I am in the University of Maryland, but I cannot make it to the meeting this Friday. I hope to be able to attend the next one!
Alejandro1
And who said I am coping well with TVTropes? ;)
Similar, for those who enjoyed discussing this problem: Did you know that Newtonian mechanics is indeterministic?
Related to atucker’s, but I had thought of posting it independently:
This sentiment [that evil is unreal and the universe is perfect], which as much as any other deserves the name of pantheism, is often expressed incoherently and with a false afflatus; but when rationally conceived, as it was by Spinoza, it amounts to this: that good and evil are relations which things bear to the living beings they affect. In itself nothing—much less this whole mixed universe —can be either good or bad; but the universe wears the aspect of a good in so far as it feeds, delights, or otherwise fosters any creature within it. If we define the intellect as the power to see things as they are, it is clear that in so far as the philosopher is a pure intellect the universe will be a pure good to the philosopher; everything in it will give play to his exclusive passion. Wisdom counsels us therefore to become philosophers and to concentrate our lives as much as possible in pure intelligence, that we may be led by it into the ways of peace. Not that the universe will be proved thereby to be intrinsically good (although in the heat of their intellectual egotism philosophers are sometimes betrayed into saying so), but that it will have become in that measure a good to us, and we shall be better able to live happily and freely in it. If intelligibility appears in things, it does so like beauty or use, because the mind of man, in so far as it is adapted to them, finds its just exercise in their society.
I thknk that is an actual quote from Preinagrf (or if you prefer, from Cvreer Zraneq), not created by Obetrf.
These equations don’t make sense dimensionally. Are there supposed to be constants of proportionality that aren’t being mentioned?
That is my guess. The simplest way IMO would be replace the g in eq. 1 by a constant c with units of distance^(-1/2). The differential equation becomes r″ = g c r^1/2, which works dimensionally. The nontrivial solution (eq. 4) is correct with an added (c g)^2 in front.
it’s not obvious to me that a curve such as he describes exists.
I’m not sure what you mean here. What could be wrong in principle with a curve h = c r^3/2 describing the shape of a dome, even at r = 0?
Oh, I see now. Nice!
You piqued my curiosity, so I sat to play a little with the equation. If R is the usual radial coordinate, I got:
dh/dR = c y^(1/3) / [(1 - c^2 y^(2/3))^(1/2)]
with y = 3h/(2c), using the definition of c in my previous comment. (I got this by switching from dh/dr to dh/dR with the relation between sin and tan, and replaciong r by r(h). Feel free to check my math, I might have made a mistake.) This was easily integrated by Mathematica, giving a result that is too long to write here, but has no particular problem at h = 0, other than dR/Dh being infinite there. That is expected, it just means dh/dR = 0 so the peak of the dome is a smooth maximum.
Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Secret Miracle”.
Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as those ways don’t exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.
I’m picturing it with an impressive array of references at the end, and side remarks on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarsip.
According to certain versions, Chuck Jones and his team established a set of rules for the cartoon (such as “The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote” and “Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy”). One of them is supposed to have been:
The Coyote could stop anytime—IF he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” —George Santayana).
My interpretation of the original quote was to take “see that 5 + 4 is not 6” as “prove that you cannot prove that 5 + 4 = 6″, in other words, “prove that Peano’s arithmetic is consistent”. Maybe I was too influenced by this.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the “Enlightenment” (and “rationalist”!) French Revolution
To add a related data point, the same thing happened in the rest of Latin America. Abolition of slavery was of the first measures of many of the revolutions against the Spanish in the early 19th century, which were heavily inspired by the Enlightenment. Brazil held out a few decades more, because slavery was a lot more integral to its economy.
In the words of Chesterton’s Father Brown:
“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?”
“Well, well,” cried Flambeau irritably, “what does he do?”
“He grows a forest to hide it in.”
In short: Solve the self-fooling problem by replacing it with a self-FOOMing problem.
Wikipedia on “Benign Colonialism”:
[These views have support by some academics. Economic historian Niall Ferguson has argued that empires can be a good thing provided that they are “liberal empires”. He cites the British Empire as being the only example of a “liberal empire” and argues that it maintained the rule of law, benign government, free trade and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour.[12] Historian Rudolf von Albertini agrees that, on balance, colonialism can be good. He argues that colonialism was a mechanism for modernisation in the colonies and imposed a peace by putting an end to tribal warfare.[13] Historians L.H Gann and Peter Duignan have also argued that Africa probably benefited from colonialism on balance. Although it had its faults, colonialism was probably “one of the most efficacious engines for cultural diffusion in world history”.[14] These views, however, are controversial and are rejected by many who, on balance, see colonialism as bad. The economic historian D.K Fieldhouse has taken a kind of middle position, arguing that the effects of colonialism were actually limited and their main weakness wasn’t in deliberate underdevelopment but in what it failed to do.[15] Niall Ferguson agrees with his last point, arguing that colonialism’s main weaknesses were sins of omission.[12] Marxist historian Bill Warren has argued that whilst colonialism may be bad because it relies on force, he views it as being the genesis of Third World development.[6]
Strictly speaking these are arguments for colonialism as good, not for decolonization as bad (maybe these authors believe colonialism was a positive stage compared to the previous status quo, and decolonization is even better) but they do not seem to fit with your stereotype of academic views (“blaming Europeans and their descendents for all the world’s problems.”) I found this with a two-minute search; I suspect a more thorough one could find also perspectives sceptical of decolonization.
I agree both on the memetical relation between Christianity and progressivism, and on the likely receptiveness of LW to this idea. My guess is that most of sam’s downvotes are not for the intellectual content of his/her postings but for their style, that seems intent at scoring political points as opposed to finding truth.
Hello everyone,
I am a 31-year-old physicist and have been following LW since before it split from OB. It is one of the sites I spend most time reading, even though I never delurked before—I suspected, probably correctly, that it would induce me to spend even more time in it (“Less Wrong Will Ruin Your Life”, as TVTropes might put it). However, I have recently moved into an area where regular meetups are going on, so I thought it would be worthwhile to get involved in the community and try to meet some of its members.