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Isaac

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$11 trillion spent on the COVID response so far. $4 billion a year from the Global Fund against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It would take over 200...
September 23, 2021 at 12:34
Who in their right mind would think that, believing the figures we've seen? There are groups who don't believe the official figures to varying degrees...
September 23, 2021 at 11:12
I was referring to another person's first-person experience, but it makes no odds I could have said "I doubt that I use the word 'pain' correctly"
September 23, 2021 at 09:13
So your comment was meant to say "there's more deaths from Covid-19 now than deaths from Spanish Flu then, but this is completely unsurprising because...
September 23, 2021 at 09:12
No. I said ...although, had I not, my comment would still have been true. In 20 year's time the death toll would be dramatically reduced. The point I ...
September 23, 2021 at 08:53
No, I'm talking about the first-person, doubting that they are using the word "pain" correctly (or any other response to their set of physiological tr...
September 23, 2021 at 08:53
Ha! Yes. But actors, hypochondriacs... don't we already have a perfectly ordinary notion of people showing external signs associated with pain but wit...
September 23, 2021 at 08:16
See my comments to Luke above. There's considerable doubt now that such simples as 'sensations' even exist. The prevailing model consists of non-exclu...
September 23, 2021 at 06:36
I'm denying that Wittgenstein's 'sensation of pain' is a simple, so I'm "talking about it" only insofar as I'm denying it is as Wittgenstein speaks of...
September 23, 2021 at 06:28
Exactly. So it's a misleading statistic deliberately cited in terms designed to further the fear and panic. Yet you thought it a good idea to promote ...
September 23, 2021 at 06:21
I see, well on that you're right. If you want to call autonomous responses a natural kind then we'll have to say that there are some natural kinds. It...
September 22, 2021 at 11:58
But the subject here is language, no? The use of the word "pain". By examining what's going on in the brain. Autonomous reactions don't have any conne...
September 22, 2021 at 07:26
Or alternatively, the actual statistical inference. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-really-true-that-the-u-s-death-rate-in-202...
September 22, 2021 at 06:55
Well since you guys seem so much happier arguing against the entirely fictitious position that "we shouldn't trust experts" rather than saying anythin...
September 22, 2021 at 06:42
A natural expression might result from some deeper subconscious network (a direct link from a sensory neuron to a motor neuron - via an association ne...
September 22, 2021 at 06:39
Yes. Although, to be clear, we'd need to say that John was triggered by signal x. Un-triggered expressions can happen - the brain is almost certainly ...
September 22, 2021 at 06:26
You said you were trying not to undermine trust in your government by taking the vaccine, I was pointing out that holding the government to account is...
September 21, 2021 at 21:01
I see, yes. Makes sense now.
September 21, 2021 at 18:27
Interesting. To what extent did a lack of trust figure in their complicity, do you think? Yes, and you can do it without taking your shot too, making ...
September 21, 2021 at 18:26
Holding a government to account according to high standards of transparency and freedom from corporate influence is traditionally held to be a mechani...
September 21, 2021 at 17:42
Yes, that's basically what I've been saying. We choose the theories which best fit our favoured social narrative. If we're reasonable people we'll dis...
September 21, 2021 at 17:28
I see. 'Follow' doesn't only mean to take instruction from. Yes. That was the bit I wanted you to explain the rationale for. How does blindly doing wh...
September 21, 2021 at 17:22
Incidentally, if you're interested, Johns Hopkins have published a few essays on the subject. The broad conclusion... compassion, investment in health...
September 21, 2021 at 17:13
Ah, so there are possibly some historical cases which you can't fully recall but which might have tended to show something about responses to pandemic...
September 21, 2021 at 17:00
Where have I assumed this? ... ... So public policy pursues the public good, except when it doesn't. Difficult to disagree with that. What an odd sent...
September 21, 2021 at 16:49
True, but in my first case (the social construction of natural kinds like 'pain') I am talking about the sensation of pain Wittgenstein is referring t...
September 21, 2021 at 13:59
...is exactly the issue in question. If you can't make a case that one should always follow public policy (which no one in their right mind would), th...
September 21, 2021 at 13:59
Briefly, as I have a meeting to get to. FMRI scans. What I'm saying is that the lack of a public shared referant for pain is a consequence of our tech...
September 21, 2021 at 07:27
No, because anaesthetic acts differently. It might reduce conscious awareness of pain, reduce memory of pain (amnesiac effects) , it might reduce the ...
September 21, 2021 at 06:49
Yes, but you've given no evidence at all that the theories supported by the majority of scientists have a greater quantity of these properties than th...
September 21, 2021 at 06:34
Then you agree that other factors (like conflict of interest) are more important than majority support. Now you have to show what mechanisms exist to ...
September 21, 2021 at 06:29
Fair question. It comes down to this... I could give a statistical argument about hedging against uncertainty, but the stats doesn't seem to be going ...
September 21, 2021 at 05:57
I might not use the expression 'in pain'. It sounds messy "they're in pain but they don't know it". But something like "their body is being wracked by...
September 21, 2021 at 05:40
I'm not entirely clear what you mean here. If by 'that' you mean the sensation itself, then no, I don't think it makes sense to say "I doubt I had tha...
September 21, 2021 at 05:19
I'm not entirely clear what you mean here. If by 'that' you mean the sensation itself, then no, I don't think it makes sense to say "I doubt I had tha...
September 21, 2021 at 05:19
Looking it up in a maths textbook?
September 20, 2021 at 06:12
Yes, we should start with the conclusion we like and then keep changing our reasoning until we justify it regardless of any mathematics, evidence, or ...
September 20, 2021 at 06:08
Yes. We haven't even gotten to that question yet. I'm just correcting @"Xtrix"'s first error mistaking variance in a population with variance in a str...
September 20, 2021 at 06:00
I can, it's just not relevant. I'd go with the 97%. Largely for the reasons you later give If it turned out that 97% had ties to the fossil fuel indus...
September 20, 2021 at 05:56
Absolutely. There's a very strong distinction between the cause of variance within the whole population and the cause of variance within a particular ...
September 20, 2021 at 05:34
Technically, maybe. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as: “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated wi...
September 19, 2021 at 14:23
True, but this is another level of analysis from the one @"Srap Tasmaner" and I were talking about. It's something I mentioned way back though, that m...
September 19, 2021 at 12:03
At the risk of flogging the dead horse of statistical misunderstanding, I'll try another explanation. Remove climate change and replace it with issue ...
September 19, 2021 at 12:03
Not necessarily (phantom pain is still a pain). I'm talking about the fine line between what we can reflect on having happened in our minds and what w...
September 19, 2021 at 12:02
If you're claiming that Jesus was just a man (ie he didn't spend only a tiny fraction of his existence in pain, the vast majority of it ruling over al...
September 19, 2021 at 07:10
It's perfectly possible to doubt the pain you're having. Nociception is regulated by a descending pain modulatory system which in turn is regulated by...
September 19, 2021 at 07:04
A statue of him in every village in the Western world, worshipped at once a week, if not more. All who didn't worship at said statues in the New World...
September 19, 2021 at 06:30
If all you're going to do is skim through my posts for your little triggers then don't bother replying. If you have a substantive counter-argument bey...
September 19, 2021 at 06:20
Of course. How naive of me to have the impression Kasparov just rocks up to the tournament, takes a seat and then thinks "now, what's all this about?"...
September 19, 2021 at 06:16
Intriguing. I meant really that when one makes a move in chess one cannot check with colleagues that it makes sense first, as one can do with an exper...
September 18, 2021 at 17:54