Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

I’ve seen Justin Malone’s video. It’s been a while but I remember him making some good points.

[...] QR readers work best when there are the same amount of white and black areas.

Should be 'when there is' because the verb refers to "amount", but the verb's closest preceding noun is "readers", which is plural, so again the same mistake is made.

Arguably, maybe the author was thinking of the word "areas" and assigned the number that way. Either way, the sentence still fits the pattern.

https://twitter.com/danhollick/status/1570040261950205954

[A]ll proposed evidence for consciousness of animals thus far are either false or based on bad epistemology.

Should be 'is' instead of "are". But the verb's closest preceding noun is "animals", which is plural, so the author made the mistake.

https://twitter.com/magnetthatcher/status/1457496012180709379

I wrote:

Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably [...].

It should say 'probable'.

You linked to a Wikipedia article on the 'g factor'. It states:

[A]n individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.

And it presents an open problem:

The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.

How about this: some knowledge has reach, as David Deutsch would call it. Sometimes, when some knowledge can solve this problem, it can also solve that problem.

In light of that, let me get to your question:

Do you claim this measure is completely explained by “differences in knowledge or its quality”?

Not completely. But it is partly (I think mainly, for most people) explained by the quality of knowledge, and that quality is partly determined by reach (greater reach is better than lower reach). There are hardware differences – the most important being processing power and memory capacity, as with any computer. Those will affect one's abilities, too. As will some other hardware issues, such as whether one is blind. Even then, just improving the hardware doesn't always lead to an increase in what some might consider intelligence. Let me link to my article on curing blindness again – suddenly being able to see can cause much confusion, but it is definitely a hardware improvement. The boy in the linked article mostly enjoys his new ability – enjoyment can be an indication that knowledge is being created – but one could imagine a case where such a sudden hardware improvement overwhelms the subject completely and consequently stunts the growth of his knowledge. In which case quality of hardware and software (knowledge) would be inversely correlated. So it really depends.

By the way, you quote me as saying “differences in knowledge or its quality”, but I didn't write that anywhere. The correct quote is "differences in knowledge – more precisely, quality of knowledge". If you mean to use scare quotes, or if you want to use quotation marks to refer to abstract concepts or phrases, or for anything else, really, I suggest you use single quotes (‘ and ’) and reserve double quotes only for literal quotations. I learned this approach from Deutsch. (As I did much of my stance on brains vs. knowledge, see e.g. this interview with him.)

I agree that some parts of this effect are due to your upbringing [...].

I didn't say that, so you can't agree with me on it.

In BoI ch. 8, Deutsch presents a thought experiment in which the guests of David Hilbert's Infinity Hotel each receive a copy of either of Deutsch's books, FoR or BoI. Every millionth room gets FoR, all the other room get BoI. Guests are confident they will receive BoI since the odds of that seem to be 999,999 in 1 million.

Then, hotel management makes an announcement moving all recipients of one book to odd-numbered rooms, and all recipients of the other book to even-numbered rooms. Guests receive a card telling them which room number to move to, without telling them which book they got.

Your card arrives and you move to your new room. Are you now any less sure about which of the two books you have received? Presumably not. By your previous reasoning, there is now only a one in two chance that your book is The Beginning of Infinity, because it is now in ‘half the rooms’.

In other words, Deutsch argues the guests wouldn't be any less sure which of the two books they have received. But why not? Before, they were pretty sure they'd be receiving BoI – the odds seemed to be 999,999 in 1 million, after all – really close to 1. Now, the odds seem to be 1 in 2, so only 0.5. Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably that they'd receive BoI, now it's equally probable they might receive FoR.

To be sure, Deutsch uses this thought experiment to show that, due to the different probabilities the guests arrive at, they must be mistaken about their way of assessing them. But, within that faulty logic, it seems to me the guests should be less confident which book they have received. I think it should say 'Presumably.' instead of "Presumably not.".

Women also used to be considered crazy (and, to some extent, still are). In her Time article titled 'Declared Insane for Speaking Up: The Dark American History of Silencing Women Through Psychiatry' about women's-rights advocate Elizabeth Packard, author Kate Moore writes:

The received medical wisdom of the [19th century] was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick.

Medical scientism.

Women who studied or read—or who simply had minds of their own and a determination to use them—were demonstrating “eccentricity of conduct,” which meant they were “morally insane,” a diagnosis invented by James Cowles Prichard in 1835.

Doctors seem to have a knack for inventing fake diagnoses that get their patients in trouble.

