• The Foolishness Of Political Correctness
    ↪Fooloso4
    Apologies, I mistook carelessness for plagiarism.

    The irony here is that I actually read the article and quoted relevant points. You on the other hand seem not to have read the Wiki article you linked to. If you had you would know that the history of the term is not one of simply mockery and derision. — Fooloso4

    Yes, I know that the term had a complicated history, but as can be seen from the Wiki precis, throughout most of that history it was used ironically and disparagingly.
  • The Foolishness Of Political Correctness
    The proponents of political correctness like to portray anyone who takes objection to political correctness as a bigot or a neanderthal. Any expression containing even a hint of anger brings on that response. I am responding now to political correctness in a manner that is fully reasoned and that cannot be portrayed credibly as any such thing. — Ilya B Shambat

    One person's political correctness is another's basic good manners.

    You will need to be more specific about what form of political correctness you object to - giving examples - if a useful discussion is to occur.     — andrewk

    There are no good forms of political correctness. "Political correctness" - as the very history of the phrase indicates, is a term of mockery and derision. I hate it when people ask "What do you think about political correctness?" - because that is like asking "What do you think about assholes?" The phrase is so loaded that there is simply no way to discuss it "in a manner that is fully reasoned." When people launch into a discussion of "political correctness," you already know where they stand before they even complete the first sentence.

    Rather than addressing "proponents of political correctness" (there are hardly any) it would be more productive to examine what it is that opponents of PC (that is, everyone who uses that phrase) find objectionable. An uncharitable view is that they simply resent being called out for bad behavior. They insist that their behavior must be socially acceptable, and when instead they are met with disapprobation, that is when the accusation of "political correctness" is leveled.

    Not every behavior in a society can or should be governed by institutionalized regulations, such as criminal law. Part of society's self-regulation is social opprobrium. Society's attitudes shift; some forms of behavior become so odious that no one would dare flaunt them in public any more (like calling a dark-skinned student "the black spot"). And when such blatant transgressions of social norms do occur, no one thinks of deriding the inevitable backlash as "political correctness."

    The PC phenomenon arises in cases where there is no overwhelming consensus; it is an artifact of "culture wars." A part of society seeks to deprecate some attitudes and behaviors - with a view of eventually suppressing them, the way homosexuality was and is suppressed in parts of the world, or the way blatant bigotry is suppressed elsewhere. The rhetoric of "political correctness" is a weapon with which the other part of society resists the attitude shift.


    That's a great post, thank you. — fdrake

    @Fooloso4's post - a catalog of American liberal grievances with a tenuous relationship to the OP - was a careless copy-paste job from various online articles. I am pretty sure that not a word of it is original.
  • Mathjax Tutorial (Typeset Logic Neatly So That People Read Your Posts)
    ↪fdrake
    Nice. I hardly know any latex, so thanks for the convenient tutorial.
  • Definitions Of Reality
    This parses with the quantum mechanics, in which observing the phenomenon changes it - and we, through our actions, impact the world. We most certainly have influence on reality. Once again, both the man-made and non-made reality is real. What is reality? Reality is what is. We can then – measure it, study it, observe it, and of course contribute to it as well. — Ilya B Shambat

    You don't need to appeal to quantum mechanics in order to conclude that we "have influence on reality." If you are an agent, then you are influencing reality - that is what it means to be an agent!

    Anyway, there is a sense in which what we believe about a subject is what makes the subject what it is. Does, for example, logic exist - is it a part of reality? Ultimately, the answer depends on how we want to define reality in the particular context. There is no fact of the matter here, other than the fact of how we construct meaning. We can construct the meaning of the word reality so that it includes things like logic - or not: it is completely up to us.
  • Proving a mathematical theorem about even numbers
    So we can just take this and generalize our findings to represent any number? — Ulrik

    If I understand you correctly, the question that you are asking is "How can we know that any number can be given a decimal representation?" (Because the expression d0 + d1(10^1) + ... is just what the decimal representation stands for.)

    This is a good question. Note that in order to ask this question, you must first acknowledge that a number - a natural number in this case - is a mathematical entity that exists independently of its representation. So it is at least a priori conceivable that there may be a number that cannot be represented in decimal notation.

