MeImCounting

This comments and many of the others on this thread strike me as written by people who have either never worked at a real restaurant and/or tend to order bland and fatty food (eat like a toddler) by default when they patronize restaurants.

This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.

Yeah I cant imagine a use case for this

Perhaps they mean the finger thumb box thing bartenders do when asking for your ID?

Because they cost time and money to implement and there is no incentive to avoid data breaches. This should be up to legislation, if we as a society actually care about privacy we need to give data privacy laws some teeth and start really enforcing them.

Ahh yes two decades ago there was some issues. This clearly makes any disaster preparedness advice from this organization totally useless. You know what while we are at it we should all reject libraries, freeways, the park service, and the postal service as I am sure at some point all these institutions had a clear and public failure and that obviously totally invalidates anything else they do.

Runoff from mining? Activist groups I'm sympathetic to have been screaming for years about certain types of mining specifically open pit mining obliterating watersheds. At a guess I would say either new mining interests are being developed around the relevant rivers in Alaska or old mining interests are being improperly decommissioned. Either way id bet my guess is right or close to right.

Why? How is that relevant? Isnt it well established that open source security research is the number one way to have a secure app/ecosystem? Why should tooling be kept secret when another team can potentially find more exploits using these/similar techniques?

Your primary source of face time should not be coming from your work.

> Are you saying that these two claims have some sort of scientific ~proofs

No. I think this statement is a conclusion only indirectly supported by scientific fact. This is a logical leap from more and more behaviors and internal states being correlated with various external stimulus over time. I believe it only a matter of time until it becomes entirely possible (though silly and will likely not be done because it only serves to prove a foregone conclusion and would be a unfathomably huge undertaking) to provide a complete accounting of all the factors that influence a system bringing it to the state where it reacts in a given way to some stimulus.

The only other conclusion I can see is that human beings are not deterministic and there is some magical spark IE everlasting soul making randomized decisions for us.

So yeah I dont disagree with you that attempting to exert control over oneself is a desirable thing or that it generally results in things that wouldnt have happened if one didnt work to have control over ones cognition, behavior etc. This isn't at all at odds with my deterministic view in my opinion.

I guess what I am asking is what is causing you to exert control over cognition? I would say its the sum of too many variables to count (including previous states of the system) acting on you to cause you, the system to be in such a state that that is just what it does. Given enough time and resources we could probably come up with a half decent accounting of the most important of those variables and be able to explain why the system is doing a given thing. In this example that means explaining why the system is modifying its own state in some way. What would you say is the cause?

> Have you an opinion on whether your opinion is necessarily true?

Yes my opinion is that my opinion is likely true as I believe it is supported by evidence. I would bet on it but I am not certain about it.

Still not entirely sure what exactly youre getting at here.

Yes what I am describing is my opinion which I have formed from looking at evidence. My opinion isnt really a measurement in the sense that one can measure activity in parts of a brain with an MRI. It is really just the state of the system.

I'm not really interested in abstract epistemological definitions of free will because they arent useful in the way that neurology psychology and biology are generally. I am interested in predicting or explaining behavior or observations mostly. You might be interested in that kind of exploration which is great! If you think it does have bearing on such things I am totally interested in hearing how.

Well most of the explanations I personally am interested in have a public and therefore high epistemic value. Since they are published and repeatable. Certain behavioral tests or self-report surveys on the other hand have lower value because of the private nature of what were intending to test. They still have some value though.

Private experiences may be very important for individuals and like I said elsewhere, free-will is certainly a useful idea in religious contexts. I do not believe this has any bearing on practical matters such as our ability to predict or understand the actions taken by any given system such as humans or computers.

Im not really sure what you mean here, could you elaborate?

> How would thinking be determined by exterior stimulus, when we all vary to some extent to the same stimulus?

Because, and this may shock you: we are not all the same person

You make an excellent point that people respond differently to a given stimulus. This is explained by those people having had different genetics, environments, upbringings and even breakfasts leading up to the point of the test. It has been demonstrated that your metabolic state will vastly change your response to stimuli throughout a day.

I ate something different for breakfast today than yesterday because one sounded tastier than the other. I made this decision not because I have an eternal soul making randomized decisions like a roulette machine but because yesterday I craved salty food and today yogurt sounded better. I am different person today than I was yesterday. My gut, brain and everything else has been changed by all the stimulus I experienced yesterday and is now influencing my responses today.