[I]f drugs and straightjackets didn’t work, there was always surgery. Contemporary medical notes reveal that a 20-year-old woman who spent “much time in serious reading” and a 30-year-old wife who dared express “great distaste for her husband” were among those subjected to the latest treatment to cure female insanity: a clitoridectomy [removal of the clitoris].

Mistake epistemological problems for medical ones and you're liable to cause a lot of damage.

And there was only one way to escape: to submit.

Children face the same harsh reality in school. There is no way other way out.

Elizabeth Packard grasped the harsh reality: “If [women] remain, true to their natures, there is no hope for them.”

Brackets are in the original. Replace "women" with 'children' and the sentence still applies. So much so that I have adjusted the subsequent paragraph to apply to schoolchildren:

Every genuine emotion had to be stifled. Every act of difference from society’s prescribed model of [maturity/adulthood] had to be suppressed. Elizabeth could not display her anger at what had happened or even hint at hatred for her [teachers]. Her [teacher] was watching—and her [immature] emotion would justify continued incarceration. After all, [children] who had “ungovernable” personalities and “strong resolution…plenty of what is termed nerve” were literally textbook examples of [child] insanity.

Today, some "ungovernable" children are diagnosed with ADD, placed in detention, given bad grades, and so on.

Moore also shines a light on how much of medical scientism against women still continues to this day:

Think of Rose McGowan, whose resolve to hold Harvey Weinstein to account saw his lawyers discuss a plot to make her seem “increasingly unglued,” a memo revealed.

Still today, many women and especially children are "declared insane [...] simply for speaking [their] mind[s]".

In The Batman (2022) – spoiler alert, I guess – the Riddler says:

[E]very winter one of the babies die [...].

No, really. You can watch him say it here.

How did the director not notice this?

You seem to criticize the idea that brains and in-born brain strength affect our behavior and experience.

I criticize the idea that what we see in the image above is determined by whether we're "left-brained" or "right-brained", as the image claims. I do not doubt that our brains "affect our behavior and experience" to some degree.

What's "brain strength"?

Are you claiming every brain is the exact same universal computer?

No.

How do you explain phenomena such as autism, synesthesia, and intelligence differences?

I don't know enough about autism and synesthesia to say. Differences in intelligence are really differences in knowledge – more precisely, quality of knowledge. Those differences are easy to explain from a Popperian standpoint: two different people often come up with different answers to different problems (and sometimes even to the same problem). More generally, we all create different knowledge in response to the problems we face. As a result, your knowledge may be better in some regards than mine, and so you're more intelligent in those regards than me.

[...] I think it would be interesting to consider that virtue signaling sells more product by creating trust and thus is a capitalistic act [...].

To be clear, are you criticizing capitalism?

I'm not a native speaker but AFAIK 'blood money' is a common term meaning "money obtained at the cost of another's life". See, for example, the Breaking Bad episode titled 'Blood Money'.

Speaking more loosely/figuratively, it's money obtained through violence. (Although, referencing Ayn Rand, when it comes to taxation it's not as figurative as it sounds because "the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life". See The Virtue of Selfishness, chapter 12.)

But I've modified the article to link to the above definition just in case.

I have found four different endings to the same line in a quote by Xenophanes. In BoI, he is quoted as having said:

And even if by chance he were to utter
The perfect truth, he would himself not know it –

Note that the second line ends in a dash. Deutsch cites "Popper’s translation in The World of Parmenides (1998)." Popper does not use a dash – he uses a semicolon (p. 25 and 64) and a period (p. 84 and 137), respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it.

So Popper isn't consistent. (He is also inconsistent about ending the preceding line "Nor will he know it; neither of the gods" with either a comma or no punctuation.)

Deutsch's quote is a misquote either way since Popper never uses a dash.

In C&R, Popper likewise gives two differing versions of that second line, namely on pages 34 and 205, respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it:

One ends in a semicolon, the other in a colon.

David Hume is introduced twice in the same chapter (5), only a few pages apart (strictly eyeballing it from the distance in the ebook):

[A]s the philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events.

And then, a bit later:

[...] ‘you can’t derive an ought from an is’ (a paraphrase of a remark by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume).”

This second time, more information is revealed about Hume by associating him with the enlightenment. It would have been better to call Hume an "Enlightenment philosopher" the first time and then just refer to him as 'Hume' the second time.

Hume is not credited in the discussion of the problem of induction in chapter 1.

Kieren, I just stumbled upon a couple of passages in Popper's Objective Knowledge (1983, Oxford Clarendon Press in Oxford).

