fdrake

I think we had interest, given that there were private discussions of issues raised on the forum between lurker-women and some of the staff. I suppose...

I've probably done it more times than I can count Wos, but I try hard not to use any of the implicit biases I have. I don't think the spirit of that m...

I used to administrate a reasonably large and active alt-left discussion forum. Besides people posting pictures of Mario-Stalin and those who were pro...

Fundamentally all of those terms, Gaussian curve, power law, fat tails and heavy tails, describe shapes of curves. The curves they describe are models...

You're describing two common symptoms of mood disorders and claiming that they're fundamental to depression; flattened affect, and inhibited prospecti...

One way of being persuasive is to provide a good explanation and be right!

Asking why something's right or wrong doesn't require believing in the necessary existence of a sufficient justification, only that to satisfy the que...

I've never understood why morality is the kind of thing that needs a ground or foundation. If you have an ethical system, it gets tested against intui...

Don`t see anything to pick at here. So long as the problem space for the demarcation of life and not-life is the space of possible genomic networks, r...

The nodes in neural networks are placed there by modellers and use a message passing algorithm to update parameters linking the nodes. The nodes in ge...

I'm not a biologist, and have only tertiary knowledge in developmental biology. For a specific gene network, precise estimation of parameters would be...

That's what I meant. Teleological language is useful to paraphrase stuff like that.

Responding with quote from a physicist friend: "I'm uncomfortable with science that deals with anything that isn't a state variable. (temperature, pre...

I remember how much you hate possible world semantics for modal logic, but I think some idea of possibility/necessity modality is useful here to sharp...

That a biological system doesn't contradict the laws of physics doesn't tell you much about the biological system. As you pointed out, stuff like air-...

@"Harry Hindu" Really? The types of question appropriate in biology are a lot different from the types in physics. There are differences on the entiti...

I think your OP's missing a step @"StreetlightX", you go straight from the influence of abiogenic factors on gene expression without mentioning their ...

I may have a few small problems with the methodology in the study - I need to close read it rather than skim to see what they're doing exactly with Pe...

Yeah, that was an attempt to show that applying Occam's Razor, under some arguably unreasonable constraints, gives theories which are more likely to b...

I think it might be illustrative to try to come up with a case where only Occam's Razor distinguishes between the accepted and unaccepted accounts. Im...

I don't think the filters by themselves are defeaters of the disembodied consciousness claim - it is possible that there are some testimonies which sa...

I hope it's allowed within the rules: there are a few posters on here that have a somewhat developed personal philosophy (@"apokrisis", Augustino, @"B...

Maybe this will move the discussion on a bit, @"Sam26", @"Michael Ossipoff" I thought of a way to better describe the scenario which would lead to an ...

I don't think that we'll make much more progress since we're at the stage of saying the other person has not answered previous points. I presented the...

I think the unintuitiveness of the quantitative behaviour of infinity is something isolated to the folk-mathematics idea of it. Infinity isn't just we...

I'm glad you agree that testimonial data which satisfies the criteria I outlined is rare. 4000 accounts quickly becomes a lot less when the data is fi...

Ascribing a probability to an arbitrary future or past event with no information at hand is impossible. It has to be done within a context to be meani...

Looking forward to it, it was a fun discussion before, should be again.

What denial? I just gave an example of an actually macroscopic scale quantum phenomenon. Regardless, people don't diffract through doors. The true pic...

I was expecting that response. The appropriate length scale is that of an electrical signal inducing a measurement in a quibit - a quantum state. That...

I think science outreach about quantum mechanics has been sensationalist. You see little bits of 'quantum weirdness' like entanglement and vague refer...

All of your threads are lists of questions that perplex you but which you assume are fundamental problems with contemporary physics. Is it then surpri...

Try this and then this for an introduction to how polarisation works.

Some solution attempts to Maxwell's Demon rely on a mathematical relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. So there's some p...

A reply to @"MikeL" and @"apokrisis" No worries. I wrote that post mostly to clear my own head and explore the ideas in the paper. I'm grateful to any...

Also @"apokrisis" and @"StreetlightX" for interest. As was pointed out in the previous thread you made on semiosis, one advantage of the Piercian view...

Sequences of divine entities are like the rationals, incomplete and thus irreal. *badumtisch*

Spheres aren't. Most human constructions aren't. Can you choose what to have for breakfast? Yes. Does the same effect usually follow cause in controll...

That's precisely what I intended. All of those words denote things which, at face value, exist in different ways.

That's ok, Ray Brassier is the usual answer. ;)

I think it's appropriate to imagine things into existence so long as there's not a unique sense of what it means to exist. EG, Gods are myths, chairs ...

Honestly I think the ambiguity in the domain of quantification is the essential feature of the argument. You want there to be a single way in which so...

@"Fuji" What got you interested in accelerationism?

I doubt there's any way to unambiguously evaluate which is the better choice. I've tried to come up with two 'recipes for deciding in an unambiguous w...

Have you considered starting a blog?

My favourite response to the ontological argument is an attack against the uniqueness of the entity it conjures into being. (1) An entity X has proper...

If: (1) Both accounts predict exactly the same bad things to happen. (2) All the predictions that each make will happen. (3) At least one of the accou...

Thank you very much.

Say you're measuring something's length. You make 10 measurements from a ruler whose smallest division is 1 mm. The measurements might be slightly dif...

Nutshell: If you have two variables - the mean of their sum is the sum of their means. If you have two variables with no correlation - the variability...