Uh, yeah, I have taken statistics courses myself, and this exact problem was covered. I have repeated the exact math, conditional probability and all directly from my notes, on several occasions for Slashdot, specifically with regard to some people in the aftermath of Columbine who were suggesting that they could profile students and determine which were dangerous.
It's bullshit. When something is as rare as a terrorist, any time your "test" gives a positive match the odds are vastly in favor of you having an innocent person in your custody.
The difference with medicine is that first, the patient self-selects by coming to see a doctor because they have certain symptoms. Next, they're usually testing for actual physical conditions rather than trying to find out if a person secretly wants to blow up buildings, meaning that after performing a general screening test that can focus on more accurate but more expensive versions, and perform other tests to rule out other explanations. And here's the important part: Any consequences of the subsequent testing, or any treatments carried out under the assumption that the test was correct, can be openly discussed with the patient who can agree or disagree that the risks are worth it.
Do you think someone picked up by a Terrorist Detector is going to be able to opt-out of the subsequent interrogation or six year stay at Gitmo?
Second guessing the United States Government?! I see you are a perfect match of the subject of Chapter 25: The Elusive Tinfoil Hat Thought Crime Terrorist of Mother's Basement.
We need to invade Mother's Basement to stop these villains before than can strike. But that means passing through our ally Mother's territory, and she won't agree because she just waxed the kitchen floor! Damnit all!
In any case, there is a certain silliness to the seriousness of a debate over what is really a minor descriptive term that has little actual physical meaning. Thus, it has been pointed out that Titan is much more Earth-like than is Mercury, but Titan is called a moon rather than a planet. Earth's moon is more like Mercury than it is like Titan, including having an orbit about the sun that's nearly circular, leading some astronomers to propose calling the Earth/Luna system a "binary planet" rather than a planet and a moon. This isn't so much a serious suggestion, as it is pointing out the silliness of the argument and the irrelevancy of the terms in question.
I think that if Earth were in orbit around Saturn, we'd say that we were living on the moon called Earth. Or Endor, if we were ewoks.
But yeah, it's kinda silly to get all upset about it, because essentially the terms are there to describe organization as it appeals to humans, not essential physical properties.
I liked the historical part of your post, very interesting.
Ah, see, I thought they were, so that police could use them essentially on demand. I guess sometimes I can't recall the difference between what they've done and what they want to do. So I was wrong about that.
Well, okay, I guess asteroid is actually a deprecated name for non-comets in the Kuiper belt, according to this wp article. Since this is a thread about technical terminology and recent changes to it, I have to concede that point.
But the fact that we can read 1984 and that we have people who can speak out against the government without getting killed is proof enough that we don't live in an Orwellian dystopia.
While this is true in that it wouldn't be an Orwellian dystopia (that word having come largely to mean one in which misinformation, revisionist history, and the ensuing double-think are major aspects of controlling the people), that doesn't mean we can't come close.
It's not like it's impossible to have socialist/fascist police state + free speech. In particular if you can convince the people that their ability to speak freely is ipso facto proof that the police state doesn't exist. I think the authorities have realized that free speech is an almost necessary outlet for discontent. "Here's proof we are in a police state." "The fact that you can say that and not be killed is proof you're wrong." "Damn I guess they win."
I wouldn't be happy with a world in which I'm constantly being monitored for abnormal behavior by the police and even my neighbors, just because I was allowed to complain about the fact.
Have you ever actually read Orwell's work? The cameras weren't the point, the eradication of privacy was the point.
And the cameras aren't the point here, it's the eradication of privacy that begins with massive monitoring of the public. The presence of cameras in public was a major part of how the party maintained control in Orwell's book, and this is very much following in those footsteps.
You're wrong about the "government owned and monitored cameras" too. The vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned.
But they are part of the network that was created. So the "owned" part is out for most TVs, but the police surveillance part is not. Why quibble over that? In Orwell's book the government was pure socialist, the UK's system is mixed. So why should it make a big difference that many of the cameras are privately owned, just because they didn't want to duplicate the effort? Is that the key? If the dystopia isn't following the principles of Ingsoc, it's not "Orwellian"? Again, that's making "resembles" the same as "is, literally".
