Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

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.

Regarding self-referentiality, I wrote previously:

I think discussing [self-referentiality] further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent [...].

You continued anyway. Then, later on, in another comment, I wrote:

[A]gain, discussing [self-referentiality] further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent.

That was the second time I recommended not discussing this matter further.

Now you're continuing again:

Other than for self-replication, do you think self-referential modeling within the brain is a possible cause of consciousness?

Why do you ignore my warnings that discussing this issue would lead us down a mostly unrelated tangent?

Separately, you wrote:

How do you account for the fields of social sciences and medicine where we often make use of a theory because of its survival of past testing, not because we think it is true [...]?

You wrote this as a quote but it's not a quote. Presumably this happened because you quoted one of my lines and then didn't put a blank line between the quote and your text. As you write your comments, check the markdown preview on the right before submitting them.

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. I could imagine cases where you have two rival theories, one of which survived testing and one of which failed a test, and you still prefer the latter. Or your preferred theory may be the only one that has survived testing.

I understand that we know in physics that at least one of general relativity and quantum physics must be false, maybe both, because they contradict each other. That doesn't stop us from using general relativity for, say, navigation, and it doesn't stop us from using quantum theory to explain the outcomes of double-slit experiments. And note that so far I have written this and the previous paragraph without invoking corroboration. Granted, physics isn't a social science or medicine, but why should it be different there?

Separately, you wrote:

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 ask you in turn: in the old example of the farm animals being fattened up every day and growing more and more confident that the farmer only has their well-being in mind, should they bet the day before the slaughter that the next day he will feed them again?

Amaro wrote:

Talking about plagiarism, I ran into this article by Temple accusing Dennis of plagiarising Temple in Dennis’s book A Window on Intelligence. The fact that I had found that article (I won’t link to it here, I don’t want to give the guy any traffic) by looking up his name on Google precisely because I ran into a bunch of citations mentioning his name in the book didn’t really lend Temple much credence when it came to his accusations. I had never heard of the guy until stumbling upon the citations that Dennis had bothered to include in his book. Mentioning this here might not amount to much more than gossip, but I did think that was very curious and I was wondering what was up with that. Is Temple just an unusually bitter person? His article was pretty hard to read, filled with righteous indignation and vitriol as it was.

In fairness, Temple's article is about the first edition of the book, which cited him less overall and less obviously. After he published that article, I pulled the book from the market, did a line-by-line analysis to see where he and others were affected, and switched to a rigorous Chicago-style reference system. The second edition is the result of doing that.

(Note to others: I have reached out to Amaro privately to alert him of this comment.)

New "German health minister Lauterbach calls for mandatory vaccination of the population as soon as possible, does not rule out further doses in this context."
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1472680462321479680

Following a suggestion from Roman Glebov,

Whoever owns the roads can make those rules and enforce compliance in exchange for letting others use them. This goes back to property rights: he who owns the roads gets to make the rules.

has been changed to

Whoever owns the roads should be free to make those rules and enforce compliance in exchange for letting others use them. This goes back to property rights: he who owns the roads should get to make the rules.

Changes are bold here but not in the text. These changes are necessary since even private-road owners are not entirely free to make the rules for usage of their roads.

Salmon wants Popper to show that he has knocked on the door of corroboration, and that corroboration growled back.

Did you mean to say 'and that corroboration did not growl back'?

Regarding the quote from C&R: you previously said Popper claimed that the social sciences are "useful instruments for predicting social behaviours [or] wellbeing". Your C&R quote doesn't contain anything to this effect.

Well, that seems to be the closest he came to addressing this particular criticism.

Popper wants to "adopt critical methods which have themselves withstood severe criticism". He would have addressed criticisms of corroboration. (I imagine there are examples of his doing so but I do not wish to look up the literature at this moment.)

If you think there is a better defence of corroboration I would love to hear it.

I don't care to defend corroboration because I don't need it.

So would you agree that it is at least plausible that some form of self referential modelling occurring within the brain could be the cause of consciousness?

It's more than plausible: I wrote that "self-replication [...] depends on self-referentiality" (emphasis added). But again, discussing this bit further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent.

