Alan Turing died 70 years ago
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Government_apology...
Homosexuality was seen as a perversion in the public eye.
We should be introspective, and it helps, but it is far from being a solution. It is very difficult to get away from personal feels, or from you culture.
I've thought about this way more than I probably should. While I don't have any answers, I do think two very famous attempts are particularly worth studying (and IMHO, blending). Immanuel Kant's exploration, particularly his categorical imperative, and Jon Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.
IMHO though, it's a very difficult task because we humans tend to base our moral judgments on our emotional reactions to things, and our reactions (such as disgust) are a complex combination of instinct from past evolution, and culture we are raised in. If the outcome from some system/principle disagrees with our emotional reaction, we tend to discard the system rather than examine and question our reactions. I actually find Robert Sapolsky's work (and others in that area) to be just as interesting/illuminating because while they don't provide answers themselves, they do a remarkable job helping us see the challenges involved with trusting our gut.
There is no ultimate right or wrong, it's all perception.
Moral and value are both subjective. I doubt there is a single value that all people share across the world and time. So it's always about perceived morality at a certain place and time.
Possibly, but the law was criminalising what happened in private. There's a big difference between prudish laws that ban public displays and intrusive laws that govern what consenting adults do in private.
Perhaps the lesson is that actions done out of a sense of moral righteousness should not be immune from challenge. Much evil is committed in the name of good.
> “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
People seem to thing us moderns are more moral but we're not really, we just changed our morals so other cultures look immoral in comparison - and we look immoral in comparison to them too.
Lest you think this is totally confined to the past:
> In his concurring opinion [on Dobbs], Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. […]”
Those would be the court cases which legalised contraception, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage across the US. It would be a mistake to think of this sort of intrusive law as purely a thing of the past; the far-right will bring them back, given half a chance.
my point would be ethics is also subjective, and thus morality and ethics can be used interchangeably. in german, they are! (Ethik und Moral/Moralität)
Of course if you define both words to be the same thing to the point where they're interchangeable then the meanings change, but that's not what those words mean to me. I don't define ethics to be a socially held belief.
What do words even mean?
Edit: I don't know why I'm arguing with you, I have no strongly held belief and don't care about this at all.
>His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido, known as "chemical castration".
I will never recognize a government's right to tell adults what they can do with their own bodies and other consenting adults, and it's insane that there are zero governments in the entire world that can uphold the basic principle of full bodily autonomy. Death to tyrants
If there is zero government you get gang rape etc so it's more a question of where you draw the line.
that's not what gp said
> it's insane that there are zero governments in the entire world
He said the subset of governments for which it is true they uphold full bodily autonomy is the empty set.
He did not state anything about a country not having a government
Its almost like that's what they said
That rank populism is what Franklin warned us against and sounds suspiciously like a Leni Riefenstahl movie, except to libertarians.
But what’s the argument that doesn’t resort to the supernatural? There’s a logical, utilitarian basis for saying that governments are created by societies to effectuate the popular will. There’s no God-favored king or clergy, and biology doesn’t anoint some humans to rule over others, as with say bees, so the popular will should be carried out. Insofar as the people have committed to things like constitutions and laws, of course, that can provide a principled basis for limiting what the government can do to individuals.
But OP was talking about some “principle of full bodily autonomy” that apparently transcends any specific constitution or law. Where does that come from? If the people don’t believe in any notion of “bodily autonomy”—or impose particular limits on that concept—what higher law can possibly override that?
You invoked Franklin’s statements about “populism.” But Franklin thought that humans were made by God and that God-created law was a real thing that existed. Under that world view, it makes sense that a democratic society couldn’t decide to say legalize the murder of rich people, because God’s law was higher than man’s law. But presumably we are not having a theological discussion here. If we don’t accept the notion of divine law, how can there be limits on what democratic governments can do with the consent of the people? The people’s law should be the highest law, right?
I do not accept your divine law drivel nor do I accept your people's law either/or. Instead, I would counsel you to re-read and meditate on the Preamble to the Constitution, especially that part where it says in Order to form a more perfect Union. That part, the Enlightenment part.
