Srap Tasmaner

Suppose the Lakers and the Celtics are playing tonight. Now suppose I agree to pay you $5 if the Celtics win, and you agree to pay me $5 if the Lakers...

I'm first going to state your worry as I understand it, then answer -- if I've just misunderstood, then at least that will be clear. My position, as y...

You probably want to look at Against the Grain. I haven't read it, but I think several folks here have.

This is an excellent example (and I envy you your knowledge of bridge). We are in complete agreement. As you noted, the reason what happens on your tu...

@"Olivier5" @"Janus" Y'all might want to look at Fitch's paradox, which has been discussed on this site before.

A couple random questions about the vaccines: Would anyone put it past Donald Trump to pressure US pharmaceutical companies to cut corners and seek ap...

Let's use the nearby word "wager" to mean an agreement between two parties that one of them will pay the other some agreed upon amount depending on th...

Only three posts to go until I hit 3000. Was thinking I might let the forum decide what I write about for post number 3000. (I'm fun, dammit!)

I don't understand in what sense you think I'm conflating them. Who pays out if you win? Nobody? Then what were the stakes? Nothing? Then no wager. Th...

Or because he wasn't even offering a wager but expressing his confidence by saying "I'll bet I can ..." --- an alternative which you passed right over...

No you really didn't. Suppose you and a buddy are drinking behind the 7-11. Your buddy finishes his beer and says "Ten bucks says I can make it." You ...

Cool. Then what were you claiming, and what does it have to do with whether what we say is factual?

Perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you had claimed that because you had said something like "I bet $5 I can make a fact by saying something" you m...

For the record, no, that's not how bets are made. Like the christening of a ship or any other speech act, it requires specific circumstances and the c...

Recommending again In Search of a Flat Earth.

I wrote a long rambling response about the American culture war, but I'm replacing it with this: Yes, orthodoxy is both dangerous and repugnant. I don...

Here's the response to that from a well-read member -- don't know if he's around anymore -- in a similarly-themed thread from four years ago. (It's ov...

Last day or so I've trying half-heartedly to form a thought about this, and maybe you have something to add. Let's say we have reason to think disenta...

I share that intuition that tautologies shouldn't count. Either because they carry no information, or the information they carry is only the indirect ...

I was thinking of it as the definition of \pi most people learn first. They may learn other identities later, and thus other ways of deriving \pi, but...

I really thought that's what I said, but said it acknowledging that names are a little weird. Why does everyone go straight for names and math, areas ...

I'm not much invested either way. Whether you throw mathematical theorems into the fact box or not, you're still going to end up talking about them di...

Then you've agreed to fight it out on @"Isaac"'s terms, but I'm not sure you have to. This is what I wanted to get at: are we compelled interpose a st...

Guys, I know what speech acts are. I even nodded at the concept by describing stipulative rules as a case of "saying it's so makes it so". Note that t...

Is what not a fact? That animals we've classified as canines are what we've classified them as? That they share certain characteristics we used to def...

It's true. I wouldn't call it a fact, but you can if you like. It's provable. It's also uninformative. And sometimes dogs turn out to be coyotes.

No can do. Evidence is all you're ever going to get. Anyway, that's the party line. I don't have a solid alternative to offer.

I get that. It's an interesting point, a reasonable point, but what kind of point is it? This is what I was trying to get at by asking whether we're e...

Both are immortal, thank you very much.

Alekhine: No, because it is stipulated that this is how bishops move. Morphy: But if it's a case of "saying it's so makes it so", then it must make it...

I'll bet I can guess without reading anything but the title.

We don't end up there immediately though. You can deny that a simple headcount of experts is dispositive, without concluding that's there's nothing el...

But the aptness of that analogy is exactly what @"Isaac" is disputing, isn't it?

But Hume. The "provable true or false" definition seems to be widely used in "critical thinking" curricula, and it's what Pew used in a recent survey ...

I've just started reading Plato again -- been a very long time -- and it's practically the founding claim of philosophy: we don't care what the majori...

I think I understand what's happened here. I did not bring up baseball umpires to make the point you appear to think I was making. I was not attacking...

Yeah it has. I mentioned it. It's why we're talking about this. There's a fair amount of noise in any umpire's calls, and in umpires taken as a group....

Then you'd be wrong. I haven't looked at Fangraphs in a while, but the "average called strike zone" tends to move around from year to year. Either ump...

It's a simple point really: a chess player is a cumulative person. When you play an opening, your moves have been vetted by generations before you -- ...

Naughty. And all that's basically wrong, but I don't know that it matters. Probably?! But the blunder idea is not the main point anyway. No, no, that'...

This argument makes some sense, and maybe is relevant to the covid debate, though I'm thinking of the more general case. But it seems to entirely miss...

And I think we'd all agree with that under the heading of "human frailty". I haven't read Noise yet. Have you looked at it? It seems like the natural ...

The brain does a whole lot of filtering of sensory input. If some of those filters start to fail...

It's hard to disagree with a statement that ends with "etc." and I won't try. But I do disagree with the suggestion, which you constantly walk right u...

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

This argument seems like it makes sense, but how exactly is "how hard the flaw is to spot" defined? As I understand it, you want this to be the indepe...

Pick any one you like. I could have added a lot more.

I read it when it came out, listening to Sonic Youth on cassette. Ah, cyberpunk days...

A line has curvature of 0, I believe. Mathematicians sometimes call something like that the "degenerate" case -- the way in everyday life you might sa...

What is the difference between having a brain and a body but no mind, and having a brain and a body and a mind?