felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
That is an interesting example of a slippery slope. Divorce has been legal in Christian countries for what? Around a hundred years? Longer in some places (America), a more recent development in others (Southern Ireland).
I think it came in on the basis that maybe 1% of marriages were wretchedly bad. Let them be dissolved and the sum of human happiness would rise, with no unexpected consequences to follow. But divorce became more common. Rich middle aged men took to trading in their middle aged wife that they had married when young, and starting a second family with a new, younger wife. That was understood as an abuse, and was tackled with alimony laws that were generous to the old wife. Those generous payments encouraged wives to divorce their boring middle-aged husbands, in the hope of a more exciting sex life, as an independently wealthy women. Divorce rates soared towards 50%. That in turn soured men on marriage. Men are reluctant to marry, and some countries (Canada?) have tackled this problem with marriages of adhesion (usually called common law marriages). Live too long with your girlfriend and bam, married.
Slipping further down the slippery slope, we are eradicating financial privacy to tackle the problem of men hiding their assets from ex-wives. Ponder how strange that would have seemed in the early days of divorce, when the idea was that the husband was perhaps an abusive drunk, probably unable to hold a job. Of course we want the woman to be able to escape and start a family with a hard working, good provider husband. Imagine if the early divorce law reforms had including the full range of legal changes. People who doubted that permitting divorce at all was wise, would have been confronted with the idea that the husband might be rich, and financial secrecy would have to go so that the ex-wife could be guaranteed her big share of the dosh. I think that people would never have started down the road of permitting divorce.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.
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It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.
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I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!
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I like the https://www.themotte.org/rules#Disagreement rule, which the comment is breaking. That should be a warning.
I went with "bad". The instruction do say go with your gut.
I think that the disagreement rule is a good rule that we should uphold, partly for the stated reason, partly for my point 2. It might be easier for the volunteers to uphold it if there were a button with a label that was the terse version of "Brilliantly funny sarcasm, but bad, because brilliantly funny sarcasm is fentanyl for discussion."
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
That is a bad comment. You are replying to a comment that claims there have been twenty-four years of disasters and laments that people are not learning. Have there been twenty-four years of disaster? Does past performance predict future performance? Is this time different? There is plenty to engage with. But your comment is negative, low effort, and unresponsive.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I clicked your link and saw "Deleted by user" when logged in (as me, not you). So yes, there is problem. But I'm merely a peasant, tilling my freehold outside of the Bailey, so I cannot help :-(
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I've just watched this footage of Rand Paul asking Anthony Blinken for information relevant to the lab leak debate. It seems clear that there is information on file that would settle the debate, one way or the other. The AstralCodex article is about sifting the information that we are allowed to see, hoping to work out the answer from that limited information. This seems futile; once the real information comes out, it will trump all that we learned with our attempts at Bayesian integration of piles of weak, probabilistic evidence. Worse still, the refusal to release the information that we are not allowed to see is also informative. I think the fact of the refusal is in itself sufficient to prove that it was a lab leak.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I'd never heard of "The Mind and Society" so I had a poke about. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Vilfredo%20Pareto are selling a new copy for £26. But wait, that is only volume 1. Where is volume 2? Checking https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGeneralFormOfSociety/Pareto%20-%20The%20Mind%20and%20Society%20Vol%204%3B%20The%20General%20Form%20of%20Society/page/n11/mode/2up?view=theater there are four volumes, a total of 1900 pages. Pareto seems to be stacking his concepts, maths style, with Greek letter names.
My Dover edition of The Prince runs to 71 pages of ordinary English. Brevity and language make it accessible to a boy, even if the topic does not. But is "The Mind and Society" not a little heavy going?
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I'm seeing
The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 14% from 2020 (28.3 per 100,000) to 2021 (32.4 per 100,000).
but 32.4 per hundred thousand is 0.0324 %.
