> I'm not saying you are one
I'll say it.
1,355 karma · joined October 23, 2025
I'll say it.
Not with that attitude there won't be.
My money's been forcibly confiscated for a whole lot worse.
> because governments caring for people’s children is famously the best way to raise kids
I can guess your views on public education in general.
> Doxing 900,000 people who own a second residence.
Wasn't that info public already?
My lived experience says they're right. In the 90s one didn't have a "phat ass", one was just a "fatass".
> The best argument I've found is here
They also walked ten miles uphill (both ways) to school every day.
Unfortunately the effort is likely lost on the people who most need to understand it. It's very hard to reason someone out of a position they didn't get into via reason.
I think there was something else going on that might explain that.
Granted, but on the other hand: the entire history of this profession.
Man, I wish.
Skill issue.
I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.
You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.
Never was.
Only at vanity presses. Money flows towards the author, as they say.
In this case presumably the virtue is "able to churn out papers".
Every cloud has a silver lining.
My biggest overall critique is that you start with the assumption that everything is an algorithm, that the brain works like a computer, and the world can be derived from that.
"To the intuition of anyone who has seen hardware designed it seems very likely that the brain is halving/doubling frequencies by many different powers of two in parallel and then running all of the results through the frequency recognizer at once. If any one matches, the harmonic has been found. If this were so, then tones (and notes) that differ from each other by a factor of two would sound very much alike. "
I don't see why I should care about a hardware designer's opinion on the matter any more than a clockmaker's or a dog trainer's.
"1.5.1 Timbre: Systematic Distortions from the Ideal Harmonic Series" I don't believe you ever mention how you want the intensities in your "ideal harmonic series" to be distribute, so why does changing the relative intensities to get timbre matter? If I have an ideal harmonic series with peaks at 220Hz, 440Hz, 880Hz, etc, what should its intensities be? Timbre also has to take into account the full ADSR envelope.
"That is, two notes (series-es of overtones) made by the same (kind of) instrument will be distorted from the ideal Harmonic Series in the same (or similar) way. This must be the case in order for an instrument or instrument kind to have a uniform, recognizable timbre"
If you get a guitar in standard tuning and play, say, the 5th fret on the 6th string it sounds different than the open 5th string, despite them both being the same 'A'.
"But The Nasca People Of Peru Use A Linear, Not A Logarithmic, Scale!" "Who knows what is going on with the linear scales of the Nasca. I suspect the following: Linear-scale flutes are easy to make ... This culture was small and isolated and so no one ever noticed harmony"
I checked the cited article (Joerg Haeberli (1979). Twelve Nasca Panpipes: A Study. Ethnomusicology, 23(1), 57–74. doi:10.2307/851338 ). Among the things I learned: (1) At least some of the pipes were ceramic (picture here: https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/collections/objects/1374...) (and the Brooklyn Museum claims that "hundreds" have been found: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/51700), this is not consistent with a culture that is just figuring things out (2) "Intervals close to the fifth, major third, minor third, and major second occur".
You've got an awful lot of assumptions in there that I don't think are at all supported, and this is one. It's also contradicted by 3.5.2 in the article: if the brain were actually doing this, then you could, say, replace the 9th by the 2nd.
> Ok, but where do the expectations come from? Your assertion that it is all culturally relative ("nurture") and none from the structure of the most efficient algorithm for recognizing the harmonic series ("nature") has no basis in fact; you just assert it without proof.
I interpreted "mostly meets expectations but surprises you" as referring to things like chord progressions creating tension and resolving it, for which you don't need major triads. (and of which there's no discussion in the article).
> In contrast, there is strong evidence for the absolute nature of auditory processing
I'm perfectly happy to grant that an owl experienced the sensation of a pitch at a frequency that was not actually present, but there's something missing here that's also totally missing from the article: the role of the cochlea. The brain doesn't experience sounds, i.e. the pressure waves in the air, the brain experiences electrical signals transmitted to it that, tinnitus aside, come from excitement of the cochlea by those pressure waves. How do we know that there isn't some kind of mechanical resonance somewhere in the ear that fills in the missing root? And if we know there isn't in the human ear, how do we know the same for the owl?
> The explanation of the experience of the minor triad in "Harmony Explained" requires the concept of an inconsistency arising from a redundant recognizer algorithm.
Once upon a time the explanation of the propagation of light required the concept of a luminiferous ether.
Anybody interested in this stuff would be better off with something like Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale (https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html) or Music a Mathematical Offering (https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus...)