On p. 67, he speaks of "the logical justification of the preference for one theory over another" (emphasis removed) and calls it "the only kind of ‘justification’ which I believe possible [...]".

He also says on p. 7 (emphasis removed):

[T]he assumption of the truth of test statements sometimes allows us to justify the claim that an explanatory universal theory is false.

Do these quotes help your case?

I think there's an instance of the wrong-number pattern in David Deutsch's 'Taking Children Seriously and fallibilism':

[W]hat passes for rival educational theories all depend on structures of arbitrary authority [...].

The verb should be singular 'depends' because "what" is the subject, and it refers to a singular concept – hence the singular "passes". Deutsch mistakenly took the closer preceding noun 'theories' to be the subject and hence assigned a plural number to the verb.

To play devil's advocate, the word 'what' can be singular or plural. But if it were plural in the quote above, the verb would be 'pass' instead of "passes", and the beginning would read: 'What pass for rival educational theories all depend on structures' – and that doesn't sound right, either. So I don't think 'what' can be plural here.

Lastly, the sentence would read better to me if "rival educational theories" were singular as well. Since, if the number of the word "passes" is correct, whatever "passes" must be singular, it can only be one thing at a time that passes as an educational theory. So, ideally, to my non-native-speaker mind, the sentence would read: 'What passes for a rival educational theory all depends on' etc.

I just noticed that I erroneously quoted Lysander Spooner on a man's rights being his against the whole world twice – once in the main text, once in the previous comment, each from a different source.

I also noticed that the quotes are slightly different, so at least one of them may be a misquote in the given source. (I did verify that I quoted each source correctly; I didn't introduce the error myself.)

I thought of two more things people can do.

First, companies can aggressively poach government workers so there are fewer and fewer government workers left and it gets harder and harder for the government to function on a daily basis because it simply runs out of them. (The private sector has to be willing to pay higher salaries as government workers become scarce.) This approach can also promote the building of private alternatives to government 'services'. For example, consider private-security companies hiring cops.

Second, whenever you interact with a government worker, invite them to think about the source of their salary (it's paid with money that was robbed of peaceful citizens). Then, invite them to consider a switch to the private sector. Not everyone will be convinced, but if even a single person switches, that will be a win.

By the way, in my previous comment I wrote that people should "never work in the 'public' sector". To be clear, they shouldn't work for the public sector either – e.g., they should not accept government contracts.

Speaking of Popper's Open Society, somebody should look into how much overlap there is between his distinction between open and closed societies and Deutsch's distinction between dynamic and static societies. At the very least, Deutsch probably got the idea that one can and should distinguish between different types of society from Popper.

Because your [sic] expecting GPS to work because it worked in the past.

No. I'm expecting it to work because others have good explanations for why it works. Conversely, if those explanations stated that GPS only works for the hemisphere facing the sun at any given moment, I would expect it to work only intermittently. If our explanations said it will stop working in the year 2030 and why (maybe something changes about the universe that destroys it), I would expect it to stop working despite it having worked in the past.

In all those cases, our explanations tell us why GPS worked in the past and why and when it is or isn't going to work in the future. In no case does the explanation say it's going to work in the future because it has worked in the past.

I think you could have just answered “no” [to the question "If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?"] since we don’t have to be so careful about restating that we are fallible every time we answer a question.

So shouldn't I have answered 'yes'? Since "I may well" make the mistake of predicting the future from the past. (Note that it remains a mistake methodologically even if I happen to be right about the color of the bead.)

Circling back, this would mean that given 1000 random jars, you would not bet that the final jar contains a red bead, even though the previous 999 jars only contained red beads?

For you it would be just as rational to bet on a blue bead?

Depending on the explanation, yes. Knowing nothing else I probably would bet on the next jar containing only red beads (I think that's what you mean when you say "the final jar contains a red bead", emphasis added). But this strikes me as another case of distinguishing between the logical and the psychological. And, as always, it depends on what Popper calls background knowledge: what if I know the owner of the jars wants to fool me? What if I know there's at least one blue bead in one of the jars and we haven't found it yet? What if I'm at a casino and know a thing or two about how the odds are stacked against customers? What if I don't? Etc.

Is this not a case of using a theory based on its pass success (past testing)?

I don't think so. Why would it be?

Sorry, I’m still not sure how your referenced comments are answering my question. Could you please elaborate on your answer?

Not sure what you're looking for. You asked me if I break symmetry that way and I said "I may well". As in: I'm fallible. I may use wrong ways to break symmetry sometimes, even if I make an effort not do.