    Natural numbers are usually formalized by Peano axioms. Any set of entities that satisfy these axioms represent natural numbers. So if we can prove that the set of decimal numbers satisfy Peano axioms, then we have proven that decimal numbers represent natural numbers - in other words, any natural number has a decimal representation. (Now, of course, every decimal number is a natural number, but what is in question is whether every natural number is also a decimal number.)

    If you take a look at the Peano axioms, you will see that decimal numbers automatically satisfy most of them, since every decimal number is a natural number. The one that is not obviously true is the postulate that says that natural numbers are closed under succession, i.e. the successor of every natural number is also a natural number. Is the successor of every decimal number a decimal number? In other words, does always have a decimal representation?

    We can prove this by induction. First we can easily show that the postulate holds for every single-digit decimal number: d + 1 is either another single-digit decimal number or 10. Then we assume that any n-digit decimal number has a decimal successor, and using this assumption we can prove that any (n+1)-digit decimal number has a decimal successor...
  • How to interpret this mathematical assignment
    ↪Ulrik
    It's hard to tell without a context, but if we don't assume the standard notation and the standard arithmetic, and instead assume some algebra with unknown axioms and notation, then consider an algebra where the following axiom holds:

    For any p and q, pq ≡ p
  • Theory of Natural Eternal Consciousness
    What do you guys think? — simmerdown

    At first glance this sounds really stupid. Considering that the author's previous article was published in a crackpot open-access "Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research," I'll save myself the effort of looking further into this.
  • Why the Greeks?
    ↪Moliere
    Why let facts get in the way of a half-assed "theory"?
  • Why the Greeks?
    What makes these episodes enduring is that they get transmitted to succeeding cultures. Had the Greeks been swamped by some horse-riding horde indifferent to Greek culture, we probably wouldn't be talking about Aristotle. — Bitter Crank

    Yes, this is an important point. We don't even know what was lost without a trace - the Greek civilization was very fortunate in that respect. Babylonian civilization was influential too, and it left behind lots of very durable clay tablets (most still waiting to be analyzed), and the Babylonian script was deciphered, so at least now we can take stock of their achievements. Minoan civilization was also highly advanced, but it was more isolated, and Minoan script still hasn't been deciphered. Other civilizations were even less fortunate in what they transmitted and what they left behind.
  • Why the Greeks?
    Generally I find such pop-culturology totally without merit. The usual procedure is to pick two stereotypes about a culture - or an entire civilization, as in this case - and weave a thin ad hoc narrative to "explain" one in terms of the other.
  • Why the Greeks?
    ↪Jacob-B
    Babylonian mathematics is said to have been more advanced than Greek mathematics ever was in some respects. Not only did they come up with some advanced practical techniques, like solving quadratic and cubic equations, but their numerical concepts were generally more advanced (Greeks mostly busied themselves with geometry). Some of the Babylonian knowledge reached Greece and influenced Greek astronomy and mathematics, but ideas didn't spread as readily then as they do now, so many of these impressive advances were forgotten and are only known now thanks to archeological discoveries and deciphering of clay tablets.
  • Counterexemple to Hume's Law?
    he disjunction AvB is either an "is" statement or an "ought" statement. — Nicholas Ferreira

    Like @unenlightened said, there is no reason to accept this.

    "It is raining outside or I should have bought some milk."

    Is this an "is" statement or an "ought" statement?

    I think it's just a nonsense statement.
  • Brexit
    I lived in France for a few years.One of the historic differences is the revolution. It may seem extravagant, but the class divisions in England especially play an important role. Most of the government went to the same school, and the same university. That's only slightly an exaggeration. — unenlightened

    I am not sure that the differences in class consciousness that you perceived have much to do with the French revolution. Here is Proust writing at the turn of the (last) century:

    ... middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and from which nothing, save the accident of an exceptional career or of a “good” marriage, could extract you and translate you to a superior caste. M. Swann the elder had been a stockbroker; and so “young Swann” found himself immured for life in a caste whose members’ fortunes, as in a category of tax-payers, varied between such and such limits of income. One knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so one knew his own associates, the people with whom he was “in a position” to mix. — Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    "I don't care. I believe Putin."

