b450

This is a great demonstration of the fact that people coming from very different perspectives can, through good faith inquiry, find much to agree on. I think there are a lot of thoughtful arguments and conclusions in here even though I generally find the catholic church's metaphysical pyrotechnics to be fairly ridiculous. It goes to show that E.O. Wilson's concept of "consilience" can apply even outside of sciences - just as different lines of scientific inquiry converge on a common reality, so can very disparate forms of moral inquiry converge because they both proceed from a shared human experience of what's good and bad in life.

Given the scale and variety of transformations in the 20th century - technological revolution, mass urbanization, the integration of billions of new workers into global markets, nuclear weapons, mass media, environmental change, and unprecedented population growth – it would be very surprising if all the graphs just maintained linear trends the whole time. Many of these graphs appear to show continuations - though perhaps at inflection points of exponential growth – of trends already taking place.

My guess is we're supposed to read this sentence as:

Ɐh G(h)

(for all my hats, the hat is green)

or whatever similar formulation:

Ɐx (H(x) ^ M(x)) → G(x)

(for all x, if x is a hat and x is mine, then x is green)

Either way, the general idea will be that negating the statement (making it a lie) will make it a negative existential quantifier:

Ǝh ~G(h)

(there exists one of my hats such that it is not green)

Or in the case of the alternate formulation:

Ǝh (H(x) ^ M(x)) ^ ~G(x)

(there exists an x, such that x is a hat and x is mine, and x is not green)

So I think we answer (A) The liar has at least one hat.

All that said, I think other commenters are rightly pointing out that this relies on a very questionable distinction between semantics - which is what we've formalized above - and pragmatics. In conversational pragmatics, "All my hats are green" means that I have at least one hat (probably at least 3, even, since the sentence didn't say "My only hat" or "Both my hats"). One might explain this by way of an implicit pragmatic conversational principle that all statements should be relevant and informative in some way, which vacuously true statements (like, "all grass growing on the moon is purple") are not (see the "Gricean maxims").

If we don't make this implausible distinction between semantics and pragmatics (implausible to me because it assumes that sentences in general are usefully analyzed as having "propositional" meanings which can be evaluated outside of any conversational context), we might cash out the statement as:

Ɐh G(h) ^ Ǝh G(h)

so we can conclude, since this is a lie, that:

Ǝh ~G(h) ∨ Ɐh ~G(h)

Which is consistent with the liar owning no hats, as in:

> "All my hats are green"

> "Liar! You don't own any hats"

Seeing the image come into focus is pretty satisfying, and the half-solved puzzle looks pretty cool. Nice job

It's hard to take too much issue with the general argument. Seems like there are loads of examples of theories developed out of "pure" intellectual pursuits that found practical applications later on.

But I quibble with the broad inclusion of "jazz" in the list. I don't really like the idea that jazz is this never-ending process of avant-garde musical boundary pushing. There are these cults of personality around artists like Miles Davis and Coltrane, and at some point people decided that "easy-listening", "smooth jazz", and "elevator music" were the nadir of "cool", but those particular cultural trends don't necessarily define jazz as a whole. It's also reasonable to regard jazz as having a matured musical vocabulary that we can construct accessible tunes out of without pushing boundaries all the time. I suspect a lot more people do enjoy "lounge" jazz than would admit it.

I guess this is just a silly little thought experiment, but the final estimate (6.97s 100m) is quite ridiculous on its face.

The heavy lifting seems to be done by the study linked in the "anatomical studies suggest peak speeds up to 15.6-17.9 m/s (35-40 mph) are achievable" line. I'm not sure where those exact numbers were pulled from - I can't find them with a cmd+f. One line in the study uses some nearby numbers:

> If, for simplicity, we assume no change in contact lengths or the minimum aerial times needed to reposition the swing limbs at top speed, the average and greatest individual top speed hopping forces (Favg) of 2.71 and 3.35 Wb would allow top running speeds of 14.0 and 19.3 m/s and of 50 and 69 km/h, respectively

But the study concludes that, even though our leg extensor muscles can produce much higher maximum forces than those generated during sprinting, the "contact length" imposes a constraint on these "hopping forces":

> Because humans have limbs of moderate length and cannot gallop, they lack similar options for prolonging periods of foot-ground force application to attain faster sprinting speeds at existing contact time minimums. Consequently, human running speeds in excess of 50 km/h are likely to be limited to the realms of science fiction and, not inconceivably, gene doping.

