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Posts by Lanny
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2015-11-24 at 4:17 AM UTC in Dear America
I love that it literally makes you seethe that people own guns.
Seethe? No. Actually the fact that me personally not owning a gun, even in a country where it's fairly common, reduces my chances of being shot significantly makes me chuckle more than anything. -
2015-11-23 at 3:30 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Very Freudian, in a way.
It is, isn't it? Like in general, the whole psychedelic experience has an odd flavor of childhood and proto-sexuality, more noticeable at higher doses. Makes me uncomfortable sometimes, it feels really awkward and vulnerable. Sometimes on a strong trip I'll think I have memories from before I could talk. There's this really interesting paper about a researcher who found a dude who was deaf and mute and never learned sign language, I read it years ago and I remember after finishing it I spent a lot of time for a week or two thinking about what it would be like to not have any language. The commentary on it I read before the actual paper argued that this pre-language guy not only lacked language but the fundamental mental concept of symbolism, that one thing could stand for another. Like what would a mode of thought without indirection be? If a thing couldn't have the essential property of standing for another in some kind of system. The notion of axiomatic shift between systems. It's really hard to think about, but sometimes an intense trip feels like that, like the reference/referent distinction breaks down and it feels very childish. Like some kind of intense solipsistic collapse of reality and the thing it seems to remind me of is very early childhood. 2spooky. -
2015-11-23 at 2:22 AM UTC in Do you think Jesues ever wacked off?
Then he licked it off his hand and spit it into Mary's cooch, thus keeping her a virgin.
[/MYSTERY SOLVED]
bonus points for time travel I guess -
2015-11-22 at 11:02 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
I'm guna buy some 1p-LSD and hope that helps.
If you don't mind AL-LAD instead lysergi is doing a 20% until the end of the month and they already have pretty decent prices. -
2015-11-22 at 6:31 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm
I actually started reading this, got to:Finally, with a market economy being necessary for prosperity
threw up on my sleeve, and immediately closed the tab. The upside is that I can now reflect on it any time I need a cheap chuckle. -
2015-11-22 at 3:59 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Significant was the key word, which is subjective, unfortunately.
Take my example, bringing forward the discovery of antibiotics by a week. I maintain this is not something outside the grasp of even people of middling intelligence, a clever manager of an assembly line that noticed one step in reducing the manufacturing process of petri dishes should have reduced the price of same enough to have this effect. And the reward is a hundred lives saved. By what measure is that not significant?
Consider the significance you give your own life, and you probably give less than most but the fact that you haven't died yet shows you give is measurable significance (more than the costs of existing). Then multiply that by a hundred. That's how significant contribution to the future is, more significant than everything you've ever experienced combined. This is the ultimate ingroup bias, only the group consists exclusively of you. If you were actually able to think objectively, without bias, then you should give the same weight to the interests of others as you give to your own interests. Like if we operate on the assumption that humans have comparable richness of subjectiveness (and it would be incredibly arrogant to think otherwise) then no view that could actually consider itself objective should be able to differentiate between human actors in terms of significance of interests.But just look at the people around you, think about the masses, the average person!
The average person is a consequence of their experiences, your premise was that a person exposed to a certain set of experiences wouldn't be able to have a significant impact. There's a fairly readily available set of experiences that produce people able to make significant contributions, "normal science" is composed of many pieces of research by apt but not exceptional scientists (not that science is the only way in which we make progress).I'm not arguing you can't contribute anything meaningful, help humanity inch forward by being a cog, just that compared to the top fraction of a percentage what they contribute is orders of magnitude above that.
Sure, but why does it matter if someone does orders of magnitude better than you? When did it become a competition? If the level of contribution you do were the best humans could muster would that make you the happiest man on earth? You should be concerned about doing the best you can because that's the only thing you have control over, being as good as we can individually be is our only duty since we fundamentally can't do better.I remember you mentioning a while ago a study, although you may have said that it was often/usually misrepresented by (some/a certain type) in the tech/programming/com sci sector that showed the top x% programmers were y times more productive that the bottom z percent.