But that's exactly my argument! Franklin's beliefs about "populism" are based on "divine law drivel"--God's law imposes limits on democratic law. If we reject that--which is exactly what I'm trying to do here--what basis do you have for saying that the people can't make whatever laws they want?
You're the one invoking supernatural concepts--this supernatural notion of "bodily autonomy"--not me.
The entire concept of "human rights" is premised on the idea that there are some principles that should override "the will of the people", which without any kind of protections of rights amounts to simple mob rule. I don't think you should get to lynch someone because the whole village doesn't like them, and I don't think the government should get to tell you what to do in the bedroom or what drugs you can take, regardless of what you can get a howling mob to think. I swear they don't teach people basic ethics these days. Or maybe it's just tech people? No wonder this industry's a garbage fire right now
You're just articulating a quasi-religious belief, and appointing ourself as the clergy of this quasi-religion, without admitting that's what you're doing.
Seems everyone and their grandma wants to hold the torch of "rationality" and declare anyone who has an actual belief about something "dogmatic." It's intellectually facile and morally bankrupt
But no, fool, the principle of autonomy, or in this context that "the state shouldn't make decisions about what individuals can do to and using their own bodies" is not an arbitrary moral position, it's a meta-norm that has deep mechanism design implications in a functioning cosmopolitan society, ones that the balance of evidence suggest make that society work better for everyone except for the very lucky tiny percent of authoritarian busybodies that win the inevitable holy wars that come of structuring society around the premise that a state should be able to micromanage your individual life. I say that we have not achieved a state that truly doesn't meddle in this way (and one that are closest have in some senses backslid in the last century or so), but every move in that direction has produced both stability and prosperity
The very mindset you're espousing, that no one person's morals should determine the law, is a derived principle of enlightenment liberality. It's exactly why populism can't create a stable functioning human society
Liberality and consensual autonomy isn't a charter for total nihilist moral relativism and it doesn't call for every decision to be made by pure mob rule, it calls for government to act as a superstructure to allow democracy without lynchings and pogroms against political dissenters and laws against sex you don't like. It's a technology, not a religion
Moral nihilism doesn't imply that you're wise, it implies that you're spineless
Theatrics aside, it seems like you’re saying that the basis of your “principle” is empirical effectiveness. That is of course a reasonable secular basis for lawmaking. But that confronts two problems:
1) That still doesn’t give you a justification for overriding the democratic will. Empirical effectiveness is evidence that you might submit to the public about what policies would be beneficial. That doesn’t transform it into some “meta-norm” that by its own force overrides democratic law.
We have tremendous evidence that market economies are better than planned economies. But only kooky right-wingers think that makes capitalism a “meta-norm” that must override the popular will!
2) Your historical analysis falls short. China’s rise shows you can become rich and prosperous without embracing bodily autonomy as a principle. Even moral regulation of individuals in the west was quite stringent during the period when the west was getting rich—moreso than societies that were less regimented but didn’t get rich. Victorian England, for example, was a high water mark.
Moreover, the societies that have gone the furthest in embracing notions of bodily autonomy are uniformly on the path to extinction. Western Europe is slowly being replaced by Muslims from cultures that reject such notions.
This absolutely delusional view of popular opinion and government priorities - along with the Great Replacement conspiracy nonsense - has led me to conclude that your preoccupation with the accusation that "people who merely believe in free markets" are right wing kooks might have more to do with your own being objectively and obviously a right-wing kook living in a fantasy world than it has to do with any reality about the general public's attitudes and beliefs in aggregate. Of course if you're one step from joining the next great wave of populist fascisms you think everyone's a tankie. Anyway, I think it's pointless to try to talk sense into someone who believes that anything remotely resembling "muslims taking over" is a serious existential threat to like, all of NATO? or whatever counts as "Western" this week, (Or for that matter, somehow an existential threat to white people as a whole worldwide, which seems to be what you lot tend to actually mean by that euphemism). There is a real war going on in Europe that has nothing to do with muslims, and you idiots worry about a slight uptick in brown people immigrating because some charismatic suits told you to. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. I'll leave you to your frothing madness
As to Muslim migration to Europe: I’m not invoking any “Great Replacement conspiracy.” Quite the opposite. I’m from a Muslim country, and I've come to believe that our rejection of individual autonomy is empirically superior to European embrace of that concept (at least to the extreme it has been taken in post-Christian Europe). The notion of individual autonomy has made their societies literally unsustainable. Those countries must resort to importing population from Muslim countries in order to just to continue existing.