So the craziness of the original estimate seems to follow from on a misreading of that study.

> This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max.

I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.

It's not just the input. The playback is pretty screwy. Try filling every slot with hi-hats. At least in my browser, the playback is quite stuttery and I can't really entrain to it.

It sure is neat though! I love how the icons for each instrument can combine together, and the dynamic page title is fun.

I agree that life drawing is of tremendous importance, but your characterization here disagrees with my experience:

> [life drawing] forces you to reason about physical space and the structure of objects in ways that neither drawing from imagination nor drawing from a photo reference does.

Now this may be because I am, at best, an intermediate artist, but in my experience, beginner drawing courses (rightly) focus on unlearning the natural tendency towards "symbol drawing". A bunch of beginner drawing exercises like (a) copying Picasso's Stravinsky portrait upside down, (b) overlaying a picture with a grid to copy it, (c) life drawing with various physical aids (holding out a pencil to "visually measure", drawing a scene visible through a cardboard frame) are all focused on learning to draw what you "really see" instead of what you think you see.

To me, this early learning process involves learning _not_ to reason about what you see, but to instead simply copy what's in your "visual field". Instead of "oh, a nose is sort of a pyramid shape, so it should look like this", it's, "I see a darker value in that spot" (it just so happens to be the shadow cast under the nose, but you don't even need to recognize that). In my own drawing journey, I actually think my life drawing started getting much better once I started learning to draw from imagination, because the latter _does_ require that level of understanding - using perspective, simplifying forms into primitive shapes, types of shadows, planning where the darkest and lightest values in the image will be, and so on. In particular, since practicing illustration, I'm much more capable of sketching things that aren't posing, like the geese permanently milling around in front of my house - I can quickly copy a silhouette, and then use my knowledge to fill out what it should look like. I didn't really learn to do that in all my life drawing classes, because I could just fall back on what I was seeing.

> Participants gave poorer ratings to images they thought were created by artificial intelligence.

> “It seems that where the image actually comes from doesn't matter, rather what people believe is what governs their feelings. The objective quality doesn’t seem to be that important,” says Grassini.

> “When participants thought that an image was made by AI, it was regarded as uglier and of lower emotional value, regardless of where it came from. When the image was assumed to be made by a human, it was considered more beautiful and as having a higher emotional value.”

Later:

> [...] “AI products will become more and more similar to things made by humans. What we're seeing now is that it doesn't really matter whether art is human or not, but whether it's believed to be made by a human or not," he says.

> “Customer service created by AI might be perceived as worse, not because it’s objectively worse, but just because it's degraded as something created by AI.”

Here are two examples where the researcher contrasts the "objective" merits of a thing with the subjective matter of an individual's beliefs about where that thing came from. But that is a rather loaded framing. Can we rule out the conclusion that artworks created by human artists are objectively better? I'd rate my enjoyment of holding a 5000 year old Ancient Egyptian relic much lower if I am told that it is a modern reproduction. Is it that I have a subjective bias towards an authentic original, regardless of the objective features of the relic? Or is it that the relic's provenance is itself an objective attribute of the relic, and if I am lied to about that attribute, it will affect my opinion?

This reminds me of a study on disgust. As I remember it, subjects in the study were shown a dead cockroach and told it had been totally disinfected and sanitized in some way. The roach was dipped in a glass of water, then the subjects were asked to take a sip. Obviously, many participants were grossed out and didn't drink the water. The researchers' conclusions went something like this: "the disgust response is an adaptation which serves to limit our exposure to dangerous pathogens and such. This cockroach has no pathogens on it. Therefore, our disgust reactions (and the subjects who did not drink the water) are irrational". An excellent reply was published, which went something like this: "Dead cockroaches are gross. Drinking dead cockroach water is gross. Therefore not drinking the water was rational".

> Goff knows what he’s proposing sounds “extravagant”, but, he says, new ideas always sound extravagant, especially in the West where we’re “trained” to be sceptical of anything that smacks of religion. We don’t often think of our “secular bias”.

