eynsham

I wouldn’t say that Chinese verbs have no tense so much as that they are uninflected and that tense is marked with particles (which admittedly do not cause difficulties with irregular infexions).

I imagine they’d only be taken to be proofs if formally verified. Admittedly formal verification needn’t guarantee comprehensibility.

Who said it was ‘prosecutable’?

Taiwan doesn’t fully drop the legal pretence of being China because the /mainland authorities/ would complain. Otherwise, they would do it immediately.

(Compare the CPG’s vetoing of democratisation in Hong Kong prior to in the 50s and 60s.)

There was once a (joke) civil service paper on moving Hong Kong to Northern Ireland (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/03/uk-officials...).

There are lots of Chinese who think that reunification is something that can wait for centuries even though it’s important. However, this raises the question of what the purpose of the current PRC naval buildup is. Some observations.

1. China is no longer so weak or unconnected that PLAN expansion serves to protect its sovereignty from Western intrusion. It would be utterly bonkers for the West to launch a preëmptive or unprovoked attack on China. There is no credible risk of a recurrence of a century of humiliation that is being prevented by the current naval buildup.

2. Current PLAN expansion is useful on a scale of decades rather than centuries. It is doubtful that the same ships will be helpful in two or five hundred years.

3. PLAN expansion is part of a broader more hawkish strategy (also in Hong Kong) that makes much more sense on the scale of decades rather than centuries. Taiwan was on a very slow path to HKSAR-like status in the 90s, and both HK and Taiwanese separatism are fundamentally reactionary phenomena that would not have gained significant traction but for fears of an /illiberal/ China. Peaceful economic integration and close people-to-people ties would have been far more effective on the scale of centuries—the problem is that one has to wait.

4. The strategic advantage PLAN expansion confers is plausibly time-limited. The PLAN is building ships far faster than everybody /right now/. That advantage may well diminish soon, depending on US/Aukus/Japanese politics.

5. Demographic factors (on the scale of decades) will soon pose a problem.

Given this combination of factors, there is a period in the next decade or two that will plausibly mark the best opportunity for decisive action to take Taiwan for perhaps the next century, and the zhongnanhai clearly wants to make the most of it. It doesn’t follow that invasion is guaranteed, but it seems a fairly safe inference that the zhongnanhai wants invasion on the table.

If people are stupid enough to misread the current press release, they are stupid enough to misread two press releases separated by a week as if they were one press release.

>Neither is the US nor most countries in the World.

The standard semantics of ‘most countries’ counts countries, not the people in them. Of course the related claim that the majority of /people/ do not live in state parties to the Rome Statute has different truth conditions.

There are 124 state parties to the Rome Statute, which is more than a majority, counting standardly.

Juxtaposition and equation are different. The press release makes very clear which charges apply to which parties—the charges against the Hamasnikim are quite different from those against Israeli leaders. It also makes clear that the principle of subsidiarity of course applies.

If you think the prima facie case against Bibi and Gallant is convincing, the Israeli AG is quite plausibly doing so little that subsidiarity is no longer engaged. If you think it is unconvincing, as you say, the problem is not some inappropriately symmetric ignoring of subsidiarity but that the charges themselves are unconvincing.

A final point is that the Rome Statute does not prohibit merely ‘orders of directly targeting civilians’, and so other potential crimes must be considered. These include ‘cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); [e]xtermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity; [and o]ther inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k)’. Of course, you may think that Khan has jumped the gun on each of these in that each of these charges is also implausible, but that is a stronger position than doubting that there were orders to directly target civilians.

(edit: I should add that Khan [I imagine] and I would say that while subsidiarity may not preclude proceedings against Israeli officials because of Israeli inaction, Hamasnikim are not subject to anything that remotely resembles a judicial system worth the name, so there is nothing comparable to even fail to act.)

