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The distinction between debit and credit card is not really what is at play here, but rather, whether Visa or MasterCard is accepted. A Visa credit card or a US Visa debit are both Visa, so if a place doesn't accept Visa it won't accept either, but if it does accept Visa (increasingly the norm) then both credit and debit work. It's just that in Netherlands none of the debit cards are Visa/Mastercard so people might be mistakenly attributing the card acceptance as being about a debit/crédit distinction.

For example, the largest supermarket chain (Albert Heijn) usually won't take credit cards, with the exception of certain cities and contexts (train stations) where there are more foreigners.

Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to some model instance.

I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decades.

We are in agreement. Your definition of system properties that do not derive simply from the sum of the elements is what the article is really talking about. That's closer to the physicist meaning.

What are you talking about? I read the article, there is literally no implied metaphysics about deeper emergence in the article at all.

The ACLU is a legal organization about civil liberties. It is not a political campaign trying to convince moms to vote for them.

"Emergent" as used here is akin to how physicists use the word. "Emergent" as you interpret it (with the implication of something deeper) is more akin to how philosophers use the word.

Almost every discussion I've read in philosophy over emergence is tedious and hard to see any use, whereas in physics it's intuitive and descriptively useful. My sense is that it's better to follow the physics style and stress there's no metaphysics implied.

First off... The authors of articles doesn't come up with the title. If you want to gripe about the headline writer, fine, but it's not relevant to the substance of the article that was actually written. I don't see the title as pejorative, but then again I'm also not seeking to feel performatively offended.

Never once in the article is it suggested we should think unkindly of Da Vinci. From the very first paragraph onward, the article is sympathetic to him. You wanted to be offended and wanted to read into the article that this was something akin to Da Vinci being cancelled or criticized according to modern norms, but that's literally the opposite of what is written.

That is not the focus of the article at all. The very first paragraph starts with a sympathetic quote of Da Vinci's. The third paragraph approvingly suggests his drawings were foreshadowing Munch and Bacon's art. Almost every other paragraph is also a sympathetic reading of Da Vinci's drawings that are being featured an upcoming art exhibition.

You've invented a strawman and then sneered at the author for not following through with it, and then, it seems, you became overly sensitive about the comment on androgyny with Mona Lisa, as if that comment is offensive and denigrating (it's not, and the author didn't intend it as such, but it does reveal that you think it is offensive).

Ah yes, the current craze of Da Vinci art exhibitions that show him humanising unconventional subjects. It's very important to be aware of this craze!

What are you talking about? This is completely unrelated whining to what the article actually talks about, which is Da Vinci's artistic interest in humanising the traditionally "grotesque". Very far from discrediting.

You're not only ignoring the link, but you're going out of your way to write up an irrelevant sanctimonious comment.

Exactly. It's not just syntax and semantics, but also pragmatics. Human users imbue meaning into the language they use through the pragmatics of their communicative acts within a context, and this is not something our programmed software can do.

I also immediately thought of Borges on reading the link's title.

When I was learning Spanish in adulthood, I decided for practice to re-translate this Borges story back into Spanish, having never read it in the original. Incredibly challenging (for such a beginner), but also very amusing to see the overlaps and the differences.

"On the other hand, if “superiority” is taken to encompass things like scoring higher than others on an IQ test, then every submission to Intelligence would flout the guidelines."

Or one better. IQ is pseudoscience. "Biological group differences" is pseudoscience. All of these journals peddle pseudoscience.

The bulk of what passes for statistical analysis by the so-called "scientists" in fields such as human behaviour and demography is an affront to the actual mathematics and philosophy of statistics. These are not scientific disciplines, they are speculative fields that wrap pseudoscience in a sophomoric garb of statistical vocabulary to gain a false sense of authority and objectivity.

The meaning of words arises from the pragmatic context of their use: the speaker's intentions, the shared social and linguistic conventions, illocution, etc

AI, and especially the abstract and disembodied software artefacts that make up the more advanced AI we have developed, has almost nothing to do with any of that.