The UK resembles an Orwellian dystopia about as much as Britney Spears resembles Samuel L. Jackson.
More like Carl Weathers and Billy D. Williams.
Parent was using "resembles" correctly. You aren't.
Oh fucking please, that's the most retarded arbitrary ignorant pedantry I've ever heard. What precise definition of "resembles" are you formulating out your ass here, and do you have a source for it?
"Resembles" is a perfectly valid description for when an aspect of something is similar to something else to a degree. To the extent that the UK has and is building an expanding network of surveillance, and desires to build more, it resembles an Orwellian dystopia. That is a correct usage of "resembles". Whatever definition you've invented here notwithstanding.
I was going by the same standard that was presented: "the size of Pluto". I took that to mean of similar size in both positive and negative directions.
And yes, Kuiper belt objects that aren't comets and are bigger than 10m across and smaller than a planet are asteroids.
The headline said "resembling an Orwellian dystopia". A city with government owned and monitored cameras at every corner does in fact resemble an Orwellian dystopia. Sounds like a perfectly sound comparison to me.
Perhaps if you didn't inflate "resembles" to mean "is", you would have understood.
I must've missed the part where we found HUNDREDS of objects the size of Pluto. Seems to me we've only found two or three so far.
A few more than that are known. Theoretically there are probably many more such objects, and very unlikely for there to be earth-sized objects.
There are more than eight planets. Pluto is a plant. Xena (or whatever official name they've assigned it) is a planet. Get over it.
No, Pluto is just a large Kuiper belt object, a glorified asteroid. You are the one who must get over it.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?
You're the one who wants to include Pluto as a planet based on... what? History? Sense of style? Desire for there to be more planets? They changed the definition of planet to exclude Pluto based on the evidence of discovering that there was an entire belt of objects at that distance including other objects in Pluto's orbit, and it was not in fact unique or formed in the same way as the other planets. The only reason it was ever called a planet in the first place is because we didn't know about the Kuiper belt or all the other objects of similar size. In what bizarre universe is refusing to revisit old assumptions made out of ignorance "looking at the evidence"? That's stasis. Science is all about revising theories.
Why not call every asteroid in the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt planets? There'd be tons of planets then. There's several objects in the asteroid belt that are similar size to Pluto. I don't hear you calling them planets. But that's because the not-following-evidence accusation you level at science is the one you yourself are guilty of.
Nobody. One of the first things you learn in astronomy (observation, not education) is how to distinguish between a star and a planet or moon. It's easy: stars twinkle, big balls of rock or gas don't. Next time you're out at night, try to find Venus (it's the brightest object after the moon and sun), and compare it to any bright stars in the sky like Polaris. Venus will look very static, like it's just a dot of paint on the sky. Long before anyone knew what the solar system looked like, or what a 'planet' was, people knew that the planets were "different" than the stars.
BTW you can see the 4 largest moons of Jupiter through a decent pair of binoculars; they too don't look like stars.
I hypothetical tax increase targeted specifically at married couples due to the fraction of the 10% of the country that is gay getting married is not in any way "demonstrable". If you had any refutation to anything I said worth considering, you would have come up with something that was actually demonstrable and not hypothetical. As if your follow-on logic that making such a point directly infers that anything else I say is wrong. That is a demonstrable logical fallacy, and thus by your own faulty logic you are not worth listening to.
Ahh, but in the first instance you're swinging an axe at an intact door, whereas in the second instance you're swinging an axe at a weakened door. So you're not really trying the same thing at all.
In a very pedantic sense, yes, but that pedantic sense applies to virtually no real world situations.
Now if you had a row of identical doors and swung an axe at each one with the same force etc you would expect the same result on each door.
If you're going to be say that a door is different than a door with a chip in it is different than a door with two chips in it, then you must surely see that in fact the result of your axe swing on each door will be different.
