hanaH

I've heard that Von Neumann was to brilliant people as brilliant people are to normal people, and it's the brilliant people who said so (and who else ...

I know what you mean. 'Genius' makes me think especially of artistic genius (Van Gogh, etc.). It's hilariously banal to apply this old word to someone...

I can imagine practical uses for the test, like steering children through some system. But when adults give it too much thought, I imagine they've nev...

I did a quick calculation. An IQ of 160 indicates that one scored better than about 97.72% of fellow test takers. This means that that roughly 2.28% o...

Thanks! I'm not surprised by this at all. Note that this does not say that they are reliable indicators of other kinds of ability. I will say this: in...

. He might have been tuned so that being alone was intense enough. Should be noted that he worked an office job and made the equivalent of something l...

Which, incidentally, doesn't increase my regard for IQ tests.

I suggest thinking about our entire way of life. How do we feed ourselves? Raise children? Punish criminals? Get to work in the morning? Then think of...

:up: Cool post.

That reminds me of Pinker again. In that spirit, As a species, drenched in superstition and scientifically infantile, we could barely keep half of our...

Fish picked examples of impractical philosophy. If that's all philosophy is, then it's like chess problems. But consider Hobbes. Agree with him or not...

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FWIW, Pinker's book makes a strong argument that the world has never been better, which is not to say that he fails to acknowledge our problems. IMV, ...

Quantity allows us to be definite in our observations and our predictions. Some focus on physics, but as as I can tell that would just be a bias. Meta...

Fair enough, and that's an important distinction. Let those with ears to hear (and only those) hear. But in a 'rational' context, this means promising...

Which is 'foolishness' to the humanist-without-thinking-about-it 'Greeks.' There is something appealing (because dangerous?) about a religion that's w...

Personally it doesn't make sense to me to treat science as a religion. One way to look at science is as distilled irreligion, as something like refine...

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I agree. For most part the answers of science are definitive in the form of technical solutions. A vaccine can be tested, and the essence of such a te...

Good question, though not meant for me. The 'rational community' is something like educated, rational humanists. Sure, one can cling to cultural Chris...

Imagine the kicks that Pinker gets being an intellectual rockstar. He has the joys of the poet. Romanticism is alive in well in him, even if he writes...

Many of us live in free societies where even the proles can read the Gospels in the private and either scribble improvements in the margins or burn th...

I did overstate the case perhaps. 'Scientism' is usually pejorative. It's sometimes a good play to grab a slur and rehabilitate it. I don't think Pink...

Just to be clear, I'm saying that he argues for scientism. Or, knowing the term is used pejoratively, he defends a data-driven, scientific approach to...

That's the kind of point a Western philosopher might make, though, is it not? Yet you write as if the Western philosophy was a simple beast with clear...

For me there's a delicate issue here: how can words and behavior indicate sensation in the strict sense? Imagine a supervised learning scenario. I nev...

We are talking about the same thing. Pinker defends scientism essentially, and he does a pretty good job. But I imagine the revolt against Pinker's sc...

Perhaps it can't be killed, but I think it can be challenged in new ways. For instance, we can refuse to accept the lonely-experience-hole of the self...

I was quoting a song, having pointed out what I considered your twisting of a word. Unless 'God'(or whatever) just is the text itself, merely reading ...

I like the story. To me the issue is not about the denial of sensation but rather about its status. We seem to understand sensation (the 'what it's li...

Yes, if one accepts private experience, one seemingly opens the door for standard skepticism. To try to answer your question, I speculate that I gain ...

We are tempted to say that she 'learns' what color is (in some, questionable sense.) But this presupposes a common experience of color, or, similarly,...

It's tempting at times, but no. Reading @"baker" reminds me of offensive thinkers like Kierkegaard. I use 'wicked' because it's a sort of indulgence t...

:up: Imagology... https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.003/id18182/press_release.pdf

I agree, but the fun of religion is precisely in the wickedness. A 'reasonable' religion is something you can buy and sell at the mall. 'Keto' is a re...

Unless God just is the text, you are abusing 'direct' here. 'I don't want to sit and talk about Jesus,...I just want to see his face.'

At least when the flesh is healthy (which ignorance makes more difficult.)

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Nice quote, Josh. This too.

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How about defining the complexity of a theorem as the length of its shortest proof in some formal system? For each formal system you could have a diff...

That seems right on some level, but this game of pretend, presumably evolved, is no so easily shaken off. What's an event? Does it involve objects? 'T...

Just as objects are 'fictions'/inventions (eddies in the stream), so perhaps are meanings? That sounds correct, but would you agree that the conceptua...