Let's say that I wanted to bet on a coin toss. I bet £100 that it will be tails. To increase the odds that it's tails, I ask you to put me to sleep, wake me up, but me back to sleep, wake me up, put me back to sleep, wake me up, and so on. Does that make any sense? — Michael

Nicely put.

I don't know but close enough e. g. "The Stranger" by Camus, "Death in Venice" by Mann, "The Trial" by Kafka. + Pretty much everything by Orwell.

:grin: But really I'm not sure if it's a boon or a curse that I can't seem to finish a book unless it's nigh on perfect.

I read the first bit of Perdido St. Station and it inspired me to write a few paragraphs in that style. The insectuous relationship didn't do it for me though and so I dropped it.

Maybe another way way to put it is "the conditions under which such a decision can be made negate any possible distribution that can be profitably exploited by switching". This avoids using the word "probability".

Given that there's £10 in my envelope, the probability that the other envelope contains £5 is equal to the probability that the other envelope contains £20; that probability being 1/2.

As an analogy, if I flip a coin and hide it from you, it is correct for you to say that the probability that it landed heads is equal to the probability that it landed tails; that probability being 1/2. — Michael

This seems confused though with you conflating non-overlapping scenarios and adding a poor analogy. If you want to use ordinary language, just say what I said. Your maths is on the ball though.

It seems to amount to us saying the same thing. We must either be, in your example, in a 10/5 world or a 10/20 world. In neither possible world is switching a rational strategy. (I think we've discussed this one before btw.) But maybe your way of expressing the issue is more accurate technically.

Yes, there's no possible world in which the fiver is both the larger and the smaller amount at the same time. So there's no possible world in which the other envelope may with equal probability contain either two fifty or a tenner, which is the only way to make a profit by switching.

CLAIM: "I grab 'em by the pussy"
REALITY: He grabs them by the pussy.
CULT MEMBERS: "WITCH HUNT!"

According to predictit.org, his chances of winning the presidency are only down 1% on the day. Sad.

Yes, they're well-lit public places usually with frequent visitors. Obviously not ideal territory for sexual predators. But suppose there was no one else around, and there was an opportunity, why would it have to be a trans person going in to the bathroom to do it? Why couldn't e. g. a cis man just follow his victim in? The fear is kind of bonkers and is actually likely to lead to anti-trans violence of the type highlighted, making it not just irrational, but dangerous.

Neither I nor anyone else would require any qualification to make the rather prosaic observation in the quote.

If there are Russian influencers on this forum — Christoffer

Might be but it'd be virtually impossible to distinguish an effective Russian influencer from a genuine forum member as appearing genuine is what would make them effective. Same would go for the other side, incidentally. So this is probably not going anywhere and can be dropped, I think.

That was a warning not an assurance it was about to happen. The warning if heeded assures it won't happen. But leaving that aside, your passive aggressive "contributions" aren't helpful or welcome.

Except that didn't happen.

No, don't say fuck us, just come up with some reasonable arguments instead of ranting. You've done that bit already.

Might work on Twitter. Will fail here.

I don't think your outrage has or is going to convince anyone here, do you?

You're not a spokesperson for women on trans rights though, nor is anyone as unsurprisingly their opinions on this and other things vary. Which makes all of that rather patronising, no?

To elaborate a little, where I sympathise with conservatives is that "trans rights" is not just some isolated ethical atom that they are obligated to unconditionally accept to maintain the rights / responsibilities balance of a free and open society and so consistently justify their own place in it, but a kind of valence whose pull reshapes the contours of social life and it's these somewhat unpredictably reshaped contours they are being asked to assent to.

It's never going to be squeaky clean in here but we'll come round with a brush and pan now and then..

But that would be a violation of the first amendment. I don't think any government agencies are actually advising people to become trans, are they? — frank

No, but I think that conservatives think that the line between protecting trans rights and promoting trans lifestyles is blurred. Of course their unofficial spokespeople rarely manage to say anything about the subject without sounding like a-holes.

Strawman again... seriously, get your medicine or whatever. — Christoffer

Calm down. You're crossing a line here.

Affirming your right to be a Muslim is tantamount to forcing people to be Muslims? — frank

A more accurate analogy might be that for the U.S. establishment to publically espouse the virtues of Islam, including in media, schools, and society generally would virtually guarantee more converts to Islam. Someone who wants less Muslims in society might justifiably be accused of Islamophobia but someone who resists the ethical injunction to want more is of a different category. To not want diversity for the sake of diversity or change for the sake of change is just part of the conservative mindset. Liberals sometimes neglect to recognize their own ideological commitments here in order to paint opposition to them as bigotry.