It would be ridiculously improbable for it to be the same, even if it were possible to somehow exactly match the force and direction of swing (using a robot arm), since each door would have different grain.
Basically, as far as I can tell, the "definition of insanity" is actually bothering to set up a situation in which the original definition actually applies.
I highly doubt the original phrase was intended to be a statement of formal logic. That's why taking it as such trivializes it so much. It's a pointless exercise.
(better, but means our world view is now non-monotonic, a fact which breaks 95%+ of all computer reasoning).
95% of computer programming is working around the limitations of computer reasoning; part of why as a computer programmer I get so upset at the binary thinking and false dichotomies so many people fall into. You'd think that should be what I do! Not that I see how having two variables (one a classification, of being a door or not, and a second, describing the amount of damage to a door) necessarily breaks computer reasoning.
The act of adding a small chip to a structurally sound door does not make it structurally unsound, yet eventually the door fails. How many chips are required? (the classic version is how many grains of rice do you need to make a heap?)
The only problem here is the desire to take a (more or less) continuous spectrum of possibilities and force it into a binary classification. Buddha would frown upon this, as desire causes suffering. Instead, be happy with what you have, a door which it is perfectly possible to describe the structural integrity of using fuzzy logic (i.e. non boolean variables).
I do have the trophy wife, but she's been with me since long before I became a lawyer, since back in the days when I was just an argumentative amateur.
So would you say you were arguing in your spare time?
I'm also not naive enough to think that allowing gays to marry would not have an effect on straight couples. They might be bigoted, they might have their head up their ass, they might be ignorant, but that doesn't change the fact that they feel the way they do about it. The anti-gay people DO think that homosexuality is wrong.
Ah, see! Right there is the huge fallacy of the whole argument right there in bold!
Gay marriage does not have any affect whatsoever on straight couples.
Gay marriage does have an affect on anti-gay bigots, regardless of whether they are married or not.
So while "pro-gay" legislation is not in any way "anti-marriage", it is anti-anti-gay.
Which is a rather trivial and meaningless conclusion when you think about it.
But of course, as I pointed out in my first post, the whole problem is that the "pro-marriage" movement is nothing but a linguistic cover for the "anti-gay" movement. The original post I replied to, and you in your last post and this post, conflate "straight couples" with "homophobes". That is simply wrong.
So yeah, once you strip away all the bullshit and get to the bottom you are simply left with "pro-gay marriage legislation pisses off anti-gay bigots". Yes that observation is true but why on earth should I care? Why should anyone who cares about the values of freedom and equality that our nation was founded on care? I don't care that it steps on your toes anymore than I care that the Civil Rights movements stepped on the toes of ignorant racists. Their "right to disagree" does not include the right to discriminate; to the extent that such discrimination is allowed, we must strive to eliminate it.
"Pro-marriage" is explicitly and actively anti-gay, because it explicitly prohibits them from getting married and enshrines discrimination in law.
If you're going to turn around and say the opposite, that they are somehow "anti-you", you're going to have to come up with a lot better than "merely knowing gays exist and can possibly get married offends me". That's your own damn problem, not something they caused other than by existing (and refusing to hide the fact that they exist to protect your delicate sensibilities).
But thank you for at least acknowledging that despite your discomfort, it is in fact none of your business whether anyone else gets married. Would that all bigots would be so enlightened, the world would be a vastly better place.
Sorry, but that was bad logic: If I swing an axe at a door and put a chip in it, then I would expect that when I next swing an axe at a door I would also put a chip in that too. However the first door is no longer a door, its a door with a chip in it. What will happen when I swing my axe at a door with a chip in it? I don't know.
You can make the definition true by trivializing it to the point of worthlessness. If the axiom of the problem is that no changes to the state of the universe are possible due to performing the action, then the only thing the "insane" person could be accused of is not knowing that they are in such a contrived situation.
However that is not how the definition is used. As it was used in this very thread, it was applied to a situation where the "same thing" was done, but with a slightly different state of the universe.