> this description misrepresents Relativism

The position I have outlined is fairly standard and commonplace; that it is different from the view you call ‘relativism’ does not mean that I have misrepresented you, since I did not in fact intend to characterise your specific view.

> It’s not that there are no facts to discover, but that whatever you discover is a mental construct that is mediated by how you think about it.

If the ‘mediation’ in question is sufficiently strong, whatever is discovered is not, on the usual reading of ‘fact’, really going to consist in facts.

> This ‘nihilism’

is not standardly called nihilism. Those standardly called metaphysical nihilists in the literature tend not to be relativists; in insisting on their position in the debate, they usually think that the debate is meaningful.

In the later section of your comment, the sort of mind-dependence to which you advert is unclear. One reading is that you think that the process of intellectual enquiry as we perform it is mind-dependent because it takes place in our minds; this much I think is quite plausible. Another reading is that you think that any criteria of success (e.g., correctness) will also be mind-dependent, which is fairly close to Berkeley’s idealism, in that, if Berkeleyan idealism is denied, there will presumably be mind-independent facts (up to translation schemata) that we can get right or wrong. I do not intend to debate whether Berkeleyan idealism is true, but it is certainly different from what is typically taken to be metaphysical relativism in the metametaphysical literature.

1. Some philosophers think many metaphysical debates meaningless. Consider the debate about ordinary objects such as chairs. These typically are the result of composing more fundamental entities (such as those of the Standard Model). Mereological nihilists say: there are no ordinary objects (such as chairs). Others disagree. /Relativists/ about metaphysics say that these disputes are merely verbal. There is no fact of the matter to discover and expound. Whether or not there is such a thing as a chair is simply a matter of convention.

2. I disagree. But I think one point is right. Relativists point out that it is often (or maybe even always) possible to translate statements between the languages promoted by different metaphysical schools. For example, nihilists translate ‘the chair is on the ground’ to ‘some particles arranged chairwise are such that the particles at the bottom touch the ground’ (or something similar). For this reason, they claim not much hinges on whether nihilists are actually right.

3. Despite my antirelativist metaphysical inclinations, I think it is possible to translate statements in the language given by the ‘same ontology that constitutes reality’ systematically into languages that reflect different metaphysical views.

4. Some of those erroneous metaphysical views may correspond to how we naturally tend to think about certain areas, or the needs of computation (e.g. in being better complexity-wise). For this reason I am sceptical about the (admittedly very interesting) technique advanced in this essay, since it seems to assume that no conflict between these demands will arise.

5. A final worry is that metaphysics does not really speak with one voice. Many philosophers are quite sympathetic to the sort of picture outlined at the start of the essay, but e.g. mereological nihilism is surprisingly popular! If resolving these questions definitively is too much even for philosophers, those applying their conclusions will have some trouble too.

>an edict about expiration dates

is exactly what Division 3 of the Archives Act 1983 (Australia) and section 3(4) of the Public Records Act 1958 (UK) provide for, so this is hardly as unworkable an idea as you make it out to be.

Have you read Division 3 of the Archives Act 1983? Something along these lines is fairly widespread, although of course the Sir Humphreys of the world have had some success in limiting the damage done to their interests.

https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A02796/latest/text

How does the section titled ‘Category 2: the known health risks of BCS3L-1’ problematically appeal to authority? It seems to about as much as appealing to known results that swallowing vast quantities of lead is a bad idea would. (The other sections certainly appeal to authority, although not obviously fallaciously to me, but that would be to go over quite tired ground about medical regulation.)

I believe that it is an open question. Were I a betting man, I’d bet that P≠NP. I believe it would also be significant to show that P≠NP implies BQP≠NP but that may already be known.

Well, I also suspect BQP≠NP, but we don’t know that yet either.

I still don’t understand what is meant by ’straightforward nondeterministic solution’. If you mean that QTMs or quantum circuits aren’t formally the same as NTMs, I agree. But nor are two-tape (D)TMs and single-tape DTMs, and yet we have linear speedup. Presumably there is a stronger claim here, but I do not understand what that is.