> He cites Occam’s razor – the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best. What makes greater sense to you – the God of the Bible or one of the other world religions, the meaninglessness of an atheistic universe, a multiverse, a flawed designer god, or a conscious universe? Perhaps, none. Perhaps, it all seems nonsense to you. Perhaps, humanity will never find an answer.

> “Why believe in a supernatural creator that stands outside the universe if you can just attribute consciousness and intention to the universe itself? The physics just gives us the maths, there must be something that underlies the maths. I argue it’s a ‘conscious mind’, and strange as that may sound it’s no less extravagant than the other options.”

What the heck, man. I'm really not qualified to comment on the whole fine-tuning argument, as suspect as it seems to me, because I don't know a lick of physics or anything about the calibration of the universe's variables or whatever, but to excuse the leap made here with "Occam’s razor" is simply incredible to me.

Can we not agree by now? Minds evolved. Their evolutionary value is obvious. Someone shared an amazing article on HN recently about chemotaxis in E. Coli recently. It's an incredible illustration of how, from the _obviously purely physical_ nanomachinery of the cell, there seems to emerge a creature with genuine "interests" - that is attracted and averse to things in its environment according to their survival value, and even possesses a "memory" and other seemingly proto-mental capacities.

So now we have this Goff fellow positing a minded universe as an explanation for fine-tuning. And it is meant to serve as an explanation in that minds have "certain goals and aims". But the "goals and aims" of minds are explained by the fact that they are the products of natural selection. In a meaningless physical universe without values, values will be manifest within the perspective of creatures created with implicit imperatives (reproduction, homeostasis, survival, whatever we want to say is being selected for). The idea that the whole universe has a mind which has values (goals, whatever), values which in turn serve to explain fine-tuning (it's just what the universe wanted!), seems to me to be insane, because where the hell did that mind come from, why does it have goals, why are its nature and provenance it so radically unlike all the evolved minds that we actually know exist? Occam's razor???

Yeah, I spent too much time this morning mastering this (thanks for sharing!). For me the key was realizing that - unlike most modern platformer controls - jump height isn't affected by the length of the key press. So you can quick tap jump, then use the direction keys to aim your spikes. The ground-dive is also quite useful.

Once you grasp these controls, you stand a chance. Once you master them, the AI becomes trivial to beat by this method: When serving, jump and perform a horizontal spike at the apex. The AI will defend it, then reliably do his own horizontal spike from the backcourt. Meet it at the net and spike it diagonally downwards. Works every time! And now I can rest (work).

This strikes me (a total ignoramus) as the generally balanced and correct take.

One question I have is, how much of that inflationary period has been due to supply issues that would have occurred regardless of stimulus checks?

I share your skepticism about the "lol just tax the rich" approach. I'm not sure how true it is that taxes "hobble our most productive citizens" (what are you alluding to about china?), I generally just think rich people inevitably outmaneuver the government trying to tax them, and that rich people really shouldn't be "earning" that much to begin with (because I think their earnings in most cases has fuck-all to do with their actual "productivity"). I imagine there are plenty of smart people who have thought up other ways of socializing the fruits of economic growth in, idk, better ways.

You must not have happened upon the master-pupil attack..

Wow, all these "why is this still so hard" complaints feel so off-base to me! As the article says, Flexbox straightforwardly solves centering in every simple case. When it doesn't solve it for you, you're doing something more complex than _just_ centering, so it's inappropriate to expect that the implementation will be dead simple.

Interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm gonna trash the review now, but really just because I'm a bit bored at work and I enjoyed the review and it got me thinking.

This review is kind of funny - it's like, "look how prescient and correct Arendt was about the Nazis. But then she was wrong about desegregation. Also her one-time lover Heidegger was a total Nazi! Hannah Arendt was a philosopher, but also a complicated and flawed person!" Anyone read the book, "The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War"? It's an interesting sort of de-mythologization of 20th century American culture, where these intellectual and cultural giants of that time are argued to have not really _defined_ the thought of that time, but rather were elevated and canonized according to the needs of Cold War politics.

