tprice7

Diamond & Shurman

I think that unyttigfjelltol was saying that taxing the value of improvements is goofy, not LVT. The comment was in favor of LVT.

In other words, the codomain needs to be a vector space.

I've published a couple of papers in decent pure math journals with no affiliation at all. It didn't cause any issues.

What do you think about all these people with long covid then? I've seen studies suggesting that it's pretty common, as well as anectodal observations, although I don't have any links handy off the top of my head.

Furthermore, it doesn't involve complex conjugation, and (closely related) it doesn't have any property akin to positive-definiteness.

Ok, I think you are just playing word games here, using one very broad interpretation of the word eugenics when you say that gene editing is eugenics, and then a narrower interpretation of the word when you say that there are strong ethical claims against it. Things like forced sterilization are obviously unethical but the reasons have absolutely nothing to do with gene editing. Maybe we could make this more concrete if you gave some specific examples of the ethical claims against eugenics that you are referring to, which you think also apply to gene editing. Also, if you are talking about public appetite, I think it's worth observing that this is the first time I've heard someone compare gene editing to eugenics (I'm sure it's been done before, but it certainly doesn't seem common), and your comment is at the very bottom of the page.

Could you please clarify what you are referring to by "non-binding eugenics guideline" and whom you are quoting? Also, could you explain directly why gene editing is unethical without making a vague analogy to eugenics? If the analogy is sound then you should be able to.

I think there is an essential difference between "you have to do X because it is mandated" and "you practically have to do X in order to keep up". For one, the latter scenario is essentially more democratic than the former, it first requires some critical mass of people voluntarily (in the strongest sense of the word) deciding that they are better off with X, whereas the former may only require a decision from a relatively small number of authorities. This puts strong restrictions on what X could possibly be: for example, you would never have people sterilizing themselves because some critical mass of other people are sterilizing themselves. I will also point out that your argument applies to technological progress in general and is not specific to gene editing.

EDIT: I may have misunderstood you, I interpreted your comment to be about the hypothetical scenario where most people have genetically modified themselves into being "super heroes" and now the people who haven't can't keep up with the rest of society, so it becomes a practical necessity without being legally required. On second reading though I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

Even if it could be used to create genetic super heroes, there's nothing inherently compulsory about it, in contrast to eugenics.

I'm rusty with this stuff but I'm pretty sure your guess is correct, a countable model is one with countably many objects.

For other readers who might not be familiar, I'll mention that Skolem's paradox is about how there are countable models of set theory, and yet it is a theorem of set theory that uncountable sets exist, so these countable models must contain sets that are uncountable according to the model.

I think it seems less paradoxical if you think of it like this: in order for a set to be countable, there needs to exist an injection from that set to the natural numbers. So a countable model can have a set that internally looks uncountable: there is in fact an injection from that set to the natural numbers, it's just that the injection isn't included in the model.