    That's what President Trump is alleged to have said in a discussion with U.S. intelligence regarding information he was given about North Korean intercontinental missiles and whether they could reach the United States.     — CBS
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    ↪Christoffer
    ↪fdrake
    We have a Resources section just for that sort of thing. A topic with resources on good argumentation and critical thinking would be right at home there.
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    It's patronizing and overbearing and has a whiff of... Let's just say it has a whiff of Sapientia about it :razz:

    Having a sound logical structure is the bare minimum requirement for an argument, so bare indeed that it is hardly worth noting - unless the argument itself is so bare that a sound logical structure is all that it has going for it. Most disagreements that are worth arguing about are not over logic, and those that are not worth arguing about shouldn't be argued. (ETA: Just saw that
    ↪StreetlightX
    said the same thing.)

    Besides, I doubt that such hectoring will be pedagogically effective.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    Heh, I wouldn't say 'no reason at all', but rather, for more interesting and varied reasons than we are usually prepared to countenance. — StreetlightX

    Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it's completely random and chaotic; of course there are reasons - they just aren't the obvious reasons that we like to attribute to nature.

    Nature is scary and wildly facinating. — StreetlightX

    It sure is. One of the more disturbing instances of antagonistic evolution is the struggle between the mother and the offspring. The (future) offspring wants to suck in as many nutrients as it can, grow as big as it can, but the mother wants to ration her considerable investment of resources more prudently, so that she has more chances to reproduce (starting with surviving the childbirth). It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that this struggle takes place inside one and the same organism!

    the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? — StreetlightX

    It's not such a cut and dried question. On the one hand, there are distinctions between different types of selection, sometimes very obvious ones. On the other hand, the reason Darwin ultimately set sexual selection apart from natural selection may have to do with the fact that he tended to think about natural selection as survival of the fittest (even if he didn't coin that phrase). Later thinkers amended that formula as differential reproduction of the fittest - not as snappy, but more in keeping with the thrust of the theory. Dying before reproducing and surviving but failing to reproduce have exactly the same effects on fitness. Put that way, sex - reproduction - has everything to do with natural selection. Again, I am not a "lumper" - I don't believe that everything is the same as everything else and all distinctions are meaningless; but selection categories are not as starkly distinct as some make them out to be.

    Unfortunately, this is not true. Or rather, for quite a while its been thought to be true, but has begun to crumble under large swaths of emerging evidence that it simply does not account for a great deal of evolutionary phenomena. Ascribing 'what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates to survivability alone' simply flies in the face of evidence - Prum, the Yale ornithologist who I'm relying upon here - cites case after case after case (from the wings of Manakins, to the reproductive systems of ducks, the displays of the great Argus, and so on) where attempts to account for aesthetic phenomena in terms of survivability simply does not work. The evidence itself needs to be read to be discussed, so I can only encourage that you read his work. None of this is to say that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has nothing to do with survivability. Only that survivability does not exhaust accounts of aesthetic phenomena. — StreetlightX

    Whatever the 'metaphysics' of 'choice' at work here is irrelevant. Ironically, one of the reasons sexual selection was so violently rejected as an independent evolutionary mechanism in the time after Darwin theorized it was because the very idea that animals - specifically females! - could play any causative role in driving evolution was nothing less than an offence to Victorian puritan mores. That same regressive hangover remains an infection on our understanding of evolution today. — StreetlightX

    I can see where some of the negative reaction to Prum's book may be coming from. I haven't read it, but I have seen some of the media reporting, like this New York Times piece: How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. One can easily recognize a familiar narrative: a maverick scientist bravely challenges the dogma, only to be met with outraged howls from hidebound academia. And this precious flourish about "Victorian puritan mores" is a topping on the cake.

    Only there seems to be something wrong with this story, starting with the subtitle of the book: "How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us." Now wait a minute, Darwin's theory of sexual selection was never forgotten or abandoned, as Prum claims (judging by the reporting that I have seen). Challenged, modified, developed - yes. It is true that Alfred Wallace, Darwin's younger colleague and the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, was skeptical about the role of female preference, but the idea that female preference is one of the most important drivers of sexual selection has been the received view since at least Ronald Fisher's 1930 hugely influential work on population genetics (he was the one who introduced the idea of "runaway" evolution in connection with sexual selection). Yes, purely adaptationist explanations of sexual selection have been put forward (starting from Darwin himself), and, as it often happens, some scientists tried to put all their chips on that idea, but it never became the mainstream dogma. For example, one idea that gained some popularity, which is that females choose bizarre and maladaptive male traits precisely because they are maladaptive (a male who thrives in spite of the handicap must be very strong indeed) has been extensively criticized, including by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
  • Why isn't education free?
    ↪Susu
    Distance education

    "The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s"
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    This, though, is a non-sequitur through and through. The whole question of intentionality is an irrelevancy - the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? — StreetlightX

    As far as a particular gene/genome is concerned, the source of the selective pressure is of no consequence: it is the same heritable variation/selection mechanism. Of course, from a wider perspective of a species there is a difference.