Comprimises are made to meet deadlines and a “seems to fix it, but not sure why” can be acceptable. The basis on whether to accept such a solution is often the result of repeated testing. If the bug doesn’t happen more than 1 in 1000, then that might be fit for purpose.

I agree that people do that (hopefully only as a last resort). Of course, then they might find that they can reproduce the bug 1 in 1000 times only in dev, and that in prod it happens every time, or every other time, or whatever.

BoI has a misquote of Popper's The Myth of the Framework at the beginning of ch. 9. I want to use it to showcase how one can find the differences between the quote and the original text. The following character-based git diff highlights the changes that were introduced in BoI (at least in the ebook):

The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store.↵ Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.

In other words, Deutsch moved a comma and replaced a line break with a space. (Maybe Elliot already pointed these mistakes out, I didn't check.)

You can find the original passage here, p. xiii. Presumably that's the same edition Deutsch used (it's from the same year, 1994).

When the programmatic equality check I suggested in the post above returns false, a character-based git diff helps you identify where the differences lie. Here's what I did to run such a check:

1. Created a file called original.txt containing the original text
2. Created a file called quote.txt containing the quote

3. In my terminal, ran:

   $ git diff --word-diff --word-diff-regex=. --no-index original.txt quote.txt
   

This command prints a color-coded diff similar to the one above. The option --word-diff-regex=. changes the command to create character-based diffs instead of word-based ones. Careful, however: removed line breaks won't show, for some reason. I've modified the diff above to indicate the removal.

Though word-based diffs may help, they shouldn't be relied upon exclusively because they're not granular enough and ignore some changes involving whitespace. Line-based diffs don't work well for prose because lines are usually long (each paragraph is really one long line) and so they likewise lack in granularity.

Another instance:

[T]he lies of the Uvalde police department is no longer front page news

They're multiple lies, so it should say 'are no longer'.

The error has been corrected.

Whether the deeper error – that the CDC can effectively temporarily revoke your citizenship – has been corrected remains to be seen.

Another instance of the wrong-number pattern from https://infura.io/:

Our suite of high availability APIs and Developer Tools provide [...].

It's one suite. Should say 'provides'.

I looked up the definition of the word 'psychopath' and the first entry here says:

A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized.

On the one hand, a lot of politicians' behavior isn't legally speaking criminal, but it's certainly morally criminal and also antisocial (even though it's often advertised as the opposite – like, some policies are promoted as being 'for the good of the community' when really they end up hurting the community). Politicians also usually have no empathy for those they steal from (their victims, the citizens) or coerce in other ways. One of the 'cloaking' effects of the enormous bureaucracy surrounding politicians is that they aren't the ones collecting taxes anyway but have minions doing that for them (IRS employees).

On the other hand, they don't consider their victims, victims but beneficiaries of their 'services' who are better off for paying taxes (and all the other ways in which politicians violate their natural rights). It's unclear to me whether a psychopath is only someone who knows they're hurting someone else and still do it, or whether it doesn't matter if they know. That determines whether most politicians are psychopaths or not.

Is a parent who beats his child and thinks it's for the child's best a psychopath or not? Does the classification really matter, or can we agree that beating the child is disgusting either way?

In any case, you asked:

[W]hat approach would you personally take, or you think would be better?

In no particular order: people should get a gun, become harder to govern, know their rights, build wealth, use and offer peaceful, voluntary alternatives to government 'services' (e.g. choose private carriers like FedEx over USPS for sending mail), never work in the 'public' sector, refuse to accept blood money in the form of government handouts (unless, maybe, their taxes offset them), make sure not to overpay taxes so as not to feed the beast unnecessarily, speak truth to power, challenge unjust laws in court... The list goes on.

I personally wouldn't take that approach but if somebody were to take it they might say they're still not fetishizing political institutions because they wish they didn't have to take that approach but see no other way. Maybe they feel like taking a shower every time they get home from Congress.

From Lysander Spooner's No Treason (number 1):

A man's natural rights are his own against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime whether committed by one man or by millions; whether committed by one man calling himself a robber (or by any other name indicating his true character) or by millions calling themselves a government.

And:

The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters and which of them slaves: a contest, that — however bloody — can never, in the nature of things, be finally closed so long as man refuses to be a slave.

And:

[I]f a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war upon it, he does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor — that is, as a betrayer, or treacherous friend.

And:

The governments then existing in the colonies had no constitutional power, as governments, to declare the separation between England and America.

