Strange: Slashdot seems to have eaten my original reply. C'est la vie.
No, Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was from the Old Testament Books of Isaiah and Micah, where the authors were speaking about what life would be like once God's plans came to fruition: an end to war, no one will lift a weapon against each other, and so forth.
Christ, for his part, said he did not come to bring peace to the Earth, but instead to bring a sword (Matthew 10:34).
Further, Christ almost certainly celebrated the Jewish Feast of Purim, which celebrates the avoidance of a genocide. The evil Haman tried to organize a Go-Murder-Your-Jewish-Neighbors-And-Take-Their-Stuff Day, but Mordecai and Esther were able to persuade the King to enact a By-The-Way-The-Jews-Get-To-Carry-Swords Day. Haman's attempted genocide failed due to the Jews being armed. To this day, the Feast of Purim is one of the best celebrations in Judaism -- it's a day whereupon observant Jews believe they are commanded by God to get shitfaced drunk until they can no longer tell the name of Haman from the name of Mordecai. (It takes a lot of wine to get that far.) I have fond memories of being in college and Rabbi Avi walking across campus, waving his arms and calling out "WHO WANTS TO GET LIT FOR GOD? FREE BOOZE AT CHABAD!"
Further, Christ said quite clearly he did not come to change even one letter of the Law, but only to fulfill it. Part of the Jewish Law involves how one treats rodef -- those who seek to shed another's blood unjustly. Jewish Law says, point blank, to give them one warning to stop. If they don't, then all Jews are commanded to stop the rodef by any means necessary, even if it means bloodshed.
So if the din rodef is part of the Law, and that's part of the Law that Christ said he did not come to change but to fulfill... then yes. The only way you can get the idea Christ was a pacifist is if you decide he was lying about not changing the Law. Christ advocated the possession of arms, and the ethical use of the same.
You can rail all you want against weapons. Go ahead, doesn't matter to me a bit. But when you try to rewrite history in order to satisfy your psychological hangups, then I have to quietly insist, "no, that is not how it happened."
You need to re-read your Bible. Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was Isaiah (and later Micah) talking about what life would be like in God's heavenly kingdom. Christ said (Matthew 10:34), "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
Incidentally, I'm a little irritated at your assumption that I'm any of (a) a Christian, (b) an American, or (c) a firearms owner. Someone asked a question, particularly with respect to whether Christ would have supported the NRA. The answer to that one is "almost certainly."
One of the biggest festivals of the Jewish year is the Feast of Purim, where Jews celebrate the story of Esther and Mordecai and their triumph over the evil Haman. When Haman plotted genocide against the Jews, Esther and Mordecai were able to convince the king to permit the Jews to carry swords to protect themselves. Haman's treachery was discovered, the Jews were armed, and those who wished to murder all the Jews in the country were too afraid to take on Jews armed with swords. This long predated Christ's ministry. Given that Christ also said he did not come to alter one letter of the Law but rather to fulfill it, it's quite likely that Christ celebrated Purim, the survival of the Jews against the first recorded attempted genocide against them, and how the civil possession of armaments let them survive.
I'm not arguing one way or another that firearms are good, bad, or the product of space aliens from Zarbnulax. Really, whatever politics you want to project onto them is your call. But when it comes to history, we have some pretty clear answers. Christ was in favor of arms and the ethical use of them.
"Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. -- And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough." (Luke 22:36, 38)
So, yeah, I think Christ would've approved of the NRA. He directly advised his disciples to be armed. Also, "turning the other cheek" was never intended to mean passive submission to violence. The culture of the day was one where the wealthy would often slap around the poor using the right hand, but using the left was a mortal insult and would provoke a fight. Christ was telling the poor that if someone wants to bully them and shove them around, they should not initiate violence, but demonstrate their willingness to end a fight if the other guy wanted to start one -- that's what "turning the other cheek" meant.
Christ was not a pacifist. This is the guy who chased moneychangers from the temple with a whip (probably more for preying on the poor than defaming the faith), and who openly welcomed a Roman centurion as one of his followers, and didn't demand the guy give up his life of the sword. Christ's message had more to do with the ethical use of violence than it did with the total abjuration of it.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
Either go to a common law based system (the French have that...)
The French do not use the Common Law system. They use the Civil Law system, which is derived from the Napoleonic Code, which is derived from the Code of Justinian, which actually dates from well before the fall of the Roman Empire.
The United Kingdom uses the Common Law system.
The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states: but Louisiana in particular uses a Civil Law-based system, in keeping with its heavily French heritage.
I don't see that either one is clearly superior. If you take a look at what comes out of Louisiana state courts, you'll see they're just as crazy as any other system. It's just crazy of a slightly different flavor. You might think that flavor tastes better, but I don't.
