Both the retarded wavefunction going from t -> t' and the advanced wave coming from t' -> t may explore whatever places they want, but only in the trajectories where one is the conjugate of the other do their trajectories become real. — Kenosha Kid

Probably a stupid question: if the mapping from a wavefunction to it times its complex conjugate always produces a purely real variable, and that the "advanced wave" is defined by the mapping of this wavefunction to its complex conjugate, how could this be taken as evidence of a coincidence of physical mechanisms (two processes with the same result) when it's actually two names for the same mapping?

In other words; what generates the advanced wavefunction trajectories aside from the conjugation operation?

Analogy:
"By applying this new technique, we have transformed the sleeping agent into a soporific!"
"What did the technique add?"
"It reveals that it's no coincidence that sleeping agents are soporifics".

What can I say, my bar is high. No anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Truly a huge expectation for any enlightened mind.

Oh so he was. I wonder why they keep coming back.

Since it came up, I banned @bccampello. Who is returning banned member @Bruno Campello, also @BrunoCampello also @bcccampello among others. I banned Bruno originally for two things:

(1) Advertising.
(2) Posting something that endorsed an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.

@SophistiCat @Hippyhead.

I would guess that the Plush Forums servers have a priority system for operations. Putting a post on site I guess will have a higher priority than updating the displayed post count. When the servers are sufficiently busy, lower priority operations will be done noticeably after higher ones. Your post count is currently at 120.

Cocoa Puffs — Hanover

Fruity Pebbles, — Hanover

For some reason I doubt that those types of cereal meet the exacting standards of the Proud Boys.

What is necessary to count as explicit enough?

Perhaps ethnicity is inferred from other data, so this data was never disclosed and that might be how this was avoided but still. Bloody insane. Can you still select your race in Facebook? 15 years ago when I was still using it, that was still possible. I quit it because of all the privacy issues already surrounding Facebook then. — Benkei

I don't have an account any more. I had a look, it doesn't seem like an attribute someone can fill in on their page any more. Regardless, would making the account and filling out the ethnicity information count as consent?

What I find rather incredible is that you can collect "race" data in the first place and then even share it with third parties. This would be so incredibly illegal in the EU it wouldn't even be contemplated. — Benkei

It already happened to EU citizens didn't it?

Facebook lets you target people based on ethnicity. It included it as a targeting demographic explicitly in their ad workflow for clients thingybob. Despite that, it does not elicit ethnographic the information from users on their profiles, it merely infers ethnicity from their usage. If you can target ads to anti-semites explicitly, they will target based on how you're classified by their algorithms. You may be able to elicit ethnicity information by designing a survey that elicits it, then it gets stored and identified with the user etc...

Christopher Wylie's on the record saying Cambridge Analytica used essentially the same targeting methodology for Brexit campaigning as for Trump. Same Facebook data mining and targeting bollocks.

Before models, best to understand underlying issues like the impact on war on drugs, as I mentioned already, or how broken communities really go into free fall in the US making a huge divide between the prosperous and poor communities. Poverty goes through racial lines still in the US. — ssu

You'd enjoy the report I linked to frank above. It's actually adjusting for economic variables in the context of police killings.

Aye.

Relevant report.

Higher poverty among the black population accounts for a meaningful, but relatively modest, portion of the black-white gap in police killing rates. In contrast, higher census
tract poverty fully explained the Latino-white gap, and the police killing rate among Latinos
was lower than expected given their relatively high rates of census tract poverty

Not from what I looked at for the above.

Percentage of population: 63......13
of total offenses charged : 69......27
Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement: 54......32
Inmates in prison by race: 57.....38 — ssu

If deaths or prison sentences would have no racial bias, then the total offenses charged would be a good indicator in telling how many go to jail or how many are killed by the police.

32% differs from 27% by 5%, which is noticeable, yet 38% (percentage of inmates) differs from 27% by 11%, which is huge. — ssu

A better naive hatchet job of the numbers would at least adjust for per-capita rates by making an odds ratio. The percentage of the population numbers are right there.

63/13 gives you about 5. So the left column numbers should be about 5 times the right column numbers under random assignment of outcomes given that ratio. Instead, the left column numbers are about 2.6 times then 1.7 times then 1.5 times the right column numbers.

Every one of the left column is about under half of what it "should be" under the assumption of random assignment. And the bottom two are the most out of line with that assumption, not the least.

That's the "are there racial disparities" question.