So I can pick between a precise but trivial definition of no use, or the more generally used definition which is simply wrong.
Yes, it would help if you comprehended what you read.
The definition was:
Insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
Yes, and my argument is that is stupid, because normally the results will in fact be different.
The definition was not:
Insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting the same results.
Yes, that was the definition of sanity implied by the original definition of insanity (i.e if it is insane to expect something different, then sanity is to expect the same thing). However, as I have argued, it is in fact insane to expect the outcome to always be the same because that is so rarely the case.
So by your wording, the definition of insanity is having a memory, and expecting results that differ from the results stored in memory.
Yes, precisely! And that is not insane at all, that's very sane, because rarely is it the case that your previous actions have no impact on the result of your future actions. In other words, the result is going to differ from the results stored in memory, and expecting that to happen is quite sane.
The situations are different; thus you're doing two different things that just have some things in common.
And since every action you take changes the "situation" such that if you repeat the action, the state of the universe has changed and thus it is a different "thing", which applies to nearly all scenarios in the real world.
Including the one that the saying was used to describe in this thread.
And most situations in which it is invoked.
For a "memoryless" case: if you saw a button on the wall and pushed it and got a hard shock, you probably would expect the same thing to happen again the next time you pushed it. That's entirely sane.
In other words, the saying only applies to highly contrived situations that rarely occur in real life, rendering it basically pointless for providing any sort of wisdom or insight. Attempts to use it to enlighten real world situations are misguided and incorrect. Got it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, I have taken statistics courses myself, and this exact problem was covered. I have repeated the exact math, conditional probability and all directly from my notes, on several occasions for Slashdot, specifically with regard to some people in the aftermath of Columbine who were suggesting that they could profile students and determine which were dangerous.
It's bullshit. When something is as rare as a terrorist, any time your "test" gives a positive match the odds are vastly in favor of you having an innocent person in your custody.
The difference with medicine is that first, the patient self-selects by coming to see a doctor because they have certain symptoms. Next, they're usually testing for actual physical conditions rather than trying to find out if a person secretly wants to blow up buildings, meaning that after performing a general screening test that can focus on more accurate but more expensive versions, and perform other tests to rule out other explanations. And here's the important part: Any consequences of the subsequent testing, or any treatments carried out under the assumption that the test was correct, can be openly discussed with the patient who can agree or disagree that the risks are worth it.
Do you think someone picked up by a Terrorist Detector is going to be able to opt-out of the subsequent interrogation or six year stay at Gitmo?
Second guessing the United States Government?! I see you are a perfect match of the subject of Chapter 25: The Elusive Tinfoil Hat Thought Crime Terrorist of Mother's Basement.
We need to invade Mother's Basement to stop these villains before than can strike. But that means passing through our ally Mother's territory, and she won't agree because she just waxed the kitchen floor! Damnit all!
Neat!
And no, don't think we need an acronym, at least for now.
Yeah, I don't read the IAU minutes. I didn't know they changed the meaning of asteroid in the last two years.
Did you have a point, or was this the best you could do?
In any case, there is a certain silliness to the seriousness of a debate over what is really a minor descriptive term that has little actual physical meaning. Thus, it has been pointed out that Titan is much more Earth-like than is Mercury, but Titan is called a moon rather than a planet. Earth's moon is more like Mercury than it is like Titan, including having an orbit about the sun that's nearly circular, leading some astronomers to propose calling the Earth/Luna system a "binary planet" rather than a planet and a moon. This isn't so much a serious suggestion, as it is pointing out the silliness of the argument and the irrelevancy of the terms in question.
I think that if Earth were in orbit around Saturn, we'd say that we were living on the moon called Earth. Or Endor, if we were ewoks.
But yeah, it's kinda silly to get all upset about it, because essentially the terms are there to describe organization as it appeals to humans, not essential physical properties.
I liked the historical part of your post, very interesting.
Very few of them are networked in any way.