Less dogma, more code, please.
on
Parlez-vous Python?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At OSCON 2006 I was delivering a presentation on a new heuristic algorithm. We implemented it in C++ and provided Python bindings for it. An hour before my presentation I was in the green room, head deep in code, getting one last bugfix in before the presentation. As I found a bug and fixed it I said to myself, "Python, I love you. You make the hard stuff so easy."
The green room immediately went quiet. I lifted my head and looked across the table and discovered Damian Conway, of Perl fame, was sitting across from me hacking on his own code. Damian looked up, looked around, and particularly at all the people who were expecting a Python-versus-Perl flamewar to arise. "What?" he asked them. "Listen, the only thing I love more than Perl is software that works well, even if it's not written in Perl." Then he went back to his code, I went back to mine, and the room resumed its normal dull roar.
There's a lot of wisdom in Conway's perspective. If you seriously believe that coding in Ruby makes you a better programmer than a Python or a PHP programmer, then I hate to break the news to you, but you've been sadly miseducated.
Yes, I know Ruby. I prefer Python. So what? My best friend knows both languages and prefers Ruby.
Children get into holy wars about code. Grown-ups are too busy writing code to waste time on such childish diversions.
I know my Soviet history (or at least the history of premiers) better than you do, apparently, and I think you're overdue for your Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Duranty.
In point of fact, there's a good sushi restaurant in Iowa City -- Takanami, just east of the University of Iowa's Pentacrest. There's also the Drunken Fish on Laclede's Landing in St. Louis, which has the best sushi I've ever had anywhere: better than California, better than Oregon, better than anywhere out East.
The rest, though, seems like exactly the kind of vitriol I have no interest in engaging in. Sorry.
Who participates in the caucuses? It's a banner year if ten percent of eligible voters make it to a caucus. (In fact, I wonder if Iowa has ever broken ten percent.)
So, yeah, if ten percent of eligible voters care, and the other ninety percent are all "I'm going to take a long nap, wake me up on January 4" -- which seems to be the case -- then I think it's inappropriate to say that Iowans as a whole demand our caucuses be first, or that they deserve some kind of special prominence.
Don't think that the loudest voices actually represent Iowans. They represent themselves. Most Iowans just want the day after to come as quickly as possible.
Iowa and New Hampshire, small population states that they are, are legends of importance only in their own minds.
Hi. I'm an Iowan. I'd like to point out that we're not the ones who are telling CNN to keep our caucuses in the 24/7 news cycle. That's the rest of the United States. We just want to hold our caucus and be done with it. The unrelenting campaigning is something that pretty much every Iowan finds quite distasteful. Our own electoral campaigns tend to be much nicer by comparison. When Jim Leach, representing eastern Iowa's interests to the House of Representatives, lost to Jim Loebsack, the two of them parted with a handshake, as friends, and with mutual respect. When was the last time you saw a race for national office end that way? True, by Iowa standards the Leach-Loebsack race was quite a nice and pleasant one, but it wasn't unusually so or without precedent. Compare that to how the current crop of GOP candidates is going after each other, and... well. You might begin to get an idea of why so many Iowans are so looking forward to these caucuses being over. And that's just the half of it, really. What's as bad as the very un-Iowan nature of presidential campaigns is the two-faced condescension we face every four years from people who come into the state to butter us up to our faces just to tear us down in private.
I grew up in a town of 1500 people. My high school graduating class had fifty people. And every four years, like clockwork, a whole lot of people from out East and out West would converge on our small towns, filling up small motels that sat mostly-vacant all other times, and they'd converge on our diners and try to strike up conversations with people. Then, as soon as they thought we weren't listening, we'd hear them snigger about how uncultured we are, or grouse about how impossible it was to find good sushi or Ethiopian or what-have-you, or mock our religious beliefs. When they think nobody's listening they tell their friends back Somewhere Else about how they're "lost in flyover country" and how backwards it is.
And yet, while the rest of the country is arguing about gay marriage, Iowa is actually doing it, having decided that it is required by our State constitution. (Sure, there's been political fallout over that. But that doesn't change the fact it's what we decided.) While the rest of the country is lamenting the collapse of education, Iowa quietly continues its tradition of excellence. While the rest of the country is fearful of crime, we don't bother locking our doors at night. While children nationwide are being overprotected by parents terrified of stranger danger, we let elementary-age kids walk half-a-mile or more to school, alone and unattended.
You say we're "legends of importance only in our own minds." That's exactly the sort of thing I've heard from a lot of other people. Heard it before, and I've heard it again. I don't expect anything I've said to convince you that you want to live in Iowa. You probably don't, and I understand that. But if you want to know what I think Iowa deserves to be legendary for, it's those things. The caucuses are honestly a sideshow that's a lot more trouble than they're worth, and bring a whole lot of people into the state that I'm quite comfortable them staying away from the state.
No: in fact, very few runtime-typed languages support type inference. What happens instead is that the value gets tagged with a type. E.g., in Python, when I type "x = 3", the variable x has no type attached to it, but the value 3 has the type 'int' attached to it. When the system needs to know type information, it queries the value.