So to recap: “full bodily autonomy” is just a principle (frankly, it’s a cultural precept of European culture). And its empirical results are mixed. So why should such a principle override the popular will?
Paranoia and edginess begets more paranoia and edginess it seems. I projected stuff onto you that wasn't fair. I sincerely apologize for that
With that said, you're still dead wrong on universal rights. I evoked outcomes because my claims of better outcomes are in vogue as an epistemic path currently, but it's far from the only one that favors it. As I said before no government has existed that fully respects human autonomy (And this isn't that surprising honestly. A government is at the end of the day fundamentally the winner of a contest to see who has power over people, and people who want power tend to want to use it), but as we have asymptotically approached these perhaps unachievable ideals from numerous directions, we can study the trends empirically and say that freer societies on balance tend to do better over time. Sure, there's no single definition of "better" in the world, but quite a few correlated ones. If you permit degrees in your model, the information landscape's structure becomes a lot more apparent. Periods of more freedom for individuals (whether in life, love, commerce, whatever) produce better outcomes across numerous dimensions (more active economies, more great art is made, more scientific discoveries, more people who want to fuck off and have a simple life with people they care about can have it without as much fear of being targeted by powermad states as their will becomes more predictable - predicated on strong meta-principles - and less arbitrary and based essentially their taste, as you have tried to claim all morality is). Obviously there are points in every tradeoff space where other factors may outweigh this correlation. But for individual autonomy this is pretty rare. Feel free to cite a counterexample if you think it's so apparent they're there.
But there are lots of tools for examining complex systems instead of just resorting to the solipsism of "Well some people disagree so there's clearly no way to know." Game theory is an attempt from the realm of logical models rather than empirical ones, and the equilibria of oppression always tend toward cycles of dystopian contraction and bloody revolution, not just because that's littered throughout history, but because when we purport that we can better society by intruding in people's ability to self-determine, there will always be a subset of people for whom rebellion and if possible destruction of the order imposing tyranny will be the only viable course of action. And killing or jailing all those people is already getting pretty dicey for this whole "This world is better for everyone on balance" propositon, but doing that is also a feedback loop. It's pretty apparent why seeing the atrocities of power, even from a wholly selfish perspective, the "what if I'm next someday, or someone I care about is, etc" could lead many to become opposition themselves.
Every time people say "Well my tyranny will make society better", they always mean "For me and mine", an in-group, which may be as small as close friends and family, and may be as large as "people who don't get ground to dust by the tyranny directly and will fall in line instead of rebel". Like the American neotraditionalists point to some (usually at least partially imaginary) time in the distant past when no, really, everyone was a christian, and everyone was super happy and prosperous! Nonsense. Even if my rose colored glasses come from the fact that my ancestor I'm thinking of was literally the king of a christian nation, and thus are probably pretty correct in saying that guy had it quite good back in the day, every king has the blood of the conquered on his hands, and every tyranny made life worse for a lot of people. Anti-semitic pogroms pervaded medieval Europe. Lots of women who didn't accept the life of a second-class citizen were and still are directly harmed by the mechanisms that enforce that choice on them in societies where we do not have equal rights. And to be clear, this does permit degrees and improvement in equality is good even if it's not perfect. Degrees matter everywhere.
So let's say you're renaissance Britain or, hell, modern Iran or Uganda, and you put your gays to death. Those gays hella didn't have a better life, and by saying "well we consider it immoral so it's justified", you just said "Those are bad people anyway, because I said so. Their happiness and prosperity doesn't count." Same for people who worship a different god or do the wrong dances about it or whatever. It's circular reasoning.