On the contrary, those governments, as governments, were organized under charters from and acknowledged allegiance to the British Crown. Of course the British king never made it one of the chartered or constitutional powers of those governments, as governments, to absolve the people from their allegiance to himself.

And:

[Around the time of the American Revolution, any individual] had the same natural right to take up arms alone to defend his own property against a single tax gatherer that he had to take up arms in company with three million others to defend the property of all against an army of tax gatherers.

Thus the whole Revolution turned upon, asserted, and, in theory, established the right of each and every man, at his discretion, to release himself from the support of the government under which he had lived. And this principle was asserted not as a right peculiar to themselves, or to that time, or as applicable only to the government then existing, but as a universal right of all men, at all times, and under all circumstances.

[...]

This principle was a true one in 1776. It is a true one now. It is the only one on which any rightful government can rest. It is the one on which the Constitution itself professes to rest. If it does not really rest on that basis, it has no right to exist, and it is the duty of every man to raise his hand against it.

From Lysander Spooner's No Treason (number 6):

If [those alive during the founding of America] had intended to bind their posterity to live under [the constitution], they should have said that their objective was, not “to secure to them the blessings of liberty,” but to make slaves of them [...].

And:

The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes – a large class, no doubt – each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a “free man,” a “sovereign”; that this is “a free government”; “a government of equal rights,” “the best government on earth,” [...] and such like absurdities. 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.

No man can solve every problem in his life by himself. He depends, at least in part, on the knowledge of others, so he will want to cooperate. This is what holds society together—not government!

While reading the opening pages of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which I have just started, I was delighted to discover that he had independently set forth this argument hundreds of years ago:

[T]he strength of one man is so unequal to his wants [...] that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same.

Although a bit later he seems to set forth rather pessimistic arguments about man's inherent vices and that government is necessary after all:

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security.

As Logan Chipkin likes to point out, government is just made up of men, too – so if men have inherent vices, that affects government as well. In which case it's particularly dangerous to make government a privileged institution of any kind, especially for services as important as freedom and security. There is no reason at all private corporations couldn't be hired to defend the freedom and security of their customers.

Im Deutschen gibt es dasselbe Muster wohl auch. So sagt David Deutsch in einem Spiegel-Interview:

Am Anfang des Zweiten Weltkriegs sah niemand voraus, dass die Eigenschaften des exotischen Elements Uran irgendeine Rolle für den Ausgang des Krieges haben könnte.

Allerdings ist unklar, ob Deutsch denselben Fehler im Englischen macht und der Spiegel ihn ins Deutsche übertragen hat oder ob er sich erst bei der Übersetzung seitens des Spiegels eingeschlichen hat.

An instance of the wrong-number pattern observed here:

The emotions of a horse comes first [...].

Liam Neeson (or perhaps the screenwriter) makes a different but nonetheless interesting mistake in the 2008 film Taken when he says, in his famous 'speech' to the abductors of his character's daughter:

[W]hat I do have are a very particular set of skills.

It should be 'is' instead of "are" since the subject is "set" not "skills". 'Set' is singular; it doesn't matter that it's a "set of skills", i.e., a set of something plural. The set itself is still singular even if it contains many things.

In this example, the verb is closer to the subject than to the other (non-preceding) noun, so it doesn't match the wrong-number pattern I have laid out. I suspect it's unusual for such a mistake to happen, and rather glaring, too. They should have re-shot the scene.

Here's an article containing the grammatical mistake I mentioned:

[T]he full current of the scripts are breaking bad [...].

The subject of the sentence is "current", which is singular, so the verb should be "is" instead of "are". But "scripts" is closer to the verb than "current" so I guess the interviewee mistook "scripts" for the subject.

The same restructuring I mentioned before could correct the mistake while continuing to use the closest noun to determine the verb's number: 'The scripts' full current is breaking bad'.

Grammarly, an online writing tool, has also changed the colors of its logo to resemble the Ukrainian flag:

And they have added a banner at the top of their homepage saying:

Grammarly stands with our friends, colleagues, and family in Ukraine, and with all people of Ukraine.

They also link to a statement about the war. Judging by that, Grammarly's case seems to be more genuine and less about seeking approval since "Grammarly was founded in Ukraine; [their] co-founders are from Ukraine, and [they] have many team members who call Ukraine home". However:

We have also made the decision to block users located in Russia and Belarus from using Grammarly products or services.

It's not clear to me what good that does. It seems to only punish the citizens of Russia and Belarus, who are not to blame.

