big_curses

I agree, but I'd also like to defend Jackson on this one. He was brought in after Del Toro dropped out and the movies had been in production for years already. He had no prep time and seemed to exist on little sleep for years. You can see some of this in the behind the scenes recordings/interviews they did. I have a feeling they were only as good as they were because of him. Regardless, they were disappointing.

If I really need to remember something I use spaced repetition, Anki being one of the more well known tools for that. Spaced repetition is particularly useful if you need to retain information indefinitely; you can do so as long as you stick with the process. The downsides to it are the upfront cost of ingesting whatever information you're looking to memorize into what is usually a flash card like system.

As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of housing that many people, but a significant number of the homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally ill.

Unfortunately, if this is serious, it just makes me lose respect for him. The Enlightenment was the greatest period of human history ever with regards to philosophical and intellectual progress since ancient Greece.

I think the focus on sentience is misplaced. Rather, the value should be rationality, meaning here the ability use one's mind to survive and to live by reason alone. This is valuable to any other rational living creature because rationality allows one to eschew violence and live cooperatively, so it is in the best interest of every rational creature to, at least on a basic level, value and respect the life of any other rational creature. The reason we don't apply and respect rights to animals and plants is because they are incapable of doing the same to us, or even being aware of the concept of 'rights'. You should interact with other forms of life on the highest level it is capable of interacting with you.

But at the same time, I think it's doing a really good job of what it's trying to do. Google search is not trying to be a repository for all the world's information. It's just trying to get people to what they're most likely looking for or show the most related things. Given the significance of the moon landing and the fact that no one has set foot on mars I find it unsurprising that it brings up info on the moon landing. It's seems better to assume what the user is likely looking for especially when (at least my) Google searches often take the form of "moon land neil year". I can just type things like that out, stream of consciousness, and the majority of the time I get what I'm looking for immediately.

Exactly, so this would be a legitimate reason for us to support biodiversity.

Yes, but if biodiversity loss and changes in the land caused by some action we've taken leads to civilizational collapse, then obviously that's not good for our lives and we should stop doing it. If biodiversity has effects that are good for us, then we should build things with that in mind (I only say "if" here because I have not read much in depth on the effects of lessening biodiversity, although it's pretty obvious how it could be destructive). I support infrastructure that promotes biodiversity, but disagree that we should do it for the animals, we should do it for us.

> The good news is that what is good for humans is to maintain biodiversity and what's good for biodiversity is good for animals.

Exactly, which is why I'm generally in support of building things in a way that maintains biodiversity. But we should be doing it for us as the principle driving this action, even if the outcome seems the same.

> But you are wrong that animals don't have, or cannot conceive of, having rights and that we don't "owe" them anything. The truth is that we owe all living things the right to exist in the same way your rights are granted by the constitution.

Which animal can grasp a philosophically grounded conception of rights? If they can't do that, they do not know of rights. Certain species of primates may react to what they perceive as fair and unfair, but this is founded in emotion and social habits, not reason, which is required for a conception of rights. You will never see an animal respecting your rights, they simply happen to act in a way that doesn't directly infringe on them, but only sometimes. Also, I should clarify, just because animals don't have rights doesn't mean it is good for us, as individuals, to do anything we want to them at any time. Unnecessary cruelty is not good for an individual psychologically, in addition to the fact that it does not add to your life in any way.

This is going to come across as a nitpick on the title, the idea is taken farther in the article and I think it's an important distinction.

No, we should not build for wildlife. We should only build for people and what is good for people's lives. The only question then is, "what is good for people?". If not harming the biodiversity in a region and having more green spaces are good for people (which they likely are), then we should do it, but it is not the case that, as the article says, "whenever we build something...it's our responsibility to accommodate wildlife that would be displaced otherwise". Our only responsibility is to our own lives and the rights of others, animals do not have rights and cannot even conceive of them. If people want to help animals because it makes them happy, that's great, but we don't owe any moral responsibility to them.

Why abolish patents rather than just fix their implementation? Patents are very important. Without them, incentive to bring things to market falls as all your hard work of designing and creating something can just immediately be taken and reused by others. This encourages everyone to sit around and wait for others to make something first, and then punishes the one who does. Why not instead rework patents so that they have to be used continuously to be upheld or increase the stringency of that aspect of them?

I'll give a perspective, although my specific knowledge of math is not very deep at all, I've thought a lot about concepts and abstractions.

I think the difference here is that math is much more abstract than physics. The concepts backing math are built off of very low level abstractions about the world. For math, over a long period of time more and more relationships and rules were deduced from what had already been induced from reality. And if you CAN deduce, you should likely, as it provides a proof for some idea or concept that induction never could (but only if your previous inductions and deductions were accurate).

Physics on the other hand, cannot deduce as readily. It is primarily based in the realm of gathering more and more data from the world and observing physical relationships firsthand. This cannot be done in abstract math because abstract math does not exist in reality. There is nothing to observe, it is mostly abstractions based on lower level observations in reality. For example, you can measure the effects of gravity firsthand, but you cannot measure infinity, a mathematical abstraction. Infinity does not exist in reality. It is simply a useful abstraction for things that are too large or small for us to meaningfully measure.

The only two options are not either that the FDA screens and approves drugs or it being down to individuals (or even these individuals' doctors). We could have private screening and trials companies that the drug producers themselves would pay. We already see this in other industries where there are both public and private inspections done. I've heard in those cases the private inspectors are actually stricter as well, as they actually have more incentive to be correct.

Do they attack education through funding or through rhetoric? I imagine funding is where they would have more power.

I already believed that education should be outside of the purview of the government, but this even more reason to keep them separate. A government whose sole purpose is to protect individual rights (properly defined) would have no ability to gut the education of it's populace.