I think that the issue is that CDC is dividing (overdose deaths this year) by total population, but we are trying to get a feel for the meaning of the number of overdose deaths by doing the calculation
(overdose deaths this year) divided by (total deaths this year)
We are pondering: people are always dying, what proportion of deaths are overdose deaths?
One anticipates that (total population) divided by (total deaths this year) roughly approximates life span, so 70 or 80. But the ratio is more like 100. Err, I'm seeing in other calculations that (total population)/80 over estimates (total deaths this year) by quite a lot. Total population is around 334 million, total deaths for 2021 3.4 million. The ratio is surprisingly (confusingly?) close to 100.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
This is why I hate meta-moderating. I'm given your comment. It's vulgar mockery is excessive. "Bad" or "deserves a warning"? Being conscientious I check the context first.
Oh! I read the "self correcting problem" comment myself yesterday. It struck me as incorrect. Dangerously incorrect. But how to phrase my disagreement? What would crisply convey the tragic truth that there is nothing to guarantee that it will actually self correct. Everything could collapse, like when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD. I fail to reply to it.
Your comment crisply captures the sense of "Look around you! The people you see running towards the cliff edge may well fail to stop." I go with my gut, tick the "Good" box, and click submit. May God have mercy on my soul.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
I think I muddle together various issues
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the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.
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fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.
Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.
Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.
But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.
My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.
I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.
tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
Help! I'm old and not keeping up
you don't join
Who is you and what do they not join?
into the pit with the rest of us
Who is us? What is the pit?
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
That is a good question and exposes that I'm a little out of my depth. But I've spent a happy half hour writing some crude dice rolling simulations, so what follows is partially checked (I'd like to draw some scatter plots too!)
Consider a data generating process using a red d6 and a green d6, where d6 is jargon for the ordinary cubical die with 6 faces. We regard the red and green dice as generating the red and green random variables. A third, yellow random variable is generated by adding together the red and green rolls.
Then red and yellow have a correlation of 0.7 (Will checking with pencil and paper discover that this is 1/√2 ?). Yellow and green also have a correlation of 0.7. Red and green have a correlation of 0.00506. Now I'm regretting writing a dice rolling simulation, rather than a computation using distributions. That has to be really 0.
But lines don't really work. Two of the scatter plots have lines at a definite slope, but red versus green is just a filled in square showing zero correlation.
I'd really like to get the third correlation to be negative rather than zero, to make the point about non-transitivity more strongly. Can I do that with dice? Yes.
Roll five dice, A,B,C,D,E. Generate three random variables
Red = A + B + C
Yellow = A + B + D + E
Green = - C + D + E
Red and yellow share A and B giving them a correlation of 0.57. Yellow and green share D and E giving them a correlation of 0.59 (it has to be the same, but I'm out of time to do the computation exactly)
Meanwhile Red and Green share C but with C subtracted from Green, for a correlation of -0.3
That is shocking. Red correlates positively with yellow. Yellow correlates positively with green. But red and green have a negative correlation.
Now we have reached the point where I really need scatter plots. I think the Red/Yellow plot and the Yellow/Green plot are basically the same (there is an offset because the red mean is 10.5 and the green mean is 3.5, but I don't think that matters). Red/Green contrasts by sloping down rather than up. It doesn't lie between Red/Yellow and Yellow/Green at all.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I half agree that the idea of censorship is a bad idea that ought to be suppressed. The factor of two in the denominator comes from splitting the concept of censorship into two. One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship.
Monocensorship is the traditional notion of a unitary system of censorship, with a Chief Censor who is a kind of Monarch. This is a much worse idea than it initially appears. The Chief Censor has three kinds of power: ideal power, armour power, network power.
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Ideal power is the power to suppress bad ideas. It is what the Office of Censorship is for. Obviously this works badly. Some good ideas are suppressed because humans cannot reliably tell good from bad. Worse the Chief Censor is unsupervised. Yes, there are rules. This is to be blocked. That is to be permitted. But nobody gets to see what is blocked, so the Chief Censor gets to please himself and block whatever he disapproves of. It is built into the structure of Monocensorship that people don't know that permitted material is being blocked, because they don't get to see it.