You have said that my position that human rights are of value is an arbitrary dogma, but I think the kids these days have it right when they say the thing about accusations and confessions. When our crimes as a society have victims, we can straightforwardly say "No, it's good we lock up the murderers, the harm they do to others outweighs the harm we do them by not allowing that behavior, and sometimes even preventing it by harming them directly, by quite a lot". Your principles may be arbitrary preferences, but that does not mean it's impossible to have principles that aren't
When you can have crimes with no victims, you have to invoke either literal imaginary beings or deeply complicated abstractions ("Monocultures are good because something something social cohesion so it's totally a net good to kill the heathens, trust") to make the morality make sense. I can tell utilitarianism is in vogue because of how often these people grasp at some complicated sociological theory when trying to justify their weird vendettas. Maybe in the giant pile of bullshit that every super complicated economic or sociological model there's One Neat Trick Free People Hate that will Be Good Tyranny Actually, or maybe one of these unfalsifiable literal angry demiurges will end up being real, but I doubt it, and it doesn't seem worth trying every charlatan's rationalization to let them oppress people they hold responsible for some nebulous harm like "social decay" that you supposedly need three advanced degrees to even talk about to find out
The project of modern democracies has always been trying to find the way to grasp the dove's wings and be responsive to the will of the people without just going and burning a witch every time someone popular and charismatic enough drums up a big enough mob. The fact that this is falling apart in an age of unprecedented wealth disparity and unprecedented power to disseminate propaganda is not uncorrelated with the fact that people feel worse off and angrier. Occam's razor likes the argument that that's what's happening a lot better than my aunt's argument that the rainbow rays that come off her gay landscaper neighbors are somehow doing this. When the argument that pagans or queers or weirdos of some other kind aren't objectively batshit, they sound more like arguments that not having to deal with people they don't like would optimize the last sharp corners of the world for people who are already not really suffering, not like this urgent and existential threat they tend to sell it as when trying to open a can of "will of the people" on some people they basically just don't like the aesthetics of
A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence that now seems both cruel and absurd—particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.[0]
--- [0] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201212/ldhansrd/text...
That specific bit of reasoning is very likely wrong.
The circumstances of Turings investigation and arrest started with Turing going to the police to report that had been robbed by a person considered to be a rent boy.
If he had the slightest notion of how homosexual behaviour was dealt with by the regular police and that he would be the main subject of interest rather than the robber he would not have reported the theft.
Turing very much came from a class isolated from common consequences, he spent his youth at an elite school and then university, later at Bletchley Park, all places where lads with an odd bent were not at all uncommon, largely tolerated although often teased, and very rarely, if ever, arrested.
What's the (north african?)-set movie to which Mika refers in this tube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MPtXUeUznY
While I find my eyes and ear (même les américaines comprennent) caught by Mme Mac, and I wouldn't have the foggiest in what context "molly with a Dilly" might usually occur, the video and text make one suspect that MM. Doriand and Mika tended to foreground the other characters (do long guns imply rough trade?).
[come to think of it, an odd bent would probably have been a career advantage at Bletchley, in that one might have been already habituated to picking up on metadata during traffic analysis?]
The following piano man bars just prior to the singing are, to my ear, a definite riff on Moby's Extreme Ways that was repurposed for the Jason Bourne films.
So bouncy .. does no one call back to Arthur Rimbaud anymore? https://genius.com/Paul-kelly-and-the-messengers-the-executi...
Everyone loves long guns, how else can you reach the gate from the house? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
All transverse geometries are alike, each non-transverse geometry fails to be so in its singular manner.
Mark and Sam (XXI): Солнце моё, взгляни за меня (my sun[shine], spot for me)
Otherwise, it's Sierra Leone alright ("movie-set")
(Or Maltese Falcon for a very loose def of "set" or "N Africa")
[0] fr wikipedia for the song
The multivalued functions are a relief — should the sparks/stars lit in my noggin by a comment align in a different direction from intended, it's not that I'm running riot in a deterministic world, but merely finding myself perhaps at the same coordinates, but on a different sheet, in a nondeterministic one?
The Maugham story in which bumble-puppy appears (if slightly later in the decade than in Huxley) is worth reading, especially with the background that WSM worked for MI6 and had (orientation as well as valuation?) reasons to make use of glueings along branch cuts in his personal, as well as his professional, life.
