NotAnEconomist

I've always wondered if 'exists' is something like that -- and hence why it can't be a property. (Well, if you believe that Kant guy.)

You can sort of think of all objects -- broom, bristles, quarks, etc -- as being codata that decomposes to some version of "existence existing", an interference pattern of some fundamental object self-interacting.

Your answer is "not even wrong" -- it's overly pedantic terms which miss the point of my question.

Such as here:

> If you calculate out the geodesics, no; all the parts of Earth down to its individual molecules and below "want" to travel on geodesics sourced by the system and do so unless the stronger three forces interfere with that "want" (and in bulk Beiglböck and Dixon show that the Earth has a coordinate-independent centre-of-mass that does travel on a timelike geodesic, and you arrive at it by considering the vector position of each particle).

This is a very dressed up non-response, because my initial comment was about geodesics braiding around that central one, and the resulting complexity of the paths, emissions caused by that finer level of path resolution, etc.

Responding that you can calculate paths entirely misses the point.

Isn't every "field" in QFT basically an aether?

> By aether, do you mean an underlying medium that allows forces to be propagated? I guess that using that definition, there is an 'aether'.

That's what an 'aether' is -- that background medium which the interaction is happening within.

My conception of it is that Michelson-Morley disproved an infinitely rigid aether, which was the conception at the time and squared with Newtonian physics because it's equivalent to an infinite speed of information.

Einstein then corrected the aether models to account for the finite speed of information through the aether, and the impacts that aether waves have on causality.

My impression has always been that dropping 'aether' was merely a branding move, rather than anything technical about the term. (Not that I fault scientists for this, it's politically savvy -- but it's weird to see their marketing used as arguments decades later.)

How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking?

Here's a common interaction, which would create that feeling without anything at all underlying it:

1. A person is sitting at a table, with me sitting at a table behind them -- both of us facing the same way, ie, me facing their back.

2. I was staring a few feet to the side of the person -- zoning out in space, and not looking at anything besides the wall pattern.

3. That person has a transient feeling someone is watching, and turns to look.

4. The motion of their head turning causes me to leap to alert, as there's suddenly motion in my peripheral vision -- I move my eyes to focus on the motion, and resolve what it is.

5. We make eye contact, validating their initial belief.

6. The other person has taken a step to condition themselves, similar to Skinner's dancing pigeons. Repeating this interaction over decades leaves them believing in a sense they don't actually possess.

Add in some bias in what people remember, eg the times they make eye contact instead of the many times no one was looking, and it's a powerful way to end up confused about the world.

I'm not sure how you'd suss this one out without an extra interaction which necessarily confounds the results (eg, an extra observer -- but since we're testing observer effects, that's messy and a half).

Staring is a precursor to attacks; animals which responded to other animals getting ready to attack them by posturing as if they were ready to counterattack avoided many fights.

Over time, this interaction was offloaded into specialized hardware analyzing gaze -- the one more interested in fighting was the one who stared longer, and that interaction became associated with dominance in social groups.

This was accelerated as the system became more advanced, and more gestures could be recognized as implicit confrontations (and their resolutions).

But the arms are predicted to vary in those cases by the same theory that LIGO is confirming: our rotation causes frame dragging, and there's some weird Sun-Earth orbital relativistic effects as well, right?

I know the Sun-Jupiter orbit produces a large portion of the estimated 5,000 watts of gravitational emissions given off by our solar system. My mental model of this is that it perturbs the aether ("spacetime") through which it travels, radiating waves which carry energy out of the system. Is there a different one?

It's just the power output in those waves is incredibly, incredibly low -- LIGO can only hear much larger events, such as large astral bodies colliding.

So I'm not sure I understand -- there seems to be at least a gravitational aether.

> In 1887, the Michelson–Morley experiment gave the first experimental disproof of the "aether".

In what way is LIGO not a bigger, and successful, version of the Michelson-Morley experiment?

I'm honestly asking, because from my limited understanding, it seems to be.

From Wiki:

> This result is generally considered to be the first strong evidence against the then-prevalent aether theory, and initiated a line of research that eventually led to special relativity, which rules out a stationary aether.

It seems that LIGO merely confirmed properties of an existent aether, not that we no longer believe in one:

> Aether theories (also known as ether theories) in physics propose the existence of a medium, the aether (also spelled ether, from the Greek word (αἰθήρ), meaning "upper air" or "pure, fresh air"[1]), a space-filling substance or field, thought to be necessary as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces.