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Armour power. Criticism of the Chief Censor is the second victim of overreach. If you find out that your permitted political opinions are blocked, you will complain, and your complaints will also be censored
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Network power. After a hundred years, the seventh Chief Censor gets a circle jerk going. The lazy and incompetent government bureaucracy make the lives of citizens miserable. If you complain, you get censored. Why? Try complaining about the Chief Censor. Your interactions with the bureaucracy will get even worse. The quid pro quo of the Chief Censor protecting the bureaucracy from criticism is that the bureaucracy retaliates against critics of the Chief Censor.
Bicensorhip is the idea of sacrificing the old to protect the young. There are two classes of people, Elders, say the over forties, and Juniors. Twenty-something Juniors hear rumours of Communism. They go looking and find tales of Gulags and Terror Famines and not much else. They notice the censorship and get told "you'll get the full story when you are an Elder."
Twenty years later our twenty-something Junior goes to his Elder Initiation and gets his access-all-areas pass. What was the full story of Communism? By the time he is forty, he has lived out the story of good intentions and bad consequences in his own life. He gets to read the positive advocacy for Communism and it seems a little off. How do they not see that it is going to end badly?
But what do I have in mind with "sacrificing the old to protect the young"? Think about Breatharianism, the idea that one can live on light, no food required. Some young people believe it. Mix together naivety, wishful thinking, and a touch of mental illness; some young people starve themselves to death. Censoring Breatharianism protects young people. Age and experience partially protect the Elders. But once in a while, an Elder gets his access-all-areas pass, discovers Breatharianism, becomes a believer and starves himself to death.
Don't old people deserve protection from bad ideas? Shouldn't we change from Bicensorship to Monocensorship to protect every-one, young and old? Think about the social dynamics of Bicensorship. There will always be a temptation to make the qualifying requirements for being an Elder a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, until after a hundred years it has turned into Monocensorship. The social dynamic pits news stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography or reading Ted Kaczynsky and turning into primitivist terrorists, against abstract principles of having a large body of people with access-all-areas passes to keep an eye on the censors.
We see that Bicensorship and Monocensorship are mortal enemies. Those who believe in Monocensorship want to protect everybody, young and old. (The cynical take is that they fancy themselves as Chief Censor and hate Bicensorship because it cripples the power of the Chief Censor.) Those who believe in Bicensorship answer the call of duty and willing undertake the work of an Elder, exposing themselves to bad ideas to keep the Chief Censor in check and preserve young peoples access to good ideas that the Chief Censor doesn't like. (Cynically, you cannot abolish Eldership, because Elders love their weird porn, even as they accept that it is too weird for young people.) I could see the social dynamics of Bicensorship being stabilized by ruthless censorship of the idea of Monocensorship. Stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography are kept out of the news. The whole idea of protecting Elders from bad ideas is missing from common discourse. Those who advocate Monocensorship run into a brick wall:"censorship is about sacrificing the old to protect the young" is the thought terminating cliche that the NPC's chant back at them, and the idea of protecting the old from bad ideas gets no traction, even when it can evade censorship.
The fun part of this comment is normifying "A system of Bicensorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of Monocensorship.". Since normies hate neologisms, they have to merge Bicensorship and Monocensorship into just censorship. This leads to the normie version: "A system of censorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of censorship." Which sounds weird. If you force it to make sense you probably come up with a notion of censorship censoring the concept of censorship so that people don't have the words to understand what is going on. That changes the meaning. When Bicensorship protects itself by censoring Monocensorship all of the Elders are in on it and know what they are doing and why. Sometimes you really do have to coin new words and split an old word in two.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
If you have a thousand years of history behind you,...
I'm thinking that there is a problem right there. Jesus is supposed to come back. As the Nicene Creed puts it "and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead;". But it has been a long time, two thousand years. I don't think any-one expected having to wait that long.
