Delta1212

Of course it happens to a similar degree in English. There is no way to tell the difference between the act of moving quickly by foot, an enclosure for keeping dogs and a panicked attempt to withdraw funds en masse from a bank except by context, and yet native speakers rarely confuse these meanings because, again, context. That's why using a machine translation as an authoritative source doesn't work. They've gotten better about utilizing context over time, but they still suck at it compared to people and when context is lacking they throw up one result that may or may not be the most likely one. The time period is also entirely possible to use as context. If I tell you the word "gay" appears once in an article written in 2010 and once in an article written in 1920, I think you should be able to figure out the probable meaning for each, which are not the seem, even though no other context has been provided. It's hardly ambiguous. Language changing like that is the reason that so many modern audiences think "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" means "Where are you, Romeo?" instead of expressing despair that he belongs to a rival family. But just because a meaning has become ambiguous or completely opaque in modern usage doesn't mean that people who are familiar with and study older works can't decipher the correct meaning or that it is actually ambiguous. There's not a debate over whether "wherefore" really means "where" or "why." I'm obviously completely on board with the fact that this phrase is not describing black holes in even a "kind of if you squint at it" way, but there are better reasons why this is wrong than the linguistic argument you seem to be trying to make.

I think a big part of the problem is that popular science and low level education focus more on the "stories" and less on the predictions of scientific theories. It's very easy to assume that we've been telling ourselves the wrong story and that in reality everything is different than we think it is. It becomes much less easy to think that way once you discover that scientists are much less concerned with the stories that get told about their results than they are with the results themselves, and that the real scientific theories are actually mathematical descriptions of precisely how things behave in reality and that these descriptions get tested over and over again in different circumstances such that it becomes very apparent when something isn't working the way it is supposed to, and this is actually what drives forward progress. To some degree, I think people are given the impression that all of our theories are the result of lofty philosophizing about the nature of reality. In truth, real science is a collection of very precisely detailed accounts of exactly what happens when you go out and poke reality with a stick. All you need to do is grab a stick yourself and see what happens when you give things a poke to tell whether the current accounts hold water or not. That's not something you can fake over extended periods of time. The rather simple solution is to not trust results from any single source. That's really a decent policy even if there is no corruption involved. Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes people are biased. Sometimes things break down. Sometimes people do everything perfectly and wind up with a statistical fluke in their results. Results really need to be replicated, preferably many times, before they can be considered fully reliable. Unfortunately, for many things, especially the more off-beat or niche studies, there is scant follow-up, so we're left with a lot of maybes that get treated as facts by the press until the next study comes along years later and determines the result from the first one was erroneous.

Intuition is mostly extrapolation from past experience. A lot of things that are outside of our daily experience don't behave in a way that is immediately extrapolatable from said experience. That doesn't mean you can't develop an intuition for those things by working with them extensively, though. There are a lot of things that are "counter-intuitive" in various fields that I remember being counter-intuitive when I first learned them but currently have to stop and think about why because they now seem very natural and the way I formerly 'intuited' that things should work seems quite wrong. Intuition is not a matter of what we are capable of understanding. It's a matter of what we are capable of easily guessing based on what we already know. The first would be a hard limit. The latter most certainly isn't.

The idea that amateurs are not only capable of contributing to meaningful science but that they are actually necessary because they haven't been indoctrinated by misguided ideas yet is both very appealing and mostly wrong. It's appealing because we all start as amateurs and most of us remain that way, because putting in the work to become a professional is both time consuming and difficult. Unfortunately, there is a reason for that. There is a huge amount of information out there, and that includes not just what we do know about the world but also what we know has already been tried and didn't work. An amateur tinkering in his garage might stumble upon something new and innovative, but most likely they'll be spending a lot of time stumbling down the exact same blind alleys that hundreds of thousands of other amateur scientists and inventors have stumbled down before them. A truly innovative perspective doesn't come from a lack of education. That's not a unique perspective; it's the one everyone starts with and there are plenty of people in the world with the exact same perspective, making the exact same suggestions and critiques without realizing that they've been suggested uncountable times before. No, a truly unique perspective comes from being highly educated in the field in question and being highly educated in some other field that scientists and engineers aren't typically highly educated in. It's not as appealing of an idea, but bringing something new to the table requires doing more work than everyone else, not less.

The two best uses I've found for Google translate are, one, translating long passages to get the gist of what they are saying. With individual words, it throws up a single random definition when many words have multiple, often completely unrelated, translations depending on context, and with single sentences are a crapshoot as to whether it'll hit upon the right idea and without larger context it can be difficult to tell whether a given translation is a little awkward or completely broken, and two, writing sentences in another language and then translating them back into English as a sanity check. If a sentence comes out in good English (and you didn't write a word for word translation with English grammar) then you probably wrote a good sentence in the other language. If it comes out garbled in English, you may want to double-check that you didn't get something wrong, or think about rewording it. That last one requires a decent knowledge of how Google translate works with a given language, though, as I've found there are some things in, for example, German that are perfectly natural to say but that it has a difficult time translating properly, and you sometimes need to work around certain words or sentence structures that tend to confuse it.

Google/Bing can give you a rough idea of what something means most of the time, but I would not trust them as being overly reliable in any one specific case, especially for non-European languages. They're a supplement to understanding, not a good primary source. Especially, incidentally, for Arabic which has quite a lot of variance by both region and time period. You might as well run Spanish, French and Latin exclusively through the Italian translation setting.