Grammarly's favicon (the little icon in browser tabs) is also in the Ukrainian colors, but for some reason the archiving site did not capture that.

As usual, some might argue that the cat just isn't very smart – meaning it doesn't have sophisticated knowledge.

That happens to be correct, but it doesn't explain why the cat is so utterly uncritical. Which, if it is true that being conscious = being critical, in turn means that any argument supporting the standard view, which alleges that consciousness arrives at some sufficient level of smarts, must fall flat on its face.

A cat going in circles several times chasing its own tail:

https://twitter.com/_Islamicat/status/1516069606041001985

To make matters worse, it already has its tail in its mouth, meaning it should feel its teeth on its tail and realize that a) it's bitten itself and b) it doesn't make sense to keep going.

Cats are clearly not critical. And, as I wrote previously:

‘[M]indlessly’ may be the same as ‘uncritically’…

Everyone suddenly pronouncing the Ukrainian capital 'Keev' instead of 'Kiev' is another thing that should make us suspicious.

[Dennis:] But we wouldn’t throw GPS out the window if we learned GR is false (and GPS would keep working the same regardless).

[Kieren:] But why? What reason do you have for thinking that GPS would continue to work?

What reason do I have for not thinking that? If GPS has worked at all, it's because some truth is encoded in its functionality. We don't know what that truth is, but to think that GPS would suddenly stop working if our state of mind changed is some weird version of solipsism or telekinesis or something.

[Kieren:] I agree that people often break symmetry this way, but do you? Given that you think it is invalid?

[Dennis:] As I’ve said, I may well.

[Kieren:] I’m confused which comment you are referring to here. Are you referring to breaking symmetry with the hard-to-vary principle? Because that would be a different principle.

I had linked to the wrong comment (parent comment instead of the comment itself; both ids appear on the same line so I may change the UI around that). I meant to link to #242. There's also #252. Bottom of each.

https://twitter.com/MinistryofTru16/status/1508152541292511235

I recently stumbled upon this Ayn Rand quote about beauty (I haven't read the associated work, so I may be misinterpreting something or taking things out of context):

[I]f you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you [corrupt] the concept of beauty. [T]o love [a woman] for her vices is [...] unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake [...].

From Atlas Shrugged, as quoted here, except the brackets are mine. Notably, without those brackets, the quote reads like something Rand would disagree with and might have an antagonist say in the mentioned work. But there's some truth in the unaltered quote, and the brackets are meant to help that truth come to light – again, with the grain of salt that I haven't read the book.

The altered quote above is reminiscent of Rand's stance on compromise. In 'Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?' from her book The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 93, which I have read, she writes:

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property.

As quoted here. Recognizing the ugly as beautiful is a total surrender in the same sense.

Unfortunately, the Ayn Rand Lexicon's entry on beauty currently doesn't load.

Do I have this right. You would continue using GR because you want the things it explains to keep working?

I was referring not to the things it explains but the things that depend on it. If we were to reject GR in its entirety, we'd also have to reject things that use GR. Like GPS (from what I understand). But we wouldn't throw GPS out the window if we learned GR is false (and GPS would keep working the same regardless).

I agree that people often break symmetry this way, but do you? Given that you think it is invalid?

As I've said, I may well.

A couple more thoughts on induction that I've had since my previous comment:

1. Supporters of two conflicting theories may observe several pieces of evidence corroborating both theories. As a result, they might become more confident in their respective theory as each piece of evidence comes in. As always, they'd be wrong to mistake their feelings about the theory for a truth criterion (or probability criterion). They'd have to be, since the theories conflict.

2. The other day, I was building an image upload for a website. Part of the feature was to display the images back to the user before he hit enter to confirm the upload. I noticed a bug: the images were sometimes displayed in a different order than the one in which the user picked them. That made it more difficult for the user to confirm his selection, so I set out to fix the bug. The nature of the bug was that I displayed the images in the order in which they were loaded, but larger images take longer to load, of course, so they'd be displayed later. I also noticed that the browser's file API gives me the images in the order in which they were selected by default.

   I fixed the bug by rendering each image's container immediately, in order, and then rendering each image within its respective container whenever it was done loading. Because the containers rendered in order, so did the images.

   Here's the thing: when I tested whether my fix worked, I did not try to make repeating observations. I hoped for non-repeating observations so I could still reproduce the bug and thereby falsify my fix! And when I did not reproduce the bug only a few times in a row, I stopped testing because I already knew from the explanation of how and why the fix worked that I should never see the bug again. I did not keep testing the fix in hopes of getting more confident in it. (That really would have been rather pathetic on my part – like I'm hoping to feel good about my code or something.)

