thisiszilff

I think this is related to the bayesian/frequentist approach to statistics. Bayesian statistics revolves around incorporating knowledge to update beliefs and probabilities express degrees of belief. IE, bayesian probability is the logic of uncertainty and how we should reason with imperfect information.

The most famous example of this is the "draw a ball from an urn" example, and how we frequently day we "shake" the urn after we add the balls to "randomize" it. There is a lot of wordplay going on in stats to effectively forget certain information so that the problem I'd workable

The charitable interpretation is that most people -- even atheists -- will have a belief system that is functionally equivalent to a religion.

> Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.

Another way of saying it is that religions (as we know them) are answers to questions, you can get rid of those answers, disagree with them, etc. but the questions will remain and you will implicitly provide answers to them. Those answers will constitute what your religion is -- albeit one might not examine their answers in any detail.

I don't think PM itself had any contradictions inside of it, rather there are statements composed of the PM langauge that aren't reached from the axioms selected by PM -- that is one of the sentences Godel demonstrates in his proof where he gets one that basically says "this statement has no proof in this system" (so if it does have a proof it is a contradiction, but if it doesn't have a proof then PM is an incomplete system). Someone else in the thread mentioned the continuum hypothesis as something that couldn't be proved from the standard ZFC axioms, so that would be an example of a statement without proof (incompleteness) albeit not in PM. I don't know of any contradictory statements.

What communist countries are you referring to here specifically? It would help to look at specific cases.

I have been thinking about the same argument recently as well and the most compelling argument I can come up with to justify it is that the states give up some of their power in the federal scheme in return for a degree of sovereignty. That conception of it works out pretty well if the federal government is limited and deals with concerns that all states share (like defense) and leaves most of the decisions that impact people's everyday lives to the states. IE, the degree to which the federal government impacts a person's life in California is far less than California's impact on that person's life. But interpretations of the interstate commerce clause really drive up the federal governments power to where that tradeoff in power might not be worth it. It is interesting, really, to consider this system where we have sort of two, dual sovereign entities governing us that are sort of kind of related but not directly so.

That is more like "speak as it is written" -- ie, the pronunciation derives consistently from the orthography. That is slightly different from "write as you speak" where the spelling of a word is literally speaking it slow enough so the individual sounds can be distinguished.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.

(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.

Well, good to know it is not just the US.

It isn't a very good comparison given that those thermostats/locks aren't free and it's unlikely Google wouldn't like someone because of how they are using their thermostat. In this case, twitter provides the account and the objections are to how the account is being used.

I don't think that every event is equally important or that any event is "special". Rather, the avoidance of paradoxes is. You just have to ensure the alternate history you get with respect to an action (or an event) doesn't preclude that event from happening. So if you go back to stop a disease from escaping a lab in Texas, that doesn't stop the disease from escaping two months later from a lab in California. The key is the avoidance of paradoxes.

This is a somewhat puzzling article given that the change appears to be "less credible sources are downranked" and not "conservative sources are downranked." The article even mentions, after the lead, that liberal news sites were also downranked. It might be a valid if conservative new sites were disjoint from mains stream new-sites, but I don't believe that to be the case.

A part of the difference between college and elementary/high school is that most people don't want to be in elementary/high school while in college there is a lot more self-motivation. Learning is a lot easier when you actually want to learn and improve and you feel you have a personal stake in what is going on.

I was curious so I looked up some data: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, sorting by the deaths/100k people, the US is below Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy and Sweden (in addition to some others). That data seems to support the situation in the US isn't exceptionally different than the situation in the EU.

I love brutalism when it includes plantlife. Another example is the Barbican Estate in London. Without plant life though, I agree with the article, brutalism looks too bleak.

I suspect it is the difference between the VC realizing they made a mistake and moving on (for a reason related to race) vs speaking to the white guy because they are racist and they would refuse to deal with a black CEO (ie, 'we don't serve your kind here'). The latter is very much intent, the former is rooted in biases from living in a world where there are few black CEOs. The question is to what degree do the biases in the former hold those people back (in the form of expectations, etc.).

The reason why this is contentious is because it relies on how you are defining 'a police intervention.' Very few people I see debating this issue dispute that blacks are killed at 2.5x the right whites are by the police. What they dispute is that this disparity exists because of police officer bias, and they point to differing crime and geographic factors that cause the disparity. In that case, blacks and whites might be shot at the same right within the context of a given police interaction, but what that specific context is and the frequency of that context between black and white populations differs.

The 2.5x number isn't really disputed, it is the reason for it & the policy that is proposed because of it that is contentious.

