61 karma · joined April 4, 2018
Why do you say 'may'? Just curious. Surely you've got something
If it looked like a RAZR, I'd buy one today
William of Ockham objected to his fellow theologians inventing things out of whole cloth (like dark matter question mark). That’s the point, not that a simpler explanation is more likely to be true.
The common understanding would have us believe that creationism, being simpler, outshines evolution, or that there is no such thing as a color revolution because the simplest explanation is that the mass protests are earnestly aggrieved locals.
The fact is, zero's usefulness is a bookkeeping device. "There are zero apples" is not better or more useful than "there are no apples." That's not why zero survives. You can wax poetic day and night about what a mind shift "lack of existence is." You're not getting it. You're missing the point. What does that _enable_ that "no apples" does not? That's the measure of its usefulness, right?
It enables positional notation. That's zero's primary gift to the world. It is a necessary bookkeeping device for positional notation. And the measure of positional's usefulness over its predecessor, additive numerals a la the Roman system, is so profoundly great that no argument need be made. No waxing poetic is needed. No "it seems obvious now but back then." It's just indisputable.
Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).
Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.
The JCPOA was written in pencil.
What differentiates High-Power from the other options?
We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.
They don't always listen.
Writing SQL, I'll give ChatGPT the schema for 5 different tables. It habitually generates solutions with columns that don't exist. So, naturally, I append, "By the way, TableA has no column FieldB." Then it just imagines a different one. Or, I'll say, "Do not generate a solution with any table-col pair not provided above." It doesn't listen to that at all.
But - and this is the funny part - I feel like my teen-angsty self has been vindicated. I'm so burnt out on exaggeration, not a single news site has gotten regular clicks from me in over a decade, nor do I comment or read comments. I listen to a little history dork YouTube before bed, or for tutorials. I'm free.
It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."
In my time in management, I found that the commonplace psychological descriptors we use failed to adequately describe what I was seeing. Two employees may both be “detail-oriented,” but there are subcategories within that depending on where the motivation comes from and those subcategories behave differently. Some people want that A+, some people like their squares square and their circles round (and it gives them anxiety when they’re not). Those groups are different, and I don’t know what to call them.
At bottom, there are ‘simple machines’ of psychology that, in combination with each other, produce behavioral traits at the top level. We don’t really have words for them, or at least not words I can think of for the ones I see.