    What accounts for the difference? In the simple Darwinian scenario the environment - and thus the fitness landscape - is fairly stable, and the population either adapts to it gradually, through successive generations, or goes extinct. However, in the case of sexual selection the fitness landscape is not only dynamic, its evolution is tightly coupled to the evolution of the population genome. This is now a very different game.

    Those who studied the basics of partial differential equations may be familiar with a variant of the following problem. An island is populated by goats and wolves. Goats eat grass, wolves eat goats. The populations of grass, goats and wolves grow or shrink in response to the availability of food and/or predation. This can be modeled by a system of coupled partial differential equations. The model is so ridiculously simple that it actually has an exact analytical solution (a rare thing in real-life modeling). And yet even this extremely simple setup gives rise to an interesting dynamics in the phase space, with loops, spirals, regions of stability/instability and tipping points. The reason for this complicated dynamics is the mutual dependence of processes that make up the toy model.

    And now imagine something similar in principle, but hugely more complicated - that is what the dynamics of sexual selection is like. But not just sexual selection: similar antagonistic evolution results in arms races between males of the same species
    or between predators and prey.

    rhino-beetle-emlen-130312.jpg1363124438

    From the naive point of view such antagonistic evolution is counterproductive: wouldn't it be better if we could all get along instead of wasting resources on pointless competitions? Make love not war! But of course nature doesn't care about such "commonsense" sentiments: it just does what it does for no reason at all.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    As I said, it really depends on your definition where to put the line between natural and artificial and that is arbitrary. Artificial is meant as "man made rather than occuring naturally". My issue with that, is that anything man made is natural in my view. Perhaps it's easier to just do away with "artificial" and simply say man-made as something understood as a more specific process found in nature. — Benkei

    This insistence on everything being natural is a self-inflicted semantic confusion. The point being made is silly: everything is natural, because nature is everything, by definition. This does not say anything meaningful, it's just a tautology. Yeah, I get it, you don't believe in gods and the supernatural. If that's what you want to say, then say it (though why you would want to bring that up in the present context - I have no idea). But why do violence to language?
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    ↪unenlightened
    If you step back far enough then everything is like everything else and you are staring at one featureless mass. As you note yourself it's no use insisting that everything is "natural"; this isn't any more meaningful than clearing your throat.

    There are advantages to stepping back some way and looking at ourselves and our purposeful activity, such as building dwellings - and yes, breeding sheep - as being a kind of ecological adaptation in itself - and thus being a part of the same dynamics that is exhibited in the "natural" world. But so too there are advantages to stepping closer and distinguishing different varieties of selective pressures and adaptations. And of course in appropriate contexts there are any number of reasons for distinguishing "man-made" from "natural."
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    These are all natural agents, their rationality is irrelevant, and there is no reason to single out man as something different, or unnatural, as Darwin actually did, when he theorized about the difference between natural and artificial selection. — Hrvoje

    No, you still don't understand Darwin's argument - maybe if you actually read the book where he introduces his terms, you would see where he was coming from. That selection practiced by a sheep breeder or a horticulturalist on the one hand, and by non-anthropogenic environmental factors on the other hand - both resulting in differential reproduction - was rather his point - a point that would not be immediately obvious to his readers. So he starts by describing something his readers would be well familiar with - what he calls Man's selection or artificial selection, offers an explanation for it, and then proceeds to apply that same explanation to other forms of selection that had been in operation on Earth long before sheep breeders and horticulturalists.
  • My Opinion on Infinity
    ↪Echarmion
    The business of science is to come up with theories, and the best theories win more peer approval. What is the "best" theory? Ideally - one that has the most theoretical virtues. As we have discussed, providing a good fit to data is an important, but not the only virtue. Otherwise the best theory would just be an enumeration of all known observations and measurements: that would guarantee maximum fitness. But the best theories can actually sacrifice some fitness in favor of other virtues, such as simplicity, and of course they venture to extrapolate beyond available observations. That latter feature is pretty much a sine qua non for a scientific theory: if it does not offer theoretical predictions that go beyond what has already been observed, then it is not much of a theory.

