domain:web.law.duke.edu
faceh
5m ago
Hey now, I'm mostly cynical about the larger issue of intersex relations.
I'm quite the fan of women in the abstract and many specific ones that I like a lot, and are great people.
The stats inform my behavior and proposed solutions, but cynicism is reserved for the larger system that I think is sucking everyone dry, and not in the fun way.
FtSoA
23m ago
So, in your view:
- Israel is lying about having achieved air superiority over Iran. Even though a number of countries, notably Iran and the U.S., would know the truth and Israel would risk leaks.
- Israel is lying about having dropped any munitions over the target. Even though a number of countries, notably Iran and the U.S., would know the truth and Israel would risk leaks.
- Israel is lying that they crippled Iran's ballistic missile production and destroyed 80% of the launchers. Even though a number of countries, notably Iran and the U.S., would know the truth and Israel would risk leaks.
- Iran (and Hezbollah) were not defeated; they chose not to deliver further damage to Israel. The country they have sworn to destroy.
The IDF is just doing these photos with various JDAMs and whatnot linked in this article for pure propaganda? Why?
We know why Iran would lie about having shot down an F-35 or two. But why would Israel need to lie about dropping JDAMs vs. blasting things with ALBMs? They certainly were blowing things up.
Hitting Mashhad proves that they didn't control Iranian airspace
You can argue that it doesn't prove the IAF did; you can't argue it proves they didn't. Elementary logic.
Here's a funny (bit)[https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/tensions-erupt-did-israel-use-azerbaijani-airspace-to-strike-deep-into-iran/]:
Iran’s intelligence circles argue that its strategic allies, including Armenia, Turkmenistan and Russia, would not permit such corridor access, leaving Azerbaijan as the only feasible conduit for Israeli fighter jets and drones to operate deep behind Iranian lines. In Tehran and Karaj, damage assessments indicate that multiple sites were struck from vectors consistent with air routes crossing the Caspian, while Iranian air defence infrastructure in Kermanshah and Isfahan was reportedly neutralised by precision standoff munitions launched from Iraqi airspace.
Yet they somehow made even less progress on the ground compared with 2006 despite all this.
What was their goal this time? Was it the same as 2006? (No.)
They hit took out a lot of military leaders assembled for exercises but as far as I know nobody confirmed that it was an actual command bunker or even that the IAF was responsible.
For "exercises"? AYFKMRN? We know who the dead generals are.
Most of the confirmed assassinations have been ascribed to Mossad drones, Mossad Spike missiles and the occasional Mossad bomb, all of which could plausibly have taken out the assembled generals just as easily as an IAF bomb.
Well at least you're willing to acknowledge one part of the Israeli government did a good job.
Why weren't they able to replicate the pace of assassinations for the remainder of the war,
Because the Iranians got a lot more cautious about things. Obviously. Targeting people is hard when they know they're being actively targeted.
blowing up the TV broadcaster would cause the Iranian people to spontaneously rise up
This is not what "spontaneously" means. Quite the opposite.
Trump decides to call off Israel for no reason
No reason? He has a whole wing of advisors who wanted the U.S. to take no part. As far as Trump is concerned, the nuclear program was bombed, so mission accomplished.
Israel decides to obey Trump despite having previously had no problem disobeying him regarding Lebanon and Syria
Those are not the same situations. (After all, you seem to believe Iran remains a significant threat to Israel right now.) Bibi will only test Trump so much.
Today, Iran is openly defying Trump by continuing nuclear enrichment and Trump is threatening to restart strikes, yet Israel is still doing nothing to Iran while continuing to bomb Syria in active defiance of Trump. I dunno, I still think the explanation that he was saving Israel rather than Iran makes more sense.
The Iranians have formed a war council because they expect the war to recommence. Israel is, one presumes, presently plotting for such an eventuality. As they did that last time.
On the flipside there's no reason why Trump or Israel would cut a favourable truce with their worst enemy at their weakest only to impotently threaten to return to fighting by the end of the month because said worst enemy continues to defy them.
Trump is not a particularly rational actor. He is wildly inconsistent and easily influenced by his advisors; who often have conflicting views. Many people predict great catastrophe if the regime falls. So if it's defanged why not let it live. I think this is wrong, but I know why they think it.
Again, no truce was "cut." Nothing was negotiated. It's a de facto ceasefire.
Do you deny that Iran's economy was massively impacted during the conflict because of the reliance on the oil industry, or is that also propaganda?