> In a place like the sanatorium where there was little to occupy the mind it was inevitable that soon everyone should know that George Templeton was in love with Evie Bishop. But it was not so easy to tell what her feelings were. It was plain that she liked his company, but she did not seek it, and indeed it looked as though she took pains not to be alone with him. One or two of the middle-aged ladies tried to trap her into some compromising admission, but ingenuous as she was, she was easily a match for them. She ignored their hints and met their straight questions with incredulous laughter. She succeeded in exasperating them.
Being partway through Conflict, War and Revolution(2022)*, I think something may be coming together modelling all your options: Kaczynski and Galois may have been too idealistically violent (the one having done what he could unto others, the other having suffered what he must?) and Grothendieck too idealistically nonviolent (which obviously leads to minimising one's dot product with the world) but Kolmogorov found a nonviolent quadrant inside Machiavelli's pragmatic lead: Fortune provides a martingale process, and virtu consists of minimaxing one's expected interests with respect to her whim.
On a planet like earth it is inevitable that men should seek the favour of Fortune, but it is rarely easy to tell what her feelings are. (or, for that manner, if they even be iid)
* https://press.lse.ac.uk/site/books/m/10.31389/lsepress.cwr/
EDIT: not "viti"
Going to flip through your recommendations (at least) with an eye (3rd) towards ergodicity (or even Hurwitz spaces)
EDIT: don't worry too much about Galois -- you make me wonder if I had not read his letters (esp the fine print in his last testament) too carelessly.
I have been brought up in a culture where seduction follows a sequence ("running the bases"); are there cultures where that does not suffice, and seduction requires more sophistication: a net*, say, or even a filter?
* in line with the genre fiction cover kind of net, someone once won a competition we had at uni for "best line to get a member of the appropriate sex into your room" with 75 pound test, eg https://fr.aliexpress.com/i/839412765.html
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM (Scholes, Meriwether, and Merton would've done well to listen more to this one?)
Re: uni- Cantabrigian?
Yes, for "better" seduction technik, you should restrict your search to uni culture.
If either of us had had any irish gaelic, maybe we would've agreed upon glas? see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briggs_(surname)#:~:text=Brigg....
If that's too much travail, consider that its location is the namesake of an oikos that perpetually draws in a certain Homeric hero.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JhdMPkA0YM&t=120s
(as for me, one of my friends is on the faculty, studying among other things quiver varieties, which brings us full circle back to Penelope, who set up the competition with Odysseus' bow. If it were an asian recurve bow, it makes sense that the suitors might've tried to string it backwards, and if it were a horseback bow, the draw weight for its size might easily have been such that only someone who knew the foot trick for stringing would've managed)
(Acronym because I need any now or ever other lurkers on this thread to work just a wee harder)
Otherwise I fear the vexillary varieties may indeed be waving from his (not a Tits building) field pavilion.
Here's a ... my response to that as a theoretical engineer https://youtu.be/v5ev-RAg7Xs
(1:10 Every property a feature! (See comments for less obvious takes with regards to your coalescence hierarchies))
Your geneticists? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
EDIT: ahhh missed that it's already frontpaged
PEE: looks like the usual nonconfrontational juxtaposition of the tribes ("they use our words but not our theorems")
As Physics for the staid hens, So Flags for the rabid fens https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruy%C3%A8re (Root of Bruhat?)
(if we were chemists, H₁₅ would sound very unstable)
But if we were physicists H₁₅ would have a rich inner life https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/142
"Gnoramus et gnorabimus?" is absolutely gusting, btw...
This reminded me strongly of a paragraph from Funakoshi (冨名腰 義珍):
When birds of prey are attacking,
they fly in low without extending their wings.
When wild beasts are about to attack,
they crouch low with their ears close to their heads.
Similarly, when a sage is about to act,
he always appears slightly dull.
After having translated to simplified characters, and thanks to a literary search engine, I found the referent[9]:
鸷鸟将击，卑飞敛翼；
猛兽将搏，弭耳俯伏；
圣人将动，必有愚色。
Did Jiang follow his own advice?
[0] or magma, as it's called when it's at home
[1] having "rhymed" 'repeats' with 'feet'
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction#Grue_a...