Ah, see, I thought they were, so that police could use them essentially on demand. I guess sometimes I can't recall the difference between what they've done and what they want to do. So I was wrong about that.
Well, okay, I guess asteroid is actually a deprecated name for non-comets in the Kuiper belt, according to this wp article. Since this is a thread about technical terminology and recent changes to it, I have to concede that point.
But the fact that we can read 1984 and that we have people who can speak out against the government without getting killed is proof enough that we don't live in an Orwellian dystopia.
While this is true in that it wouldn't be an Orwellian dystopia (that word having come largely to mean one in which misinformation, revisionist history, and the ensuing double-think are major aspects of controlling the people), that doesn't mean we can't come close.
It's not like it's impossible to have socialist/fascist police state + free speech. In particular if you can convince the people that their ability to speak freely is ipso facto proof that the police state doesn't exist. I think the authorities have realized that free speech is an almost necessary outlet for discontent. "Here's proof we are in a police state." "The fact that you can say that and not be killed is proof you're wrong." "Damn I guess they win."
I wouldn't be happy with a world in which I'm constantly being monitored for abnormal behavior by the police and even my neighbors, just because I was allowed to complain about the fact.
Have you ever actually read Orwell's work? The cameras weren't the point, the eradication of privacy was the point.
And the cameras aren't the point here, it's the eradication of privacy that begins with massive monitoring of the public. The presence of cameras in public was a major part of how the party maintained control in Orwell's book, and this is very much following in those footsteps.
You're wrong about the "government owned and monitored cameras" too. The vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned.
But they are part of the network that was created. So the "owned" part is out for most TVs, but the police surveillance part is not. Why quibble over that? In Orwell's book the government was pure socialist, the UK's system is mixed. So why should it make a big difference that many of the cameras are privately owned, just because they didn't want to duplicate the effort? Is that the key? If the dystopia isn't following the principles of Ingsoc, it's not "Orwellian"? Again, that's making "resembles" the same as "is, literally".
The UK resembles an Orwellian dystopia about as much as Britney Spears resembles Samuel L. Jackson.
More like Carl Weathers and Billy D. Williams.
Parent was using "resembles" correctly. You aren't.
Oh fucking please, that's the most retarded arbitrary ignorant pedantry I've ever heard. What precise definition of "resembles" are you formulating out your ass here, and do you have a source for it?
"Resembles" is a perfectly valid description for when an aspect of something is similar to something else to a degree. To the extent that the UK has and is building an expanding network of surveillance, and desires to build more, it resembles an Orwellian dystopia. That is a correct usage of "resembles". Whatever definition you've invented here notwithstanding.
I was going by the same standard that was presented: "the size of Pluto". I took that to mean of similar size in both positive and negative directions.
And yes, Kuiper belt objects that aren't comets and are bigger than 10m across and smaller than a planet are asteroids.
I don't know, do you exaggerate much?
The headline said "resembling an Orwellian dystopia". A city with government owned and monitored cameras at every corner does in fact resemble an Orwellian dystopia. Sounds like a perfectly sound comparison to me.
Perhaps if you didn't inflate "resembles" to mean "is", you would have understood.
I thought you were cleverly combining "Crook" "Coot" and "Cock" in a sort of diskeyboardlexia.
;)
Ah, see, there was your mistake.
I must've missed the part where we found HUNDREDS of objects the size of Pluto. Seems to me we've only found two or three so far.
A few more than that are known. Theoretically there are probably many more such objects, and very unlikely for there to be earth-sized objects.
There are more than eight planets. Pluto is a plant. Xena (or whatever official name they've assigned it) is a planet. Get over it.
No, Pluto is just a large Kuiper belt object, a glorified asteroid. You are the one who must get over it.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?