Type inference is a little bit of a hard thing to do in runtime-typed languages. Not impossible, but... interestingly wacky. Basically, the runtime environment has to be able to make a formal mathematical proof that "there is no code path in which this variable can point to any type of value except an 'int'", or what-have-you. If it's able to do that, then it might be able to optimize access to that value in ways that normal runtime typing can't. E.g., if you know something is always going to be a 32-bit integer, why not store it as a native primitive, rather than wrap it up in an object and have all the associated object overhead? That sort of thing.
Arrgh. I'm sorry, I was thinking you were the fellow who was dismissing Copenhagen as "superstitious nonsense" that few people had taken seriously in the last 50 years. My bad. I apologize.
With respect to the null hypothesis, I've heard several respectable physicists use it in the context I've given. I'm not a physicist, but I did spend a good bit of time lurking around their neck of the university during my Ph.D. program (the overlap between digital physics and computer science being fairly strong, I wound up collaborating with Ph.D. graduate students in physics a fair bit) and heard it used that way in conversation a great deal.
With respect to failure to reject the null hypothesis not being evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, this is just a recasting of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Which is, as I've said several times by now, true. But that statement by itself does not absolve you of the responsibility for presenting extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims -- and claiming that the universe follows Goedel is an extraordinary claim.
Sorry, but at this point I no longer believe that you're a scientist, or even that you've taken an undergraduate-level course in QMech. Writing off Copenhagen as superstitious nonsense, claiming it hasn't been taken seriously in 50+ years, and so forth, are the sorts of errors that make me think quite the opposite of you. Had you taken one, you would almost certainly know how popular the interpretation is among physicists.
Likewise, insistence on failure to reject the null hypothesis being some kind of "fallacy" shows a willful blindness. Nobody is saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Instead, what I'm saying is absence of evidence means your claim is unproven and can be discarded. Which is exactly what I've done here with your claim that MWI is "scientifically plausible."
Whether Copenhagen is correct is not at issue. What's at issue is whether it's nonsense. The overwhelming opinion of working physicists, as evidenced by surveys asking which interpretation they subscribe to, is that Copenhagen is not nonsense.
The professor who taught me quantum mechanics summed it up like this: interpretations are our attempt to pretend that we know what the structure of knowledge is, and that we can use that metaknowledge to interpret the confusing world of quantum mechanics. The history of epistemology gives us very little cause to hope that we know anything useful about the structure of knowledge, though. Frankly, the only reason why physicists can philosophize on par with professional philosophers is that the whole of epistemology is bunk, and everyone operates on more or less the same level of bunk. Physicists should do physics and let philosophy attend to itself.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with his entire position... but I've definitely seen enough to make me sympathize with it. If I had to declare myself as an adherent of one interpretation or another, I'd say I belong to the Epistemology Is Bunk Interpretation.
It's an argument from Bayesian statistics, actually. Werner Heisenberg has a long, distinguished track record of highly creditable contributions to physics.
Your track record is unknown, but is exceedingly unlikely to match Heisenberg's. Doesn't take a genius to figure out which side I'm going to side on.
But, hey, being a philosopher makes you much better than a Nobel Laureate physicist who invented quantum mechanics, I guess, so -- bully for you.
With respect to Copenhagen having fallen out of favor, per Max Tegmark's paper "The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?", Copenhagen is the overwhelmingly preferred interpretation among working physicists, with MWI coming second. This is from a 1997 survey, so -- your claim that it's been out of favor for 50+ years is simply not true.
Oh -- also, scientists don't use the phrase "null hypothesis" in the way statisticians do. Ask Richard Feynman, who seriously proposed a Journal of the Null Hypothesis which would publish good ideas that have been shown not to be the way the world works, in order to help keep other scientists from going down those same blind alleys.
If you want to say Feynman was falling into a fallacy, go right ahead. Me, I'm going to side with Feynman.
At this point, you're wasting my time trying to shore up an argument which can't be shored up.
The current observed universe does not include things that correspond to mathematical incompleteness. If you want to claim otherwise, the burden is on you to demonstrate it: the burden is not on me to believe it simply because you'd like it if I did.
Carl Sagan's credited with a quote about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. The claim that the universe includes things corresponding to mathematical incompleteness is extraordinary. (Possible, yes! But extraordinary.) So either present extraordinary evidence, or stop wasting people's time.
It is not logically valid to equate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
Correct, but you'll note that's not what we're talking about here. I'm not saying I believe there does not/cannot exist physical analogues of the Incompleteness Theorem: I'm saying that such things have not been established, and for that reason I accept the null hypothesis -- being that they do not.
Just because something hasn't been proven wrong doesn't mean I'm obligated to take it seriously. I'm not obligated to take Last Thursdayism seriously, either -- and I don't.
