Delta1212

The obvious caveat is that if he provides evidence for something he says, I can then evaluate the evidence, which I can then either accept or reject on its own merits and base my belief on rather than believing Assange himself. I'm not going to actively disbelieve that the sky is blue just because Assange says it is. I just won't be taking his word for it.

I did not say that no evidence presented by Assange is credible simply because it comes from Assange. In fact, I specifically referenced the fact that, were Assange presenting credible evidence, then attacking his credibility instead of addressing the evidence would indeed be an ad hominem. I said that Assange has not presented any evidence, and in the absence of evidence, I am disinclined to take his word for it. It should also be noted that, just in general, an ad hominem is not merely a personal attack but is specifically a logical fallacy. It specifically takes the form of attacking the validity of someone's argument by attacking the personal characteristics of the person making it. I am not attacking the validity of Assange's argument. I'm not sure he is even making a logical argument in the strictest sense, although if you boil it down to something like "If the source of the information is someone in the US, then the source is not the Russian government > The source of the information is someone from the US > The source is not the Russian government" then I agree that it's a perfectly valid argument. I am, rather, attacking the truth value of one of his premises based on the fact that there is no credible evidence that the source was someone from the US with legitimate access to the information. Evaluating the credibility of a piece of evidence is not an ad hominem attack, and this does not change if the evidence is simply that someone said something is true simply because the evidence is, then, the word of a person.

I do think this is a bit of a complex question insofar as it depends on how you define intelligence and how that definition interacts and is impacted by culture and environment. That said, I think it's rather trivial to state that there is no serious biological contribution to any differences in average intelligence and that the advances in technology over the last hundred years are are not in any way the result of a corresponding evolution of our biological capacity for intelligent thought that allowed us to develop said technology, which I realize is the point you were making for the purposes of this thread.

An ad hominem is an attack on an individual in order to discredit their argument rather than addressing the substance of their argument on its merits. Assange did not make an argument. He made a claim. The only source for that claim is himself. I am not attacking the maker of an argument. I am attacking the credibility of a source. If the only source for a piece of information is someone who lacks credibility, pointing out their lack of credibility is not an ad hominem. If he was citing a credible source, then attacking him instead of addressing the information would be an ad hominem. As is, there is nothing to address regarding his claim except for the likelihood that he is lying or misrepresenting what he knows. He has provided no evidence for his claims other than his word. And I don't find his word particularly compelling for the aforementioned reasons.

Depends on what you're going for. An annual physical is free or relatively inexpensive (like $20-$30) with most insurance. Without insurance it can range from a little more than the above co-pay to $100-$200 depending on where you are getting it done. Hospital visits, on the other hand, are almost always expensive with or without insurance. One person I know went with intense abdominal pain, got a hospital bed for a few hours, some pain killers and an ultrasound that didn't show anything but that they think may have broken up a kidney stone by accident and a prescription for antibiotics. The final bill was $7,000 about $5,000 of which was covered by insurance.

I stopped believing anything Julian Assange says a long time ago. The man is a hypocritical egomaniac with a personal motto of "privacy for me but not for thee." I was intrigued by Wikileaks' stated mission of global transparency when they first started, but in the intervening years, they've shifted from a stated policy of "We release everything we get as is" to using very obvious editorial control over what and when things get released seemingly based on Assange's personal feelings. At this point, they're less of a whistleblowing platform and more the heir to Gawker media, except with a founder who is more concerned with the numerous axes he has to grind with various people and entities than with page-clicks.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-2769290/Majority-Brits-1-000-saved-surprise-cash-Isa-rates-record-low-1-17.html But, also: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/11443008/Britons-have-an-average-of-32407-squirrelled-away-but-1-in-4-have-nothing.html I suspect in both the above case and in the US one, the "less than 1,000" number is only counting liquid assets in a savings account and not investments, savings bonds or retirement plans like 401(k)s. Which is not to say that everyone has those, but I suspect the amount the average person has saved rises significantly when you aren't solely counting cash on hand.

What exactly are you looking for it to do?

What if they are not living on US soil?

How do you feel about the ban on candidates receiving campaign donations from non-citizens?

Roughly, photons interact as particles, but travel between interactions as waves. That's overly simplified, but I think it works for the sake of this example. The double-slit experiment allows us to observe the wave behavior of individual photons by allowing them to interfere with themselves on their way to being detected as if they were a wave passing through both of the slits. This affects where the final interaction takes place on the screen at the end. By placing a detector, you are creating an interaction at one of the slits. It's no longer a wave with a double slit between it and the screen it will eventually hit and interact with. It's a wave traveling to the slits where it interacts with the detector and then sends out a new wave from that point which has a clear path from the slit it passed through to the screen, so no interference pattern. If you place a detector at the beginning of the experiment, the wave will travel to the detector, interact with the detector and then propagate again as a wave with the detector as a starting point. If there is a double slit after the detector, then you'll get the interference pattern exactly as normal. If you don't have the double slits in between, then you won't get the interference pattern. Obviously.

I can kind of visualize a four dimensional object. I start losing the thread at five dimensions, and by six is really more of a concept of what visualizing a six dimensional object should be like than an actual visualization. At seven I give up completely and it just becomes abstract knowledge rather than trying to picture anything. I once spent some time trying to work through how someone could play chess (or at least a chess-equivalent) using a board in 4+ dimensions, which helped a lot with getting the visualization aspect down.