Right, they call it the "10x principle" or people who fit that description the "10x programmer" (yeah, it's that faggy). But I do have a definite sympathy for it, it's based in actual observations. God knows I see people who are a tenth as productive as others. I'll argue the split, I think it's probably a painfully visible low 20-40% who rather than being average (making the 10x programmer exceptionally rare and valuable) is actually just irredeemably shitty, below the actual average by a mile. But the interesting result there is that if people took the time to read a fucking book now and then they could stop being total dumbshits. Literally reading undergrad level textbooks and actually engaging with them is all it would take for know-nothing dipshits to come up to the level of competence it requires to be "good". And that should be encouraging! Not only is it possible for most to not be useless but the path from useless to not-useless isn't even that great. You don't need to discover relativity to do it, even the average joe is redeemable if only they would try. -
2015-11-22 at 3:16 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Lanny, you aren't hard science retarded, could we actually feasibly generate a magnetic field of sufficient strength at home, at a relatively affordable price, with an acceptable risk of death?
I mean if you want to generate a magnetic field with a specific (fairly low, if we're talking about "mimicking" what's natural to a human brain) intensity then sure, it's almost trivial. If you just need magnetism you can produce very strong magnets pretty cheaply (not like pocket change, but not too costly) but if you need high accuracy then it's different. MRIs (I've actually worked with before, incidentally) can produce very specific intensity/field direction (a caveat here, a specific directionality but only one within the field, but if someone ran these trials without a crazy budget and specialized manufacturing then that's what we'd expect this treatment involved) but they're very costly. They're also very strong in terms of the field they produce and the sensors (MRIs are only useful if you can take readings, presumably this TMS stuff doesn't require feedback), and software (absolutely fucking fascinating in its own right) would presumably represent a lot of a cost of an MRI machine. So I guess the answer is it depends on the the manufacturing process that presumably dictates the price of making an MRI machine.
But if you're asking if I think this has a snowball's chance in hell of turning out to be effective then I have to express extreme skepticism. Not only does "mimics the brains electromagnetic signals" sound painfully like a scam but the R in MRI stands for resonance. If you can't achieve resonance (have a device with a high level of field control) then the skull is totally opaque to imaging strategies (like CT). There would have to be a novel technique for skull penetration if something homebrewed (not an MRI and costing significantly less, even a well funded study would be unlikely to be able to develop this kind of thing) is used. I mean think about the actual mechanism of brain signaling via magnetism. Our atmosphere is very magnetically noisy, in the past but even more so now. We should be highly skeptical of a proposal for brain signaling via magnetism without an explanation of a shielding strategy and we seem to need to choose between the two here, if penetration via device is possible then we need to explain why other varieties of magnetism don't affect us in similar ways and if we deny effects of magnetism on the brain then we have zero reason to think this is an effective treatment. -
2015-11-22 at 2:14 AM UTC in "I'm an alcoholic"I do find that it's a lot harder to talk myself out of a drink than just about any other drug but I think part of the reason for that is that it's so unintrusive in your life. Like pot makes me pretty useless, benzos put me to sleep or make me want to watch TV for hours, psychedelics require like a full day and planning and shit and even stims which basically make me better at everything fuck up my sleep schedule and make me feel like ass on the comedown. But booze man, I can drink just short of blackout and do basically anything I usually do, maybe a little clumsier but sometimes significantly better and I don't think I could physically drink enough for it to be a real financial problem. It's hard to give up drinking because there's really not many reasons to stop, at least before a certain level of alcoholism where it starts fucking you over, but then you can do a lot of drinking before that happens.
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2015-11-22 at 1:04 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Oh and another funnything happened. This other lady over heard me talk to this other lady telling her my sons name and while I was out smoking I heard her in her car on her cell phone go on about 'how could she ever name him that? OMG blahblahblah' I dont really wanna even say his first name here, not publicly but its something my dad wanted to name me had I been a boy and has to do with arthinian legend/high fantasy novels. The other day at the library this old woman went on about 'how I didnt think about him getting teased when hes in school' my reply was 'atleast I didnt name him Sue'. Wtf is wrong with people and giving a shit about a name thats different. Its not like I named my child Shithead or Fuckface or Regret for fucks sake. Im blown away anyone cares so much. I dont give a fuck, I like his name and I think he will too, when hes older. He has a unique name and more than can be said for most people. lol his middle and last name are a whoot too. His last name is a pet name my dad would call me from when I was little and it would make me so fucking mad and he would laugh his ass off about. I did it because my dad would have got the ultimate kick out of it and wouldnt ever have thought Id do that. He was a jokster so he would have loved it. Fuck people giving me shit for a perfectly good name. Atleast I cared enough not to be generic and name himsomething gaylike Todd, Dylan or Robert. I thought long and hard about naming him something cool like my dad did with me had he got to name me. If he was gonna be naming a girl I would have been Galadriel.