You also seem to have an unusual obsession with the results of pure mathematics being somehow connected to the state of the physical world. But the neat thing about the physical world is that it exists -- and thus, the proper response to spectacular claims is to say, "show me." If you can't show me, then you have an interesting MacGuffin for a science fiction story, but I'm not convinced you're doing actual science.
The central point I was making -- which you seem to have completely missed -- is the OP was claiming Occam's Razor told us the heliocentric model was correct and the Ptolemaic model was wrong. This is completely untrue. They are each equally true from within their own frame of reference. Using Occam to decide "heliocentrism is the true state of affairs" leads to a false conclusion. The truth is there is no true state of affairs: it all depends on your point of view. And that revelation lies at the heart of relativity.
Yes, relativity concerns itself an awful lot with inertial reference frames. However, it doesn't ever claim the inertial reference frame is true: it only claims the math is easier. This is generally good cause to prefer inertial reference frames. But any answer you can derive from an inertial reference frame can also be derived from a noninertial one. Neither reference frame has any claim on absolute truth.
I don't recommend the Ptolemaic system. As I've said in other posts in this thread, I am fervently on the side of choosing frames of reference that make the math easier. But the Ptolemaic system is equally valid, in the sense that the universe does not give special privileges to certain observers: and the Ptolemaic system is equally correct, in the sense that a suitably-derived Ptolemaic system gives the same answers as a standard heliocentric system.
Heliocentrism is simpler and easier to get right. Those are enormous virtues, and enough to recommend it. Why do we also need to believe that it is somehow "more true" than the Ptolemaic version? There's no reason for us to do that, and it's a gross abuse of Occam's Razor to make that claim.
Yes, you can make Ptolemaic theory work with Newtonian physics (although, really, you might need Poincare's geometry -- I'm a little hazy). The point worth making, though, is that even though it was possible, people didn't -- including people who should've known better. It was lost on a great many people, including many physicists. For example, an encyclopedia on my bookshelf, originally published in 1890, makes this error. There's no mention of choice-of-reference-frame anywhere in the discussion about Newtonian mechanics.
This is not an error that gets made so much anymore, since a good relativity course will beat into you "NO PRIVILEGED REFERENCE FRAMES" until it finally sinks in.
If you want to say that I was wrong when I said it wasn't until the early 20th century that Einstein taught us "no privileged reference frames" and we discovered Ptolemy's vision is equally true to Copernicus's, well, I can't argue much with you: yes, I was wrong.
From that frame of reference.
From my frame of reference, I see reason to give Einstein credit for finally banishing that idea from our understanding.
You pays your money, you takes your frame of reference.:)
There is no reason why this could not be the case for physical reality.
Correct, but we've also not seen any evidence of such things in physical reality. There's a lot of work going on in the axiomization of physics, but so far no one has been able to demonstrate the existence of things that are true but not testable by experiment. In the absence of that, I take the same attitude that I do towards string theory: it's an interesting idea, and I'll be very interested in reading about empirical results if/when they come in, but for now I'm not signing on to it.
With regard to "a theory that does not make testable predictions is not well formulated, but that does not make it 'implausible'," well, I have a theory that God created the cosmos in its current form, with photons created in mid-flight towards the Earth, and all of the cosmos assembled in such a way to make it appear to be billions of years old even though it was only created last Thursday. Young-earth Creationists have the right idea, you see, they just don't take it far enough: Last Thursdayism is my theory.
This theory does not make testable predictions, therefore it's not a theory at all -- and as far as plausibility goes, I feel it's completely implausible. Yet there's no compelling evidence this argument is wrong -- which puts it on the exact same scientific plane as MWI.
(Last Thursdayism is a real hypothesis, BTW: see, e.g., Wikipedia's treatment of the Omphalos hypothesis.)
Newtonian mechanics did away with the idea of privileged reference frames for space, but said there existed an absolute clock that all observers could agree upon. So the Newtonian privileged reference frame is "the one in which all clocks agree." Newton wouldn't have phrased it that way, though: what we now call a privileged reference frame he just accepted to be the natural course of things -- he had no observations indicating the universe could be any other way.
Einstein came along and said there exists no privileged reference frame for space or time: we exist in a universe where observers can disagree about both.
I'm unaware of these statements: can you give me a couple of examples, along with references that show these statements are false? I'd appreciate it a lot if you could.
The AC has already answered this for me, so I'll just say it: yes, that.
Ptolemy's original vision was accurate for the measurements of the day. As observations got better, the model was patched -- as you say, with epicycles within epicycles. If we were to continue to patch the Ptolemaic version (which shouldn't be surprising, given how many patches we've made to the Copernican version), we would have an Earth-centric model of the universe with the heavens moving in strange, complex patterns around us. This model would give us the same answers as a heliocentric model, therefore it would be as correct as a heliocentric model. It would just be inordinately more complex.
The alternative is to claim heliocentric models are somehow privileged over terracentric models, and that's simply verboten under relativity.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange: Slashdot seems to have eaten my original reply. C'est la vie.
No, Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was from the Old Testament Books of Isaiah and Micah, where the authors were speaking about what life would be like once God's plans came to fruition: an end to war, no one will lift a weapon against each other, and so forth.
Christ, for his part, said he did not come to bring peace to the Earth, but instead to bring a sword (Matthew 10:34).
Further, Christ almost certainly celebrated the Jewish Feast of Purim, which celebrates the avoidance of a genocide. The evil Haman tried to organize a Go-Murder-Your-Jewish-Neighbors-And-Take-Their-Stuff Day, but Mordecai and Esther were able to persuade the King to enact a By-The-Way-The-Jews-Get-To-Carry-Swords Day. Haman's attempted genocide failed due to the Jews being armed. To this day, the Feast of Purim is one of the best celebrations in Judaism -- it's a day whereupon observant Jews believe they are commanded by God to get shitfaced drunk until they can no longer tell the name of Haman from the name of Mordecai. (It takes a lot of wine to get that far.) I have fond memories of being in college and Rabbi Avi walking across campus, waving his arms and calling out "WHO WANTS TO GET LIT FOR GOD? FREE BOOZE AT CHABAD!"
Further, Christ said quite clearly he did not come to change even one letter of the Law, but only to fulfill it. Part of the Jewish Law involves how one treats rodef -- those who seek to shed another's blood unjustly. Jewish Law says, point blank, to give them one warning to stop. If they don't, then all Jews are commanded to stop the rodef by any means necessary, even if it means bloodshed.
So if the din rodef is part of the Law, and that's part of the Law that Christ said he did not come to change but to fulfill... then yes. The only way you can get the idea Christ was a pacifist is if you decide he was lying about not changing the Law. Christ advocated the possession of arms, and the ethical use of the same.
You can rail all you want against weapons. Go ahead, doesn't matter to me a bit. But when you try to rewrite history in order to satisfy your psychological hangups, then I have to quietly insist, "no, that is not how it happened."
You need to re-read your Bible. Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was Isaiah (and later Micah) talking about what life would be like in God's heavenly kingdom. Christ said (Matthew 10:34), "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
Incidentally, I'm a little irritated at your assumption that I'm any of (a) a Christian, (b) an American, or (c) a firearms owner. Someone asked a question, particularly with respect to whether Christ would have supported the NRA. The answer to that one is "almost certainly."
One of the biggest festivals of the Jewish year is the Feast of Purim, where Jews celebrate the story of Esther and Mordecai and their triumph over the evil Haman. When Haman plotted genocide against the Jews, Esther and Mordecai were able to convince the king to permit the Jews to carry swords to protect themselves. Haman's treachery was discovered, the Jews were armed, and those who wished to murder all the Jews in the country were too afraid to take on Jews armed with swords. This long predated Christ's ministry. Given that Christ also said he did not come to alter one letter of the Law but rather to fulfill it, it's quite likely that Christ celebrated Purim, the survival of the Jews against the first recorded attempted genocide against them, and how the civil possession of armaments let them survive.
I'm not arguing one way or another that firearms are good, bad, or the product of space aliens from Zarbnulax. Really, whatever politics you want to project onto them is your call. But when it comes to history, we have some pretty clear answers. Christ was in favor of arms and the ethical use of them.
Let's take a look at the text, shall we?
"Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. -- And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough." (Luke 22:36, 38)
So, yeah, I think Christ would've approved of the NRA. He directly advised his disciples to be armed. Also, "turning the other cheek" was never intended to mean passive submission to violence. The culture of the day was one where the wealthy would often slap around the poor using the right hand, but using the left was a mortal insult and would provoke a fight. Christ was telling the poor that if someone wants to bully them and shove them around, they should not initiate violence, but demonstrate their willingness to end a fight if the other guy wanted to start one -- that's what "turning the other cheek" meant.
Christ was not a pacifist. This is the guy who chased moneychangers from the temple with a whip (probably more for preying on the poor than defaming the faith), and who openly welcomed a Roman centurion as one of his followers, and didn't demand the guy give up his life of the sword. Christ's message had more to do with the ethical use of violence than it did with the total abjuration of it.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
The French do not use the Common Law system. They use the Civil Law system, which is derived from the Napoleonic Code, which is derived from the Code of Justinian, which actually dates from well before the fall of the Roman Empire.
The United Kingdom uses the Common Law system.
The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states: but Louisiana in particular uses a Civil Law-based system, in keeping with its heavily French heritage.
I don't see that either one is clearly superior. If you take a look at what comes out of Louisiana state courts, you'll see they're just as crazy as any other system. It's just crazy of a slightly different flavor. You might think that flavor tastes better, but I don't.
At OSCON 2006 I was delivering a presentation on a new heuristic algorithm. We implemented it in C++ and provided Python bindings for it. An hour before my presentation I was in the green room, head deep in code, getting one last bugfix in before the presentation. As I found a bug and fixed it I said to myself, "Python, I love you. You make the hard stuff so easy."