I guess that's why I favor state patient advocates and psychologists. Let them figure it out. — frank

Yes... but let's recognize they don't operate in an ideological vacuum. (Let me emphasise again, I'm being devil's advocate here to a degree.)

On the specific point of suicide and mental illness, they might claim utilitarian grounds that overall these tendencies may increase with availability of treatment according to a relative rather than absolute sense of deprivation.

Excuse multiple posts.

Another way to state their case is that there is a kind of ethical retrojection going on here. Liberals are fostering the grounds for a problem for which the solution is its own problem from a conservative point of view.

Ok, to steel man this, I think a conservative would say that opening up more space for what anyone can be can't be separated from enforcing what some people will be.

(Active social engineering dressed up as passive social accommodation.)

Not to mention the amusing impotency of such injunctions since, considering the ubiquity of the internet, most kids have probably seen porn before they hit their teens. But no! Not a public talk by a Tranny! The horror!

I think what conservatives fear is some kind of cultural shift that becomes self-fulfilling in that it leads rather than follows science. I don't think that fear is completely irrational though in some cases expressed concern for children might be just a cover for bigotry.

Seems to me there's a legitimate debate over what to do with minors, if anything, to best help them navigate their sexual identity. The rest just seems like various ways of expressing disgust and contempt for trans people.

Oh, that was just for Hanover, sorry.

You raise a valid point about the “distancing” nature of writing vs speech but I don’t think the most important distinction is between modes of discourse (e.g. spoken vs written) but categories (e.g. political vs philosophical etc.). In conveying meaning, we’re always navigating discourses that have their own meanings “built in” and which form part of our overall contextualization and judgement of the message we receive. Discourses can bully meaning into corners from which it's hard to escape. Fiction then, I agree, can be a useful way to allow meaning “space to breathe”, especially when done so that the message is presented organically; i.e., it imposes itself naturally out of its context rather than directly exposing itself to the filter of a discourse that protects against it within a subject.

For example, if the message is political and you choose political discourse to convey it, you're in an arena where contentiousness is built in because group identity is at stake by default (political discourse taps into sociality in a fairly primal way with the rule tending to be “fight your corner” rather than “listen”). Fiction gives you a route out of this problem at the expense of making it more difficult to express your message.

The more general upshot of this is that our ideas are products of a symbolic order that can be understood as a complex of discourses that we can use as tools to convey meaning in more or less effective ways. “Truth” is a tricky concept to apply to such a situation but certainly an artist through fiction can compellingly convey an authentic experience of reality without being overly circumscribed by the predisposed notions of “factual” discourses.

I think @Mikie already mentioned just one question each as it's already going to end up a lot of questions without that stipulation the way it's going.

Glad it worked out! But I'm a little nervous -- he's 94 years old! — Mikie

I've seen him online recently. Seems to be working hard and age doesn't seem a barrier. Regardless though there's a limit to what anyone can deal with in a few days. I imagine there might end up being more questions than he can get to.

We're all extremely grateful to @Mikie for setting this up and honoured to have Professor Chomsky contribute to our community here. :clap:

It was game over as soon as Russia was in a position to annex the contested territories because NATO won't go to war against Russia for Ukraine, which would be the only conceivable way to reclaim them. It's not a movie. The bad guys win sometimes. The challenge now is for the West to engineer a situation where this doesn't look like an abject loss. I stick to my idea that a reduced Ukraine gaining NATO membership is this compromise. Russia gets its land bridge and NATO gets to fully hem it in. Ukraine gets to sacrifice just its arms and its legs rather than its head too. Sad, but...

Modern ideologies, religious or otherwise, tend to function like this. They believe for you so you don't have to. There's a sense in which it must be so because the only ideology we really believe in (if you look at our actions, which is the salient point of your OP I think) is capitalism. We act like we believe in capitalism (because we have to) but we don't act like we believe in our ideologies (like religions) because we can't act like good capitalists and act like good believers at the same time. Something must give and since some kind of religion is almost ubiquitous (in its widest form, including New Age stuff, humanism etc) and capitalism is the foundation of our personal security and survival, what must give is the real practice of religion and what stays is its social shell which provides our sense of unity, purpose, belonging and egotistical self-righteousness without interfering too much in our economic functioning. It's a nice neat human solution, i.e. foundational hypocrisy.