Christianity got a big boost in its early days from the sense of urgency. Nobody knows when the second coming will happen. Don't dilly-dally about converting to Christianity, you might leave it too late! But there is a price to pay. It gives Christianity a soft expiry date. As the century tick by, it gets awkward.
Continuing to talk about the second coming sounds odd. People keep looking forward to it; and keep getting disappointed. When will they learn that it isn't going to happen?
But quietly dropping it also comes across as odd. It was a big deal. And the faith is a one-off, final revelation; you cannot drop bits that age badly.
Perhaps the problem is me. I am "not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought". But Ratzinger sees it as a "clown costume" kind of problem, rather than an "its been too long" kind of problem. That is missing the time dimension; the problem is getting worse as the years tick by, in a way the "clown costume" problems don't.
You will sometimes see a medical study described as a "blinded randomized controlled trial" and other medical studies as an "open label randomized controlled trial". Whether a study is blinded or open-label is a separate issue from having a control group and separate again from having random assignment to treatment. The Wikipedia page on GRADE doesn't mention blinding. Checking the website of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) the reference to randomized controlled trials does not mention blinding.
A study on breast augmentation can qualify as a randomized controlled trial, generating top quality evidence, with the following design: recruit 200 subjects. Randomly assign 100 to have the operation. The others are the control group. Researchers must keep in touch with the all 200 to find out how things worked out for them.
Keeping in touch with all 200 might be tricky. Some of those in the trial group might be disappointed with the results of the surgery and feeling disillusioned with medical intervention may reject further contact with the trial. Some of those in the control group may interpret being rejected for surgery as being rejected from the trial and disappear. Such people are lost to follow up. How to analyse a trial with large loses to follow up is controversial. Do we blandly say "we don't know"? Should we interpret losses from the trial group as bad outcomes? One might vary the design. 100 breast augmentations. 50 get psychotherapy that aims to persuade them that they don't need breast augmentation. 50 get regular contact to keep in touch, but bland contact, merely reminding then that they also serve who only stand and wait.
Scott's deep dive into Alcoholics Anonymous is my goto article for the practical importance of having a control group. Or should that be the disappointing effect of control groups?
If a trial does not have randomization, it is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox. One may find that a medical treatment is beneficial, but partitioning the data into two exhaustive and mutually exclusive subgroups, find that the treatment is harmful to one of the subgroups and also harmful to the other subgroup. Wut? The analysis may collapse into baffling incoherence. Actually it is worse than that. The laws of arithmetic are chaotic evil, and permit that a conclusion that has been reversed by one partition may yet be swapped back by a finer one (if the Chrome browser objects to a faulty certificate, using incognito mode will work.)
The two issues, of needing a control group, and of needing randomization, are widely understood; I would not expect Dr Hilary Cass to restate the arguments in her report.
Edited to fix link to Simpsons Paradox, spotted error way too late :-(
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
This reminds me of my puzzlement at the reception of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I imagined that English politics in 1651 had a right-wing that favoured monarchy and the divine right of kings, and a left-wing, that favoured Parliament, diggers and levelers, and if the diggers and levelers got too rambunctious, a Lord Protector. I further imagined that the right-wing would love Hobbes. Why? Because they would notice that a mystical faith in the divine right of kings wasn't persuading everybody. Some persons had a more mechanistic, materialist take on how politics worked, and Hobbes' reasoning, about needing a king to maintain order, would persuade them, perfecting social harmony as both the pious and the mechanistic/materialists agreed on the need for a king.
I was wrong. Quoting wikipedia "The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics" and "Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers." The divine right of kings was a mystical doctrine and one profaned it by offering worldly justification.
So yes, the rightist mind finds the enigmatic, such as monarchy, beautiful. The tiny minority of rightist (just me?) who distrust enigma and construct mechanistic/materialists accounts of why we should be right-wing are rejected by the right. And then there is the left, which offers mechanistic/materialist accounts of why we should be left-wing (that I find unconvincing due to neglecting the details of the mechanisms).
