Retra

You don't have to talk about integrating higher degree polynomials, because a polynomial is just a sum of monomials, and you just end up integrating monomials over and over again. If you can integrate a single monomial, you can integrate all polynomials.

That makes your objection seem weak, as though you don't know how to integrate, and you're just imagining that it is hard. That undermines your point because there are actually things in math that are hard, but you'd be woefully unprepared to understand them if you don't see the value in memorizing the absolutely trivial stuff.

It's like a child saying "I don't want to be forced to memorize the shapes of the letters, because that's not what makes a good writer." Does a good writer sit around looking up letter shapes in a diagram all day because they can't be bothered to remember them?

Either way, the optimal solution is the same: do the task over and over again until you are so familiar with it that you can recall it from memory. Memorization is a necessary part of learning.

If you are offering your employees a paycheck, that is all they will work for. If you give them your companies assets, capital, and control over the org structure, then that is what they will work for. If you're offering them the opportunity to work on interesting problems, then maybe guarantee it in an employment contract. There is no reason to blame anyone for working to acquire the only things you're actually offering.

This cage metaphor really doesn't work when the 'cage' is big enough to allow international travel completely within its confines.

Well I suppose "Hahahahahah hahhaha ahhah hah. Lol" is a better example of the kind thought-provoking serious writing one should aspire to consume.

Learning the meanings of things without learning how to do them leaves you powerless to do anything with that knowledge. It's very easy to walk around saying "we could solve problem X with technique Y", but if you don't actually know how to do Y, then you're just conjecturing fruitlessly.

For instance, here you're talking about "memorizing how to manually integrate a 5th degree polynomial" as if that's something anyone who knows calculus actually does. What it really sounds like is that you don't want to put effort into things. Giving you easier classes isn't going to solve your problem.

Granted, you'll want a broader understanding of things, but the best way to get that is often to actually learn as many details as possible over the long term, not by watching teaser trailers and being told that's the whole plot.

Then they're not free to operate as they please.

Photons are by definition quantized energy packets. If the energy weren't quantized, it wouldn't be a photon.

What you're probably referring to is quantization of the electron energy, but I believe that only happens for bound electrons. If an atom loses or gains electrons, things can work quite differently. This is also different for electrons in a metal's conduction band, which are somewhat free, since they are bound to the metal, but not so much to individual atoms.

Then it is in our rational self-interest to be angry at them, so what is the relevance of your point?

That's called a lightning rod.

If they knew the costs before being charged, you could make a stronger argument. As it is, they are not being charged for expertise, but for being ignorant of the costs.

It's not that simple to equate the two. Modern western ideals are modern western ideals. If living under an authoritarian monarchy were just another way of living, there wouldn't have been a history of revolt against it in the west, because western civilization is no stranger to this kind of society. Western societies have tried autocracy many times. How many times has Saudi Arabia tried liberal democracy?

For now. But what if it stops working? What if someone else wants the benefit but can't do the same things? What if there are other undesirable consequences that you'd like to avoid? Knowing how something works is generally much more valuable than knowing that it works in the long term.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is a saying too, but it doesn't mean people are eating apples regularly. If anything, it means people are not doing it as much as someone thinks they should. It could easily be the case that we have such a saying because people don't regularly eat breakfast.

Mauna Kea is important to astronomers, hence their desire to build there. Would you feel their decision would be more acceptable if that belief were grounded in superstition, historical circumstance, or contemporary practicality?

Informing people about your product is not the same as manipulating them into buying it.

On the 4th, it wasn't random. The days following? I can't predict when fireworks are going to go off. (That's irrelevant anyway, as the dog needs to go out regardless of the date.)

As far as I understand it, the general scientific consensus is that linguistic relativity does not hold true. More anecdotally, I don't often find myself constructing sentences before having an intuitive (non-linguistic) understanding of what I am trying to express, and the process of putting ideas into words doesn't feel like it would be advantaged by high information density, but rather that the majority of filler-words are useful for smoothing out the process and providing information at a more controlled pace, which can be useful for things like adding emphasis to particular phrases and concepts.

My dog is a 1 year old animal. Of course he is a problem. But he isn't the one exploding shit to amuse himself.

If you know of any, let me know. The problem is that any harness you buy will get more loose as it is warn, and panicked dogs can get out of a harness the same way you can get out of a t-shirt: line your head and arms up along the same axis and back up. A harness is only really effective if the dog is moving forward and away from you, not if they are backing away from you in a desperate panic.

My dog almost pulled out of his harness and took off a few weeks ago because of some random evening fireworks. It's not a harmless thing.

Beamed energy always has attenuation problems that make it inefficient.

Points made through the application of logic can't be nullified by a failure to appeal to emotion. The writing style may not be optimal for building consensus, but that won't make it invalid.

I can imagine if such a person actually treated everyone like they were talking to a 2-year-old, you would actually find it disrespectful.

you

    pro.
    Used to refer to an indefinitely specified person; one.

The word is ambiguous, but don't ask me to "assume good faith" when you're choosing the more offensive or questionable interpretation of my words over the most fitting one.

In any case, this issue is not important enough for me to be spending any more time on it, so if you don't understand me, we'll just have to live with that.

Like deriding irrelevant things on the internet?

It's probably a sensible choice for other reasons too: if that had been the explanation, it would have introduced a Chekhov's gun that would probably have to bear plot relevance later, but the battery idea is too mundane for that.

There are no phenomena that are only perceptible through internal experience. (A term that you've basically introduced in a True Scotsman fashion.)

Consider a radio antenna. A radio operates by responding to electrons sloshing around in a wire. The radio can 'experience external reality' iff that sloshing behaves analogously to something 'external': another antenna. This kind of analogy is what observation is, and it basically defines what an experience is. (Though in general, it doesn't need to be external: you can easily observe internal state or have a feedback loop.) Two antenna can be said to pick up the same signal only if their responses strongly correlate.

A brain doesn't work any differently, it's just a far more complex antenna that integrates more complex signals from more diverse sources. The only thing you have to do is establish a strong enough correlation (depending on the accuracy you care to assert) and to do that, you need to pick a number of aspects of the system, measure them, and ensure they correlate sufficiently nicely.

Again, this has nothing to do with the brain per se: all scientific measurements operate on the same idea. A large enough number of correlated observations is sufficient to establish whether two phenomena are the same. Humans are so good at doing this implicitly that we don't even question if other people have emotions, thoughts, ideas, or experiences that differ significantly from our own. In fact, human development involves a great deal of social mimikry and exploration which serve to constrain people's behavior to those things which communicate shared experiences particularly strongly. (Conversely, human behavior is not so unpredictable that we can't build an understand of it.)

I was being succinct. It is not the quantity of reactions that is important, but the type and nature. The quantity is simply what makes it a reliable measure.

Consciousness has been observed externally many times using a very well known method: a vast number of analogous reactions to a large variety of stimuli. This is the very reason we aren't all solipsists and believe in human consciousness in others.

And that's all that any agreed upon measurements and observations have ever been. Just because you can't (yet) quantify it or model it formally doesn't mean you can't observe it.

The same in what sense? Sameness is not an objective property of organisms.