I'm not sure that postulated is quite the right term. It falls out of Maxwell's equations, but nobody had fully worked through all of the implications of that before Einstein did.

You're getting into whether anything exists when no one is looking at it. While that is often conflated with the observer effect in the press, that is not what the observer effect is. Any interaction for which a particular state or property of a quantum object has an effect on the interaction will effect that state or property. There is no way to measure any state or property without setting up such an interaction. Hence the relevance to measurement. But the same interactions have the same effect regardless of whether anyone is watching or whether any instrument is recording for posterity. This is separate from the larger philosophical question of whether the room still exists when you leave it or the moon still exists when no one is looking, as the two classic examples generally go. We can't know what no one knows, and if the universe is capable of snapping back into a state as if everything had preceded exactly as it would have if everything had existed the entire time no one was present then there is really no way to tell one way or another. Even this is often conflated with the observer effect in science reporting, that is not what the observer effect refers to in terms of quantum mechanics, which is more about the inevitability of the thing being measured being changed by the measurement because of the way interactions work on the quantum level. But the interactions work the same way whether they are being used to measure anything by us or not. It's just that we can't measure anything without an interaction.

Or even a brick wall, for that matter. "Observing" just means "interacting in a way such that the property in question is important to the outcome of the interaction." It doesn't really require an apparatus designed for detection, recording or measurement.

You didn't ask if people wanted to live longer than currently possible by a few decades or even a couple of centuries. You asked why people who are ok with dying eventually don't just kill themselves right now.

Forever is a very, very long time. When people say they want to live forever, I think they are considering living for centuries and not considering way the experience of living for the next ten billion years would be like. I don't imagine that would be particularly pleasant, frankly, and so I'm not interested.

Or at least accidental ambiguities. Intentional ambiguities can be both necessary and useful depending on circumstances.

Yes, I did put loosely there for a reason.

Name one politician you don't believe should be killed.

I would seriously suggest doing some research into the results that modern artificial neural networks are getting right now. They're loosely modeled on the networks of neurons in the brain, and can be taught to perform tasks that were thought to be difficult or impossible for machines to do on a human level. They're what power a lot of modern image and voice recognition software, content recommendations, are behind a major recent upgrade to the machine translation ability of Google translate and in splashier news, one was taught to play Go to a level that allowed it to beat the top human players in the world. Such neural networks derive a great deal of their flexibility and power from the number of connections in the network, and the best neural networks we have today are achieving these results with many orders of magnitude fewer connections than are present in the human brain. If and when we solve the requisite engineering challenges to build a network with a comparable size to the one presently found in humans, I'd expect to see some remarkable stuff in terms of general AI. Intelligence is a complex trait whose features we have only been able to study directly in any serious way in the last couple of decades. Without being able to study the structure of the brain on a cellular level while it is intact, or get a reading on the responses to specific stimuli or outputs in real time, there was very little anyone could do in terms of real work to understand what was going on with our own minds on a physical level. And the technology to mimic those effects to a similar enough degree to achieve anywhere near comparable results is even more recent than that. You are, in effect, asking why humans are having so much trouble building airplanes even though birds have been able to fly for years, when no one had seen a live bird in motion until thirty years ago, and the wheel was only just invented in the last decade. Given the circumstances, we're developing the technology in that department remarkably quickly.

So you can't say that true randomness doesn't exist. You just hope it doesn't exist because you don't like the idea of it existing. You're in good company there. Even Einstein didn't like it. Unfortunately, as with everything else in science, the universe doesn't particularly care how we want it to work. It is what it is and isn't bound to conform to any notions we have about how it should or shouldn't operate.

I... what?

Of course it is possible to evolve rapidly, but that isn't related to active efforts to attempt to mutate by the organism. And altering the genetic code doesn't require many generations, depending on how you're defining that. A mutation happens in a single generation. It may take many generations to spread and become fixed in a population. Alterations in the genetic code don't start with epigenetic processes like the above. Those are separate things, generally speaking, than mutations and are not primary drivers of evolution, though obviously they have some effect. Think of most epigenetics of this nature as being like little switches on your DNA that control how genes are expressed. Things that happen to you, or that you do, can flick the switches on or off. And what state a switch is in can, in some cases, be heritable. But you aren't fundamentally changing the DNA in any way. The switches can be flicked back and forth. Flicking a switch doesn't change the lightbulb. It just changes what state it is in. And, just like mutations, while things that happen to you during the course of your life can certainly affect the traits that your offspring inherit, there is no simple correspondence between the thing that happens and the trait that is passed on as a result being helpful for that circumstance. It's like blindfolding a person and having them flick a light switch and assuming the position they put it in will help the next person see better. They're blindfolded. For all they know, they just turned the lights out entirely. You seem to be ascribing to this process a responsiveness to the environment that does not exist to the requisite degree for it to be meaningful. The peppered moth in coal country is not an example of this process, for example. There were always moths with the different coloring, just not as many because they weren't as good at camouflaging themselves. Then the environment changed and suddenly their coloring was a very good disguise so their population exploded and outpaced the old coloring. That is the extent of the cause-effect relationship between the environment and the evolution of traits. And yes, it can happen very quickly, especially when, as stated, the advantageous trait already exists in some form within the population.