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Perhaps my final paragraph needs spelling out explicitly.
I think that there was a gentlemen's agreement that kept electoral fraud at a low level, just lone wolves doing too little to change the result. I think that agreement is breaking down, which is a bad thing. The two manifestations of the bad thing are (1) Too much electoral fraud, partly driven hyperbole and polarization (2) Senior Democrats liking, rather than resenting, the help they get from lower level Democrats spontaneously cheating, and the senior Democrats ending up complicit rather that opposed. Both are bad and need to be opposed.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The answer to your hypothetical is already in the constitution under Article V.
The governance issue is choosing the venue for public policy debates. Perhaps the policy issue is whether to have an exception to the first amendment for anti-social speech. The trade-off is that if the government gets to decide what is "anti-social speech" the ruling party will attempt to consolidate power by declaring that the opposing party's talking points are "anti-social speech" and banning them.
The constitution currently goes 100% on not letting the government consolidate power by limiting speech, and 0% on banning novels and films that celebrate degenerate anti-heroes. Is that the right trade off? Maybe. I'm not sure about the policy issue. But the governance issue seems clear enough, the public policy discussion takes place in a constitutional convention, not the Supreme Court. That might seem obvious. If the Supreme Court balances public policy trade-offs themselves, that replaces the Republic with a Kritarchy.
But there is a second, more subtle issue. Contemplate the likely arguments in a constitutional convention. There will be those who are sick of the mass media pushing degenerate narratives and wish to grant the government broad powers against "anti-social speech". There will be those who are terrified of the dangers of such powers and want a narrow amendment that only grants congress the power to ban speech that advocates shoplifting and porch-piracy.
Let us suppose that it is the narrow amendment that is passed. Congress decides that calls for reparations are in really just a nudge and a wink for shoplifting and bans it also. Those who advocate for reparations sue, claiming that there remaining free speech right are being violated. Do they get to have their case heard by an independent tribunal? The traditional idea is that the Supreme Court is that independent tribunal. The constitutional convention thrashed out a deal. Yes to restricting speech, but narrowly. Who upholds the deal? The Supreme Court.
What is supposed to happen if the Supreme Court is debating and making the trade-off? One idea is to have a Super-Supreme-Court. Once the Supreme Court has decided that some speech restriction are permitted, who hears cases claiming that speech restrictions are too restrictive? The Super-Supreme-Court! But this is getting silly. On the other hand, if the case is hear by the Supreme Court itself, does it hear the case as though its previous ruling were carved in stone, or does it revisiting the issue, acting as free-wheeling kritarchy that makes it up as it goes along. What a mess!
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?
This strikes me as a Socratic question. Socrates used to ask Greeks questions that were slightly off. Being polite, the Greeks would refrain from nit-picking the questions, and try to answer. Then Socrates, being an arse-hole, would nit pick the answers. He would entangle his victims with his verbal dexterity, and skillfully obscure that bad answers were down-stream from bad questions.
There are many stories to tell about gravity. Kepler discovered that the planets moved in ellipses. Newton invented a theory of mechanics and new mathematics. Then he was able to respond to speculation that the ellipses were due to an inverse square law of attraction by filling in the details of what that actually meant, and solving the mathematical problems to demonstrate it.
Newton went further, spotting that gravity was "universal". By "universal" Newton meant that the attraction was not a specific property of the Sun (which would leave gravity on the surface of the Earth as a separate mystery) but was about all matter attracting all matter. So a cannon ball fired by an artillery man follows an elliptical trajectory with one focus at the center of the Earth. Obviously an artillery man uses the parabolic approximation (until the Paris gun in 1918. But (unless my memory is playing tricks on me) Newton had the idea that a cannon fired horizontally with sufficient force would cause the cannon ball to orbit the Earth, just as the moon orbits the Earth.