Warren lies about wanting to regulate Bitcoin to fight Russia, when in reality, she wants to regulate it to increase government’s power over cryptocurrency and trade. As the linked article states:

The bill from the Massachusetts Democrat would grant the Treasury Department the authority to prohibit cryptocurrency exchanges under US jurisdiction from processing transactions involving addresses affiliated with Russians and would give the president the authority to apply secondary sanctions to foreign exchanges that do business with sanctioned people, companies or government entities, according to Warren’s office. The goal of the secondary sanctions is to force those foreign exchanges to choose between doing business with the US or sanctioned Russians, like its president, Vladimir Putin, and many of its oligarchs.

Even though the article is written to support Warren’s efforts, describing the phenomenon of people going about their businesses without government intervention as “shadowy”, its author, Jim Puzzanghera, does not seem to realize he’s betraying Warren’s purported intent by divulging her real one when he continues:

[The legislation] would require U.S. taxpayers engaged in transactions of more than $10,000 worth of cryptocurrency offshore to report those holdings to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
[…]
Warren has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrency, which she believes lacks consumer protections, destabilizes the financial system and adds to global warming because of the huge amount of computing power required to digitally mine bitcoin, Ethereum and other forms of the virtual currency.

The government using a foe as an excuse to increase the regulation of its subjects is a very common issue. As Thomas Jefferson said, “[t]he means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

As always, an unintended (?) consequence of any regulation of Bitcoin is that it makes it harder to use for law-abiding citizens and gives criminals, who by definition won’t abide by the regulation, a leg up over them.

Warren lies about her stance on freedom, making it sound like she supports freedom fighters. In reality, as you can see in the previous comments, she supports policies which rob people at gunpoint. If she really believed in freedom, she would work on reducing the government's size until it is gradually reduced to zero, or she'd at least work to outlaw taxation.

Warren lies about the cause of restaurants' struggles to stay alive, blaming "Republican obstruction", when in reality, it was government-perpetrated lockdowns that got restaurants in this mess.

A relief fund would, again, force people to pay for the 'revitalization' of the restaurant industry the government has been busy destroying. Are you seeing a pattern here? The government fucks up some industry through regulations, then comes in posing as the hero who extorts money from other victims to heal the first victims. Warren loves violence and extortion. Somebody once said the government is like someone who creates a fire on purpose and then rushes in to extinguish it to cast itself as heroic – only it's worse because it forces others, at gunpoint, to extinguish the fire it created.

She also uses the opportunity to cast herself as brave for facing said “Republican obstruction”:

[...] I’ll keep fighting to ensure they get help as soon as possible—even in the face of Republican obstruction.

Warren lies about there being "systemic racial and class inequities". Additionally, this is SJW language, which she uses to score points.

She lies about anyone opposing the violent funding of "COVID aid" not wanting to "be prepared for the next variant" when they could just oppose it for any number of reasons, including not wanting to fight disease with violence.

I suspect she lies about people who write in to her "about issues that touch their lives". Such as some obscure "Patricia F."

I suspect she lies about the cause of increasing gas prices. She attributes them to "Big Oil’s price gouging" while they seem to be caused by supply disruptions, high demand, and low production. In the same tweet, she lies about fossil fuels increasing America's dependence on Russia, when in reality, she has contributed to that dependence, as I pointed out in the main post above.

She lies by implying that seeking to make profits is immoral. (She has several other tweets accusing companies of "profiteering".) She then uses the moral pressure that creates to extort more money from corporations using what she calls a "windfall profits tax".

She lies about her motivations when she uses children, in this case a black girl, to show how tolerant and wonderful and accepting she is.

She spreads a lie that "[s]tudent debt cancellation is a racial & economic justice [sic] issue". She does this, again, to score points with SJWs. And I suspect the 'cancelation' of student debt can mean only one thing: to force people who did not take out student loans to pay for them. Calling it a 'cancelation' – as if you could just legislate away debt – when it's really a forced transfer of wealth is also dishonest.

Warren lies by implying that "roads, bridges, and childcare" must be provided by the government, i.e., financed at gunpoint, or else "[o]ur economy doesn't work". She also links to a CNN article that heavily focuses on women so she can score points with feminists.

I agree that you could proceed here without corroboration because the use of Newtonian physics is justified because you know that it is an approximation to your current best theories. However, this scenario is too different from the hypothetical I posed. Could you please respond to it?