The green room immediately went quiet. I lifted my head and looked across the table and discovered Damian Conway, of Perl fame, was sitting across from me hacking on his own code. Damian looked up, looked around, and particularly at all the people who were expecting a Python-versus-Perl flamewar to arise. "What?" he asked them. "Listen, the only thing I love more than Perl is software that works well, even if it's not written in Perl." Then he went back to his code, I went back to mine, and the room resumed its normal dull roar.
There's a lot of wisdom in Conway's perspective. If you seriously believe that coding in Ruby makes you a better programmer than a Python or a PHP programmer, then I hate to break the news to you, but you've been sadly miseducated.
Yes, I know Ruby. I prefer Python. So what? My best friend knows both languages and prefers Ruby.
Children get into holy wars about code. Grown-ups are too busy writing code to waste time on such childish diversions.
Irony, thy name is...
Stalin died in 1953.
I know my Soviet history (or at least the history of premiers) better than you do, apparently, and I think you're overdue for your Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Duranty.
In point of fact, there's a good sushi restaurant in Iowa City -- Takanami, just east of the University of Iowa's Pentacrest. There's also the Drunken Fish on Laclede's Landing in St. Louis, which has the best sushi I've ever had anywhere: better than California, better than Oregon, better than anywhere out East.
The rest, though, seems like exactly the kind of vitriol I have no interest in engaging in. Sorry.
Who participates in the caucuses? It's a banner year if ten percent of eligible voters make it to a caucus. (In fact, I wonder if Iowa has ever broken ten percent.)
So, yeah, if ten percent of eligible voters care, and the other ninety percent are all "I'm going to take a long nap, wake me up on January 4" -- which seems to be the case -- then I think it's inappropriate to say that Iowans as a whole demand our caucuses be first, or that they deserve some kind of special prominence.
Don't think that the loudest voices actually represent Iowans. They represent themselves. Most Iowans just want the day after to come as quickly as possible.
Hi. I'm an Iowan. I'd like to point out that we're not the ones who are telling CNN to keep our caucuses in the 24/7 news cycle. That's the rest of the United States. We just want to hold our caucus and be done with it. The unrelenting campaigning is something that pretty much every Iowan finds quite distasteful. Our own electoral campaigns tend to be much nicer by comparison. When Jim Leach, representing eastern Iowa's interests to the House of Representatives, lost to Jim Loebsack, the two of them parted with a handshake, as friends, and with mutual respect. When was the last time you saw a race for national office end that way? True, by Iowa standards the Leach-Loebsack race was quite a nice and pleasant one, but it wasn't unusually so or without precedent. Compare that to how the current crop of GOP candidates is going after each other, and ... well. You might begin to get an idea of why so many Iowans are so looking forward to these caucuses being over. And that's just the half of it, really. What's as bad as the very un-Iowan nature of presidential campaigns is the two-faced condescension we face every four years from people who come into the state to butter us up to our faces just to tear us down in private.
I grew up in a town of 1500 people. My high school graduating class had fifty people. And every four years, like clockwork, a whole lot of people from out East and out West would converge on our small towns, filling up small motels that sat mostly-vacant all other times, and they'd converge on our diners and try to strike up conversations with people. Then, as soon as they thought we weren't listening, we'd hear them snigger about how uncultured we are, or grouse about how impossible it was to find good sushi or Ethiopian or what-have-you, or mock our religious beliefs. When they think nobody's listening they tell their friends back Somewhere Else about how they're "lost in flyover country" and how backwards it is.
And yet, while the rest of the country is arguing about gay marriage, Iowa is actually doing it, having decided that it is required by our State constitution. (Sure, there's been political fallout over that. But that doesn't change the fact it's what we decided.) While the rest of the country is lamenting the collapse of education, Iowa quietly continues its tradition of excellence. While the rest of the country is fearful of crime, we don't bother locking our doors at night. While children nationwide are being overprotected by parents terrified of stranger danger, we let elementary-age kids walk half-a-mile or more to school, alone and unattended.
You say we're "legends of importance only in our own minds." That's exactly the sort of thing I've heard from a lot of other people. Heard it before, and I've heard it again. I don't expect anything I've said to convince you that you want to live in Iowa. You probably don't, and I understand that. But if you want to know what I think Iowa deserves to be legendary for, it's those things. The caucuses are honestly a sideshow that's a lot more trouble than they're worth, and bring a whole lot of people into the state that I'm quite comfortable them staying away from the state.
No: in fact, very few runtime-typed languages support type inference. What happens instead is that the value gets tagged with a type. E.g., in Python, when I type "x = 3", the variable x has no type attached to it, but the value 3 has the type 'int' attached to it. When the system needs to know type information, it queries the value.
