david_w

I agree with you which is why I got downvoted too. People with nothing better to do in their lives than get paid to downvote on public forums. My solution I guess is to leave this forum and find one that doesn't enable downvote brigades the way this one does.

Supposedly, commentors here have something of value to offer, otherwise it would just be a news headline site without commentors. I am taking whatever value I have to offer and going elsewhere. I suggest you do the same. Sure, HN will turn into a political echo-chamber but it's really that already, right? I had 10% of my karma- whatever that is and whatever it's good for- disappear in an hour when I proferred the opinion that I didn't blame Trump for the virus.

You get a result like that - people telling you that that should NOT be your opinion and here's the punch in the face to teach you that lesson- and you know the forum is already a lost cause.

Gab has a browser plugin that will let you comment on any website, including this one and not be censored. Also there are scrappy alternatives to Reddit, saidit I think is one, where its not a groupthink party.

It's just a period of time we're living through and technology will catch up with it.

Historically, problems had to go on much longer than people reading about them later realize they did before corrective action was taken. This is no different.

For all the busy-beaver downvote-assassins on HN- way to waste the days and hours of the prime of your life, fighting the losing battle against freedom!

You go girl!

At least some of life for some people is luck in the real sense that undeserving people (Joe Biden's son, say, merely to cite one example) are lifted up thanks to who their parents are.

Bad luck is when you're effectively ruined by the age of 5 thanks once again to who your parents were. The only way out for someone that fits this description is to adopt a self-reliant, goal directed attitude.

Self-reliant, goal directed behavior is essentially what people not born lucky or ruined do to improve their position in life.

What society can do to help is communicate clearly that the virtues of persistence, resilency, self-reliance and goal directed behavior are "cool" or in sociological-speak, society's normative values.

Unfortunately, since Rousseau and Marx, we have birthed a counter-culture that is determined to do the opposite. It's determined to place the locus of control over one's life outside of the individual and onto a nepharious "society".

Marx personally was an unhappy, deeply defective, and cruel personality. His philosophy stems directly from this. It attracts people who share his defects- namely people filled with resentment, envy, a desire to extract revenge for perceived slights and a lust for absolute power.

The hope is that eventually, through CRISPR and other techniques, that as a side effect of improving human functioning the well-spring of such people will simply dry up.

Until then, we have to do battle with a philosophy which preaches the diametric opposite of what we know leads to human flourishing and happiness.

How about the future value of dollar spent today? What the best and brightest do is advance science, including the science which later alleviates the issues plaguing the the bottom 1%. This is the whole idea of universal education in the first place. It pays for itself in the long run. The top 1% pay super-extra dividends to everyone.

2). If you include civil war and if you allow that civil war to be a war of factions within the CCP then you're wrong. There will be a new leader of the CCP, call him / her China's Gorbachev (and SARS2 is China's Chernobyl) and this will eventually lead, with assistance, to the de-Communization of China within at most 15 years but possibly just two.

update: possibly 6 months.

Consumers are expert at detecting what has value for them. Putting the "correct" price on it means locating it on the can-pay / will-pay / will-pirate normal distribution of price vs profit chart you've seen .

If something saves me thousands of hours, I am not likely to both miss that fact and stay in business to be a customer for long.

Sellers have a harder problem figuring out what consumers value. The solutions to that are things like collecting useage data, eating your own dogfood or BYOC (be your own customer), outright feature requests, competitor's decisions ( which are market-proven value assignments) etc.

Also 0.xxx versions serve this purpose- it's partially a pre-market exploration of the value of features before a pricing / version segregation attempt is made .

There's just no way consumers doesn't know what they value when they use it or its not there.

There is a class of things which consumers dont' know they value because they've never had it to value in the first place (Pinterest, Instagram) but that's a different thing than assigning different values to different aggregates of established features.

Someone, a woman, I forget her name, a physicist has lately questioned the parsimonius assumption or more accurately the whole beauty assumption, meaning, roughly, the most beautiful or parsimonious theory is correct. Just a data point to this conversation, not an argument.

Re: Solomonoff, if you're chucking away unnecessaries, which is what I understand Solomonoff to be doing (I had to be reminded what his theory was truthfully) then that's all well and good, let's chuck. But you still are left with the problem of whether the axioms are true. That's a different thing entirely except to the extent we define true operationally, as having predictive power over the things we understand and know about in the way we understand them.

We moderns are all deeply enmeshed with Scientism which is an ism that says logic and reasoning and the scientific method etc. are the only valid tools for aquiring certain (indubitable) knowledge. What if it's just not true ? Then what ?

Not parsing it quickthrower2. I get two possible parses:

Bisons (Buffalo) bewilder (buffalo) Buffalo bisons (Buffalo bisons) confuse (buffalo) annoy (buffalo) and vexate (buffalo) other bisons (buffalo).

But that is not grammatical.

Neither is my second parse:

Bisons from Buffalo (Buffalo buffalo) Bisons from Buffalo (Buffalo buffalo) confuse (buffalo) and vexate (buffalo) other bisons (buffalo).

Am I missing it?

You can do this: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Which is like my first post except each alternative definition of buffalo (confuse, annoy, vexate) is included using the word buffalo in its stead.

But that's just gratuitous.