The charitable interpretation of immigration enforcement is that it ensures a nation does not get overwhelmed by people entering the nation -- in terms of its economy, bureaucracy, etc. I can see that argument that enforcing immigration maintains the economic inequality between individuals in the US and, for example, individuals in Guatemala, but controlled immigration ensures that a nation is capable of growing and supporting the immigrants that come in in the first place. After-all, immigrants are coming to a given country because of perceived advantages of that country, if too many immigrants come at a single time, those advantages may disappear.

Also, In the article I believe the reasoning is outlined that given you wouldn't fire a woman for dating a man, then firing a man for dating a man is discriminating on he basis of sex. The behavior alone isn't objectionable, it's only when sex comes into play that you start discriminating which cases are ok and which aren't.

For me at least I can train myself to go to bed at 10PM with discipline, but if I miss one day I find myself back into the natural groove of going to bed at 2AM. I do not expend effort to sleep at 2AM, I expend effort to sleep at 10PM. When I am jet lagged my body is confused and does not quite know when 2AM is, but eventually it figures it out and we're back to square one (Google "zeitgeber" for how it figures this out, but subjectively I assure you my body does the adjusting, not me).

He does make it explicit that rioter =/= protestor:

> Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn't be confused with bands of miscreants.

Here is a link to the op-ed for anyone following along who wants to read it: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1375.

It is true that it does start of by talking about violence, rioters, and harm that's come to the police. But after that he explicitly says that these should not be confused by the protesters:

> Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn't be confused with bands of miscreants.

The majority of the op-ed is a fairly straightforward argument for deploying federal resources to help police, how that might be done, and why it needs to be done.

This is the most controversial paragraph it would appear (following the above paragraph).

> One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what's necessary to uphold the rule of law.

The op-ed doesn't seem particularly controversial to me. Whether or not a given city takes the action outlines in it -- yes, sure, that might be controversial. But this seems like the basic argument that is made by people in support of sending in troops to supplant police. I struggle to see why the views of a good chunk of the population should not have a public platform to be presented & discussed.

For the US healthcare system you can add poor people without insurance using emergency rooms as their primary point of care. Emergency rooms are required to treat them, they can't pay, so those costs get shifted to other people. Worse, the care they receive is usually the bare minimum and there's a good chance they end up back there. Overall a horrifically inefficient way to socialize medical costs.

My impression of the economist is that they are unashamed and forward with their perspective. You read it and you get "this is a neoliberal perspective and these are the arguments of of neoliberales." So yes, they write from a very clear perspective, but it doesn't feel like bias creeping in. Instead it feels like "this is what this situation looks like from this perspective." Bias is trickiest when it's hard to tell where someone is coming from, and with them I never have a problem.

Yet laying out your thoughts, your reasons for them, and your evidence and having someone else rummage through them is often the best way to deepen your views and come to a more accurate, nuanced understanding of the world. I'm afraid if our exteriors are not accurate reflections of the truths we believe in, our worldview may cease to develop and remain too simplistic.

Maybe a necessary defense, but still, saddening.

The charitable interpretation of the centrists position is trying to straddle the line between "I believe the government should be responsible for intervening in order to secure equal outcomes for all people" and "I believe individuals should be responsible for their owns lives and own outcomes." Or something along those lines. Centrists are not centrists because they embrace some negative, immoral 'other side', but because they recognize the other side has it's own values that are good and worth preserving. Many centrists likely see themselves as trying to strike a balance between these values.

My ideal view of the marketplace of ideas is that it engenders discussion about those ideas, responses to them, and ultimately deepens the view to a more nuanced, accurate place. One problem, undoubtedly, is that discussing anything through some means of communication is difficult, especially when we prefer short form communications to long form ones. So instead of discussing, we tend to think in terms dog whistles & a few short words are connected to an argument that we've heard from the other side and that is where things start to go downhill. People do not seem to be engaging the actual arguments in this marketplace of ideas, but rather with the people presenting the argument & what they think those arguments are.

The op-ed cites the statistic:

> According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities' calling in the military to "address protests and demonstrations" that are in "response to the death of George Floyd."

As evidence that the view espoused in Cotton's op-ed are the majority's view. Do you have a source saying that that is false?

Not necessarily insufficiently supportive, but insufficiently supportive in public mediums.

Aside: This is the first time I've seen "congressbeing" and from now on it will be my preferred term.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge doesn't appear to be in the middle of a city.

From my own personal experiences, the most profound, impactful realization I had was in simply seeing my mental state change in an irregular way. It makes you suddenly aware of all the things you've taken for granted in your mental life that suddenly seem so fluid and malleable. The observation of lots of mental walls suddenly coming down and being free in your own head, that sticks with you.