Had the conflict continued roughly as it had, who was going to run out of money first?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
27m ago
· Edited 3m ago
It's a process for everyone. Demoralization is real. And everyone is trying to improve all the time, and there's just too much to know and master. There's a real balance between maintaining the standards of a community and maintaining the morale of individual members of a community - you do need enough high quality not to run off people who have actually mastered some things. And yet there really is very little to be gained by ripping bad work to shreds, in the usual case.
Above standards, there is politics, and there is tribalism. Take the Culture War Thread, for example. "This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
Is that how we act here? Look at the gun discussion from last week. Do the votes look like they track response quality (i.e. of argument), or do we simply have a large American gun-owning population that vehemently downvotes anything that might be the slightest bit critical of their god-given constitutional right? And of course, it's not just the voting. I regularly see people with minority views accused of being trolls, of being alts, etc. etc.
This is a rising trend on the broader internet. Even going into a reddit thread trying to post some polite, neutral information, not even taking a side draws downvotes because it pattern-matches a tribe. It didn't used to be like that. Again, this is politics and tribalism, not standards or correctness.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
31m ago
Hmm.. I'm not sure what to do in that situation. My best guess is to plead utter uncertainty, and ask it to formulate the most probable issues in the order of likelihood.
faceh
35m ago
You pretty much nailed it, impressively accurate for an 'outsider.'
The one achievement of the apps is getting the average guy to finance (both paying for apps, and paying for dates) the whole operation so that average women can sleep with a variety of hot guys who will never, ever commit, and the hot guys don't have to invest much capital, so it is cheaper for them than finding hookers.
And for the women, its definitely a 'decision paralysis' or 'paradox of choice' situation. You've got 50 matches on any given day, and you need to pick one or two to go on dates with, but of course doing that is possibly locking you out from choosing the ideal match... if such a thing exists, so its easier to just not pick and let men do the whole song and dance to hold your attention.
Its horribly toxic, and I worry that the younger kids just have never known anything different, so its 'normal.' When it really, really should not be normal.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
44m ago
I know, but it's one of the few things in their worldview that I agree with.
TitaniumButterfly
46m ago
I don't think I'm equating them exactly — if there's a spectrum between man and child women are somewhere in between and probably a bit closer to man — but yes I take your point. And yes it's a problem.
But how horrifying is it to hear that, since we must treat women as indistinguishable from men, and since that's clearly untenable, the solution is to abolish women‽
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
51m ago
Archeology? Historical records?
If someone claims that the the primary language of ancient Rome was Chinese, they would be laughed out of the room. When the BBC claims that there were black people in high society during the Regency, there are enough honest historians around to criticize them.
While historians are prone to fads and stretching plausibility at times, the field as whole is far healthier than literature. At the end, it is a matter of degree, not kind.
Tree
52m ago
Maybe I just admire the superior empathy of women? (No, you're right, I don't)
Serious question: Is this an order to cite studies justifying my original statement? Because if I dumped a bunch, it could be seen as more inflammatory and offensive to women, and as me refusing to back down, being belligerent.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
55m ago
· Edited 13m ago
I can't really ask for a better steelman for the positions I'm against, so thank you.
You have previously shared your own philosophical views on machine consciousness and machine understanding.
You accuse me of engaging in philosophy, and I can only plead guilty. But I suspect we are talking about two different things. I see a distinction between what we might call instrumental versus terminal philosophy. I use philosophy as a spade, a tool to dig into reality-anchored problems like the nature of consciousness or my ethical obligations to a patient. The goal is to get somewhere. For many professional philosophers I have encountered, philosophy is not a tool to be used but an object to be endlessly polished. They are not in it to dig, they're here to argue about the platonic ideal of a spade.
(In my case, I'm rather concerned that if we do instantiate a Machine God: we'd better teach it a definition of spade that doesn't mean our bones are used to dig our graves)
This is especially true in moral philosophy. I have a strong conviction that objective morality does not exist. The evidence against it is a vast, silent ocean; the evidence for it is a null set. I consider it as likely as finding a hidden integer between two and three that we've somehow missed. This makes moral arguments an interesting class of facts, but only facts about the people having them. Potentially facts about game theory and evolutionary processes, since many aspects of morality are conserved across species. Dogs and monkeys understand fairness, or have kin-group obligations.
it's just that you think your own philosophical views are obviously correct, and the views of your philosophical opponents are obviously incorrect
I must strongly disagree, this doesn't represent my stance at all. In fact, I would say that this is a category error. The only way a philosophical conjecture can be "incorrect" is through logical error in its formulation, or outright self-contradiction.
My own stance is that I am both a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist, and I deny these claims are contradictory. My preference for my own brand of consequentialism is just that: a preference. I do not think a Kantian is wrong so much as I observe that they must constantly ignore their own imperatives to function in the world.
