lisper

Then by all means please do enlighten me: what is that criterion?

How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense.

If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idio...

Oh, and since this is HN, I'll also invoke an argument from authority and cite:

https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Well, yeah, obviously. I didn't say that all philosophy is BS, only that a lot of it is, including a lot of what is included in SEP. But as a source for making the field accessible, SEP is excellent.

There's a lot of BS in most fields. The problem with philosophy is that it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. All other fields have some kind of external forcing function. In science, its experimental data. In the arts, it's the ability to produce novelty or exhibit skill or attract an audience. In philosophy there is no external forcing function. The only thing that makes a great philosopher is other philosophers saying they are great philosophers.

There are definitely some non-BS philosophers, like Dan Dennett and Tim Maudlin. But really they are more like scientists than philosophers. In Maudlin's case, he's really a physicist, he just happens to work in a philosophy department.

It doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.

Here is what I wrote about it at the time:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster...

Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.

Newer CA homes also tend to do better in fires.

No, they are not testing these wings in the present, they are planning to test them in the future:

"Over the next three years, Airbus will design, build and flight test full scale wing extensions."

AFAICT they don't exist at all today. They are just renderings. So double clickbait. A more accurate title would be, "Airbus announces plans to develop foldable wing extensions, with non-foldable versions as the first step" or something like that.

Making polio great again.

I wouldn't think the glass and fire would do them a lot of good either.

You should take a look at this:

https://www.uptoplay.net/wordiest-online-game/com.concretero...

Very similar in spirit, but IMHO a lot more enjoyable than your version. It's untimed which takes the pressure off, but still a challenge because there are multiple potentially correct answers.

The on-line version doesn't seem to be working, and I don't have an android device so I can't tell if the app is still working either. But I ran this on my nexus 7 for years until it died. It was one of my favorite on-line games. I would happily pay someone to port it to ios.

Yeah, I actually meant to post this comment in the comap thread. Both comaps and SC were on the home page at the same time.

See also:

https://gurumaps.app/

See also:

https://gurumaps.app/

When the journal in question is called "Studies in Liturgy", yeah, a blog post is better. At least the blog post isn't manifestly biased.

> Look at your source — hardly authoritative!

Still better than the source you originally gave, which was non-existent, or the one you've given now, which is Catholic propaganda.

It might be true that Christmas was not a direct rip-off of Saturnalia per se (though we will probably never know for sure because the Church surely did not go out of its way to record this) but there can be no doubt that both Christmas and Saturnalia are solstice festivals, so at the very least they share a common motivational root. The exact provenance of the details doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25, and so whatever the motivation for that date was, Jesus's birth wasn't it.

No, it isn’t:

https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-beca...

Hm, hadn't thought of that.

For technical requests, one of the most effective ways to demonstrate that you are serious is to cite something about the person's published work that is relevant to the request. There is no more effective way to get someone's attention than showing that you have read and appreciated something they've written.

You need to search for "Why China can't build jet engines." Just because China hasn't been able to do it doesn't mean it's not possible.

> you can't blame over regulation

I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal conspiracy of car, oil, and rubber companies dismantled it, making the poor quality of public transit into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason we don't have good public transit in the U.S. is not because it can't work but because we chose to force it not to work so that car, oil, and tire companies could make more money. It's the same with nuclear energy.

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver

So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.

My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.

The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.

> attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates

Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.

The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.

> it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones

Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.

> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.

A trivial counterexample to what? The antecedent of "one of the easiest" was "ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output." One even the most charitable reading I can muster that still seems to me to presume some pretty abject stupidity.

Sure, but that is a completely different issue. People have mutually-conflicting goals on occasion. That is a Thing That Happens, but it is a very different phenomenon than being surprised by the obvious fact that putting a time stamp on your build makes that build non-reproducible.

> the accidental part is that you suddenly made your build non-reproducible

But that's exactly what I don't get. How can that be considered "accidental"? How can any thinking person not realize that putting the build time into the compiled image will make every build different because, you know, different builds happen at different times? Has software engineering really been dumbed down so much that this is not immediately obvious? It feels like a mechanic doing an oil change and being surprised by having all the oil drain out if they neglect to put the drain plug back in.

> There are a shocking number of ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output when doing C/C++ development. One of the easiest is to use the builtin __DATE__ and __TIME__ macros to stamp a build with the time the compiler was executed at:

Am I missing something here? Yes, if you use a feature that intentionally inserts the build time and date into the code, the every build is going to be different. That's the whole point of these macros. It's a feature. If you don't want that behavior, don't use that feature.