“Ought implies can” in that linked article is about the present and future, not the past. There is nothing in that principle to disallow having a preference that the past had not been as it was, and to have regret for former actions. The past cannot be changed, but one can learn from one’s past errors, and strive to become someone who would not have made that error, and so will not in the future.
Richard_Kennaway
Karma: 2,678
I don’t know what AllAmericanBreakfast had in mind, but for “random connection with strangers for open-ended conversation”, what leaps to my mind is Usenet. In its heyday it was wonderful. It took a blow from Eternal September, but in the end I believe it was blogs that killed it As soon as LiveJournal invented blogging for the masses, most everyone preferred to write in their own personal space on the net instead of the town square, and left in droves. In principle Usenet still exists even now, and a few pockets of it still have sensible activity, but it is as lichen creeping on rocks compared with the tropical forest it once was. It is at least fifteen years ago that I finally left, recognising that I only still hung on out of sentiment for what it had been.
The standard Christian answer to the question of deliberately going to heaven early is that our presence here on Earth is like being a soldier on duty. The soldier may not leave his post, no matter what happens, until he is stood down by his commanding officer, i.e. God. Suicide is tantamount to desertion, and a sure ticket to hell. Instead he must serve faithfully until that day, whereof no man knoweth the hour, when God says, “thou good and faithful servant, now mayest thou depart in peace.”
I doubt, though, that many Sunday school teachers would be able to present that very well. Their job is really just to provide religious-flavoured childcare, taking the little mites off their parents’ hands for a while.
I can’t match any of that up to Conant and Ashby’s paper, though.
As you say, the engineers designing a thermostat have a model of the system. But the thermostat does not. It simply compares the temperature with that set on the dial and turns a switch on and off. There is no trace of any model, prediction, expectation, knowledge of what its actions do, and so on. The engineers do have these things, the proof of which is that you can elicit their knowledge. The thermostat does not, the proof of which is that nowhere in the thermostat can any of these things be found.
The hunter is an obscure example, because no-one knows how humans accomplish such things, and instead we mostly make up stories based on what the process feels like from within. This method has a poor track record. More illuminating would be to look at a similar but man-made system: an automatic anti-aircraft gun shooting at a plane. Whether the control systems inside this device contain models is an empirical question, to be answered by looking at how it works. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. There is such a thing as model-based control, and there is such a thing as PID controllers (which do not contain models).
“Ratio breaks.”
I’ve never been able to make sense of the “Good Regulator” theorem, and in the original paper (linked in that Wikipedia article) I cannot map their terminology onto any control system I can think of. Can you explain it? Because it seems obvious to me that a room thermostat contains no model of anything, and I can find no way of mapping the components of that system to Conant and Ashby’s terminology. Their own example of a hunter shooting pheasants is just as opaque to me.
I have seen, more than once, rumour amplification get nipped in the bud by someone asking, “Hang on a moment. What did you actually hear them say?”
aAlice should be comparing people’s statements to reality, rather than to each other or to her own, as we should be doing with aAlice’s. Reality is the Rosetta stone that deciphers all languages.
How does the batch() procedure terminate? It contains an infinite while loop, within which there is neither a return or a break statement. Maybe there are some goings-on concerning termination of threads, but that is beyond my knowledge of C or C++.
I didn’t vote on it either way, but I read the Forrest article, and if someone made a top-level post promoting the “Drama Triangle” I would very likely give it a strong downvote. It’s yet another universal Procrustean psychological theory, every possible response to which can be shoehorned into the theory itself.
I also found the first paragraph of Valentine’s comment icky. It comes across to me as histrionic emoting, and I would not care to encounter that sort of thing addressed to myself. But it was addressed to lsusr and it is up to him how he takes it.
Thank you for writing this. I’ve been considering whether I should switch to self-assessment for some time now, and this might give me the impetus.
I don’t know what “STD” means.
I haven’t seen the form, but in the context of a phone number, STD would mean “subscriber trunk dialling”, a phrase that younger readers may never have encountered. It’s a new-fangled technology that obviates the need to place long-distance phone calls (“trunk calls”) through an operator. In the UK it was introduced in 1958. Nowadays, an “STD code” is more usually called an area code.
The selfish jerks would not be rational, as they wouldn’t be winning. That’s what the game theory is about.
The game theory is independent of morality. In some such games, winning happens to involve being good to your neighbours. But in others, winning may involve doing evil to your neighbours. It would be nice if the morally best action (“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour”) were always to be the selfishly winningest one, but while the examples have this property, I do not think it has been established in general.
Your morality is a part of your goals, what your instrumental rationality is pursuing. Therefore there is no conflict between them.
The rest of the post seems to be about game-theoretic issues, and I don’t see a connection to morality there.
As a Brit, I can confirm what TAG says. The word is here pronounced “hiccup” and spelled either like that or as “hiccough”. I think “hiccough” is older, and I’m not sure how often it is currently used.
Do Americans write “hiccough” and pronounce it “hickoff”?
Yes: this page contains a link to his solution.
Yes, I’ll grant that “causal” doesn’t fit so well for mathematics. Yet even in mathematics, people still talk in terms of “why” and “because”.
Talk of causation happens, but talk avoiding causation also happens, for example the EDT and action-as-prediction ideas that I mentioned.
My aside about Hume referred to the passage where he gives two different definitions of causation in consecutive sentences, yet asserts them to be equivalent:
we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.
“Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”, V,2,60. Emphasis in the original.
The first of these is the idea of constant conjunction, or as we would now call it, correlation, and the second is the idea of a counterfactual statement. Many have remarked on this contradiction.
I came up with a few other theories, although they all have in common that the Things are trying to make us see things we do not want to see.
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The Things are the bottomless Pit of Suffering that is this world. Most people frantically try to not see this, but most of those who truly comprehend go mad, either wearing themselves out with useless efforts or screaming at everyone to see the suffering. A very few are able to find peace in working ceaselessly for a better world, while knowing that their greatest efforts are but a drop of water in the ocean.
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The Things are agents of those outside the Matrix who are trying to wake us all up from our illusory lives. Unlike the “nice” version depicted in “The Matrix”, most people who they awaken go mad. The few who can deal with it know that the most urgent task of all is to wake everyone else up. Birds are agitated around the Things because birds are not real. They are agents of the Matrix keeping the population under surveillance, and hostile to any effort to wake us up.
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The Last Judgement has already happened, and we are in Hell, a condition so intolerable that we have shut ourselves off from it in our imagination. Each one of us is the sole occupant of our imaginary world. Everyone’s world is different, and different from the original, pre-Judgement world. The Things are intimations of our true condition, that we have not been able to entirely shut out. Birds are strange. Look at the bird-like figures that appear in Hieronymus Bosch’s visions.
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In a sense, there are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, “Curiosity killed the cat” vs. “La curiosité a tué le chat.” French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn’t have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of “the” is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.
English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries. and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.