Btw you need a hyphen between "self" and "referential" in "self referential modelling". In some cases hyphenation rules are confusing.

[...] the contents of the last earn is kept private [...]

"urn" and "are"

As an aside, I've noticed lots of people making the mistake of using mismatching numbers for the verb and subject of a sentence if there's another noun of a different number between them and therefore closer to the verb. It's interesting grammatically. Maybe some people's algorithm for determining the verb's number is to use that of what they believe to be the closest preceding noun. In this case, that's "earn", which is singular, whereas the subject is "contents" (plural), so the verb should be plural as well. People shouldn't use that algorithm because it doesn't work in cases like the one above. They should instead look to the subject's number, no matter how far away from the verb it is. If they have trouble remembering, that's easy to correct in writing: just read the sentence again and look for the subject and its number. Or they can write shorter sentences, or they can structure their sentences such that their algorithm does work, for example: 'the last earn's contents are kept private'. When speaking it's a bit harder; people could use shorter sentences so there's less of a possibility of another noun separating the subject and verb, and with shorter sentences it's easier to remember what the subject is while speaking.

I love languages and am interested in grammar, and writing well is an important skill, especially in discussions where misunderstandings are commonplace. (Though my notes on English writing and grammar should always be taken with a grain of salt since I'm not a native speaker.)

Sorry, I didn’t make it very clear, but the contents of the last earn is kept private as an analogy for consciousness.

My version is better because people shouldn't be able to look into other people's urns at all for that same privacy reason.

In any case, even drawing beads from a single urn, draw as many as you like, the drawn beads' colors are no indication whatsoever for the next bead's. That's the problem.

[We should] play it safe in regards to animal suffering.

You seem to be advocating the precautionary principle, which, for the reasons Deutsch explains in BoI, is a bad idea.

More disturbing development across Europe in the past few days:

• "German constitutional court rules curfews, lockdowns, and school closures were lawful amid pandemic." "The top court had received nine constitutional complaints against #COVID19 restrictions imposed in Germany earlier this year. All complaints were rejected." More info from state-financed news outlet Taggesschau here
• "Greece enacts compulsory vaccination against #COVID19 for those aged 60 and older."
• “EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: It's time to "think about mandatory vaccination" against #COVID19 across the entire European Union.”
• Video of public-health officials and police shutting down hairdresser in Germany
• "Germany to announce nationwide Covid lockdown for the unvaccinated"

I just learned that Popper did a similar kind of 'translation' as Feynman's, of Adorno and Habermas:

I can only say that when I read either Adorno or Habermas, I feel as if lunatics were speaking.
I have translated some of their German sentences into simple German. It turns out to be either trivial or tautological or sheer pretentious nonsense. I completely fail to see why Habermas is reputed to have "talent". I do not think that he was born less intelligent than other people; but he certainly did not have the good sense to resist the influence of a pretentious, lying, and intelligence destroying University education.

And again.

I'll only report new lies from now on, unless there's something notable about repeat lies.

'Anti-vacine=mandate demonstrations' is another example of nested groupings that occur in the middle.

The Netherlands arrested several people "as a precaution", according to Der Spiegel (Twitter lets you translate the tweet which quotes the Spiegel article – it's technically a misquote but the meaning is intact).

Here she is again lying about "giant corporations" not paying taxes.

In this video from May 2020 Deutsch says:

I'm always a bit perturbed when people have strong feelings about things like [...] 'is it moral to kill [and] eat animals', 'are animals conscious' [...] when they do not know what consciousness is. None of us do.

This quote is interesting because the way it is phrased it addresses both those who think animals shouldn't be eaten and those who think it's fine. I, too, find animal-rights activists perturbing (many of them are insufferable, really).

However, given the New Yorker quote above and his view on animals, I think the quote is really only directed at those who think animals are sentient. Especially because shortly before that he reiterates his view that all the relevant features of sentient beings arise on the same level of universality and cannot be reached independently. Also, those who think animals are not conscious tend to not feel very strongly about that because there isn’t some case to be made that ‘grave injustices’ are being committed against animals.

