ceceron

Still, it is a bias which is funny given the title of this blog.

As far as I'm inclined to agree, that causation can't be easily defined, I believe that your cycling argument is incorrect. Not only because of what the @dentalperson wrote below (they are completely right that there is a crucial difference), but also because it doesn't follow the human intuition on causation.

I understand the sentiment though. Causation should imply correlation at least on a "direct" level. Pressing the gas pedal correlates with the higher speed of the engine, not the vehicle speed. I believe the problem lies in our ability to detect the correlation. Sometimes, the correlation may go undetected (as in the case, when we ignore the engine speed in the vehicle example). I would be very happy to hear a stronger argument against "causation -> correlation" :)

Have taught first year undergrads. Highly recommended experience: 5 stars.

C definitely has many flaws, but I wouldn't say complexity is one of them. I wulld rather say it's too simple and one has to add the complexity all by themselves :D

I was a volunteer in the place helping parents of autistic children. Sure, there are autistic people able to study / work / write books (I knew at least one), but for many just a gentle touch makes their nervous system short circuit. In their case sentence "Autistic individuals don’t have any difficulty communicating with another autistic" is just a lie, it's like there was an invisible bubble wrapping them and separating them from the world we know.

Always happy to hear good news about KDE. Recently I've installed OpenSuSe Tumbleweed for my wife (previously she was using macos and she is not 'technical') and it's great, even better than I remembered. Stable, customizable, one can make it beautiful with a minor effort.

The biggest issues I still have are not KDE related:

- touchpad experience on Linux just sucks compared to macos. Even started sponsoring the gitclear because of that. I haven't tried the mtrack yet, but lack of the reasonable configuration tool is a bit discouraging.

- there is no modern mail client for Linux. The only "serious" mail client is thunderbird. Unfortunately it hasn't received enough love/attention in the recent past :(

That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)

We can try to build a wooden bridge made from him. If we succeeded it would be a proof he is a wood, therefore he floats, so basically he is a witch.

Thanks. It's a great piece of writing!

I've been always taught that classical (Newtonian) physics doesn't have to be interpreted as deterministic. However, the reason was simpler than the lack of the "infinite precision". Basically, some classical systems can have several solutions, e.g. the famous Norton's dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome .

Fair enough, the comparison itself may be useful as an "intuition pump" to start the discussion.

Sure. It makes sense, law should be protecting public health - it is a fair assumption. Now, there is a disagreement on the methods, whether making drugs more accessible would have a positive impact on the public health. A common basic argument just going per analogiam with alcohol doesn't have any sense in this context. It's a bit like a child's argument: "other children can binge youtube, why can't I, mommy?". Other arguments, like the lack of quality control in the illegal market, are different - they can't be reversed in such a childish manner and should be taken seriously.

PS Your point of view is very US-centric, I assure you the arguments against drugs in country I live might have been invalid, but definitely not racist.

It is a valid point, that should be taken into consideration in the discussions on the topic, but it doesn't validate the original argument.

The proponent of the "reversed argument" may argue, that, even if we can't ban alcohol (a real shame in their opinion), we shouldn't damage the situation any further with another evil substance. Later we may find that the new substance becomes "unbannable" as alcohol.

Sorry for sounding nit-picky, I didn't want to undermine your argument as I agree with you.

The only problem I find is that, even if 1) and 2) are true, and you are talking to someone in group 2), it doesn't entail that the person believes that "1) is true". They still may be perfectly self-consistent by rejecting 1).

Talking just from my experience (anecdotal evidence, I know) most people from the group 2) would reject 1). People don't know the scientific studies or do not trust them enough to be convinced.

Sure, you're perfectly right, this is a different point polarizing the discussions. There is a lot of misunderstandings around modalities (should/has to; is possible/is necessary) in common arguments:

- substance is legal = there is a free access to the substance

- you have right to protest = you can go around the city and do anything, as long you make a point

- there is freedom of speech = you can speak anything you want without consequences

ad 1) that is a disputable assumption, but sure

ad 2) as you've said - it's interpreted as "alcohol should be legal". Such interpretation is arguable, but still it makes sense under some views on ethics.

ad 3) this doesn't follow logically from 1) and 2). You have to add new assumption: "2.5) There exist people who believe both in 1) and 2)". Going from "something is true" -> "there are people who believe" is also an invalid reasoning, similarly to the previous: "most people believe" -> "should"

Obviously, you're right in the last paragraph, the polarization makes the debate a bit pointless. The middle ground is quite vast, in fact.