A few points. Senescence, that is the process of aging, is quite a bit more complex than just "telomeres" and we don't have quite the in depth understanding of it that you seem to think we do. We know more than we did in the past, but we're a far cry from being experts. Additionally, there is likely a limit to how advanced our technology can get. The things that are physically possible for us to do are finite and it's entirely possible that we may never figure out some things that are possible simply because they are exceptionally difficult to figure out. The difficulty is that we have no real idea where the hard or soft caps on human ability lie or how close to them we are. And lastly, robots are precise, unbiased and without opinion in large part because they are currently very dumb. That's not an intrinsic property of robots. That's a property of robots that we have built. We don't know what a truly intelligent AI would look like. That's going to depend on what we build it to be like, and it's very possible that with the way our more advanced AIs are currently developed, there may be elements to how really advanced ones turn out that are not entirely within our control or fully predictable. It's also not a problem to intentionally program one to be an emotional mess if that's what you really wanted. Artificial intelligence is going to depend heavily on what it was built to do rather than being anything like the robots you tend to see in science fiction.

But I don't hate people who vote Republican. That's my point. I have many relatives who vote Republican. I have many relatives that I consider good people who vote Republican. When I point out terrible things that Republican politicians have done in our country, my objective is to get people to notice that, hey, that's actually a pretty terrible and harmful idea. I'm not calling people who have voted for Republicans monsters. At worst, I think many of them are misinformed. You're conflating criticism of an idea with criticism of the character of the people who subscribe to that idea.

It's impolite to protest in a way that calls attention to an issue that people would rather ignore.

I know plenty of generally normal people with good intentions and reasonable hopes for themselves and their country who also have some very noxious opinions on certain subjects. A problem I run into over and over again is the caricaturization of things like racism. People follow a chain of logic that goes something like "Racism is evil. If someone calls something I believe racist, they are calling me evil. I am a good person. Therefore that person is wrong." You can be wrong, you can be violently dangerously wrong to the lasting detriment of whole swathes of the population, without being an evil person. You can hold views that harm other people when implemented and still be a completely average normal person. We cannot have a political debate about the value of ideas if you identify so strongly with a particular opinion that you take any criticism of that opinion as an indictment of you as a person. If a particular idea or political philosophy has done demonstrable damage to people in this country and elsewhere, you cannot say "Criticizing this philosophy means that you think I'm an evil person and I can't deal with anyone who thinks I am evil." While I do respect you and the way that you present your thoughts, TAR, this is something I have noticed that you do a lot. You have a tendency to interpret criticism of certain policies, beliefs or political organizations as sweeping judgments of the moral character of anyone who supports those things. You can be wrong without being a bad person, and I think you need to try to stop interpreting people pointing out that you or others are wrong as people claiming that you or said others are somehow evil people.

You don't know what a third way Democrat is? I've been on your side for pretty much this whole debate, but I do find that mildly surprising and think that it's important information for historical context, even if it doesn't change my vote at all.

We're not really in a position to look for any other kind outside of our own solar system at the moment. As the drunk said, this is where the light is.

So you're saying that the main problem with the Black Lives Matter movement is that they all make sweeping generalizations?

There have also been many criticisms of Obama that he seems to be a Muslim who was born in Kenya.

Is that likely to happen?

Glad to see I'm not the only one that made the mental association between the Trump campaign and that scene. That was really very well done.

And that's before you even throw in ethics as a complicating factor. You can't just keep cloning humans with different genes turned off to see what breaks.

I think it's culturally important to consider our rights as things that exist independently of the government, since it's easier to justify taking them away if you're in the mindset that what rights you have is up to the government to decide rather than something that needs to be defended against being infringed upon by the government. But like pretty much all of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works, it obviously isn't objectively true. Rights don't really exist. They aren't physical things. But the story is still important because human behavior is shaped by the stories we choose to tell each other.

But knowing a reason for a general behavior does not make individual expressions of that behavior deterministic. You can't know which way any individual photon will go ahead of time no matter how much information you have, and that is including all possible hypothetical sources of information, not just a result of us not being able to do it technically. On the quantum level, there are non-deterministic processes that involve an element of probabilistic randomness. And there are mathematical proofs demonstrating that it isn't just a technical limitation that we haven't figured out yet. We don't live in a clockwork universe and events are not perfectly deterministic.

I've stopped thinking of it as smaller and just think of it as homogenously denser. Our current observable universe may have been the size of a pea at some point, but I solve the "pea floating in empty space" by imagining that the universe outside of the observable universe is the same as the universe outside the observable universe, so while I may still be "outside" the observable universe when imagining it smaller, I'm sitting in a dense block of matter and energy rather than empty space.

You make that sound significantly easier than it would actually be to do.

My family has done it. I went through 23 and me, and the information it provides is very interesting. Not sure how much impact it would have on further research, though. I suppose it depends. My dad, for instance, is very into genealogical research and had most of what he's done upended when he got a DNA test done to compare with his cousin for research purposes and discovered that his father wasn't really his father. But that's probably a little more dramatic and immediately applicable to continued research than what most people would get.

I said it was important. I didn't say it was easy or always comfortable. It's much less scary not to see the train barreling down the tracks at you, but it also robs you of the opportunity to get out of the way.

Italiannihilation?

I was disagreeing most specifically with the "unlike civilians" part of what you quoted and highlighted. Civilians are no more or less free to say things that compromise their ability to do their job than public employees are. Private employers can and will fire people who compromise their own ability to do the job they are employed to do.