Pfhorrest

It it takes machines 2 cents to restore the damage caused by a crime, then fine the criminal 2 cents and pay the machine-owners to do the restitution....

Punishment in general should only be preventative and restorative, never retributive. Hurting someone (including locking them away as a kind of hurtin...

Sounds right to me! :smile:

Doing what? Differentiating more correct beliefs from less correct beliefs? I’ve already given an argument for why we could only ever assume one way o...

I guess the analogy wasn’t clear enough then, because the point of it was that we can (and should) intervene just enough to find out if our help is we...

While the government is divided between those who openly back the exploiters, oppressors, kleptocrats, and oligarchs, and those who at least give lip ...

I once saw a man and a woman fighting (physically) in a public place, and out of concern for the woman I stepped in to ask her if she was okay or need...

No, that sounds about right, though it's phrased a little unusually for talk of a theory. But yeah, Einstein discovered that Special Relativity was a ...

It does address them, directly. You can falsify a belief that not P, and so prove that P, sure, but only by observing something contrary to the observ...

The truth of every statement is equivalent to the falsehood of its negation, sure, but that’s not the point in contention here. The point is the form ...

Sure, that’s a fine way of putting it. Two different subjects: When people speak of discovering something abstract, the “thing” they have discovered i...

Abduction falls into the same place as induction as far as I’m concerned: a fine way of generating a guess, a hypothesis, a theory, a model, a belief....

:up: :100: I’m almost a complete pacifist, and even I’ll say it’s fine to go help someone else under attack if they want it, and they’re in the right ...

I’ll save further discussion on parsimony for the thread on that, but for now I’ll just say that your characterization of it does not bear any resembl...

Sure, but that's completely uncontroversial. My point is that the distinction between something being found and something being made originates in a d...

IOW they’re radical regressives.

I’m not sure I know what you’re asking, but maybe a picture will clarify my answer anyway: https://geekofalltrades.org/codex/images/criticism-liberali...

No, I started off with arguments for why we must start in the middle. I’m not repeating those arguments in full in every thread, but exploring the imp...

Born and raised in California, Elder Millennial (HS Class of 2000).

I was also suspecting that it would be necessary to clarify that you mean “liberal” in the historical and current international sense, which is closer...

So you admit that such people do exist. Why then were you pressing me for proof of them? This is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious that you'r...

I was going to reply to @"tim wood" with a much inferior version of that as soon as I got a moment, and I'm glad that you were able to get to it befor...

Sort of both and neither. With abstract objects it's not really possible to differentiate. Some concrete objects are invented (or created if you prefe...

In the version I’m familiar with, the scorpion stings the frog mid-crossing, and so both of them die. As the frog pleads why, the scorpion replies tha...

Interesting that you use the word "bullshit" here when denying that the philosophical sense of 'bullshit' exists. TL;DR: a lie presumes you know and c...

There are different senses of "right", and you're conflating at least two of them here, while denying that another is a sense of the word at all. Ther...

What does it mean for an atom "now" to be (or not be) the same as that of one second ago? The notion we have of diachronic identity (something being t...

Okay, well part of my position could be phrased in your terms here as "don't assent to things you don't actually believe", though I would phrase that ...

Good question! I don't think either discovery or creation, in the senses that we normally use them of concrete objects, properly applies to abstract i...

I pretty much agree with this. I don’t see fideism as one of the two main choices, but as one of the two main types of error, and the view I advocate ...

What? Fascism ? Communism. (Although the USSR and PRC and other countries ruled by authoritarian "Communist" parties self-avowedly practiced state cap...

This may be a root of our disagreement. I do agree that well-formed beliefs are coextensive with "tendencies to act as if...", but there is a broader ...

It rained here for the first time since April too, and it’s such a gorgeous sunny post-rainy day that it feels like this must be a movie where the Big...

:lol: :rofl:

Yeah, and that was dumb too.

For me, it’s mostly a repeat of Obama. W was the worst president of my life by then, ruining things after the heydays of the Clinton 90s, and Obama’s ...

No, that’s something completely different. Basic beliefs are the kinds of things one would use as premises in an argument. The validity of logical inf...

That is exactly what I mean by fideism. If you think any beliefs are basic and immutable, not subject to question, then that's fideistic. Foundational...

This post in response to you yesterday.

I think there is no intrinsic conflict between pleasure and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. That’s parallel to supposing there’s a conflict b...

I have already described what I mean by far-fetched in a way that has nothing to do with induction, and everything to do with parsimony.

I don't see what's obvious, or what particular domain you're referring to. A large part of all critical rationalism, including mine, is that there's a...

I expected to cringe but that actually make me smile and chuckle a little.

Thanks! I grew up here and have fought tooth and nail to remain here; California housing has gotten so expensive over my lifetime that it feels like m...

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "the" Krishnamurti school. There are several schools in the area owned by various theosophist groups. I did a su...

We can only hope that he will, against the Republicans who're about to drop him like a rock, and then he'll split the right-wing vote.

Maybe we'll get lucky, and Trump will spur a split in the Republican party; if the Republicans won't have him back, he might run on his own platform, ...

We can of course know when they tell us, but that's not the scenario you asked about; you asked how we can tell. There are plenty of people who tell u...

I said already earlier that induction is a perfectly fine way of coming to your initial beliefs -- not that you need any reason to believe anything, r...

But more than the amount of modifications, it's about the amount of exceptions to an otherwise more parsimonious system of beliefs. If you have the ch...