I won't pretend to be an expert in the matter and, therefore, I won't share any opinion whether magic mushrooms should be legal or not.

What bothers me is the way people argue about such problems.

The common argument goes like this:

---

1) alcohol is as bad (worse than?) as X

2) alcohol is legal

therefore per analogiam:

3) X should be legal.

---

I'm fine with this reasoning, but one could also reverse the argument:

---

1') X is bad as alcohol

2') X is illegal

therefore per analogiam:

3') alcohol should be illegal.

---

Both stances are consistent and depend on other views. I believe the discussion should rather focus on the role of the law in the public life. Maybe "everything should be legal", but with some age clauses / agreement of a medical doctor? Maybe the law should be replaced with other measures?

What really saddens me though is when people advertise recreational use of possibly dangerous substances. It applies to all kinds of recreational drugs. There always will be person claiming that X solves problems/takes your conscience to next level/cure COVID/whatever. In case somebody attacks their stance, saying there is no valid research on the topic (but rather other way around), they will tell you of a conspiracy in the research community/government funding/whatever. Even if there is such a conspiracy, it doesn't validate the argument.

Please don't advice people to take drugs (or drink alcohol BTW), even if they work for you.

I've read this twitter thread, thanks.

I don't know whether @ScienceVet is an expert, I don't know them and they don't use a real checkable name, but I trust that you wouldn't mislead me. The biggest issue for me is that the thread is referring to some data, but doesn't show the data - I guess I have to read cited papers and I would find it somewhere there? If somebody wants to use "scientific arguments", they should add some inline references to the sources, so reader could cross-check. Otherwise it's just an authority argument.

I'm mainly a Firefox user, but there are two cases when I fall back to another browser (Brave, in my case): - I have to maintain two MS Teams account for the professional reasons. I use one account in the electron app, one in the Brave. So Brave is just a Teams client... (if somebody knows a better solution to handle multiple Teams accounts on desktop, I would be grateful for any tips) - I have so many privacy/security enhancing extensions in Firefox, that some pages render/work incorrectly. I'm too lazy to disable the extensions, so in case I really need such a page, I switch to Brave.

Otherwise Firefox is more than enough, I would say more - it's better IMHO than currently available chromium clones.

As a philosophy graduate I would say that learning philosophy solely from books would be a very ambitious / dangerous attempt. The philosophical books can be very persuasive for the beginner in the field, leading to many misconceptions. I would recommend to take part in some (university/on-line) courses, but not in one, but at least two from different teachers.

As for the books, Plato (Socrates dialogues) is must have to understand the field. Also it's fun to read, so it's great to begin with :) The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle is another beginner friendly book which lays field for others to follow; it's much more practical/friendly than the Metaphysics, which should be approached only with an assistance of a good teacher (unless you're a genius like Avicenna or Thomas Aquineas).

This is not a proper analogy. The government money comes from taxes, they are not doing charity out of their funds.

Praying doesn't exclude a more "physical" action. When a catholic is praying for something, they should actively pursue the goal. The New Testament (James 2:14-26) states it explicitly. "Faith without deeds is dead" - praying is just one of many things people can do, sometimes the only thing.

It's very difficult, but important thing, to express abstract things in a correct, yet still understandable way, so "kudos" for trying :)

You make a good point, however:

1) > And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy

It's not exactly true that ownership models weren't "proven" in different languages. Objective-C comes from the top of my head; the main memory management technique there was reference counting (with the memory pool/manual management fallback). And yes, the non-linearity of some structures was a pain in the ass, one had to be careful to not create a "strong reference loop", but... in the end it worked quite well :) The difference is that in Obj-C one had to do it manually/in runtime, Rust checks it automatically/during compilation.

2) quoting your article "Ownership semantics [...] cannot be used to express non-linear problems".

This is a very strong claim. What does it mean for the problem to be non-linear? I would say, that linearity (in programming) may be ascribed to a model of the problem, not the problem itself, i.e. Traveling Salesman Problem is a problem involving a non-linear structure and still the best known solvers (e.g. Concorde) use linear models to solve it.

It is true that ownership semantics has to be bypassed in the non-linear model, but the question stays whether the given problem really requires one.

> The first advantage to just copy-pasting is that the snippet author might update it (e.g. if he finds a faster/safer way to do the one thing his package does), and you don't have to do anything.

