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Alright, I will abrogate uninformed to misinformed. The latter is worse because it blinds PG.

Yes, exactly, Aristotle's project was supremely successful and one of its fruits is the calculus that underlies modern science and technology. How is that for immortality? I'd like to see PG discard that part of ancient philosophy.

Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I believe the dismissal of philosophy has a deeper cause, perhaps because it poses uncomfortable questions.

Regarding PG's essay, I don't think it is fair to say metaphysics is a failed project. For instance, deeply thinking about whether things can be infinitely divisible led to the concept of the infinitesimal, which led to the discovery of calculus. If any field of math can be said to be useful, calculus surely is. None of our modern IT would exist without it, nor things like rockets, flight, material engineering, etc. Yet calculus is based on the non physical notion of infinite division that Aristotle discussed in his metaphysics.

As for Plato and math, in Meno Socrates leads a boy to understand the existence of irrational numbers, which the Pythagoreans had executed its member for discovering. So not only are ancient Greek philosophers discovering deep useful mathematical truths, they are also speaking truth to power at the same time. Imagine if math were outlawed under threat of death!

Ironic pg passed up philosophy in his search for immortality. Not only is that a focus of philosophy, even in today's materialist worldview, but philosophers are some of the most ancient and best preserved thinkers. The ideas of the ancient greek philosophers still hold sway today, even in popular culture, see Plato and The Matrix, or how the US government is organized in checks and balances to preserve liberty. In fact, pretty much every other aspect of society could be said to be downstream from philosophy.

SRE is orthogonal to kubernetes. It is a quantitative approach to balancing customer demands with operational optimization, the latter which may be addressed with kubernetes, though not solely or even necessarily in the general case.

In general that is true, but is that true for all specific instances?

When doing it manually can people find shortcuts that would elude brute force computation?

Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/bioinformer/status/1252813532850081792

"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"

I guess that means we cannot say anything exists. Sounds sensible to me.

Yes, no one else has ever grappled with the problem of evil. Harris is certainly a trailblazer speaking unmentionable truths.

My conspiracy theory as to why someone might with good intention trigger the pandemic and then fast track the mRNA vaccine is to pave the way for gene therapy to reverse genetic entropy and reverse aging and consequently eliminate the genetic basis of death, granting us a sort of immortality. Eliminating death for untold numbers of people would justify the death of a few million from a utilitarian perspective. In fact, there is really no limit to the number you can kill in your research if the payoff is immortality for all, which would then give researchers time to bring about the singularity and digitally resurrect those sacrificed along the way. Sounds crazy, but does seem to be how a lot of tech elite think: utilitarianism, anti death, singularity, everything is ultimately a technical problem. It is also the logical conclusion if materialism is true, but tragically misguided if materialism is false. Just like all the other materialism based utopian ideologies of the past couple centuries that have killed hundreds of millions of people.

I'll have to refind the tweet, but a researcher found the read dataset could not be assembled into the bat coronavirus assembly.

In the lab scenario their lax standards wiped out 2 million people and they covered it up. In the wet market scenario, it mostly reflects on the local inhabitants doing the usual black market stuff most local inhabitants of most countries do, and the CCP can only do so much to control their people. Plus, lab source has many other possible implications that are concerning, e.g. engineering bioweapons, IP theft, more nefarious conspiracy if it turns out to be a purposeful leak, etc. Wet market is overall much more benign. Also, from an evidential standpoint, lab outbreak seems much more plausible. Very easy to connect the dots with researchers, funders, etc. On the other hand, they cannot even determine the proximate transmission animal for the wet market theory, and the supposed bat source assembly is based on a faked dataset from the wuhan lab.

Radin claims in his meta analyses he gets powerball level results, much beyond that in fact.

Either these are some quite incompetent and/or deceitful researchers, or they have found something we currently cannot explain.

I recommend you look into these things more carefully, e.g. read the wikipedia article on historicity of Jesus. I am just throwing out sketches of the many different well know arguments for theism that atheist believe they don't even have to engage with to have an intellectually robust position. Well fine, anyone can believe anything they want to believe, but that doesn't mean they've put any careful thought into their position.

And plus he could look at Duns Scotus arguments which even grant an infinite causal chain, e.g. by forming a circle. Modern atheists are just very snobbish thinking everyone who existed before you could post online take downs on reddit was an idiot.

Well that's the problem with all proofs. If the premises are false the proof is not sound. That doesn't preclude the proof being tight, i.e. as in well reasoned and logically argued. Outside of mathematics you will be hard pressed to find a proof where someone doesn't disagree with a premise or two. And even within math we have intuitionists and constructivists claiming things like proof by negation is invalid. So if your criterion for solid proof is one that everyone agrees with, you are bound to be perpetually disappointed. On the other hand if your criterion is proofs that highly intelligent people find convincing after fully understanding the argument, then I again submit to you the ontological argument which even Russell claimed was sound at one point in his life before walking that back and saying it is wrong for some unknown reason.

