A convergent series tends to a limit, gets closer and closer to a given number as the set increases. What is 'progress' converging on, if it's like a ...
That's very simple. One side of the debate is responsible for enriching the most powerful people in the world in the largest transfer of wealth ever r...
A fair summary. One of the issues with policy here (masking is a good example) is how policymakers deal with the absolute known fact that the policy w...
Is anyone suggesting you should? I don't see any talk about making non-mask wearing compulsory. I don't see anyone accusing mask-wearers of having 'bl...
Indeed. And here are the flaws in the Bangladesh study you cited. https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-022-06704-z Do you s...
Nothing's coming to mind, no. Sometimes people having fun is just that, other times it's an unhealthy expression of ingroup/outgroup exclusory reinfor...
At the risk of further bruising from this wall I appear to be banging my head against here, this still ignores the very real possibility (one might ev...
If you put your fingers sufficiently far in your ears and squint enough that you can't read properly, you can continue to believe whatever your Facebo...
I see. Well then we're not going to have a very productive conversation. We are, at best, peers. You're not my teacher. If we disagree about sources, ...
You write as if handing in an undergraduate essay. I'm not particularly interested in how well you've understood the sources, I'm not grading you. I w...
Yes...and you'd judge those facts and opinions using what skill, that those sources themselves presumably lack? Professor Joe Bloggs says X, you look ...
I've not presented a single argument here that isn't backed up by academics with relevant qualification in their fields. So are you claiming that qual...
At 1) Judging whether something is an improvement is itself a time-constrained activity. New techniques have consequences which reach far into the fut...
...and in case anyone was thinking this was an unexpected side-effect... ... does that give any clues as to who might now be too embarrassed to commen...
I think that's nonsense, and quite evidently so. Ethical judgements tend to involve quite different parts of the brain than might be involved in sense...
I think that may have been true a few hundred years ago, and more, but Philosophy was in a different place then. Philosophical treatises contained mus...
... assumes the aim is merely to solve puzzles. What if the aim were to increase human welfare? In what sense does merely finding the solution to a pu...
There's been change. How would you measure 'progress'? Net improvements? It's easy to prove an improvement if you're selective about which negative co...
I'll bite, if that's not treading on anyone's toes too much. Give us a good single example from this 'mountain of evidence' you think best proves 'gen...
The question wasn't about your record. It was a specific question about the corroboration of evidence. You (and the others I've mentioned), seem to we...
Come on! How uncharitable do you have to be to think @"Benkei" was seriously asking if it was actually impossible? That would be a ridiculous question...
I agree we tend to interface with religion badly. I think the fault lies (not wanting to come across as too fence-sitting here) on both sides. Excessi...
No. Take Seymour Hersh's article for example. It blames the US government for the pipeline sabotage. So the US government will want to suppress that s...
I'm not sure that this line of inquiry is relevant to the thread, but there are a range of options depending on one's position. My job gives me an out...
That's the point. We don't have a choice. It's either let them do what they're going to do, or respond fast and hard enough to stop it. You can wring ...
Exactly. I was having this exact conversation with a student only yesterday (whilst bolshily inserting myself into a seminar I was only supposed to be...
Yes. We'd want to avoid such loaded terms as "unwavering faith", being, as you say, mere caricatures... Now, unrelated, to your substantive and dispas...
Indeed, that will have to remain a mystery. Fortunately for us amateur sleuths, we do have one piece of crystal clear evidence. Despite knowing nothin...
Again, I think the mere existence of pluralities isn't quite sufficient to justify an extension of "rational thought". One can arrive at pluralities s...
I think this unfairly equivocates on what "thinking for oneself" could possibly mean. An act of rational decision-making is a series of heuristic step...
Do you even know the meaning of the word "actually"? It isn't 'stuff I reckon'. Some absolute classics from those two articles though. The first... No...
Well shit, who knows? Intelligence officials leak a story to the media exculpating the countries they are officials of. What could possibly be going o...
Yes, I read your argument there and thought it very compelling. There's something in all this of the urge to defend the status quo against a certain t...
Don't be ridiculous. All the intelligence agencies are saying this is a very difficult operation with either state-level actors or those with state tr...
Indeed. My Dutch is entirely reliant on Google translate I'm afraid, but have I got it right that they're citing the 'Western intelligence' source too...
I think he probably would try. I just can't see how one could conduct any sort of comparative study by nation. Pretty much since the first nation stat...
Having read Pinker's book (and found nowhere a satisfactory answer), I'd say... 1. Nowhere is it established how we (enlightened countries) justify su...
I'd advise any of our younger readers to check out... https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/13/first-woodward-bernstein-watergate-scandal/ Th...
I think this has become a really key theme in political discourse over the last few years. If you can't trust your government (or even if you want to ...
I didn't get that from the German article (in Zeit https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2023-03/nordstream-2-ukraine-anschlag). all I could find about ...
Got to love the brazenness of these people... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/us/politics/nord-stream-pipeline-sabotage-ukraine.html Just a quick s...
Yep. You win. My search for "World Goes to Hell in a Handcart" yielded nothing. I am, however, thinking of embedding this as my new email signature ht...
I don't think it does (though doubtless some materialists do). It's a conjecture. A hypothesis to explain how things seem to be. It has against it the...
I think the mistake here is to confuse that which is being posited with the justification for doing so. Had I only ever seen teacups, I might reasonab...
Thanks. Anger is understandable, many of my posts here could fall under a similar criticism and are motivated by the same anger you feel (I just disag...
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