It means that nobody gets a majority of delegates. Say Bernie gets 40% of them and Biden gets 30% and Bloomberg gets 20% and the last 10% are spread a...
FiveThirtyEight has updated their predictions since yesterday, apparently. Bernie and "no one" are now about tied for most likely to get a majority of...
That's still a hedonic criteron though, assuming by "harm" you mean something like "cause suffering". I'm not saying that anyone has an obligation to ...
To the positivists "meaningless" and "not truth-apt" are basically the same thing, because their theory of meaning is basically entirely descriptivist...
But what does God say and how do we know what God says and how are we to interpret it and what do we do to fill in the gaps on what things he hasn’t s...
That sounds like the thing that the logical positivists claimed was necessary, basically creating the field of meta-ethics in the process. There has b...
I do get into it later in the Codex, I’m just taking things one step at a time here. At this point I’m only arguing not to completely abandon even att...
FiveThirtyEight is now showing "one one" as the most likely to get a majority of pledged delegates, with Bernie shortly behind him, and Biden about ha...
I went to add something about that to the essay just now, and realized that the very next paragraph after the one you quoted contains something like t...
Thanks for the feedback! At this point I am indeed treating both prescriptive and descriptive claims the same. In later essays I go into more detail o...
Don't forget the big one: do you want to exist somewhere? Well unless your wealthy parents just gifted you a house the moment you became an adult, you...
No, my point is just that it’s not as mathematical as that. It’s not like good deeds add up and bad deeds subtract and that just gives you a score by ...
Actions are not people, and each category of things has its own kind of judgement. Actions tell you something about a person, but accumulated action-j...
Actions can be judged on their merits, people can be judged on their tendencies to behave a certain way, and their past actions can be evidence of the...
Yeah I don’t think blameworthiness and praiseworthiness work like that, for a practical morality. What matters is whether a person is likely to do mor...
Meaning is like love: there is nothing more to it that you could ask for than the feeling of it, and aside from asking if someone feels it, there is n...
Do you think black holes have never been observed too? Because we've observed them with the exact same methods as we've observed dark matter. Anyway, ...
Yeah, and that's kind of my point. Indirect observations aren't really fundamentally different from direct ones. Everything is to some degree indirect...
You're behind the times. MOND is dead. There was a huge headline, about the Bullet Cluster observation. We looked at two galaxies that had collided, b...
There is a difference between not having a complete explanation of a pheonomenon, and that phenomenon being "metaphysical" or somehow not physical. An...
There are some features that I think are universals of a good life: learning, teaching, loving, and being loved. But there is perhaps infinite variety...
We can’t see radio waves. We can build machines that interact with those radio waves and do things in response that we can see, and so infer what kind...
We know it is real, we just don’t have much of account of what it’s like besides the basic stuff we observe about it (weakly interacting, massive, abo...
Where can one find Chomsky's running commentary on current events? I'd like to read that. This. I was thinking last night, on the topic of someone ask...
Not according to current theories of physics. "Closed system" means no energy enters the system or leaves it. But according to current physics, new en...
I voted Yes assuming a compatibilist definition of free will akin to Susan Wolff's or Harry Frankfurt's (my full view laid out here). Determinism is i...
The second law of thermodynamics happens as a result of statistical mechanics: more-entropic states are definitionally more likely than less-entropic ...
Only closed systems are statistically required to increase in entropy. According to our current understanding, our universe is not a closed system: th...
Has he said that publicly somewhere? If so, there’s an easy strategy to make him do it anyway. Schedule a debate anyway, show up, and them call Trump ...
I don't see how your comments are in response to mine. I was honestly running with your point and showing how it supports the claims of libertarian so...
You're right, if we get rid of the government-enforced power to contract, or the government-enforced claim to property in the first place, then there'...
On a different subject, FiveThirtyEight is now showing that the top two predictions, tied for most likely outcome, are either Bernie or no clear winne...
It's important to distinguish here between what's in someone's best interest and what someone will choose. People often makes choices that are bad for...
I think you already asked this earlier in the thread and I replied, but in case not: I live in California so it's pretty much guaranteed that all our ...
The argument of the free will theodicy (which I disagree with, I'm just explaining it) is that having free will is such a good thing that it can outwe...
People are sick to death of the neoliberal centrist consensus of the past forty years, and no doubt there is some common appeal to both Bernie and Tru...
The Problem of Evil that is the topic of this thread is specifically an argument that an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God is incompatibile with...
Why would an all good God have created an array of life forms that can only flourish at the expense of each other's suffering, instead of creating an ...
A couple of thoughts: First, anarchism is not against there being laws or government, it's only against states, which are monopolies on the use of for...
This is my view as well. The kind of "free will" that people like Plantinga (originator of the free will theodicy) use is incompatibilist, where it ju...
I haven't read this whole thread yet, but just responding to the OP: I agree completely that the free will theodicy fails, but (aside from it hinging ...
Look, Frank, nobody is saying that you have to introduce yourself as an atheist. You're clearly also an agnostic; I'm getting the impression of a hard...
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