Sure. In Java a class named :

ArraysOfConcreteParameterizedTypesAreDisallowed

The body of this class is a proof of this fact.

>>But once we reduce things down to simple logical axioms and constructs, these exist as much as anything can be said to exist.

I agree.

But this assumes logic and at least the principle of non-contradiction: not both A and not A - is how reality "really" is.

We can't get past the idea that it must be this way because only provable nonsense lies on the other side of this assumption. But our brains may be fundamentally unable to process ultimate reality and the nonsense a contradiction represents may be a statement not about reality but our brains, our thinking.

So logical contradictions aren't actually nonsense, they're the sound of us hitting the walls of what our minds can conceive of. All animal have such limits. We assume those limits look like darkness- stuff we can't peer into. What if they look like impossibility instead?

That's the point of view I'm entertaining here. I am not saying this is true. It certainly isn't useful or provable as far as I know, but it is possible.

The practical value of such an exercise, if it has any (and I think it does) is to twofold.

One seems to expand my imagination to the maximum extent pops me out of the assumptions that frame my thinking and this seeps into my thinking about things, technical problems, generally.

Two it confers humility and a certain openess and makes me less judgmental. So that, for example, when I hear or read people with claims to spiritual knowledge I don't automatically blow them off as crazy / bitter / ignorant because what they're saying "makes no sense".

Thinking and talking about Ultimate Reality capital U capital R, ought to fill us all with humility if we're being intellectually honest by our own standards. Yet, I find people totally lack that humility. They make huge pronouncements about Ultimate Reality which they can't really be sure of, and the effect this has on the world, and how we think of each other, and therefore how we treat each other, and even the effect on one's own mind, is one of diminishment generally.

Mea culpa, I was one of those people and I didn't like it.

If you get down to the core of knowledge and how we know something, this is what's really there, and it's good to be reminded of it.

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Bisons hailng from Buffalo, N.Y. confuse confound and befuddle more of their own kind.

I always hear this back from people, but it's a failure in understanding what's being said. You can't conceive of any future "knowledge" or state of being or most broadly, "configuration of reality" which could retroactively justify or "make right" proven and real human suffering already suffered. That is just not possible to you.

That is what you're saying. It's isomorphic to your argument; it is your argument's essence.

Expressed that way, the issue becomes apparent. We cannot conceive of something; it is inconceivable. But that inconceivability is exactly what the original argument is asserting - it's a thing beyond human conceptualization. Exactly.

All parties to the argument find agreement on this point.

I have a folder named "proofs" on my machine which is just this. About 1500 and counting little programs that demonstrate or prove that something works some way or another. The class name expresses the proven fact. When I find out I am wrong, I change the name of the class to reflect the correct understanding. I read through the names in my IDE when I need to know some detail about something I've forgotten.

This. It is discovered in the same sense that humans "discover" facts about humans via science- we're not born with perfect self-knowledge.

It is "created" because there is no guarantee that our efforts correspond to reality. In that sense we are just playing in the sandbox of what we can conceive.

The fact that mathematics corresponds so "unreasonably" to objective reality is because what we call objective reality is mediated by our brain's own idiosyncrasies and limitations of thinking.

It's no more surprising that external objective reality is mathematically predictable and describable than it is that our eyes can see shapes and some, but not all, light. That's the purpose of eyes and they tell us enough of what we need to know that we can survive.

Our brains are exactly the same thing- they tell us a story in a way which helps us to survive. Actual reality may be beyond our capacity to conceive of or worse, may seem like nonsense to us because it's aggressively illogical or specifically contradictory and reality therefore makes no "sense" to us.

All religions have a mystic branch which describes an awareness , usually transient, of a higher order to reality in which the suffering of people is "redeemed" or put into perspective or somehow negated.

One interesting thing is that the language and imagery used by the mystics of these different and separated religious traditions are often indistinguishable from each other- it's not clear if it was St. John of the Cross or Augustine or Zen Masters Ikkyu or Dogen who is saying them.

On thing they refer to in this transcendent reality is apprehension of "the coincidence of opposites". So for example, the obvious fact that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time is itself contradicted or "resolved". In logic we say "not both A and not A" (or else a contradiction is permitted and from there literally anything can be proven).

If I were a goldfish, no matter how right the math you read to me was, I would not understand it, you or anything it referred to. Even as the atomic bomb it described exploded, I still would not understand the nature of reality which now quite literally impinged itself on my flesh.

What would it feel like to be confronted with that kind of knowledge? Would we recognize some formulation of it but reject it, as in: both A and not A?

Would it be something impossible, existing outside of what appears to us to be exhausted possibilities?

Not A Not not A Not both A and not A Not not both A and not A. etc?

We can feel the limits of our own thinking when we reach something which is logically impossible. We just can't get our thinking around these things; contraditions seem like an absolute dead end, leading everywhere and nowhere.

Are there things in our lives which we literally experience, like an atomic bomb disntegrating a goldfish, which even as they touch us and we feel them, we simply fail to comprehend the "real" meaning of them? The breeze? A look? A birth? Suffering?

Spirtual insight may be a thing like mathematicqal talent- some people have a talent for it and some people don't. Such a talent may be completely disconnected from normal intelligence. To people who don't have it, it seems like garbage, i.e. self-contradictory, self-pacifying wishful thinking.