"Universal" creates a loose end. Jupiter is attracting Saturn and Saturn is attracting Jupiter. The Sun is not the only player in the solar system. That loose thread went unpulled until it was noticed that Jupiter was spiraling in. Jupiter's orbit was decaying and it would in time destroy the Earth. Then a French mathematician (LaPlace?) got stuck into the details. Jupiter and Saturn are nearly in a five to two orbital resonance. The difference frequency is about 800 years. Four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling in and Saturn spiraling out get followed by four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling out and Saturn spiraling in. Theory and accurate astronomical observation agreed; panic over.
Other stories include Halley working out the orbital parameters of a comet and predicting its return. That was a big deal at the time, because comets were traditionally seen as bad omens. If they simply moved in obedience to Kepler's Laws, they stopped being frightening. The comet returned as predicted and is now called Halley's Comet.
After Hershel discovered Uranus, both John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier puzzled over anomalies in the orbit of Uranus. Could there be another planet. Verrier go Johann Galle and Heinrich D'Arrest to look, and there was Neptune, discovered in 1846 by mathematics and Newton's Law of Gravitation. Verrier tried to repeat his success with anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and inferred the existence of the planet Vulcan. Which wasn't there, leading eventually, by a circuitous route to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
For me, this raises questions about the word believe. I'm comfortable with three interpersonal meanings. Do I believe a person's testimony: did the things he tells me actually happen? Do I believe a person's promises: will he keep them? Do I believe a person's predictions: will they actually happen? But how does one extend the word believe to cover scientific theories? The tale that I've told goes well beyond my personal experience. The largest telescope that I have looked through is a twelve inch reflector. Maybe the story about Neptune is made up; I've seen Saturn, but neither Uranus nor Neptune. Interpersonal belief is at issue. Yet when we talk of belief in Newton's Law of Gravity, we assume the honesty of astronomers and are talking about something else. I'm not clear what. Contemplating the long narrative that I have sketched is valuable because it gives a concrete example of what successful science looks like. Trying to abstract a high level concept of "belief"? That is the kind of unmotivated abstraction that confuses things.
I'm comfortable with two meanings of the word true. One is person testimony (again). Did that actually happen? The other is in my books on mathematical logic. When is (A and B) true? When A is true, but not just A, B must also true. Add in first order logic, sets, and model theory and there is lots to read about. But neither notion of truth fits well with generalisations arising from empirical investigations.
The most promising notion of truth, appropriate to empirical investigation, that I have encountered is Probably Approximately Correct learning theory and Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension. Those are crap links. To get the basic idea, image rolling a d6 six hundred times to estimate the probabilities of each face. You get numbers like 100, 118, 95, 88, 114, 85 or like 112, 103, 93, 104, 99, 89. Empirical work always has a certain about of random slop and your empirical estimate will never be true in the sense of being exact. But what about being approximately true? Fix an unambitious goal for accuracy and ponder the probability of being approximately correct. Things can still go horribly wrong; an unlucky sequence of rolls could give you 600, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and your empirical work is not even approximately correct. But something interesting happens when the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension is finite. Fix your desired level of approximation and keep rolling the d6. The probability of not meeting your approximation goal eventually starts to decline exponentially with the number of rolls. Exponentially! You are on the route to the practical man's version of certain knowledge. Well, that is nice, but God is it complicated.
Asking "Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?" is doing the 20000 foot overview thing. It can only lead to vague waffle. On the other hand, waffling vaguely is rather fun; what am I actually proposing as a rival ideal? I think that interesting gap is between social science and "hard" science. There is a gap between "hard" science and ideal certainty, but it seems unimportant compared to the gap between social science and "hard" science. Let me give a concrete example of how little we know in social science so that you can see how well Newton's Law of Gravity compares.
Think about Laffer Curve effects. Here are four theories.
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The Laffer Curve is bunk. If the government increases income tax from 40 pence in the pound to 83 pence in the pound, that will increase revenue. Revenue will probably double.
