simondw

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted

Or maybe you have a different definition of "religious" than I do? But no, it must be that I lack the right cognitive tools. Sheesh.

Maybe you should petition the city of Monterey to change its name. And while you're at it, do the same for every other city in the world with a name that has changed slightly over time.

By the way, does it bother you at all that "Mexico" isn't properly spelled? Or is that OK because there aren't enough native speakers of Nahuatl to make a case for "Mēxihco"?

Does your hypothetical Mexican company have an established pattern of naming its products after cities in Mexico? And, in this scenario, is there an actual city in Mexico called "Niu York"?

But why stop there? The Spanish name is just a couple of badly spelled Latin words ("montem" + "regem"). And guess what? The Latin words are just some mispronounced Proto-Indo-European words.

Clearly Apple should have called it Men-h₃rḗǵs, right?

I suppose the point is that's there's little difference, practically speaking, between this situation and being fired 5 minutes into your first day on the job.

Everything you say makes logical sense, but I wonder if you're overthinking this?

I can't imagine any editor would let you get away with something like "the red big-ball."

I'm not sure if you mean "big-ball" as a special object distinct from any "big ball." If not, I would still say "the big red ball, not the big green ball."

"John" is another word for bathroom. So is "loo", at least in the variety of English that Ringo speaks.

Well, from the perspective of a Ruby programmer, Python is terrible Ruby code. There are different rules and conventions in American crosswords; you might actually learn to enjoy them once you got past your initial "This is different! And therefore terrible!" reaction.

> there is a single correct pronunciation in their native language

But see, that's the point. We're not speaking German when we use a borrowed word in English. It's no longer a purely German word, despite its origins, just as "xylophone" isn't a mispronounced Greek word, nor "Handy" a misused and miscapitalized English word.

That's not hubris, it's just descriptivism.

But that just pushes it back a level. How does the outside force arrive at its decisions? Whatever it is, it has an effect on a body, so it must be measurable; could we perform something like Libet's experiment on it?

> This is obviously about as far from the argument that Nazis want to make as you can imagine

Without wading in too far here, I want to point out that picking a slightly different "master race" is no better.

> they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism

Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.

Oh. I meant that we can't run this code:

  if (yourCondition) {
    crazyImplications()
  }

until we know the truth value of yourCondition.

When did I say that?

Size, mostly, I guess?

> has someone actually just been tortured to death

I can't rule out the possibility that there are some qualia associated specifically with the neuronal activity corresponding to your mental simulation, but I can say that the leap to the "someone actually being tortured" interpretation isn't warranted. It's clearly not a "someone" in the sense of a human person, and so all bets are off when it comes to interpreting what it's like to be that thing.

> Crazy implications if true!

Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector.

If I said yes, how would you prove me wrong?

I think the idea is that the effect on the listener is not purely a function of the objective characteristics of the music, but also depends on historical context and conventions that may change -- or be forgotten -- over time.

> Why should Silicon Valley play the roll of unelected police-state.

Since when is a corporation deciding not to do business with someone equivalent to throwing them in prison?

What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death?

No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.

You think Gene Roddenberry is down there?

Sure, morally speaking, I completely agree. It might mean the language ends up more awkward and complicated than it had to, though.

It would have been nice and simple if Swift had used Smalltalk syntax from the start. It's quite another thing to reject it at first, and then also bolt it on later alongside the non-Smalltalk syntax.

> "soul", for lack of a better word

A better word isn't all we're lacking. We don't have a clear idea of what that thing is, or whether it even exists.

> Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you?

Whether there is a "you" distinct from both bodies is the actual question to be answered here. If the experiment were done, my guess is that both bodies would swear that they were the original -- in much the same way, perhaps, that you would swear that you are the same "you" you were yesterday.

> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency

Well, none, of course. But the point is that white paper and a display's #FFFFFF probably won't send the same wavelength or number of photons into your eye.

> There are no solutions, just tradeoffs. Don't think there's a perfect tech stack

I completely agree with your point, but the absence of a "perfect" solution doesn't mean there isn't a global maximum. I think people already understand that too -- how many "what's the best X?" searches do you think people perform compared to "what's the perfect X?"?

Fortunately, that is how it's spelled.

How are those related? I don't understand why you think that some people working from home means that others will be less able to, or that those who can WFH don't care about those who can't WFH.

Given that some people are not working from home, surely it's strictly better for them if the spread of the virus is reduced?

I think the idea is that humans, despite being essentially no more than chemical reactions themselves, have developed the power to cause nuclear reactions (through technology).