Srap Tasmaner

I know what you're getting at, and I said something similar earlier -- that science is common sense made systematic -- but it's really not, and that's...

Okay so the one thing at a glance that clothing does, and competitors don't, is cover your body. And then we start all over right? What is the functio...

Is clothing necessary for what? You and several other posters have pointed out functions clothing serves, but the question can lead in at least two wa...

This is a pretty strange conversation to have with a friend. Your friend mentions he wants to get home because he has money on tonight's game. You poi...

People can get better at reasoning, sure, but it should be clear I think ordinary people already have intellectual standards that work just fine in th...

Okay, yes, I like these examples. So how would you actually try to talk a friend out of betting on the home team, when you expect them to lose? Keep i...

Not the place for that discussion.

Oh gosh no I don't feel insulted or anything. There's no personal animosity between us. But if I now told you, as I believe, that classical empiricism...

Welcome to the forum. If you don't hit the "reply" button or mention the author of the post you're responding to, the author of that post probably won...

So how's the project going so far? I watched your video and liked it; I sympathize with your goals. You are now mostly telling me that I'm not doing w...

It's a narrative technique. There's an old documentary about cinematography called Visions of Light. In it, the cinematographer on Rosemary's Baby tel...

People who hold a view close to this (@"Isaac") tend to be truth-deflationist: p is true =df p is true for me =df I believe that p without circularity...

Broadly, I'm relying on Sellars's Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, though without much subtlety. That's definitely not what I'm saying. It'...

Absolutely. Carl Sagan talks about this in Demon-Haunted World -- there are people out there who are curious and inquisitive and the scientific commun...

If the plan is just to cash out talk that relies on "universals", broadly construed, into talk that doesn't, because it just uses names to refer to in...

No.

I heard an interview many years ago on NPR with a former FBI sniper, and he tells a story about a sting they had set up to arrest some militia-type du...

Interesting and persuasive stuff. Recommended reading for this approach?

But monkeys have also been shown not to make the "it's a frickin' big snake" call if there are no monkeys near them to hear it. (Don't have a citation...

This is the right thought. It's a truism that you have to find common ground to convince someone, a shared starting point, something. It's no use prov...

I'm out of my depth here, but I think the real target is Hobbes (who holds the honorary title of Founder of Game Theory). No coincidence that, in mode...

Ever seen the Dilbert strips with the guy who repeats what you said, but makes it sound like it was his idea?

If you do it means you're getting credit for someone else's discovery, so ... Congratulations?!

Say what? It's just math. It's not like nobody was exploited until von Neumann and Nash and the others hatched their evil scheme. And ... therefore we...

I certainly wasn't suggesting that it was.

I thought the point was that an horizon looks like a boundary but isn't, that we imagine there is a self on this side and a world on the other side, b...

I thought it was lovely. Your focus on tools sounds somewhat like Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex, putanumonit, Effective Altruism. I fi...

On the other hand, a couple of recent threads raise issues about the forum's culture that in my mind do relate to questions of privilege. There is the...

You suggest we're not the separate things we think we are, but all parts of a whole. There is no genuine separation, but only a perspectival illusion ...

Cool. (I looked around to see if I had unchecked a box somewhere, and then decided I must be remembering a feature from the old forum! No idea how lon...

@"unenlightened"'s thread.

I'm not quite following this. If the distinction between me and the world is on the order of an optical illusion, and the world is definitely a thing,...

0.77 I'm honestly surprised it's even that high. It feels like about half that.

@"bongo fury" @"Pfhorrest" Last post resorted to heavy use of tenses, and maybe it turns out this is the most obvious difficulty in "applying" classic...

And hurray for the guy who invited him up. That was a pretty ballsy move.

Recommended: The Half-life of Facts, by Samuel Arbesman. Less philosophically sophisticated than I was hoping but interesting material. Addresses exac...

Yeah that's worth considering, but it looks like a category mistake to me.

I clicked on another version of the video that shows more crowd response, and it was pretty predictable. Presumably clearer to Newsome's ears and he s...

I think I've been running together a few different sorts of concerns. I want to say that what we predicate of is not a generic unknown object but a mo...

Thanks for posting the video. (As it turns out, BLM officially disavows this guy, Hawk Newsome, but I don't know the whole history there.) What fascin...

I'm just not signing up for "dropping" words that non-philosophers use successfully all the time. (See what I did there?) I could see bringing "correc...

Oh sure throw that back at me! Anyway, now that I'm home from work I can sniff around Kripkenstein and see what sorts of things they reach for. I'm go...

Exactly like that! Actually I think I'm probably just recreating work Strawson did years ago ...

I'm not sure I can think of a game without rules, not off the top of my head, or of a game with implicit rules. What are the canonical examples?

As you like, it's just that math never uses quantifiers that range over even all mathematical objects, much less everything in this and all possible w...

Shrug. The ad-hoc sortal thing is appealing, but we lose some of the other stuff we might want to say, even though the analysis of the sentence feels ...

I'm honestly not sure how to answer. I leaned on the word "about" there but I often find analysis of "about" kinda slippery. What I have in mind is pr...

Does this show that chess does not have rules? No. Does it show that at some points in history chess did not have rules? No. Does it show that the rul...

There is no teaching tic-tac-toe without rules; my attempt just results in a version with a much larger but equivalent set of ad-hoc rules pretending ...