Of course it's not a surprise that Arendt got some stuff wrong! She was a Kantian, and Kantian ethics which stands out as a facially absurd theory, even in the already ridiculous field of philosophical ethics. The reviewer here sort of argues that she managed to liberate herself from the "grand systems" and tidy, comforting rationalizations of philosophy, instead bringing a messy, incoherent humanity to the philosophical enterprise. I can't help but shake my head at that representation of a Kantian, who thought all our moral duties were fricking a priori! Not to mention that this is all represented as feminist, when her whole idea that "just as for Kant, feelings could get in the way of proper moral judgement" still reeks of philosophy's delusional male chauvinism.

I admit I'm a weirdo and bring a very specific, partisan, and generally confused perspective to this matter. But I think something like Carol Gilligan's "ethics of care" (which came well after Arendt) is such a more powerful and relevant feminist critique of the grand systems of philosophical ethics.

I can personally attest that some medical professionals have a pretty dismal broad understanding of genetics and evolution. And besides, even if the book isn't breaking new ground, or is targeting a more a popular audience, a good writer synthesizing developments in a field and providing fresh metaphors for understanding it can be tremendously beneficial, even to the academic side, I think. There's also an element of marketing and puffery in how authors talk about their new books.

All that said, yeah. I've for a long time liked the simple idea that the organism is the product of interaction between genes and their environment. That simple notion alone banishes many of the supposed misapprehensions under attack in this article.

> This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic. It feels like people just want to stay stuck but as the author says "to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better."

I don't think people "want to stay stuck". I think it is simply the state of our polarized polity, and the mistrustful, zero-sum approach to discourse that it breeds. Even a plain factual statement feels like it's signaling some political allegiance or pushing some agenda, and that feels threatening. I'm not placing myself above this phenomenon, either. Your choice of example fact – something about 'crime in a city' – feels like a right-wing shibboleth (and after all, even if there are objective facts, the particular facts we recognize as salient, the narrative patterns of fact that we use to make political arguments, are of course driven by our values and political allegiances). Maybe I'm off-base about your example, but really my point is that it feels that way, so discussions of politics feel scary, even when they stick to matters of putatively objective fact. Apologies for shoehorning in the Israel/Palestine issue, but I thought this piece[1] was eloquent on (something like) this phenomenon:

> [...]if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another. Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions. This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October.

> Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative. They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power. And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy.

[1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/

I have several well-worn Far Side collections, including one with a lovely introduction by Jane Goodall, which has a funny story behind it [1]

Linking my favorite below [2]

> Donning his new canine decoder, Professor Schwarzman becomes the first human being on Earth to hear what barking dogs are actually saying.

[1] http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The%20Complete%20Far%...

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FNZar0hX0AQB98d?format=jpg&name=...

I've only read partway, but some of these stories of elephant behavior are very touching. It's clear that elephants have very rich social and emotional lives. Given how similar elephants are to humans (long-lived, highly cooperative mammals capable of fine-motor manipulation), it makes you wonder how close elephants were to the kind of evolutionary breakthrough humans had (I'd offer the crude speculation that apes' vocalization-related anatomy was the edge that caused human cultural evolution to outpace that of elephants).

The author seems to be setting up a lot of human-animal binaries (humans choose, animals act on instinct) in order to ultimately cast doubt on them. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding these binaries quite implausible to begin with, and therefore finding those parts of the piece a bit tedious. But I am moved by these vignettes illustrating just how relatable elephants and humans are to each other.

> Reddit is perhaps the web's best example of enshittification. I've never seen such a level of self-sabotage before as seen with the old -> new reddit UX change

Browsing (new) reddit on a phone (or at least Safari on my device) is truly incredible:

- On first page load, the whole screen is obstructed by an obnoxious inducement to download the app.

- On subsequent page loads, a similar modal nags me to log in with a Google account.

- Routing is simply broken. Pressing back or refreshing a page rarely gets the desired effect.

- Most interactive UI elements – the dropdowns that sort posts, embedded video players, image galleries, expand/collapse toggles – either don't work at all, or have major visual bugs.

- Most times I view a post, comment vote counts are broken, showing 1 on every comment.

That's aside from the actual visual design (which I find terrible) and the state of Reddit's front page and communities, which (here echoing most other commenters here) seem more and more dominated by stupid, inflammatory political trash and other crap. This may be overdramatic, but seeing changes Reddit has made in the lead up to this IPO (and knowing how representative these changes are of general enshittification trends) have made me demoralized and almost ashamed to be a web developer.

