Viewing profile — pdonis

It's unfortunate that the Greek word eudamonia , which is the one Aristotle used, gets translated into English as "happiness", which is open to so many misunderstandings, particula…

> Aristotle, being an endless questioning guy he was I dunno--as far as I can tell Aristotle never asked the slaves who supported his philosophical lifestyle what they thought abou…

LLMs don't have the connection to reality that humans have. LLMs only have text. That's the difference.

> what does that mean for Maxwell equations? Nothing. They're still just as valid as they were before. > For electromagnetism? In practical terms, nothing significant. It's not goi…

> most of the proofs I've looked at appear super messy and chaotic to me (while still being correct of course, so it doesn't matter) How do you know they're correct if they're supe…

> Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". I just mean that your brain can do lots of other things besides Bayesian reasoning, and most of them can't be…

> They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in repl…

> We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism. We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes …

> Dawkins never had much of a research career. Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative. Unfortunately, when h…

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't pr…

> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in. Twain wasn't a poet. The article specifies right at the start that it's looking for a great American poet.

> n any system of mathematics with enough complexity to be interesting, there are statements that cannot be proven true or false. Note that the article itself is not as careful as …

Lewis Black once said that swearing has a point--it is how we express a sufficient level of rage and anger against something extremely dysfunctional. What should we say, he asked: …

I'm no fan of the government trying to regulate such things, but I won't shed any tears if infinite scroll is forced to go away. It's one of the things I hate the most about the so…

> there is global historical temperature data Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long tim…

"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed." Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. H…

> I thought neutron stars generally had a shell or crust of iron, which generates a magnetic field (as metals do) if the neutron star is spinning. They do, but the neutrons themsel…

> The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours Ok so far. > and you can divide that by 60 twice I'm not so sure. The concept of 24 hours in a day originates in civil timekeeping…

> The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours and you can divide that by 60 twice. And that's exactly why the SI second has the length that it has--to be as close as possible i…

> we nailed down the second to make the technical side easier at the expense of relatability. Would you also say that getting rid of leap seconds and allowing UTC to gradually drif…

> The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history. In terms of what physical process we use to set the standard, yes. But those very changes…

> If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydro…

> the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon. Yes, but averaged over an entire year, it still comes out to zero. The difference between mean solar and atomi…

> Why? Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined? > It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. Which is why I specified on …