OK your hypothetical was:

If we did find that both general relativity and quantum physics were false (in some aspect), what argument would you provide for your continued use of these theories? […]

E.g. general relativity is needed to keep GPS running and you'd want to keep that running while finding the successor theory to GR.

If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?

I may well.

Would your betting have anything to do with the fact that the last 30 jars that you randomly selected contained red beads? Does it make it easier if it was 10 thousand jars?

Psychologically, yes to both. People break symmetry this way all the time. That doesn't change the fact that, epistemologically, induction doesn't work, and that this way of breaking symmetry is invalid. It was either Popper or Hume who broke the problem of induction into the logical problem of induction on the one hand and the psychological one on the other.

I wasn't. Here's the link for those interested: https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/frequencies

The source code looks fairly close to what I do above. One difference is that they use another solution to the problem of inferring zero when a key does not yet exist:

(defn frequencies
  "Returns a map from distinct items in coll to the number of times
  they appear."
  {:added "1.2"
   :static true}
  [coll]
  (persistent!
   (reduce (fn [counts x]
             (assoc! counts x (inc (get counts x 0))))
           (transient {}) coll)))

Namely, passing 0 to get.

They also use transient and persistent!, which my solution lacks. It appears that without them, my solution will break when the map gets large enough.

Adding to my previous comment. You wrote:

If the animals knew something about human history, farming practices, etc then things would be different.

Yes – and if they don't already, they might conjecture something about that (assuming they can think like humans). If their conjecture is, as I've said, that their farmer only has their wellbeing in mind, then they are wrong every time, even if their prediction is correct some of the time. And if they wish to explain rather than just predict, that's a problem. Especially if it results in death.

Humans' situation isn't all that different as sustained failure to explain the world around us also results in death.

The reason I find it relevant is because self-referentiality could be an example of an alternate cause of consciousness, which would refute your claim that creativity is the only remaining explanation.

No because, as I've explained, creativity seems to itself rely on self-referentiality by way of self-replicating ideas. In which case it's not an alternate cause but part of the same cause.

Why don’t you think it is relevant?

Strikes me as largely if not entirely separate from the issue of corroboration.

To answer your question: the theory may be really good (“hard to vary”, to use Deutsch’s terminology). It may be harder to vary than all the other theories we have guessed so far. So it’s not just that a theory has survived testing.

This answer doesn’t satisfy me because I’ve come to see the hard-to-vary principle as essentially an account of corroboration/induction. I have an outline of my argument for this here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XL3yp1KfOLmnMSpUUA2GmiMLi7bxDg7Wj5E8j0MUZu0/edit?usp=sharing

I start to read the first line, which says:

David Deutsch’s hard-to-vary (HTV) criteria [1] is offered [...]

The verb is "is" so the subject must be singular. But the subject is "criteria", which is plural. It's one criterion. Foreign-language sounding words ending in -on are usually Greek and often end in -a when they're plural. E.g. phenomenon -> phenomena, lexicon -> lexica (or lexicons, but even there the point is you'd never say 'one lexicons'). I'm no expert on Greek, so see for yourself. Lots of people fuck it up and say "many phenomenon" or "one phenomena". Or when speaking they pronounce the last syllable so quietly you can't tell, to hide their ignorance. People get this wrong all the time but it's such an easy thing to get right.

Then, in the footnote marked [1], the title to Deutsch's book says "Beginning of Infinity". That's not the correct title. It's The Beginning of Infinity.

So I'm only nine words in and have already found two blunders, which makes me question how much value the document can offer. I don't wish to read on at this time.

Right, but those would be cases where you know significantly more than just the past success of the theory right?

Don't we always? We always have theories about our theories, background knowledge, expectations...

If we did find that both general relativity and quantum physics were false (in some aspect), what argument would you provide for your continued use of these theories? [...]

Instead of quantum physics, consider Newtonian physics, which also conflicts with general relativity and, as I understand it, is often used in engineering and experimental physics instead of general relativity, despite symmetry having been broken in favor of general relativity. Its continued use is not due to its having worked in the past (i.e., having survived many tests – on the contrary, I understand it has also failed many), but because the errors it introduces compared to general relativity in these contexts are negligible. We can know this from theory alone, without running any experiments. There may be other considerations such as Newton's equations being easier than Einstein's (I don't know if that's true, but it's easy to imagine other cases involving other theories where it is).

Do you not invoke corroboration then?

As you can see in my previous paragraph: no. I instead invoked two other properties: negligible error introduction and ease of use.

If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?

I may well.

Apparently being 'merfolk' is a thing.