Mostly I keep using it because I enjoy r/nba. Not exactly highbrow stuff, and not really exempt from the general Reddit community rot, but still mostly a fun way to follow the news of the NBA and share in the excitement of its goings on. I do wish there was a good alternative to it.

Maybe not the right term. My point is that many philosophers believe that reality (a) is basically as it seems, and/or (b) is basically knowable. It's very odd to say that those views are exclusive to Rand.

edit: one nice example would be Thomas Reid.

Setting aside the significance of Rand in the philosophical canon (which is minimal, though that almost certainly reflects a bias against her politics), the claim that Rand is the only realist philosopher is pretty outrageous.

The argument is sometimes made that philosophy is the mother of all other academic traditions - once a philosophical idea reaches a sufficient level of promise or maturity, it spins off into its own discipline, as in the speciation of "natural philosophy" into specialized hard sciences. One might even point to psychology (or even more contentiously and partially, computer science) as a 20th century offshoots of philosophy.

That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful. The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics.

Anyway, the article is a fairly (though maybe inevitably) partisan read on the crisis of philosophy. The author pretty casually dismisses some views which are pretty popular among philosophers - examples include the idea that philosophical theories are rival, and can be disproven; and the view that philosophy is supposed to be therapeutic (the rejection of this view is especially surprising given that it was pretty much universal among the archetype philosophers, the Ancient Greeks). The author appears to favor the view that the point of philosophy is to "articulate cultural self-understanding" (or, "[promoting] cultural self-consciousness"). Seems reasonable enough I guess, but I'm not sure what it means.

Did you notice, though, that rebase advocates use very "emotive" terminology when talking about git history? Like it's a subject they care about? Seems awfully touchy feely.

It's not really a reflection on utilitarianism. That's just philosophical ethics, at least in the form that predominates in Anglo-American philosophy departments.

The game of coming up with "counterexamples" to moral theories is fun, but basically stupid. By definition it involves "contriving" cases, however realistic really, which can make whatever preposterous "stipulations" they please. The underlying assumption is that moral theories are somehow like scientific theories in that they are validated by "predicting" the available observational "data", i.e. our moral intuitions, i.e. the social values of the cultural/economic groups we're a part of. Mysteriously, christian conservative scolds engage with philosophy and end up developing something a lot like christian social conservatism, and cosmopolitan liberal scolds come up with something a lot like cosmopolitan social liberalism, despite the fact that both are engaged in this highly scientific form of inquiry. Very odd.

The whole game is also probably largely irrelevant to the kind of stuff Bentham actually cared about, since he mainly wanted to use utilitarianism to guide state policy, and (famously) hard cases make bad law.

It is very hard to read philosophy in this phenomenological/continental tradition. There is a real resistance in that tradition to plainly stating a core thesis. There may well be defensible reasons for this - maybe it preserves the subtleties, peculiar texture; the holistic, or even contradictory nature of thought or consciousness or what have you. But I think a lot of the time these philosophers won't come right out and say what they mean because they don't really know what they mean, and any sufficiently plain statement of their views would reveal itself as either trivially correct, or obviously wrong. Here is an example:

> Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here?

> Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours. When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action. “Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus réel et de plus nécessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; – que dis-je ? c'est l'action même.”

> Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them.

This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the conflict is here.

---

Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine, they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical, person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and the role of philosophy in reconciling them.

The flip side of this is that chord shapes (in terms of hand shape, not intervals) are constant on the guitar (assuming no open strings). Learning piano after guitar, I was intimidated by the fact that – for example – an Am and Bm had different shapes, whereas on the guitar it's just the same shape transposed up the neck.

Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1]

[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8

In replying to something this deranged, one runs the risk of responding with sincerity to a troll, and thereby being Owned. Nevertheless, my ethics require me to implore anyone who sympathizes with the section on Square Brackets to seek help.

Anytime some even vaguely anti-realist claim shows up in a HN headline, such as "the past is not true", a bunch of predictable and dull comments inevitably show up to perform some table thumping about reality being factual and objective, likely paired with some sanctimonious moral panic about the dangers of relativism (normally with a political slant one way or another).

I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.