eynsham

> Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem shows that you can prove anything, without that proof being meaningful is a lens into that.

What has Gödel incompleteness to do with that? We can just take any sentence φ as an axiom, and we’ve a trivial proof thereof.

Most people at e.g. Oxford and Cambridge (and, I suspect, many other universities) use their university emails for a fairly wide variety of extramural correspondence, and are stuck with M$ as the provider, alas.

> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools

This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.

> or just 3 As from state schools

Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.

What do you think fully homomorphic encryption is, then?

I don’t see how free software licences ‘sound too good to be true’, in that they don’t even sound relevantly good: they don’t suggest in the slightest that support will be available.

Gates is one of the best placed people to claim that the advantages of meeting people in person &c in disbursing his wealth (rather than just ‘giv[ing] talks’) outweigh the emissions. There’re obviously diminishing returns (do COP delegations need to be so large?) but it would be surprising if the optimum were zero flights.

It’s rather odd that the ICO is saying this rather than industry lobbyists. No 10 is full of middle-aged technically unsophisticated types who want to look otherwise, and substitute credulity for wordliness, and I think Quangoland’s denizens are following the party line. (The shadow cabinet, but they aren’t that focused on growth because they have the luxury of not having to run the country.) The ensuing disasters may well be far worse than Horizon, if HMG ever gets anywhere with its AI plans.

I think that it would help if you were to suggest a term people who don’t want to ‘shut down discussion about related topics all together’ should use. Otherwise, the effect (although perhaps not the intention) of deprecating the term ‘attacks on trans people’ is that the sort of discussion you admit is possible theoretically will be impossible for want of a suitable term to designate the sorts of attacks it concerns.

Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted.

Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?

> Have you ever

Yes, often.