Naively, spacetime and quantum fields are both forms of aether theories.

That's not an excuse for other people to sit there re-broadcasting it.

There's a strong case to be made that we're actually substantially better off with certain kinds of information having a generally ephemeral and hard-to-collect nature.

The only reason you don't pay more in taxes is because you don't like the feels of not keeping up with the Joneses?

Okay, but I don't regard you as an sort of moral actor for that: you intentionally don't do something you readily admit would make the situation better, out of your emotional needs, while politicking to force everyone to do the thing you're not actually willing to do yourself.

So no, I simply don't believe you: I don't think you believe you should pay higher taxes, I think you believe other people in your income bracket should, to run society the way you envision. If somehow that didn't apply to you, but applied to every one, well that would be just fine wouldn't it?

I originally didn't agree with GP, but the posts like yours trying to refute it are actually bringing me around to that position -- because they're deeply morally compromised, full of special pleading, and so on.

I think your point support theirs, actually.

You don't want to pay more in taxes -- you don't believe it would make a difference, despite knowing how numbers work, and knowing that it literally would. I suspect you mean that the marginal difference for the government doesn't justify the loss for you.

That's fair, but it's exactly GP's point: you don't want to pay more taxes, because you don't care when there's no reward for you personally; instead, you want millions of people to pay more taxes for your benefit.

My point is the double-standard in the tech community making that argument on behalf of one kind of technology, while ignoring that weapons extend from the very basic human need for security and agency.

It's a standard human fallacy, which I've made numerous times: we look at the intentions of ourselves (the tech community) while looking at the results of others (eg, the military). But the question we really need to be asking is if our impact on the world leads to better outcomes than theirs, regardless of what either group intended -- and I'm not sure it's so clear cut, once you account for second order effects of social media.

And it's certainly not as simple a moral calculus as "Well, they work on weapons so they're worse people than me!"

I think you've killed less people working on literal sniper rifles for the military than working on the addictive feed dynamics of Facebook, given the Rohingya massacre and other social ills they've supported.

I think a lot of people in tech work on really questionable projects that create huge social ills, then talk about "Well, at least we don't build weapons!" -- ignoring that when measuring human suffering, their unrestrained manipulation and exploitation causes much more than weapons of war do, in practice.

So when unqualified, I tend to hear your argument as simply trying to hide the messiness of what you do, rather than than it's inherently more ethical than building weapons would be.

tl;dr: I don't believe the military is less ethical, I think they're just more honest about what they do.

Uh... but "shapes" existing is literally ontology. It's discussing the existence of non-physical entities in the world, and children first come into contact with that by matching the positive version of the "shape" (block) with the negative version of the "shape" (hole), abstracting the "shape" from its literal manifestation.

Discovering shapes is implicit ontology in the way throwing a ball is implicit physics.

> I think there's an important difference between the implicit, intuitive, relational knowledge that we build via direct interaction, and philosophical knowledge that the other poster is thinking talking about

In the same sense that there's a distinction between counting and mathematics, or throwing things and physics, or conversations and psychology, or various other academic disciplines -- that is to say, a very artificial one.

In every topic, people think about them as a routine course of events -- they just form very simple effective theories on the subject, because their life doesn't require a more advanced one.

"Physics" the academic subject is just a very advanced version of the intuition you build about throwing balls, smashing rocks, walking on ice, and not jumping out of windows.

Similarly, your argument seems deeply confused:

The burden of proof is on the people asserting that an arbitrary distinction in what's clearly a spectrum of things is meaningful. In this case, it falls to you to show that there's a meaningful difference in kind between the sorts of thoughts a child is having about ontology (eg, that a positive version of a shape and a negative version of a shape are the same "shape") and whatever other example you want to use.

Each of you has clearly admitted that they're on the spectrum of ontological thought, because that's why you recognize it so clearly as an example, then just had special pleading of "Well, simple ontology shouldn't really count as ontology, because that would make me wrong."

So again, we see that philosophy is useful -- the "burden of proof" is a philosophical concept that lets me just reply, "No, how about you show that splitting ontological thought into 'true ontology' and 'not really ontology' is useful in the first place."

It's literally ontology -- they're discovering the idea of shape as a concept, which is an equivalence of structural forms, which is an ontological concept.

I mean, I get that you don't like that because it proves my point, and that's why you're making really silly comparisons.