    Where can "indefiniteness" fit into all this? I can think of a few aspects. One is where a theory is altogether silent about some question, leaving it (as far as that particular theory is concerned) completely open. Another is an explicitly stochastic element of a theory, such as can be seen in classical statistical mechanics, population dynamics or quantum mechanics. Finally, there is an uncertainty associated with theory choice, which owes itself to insufficient or uncertain data or to theoretical controversies. As far as cosmology is concerned, this latter "indefiniteness" is the most relevant, I think.

    The amount and the quality of data that is necessary to determine the topology of the universe is necessarily limited, nonuniform and biased. Scientific methodology, such as statistical model selection, is also somewhat controversial - no more so as when data is scarce. Astrophysicists and cosmologists understand this, but there isn't much they can do about it. I said that infinite space models are currently favored as both the simplest and the fittest, but there actually are publications in scientific journals that argue that finite topologies provide a somewhat better fit to observations. I don't have any expertise to evaluate this research, but my general impression is that if you ask most experts who are well-versed in this topic, whatever their own opinion is on the question of the size of the universe, they will freely admit that there is a lot of uncertainty here, and that this is probably how it will always be.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    ↪Hrvoje
    It is not the function of scientific terminology to cater to your narrow ideological agenda (such as avoiding any hint of setting humans apart from nature).

    Also you should not confuse notation with meaning. No one who reads scientific literature expects to encounter some specialist term or symbol and instantly understand its meaning without any explanation or context. The fact that, when taken out of context, notation can be misunderstood is not a serious concern. Some care is usually taken to make a term appropriately suggestive and not grossly misleading, but in the end this is a matter of personal taste.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    ↪Hrvoje
    ↪StreetlightX
    Even more to the point, Darwin opens the presentation of his new theory in On the Origin of Species with a chapter on selective breeding, which had been well-known in England, and had been studied by Darwin before he wrote his magnum opus (he bred pigeons himself). Darwin does not even get to natural selection until the fourth chapter of the book. The very obvious point of his chosen terminology is to draw an analogy between the purposeful actions of a farmer and the unconscious processes elsewhere in nature. He argues that on an abstract level such seemingly disparate phenomena can be described by the same process: variation and selection. So natural selection here is compared with artificial selection (both Darwin's terms). Is it "anthropocentric"? Well, of course it is - appropriately so!
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    Then what term would you use to describe having to pass the 0.5m mark before the 1m mark, the 0.25m mark before the 0.5m mark, the 0.2m mark before the 0.25m mark, and so on? — Michael

    "Ordered." Rational and real numbers can be ordered, just in the way that you describe - indeed, that is how they are usually ordered. But they cannot be put into a sequence in that order.
  • Proving a mathematical theorem about even numbers
    ↪Ulrik
    Here is are a couple of hints:

    1. A number in decimal notation can be written as , where are digits.

    2. Can you prove that if you subtract 1 from any of those decimal factors (), the result is divisible by 3?
  • My Opinion on Infinity
    Are you sure that a scientific theory can have "implications" - which I presume means predictions - that are not verifiable through observation? If we have such a theory, how would we verify it? Specifically, how would we determine which of two theories is a more accurate descrition if they only differed in their implications for the non-observable. — Echarmion

    Good question (and excuse me for not quoting the rest - I believe the following will suffice to address the substance of your post). So to recap, what's at stake are our epistemic criteria for selecting among alternative beliefs - in this case, scientific theories. What are the virtues of a theory? Well, being testable is paramount. But what does that mean exactly? If a theory has any generality to speak of (we are not talking about the theory of how much change I have in my pocket right now), then chances are that as a practical matter, we can't test all of its predictions because there are too many of them and many (indeed, most) are impractical or even physically impossible to test. So, although we say that theories should be testable, we get by with testing only a manageable sample of their predictions and generalizing from that.

    And how do we distinguish between theories that fit the evidence equally well? We consider other theoretical virtues: simplicity, cohesion with other theories, fecundity.