That makes philosophical arguments not that different to debating a favorite football team. Can be fun over a drink, often interesting, but usually not productive.
This brings me back to your defense of the humanities. You give excellent examples of how these fields can be anchored to reality, like the statistical analysis of a lexicon. I do not doubt these researchers exist, my ex did similar work.
My critique is about the center of gravity of these fields. For every scholar doing a careful statistical analysis, how many are writing another unfalsifiable post-structuralist critique by doing the equivalent of scrutinizing a takeout menu? My experience suggests the latter is far more representative of the field's culture and what is considered high status work. The exceptions, however laudable, do not disprove the rule about the field's dominant intellectual mode.
Of course the possibility of actually confirming this fact once and for all is now forbidden to us, lost as it is to the sands of time
I am a Bayesian, so I am fully on board with probabilistic arguments. Yet, once again, in the humanities or in philosophy, consensus is rare or sometimes never reached. I find this farcical.
The core difference, as I see it, is the presence of a robust error correction mechanism. In my world, bad ideas have an expiration date because they fail to produce results. Phlogiston theory is dead. Lamarckian evolution is dead. They were falsified by reality (in the Bayesian, not Popperian sense). Can we say the same for the most influential ideas in the humanities? The continued influence of figures like Lacan, despite decades of withering critique, suggests the system is not structured to kill its darlings. It is designed to accumulate "perspectives," not to converge on truth.
(Even STEM rewards new discoveries, but someone conducting an experiment showing Einstein's model of gravity is doing something far more important and useful than someone arguing about feminist interpretations of underwater basket weaving)
My own field of psychiatry is a good case study here. We are in the aftermath of a replicability crisis. It is painful and embarrassing (but mostly in the softer aspects of psychology, the drugs usually work), but it is also a sign of institutional health. We are actively trying to discover where we have been wrong and hold ourselves to a higher standard. This is our Reality Anchor, however imperfect, pulling us back. I do not see an equivalent "interpretive crisis" in literary studies. I do not see a movement to discard theories that produce endless, unfalsifiable, and contradictory readings. The lack of such a crisis isn't a sign of stability. To me, it seems a sign the field may not have a reliable way to know when it is wrong. The Sokal Affari, or my own time in the Tate, shows that "earnest" productions are indistinguishable from parody.
This is not an accident. It flows directly from the incentive structure. In my field, discovering a new, effective treatment for depression grants you status because of its truth and utility. In literary studies, what is the reward for simply confirming the last fifty years of scholarship on Titus Andronicus? There is little to none. The incentive is to produce a novel interpretation, the more contrarian the better. This creates a centrifugal force, pushing the field away from stable consensus and towards ever more esoteric readings. The goal ceases to be understanding the text and becomes demonstrating the cleverness of the critic.
Regarding psychoanalysis and outcomes, I am a simple pragmatist. If a person with OCD is happy, I have no desire to treat them. If they are a paranoid schizophrenic setting parks on fire, the matter is out of my hands. In most cases, patients come to us because they believe they have a problem. We usually agree. That shared understanding of a problem in need of a solution is anchor enough.
This is why I believe the humanities are not a good target for limited public funds, at least at present. I have no objection to private donors funding this work. But most STEM and medical research has a far more obvious case for being a worthy investment of tax dollars. If we must make hard choices, I would fund the fields that have a mechanism for being wrong and a track record of correcting themselves, while also raising standards of living or technological progression.
celluloid_dream
1hr ago
Current Claude is all right, but 3.5 (or was it 3.6? I'm forgetting already..) was best Claude. Its defining attribute was that it was relentlessly curious. That felt empathetic, yet truth-seeking without being sycophantic.
But apparently it sucked at code, so it was taken out back and shot :(
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
You’re the one equating women to children, I’m just pointing out the second-order consequences if that’s true.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1hr ago
and there's Kant's noumena.
A quick aside about Kant, since so many people blame Kant for things that he really had little or nothing to do with (I recall a program on a Catholic TV channel where they accused Kant of being a "moral relativist", which is... distressing and concerning, that they think that...).
Kant saw himself as trying to mediate between the rationalists and the empiricists. The empiricists thought we could only know things through direct sensory experience, which seems pretty reasonable, until you realize that a statement like "empiricism is true" can't be known directly through your five senses, nor were they able to explain a lot of other things, like how we can have true knowledge of the laws of nature or of causal relations in general (Hume's problem: just because the pushing the vase off the table made it fall over a million times doesn't mean it'll happen again the millionth and first time). The rationalists thought that we could know things just by thinking about them, which would be cool if true, except they weren't able to explain how this was actually possible (even in the 1700s, the idea of a "faculty of rational intuition" hiding somewhere in the brain was met with significant skepticism).