[3] https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabenstreich#Konnotation
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20140223235036/http://www.hawaii...
[5] in the earlier "8 important phases of Karate" https://archive.org/details/karate-do-kyohan_202203/page/248... I'm not sure what the first 2 are supposed to convey other than the constant waxing and waning (would we now say chaotic time evolution?) of relative concentration, relative strength and weakness, etc? However, all of the last 6 I've encountered in more than one —western origin— agonistic context as well.
[6] note that to better appeal to a mainland audience, by this date Karate (唐手 "Tang[chinese] hand") has already been rebranded as Karate (空手 "empty hand")
[7] indeed, "Shotokan" as the name of the school derives from Gichin's pen name, Shōtō (松涛 "pine billow")[C]
[8] actually Shōtō faithfully gives us the source:《六韬·武韬·发启》but for some reason (Japanese pariochialism? The cold war? or just plain ignorance, as the facing page implies, that the circles indicated sources?) his translator forgot to include it?
[9] https://m.zuowenxue.com/mingju/3069.html
[A] even if the book[D] in which this appears dates from 500 years after its supposed author, as the english wp page suspects, it's still worthwhile advice from ~2'500 years bp.
[B] who achieved literary immortality in at least two other ways: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/姜太公釣魚——願者上鉤#Idiom and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/姜太公封神——漏了自己
[C] one suspects Funakoshi had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Treasures_of_the_Study#Fo... in his study?
文 房 四 寶:
筆,墨,紙,硯
[D] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/六韜#豹韜 . I have yet to delve into this, but supposedly a fair amount of it is supposed to be about first (a) laying the groundwork, and then (b) reaping the rewards when[F] the moment is propitious.
[E] in which he never awarded himself more than a 5-dan; see the 2nd idiom in [B].
[F] compare von Seydlitz, or Grothendieck's "when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough"?
Missed a step on the staircase, but as the classy Soviets might not have said,
All should start with 'G'
!!!
Now to immerse in your bit of rising sea (of lava???涛? https://nobu-tokyo.com/how-to-enjoy-suicide-forest/ >The two lakes Saiko lake and Shojin lake were the edge of lava and were the part of Semoumi.
This was reported to the Imperial Court at the time and was documented. )
!!!
Maybe the precious metals are despised for their wanton shininess. Rocks are fine. Steel is functional.
!!!
JZY famed for his expeditions against the common enemy (the Eastern Barbarians)? Reportedly enffeoffedd for this.
16. 君不肖，则国危而民乱;君贤圣，则国安而民治。祸福在君，不在天时。
。。。
18. 全胜不斗，大兵无创。
1. Cultivate virtue 2. ??? 3. Profit
Although 不在天时 suggests that the sovereign can engage at a time fully of his choosing, contra vS. (though maybe concurrent with Sasha)
This is already (!!!???) contradicted in the expansion: 太公曰：「王其修德以下賢，惠民以觀天道。天道無殃，不可先倡；人道無災，不可先謀。
天道無殃，heaven's-way no harm
不可先倡；cannot initiate
人道無災，people's-way no disaster
不可先謀。cannot plan
(Following the) way of heaven: come out unscathed, but we (neither heavenly nor omniscient) can't even start upon this path. (Following the) way of humanity: (suffer setbacks but) no disasters, we (can trace out these paths by seizing* opportunities and avoiding calamities, but) can't plan (our exact steps in advance).
Circling back to Turing: the gods can solve the halting problem, but we just have to evaluate the small-step semantics and see what happens?
* "techniques will occur when a void is found"
They claim that, but I don't see how it could possibly be true, based on the cast listing at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056172/fullcredits : apart from an uncredited nurse (Barbara Cole) it seems like a screenplay calculated to make Ms Bechdel sad.
(Consider the period)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4k3PLr4LQ ("Following the debut of this film, Sagan moved to England.")
That is what pardons are for. If he was not properly convicted then the conviction could have been overturned instead.
With that said, and Turing having been pardoned by the Queen (posthumously), I wonder if pardons in the UK also carry the "imputation of guilt" that pardons in the US carry as defined by the SCOTUS [0]?