I considered multiple readings of the claim. Obviously different readings may differ in strength. I do not exclude a reading that is neither too strong nor too weak; the comment is an invitation to give one, which you appear to have taken up.

I do not see the distinction between what you have written in the second paragraph and the claim that P≠NP.

Since quantum computers can stimulate classical computers, presumably they can solve NP-complete problems, since classical computers, by definition, can. Perhaps you mean that they can’t solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, but we don’t even know that of classical computers, so you would presumably have shown that P≠NP, which would be fairly impressive.

I suspect that Labor will lose the next federal elections, but what makes you think that /Twitter/ of all things would make the difference? (Or is the conditional not meant to be read that way)?

First, you wrote about ‘the country’ as if it’s a monolith. Second, working out what you mean more precisely is hard when you fail to give even the slightest explanation of why it’s the judiciary specifically that wants to preserve the status quo.

I wash quite annoying knitwear that has on occasion shrunk when someone else has washed them or due to my mistakes.

I wash inside out in a clothes bag with no spin and cold water using a detergent for wool (e.g. Woollite, which may not be available where you are).

I dry (also inside out) on a heated drying rack on top of a thin pillowcase or a mesh for that purpose https://www.lakeland.co.uk/25293/dry-soon-deluxe-mesh-shelf-.... This speeds up drying despite the omission of spin, and takes about a day.

This has worked for at least a dozen cycles for a rollneck I quite like.

And I find it odd that you write of ‘the country’ simpliciter when this is a court ruling against a scheme with the support of the government.

On the homepage there is another (non-pop-up) message: ‘Use contactless to pay as you go at adult rate’.

On the homepage there is another (non-pop-up) message: ‘Use contactless to pay as you go at adult rate’.

This is in theory a problem with most ticketing systems: people can buy the wrong ticket and then get stuck on the way out. The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true (e.g. enter at Bond St with contactless or a single, go to Reading via Crossrail, go to Manchester via Cross Country). Depending on how naïve one seems and how far one goes beyond the contactless area, staff may be more or less sympathetic, as the sibling comment suggests. We ought to roll out contactless nationally, and hopefully this will happen under British Rail.

>formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy departments

Few generalisations hold of philosophy departments across traditions and regions, and this is untrue of departments in the analytic tradition of which Dennett was part. Philosophical logicians are often interested in more than logic for logic’s sake, and other philosophers share that interest; see e.g. Williamson’s /Modal logic as metaphysics/.

I agree that the segment north of Birmingham was important for removing bottlenecks, including those that affect services from London. That is precisely why I think it makes little sense to regard HS2 as meaningfully cancelled only for those in the northeast. The cancellation is a problem for everybody.

This misses the main benefit of HS2 which is making the network as a whole more efficient by eliminating bottlenecks. When people say ‘we should improve regional rail services’, they ignore that HS2 is what that looks like. And, frankly, if HS2 doesn’t reach Euston, it’s nearly cancelled for many Londoners due to the inconvenience.

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2023/hs2-a-high-speed-be...

> I’d like to see metrics for Turkish.

Turkish is in figure 1; its blob is on the lower end.

> developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes

A crude statement of this view would be pseudohistory. It’s common enough for registers of language to develop (and even diverge) in particular social circumstances, and so it wouldn’t be wholly surprising of a military register of Turkish were to have emerged. But there have been lots of other influences on the historical development of Turkish: for example, Arabic and Persian influence, especially in literary Ottoman Turkish; the natural evolution of the vernacular during the Ottoman period; and language reform under the Türk Dil Kurumu to remove Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Any plausible claim of this kind would have to be about the relative influence of military registers.

It’s also not obvious whether the needs of military communication would be particularly different from e.g. industrial communication, or whether that would prioritise speed over e.g. accuracy gained from redundancy.