    Now to take an example, forget speculative cosmology (I brought that up just for fun) and consider something much more intuitive and uncontroversial. It was long thought that space was infinite; indeed, only since advances in mathematics and Einstein's General Relativity did it become even theoretically conceivable that space might not be infinite in extent. In earlier times people worried about possible problems, such as gravitational collapse (Newton) or Olber's paradox, but in the 20th century these issues have received satisfactory resolutions. So far an infinite space remains the simplest model consistent with astronomical observations. So we are on pretty safe ground here.

    If space is infinite, then how much stuff does it contain? Well, we can only observe a finite volume, but from what we can see, even this finite neighborhood looks to be pretty uniform beyond a certain scale. We could still posit that beyond the limits of observation stars and dust and all other matter end and the rest is just empty space, with out cosmic bubble being like an island in an infinite ocean. But a simpler theory says that the rest of the universe looks pretty much the same as what we see around us. Another way to put this can be expressed as the so-called Copernican principle: we have no reason to assume that the spot from which we look out at the universe is special, and so we should not so assume.

    So to conclude: we can only practically observe a finite amount of things, but other theoretical considerations lead us to believe that there's a lot more stuff out there - indeed, perhaps an infinite amount. Direct observation is not the only criterion by which we determine what exists.
  • My Opinion on Infinity
    I am not sure what is unclear about my position, but anyways "in principle" means based on the attributes of the theoretical object. A ship beyond the horizon is still a ship, which means it should for example reflect light. It is observable, even if you cannot practically observe it currently. — Echarmion

    OK, let's go with ships then. According to some speculative calculations in quantum cosmology (cf. Many Worlds in One by Garriga and Vilenkin) not only is the universe infinite, but it is infinitely repetitious: you might say that quantum reality is not diverse enough to come up with an infinite variety of objects, and so when it gets big enough, sooner or later it begins to repeat itself. The consequence of this is that an infinite universe contains within itself an infinite number of Earths just like ours. Of course, such twin Earths are so rare that statistically, we would expect them to be too far apart to ever make contact. There almost certainly isn't another Earth in our Hubble sphere. But we are talking in principle, right? As you say, these Earths (and any ships sailing their seas) reflect light and so are in principle observable.

    So there you go, an infinity of physical objects can (in principle) exist, even by your own criteria of existence.

    I do not put these constraints "on the world". Observable reality can only consist of that which is observable. I am not talking about the nature of objective reality here. — Echarmion

    That "observable reality can only consist of that which is observable" is a truism, but remember, the question is not what is observable, the question is what beliefs about the world are warranted. I agree that our knowledge of the physical world comes primarily from observation. This necessarily constrains what warranted beliefs we can have about the world. But those constraints alone don't uniquely define an epistemology. Specifically, this broad empirical principle is not equivalent to the dictum that one can only have warranted beliefs about that which one has seen with one's own eyes. Nor is it even equivalent to your vaguer observable-in-principle criterion.

    We routinely form beliefs about things that cannot be verified by direct observation - for example, things that have occurred in the past. Neither does the scientific method require that every single implication of a scientific theory be verifiable through observation. And this is why science doesn't really have a problem with an infinity of physical things.
  • My Opinion on Infinity
    ↪Echarmion
    Define "in principle." If you were living on an island with no seafaring vessel, anything beyond the horizon would be unobservable in principle for you. Would you then be obliged to believe that the world ends just at the horizon? If we expand the possibilities implied by "in principle" to anything that is not strictly forbidden by relativistic physics, our horizon would expand to the size of the Hubble sphere centered around Earth. Does the world therefore end there?

    Any way you look at it, it seems that your epistemology puts a priori constraints on the world, in that it can only be such as to be "in principle" observable. It seems strange to make such egocentric demands of the world, which doesn't seem to care about you one wit.
  • My Opinion on Infinity
    ↪Echarmion
    The things that we have actually observed, in the loosest sense of the word, are a tiny (if not infinitesimal!) fraction of the things that we believe to exist. That goes equally for physical sciences and for everyday observations and beliefs. So are we all wrong in your opinion? Are you some kind of arch-empiricist who will not acknowledge anything that he has not observed?
  • Name that fallacy
    ↪Relativist
    One can read your problem statement as "What is the probability of a 65 year old male of Czech ancestry winning the lottery?" Given that there is at least one 65 year old male of Czech ancestry in the pool of participants (you), and that the chances of each participant are the same (by assumption), the probability in question is at least as high as the probability of any single participant winning the lottery. If there happen to be two 65 year old males of Czech ancestry playing the lottery, the probability of a 65 year old males of Czech ancestry is twice as high as the probability of any single participant winning.

