b450

I thought Beyonce's "Love on Top" might qualify. Pretty iconic use of key changes, but it apparently peaked at #20 on the hot 100.

> Eric Friedman’s new book Reinventing Philanthropy: A Framework for More Effective Giving presents a similar take. In the book, Friedman goes even further than Singer by contrasting the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals with Malaje Provincial Hospital in Angola. After contrasting two patients served at the different hospitals for life-threatening medical conditions, he concludes, “I’d probably also be very angry at the donors who are continuously funding St. Jude and leaving Malanje Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are [the patients of St. Jude] so much more worthy of life…?” This seems to us an absurd contrast and presumes a callousness by St. Jude donors that bears no resemblance to reality. Of course it is worthwhile to support both institutions if they both provide life-saving results; but Friedman and others indicate that one should support Malanje and not St. Jude as the “best” choice, and support that claim with nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality.

Not OP, but this passage is representative. The authors' claims here are:

(a) the contrast between patients at Malanje Provincial and St Jude is "absurd". The authors don't explain what in particular is absurd about it. This is basically the style of argument employed in the article, which mostly amounts to "EA is self-evidently wrong" without elaboration.

(b) Friedman presumes that St. Jude donors are "callous". This is clearly unfounded, since the quoted passage is consistent with the idea that St. Jude donors are (say) well-intentioned but culpably ignorant. This is another thread in the authors' arguments - roughly, "EA takes issues with X; X is obviously good; therefore EA is wrong". This is a generic argument that could be employed against any position that isn't a bland endorsement of totally conventional morality, and is another version of "EA is just wrong".

(c) Friedman supports his claim with "nothing other than a decidedly skewed morality." This is overtly false, since Friedman's argument is almost certainly defended via some sort of EA premise, like, "saving more lives/alleviating more suffering (per dollar donated) is better than fewer/less." Not an unassailable argument by any means, but the author's don't assail the argument so much as deny that it exists at all, except as a morality that they flatly assert is "skewed".

> There's no objectively good cards, it is always relative to your deck and relics, and the upcoming boss fight

This is really the key. A card always has value in context. A good player will take, for example, a Disarm, and say "this solves Book of Stabbing". The important point is that Disarm doesn't have to be useful in every fight, but it adds a solution for _some_ fights to the deck. Good players focus on the specific set of problems the deck has to solve, discounting future challenges relative to imminent ones, and add tools for those fights. Good players also tend to highly value card draw and deck manipulation to enable searching the deck for the right card when it's needed. Depending on how effectively you can cycle the deck, adding tons of cards to a deck is often a good strategy. For example, a deck with Corruption and Dark Embrace basically doesn't need to worry about the deck bloating at all because the whole deck can be searched in one turn.

I'm a fan of Douglas Hofstadter's (of Godel Escher Bach fame) view that "analogy is the core of cognition"†

On this view, I guess the question of whether to utilize analogy or not is reduced to the question of which analogy would be most useful, since all categorization (and thus, much of thought in general) is essentially analogical thinking.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk

In a past life in philosophy, a professor of mine worked in aesthetics, and specifically wrote on the significance of genuineness or authenticity, and its special connection to the sense of touch. I don't remember it well but your remarks reminded me of it. Here is a review which summarizes it: <https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/things-in-touch-with-the-past/>

An excerpt: > Touch is often practically impossible for ordinary viewers of many genuine specimens of very valuable things, such as a Gutenberg Bible or Michelangelo's David. Protected as they often are by glass encasings, barriers and surveillance technology, these objects are for the most part currently only sensorily accessible through vision.

> However, Korsmeyer rejoins, the sense of touch is still at work given the viewers' physical closeness to these objects and the subsequent in-principle possibility of touching them. Korsmeyer's connection between touch and genuineness explicitly resonates with recent claims about the role of contagion in experiences of the authentic. Cognitive scientists Paul Bloom and George Newman, among others, have argued that our valuing authenticity in objects is explained by our implicitly accepting a magical law of contagion (see, e.g., Newman and Bloom 2012). According to such a law, desirable or odious qualities can be transmitted by contact. So, for example, the value that we attribute to the original David kept in the Gallery of the Academy of Florence (and that we do not attribute to the 20th century copy currently visible in the Piazza della Signoria) is explained by the possibility of touching an object that Michelangelo himself touched. Korsmeyer refers to this feature of our implicit reasoning patterns as 'the transitivity of touch'.

This search is amusing because among the first few results is one referencing another:

> Although the pristine myth has been thoroughly debunked, too many biodiversity researchers fail to incorporate historical ecology into their analyses.

> Overall, we reject the notion that “the pristine myth has been thoroughly debunked” by archeological evidence, and suggest that the environmental impacts of historical peoples occurred along gradients[...]

Stir in a bunch of frozen peas. It's a nice complement and you get to tell yourself you're getting some veg.

Is the suggestion that chairs are illusions because they appear solid but are not in fact? It would be more reasonable to say that chairs _are_ solid, and many solid objects, like chairs, are mostly empty space when considered at the atomic scale.

I think your post is good fodder for the "quantum formalism" described in the article, because it seems like you're getting pretty carried away with interpretation, what with terms like "metaphysics" and the conclusion that chairs are illusions. Some chairs may be illusory, but in general they would reveal themselves as such because you can't, for example, sit in them.

The first is an isometric view of 3 cubes. The second is a star inscribed in a hexagon

You include a good countervailing point in your comment, which is that our experiments are largely confined to what we think are ideal conditions. Evolution (or, whatever you want to call this abiotic Darwinian selective process) searches the space of possible designs randomly, which means it can happen on "improvements" that would be hard to predict a priori.