fdrake

, @"Baden" What actually happened in the discussion was that I left when you started saying statistics can't be applied to individuals. There's no suc...

No idea brochacho.

I think it's a stretch to say that Aristotle's metaphysics is a good description of what humans believe as a matter of common sense.

I try to suspend all common sense when asking for clarifications on metaphysics.

I didn't understand the role of 'Therefore, both exist' in the post. Is it because acorns and lighters have some 'real potential' that they can be sai...

What's the difference between potency and actuality here? I'm genuinely asking 'cos I'm curious, not for some 'destruction through Socratic method' of...

@"charleton",@"darthbarracuda" Honestly? The interesting thing about this thread isn't whether there is a God or isn't one. It's in what metaphysical ...

A cliffnotes version of the conclusion: errors in measuring the number of oscillations of atoms or lattices between different quantum states within a ...

I did some googling for you. @"Metaphysician Undercover" Here's a paper that does measurement error analysis for a type of atomic clock. Here's one th...

Every clock has a measurement error associated with its time. This is literally a quantification of how accurate the clock is. For the caesium-122 clo...

@"Metaphysician Undercover" Convention privileges a measurer of time as a definer of the second. Then other ways of measuring time are calibrated to i...

The entire point of calibrating measurements of time is that there is a privileged time-measurer and other measurements of time are calibrated through...

@"TheMadFool" Except no, because this isn't an infinite regress. It stops at whatever measurement of time is conventionally accepted as the definition...

These are just statistics and don't apply to the actions of individuals.

I'm just grateful my polemic did something for once. ;)

Oh dear.

Well I want to understand the logic by which these hierarchies are constructed. Depending on how successive elements in the hierarchy are allowed to r...

The cup has a relationship of 'is held up by' the table, the table 'is held up by' its legs, which 'is held up by' the floor which 'is grounded in gra...

Is there any detail in the book on how things come to exist in hierarchical relationships with each other? And also what hierarchy means when applied ...

Also thanks, it's a good article.

That's mostly the reason I scarequoted dialogue, the relationship of people with each-other as political actors in a state such as this is either one ...

@"Banno" I think 'the dialogue''s severance from truth has a self reinforcing character. Imagine trying to communicate political-managerial decisions ...

When people are enslaved, one of the first control measures is to stop them from reading. When we then have an educated populace with a variety of con...

@"Agustino" That's the opposite conclusion from the one you should draw. What you should draw from the idea is that increasing the lowest of wages dec...

The data on this is pretty complicated. It's often the case that poverty is used as the dependent variable in a study, then it's found that more educa...

It's pretty patronising regardless of whether the addressee is out there somewhere or me. As if the only problem arising from income inequality is env...

I know, I reject the framing of the issue that produces it. As you said: Which means your method of questioning will never even see aggregate properti...

Not even wrong. What matters is the pattern of wealth distribution. You don't seem to want to consider aggregate effects at all. Inequality is a prope...

So you're down with the idea that social mobility is impeded by inequality. Good, that's a start. But you don't care because it's still possible that ...

Because inequality makes it a lot less likely that someone is able to do those things!

The path isn't unthinkable to me. The fact that it's possible doesn't really say anything about inequality though. Other than it's eventually going to...

I do read what you're saying. People create wealth by offering goods and services. It's their own stupid fault in the west if they're stuck working pa...

I don't see the difference between what you're saying and 'if everyone was just in the situation I was in, everything would be OK, therefore it's the ...

Ah yes, if only someone working two full time jobs would have thought of that, how stupid everyone is!

Really? What access to them do the 99% have? Besides their jobs.

I have a pet peeve with the term 'butterfly effect', what it's supposed to convey is the idea that small changes in initial conditions in some dynamic...

I don't think this is relevant to inequality.

@"Agustino" Just some clarification - while it's interesting to find things out about how the income distribution looks like that, the main point of t...

@'Agustino' Just some clarification - while it's interesting to find things out about how the income distribution looks like that, the main point of t...

@"Agustino" That specific trade doesn't happen so much does it. The disjunction between the production of goods and services and the amount of money f...

There's also a category error in your individualistic response. Attempting to analyse something which appears only in the aggregate (income inequality...

Didn't know that about the Forex market, nice. How does it change things? I don't think I implied much about how people get rich. What I care about is...

There are two factors that you can interpret out of that graph, or other income distribution graphs, one is that a lot of people own very little of th...

Probably at some point to do philosophy became to engage with the canon. I think this is largely an institutional feature (or bug). I think it's doubt...

I can understand you rolling your eyes at the first post. The second one makes the case with less patronising and inflammatory language. Your call.

I hope you read more of the post than that. Getting personal about hatespeech and sexism is the best way to change people's minds, I've found. If the ...

Less Hussein, more Avicenna. Less conflict in Iraq, Iran and Afghan, more Islamic Golden Age. Less Ota Benga, more M'Banza-Kongo. Less William Wilberf...

There's a racist element to the Enlightenment myth as it's usually formulated. As it stands, history looks like: ancient Greeks -> Enlightenment think...

Bit of imprecision there. Person believes system is right. Person believes any action entailed by the system is right. Person believes system entails ...

Two things that should definitely be removed are the absurd paywalls in front of lots of academic articles and a general resistance to writing researc...