First, please don't copy paste solutions. Understand them and implement correctly. Stackoverflow is not a magic library you should take books from without understanding.

> Imagine finding a solution on Stackoverflow and just being able to import foo from stackoverflow/a/12345, and when the community finds a better way to do it, your software is automatically using the new version!

Wow, I've just imagined it. Props for the great horror story, but... it's a security nightmare. You basically surrender all control over your project for almost nothing.

> The second advantage is that it's basically built-in refactoring: Code from these micropackages will not litter your code, there is a clean separation between what is your business logic vs where you just need some generic functionality.

Writing this utility in a separate code unit (namespace, project, whatever) gives exactly the same advantage. And micropackages will litter my building process / dependency tree.

> The sorts of confusion seen here are quite common in philosophy, which has great difficulty staying grounded to facts of experience, something I think Wittgenstein complained of.

I have to comment this, being myself a multi-class character (both computer science and philosophy graduate). The confusion seen here is quite common when somebody without a proper philosophy background is trying to hold a discourse on abstract philosophical topics. Obviously it happens often in philosophy, but often due to the outsiders (computer scientists, physicists, sociologists, artists) who believe, they have revolutionary ideas ;) Wittgenstein's (or rather Kripkenstein's, depending on the interpretation) were rather of a different, more profound, nature.

In my opinion author has decent ideas but lacks skills in communication to express them properly.

> because the facts of problems to be solved and, moreso, of the physical machines we use in solving them provide ground truth.

It is a very optimistic view of the programming as a knowledge domain. IMHO in real life "The facts of problems" are often very blurry and prone to similar problems seen in the philosophy. I am not talking about academic toy problems, but real-life problems that have to be solved.

> It's all a matter of how wrong you want to be, and what information you want to use for deduction. If you see a humanoid approaching you, do you start with "that is a human (99.99% certainty)" or "that is a man or woman (98% certainty)"? I can see the use in the latter, but only here when quantified and compared to more generic alternatives.

Generalization is one of the main mechanisms making the communication (language) work. Otherwise one should probably treat every human as an individual, similarly to the Duns Scotus and his haecceity concept.

It's somehow related to the concept of overfitting, you acknowledge existence of the outliers but at the same time you may want to generalize them for the sake of the better generalization...

> On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.

Who cares about karma. What's important is that your comments may encourage some readers to think ;)

MiniZinc uses the \/, /\, ->, <-> as the logical connectives.

Prolog implements Definite Clause Grammars[0] which can express context-sensitive grammars. In Prolog there is a simple DSL to express DCGs, but in fact DCG just uses Prolog runtime features. I don't believe there is aanother general purpose language with such complex parsing just built-in the runtime.

Here you can see my version of the raku parser, it's arguably shorter (I'm not a Prolog expert): https://swish.swi-prolog.org/p/basic_logic_parser.pl

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

> No, the entire point of critiquing the author's qualifications is to break apart the idea that, because the author is well-spoken, they are therefore correct or even reasonable. If the author had declined to publish a miniature biography beside the article, then I would not have said anything. I haven't, for example, examined the rest of his body of work; I don't have any predictions to make about what else he may have written.

So basically you make an attack ad personam because it is effective way to win the discussion. It is not enough to dismantle his argument, you have also to make him unreliable source of knowledge. For my part, I haven't noticed the little bio, but I know it's a common practice to show a short info about the author under his article. It's a two edge sword, some readers may be impressed, some may feel like you.

> but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes

So I guess saying that humans have two arms and five fingers per hand is also completely wrong. You know that due to strange genetic conditions, some people are born with more fingers, etc.? Some people get Down syndrome due to an extra chromosome, but still it's correct to say that humans have 20 chromosomes. It doesn't mean that there are no exceptions and doesn't dehumanize those exceptions.

I believe you're oversensitive in this area, but I guess you already told me why.

Sure, but money is a very effective motivational power. If something is expensive, there is a higher need to produce an alternative.

> We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here?

If author justified his credentials with more titles, it would be better? If he was a biologist, his paper would stop being sexist in your opinion? Why does it matter?

As for the article itself, it isn't sexist IMHO unless you believe that stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist. If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.

You're right that author contradicts himself in the sentence "The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle". It's definitely a logical error on the author's side and is plainly wrong, but it's not the main point of the paper.