Type inference is a little bit of a hard thing to do in runtime-typed languages. Not impossible, but ... interestingly wacky. Basically, the runtime environment has to be able to make a formal mathematical proof that "there is no code path in which this variable can point to any type of value except an 'int'", or what-have-you. If it's able to do that, then it might be able to optimize access to that value in ways that normal runtime typing can't. E.g., if you know something is always going to be a 32-bit integer, why not store it as a native primitive, rather than wrap it up in an object and have all the associated object overhead? That sort of thing.
Hope this helps!
Arrgh. I'm sorry, I was thinking you were the fellow who was dismissing Copenhagen as "superstitious nonsense" that few people had taken seriously in the last 50 years. My bad. I apologize.
With respect to the null hypothesis, I've heard several respectable physicists use it in the context I've given. I'm not a physicist, but I did spend a good bit of time lurking around their neck of the university during my Ph.D. program (the overlap between digital physics and computer science being fairly strong, I wound up collaborating with Ph.D. graduate students in physics a fair bit) and heard it used that way in conversation a great deal.
With respect to failure to reject the null hypothesis not being evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, this is just a recasting of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Which is, as I've said several times by now, true. But that statement by itself does not absolve you of the responsibility for presenting extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims -- and claiming that the universe follows Goedel is an extraordinary claim.
Sorry, but at this point I no longer believe that you're a scientist, or even that you've taken an undergraduate-level course in QMech. Writing off Copenhagen as superstitious nonsense, claiming it hasn't been taken seriously in 50+ years, and so forth, are the sorts of errors that make me think quite the opposite of you. Had you taken one, you would almost certainly know how popular the interpretation is among physicists.
Likewise, insistence on failure to reject the null hypothesis being some kind of "fallacy" shows a willful blindness. Nobody is saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Instead, what I'm saying is absence of evidence means your claim is unproven and can be discarded. Which is exactly what I've done here with your claim that MWI is "scientifically plausible."
I'm finished.
Whether Copenhagen is correct is not at issue. What's at issue is whether it's nonsense. The overwhelming opinion of working physicists, as evidenced by surveys asking which interpretation they subscribe to, is that Copenhagen is not nonsense.
The professor who taught me quantum mechanics summed it up like this: interpretations are our attempt to pretend that we know what the structure of knowledge is, and that we can use that metaknowledge to interpret the confusing world of quantum mechanics. The history of epistemology gives us very little cause to hope that we know anything useful about the structure of knowledge, though. Frankly, the only reason why physicists can philosophize on par with professional philosophers is that the whole of epistemology is bunk, and everyone operates on more or less the same level of bunk. Physicists should do physics and let philosophy attend to itself.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with his entire position... but I've definitely seen enough to make me sympathize with it. If I had to declare myself as an adherent of one interpretation or another, I'd say I belong to the Epistemology Is Bunk Interpretation.
It's an argument from Bayesian statistics, actually. Werner Heisenberg has a long, distinguished track record of highly creditable contributions to physics.
Your track record is unknown, but is exceedingly unlikely to match Heisenberg's. Doesn't take a genius to figure out which side I'm going to side on.
But, hey, being a philosopher makes you much better than a Nobel Laureate physicist who invented quantum mechanics, I guess, so -- bully for you.
With respect to Copenhagen having fallen out of favor, per Max Tegmark's paper "The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?", Copenhagen is the overwhelmingly preferred interpretation among working physicists, with MWI coming second. This is from a 1997 survey, so -- your claim that it's been out of favor for 50+ years is simply not true.
Oh -- also, scientists don't use the phrase "null hypothesis" in the way statisticians do. Ask Richard Feynman, who seriously proposed a Journal of the Null Hypothesis which would publish good ideas that have been shown not to be the way the world works, in order to help keep other scientists from going down those same blind alleys.
If you want to say Feynman was falling into a fallacy, go right ahead. Me, I'm going to side with Feynman.
At this point, you're wasting my time trying to shore up an argument which can't be shored up.
The current observed universe does not include things that correspond to mathematical incompleteness. If you want to claim otherwise, the burden is on you to demonstrate it: the burden is not on me to believe it simply because you'd like it if I did.
Carl Sagan's credited with a quote about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. The claim that the universe includes things corresponding to mathematical incompleteness is extraordinary. (Possible, yes! But extraordinary.) So either present extraordinary evidence, or stop wasting people's time.
Correct, but you'll note that's not what we're talking about here. I'm not saying I believe there does not/cannot exist physical analogues of the Incompleteness Theorem: I'm saying that such things have not been established, and for that reason I accept the null hypothesis -- being that they do not.
Just because something hasn't been proven wrong doesn't mean I'm obligated to take it seriously. I'm not obligated to take Last Thursdayism seriously, either -- and I don't.
You also seem to have an unusual obsession with the results of pure mathematics being somehow connected to the state of the physical world. But the neat thing about the physical world is that it exists -- and thus, the proper response to spectacular claims is to say, "show me." If you can't show me, then you have an interesting MacGuffin for a science fiction story, but I'm not convinced you're doing actual science.