Rereading your post, I saw a different claim. That instead of adjusting for the per capita percentages, "total offences charged" should be conditioned on for calculating whether there is a disparity or not in deaths due to use of lethal force by law enforcement. Outside of the issue of whether the causal chain:

X is charged with an offence -> X is killed by police.

actually makes sense as an explanation here, which is the modelling assumption underlying that conditioning. adjusting for that does make the numbers more in line. Whether that's a numerical coincidence or not remains to be seen; though it's certainly plausible that whatever variables cause the police to charge people with an offence being racially loaded explain some of the effect of the racial disparities in police killings. If you gotta be in contact with an officer to be killed by one, anything that raises officer contact probability raises officer killing you probability; so it could be be a preferential sampling thing (read; racial profiling + police effort + economic variables + other demographic variables).

Conditioning like that doesn't explain this kind of thing though, taken from the paper you referenced:

Further, although force was employed in fewer than 4% of contacts for all racial/ethnic groups in 2008, blacks were nearly three times more likely than whites to experience any use of force during an LE encounter.

Which suggests that the simplified causal chain X is charged with an offence -> X is killed by the police is over simple. I believe it suggests that because the racial disparity from preferential sampling is already conditioned on (the people in question have encountered the police) and yet there's a disparity in the application of lethal force.

X is charged with an offence -> X is subject to lethal force -> X is killed by the police

If race also influences whether X is subject to force in an offence charging encounter, it'll have an effect over and above the preferential sampling effect. But at that point, we really need to start talking about models, rather than comparing data in a naive hatchet job way.

Should also consider whether being charged with an offence is an adequate way of representing an encounter with police that may turn lethal - Breonna Taylor says otherwise. But that's also a question of proportion.

From a more academic standpoint, the whole point of putting forward an argument is to invite criticism so you can defend it. Where you can, win! Where you can't, you amend and strengthen your argument accordingly, win! And where your argument cannot be strengthened, you've been saved a lifetime of being totally wrong, win! — Kenosha Kid

At its best, a gotcha takes a weak point in an account and shows it for what it is.

At its worst, a gotcha is actually a sophisticated means of performative stupidity. A way of focussing on the weakest point of a well reasoned and plausible account to avoid having to see it as well reasoned and plausible. Critique as a buffer to prevent needed change.

Confusing the first for the second is a bad error. Unfortunately, we are all prone to it. Believing strongly that all of our opinions are well reasoned, plausible and relevant invites the worst form, I think.

The system could be better, but I think it protects against outright fascism, although it's easy to see how that can be inverted over time. If and when fascism properly takes hold, it won't be some dark coup: the people will vote it in. That's what I'd bet on were I betting man. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

If and when it happens? Tesco's law of fash encroachment: every little helps! Muslim ban, state endorsement of white supremacist militiamen vigilantes murdering people, undermining political process and news institutions, unmarked officers disappearing dissenters in vans, the president calling for more violence against immigrants and dissenters in speeches, planned heightening of voter suppression, planned electoral disruption, federal troops dispatched to quell dissent... There should not be an ellipsis here.

I think this regime's well past the ur fascism stage. It looks to me like more of a tipping point. If enough consent for all this can be manufactured, it will get worse. It keeps getting worse. Remember when having a president that committed sexual assault was news? And when the Republicans blocked the appointment of a supreme court judge for purely partisan reasons? And when armed far right militiamen blocked the entrance to a government building and received an endorsement? Seems like a tamer time. It was. We're getting desensitised.

That's part of the encroachment I think, things that were scandalous a few years ago are not now. We've got a new frame for what is normal conduct.

We had a similar thing in the UK with Brexit. The leavers won 51:49%. Because David Gammeron was too thickly cut to consider the possibility that the majority might be comparable to the sort of result variance that would be time-averaged out, we were stuck unable to contest what ought to have been a highly contestable result. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. (Also, the physicist is strong in you)

So if Republicans didnt do anything else, they have already succeeded in creating fear and confusion which works in their favor. They have given some the impression that it's either risk getting covid (which will be death for some) or don't bother voting. As Hanover points out, it's politics. — frank

Win win really, they'll have to suppress less votes!

The problem is an electorate that can see what's happening and still vote him into a position where he can contest an election and the SC potential could read the result as a win for Trump. — Kenosha Kid

Well, there's more than one problem then. Whether people are stupid is a different concern from encroaching fascism and the risk of it.