The only Gaddis book I've read is A Frolic of His Own. It is essentially nothing but dialogue among upper class lawyers (& associated ilk), and I won't pretend it's a page-turner, but my word, it was masterfully crafted. Dialogue in novels is often so artificial, yet he managed to make it not only accurate and natural but also perfectly adept at carrying the novel along as well as if it were written in standard prose.

I saw him once on a whim at a New Years Eve gig without knowing anything about him, and was very impressed how good of a live show he puts on. Very fun and even a bit goofy, yet also having a careful mastery over both the instruments and the DJ setup.

Or maybe the Turing test is the right test but interpreted more literally: it is passed when the society that invented it genuinely believes it to have been passed. Hammering out the specific criteria ahead of time will only lead to frustration as it becomes clear that is not what the surrounding society actually holds as qualifying. The reason the goal posts move is that we fundamental misjudge what it is we find to be human intelligence, and given that we have a nasty habit of denying this quality to other humans, let alone animals, it's entirely possible we will never genuinely grant it to technical artefacts that we devise.

More is different. Reductionism does not actually explain qualitative behavior.

I want to add double emphasis on this. Christianity before and without the Greek philosophical influence is primarily a religion of itinerant ascetics and martyrs (without the abstract ideals added, almost all of the story in the Gospels boils down to an itinerant ascetic being martyred).

Some of the earliest extant texts in Christianity come from Justin Martyr, who, just a century after Jesus, was already workshopping the idea that Plato and Socrates were unknowing Christians that laid a philosophical ground for Christianity.

Liberalism is marked by comparison to abstract ideals. Whether and to what degree other areas of the world do worse in comparison to those ideals is not usually going to be something of paramount concern.

This idealisation and universalisation is not only Western of course. I'm a mixed kid like your kids, but South India rather than Bangladesh, and I would be and am rather unquestionably accepted as Indian when I am there. But a major driver in the split between India and (then-)Pakistan comes down to the (novel & idiosyncratic) liberal ideals we compare to.

As a final note re: the Crusades. I was not under the impression the Crusades were looked down upon because of war, but because they too often were incoherent raiding expéditions that sacked and subdued parts of Christendom even more than they won control of the Jerusalem.

Uhhh China has centuries of history of peasant movements rising up in improvised make-shift revolts. I don't think you understand how real revolution was for people in China. It was absolutely not a LARP.

Just looking from 1850 to Mao, there was: The Taiping Rebellion (30m dead), 2nd Sino-Japanese War (20m dead), Dungan rebellion (15m dead), Miao rebellion (5m dead), Red Turban rebellion (1m dead), Panthay rebellion (1m dead), Punti–Hakka wars (1m dead), Nationalist purges (1.5m dead), various Warlord Era conflicts (500k dead), 1911 revolution (200k dead), Boxer Rebellion (100k dead), and 1st Sino-Japanese war (50k dead). Not to mention residual deaths from the two World Wars not directly attributable to the conflicts above, but which would still number more than the losses the USA suffered in both wars.

The American Civil War was about ~750k dead. There is absolutely no comparison between the traumatic social conditions of 1940s China with even 21st century China let alone the United States. They were definitely not "role playing".

As a former Antifa-kid (I don't go to punk shows anymore as 30 something, unfortunately), it's pretty surreal how off base and delusional this is. Antifa is primarily made of:

i) dweeb grad students who have read too much Left "theory" but are really just liberals,

ii) liberal punks whose primary goals are keeping cryptofascism out of their communities and cooking veggies from the local farmers market (not necessarily in that order), and

iii) anarchist punks whose primary goals are keeping Nazi punks out of dive venues and cooking vegan chili from dumpster veggies (not necessarily in that order)

You will have more success herding cats than in getting that motley crew to agree on a single policy action, let alone organizational action.

That such a group have invokes for you a specter of Weimar-era Nazis is kind of embarrassing, and speaks to an utter lack of diversity in social experiences. The teen smoking weed in a Dead Kennedys hoodie down the street from you has probably has an Antifa sticker on his laptop, and perhaps he'd love to throw a brick through a Starbucks window... but that's not Kristalnacht.