Of all the men in history charged with "gross indecency", Turing was the only one to receive a pardon. He was not castrated for being gay, but for a relationship with an Eastern European 19-year old homeless man, and getting his house broken into, while having a security clearance and access to secret information.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make here. His chemical castration was a condition of his probation following his indecency conviction, and had nothing directly to do with his security clearance.
> following his indecency conviction, and had nothing directly to do with his security clearance.
It had nothing directly to do with his being gay. You can be gay without starting relationships with homeless boys and getting your house broken into, exposing yourself to blackmail or coercion.
Personally given how society was at that point in time, I think his gayness was a big factor in how he was treated, but there are better arguments than pointing to what he was charged with as that is easily refuted.
Beware that OP's post is full of random nonsense, such as the claim that the younger man in question was 'Eastern European'. (His name was Arnold Murray and he was born in the UK, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain.)
> His treatment was in line with that of other gay men of the time who were charged with similar offences (perhaps more 'lenient' if anything).
Not challenging you, but do you or anybody have some numbers on how often this was prosecuted? It's probably impossible to say since by definition much of the activity was underground, but that doesn't match my current understanding of the environment.
[1]: as is always a risk when stating facts, there's a risk of is/ought fallacy here with people interpreting my statement of facts with what I think should be the case. I'm not saying it ought to be this way, merely that it was. I think we've made great progress in this area and I'm glad for it.
There’s nothing complicated about the Turing case. It was a crime at the time to have gay sex. He admitted to a police office that he’d had gay sex. This led to him being prosecuted.
I’d urge you to spend more time looking at the facts of the case and less time questioning the universally accepted narrative on the basis of what you admit is no evidence.
Just in the article you linked to, it says that 49,000 gay men were pardoned. It also says the law against "gross indecency with a man" was passed in 1885 and was only repealed in 1967. The law against "buggery" was first used in 1533 and was in place until the 19th century!
If we assume that 100 million people lived through those times, and that the conservative estimate of approximately 3% gay population held, then there would have been 3,000,000 gay people during that time. That means that 1.6% of gay people ended up prosecuted. If we only consider men, then 3.2% ended up prosecuted. This seems to me to be a little more nuanced than you are suggesting, otherwise there wouldn't be such a huge inconsistency in enforcement.
Since we're urging each other now, I’d urge you to spend more time thinking about how perception can differ from reality, what the pitfalls are of binary thinking and blind acceptance, and why Socrates encouraged people to have humility about what they think they know.
I’d also add that your hypothetical conviction rate of 3.2% is pretty high, considering that people generally have sex in private. As a point of comparison drawn at random, the current conviction rate for car thefts in England and Wales is 2.12%.
Do you really (personally) believe that? You don't think his gayness was a factor at all?
Seeing the way he was treated by law enforcement, particularly after the facts started coming to light, I can't believe it wasn't a factor. His final charge may have been more for the classified info risk as you say (I honestly don't know enough about the details to have an opinion there), but many parts of the process I think would have gone a lot more differently had he not been gay. Without a doubt in my mind, they would not have treated him so disrespectfully and cavalierly.
It was a factor, but not directly. I believe Turing's gayness is being pink washed. The way I see it, the UK was not castrating people for being gay, but gave this option after breaking indecency laws and being convicted for it.
> particularly after the facts started coming to light
Turing went to police to file a report and casually (perhaps ignorantly or haughtily) admitted to breaking a law.
Yes I agree, but (and I'm honestly asking because I don't know) was it one of those laws that nobody really took seriously or that was still on the books even though it was never enforced? Or was it a crime that was enforced at the time?
Edit: Unrelated to above, but from parent comment, I hadn't heard of "pink washing" before so just dropping a link for others who might not have heard of it either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT)
Being married is a hard prerequisite for being able to commit marital rape. You don't have to be gay to have gay sex that the authorities learn about.
Assuming this is true (I don't know), would a heterosexual man have received the same punishment? In any case, it seems pretty cruel and unusual to me.
Cruel? From the lens of modern times, certainly. But don't we still chemically castrate certain sex offenders?