In any case, I explain how we can know that animals aren't conscious without knowing what consciousness is here.

Regarding "say you cut a puppy’s paw off, it cries out in pain, clearly it’s conscious, right? Clearly it is", I just stumbled upon this comment on Elliot Temple's blog quoting a "TCS [Taking Children Seriously] leader":

But what if the dog is howling and yelping? Can't we be sure it is expressing displeasure -- telling us that it does not want to do this, for example? No. Plenty of people howl and yelp doing things they want to do. Look at masochists. Look at various sportsmen. Look at me when I am trying to edit an article: I moan and groan and howl in a most alarming way (I'm told) -- but still I am doing something I really want to do.

I don't think there is such a thing as what a dog wants (in the sense of having individual intentions arising out of its own free will), but if there were, I don't think there would be any justification for assuming that it wants, for instance, to have a minimum of pain, any more than human beings always do. Human beings choose painful options over non-painful options all the time, and I am not just talking about masochists. It depends on whether the painful option seems better.

I suppose at this point it goes without saying that people should leave Australia and New Zealand immediately as well. That's been true for a while now. If they let people leave anymore...

"So stunning and brave"

Seeing tweets by @libsoftiktok reminded me to document the cultural decline happening across the West.

Apparently fat Hooters is a thing now. Cuz why be beautiful when you can be ugly?

I hope I'm wrong, but it seems as though Germany may soon need to be added to the list of countries to leave immediately. (They've been working up to it.)

Bild reports that an infographic on the German government's website stating "Will there be a vaccine mandate? NO. There will not be a vaccine mandate" has quietly been removed.

In addition, Bild quotes a government representative as saying that the removal was in response to a decision made by federal and state governments to force healthcare workers to get the shot.

But wait, you say. They just removed the infographic to be consistent. There still isn't a vaccine mandate for the general public. My response: the infographic didn't leave room for specific parts of the populace to be forcefully vaccinated. It didn't say: 'there will not be a vaccine mandate for at least some people'. It denied vaccine mandates categorically. Now a precedent has been set.

This development is a slippery slope politicians are already eager to go down further. Bild quotes several German politicians as entertaining a general vaccine mandate, and some of the media supports this trend. Consider this disgusting display by newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Tja, wie kam das wohl pic.twitter.com/x90avgCJxt

— Sauriermutantenduell 💚💚💚💚 (@RickVic2) November 22, 2021

Translated freely, it says:

November of Wrath

This November is a November of recurring discouragement and disappointment that this year will end exactly like the last one.

Does taking away the childish right of the unvaccinated to remain unvaccinated threaten to divide society? Nonsense. These people are robbing the sensible of their freedom - and governments have kowtowed to them as well.

Yes, nice.

Upon reflection, I've realized that I made a mistake in a previous comment when I implied that consciousness has nothing to do with self-referentiality.

I do think self-referentiality is an important part of any conscious mind, since my neo-Darwinian approach to the mind introduces self-replicating ideas within a mind, and self-replication in turn depends on self-referentiality.

What I do not think is that recursion necessarily plays a role in consciousness, which seems to be a very popular theory.

The mistake was that I read "self referential" to mean 'recursive', and while recursion is necessarily self-referential, it's not the only kind of self-referentiality there is, and another kind may well be an integral part to consciousness.

You can find an English transcript of my German interview with Deutsch here, and a transcript and German translation of our English interview here.

You can find a transcript and German translation of the English interview here.

Germany, my home country, has started specifically targeting unvaccinated people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-covid-vaccinations-christmas-transport-b1960065.html

Germany has agreed a series of tougher Covid-19 measures which stipulate that only those who have been vaccinated, test negative or have recovered from the virus can use public transport or go in to work from next week.

You won't be able to go in to work. They're taking away people's ability to make a living.

As if that weren't disgusting enough, ironically, their conditions imply that those who self-isolated successfully all this time and didn't catch the virus are treated worse than those who have had it. The former group are being punished for following the government's instructions. So why would anyone follow the government's instructions in the future?