Aren't these fears a little too... well... crazy? If Trump loses, he loses. The biggest problem is surely American patriotism. A vote against a sitting President, even one as demonstrably moronic and owned as Bush Jr, is no sure thing. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think the fears are crazy. He expressly doesn't want to commit a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the vote and can get away with it. From the Atlantic piece @Maw linked earlier:

The Trump-campaign legal adviser I spoke with told me the push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will. Once committed to the position that the overtime count has been rigged, the adviser said, state lawmakers will want to judge for themselves what the voters intended.

“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser said. Democrats, he added, have exposed themselves to this stratagem by creating the conditions for a lengthy overtime.

“If you have this notion,” the adviser said, “that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days—in some states a week, 10 days—then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”

As I understand it: the play they're making is based on the idea that in person voting is deemed to skew in favour of Republicans (hence all the mail ballot lies, and GOP reps asking if people voted early @frank), and giving the Democrats a choice between breaking the transfer of the presidency in a huge way that will probably skew Republican and a more minor way that will probably skew Republican... The Democrats being forced to choose between radically breaking procedure and compromising their power with a slightly milder break of procedure, their track record suggests they will choose procedure over power any day of the week. "You go high, we go low!"

The narrative seems to be that mail in ballots "rig the election" in a close call, so that launders support for the Republicans making that anti-democratic power play. Why anti-democratic? Spelling it out explicitly; it looks like either the GOP has made plans to ignore some of the votes or all of the votes, and if that wasn't enough it's entirely for reasons of power. Ignoring votes for reasons of continued power - not good.

The rest of the fash stuff is also there: federal troops being deployed to crush protests, unmarked officers disappearing people in vans, outright endorsement by state law enforcement of protester murder by white supremacist militiamen.

So I don't think the fear is crazy, no.

This is a very ambitious thread. But probably no more than the first 900 pages of Penrose's The Road to Reality. I may not live long enough to see its completion, but you guys are younger, so there is hope. :worry: — jgill

That's one of those books which is in dire need of a Miracle operator.

(vague description of mathematics)
A miracle occurs.
Now you try!

Oh are you or a loved one I'll? Sorry to hear. Be safe! — Kenosha Kid

Nah. Couldn't see my partner for a while, travelled to see her, quarantine restrictions got reimposed while I was here!

I guess a good aim atm is continuum mathematics. — Kenosha Kid

I'll be in quarantine for a couple of weeks soon. I shall try and get the field of real numbers with its order defined in that time.

And you build from there. — dussias

That's roughly where I started - gesturing in the direction of formal languages (production rules on a collection of strings).

So you'd need linear operators on vector spaces, differentiation+integration, complex numbers... If I gave you definitions of those things, would you be able to to do what you needed to do with them? Can you do the thing where you go from linear operators on vector spaces to linear operators on modules if required?

The vector space construction needs mathematical fields (commutative rings with multiplicative inverses), which needs groups.

I know how to get from simple fields to wavefunctions and from densities to wavefunctions uniquely -- that's simple enough. — Kenosha Kid

Are you talking physics field or mathematics field? Field as a mapping from, say, the plane to vectors in the plane (physics field), or field as a commutative ring with multiplicative inverses (mathematics field)?

Representatives of the GOP are walking around asking people if they voted early. Why are they doing that? — frank

There's likely going to be some effort to make the early votes not count?

Would that be sufficient? — Kenosha Kid

There should be a sound effect for a field flying over another mathematician's head. $↑ ↑ ↑ WHOOSH$

I have no idea!

I can do some more of the basic axiomatic maths, but I've been cheating and looking ahead at axiomatic QFT and decided that I really need to study more mathematics. I don't know C*-algebra from a 32C-wonderbra — Kenosha Kid

I only really know the story up until "this is a differential equation with real variables". Complex analysis stuff and actual physics is mostly above my pay grade. It'd be pretty cool if @Kenosha Kid, @jgill and I could actually get up to something like the Schrodinger equation rather than f=ma, which is what I planned to stop at (but stopped just short of the ordering of the reals).

Fred is suddenly certain that he has just stopped having a pain, of which he was unaware. — Banno

Parsed it wrongly - Fred suddenly stops being in pain, a pain of which he was unaware. He isn't just certain of it; as it it were just an epistemic state directed towards a pain; Fred had stopped being in pain! If you stop experiencing something, you must've experienced it before that.

I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Interesting thread. Ambitious too. — Kenosha Kid

Yeah fdrake is awesome and I would love to see him continue what he was doing in this thread; or for someone else to take over where he left off. — Pfhorrest

Thank you!