You're the one who wants to include Pluto as a planet based on... what? History? Sense of style? Desire for there to be more planets? They changed the definition of planet to exclude Pluto based on the evidence of discovering that there was an entire belt of objects at that distance including other objects in Pluto's orbit, and it was not in fact unique or formed in the same way as the other planets. The only reason it was ever called a planet in the first place is because we didn't know about the Kuiper belt or all the other objects of similar size. In what bizarre universe is refusing to revisit old assumptions made out of ignorance "looking at the evidence"? That's stasis. Science is all about revising theories.
Why not call every asteroid in the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt planets? There'd be tons of planets then. There's several objects in the asteroid belt that are similar size to Pluto. I don't hear you calling them planets. But that's because the not-following-evidence accusation you level at science is the one you yourself are guilty of.
would have appeared in the sky like bright stars.
Appeared to whom?
Nobody. One of the first things you learn in astronomy (observation, not education) is how to distinguish between a star and a planet or moon. It's easy: stars twinkle, big balls of rock or gas don't. Next time you're out at night, try to find Venus (it's the brightest object after the moon and sun), and compare it to any bright stars in the sky like Polaris. Venus will look very static, like it's just a dot of paint on the sky. Long before anyone knew what the solar system looked like, or what a 'planet' was, people knew that the planets were "different" than the stars.
BTW you can see the 4 largest moons of Jupiter through a decent pair of binoculars; they too don't look like stars.
I hypothetical tax increase targeted specifically at married couples due to the fraction of the 10% of the country that is gay getting married is not in any way "demonstrable". If you had any refutation to anything I said worth considering, you would have come up with something that was actually demonstrable and not hypothetical. As if your follow-on logic that making such a point directly infers that anything else I say is wrong. That is a demonstrable logical fallacy, and thus by your own faulty logic you are not worth listening to.
Ding!
Good day!
Ahh, but in the first instance you're swinging an axe at an intact door, whereas in the second instance you're swinging an axe at a weakened door. So you're not really trying the same thing at all.
In a very pedantic sense, yes, but that pedantic sense applies to virtually no real world situations.
Now if you had a row of identical doors and swung an axe at each one with the same force etc you would expect the same result on each door.
If you're going to be say that a door is different than a door with a chip in it is different than a door with two chips in it, then you must surely see that in fact the result of your axe swing on each door will be different.
It would be ridiculously improbable for it to be the same, even if it were possible to somehow exactly match the force and direction of swing (using a robot arm), since each door would have different grain.
Basically, as far as I can tell, the "definition of insanity" is actually bothering to set up a situation in which the original definition actually applies.
I trust argument more than I trust consensus; it's more likely to get us closer to the truth.
:)
No it isn't.
Which is of course why I immediately felt at home on Slashdot.
Ah, Slashdot, which combines the best of Arguments and Abuse.
Welcome to the world of formal logic (seriously).
I highly doubt the original phrase was intended to be a statement of formal logic. That's why taking it as such trivializes it so much. It's a pointless exercise.
(better, but means our world view is now non-monotonic, a fact which breaks 95%+ of all computer reasoning).
95% of computer programming is working around the limitations of computer reasoning; part of why as a computer programmer I get so upset at the binary thinking and false dichotomies so many people fall into. You'd think that should be what I do! Not that I see how having two variables (one a classification, of being a door or not, and a second, describing the amount of damage to a door) necessarily breaks computer reasoning.
The act of adding a small chip to a structurally sound door does not make it structurally unsound, yet eventually the door fails. How many chips are required? (the classic version is how many grains of rice do you need to make a heap?)
The only problem here is the desire to take a (more or less) continuous spectrum of possibilities and force it into a binary classification. Buddha would frown upon this, as desire causes suffering. Instead, be happy with what you have, a door which it is perfectly possible to describe the structural integrity of using fuzzy logic (i.e. non boolean variables).
I do have the trophy wife, but she's been with me since long before I became a lawyer, since back in the days when I was just an argumentative amateur.
So would you say you were arguing in your spare time?
I'm also not naive enough to think that allowing gays to marry would not have an effect on straight couples. They might be bigoted, they might have their head up their ass, they might be ignorant, but that doesn't change the fact that they feel the way they do about it. The anti-gay people DO think that homosexuality is wrong.
