exactly as you said. I do remember that he mentions we are something like 100 years within one of them (glaciation), and yet glaciers are melting. That should be significant too, I surmise.

Another thing to regret: Mathematics are frequently used to dress up crackpot ideas, and other times to dismiss arguments, no matter how qualitatively and clearly they are presented. The very question concerning lagging vs leading which has surfaced before I find very interesting, but it's a question that has to be formulated with a bare-minimum mathematics after all.

You're right. Thank you for reminding us. The truth is these sponges could be enormously interesting in regards to appearance of life. Sponges are very primitive. They were there before the Cambrian explosion and Ediacara... And guess what, just before the Ediacara there was Snow Ball Earth. All life was presumably under the ice. Now these sponges are Arctic... Coincidence?

If this thing can make ribosomes that can make ribosomes, I guess it does. Because it derived from something that could make ribosomes that could make ribosomes.