I don't know if we can make the assumption that it was his being gay that spared him the jail time, or if other considerations were at play; and if another man benefiting from the same considerations but with different preferences would have been treated (edit: clarifying) more leniently, i.e. no chemical castration, as you say. And together with the following:
> But don't we still chemically castrate certain sex offenders?
This goes back to the view back then of homosexuality as sexual (and criminal?) deviance. I feel like we're pretty much back at the point of his sexuality being the reason for the chemical castration.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-18561092
IIRC part of the coroner's reasoning is that "In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next."
So essentially they concluded it was suicide because something about Turing (gay? academic? gay academic?) was regarded as indicating instability. I very much doubt a coroner today would follow that reasoning!
Having said that, I'd like to see research on emotional states in male to female transitions, we should have plenty of data?
According to subreddits that the MtFs use, it's mostly sexual arousal. "Euphoria boners" and suchlike.
After a week, I was on the verge of tears pretty much 24/7, and I did cry whenever I was alone in my room. It's crazy how much I cried; I had never cried so much before in my life. My mood was much worse, obviously, since I was crying so much; I was crying due to sadness.
I'm pretty sure women aren't on the verge of tears 24/7 when they're menstruating or pregnant. So from my anecdotal experience, I'm convinced that the same hormone levels affect men and women differently.
I have read anecdotes from detransitioned FtMtFs that they had abnormally short tempers while taking testosterone. So, it may go the other way, too.
But, I posted it because it may be that Turing also felt depressed, because they blocked his testosterone and gave him estrogen. Maybe the drugs put him in a suicidal state that he wouldn't have otherwise been in.
The code breakers at Bletchley Park, Alan prominently among them, are often credited with saving millions of lives. The reasoning is that their work make the D-Day invasion possible in 1944, and had they not cracked the codes it would have been delayed at least a year and would have cost millions move lives.
And presumably Alan would have been reminded and thought about the D-Day landings on the days before his suicide.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-turing-himself-said-about-the...
Sadly, both were wiped - as was common for the time.
Why not give the billion to British immigrant Marian Rejewski and his Polish intelligence service peers and leaders who actually cracked Enigma, fled Poland, and gave their findings to the British (and French) as their home country was being taken over?
https://daily.jstor.org/polish-codebreakers/ https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/polish-mathematici...
To add some context:
1. In Rejewski's own words, all variations of the Enigma were "quantitive, not qualitive" - adding more rotors, changing them more frequently made the decryption more labor-intensive, but they did not change the main principle on which it worked, and Rejewski's team was able to figure those out pretty quickly, even before the war.
2. Rejewski, Zygalski, Rozycki they did not just disappear in September 1939, they continued their work, first in France, and then in Britain. Turing actually went to France in early 1940 to consult with them.
3. The main advantage that British "bomb" had over earlier Polish design came from improvement suggested not by Turing, but by Gordon Welchman.
2) Consider the fact that you felt the names Rejewski, Zygalski and Rozycki could be placed in an HN post without further explanation. Do people know who they are and what they did? Yes, they do. They’re not unknown or uncredited (though many others certainly are, as is the case with every other massive technical effort.)
3) I don’t think anyone has ever seriously suggested that Turing broke Enigma alone. And I don’t take Hollywood seriously: this is a medium that requires “the Enterprise bridge crew” of seven people to effectively solve every problem that comes up. But Turing’s contributions were very significant. And he never had a chance to brag about them: he maintained secrecy while many of his colleagues lived to see the work declassified.
What reward for Tommy Flowers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
I like Turing, I like his work, but he was by no means the only genius at Bletchley.
Arne Beurling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling, a Swede who cracked the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_and_Halske_T52
Hugh Foss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Foss who first cracked the early commercial variants of Enigma back in 1927
Gordon Welchman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman ... argh where to start? :D
You believe he cares about external validation and things like awards.
You believe he cares about being a billionaire.
You are more or less projecting your beliefs and ideas on what a successful life is on him.
Alan pursued truth throughout his life. Not external validations. He was a scientist not a politician or celebrity or a wannabe make world better startup founder.
Only truth could have set him free. And I hope he found his truth.