    BTW, congratulations! How much did you win? :)
  • Is time travel possible if the A theory of time is correct?
    ↪bill harris
    I think you are mixing two unrelated issues. Time travel is not the same as reversing the arrow of time: as you correctly point out, fundamental physics is time-reversible, so from that point of view all that's needed to go backwards in time is just a sign change in the equations. But empirically such reversal would be indistinguishable from the "normal" chronology: you wouldn't suddenly be able to remember the future. - unlike the case of the "real" time travel.
  • Brexit
    Perhaps the no-deal-Brexit is something equivalent to the Y2K scare? Not something to get hysterical about. — ssu

    These myopic references to the "Y2K scare" are a pet peeve of mine. If people didn't get hysterical about it and didn't spend hundreds of billions of dollars and untold hours working overtime on fixing the problem, the story would have had a different ending. But since the threat was successfully averted, a lot of people somehow came to the conclusion that it was nothing to worry about. And now it's a cautionary story about how when experts tell you about an imminent threat, you can just tell them to go where the sun don't shine.
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    ↪Evola
    Adding another controversial issue into the mix is not going to help your cause.
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    So, if I was going to convince an evolutionary sceptic, I would start by convincing her that evolution is just a word we use to describe part of a deterministic process which began at the big bang, and resulted in the biodiversity we see around us. — Evola

    Pedagogically, that's just about the worst approach I can think of for convincing an evolution skeptic (within the bounds of civility). Not to mention that this is an extremely controversial - I would even say fringe - thesis.
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    ↪Evola
    Perhaps we shouldn't derail the thread. Would you like to start a new topic and elaborate your thesis a bit?
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    Darwin wrote about these metaphysical commitments in the last chapter of his most important book. I think he understood his own theory quite well. — Evola

    That may be so, but Darwin's metaphysical commitments are of interest to Darwin's biographers; they matter little to modern biology and its philosophical interpretations.

    Relativity is a theory of the arena, and thus underlies all scientific theories. It requires all other theories to be expressible as tensor-valued fields in spacetime, and puts some constraints on the motion of those fields. There is nothing stochastic or random in this picture. — Evola

    Your picture of intertheoretic relationship is false as a statement about actually existing scientific theories, and it is untenable as a normative statement.
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    An opinion about gravity is that it does not exist as a force, but rather it is the effect of objects travelling along space-time geodesics. In this picture, the universe is an ontologically deterministic 4D structure, in which all world-lines are instantiated in their entirety. I'd go so far as to suggest that this opinion on gravity, is the prevailing opinion.

    An opinion on evolution is that it requires ontological indeterminism. This was the opinion of Darwin and it seems to be the opinion of most biologists.     — Evola

    General Relativity is a deterministic theory (with some caveats), and GR is our best account of gravity. But GR is not a theory of everything - it is only a theory of spacetime and gravity at large scales. We don't have to be committed to ontological determinism writ large just because of GR.

    Darwinian evolution deals with random variation in populations. That is statistical indeterminism - it also does not force upon us any metaphysical commitments.
  • Evolution: How To Explain To A Skeptic
    If you were a little confused about evolution and couldn't 100% tell if you agreed on it or not, would you want a quick and easy guide to access it? — ep3265

    I would google something like this or this or this. Many resources for beginners there, from one-pagers to short courses. On the other hand, I would be wary of a non-expert trying to educate me, especially one who comes across as evangelical (that doesn't necessarily describe you).

    But let me backtrack a little from what I said earlier. Writing about a subject is a good way to learn it, to organize and internalize what you've learned. So if nothing else, this will be a good experience for you. If it also helps someone else - that's an added bonus.

    However, I am troubled by your thinking about your potential readers as stupid and simple-minded. To be sure, there are stupid and simple-minded people among those who are skeptical about evolution, but here I have these concerns. One is that your direct approach of presenting facts and logical arguments (my arguments are airtight, surely they'll see the reason!) isn't going to work well with stupid and simple-minded people. You will require better-suited pedagogy. Another concern is that a patronizing attitude may push people away. Finally, I am wondering about your motivation in the whole endeavor. What do you need with these people? Why is it important for you that they accept the truth of evolution (of all things)?
Home » SophistiCat