“We are facing a serious emergency situation,” said Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, which monitors public health in Germany.

Haven't we heard this before?

“We’re looking at a horrible Christmas break if we don’t act now. We’ve never been as worried as we are right now. The outlook is bleak, extremely bleak. Anyone who can’t see how serious it is is making a big mistake.”

And this?

The normally cautious and mild-mannered [...]

Wow it must be serious!

[...] Mr Wieler said that the government had made mistakes by reopening too much of the economy too soon after an earlier lockdown in the spring, and that the country’s vaccination rate of around 67 per cent was simply too low to slow the spread of the virus.

“We’ve got to stop giving those who are unvaccinated chances to avoid getting it with tests,” he said [...].

As I quoted at the beginning of this comment, currently you can still go to work without being vaccinated as long as you get a negative test – which is a hassle and discriminatory in and of itself – but it sounds like Wieler wants to take that away, too. Which means if you don't wish to get the vaccine, you either won't be able to go to work or you will have to actively try to catch the virus so that you can recover and then go back to work.

So here's one of the country's leading health 'experts' punishing 'wrongthink' by forcing people to catch the virus.

Fuck you, Wieler.

[...] Don’t you agree that a theory requires such reasons in its favour to be rationally deemed as a good theory?

If I claim you cannot enter your bedroom because there is a tiger in there, you will naturally ask for reasons why I think that. Perhaps I will describe what I heard or show you pictures of the tiger. I would call these reasons that justify my claim. Don’t you think such reasons are required for me to persuade you in such a situation?

Depending on the details of the situation, that may well be the case, but it's the inverse that matters: it's that the absence of such reasons would cause me to dismiss the claim that there's a tiger in my room. Whether I then consider the presence of such 'reasons' a justification, or whether they satisfy me, is just psychological.

For example, if there really is a tiger in my room, then if I listen closely, I should hear growling or some other noises. At least eventually – maybe the tiger is currently sleeping. If I knocked on the door or agitated the tiger somehow I should be able to hear it.

Now, If I do hear growling that does not mean there really is a tiger in the room. It could be a recording, for example. Maybe it's a prank. It could be any number of things. As Deutsch likes to say, there's no limit to the size of error we can make.

Call failed refutations a reason in favor of a theory if you like – I think what's important is that we have a critical attitude toward our theories.

I think Popper explicitly presents the social sciences as a domain where corroboration is necessary. It is a science where we know the theories are not true, but instead approximations, or useful instruments for predicting social behaviours, wellbeing etc. [emphasis added]

That doesn't sound like Popper. It sounds like instrumentalism. But if you have a quote, I may change my mind. (Note the analogy to your tiger example here: I'm not asking for a reason your claim is true – it's that, if your claim is true, then it should be possible to provide such a quote, whereas if it false, it should be impossible to provide such a quote.)

Q: I have criticism X of corroboration. How do you respond?
A: My idea of corroboration has survived all criticism.
His theory surviving previous criticism is irrelevant to deciding whether it survives this particular criticism right?

Yes. But I don't think Popper would have given that answer A because he knew that past performance is no indication of future performance. He instead would have addressed criticism X directly, presumably.

For example, what if a level of self referential modelling within a program conjures up consciousness?

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this…

Do you have a refutation for this sort of idea and all similar variations? Perhaps in your FAQ?

I've written a little bit about self-referential stuff in my book. I think discussing this bit further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent but I do recommend reading the book in general.

Re the beads, I think your variation of my example needlessly breaks with consciousness being private, but yes it does contain the same problem. Do you see it?

Herd immunity is a collectivist's wet dream.

Kathy Hochul is the governor of New York.

New York's lawmakers should be less eager to pass new laws. From Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness, chapter 'Man's Rights':

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “rights” that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “printing-press rights” negate authentic rights.

This is the kind of legislation the country can do without:

Kathy Hochul signs bill today requiring utility companies use their customers’ preferred pronouns. So brave! pic.twitter.com/mzi74tq9lm

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) November 17, 2021

It seems that the best time to judge whether a regulation is necessary is before it's implemented, i.e. before an unknowable number of dependencies exist.