Ah, see! Right there is the huge fallacy of the whole argument right there in bold!
Gay marriage does not have any affect whatsoever on straight couples.
Gay marriage does have an affect on anti-gay bigots, regardless of whether they are married or not.
So while "pro-gay" legislation is not in any way "anti-marriage", it is anti-anti-gay.
Which is a rather trivial and meaningless conclusion when you think about it.
But of course, as I pointed out in my first post, the whole problem is that the "pro-marriage" movement is nothing but a linguistic cover for the "anti-gay" movement. The original post I replied to, and you in your last post and this post, conflate "straight couples" with "homophobes". That is simply wrong.
So yeah, once you strip away all the bullshit and get to the bottom you are simply left with "pro-gay marriage legislation pisses off anti-gay bigots". Yes that observation is true but why on earth should I care? Why should anyone who cares about the values of freedom and equality that our nation was founded on care? I don't care that it steps on your toes anymore than I care that the Civil Rights movements stepped on the toes of ignorant racists. Their "right to disagree" does not include the right to discriminate; to the extent that such discrimination is allowed, we must strive to eliminate it.
"Pro-marriage" is explicitly and actively anti-gay, because it explicitly prohibits them from getting married and enshrines discrimination in law.
If you're going to turn around and say the opposite, that they are somehow "anti-you", you're going to have to come up with a lot better than "merely knowing gays exist and can possibly get married offends me". That's your own damn problem, not something they caused other than by existing (and refusing to hide the fact that they exist to protect your delicate sensibilities).
But thank you for at least acknowledging that despite your discomfort, it is in fact none of your business whether anyone else gets married. Would that all bigots would be so enlightened, the world would be a vastly better place.
Sorry, but that was bad logic: If I swing an axe at a door and put a chip in it, then I would expect that when I next swing an axe at a door I would also put a chip in that too. However the first door is no longer a door, its a door with a chip in it. What will happen when I swing my axe at a door with a chip in it? I don't know.
You can make the definition true by trivializing it to the point of worthlessness. If the axiom of the problem is that no changes to the state of the universe are possible due to performing the action, then the only thing the "insane" person could be accused of is not knowing that they are in such a contrived situation.
However that is not how the definition is used. As it was used in this very thread, it was applied to a situation where the "same thing" was done, but with a slightly different state of the universe.
So I can pick between a precise but trivial definition of no use, or the more generally used definition which is simply wrong.
Reading comprehension helps.
Yes, it would help if you comprehended what you read.
The definition was:
Insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
Yes, and my argument is that is stupid, because normally the results will in fact be different.
The definition was not:
Insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting the same results.
Yes, that was the definition of sanity implied by the original definition of insanity (i.e if it is insane to expect something different, then sanity is to expect the same thing). However, as I have argued, it is in fact insane to expect the outcome to always be the same because that is so rarely the case.
So by your wording, the definition of insanity is having a memory, and expecting results that differ from the results stored in memory.
Yes, precisely! And that is not insane at all, that's very sane, because rarely is it the case that your previous actions have no impact on the result of your future actions. In other words, the result is going to differ from the results stored in memory, and expecting that to happen is quite sane.
The situations are different; thus you're doing two different things that just have some things in common.
And since every action you take changes the "situation" such that if you repeat the action, the state of the universe has changed and thus it is a different "thing", which applies to nearly all scenarios in the real world.
Including the one that the saying was used to describe in this thread.
And most situations in which it is invoked.
For a "memoryless" case: if you saw a button on the wall and pushed it and got a hard shock, you probably would expect the same thing to happen again the next time you pushed it. That's entirely sane.
In other words, the saying only applies to highly contrived situations that rarely occur in real life, rendering it basically pointless for providing any sort of wisdom or insight. Attempts to use it to enlighten real world situations are misguided and incorrect. Got it.
No, I mean cook! You should try his barbecued shrimp! It's got the oxycotin right in the seasoning.