Taleb btw is nowhere near as fragile as to fear Antifa as some vanguard force for e.g. Nazism or sectarian ethnic militancy. He's literally more concerned about random bitcoin fanatics.

That was Socrates' point. He was asking questions to expose how brittle the claims of knowledge and certainty were. I do find it strange that Wittgenstein—a man who considered Kierkegaard (who wrote an entire book on irony and Socrates) as one of his favorite thinkers—seems not to have realized that Socrates' quest for a certain, clear meaning of a team was ironically intended to always finish unresolved. It makes me a bit curious what he took from Kierkegaard, who was every bit as much of an ironist, if Plato's rather blunt representations of Socratic irony alluded him.

Of course the irony is that Wittgenstein asks "why?" again and again like Socrates and for very much the same purpose (to show that it gets us caught in circles), thus representing even more ironic loops than the previous circles. Wittgenstein turns to philosophy to repudiate it and show as much to his students (show the fly out of the bottle), but in so doing he affirms a central Socratic lesson, but with far less irony. And I would say irony wins out: rather than quiet philosophy into therapy, Wittgenstein became the most influential 20th century philosopher who attracts by far the most published academic and popular commentary.

Kuhn's thesis doesn't have a lot space for the sociology of science to have this kind of influence. Of the classical theses of scientific progress, this comes closer to Lakatos' thesis of research programs.[0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_program

[1] Lakatos, Imre. (1978) The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers (J. Worrall & G. Currie, Eds.). Cambridge University Press.

It's a legitimate practice in science to speculate. Having heard the Harvard guy explain more fully the Oumuamua thing, it's struck me as perfectly fine activity for some scientist to look into. His hypothesis is almost certainly going to be untrue, but it's fine to investigate a bit of a moonshot idea. You don't want half the field doing this, but you absolutely need different little pockets of speculative work going on in order to keep scientific inquiry open, dynamic, and diverse.

Brussels is increasingly English-speaking in general, and folks who work in the train areas in particular have to be fully fluent in French, Dutch and English, where the latter is just the default communication choice if you detect someone is not a native Dutch/French speaker. As well the area around the Noordstation is particularly unwise for a tourist to visit for cafés, so it is extra important for them to get across where you ought to go.

An amusing version of this happened to me in Porto recently at a bookshop. Many moons ago I was fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, but today that's retained mostly in reading, I can't speak well nor can I easily follow European Portuguese speakers. I was browsing the Portuguese literature section when the shop keeper asked me question (which I didn't catch), and then upon ascertaining I spoke English she rather forcefully explained where the English section was, but very confusedly watched as I politely kept where I was. To make matters probably more confusing I ended up buying a linguistically avant-garde book that I soon learned really is best suited for native speakers (Guimarães Rosa, the author, is basically a Brazilian James Joyce)

It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are also continental European, while the three critical examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about academics in another field is given the trappings of some historically unbound and universal insight.

There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.

But she's the Commission President—an executive position for a very complex and powerful international institution. If she were an MEP, then fine, I could accept that an MEP does not have anywhere the representative power such that their time could be so important as to need chartered flights... But I do not accept that for major executive operating in that capacity should be beholden to mere messaging politics. You cannot predict the traffic situation ahead of time, whereas you know to the very minute what any flight times are, which makes them vital for planning at that level.

Why would you want the Executive leader of the EU risking event and meeting timings when she's representing almost the entire continent all in order to "deliver a message"? Should the US president take a taxi when going from DC to New York?

In any case the message is clearly not dependent on this since basically only the AfD and British tabloids are feigning outrage over this.

Who could possibly care about that? She's attending meetings and events in professional and political capacity as the Commission President, it's not personal holiday time. The climate cannot possibly suffer some meaningfully negatively impact from her transportation means between events, whereas there could be meaningfully positive impacts from her maximizing presence in certain events.