Your comment, while true, is completely trivial.
The central point I was making -- which you seem to have completely missed -- is the OP was claiming Occam's Razor told us the heliocentric model was correct and the Ptolemaic model was wrong. This is completely untrue. They are each equally true from within their own frame of reference. Using Occam to decide "heliocentrism is the true state of affairs" leads to a false conclusion. The truth is there is no true state of affairs: it all depends on your point of view. And that revelation lies at the heart of relativity.
Yes, relativity concerns itself an awful lot with inertial reference frames. However, it doesn't ever claim the inertial reference frame is true: it only claims the math is easier. This is generally good cause to prefer inertial reference frames. But any answer you can derive from an inertial reference frame can also be derived from a noninertial one. Neither reference frame has any claim on absolute truth.
I don't recommend the Ptolemaic system. As I've said in other posts in this thread, I am fervently on the side of choosing frames of reference that make the math easier. But the Ptolemaic system is equally valid, in the sense that the universe does not give special privileges to certain observers: and the Ptolemaic system is equally correct, in the sense that a suitably-derived Ptolemaic system gives the same answers as a standard heliocentric system.
Heliocentrism is simpler and easier to get right. Those are enormous virtues, and enough to recommend it. Why do we also need to believe that it is somehow "more true" than the Ptolemaic version? There's no reason for us to do that, and it's a gross abuse of Occam's Razor to make that claim.
That's what this thread has been about.
Yes, you can make Ptolemaic theory work with Newtonian physics (although, really, you might need Poincare's geometry -- I'm a little hazy). The point worth making, though, is that even though it was possible, people didn't -- including people who should've known better. It was lost on a great many people, including many physicists. For example, an encyclopedia on my bookshelf, originally published in 1890, makes this error. There's no mention of choice-of-reference-frame anywhere in the discussion about Newtonian mechanics.
This is not an error that gets made so much anymore, since a good relativity course will beat into you "NO PRIVILEGED REFERENCE FRAMES" until it finally sinks in.
If you want to say that I was wrong when I said it wasn't until the early 20th century that Einstein taught us "no privileged reference frames" and we discovered Ptolemy's vision is equally true to Copernicus's, well, I can't argue much with you: yes, I was wrong.
From that frame of reference.
From my frame of reference, I see reason to give Einstein credit for finally banishing that idea from our understanding.
You pays your money, you takes your frame of reference. :)
Correct, but we've also not seen any evidence of such things in physical reality. There's a lot of work going on in the axiomization of physics, but so far no one has been able to demonstrate the existence of things that are true but not testable by experiment. In the absence of that, I take the same attitude that I do towards string theory: it's an interesting idea, and I'll be very interested in reading about empirical results if/when they come in, but for now I'm not signing on to it.
With regard to "a theory that does not make testable predictions is not well formulated, but that does not make it 'implausible'," well, I have a theory that God created the cosmos in its current form, with photons created in mid-flight towards the Earth, and all of the cosmos assembled in such a way to make it appear to be billions of years old even though it was only created last Thursday. Young-earth Creationists have the right idea, you see, they just don't take it far enough: Last Thursdayism is my theory.
This theory does not make testable predictions, therefore it's not a theory at all -- and as far as plausibility goes, I feel it's completely implausible. Yet there's no compelling evidence this argument is wrong -- which puts it on the exact same scientific plane as MWI.
(Last Thursdayism is a real hypothesis, BTW: see, e.g., Wikipedia's treatment of the Omphalos hypothesis.)
Newtonian mechanics did away with the idea of privileged reference frames for space, but said there existed an absolute clock that all observers could agree upon. So the Newtonian privileged reference frame is "the one in which all clocks agree." Newton wouldn't have phrased it that way, though: what we now call a privileged reference frame he just accepted to be the natural course of things -- he had no observations indicating the universe could be any other way.
Einstein came along and said there exists no privileged reference frame for space or time: we exist in a universe where observers can disagree about both.
Hope this helps!
I'm unaware of these statements: can you give me a couple of examples, along with references that show these statements are false? I'd appreciate it a lot if you could.
Sure, but so is everybody's. I'd be a very happy man if my successes were half as brilliant as Deutsch's mistakes!
The AC has already answered this for me, so I'll just say it: yes, that.
Ptolemy's original vision was accurate for the measurements of the day. As observations got better, the model was patched -- as you say, with epicycles within epicycles. If we were to continue to patch the Ptolemaic version (which shouldn't be surprising, given how many patches we've made to the Copernican version), we would have an Earth-centric model of the universe with the heavens moving in strange, complex patterns around us. This model would give us the same answers as a heliocentric model, therefore it would be as correct as a heliocentric model. It would just be inordinately more complex.
The alternative is to claim heliocentric models are somehow privileged over terracentric models, and that's simply verboten under relativity.