266 karma · joined September 1, 2015
As for receiving a reply, I know that you get a notification, at least if people use your +name in their comment, but it isn't easy to manage given the lack of history, as you pointed out.
I'm curious to know what you mean by that?
As far as youtube comments being the butt-end of jokes about bad comments, I think this is just due to the fact that video is the great common denominator (and thus, the intellectual filter is very very low). Reddit's r/videos is limited to "non-political" videos for much the same reasons (and given that r/politicalvideos is... well, let's say the comment quality is not consistent.
I don't really see how this can be improved: a voting system won't filter low-effort/common denominator comments if what the majority wants is low effort comments.
Or just if the mass of low effort comments is too large. And since low effort is easy to make, the mass will be large.
CGPGrey on what kind of ideas/memes spread faster: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry
H3h3 on the insane number of views on 'minecraft sex' videos (which is exactly the kind of thing I mean when taking about common denominator): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3LhrbSp6Mw
And then there's the lessons of Twitch Plays Pokemon: they had to remove the ability to request multiple keypresses at once because people kept stalling (start10) for example.
Everywhere? When they care for you when you're sick, drive you to sports practice, clean up after you and what not?
Otherwise known as appeal to emotions. I think I'm going to start finding examples of avowed racists who criticize lynching so I can do the 'not all racists' thing.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2014-10-first-ever-global-life-renewabl...
Well, I would argue that the vibe of your whole comment was coherent in that sense: you talked about what nature wanted, about design and about what kind of stuff would make sense while looking at it from a architect perspective.
It's a very odd way to look at it if you have no creationist conception of it all to be honest.
As for your point that not everything has an evolutionary advantage, I agree. Deafness and blindness exist after all.
But I don't really see your point as far as proposing hypotheses to account for certain prevalent traits, which, in my opinion, is what the original content was about (the grandmother hypothesis).
More to the point: what's the design goal? To quote EY [2]:
> But when you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don't fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?
> When I design a toaster oven, I don't design one part that tries to get electricity to the coils and a second part that tries to prevent electricity from getting to the coils. It would be a waste of effort. Who designed the ecosystem, with its predators and prey, viruses and bacteria? Even the cactus plant, which you might think well-designed to provide water fruit to desert animals, is covered with inconvenient spines.
I don't deny that if there is a "designer", then he gets a lot of points for creativity.
I mean, it takes a lot of "creativity" to design an 8 limbed baby [3], twins sharing the same body [4] or a child with a skull that won't stop growing [5]. Sure, it's very "creative" and even personal I guess (I mean, when you get ostracized for having an "elephant face" it sure appears to be very meant and taken very personally). So I guess you're right in at least one metaphorical sense.
[1] http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2c8_1249503802
[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM82Hs0LEpc
I agree, that's what I said "if what your parent comment suggests is true"
In fact, said parent comment said "It might have been a mere speculation but it kind of makes sense"
I agree with you that there is no predictive power in explaining things that way (indeed, what I said is speculation, hence why I worded it in the conditional), but that was not what I was responding to. I was only responding to the "design" part of your comment.
That being said, evolution does make predictions which have been confirmed. Notably Darwin's long-nosed moth. Here's a list of more predictions[1]
To design? Are you a creationist?
Assuming you're just confused, evolution doesn't "design" life. It's just a "whatever works" process.
For example, angler fish have a lure that resembles prey for their prey. This has been selected by the eyes of their prey. It's not that the prey wanted their predator to fool them, it's just that angler fish with bad lures starved and died off.
In the case of humans, if what your parent comment suggests is true, then it would just be that some women had some sort of defect where they couldn't give birth after some point and that turned out to give their grandchildren an advantage over the grandchildren of women without the defect. Over a long period of time, more and more descendants with defective reproduction genetics would survive compared to those without and so it becomes prevalent.
That's how evolution works.
That's quite the study you have there… Also, how simple is the statement "conservatives are the ones looking for simple answers"?
It's also puzzling that you would liken Trump to "conservatives", when it seems like there's quite a few definitely conservative people out there who flat out refused to endorse him (all three Bush for example, Ted Cruz, John Kasich among others).
http://time.com/4372882/john-kasich-donald-trump-republicans...
Yes. Just like the omni concepts to begin with.
> These people don't obey the scripture because they believe the scriptures are not really authoritative in all cases.
If I tell you that I believe you don't really exist and yet I'm still talking to you, does that make me a fine rationalist? No. It makes me a total idiot.