I've been thinking about going back to it for some time now. I probably will. It would be nice to have one way of telling the story in one place.

I wish I had this site when I was at school, because I suspect that, with the right wording, you could make fdrake do a lot of your homework. — Kenosha Kid

Lots of people asked me to help them with their homework when I was at school and uni! Never could say outright no to it. Unless someone wanted me to do it for them rather than get help learning it. Have no sympathy for the first motivation.

That's a series of unrelated statements, not an inference. — Banno

(4) has "as a consequence" of something in (3) in it.

(1) I was in pain up until time t.
(2) I did not realise I was in pain before t+1.
(3) I stop being in pain at t+1.
(4) I realise that I was in pain at all times before t+1 at t+1 as a consequence of the cessation of sensation in (3).

Does that seem problematic to you?

I don't think it's inappropriate to rephrase (4) as:

(4) I learned that I was in pain at all times before t+1 at t+1 as a consequence of the cessation of sensation in (3).

Because I am now in possession of a fact I did not know; that I was in pain up until time t (and did not realise it)!

Some people are probably going to balk at the idea that a sensation can happen without realising the sensation is had.

@SophistiCat gave me this reference in a thread a while ago. It talks about what philosophy can learn from special relativity.

I say memory. — Banno

Why not both?

...but if they have not been in pain, then they have not stoped being in pain, and hence they answer "no". So the posited inference that they are still in pain would be wrong. — Banno

And if someone really had stopped being in pain? Would you infer that they were in pain just prior to then?

What exactly is the missing premise? "If I have stopped being in pain then I was previously in pain"? — Banno

I don't think it's any more question begging than:

Alice: "I saw Jane today"
Bob: "How do you know?"
Alice: "I saw her."

Have you stopped beating your wife?
If someone answers yes, then we infer that they previously beat their wife.
If someone answers no, then we infer that they are still beating their wife.

Have you stopped being in pain?
If someone answers yes, then we infer that they were previously in pain.
If someone answers no, then we infer that they are still in pain.

The first is compatible with never having been in pain, the second is not. — Dfpolis

Eh, you could argue that I've never experienced something which could appropriately be described as "I have stopped being in pain now". That's not something I'm interested in discussing really. If my experience that it happened is not sufficient to convince someone that it's possible, I don't really know what to do.

And yes, the first is compatible with not being in pain at the appropriate time while the second is not. However, stopping being in pain is consistent with not believing one was in pain before it stopped. It's ultimately a question of whether you can feel something while not believing you feel it!

(But see fdrake's interesting example. He claims to infer, from "I am not in pain now", that "I was in pain previously". I'm not convince infer is quite right here.) — Banno

"I have stopped being in pain now" -> "I was previously in pain"
Similar to:
"I have stopped hearing the storm" -> "I previously heard the storm"

Looks rather a lot like an inference to me!

When it come to wind turbines there are those who claim that if all the energy taken to mine, transport and process the materials they are constructed form, install them, maintain them, deconstruct them and dispose of the waste is taken into account, they are not carbon neutral by any means. — Janus

Constructing win farms isn't carbon neutral, but neither is constructing fossil fuel plants. They take less to construct now AFAIK - they're much lighter and more efficient than they used to be! Fossil fuel plants take a lot more carbon to keep going - they need to be supplied with coal, the coal needs to be transported. Obviously the benefits of windfarms are only relative in construction, but (again AFAIK) they don't need anywhere near as much upkeep carbon.

I'll be honest and admit I didn't have the time to read that article thoroughly. I would love it if it were true that organic farming can be as productive per hectare as industrial agriculture. But, even if it were, would we not still be reliant on fossil fuels for the large-scale transportation required to feed the global population? — Janus

I read a few papers a while ago showing that poly-cultural sustainable crops can have more yield than mono-cultural non-sustainable ones. I have to say I wasn't particularly critical when I was reading them.

What I'm gonna call the Master Doom Argument goes like this:

( 1 ) We need an immediate (enough) transition to carbon neutral or carbon negative global production of electricity, water and food otherwise civilisation will collapse.
( 2 ) Every intervention towards a carbon neutral or negative transition is a huge coordination problem and requires fossil fuels to get it going.
( 3 ) Both elements of ( 2 ) mean no transition will be immediate (enough).
( 4 ) Civilisation will collapse.