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Rich businessmen are trapped by their commitments. If their take home pay falls, they won't be willing to give up their yacht or their mistress. They will draw more salary from their business, to maintain their take home pay. Rather than pay themselves $1,600,000 to take home $1,000,000 they will pay themselves $5,882,353 to take home $1,000,000. Tax revenue will rise from $600,000 to $4,882,353 Eight fold, not two fold.
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Don't ask where we are on the Laffer Curve, ask when we are. The government is taxing fifty year old businessmen, expecting revenues to hold up indefinitely. But in thirty years time they will all have retired. Will today's twenty year olds replace them? No, once Boxer goes to the knacker's yard, no-one is taking his place.
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Laffer Curve effects are prompt. When taxes are low the rich businessman pays his mistress from after tax income. When tax rates soar, he cuts the money that he withdraws from his business as personal income, and preserves his lifestyle by having his company employ his mistress as a secretary. Tax revenue falls.
What would it be like to have a theory of taxation with the accuracy of Newton's Law of Gravity? The very idea is mind boggling. A good philosophy of science would help us construct a scientific theory of tax revenue. A good discussion of the philosophy of science would look at areas of science where we are doing badly and wonder how to do a little better. Perhaps a good discussion of the philosophy of science would also look at successes, such as Newton's Law of Gravity and try to extract lessons, about how to do science, that we could apply to where we are failing. That is very different from looking at Newton's Law of Gravity and worrying about miracles or something.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Searching his name, I find his videos https://youtube.com/watch?v=tKfpXVce9c0
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The situation in the UK makes more sense if you think of the "abolition" of the death penalty as an unpopular privatization. Non-state actors still have rules, such as "snitches get stitches", and a willingness to get very stabby if you cause them too much trouble.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I believe that prohibition works less well than its mainstream advocates expect. I think the gap is huge. Mainstream advocates of prohibition never grasp how poorly it works and never admit the extent of the problems. Within the constraints of Western Morality (you cannot just take the addicts out and shoot them) the problems are unfixable, we didn't merely do a bad job of it.
On the other hand I notice a fatal flaw in my reasoning. I assume, based on pure optimism, that there is a good solution to the problems of substance abuse. I see that prohibition works very badly. Legal permissiveness is an alternative. I have my unjustified axiom that there is a solution, so I hope that legal permissiveness is that solution and does actually work. This is embarrassingly silly. In general terms nothing prevents legal permissiveness from being an even worse disaster than prohibition.
Of course the details of the particular substance in question are decisive. Legal permissiveness works very well for coffee, but it might turn out to be a mega-death disaster for fentanyl.
The Rotating Triple Crown is mainly an attempt to design a rule of succession that solves the problem of the stupid eldest son. One reason why a king might lack iron-clad legitmacy is that he took the crown as part of an ad hoc modification to the succession rules when the legitimate eldest son is seen as unacceptably stupid. The other side of this coin is when such an attempt at ad hoc modification fails, and the legitimate eldest son ends up lacking legitimacy because no-one wants to be ruled by an idiot. To the extent that the Rotating Triple Crown does actually solve the problem of the stupid eldest son (with its very limited use of election) it also eliminates two possible causes of a failure of legitimacy.
There is a third indirect boost to legitimacy
The blue kingmakers are choosing a White king. Presumably they are also looking ahead to when a member of their own, blue, line ascends to the throne. Therefore, they have an incentive to select as White king, some-one with a responsible attitude to the long term future of the kingdom; some-one who will fix problems, rather than leave them to fester and become a challenge for the next blue king.
The Rotating Triple Crown is attractive world-building for an alternative history science fiction novel set in a world with twentieth century technology, but still having executive monarchies. The world-building gifts the author an explanation for how executive monarchy has managed to survive. It also lets the author write competence porn. The kings are shrewd and effective, because the kingmakers chose shrewd effective kings, not because the author wrote them that way.
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