People do stuff that makes no sense all the time. The fact that they do, does not suddenly make their actions exquisitely well intellectually justified or what not.
Actually, I think you are confusing 'rationalization' and 'rationalism' together.
If she's omniscient, then free will doesn't exist. If she's omnipotent, then she can create a rock so heavy she can't lift it… but probably can lift it.
I also notice that you didn't mention omnibenevolent.
> Any self-professed Christian who deviates from the teachings of the Bible either intentionally or out of disinterest is doing this to some degree.
Really? Any Christian who works on Sunday is "reasonably start[ing] from first principles [and] discover[ing] whether there is a Creator"?
I agree with you: we don't use the same definition of "rational".
I am willing to bet that there is less people in this world who do this "search on their own and discover god" than there are atheists. In fact, if you hang around atheist circles (The Atheist Experience for example), you'll hear enough people say they lost friends/family after deconverting or even that they still fear Hell even after they stopped believing.
> but the Jesus of the Bible was clearly opposed to people using religion for personal ends
How would you know? You realize that, assuming that Jesus did exist as a single person and all, we only have accounts compiled by a single authority that had interest in not having any negative portrayal of the guy?
It's like saying that Steve Jobs was not a bad person because his authorized biography didn't mention any terrible things (and even then, Jobs' probably mentions his daughter in passing at least).
> Regarding nonsensical axioms, axioms can be nonsense if they are inherently contradictory.
If you believe in truth-coherence, which seems to be a belief that religiosity-inclined people have.
Monists/materialists seem to tend more towards the truth-correspondence view. Under the latter, axioms don't need to be contradictory to be nonsense. They just need to be contradictory with reality.
I mean, if it was something special about sex, we wouldn't need to qualify it as sexual (prostitution is not 'sexual prostitution' or even 'sexual slavery').
So what is it that is the problem with sexual objectification? It's not the objectification proper since nobody is lamenting the objectification of plumbers and painters or what not. And it's not like anybody cares about what their feelings are like. Everyone seems to understand that it's a job.
So really, the aspect of sexual objectification people don't like is that they believe no one should be allowed to sell sex. And my question is why? We sure are allowed to sell food, either at the grocery or the restaurant. We're are allowed to sell and rent living arrangements. Although it's uncommon, there's even places charging for access to toilets.
So why is sex so special?
It's like proving that everybody got rich in a town overnight since the average income shot up while Bill Gates came for a visit.
The driver was texting while driving.
I've seen more instances since then.
If you ask me, people can't be trusted to be safe anyway. I'd rather have imperfect autonomous cars than people driving.
Am I being too optimistic again?
I mean, sure, academics might get stopped by lawsuits. Russian social engineering hackers won't though.
The latter means that information that was _inaccessible_ was made accessible (ergo: you couldn't access the information before the event).
The former is less constrained: it just means that whatever state of accessibility the information was in, it is now easier to access.
As an example: digitizing a book that is available for free to anyone who goes to Public Library One in Big City makes it more accessible (because I can access it from the other side of the world while eating soup) even though it wasn't _inaccessible_ before.
In the matters that you're talking about, it may just be that we can't really know. Certain things take years to figure out (take Feynman's example of the Milikan value): people still −I assume− had to use some value while the "official" value was shifting.
I'm not sure I'd call that cargo culting necessarily. If the best case to be made right now is in favour of the majority position, then I think one should go with the majority position. I'd say that one should still keep a healthy dose of skepticism and be ready to change their mind if the balance of evidence changes… but then, it may be that managers/leaders need to feel committed and that a "healthy dose" for them is very, very little.
You never know exactly to what exact extent your map matches the territory. But you can have a pretty good idea. Like, we know (to the extent that we can "know" anything) that models predicting the Sun will rise tomorrow match reality better than those which don't. We know that models which predict that turning on a switch will cause the lightbulb to emit light are more accurate that those who say that it's magic or mysterious.
To quote Feynman:
> We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.
Would countries use less energy if not for Norway's oil exports?
Unless you can predict the future for as long as Microsoft exists, you can't say that.
I'm pretty sure that before the iPhone there were people saying Nokia was too big to fail, same for IBM before Windows probably.
I'm still on the fence about car companies. I sure have heard people very convincingly say that oil is a risk-free investment, that there never will be a time when oil isn't needed anymore. I have good reasons to disagree with that today.
Then again, Nokia still exists today, so I suppose a pedant could get technical about oil still filling a much diminished market in the future.
It does, however, reduce the overall impact when all connections are considered.
Even breast reduction is covered if a doctor judges that it's for health reasons.