I think the Master Doom Argument is very persuasive. But the bolded "every" and the bolded "enough" are doing a lot of work in evincing the severity of the conclusion in (4). Since neither of us are experts, and I doubt either of us are sitting on a long pdf document analysing the trajectory of civilisation, going into the specifics of what might help is likely pointless between us. However, the overall argument structure is something we can talk about.

So the severity of the conclusion; civilisation's collapse; depends a lot on how much damage climate change will do to global society. I think it's plausible that a lot of damage can be done, but civilisation will not collapse. There's a burden of proof in establishing the positive claim (civilisation will collapse) that isn't there in establishing the plausibility or (sufficient) risk of the positive claim being true (civilisation might collapse/we are exposed to the risk of civilisation's collapse through climate change). Though that "sufficient" will do a lot of work there and people have different risk tolerances blah blah (insert whole literature (or two) here).

There are two things that weaken the argument for me, one undermines (without strictly refuting) the "every" in ( 2 ), one undermines (without strictly refuting) the "enough" in (2). I think we've got to start by biting the bullet that massive changes are required on a global scale. Even in addressing it, the institutional coordination required to address the coordination problem in ( 2 ) is huge... But, notice that there's an implicit dependence on an index that ( 2 ) glosses over (hiding it in "Every"). It says that every transition towards sustainable global production is a huge coordination problem; but what if that's not true? It could well be that the transitions get easier as more happen. EG:

This next paragraph is heavily inspired by climate science journalist Potholer54's Youtube video on climate change solutions at scale. If we were in a position that about 1% of the Sahara desert was covered in up-to-date solar cells, that would provide approximately the required electricity for the whole world (I have heard, but can dig up a citation for you if required). If we were in a position where hydrogen could be split from water at scale using that electricity - that would provide a green alternative fuel to fossil fuel which can do everything it can (though there's obviously costs seeing as hydrogen fuels are so volatile). If we were in a position where pipelines and logistics for (maybe safer) hydrogen fuel were widespread, the switch to hydrogen would be relatively painless. Transcontinental power grids are possible too. If you had transcontinental power grids and hydrogen pipelines+logistics, you have aeroplanes and industry and stuff can be green into the future.

So I think ( 2 ) as stated is undermined a bit; it's plausible that the transitions get easier as they accumulate. But steel-manning it gives something like:

( 2a ) There are some PRE-REQUISITE transitions towards a sustainable global production strategy required for any other transition to take place and those PRE-REQUISITE transitions cannot be completed immediately enough to prevent the collapse of civilisation.

( 2a ) might as well be "we're all fucked" the premise, but there's still the ambiguity about the nature of the collapse after it's granted.

I think that's where the "enough" comes in - it does a lot of legwork, if you leave it vague its meaning can be tailored to the severity of the consequences. If stuff isn't done immediately enough, there will be societal damage that scales with how immediately, with some thresh-hold on immediately that leads to extinction events... And that vagueness itself is pretty scary.

Looks like people with UK bank accounts living in the EU/EEA might get their UK accounts closed after the transition period ends. Too little progress on negotiations. Thanks, you shits.

But then here is §246:

In what sense are my sensations private? --- Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. --- In one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word “know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know if I’m in pain. --- Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself! --- It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean --- except perhaps that I am in pain?

Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behaviour,--- for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them.

The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.

I don't see any denial here that we have an inner experience of being in pain, or that this might be expressed by saying "I'm in pain". But he does want to deny that this is a cognitive experience, that that-I-am-in-pain is something I learn about myself, and something I could properly be said to know. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe an aside, but: that a person cannot be said to learn of their sensations in a way that is distinguished from simply having them is something that has troubled me. It reminds me of this exchange from the webcomic Erfworld:

"Have you ever had a ringing in your ears that you weren't aware of until it stopped?" asked the Foolmancer (Jack, an illusionist)
...
The warlord shook his head. "No," he said, almost apologetically, "At least, I don't believe so."

Jack smiled and nodded. "I thought you might say so. I, ah, took the liberty..."

He gestured subtly, and made the ringing noise in Ansom's (the warlord) head cease. He'd been building it up there ever since coming into the room. ...

The warlord cocked his head curiously, then nodded. "I see."

Personally, I've had knee pain for a long time and can usually tune it out. When it goes away, I learn that I was in pain then but adjusted in a manner where I didn't feel it. But at the time before it went away, I would not have believed I was in pain. Seems like the presence of sensations very much can be inferred, but perhaps only after a transition in their intensity.