Kant's solution was that we can know certain things about the world of experience using only our minds, because the world of experience that we actually perceive is shaped by and generated by our minds in some fundamental sense. The reality we experience must conform to the structure of our minds. So to condense about 800 pages of arguments into one sentence, we can know contra Hume that the world of experience actually is governed by law-like causal relations, because in order to have conscious experience of anything at all, and in order to be able to perceive oneself as a stable subject who is capable of reflecting on this experience, that experience itself must necessarily be governed by logical and law-like regularities. So we can actually know all sorts of things in a very direct way about the things we perceive. When you see an apple you know that it is in fact an apple, you know that if you push it off the table it will fall over, etc. The only downside is that we can't know the true metaphysical nature of things in themselves, independent of how they would appear to any perceiving subject. But that's fine, because in Kant's view he has secured the philosophical possibility of using empirical science to discover the true nature of the reality that we do perceive, and we can leave all the noumena stuff in the reality that we don't perceive up to God.
So he really was trying to "prove the common man right in a language that the common man could not understand", to use Nietzsche's phrase. It must be admitted though that Kant can be interpreted as saying that the laws of mathematics and physics issue forth directly from the structure of the human mind. I believe he would almost certainly add though that this structure is immutable and is not subject to conscious modification. You could argue that some later thinkers got inspired by this view, dropped the "immutable" part, and thus became relativists who granted undue creative power to human subjectivity. But a) the postmodernists and generally not as "relativist" as many people presuppose anyway, and b) I basically can't recall any passage from any book at all where someone said "I believe XYZ relativist type claim because Kant said so", so if Kant did exert some influence in this direction, it was probably only in a very indirect fashion.
Tree
1hr ago
Nah, I don’t think it has solved anything in a truly novel way. I’ll just stay a sceptic until the evidence gets stronger, incontrovertible. I don’t want to turn into one of those AI fiends, hanging onto a new AI’s every burp, feverishly fantasizing about utopia one day, extinction the next.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
I think that in the fullness of God's unfolding, male and female shall be elided. But we're not there yet, and even though it's good to look to that, this is not the time to make pretenses.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?
While you are free to examine ideas like femininity and talk about psychological sexual dimorphism all you like, you need to watch your tone and bring evidence in proportion with the inflammatoriness of your claims.
Your comment suggested that AI is essentially a kind of "parrot," and then suggested it is like "a woman," and concluded that "obviously" the answer is going to therefore be "incorrect." Drawing such unflattering inferences, particularly against a general group, falls short of the mark. The substance of your post, such as it was, did not come through as strongly as it needed to, while your apparent disdain for women came through quite clearly. Our rules require you to balance those things more thoughtfully--and kindly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
I think Tree made a cogent point.
We moderate tone, not content.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor. A field has a strong Reality Anchor if its propositions can be tested against something external and unforgiving. An engineer builds a bridge: either it stands up to traffic and weather, or it does not. A programmer writes code: either it compiles and executes the desired function, or it throws an error. A surgeon performs a procedure, the patient’s outcome provides a grim but objective metric. Reality is the ultimate, non-negotiable peer reviewer.
What about a descriptive discipline like history? What's the reality anchor for that?
gattsuru
1hr ago
Does your theory need to change if I can demonstrate LLMs solving questions that were not previously on Quora, or otherwise on the internet? I'll admit it solved that particular problem poorly, but it seems a pretty critical issue for any parrot-style claims.
Blueberry
1hr ago
In Germany the parliament instructed the medical association to make new rules which don’t discriminate according to sexual orientation. So the change was ordered by political correctness. New rule is now that for a blood donation you can’t have in the last four month a) two or more sexual partners at the same time or b) analsex.
Gay organizations complained of course that analsex in itself is not causing HIV and there are plenty (heterosexual) monogamous couples who are now prevented from donations (IF answering honestly).
I guess this can’t be solved socially, but only by the coming HIV vaccines.
jkf
1hr ago
I doubt the same is true of the Mauritius.
I mean, if push comes to shove something like "y'know all those planes full of bombs we have sitting on the island we're leasing from you? the neat thing about bombs is that you can drop them absolutely anywhere!" seems like it would be a lot more effective on the Mauritanians than the Brits?
jkf
1hr ago
Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs"
So, bad lawyer-brained?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1hr ago
I was pointing towards the general concept (disproportionately high rate of incidence) not the specific numbers involved. I suppose 13 52 is a minority -> majority not a minority -> higher minority, so maybe a bad example.
Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right, because I see nothing but a dozen AAQCs in the mod log.
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