But to answer -- yes, most children at water parks also are figuring out fluid mechanics at a simple level, eg drag or interference.

> what shapes fit in what wooden holes

> ontology

We must be talking past each other, or something.

For context, for other readers --

> Traditionally listed as the core of metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#Ontology_(Being)

Isn't the equivalent metaphysics all those moments we have a theory of how to examine the world, so as to come to an accurate conclusion?

Metaphysics is required to make an inference -- it's the philosophical underpinning of things like science. Hence "meta-" "physics": the study of the study of physics.

Metaphysics is the glue that takes the language of mathematics to ontologies of physics. Mathematics is the modern rigorous language of metaphysics.

Assorted marketing campaigns have made the topic murky.

> Yeah, that's not metaphysics; it's pretty much just regular taxonomy (and, by the way, the term of art is labeling).

That literally is metaphysics. It's okay there's another word (or two?), but words are not exclusive in the way your logic implies.

> Hence the equivalence I claimed is a precise statement

They're obviously equivalent.

My point is that what's easily noticeable in one incarnation of the theory is different than what's easily noticeable in the other incarnation (or if you prefer, expressible), and switching our language for the same abstract structure can highlight different interesting features of it. And further, there's still utility to using topological perspectives and language to discuss the integers or naturals, even if it's equivalent to set theory.

I do appreciate the reference to ring localization -- will have to look at that further.

Your example of lack of structure, rather than merely something we can't interpret, is algorithmically generated?

I think we may be speaking past each other.

Those are both examples of signals we can't interpret interfering with the signal we're trying to interpret.

However, it's not like the electrical noise came to be by magic -- it's the result of many interactions that have a structure, and hence impart that structure on the "noise", we just lack key facts to be able to interpret that signal.

I would argue the reverse: noise is data we can't interpret.

You're welcome to point me at an unstructured noise source to support your point, though.

Because a lot of "playing god" is thinly veiled authoritarianism -- the desire to control our fellows, out of our own egotism?

Well, hold on now.

I think the language and machinery of topology, even when just reconstructing the language of sets in a discrete setting, highlights interesting facets of numbers.

eg, if you look at the inverse image of various mappings, and particularly in cases where you can iterate this via a function from a set into itself, you can start building up meaningful comments on certain classes of number theory problems.

But I am curious what you mean by "prime ideals of integers localized at some prime", since I know what (prime) ideals are, but am not sure I follow what you mean by localized

I suspect people flag it for not being very good content, and perhaps tilted in terms of its reporting on a political issue.

I find it equally likely there's an undisclosed request from the DoJ involving their accounts -- and that they're trying to get a narrative out before something like indictments come out.

There's a lot of very clear slant in this article.

It leaves unanswered the question why a front laundering Russian intelligence should expect to be allowed to operate on a US platform.

This is a dumb question, but what's the difference between geometry on discrete sets and homotopy theory on discrete sets, eg, in the spirit of digital topology?

Every set is open, so every set is closed. So something like a closed interval, or the product of closed intervals, is just going to look like the network that defines a line segment, square, etc... right?

In that sense, it seems like the geometry of numbers and the topology of numbers are basically the same thing.

But I'm going to be honest -- I know basically nothing about arithmetic geometry.

That's the point:

The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.

The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.

I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable:

1. Everyone makes a website.

2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.

3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:

3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.

3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.

3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".

4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.

There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.

It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.

I'm confused by what you're confused by -- you seem to be attacking a strawman rather than anything I said.

You're also confusing several issues:

- There's no reason that people can't be responsible for their choices and it be unethical for junk food companies to do what they do. Your entire premise is hinged on that being the case.

- I've never met a fat person that wasn't aware that junk food was bad. I'm sure they exist, but talking about the bulk of people, the 95% in the middle, they're aware that their diet impacts their health. They're simply choosing a self-destructive coping behavior of drugging themselves with food. I'm sympathetic to that, but I don't see any reason to pretend it's anything but what it is. Addiction and substance abuse, in a self-destructive behavior.

- I don't believe that ads are causal, just influential. Again, they're making a choice to act this way, even in the presence of ads. What bothers me about people in your camp is that you treat other humans like some kind of animal you own, can decide what's best for, and manipulate or control. You refuse to accept them in their capacity as human persons, who have agency and the capacity to self-direct, then have the gall to turn around and talk about me being the shallow one.