There are tight logical proofs. Note I point out the ontological argument is now validated by computer. I am merely sketching them above. I also disagree atheism is the default. As Einstein says, simplify as much as possible, but no further. Atheism is incapable of explaining reality as we experience it. While simple it lacks explanatory power. Saying atheism is the default due to simplicity is like saying nothing is a better explanation than something because nothingness is simpler than something, which is clearly the wrong way to go about picking theories. Monotheism is our most parsinomous theory to date.

There are many proofs:

- God is greater than the greatest imaginable thing, so must exist (this one is proven to be logically valid with computational theorem prover, and Bertrand Russell even said it was sound at one point in his life)

- the world is intelligently designed

- there must be a first cause, and that must be God

- nothing in this world is perfect so there must be a transcendently perfect being

- we can only be satisfied be an infinite being, so the object of our desire lies beyond this world

- moral laws exist and require a law giver

- our mind is not reducible to our body, and must have been created by an even greater being

- jesus existed, claimed to be God, and rose from the dead according to reliable historical documentation

Off the top of my head

On the other hand it is impossible to prove atheism, you cannot prove a negative

So we are left with theism and a lot of proofs, and atheism which is inherently incapable of being proven

Seems the rational choice leans towards theism

Dawkins' argument that the presupposition of god requires then yet another explanation of god. He doesn't realize this criticism applies to any posited ultimate cause, including physicalism. In fact this very issue forms the foundation for some of the classic arguments for God. The only way the regress can terminate is with an uncaused cause, which only can be met by a godlike being. So followed to its logical conclusion Dawkins argument proves the existence of god.

Sam Harris seems to think the problem of evil disproves god, yet most philosophers now believe it does not after Alvin Plantinga's work. At any rate, at best it can disprove a good god.

Dennett doesn't seem to have an argument, and just tried to explain away everything he doesn't believe in.

Hitchens also doesn't have an argument and relies on emotional appeals, claiming god is like the north korean dictator, the irony apparently being lost on him that north korea is a forced atheist state.

So overall the most glaring problem is lack of any argument whatsoever, which is not promising for a supposedly intellectual position. When an argument is offered it would not even pass a freshman logic class.

Prior generations of atheists were not so intellectually vapid. Anthony Flew would be a good example if it were not for his conversion to theism.

Oh one more thing, all of the besides Hitchens erroneously like to rely on computer science to support their claims. Whereas if you have a background in CS you understand they don't know what they are talking about.

The four horsemen are all woefully uninformed when they try to deal with standard arguments for theism. Although I will say I like how upfront and clear Dawkins is in his statements. Bertrand Russell at least had the intellectual honesty to admit the ontological argument is logically valid (which is now proven with a computational theorem prover), and says it is very difficult to identify the problem with the argument even though it feels unsatisfying.

Your response proves my point.

Ironically, it only makes sense to say humanity is more than the body from a religious perspective. Otherwise all we have is materialism, and this we must be reducible to our matter, i.e. bodies.

Most of the modern atheists are clueless when it comes to the theism discussion.

Science used to mean knowledge in general, which is its root. Philosophy was a subset of science, and theology was the top science. Natural philosophy, what we now call science, was a subset of philosophy.

Thank you, I will dig through his studies and see if I can find one that does not use filtering.

Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. There is no other way than to deny that homosexuality is wrong. Yet that is difficult to do, since sexuality has such an obvious role to play in the perpetuation of the human race. If it were normative then the human race would not exist. So the most straightforward explanation is it is a deviation from the way things should be, as is much else in our human nature, which in turn points to a standard that we deviate from.

Why would an even proportion of positive to negative be considered chance? If half the entrants won the powerball and half did not, I would not consider that chance.

Yes, that is my takeaway. Psi is heavily evidenced by the scientific literature, and is dismissed because it goes against the priors of the scientific establishment. Not dismissed because there is anything inherently faulty with the research, at least compared to the standard scientific milieu.

What is your takeaway? Scott at the end says he doesn't believe is psi despite the results because Coyne says psi is crap. That doesn't sound like checking your priors at the door.

At any rate contra your original claim it appears a psi effect has been extensively scientifically documented.

Very interesting. It is suspicious, but I also wonder if removing 1.5% of the data is enough to produce a statistically significant effect? In other words, filtering is definitely happening, but is it enough to account for the effect?

Also, he has a number of such studies. Are they all suspect due to filtering, or are some filter free?