Viewing profile — erasmuse

>What would change your mind? Something like historical examples of fundamental breakthroughs in science or great works of art produced by committee. Criticism is for stuff one doe…

I don't have a dog in this fight but surely neither the government nor anyone else gets to define what ordinary English words mean.

I doubt it. New ideas develop slowly and can't be communicated or explained until they are ready. If you look at creative intellectuals they work alone or, rarely, in pairs. Discus…

I suspect the answer will turn out to be the same for food and alcohol: have periodic breaks from both to allow the body to recover. In the case of food this is now called intermit…

>Some people are just attracted to the crazy unknown Yes. "Find what you love and let it kill you" somebody said. And most people don't feel safe unless they're living fearfully cl…

>Don't forget the scene where the rabbit warren is gassed. Good point and you're not the first to point this out to me today. I may have to amend my thesis...

Yes, our understanding gets more refined the more we learn. It remains messy, error-prone and incomplete. So the solution can never be to learn things 'well' or get things right fi…

The 1978 movie adaptation is superb and deeply memorable. Voices actors include the great John Hurt and Richard Briers. Here's a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGyQmH9NZcw …

Shouldn't you begin your sentences with capital letters? :-)

We want to explore the solar system... and there are these marvellous parcels of kinetic energy and expensive rare earth elements whizzing around the place. With built-in radiation…

>do they also share common memories? Indeed! The way I see it, identity derives from memory. So to the extent (if any) that they share identical memories they are strictly the same…

No no. The routine is a space for unstructured improvement. Nor is there such a thing as repetition in learning. Every attempt at gaining skill is at least slightly different and i…

Well, alternative medicine that actually works is usually re-labelled medicine. e.g. vaccines are thought to have had origins in China way before the scientific revolution. An exce…

Humans mostly don't eat sweet stuff for calorific or nutritional purposes. Rather I think they enjoy puddings, cakes, chocolate, and so on, for psychological reasons (comfort, plea…

Sure but I could be reading even further ahead if I didn't have to carefully trace the horizontal line from a tied note (to see if it stays on the same level or if it jumps to anot…

What should humans have instead of sugar?

I think modern musical notation could be improved by making a more readily apparent distinction between phrase marks and tied notes. As it is one often has to read ahead on a tied …

Yes. We are irrational in rearing and educating human children for example. Sandboxing. Is it like this? http://www.ptaugustacsc.sa.edu.au/images/sandpit.jpg Or like this? https://…

>Imagine being in a software team and disregarding what others are doing? I think the application of 'disregard others' to this case would be to ignore what other software teams wo…

What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then neither do most intelligent…

Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity i…