Wait, so you actually named your kid Frodo?Insignificant, it will happen without me. Think about biology, realistically only a tiny percentage of people are really going to contribute significant advancements, natural born geniuses. The idea that you could take an average person, even above average, the most intelligent members here, and with the right experiences turn them into prodigies, is a fantasy. I accept reality whether I like it or not. And many of those are questionable, development has largely been cumulative, for most major inventions they were often independently recreated throughout the world, someone just happened to be first, have a somewhat better model, or got all the fame and glory for some other reason. Lanny may be happy being a cog, but I'm not at all, it would drive me mad(der).
Based on what exactly? This is just exposure bias, the notion that the state of the art only advances in significant ways through the work of a few super-intelligent individuals is a lie. We hear alot about the Newtons and the Einsteins but consider that Einstein doesn't exist the day after Opticks is published. While we can find examples where this isn't the case (ironically Newton/Leibnitz with calculus is an example, the differential calculus actually didn't require significant prior art since the greeks) it doesn't change the fact that even great shifts in human knowledge are largely preceded by a series of lesser discoveries, entirely necessary to greater discoveries. You should read Thomas Kuhn, I disagree with a lot of what he says but one of his big ideas is that human knowledge (science specifically, but I think it's an easily generalizable notion) has two phase, "normal science" which happens through a slower methodical process, has many contributors, and is largely our source of knowledge about the world (like specific facts, when we say "the earth is X years old" this requires huge systemic shifts in the study of astrophysics but to go from "big bang theory" to knowledge of the earth's age requires a lot of calculation and measurement but ultimately is an inevitable consequence of its antecedents) and then "special science" which is a shift in thinking, things like atomic theory, or from aristotelian physics to newtonian physics (or from newton to einstein) where the very terms we use take on new meanings and our perspective is entirely changed. Sure, it's true, being Newton is incredibly unlikely but there's this whole process of human activity which is necessary for newton to exist. Not only the discovery that fills the spaces between what Kuhn calls paradigm shifts but the whole endeavor of human activity, in this era the human activity which is necessary to a mighty system of manufacturing which is in turn requisite to any kind of science conducted today (while it's true that anyone can work on an assembly line for microscopes, biology is literally inconceivable in the absence of these devices). A fulfilling life is realizing this, realizing that based on your human, personal, ability to participate in this system is wholly requisite to the path from here to utopia. Sure, what's going to happen will almost certainly happen if you pitch in or not but if you can reduce the time to discovery X by even a day (if Alexander Fleming had been able to afford a few more petri dishes he might have discovered penicillin a week earlier there are actually like 100 human lives you've just saved, you personally could have manufactured enough petri dishes to make that possible) then that's a worthwhile contribution, but the great thing is even second rate dipshits with the appropriate skill can do much more than that.
Oh, you should also read Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science. He's a total douche bag but he has some similar kinds of ideas to Kuhn and something about his notoriously smug contrarian writing style makes me think you'd like him -
2015-11-21 at 11:50 PM UTC in Roshambo is deadLong live roshambo?
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2015-11-21 at 11:48 PM UTC in Signaturesspectral, you're the most terrified bitch on this site
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2015-11-21 at 9:39 PM UTC in Signatures
signatures are for peasants anyway
This, just disable them. They're ghey anyway. -
2015-11-21 at 9:08 PM UTC in Do fast food workers deserve a $15 wage?
Why is income inequality a problem?
Because human capacity to experience utility is largely uniform. Or even if it isn't, it doesn't cut along income lines. Income inequality, at least at the scale we see in the US, causes a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering.Isn't that how a free market works?
It is how capitalism works (I'd argue "limited free markets" can exist in many economic systems including mixed command economies) which is why I think capitalism is a fundamentally flawed system.The value of your work should be determined by what people are willing to pay for it, not by regulations.
Why? That's a normative claim. What about people's willingness to pay for thing_x gives someone who owns thing_x moral entitlement to that particular price for it? -
2015-11-21 at 9:02 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
Colours are perceived subjectively
Sure, I agree completely, but for the sentence "colors are perceived" to even make sense we would have to admit colors are not mere perceptions.and I do think that therefore colours are not objective.
Well that's simply a non-sequitur. If you want to lie to yourself that's fine I guess.I just have no more motivation to argue against someone as pedantic as you.
cool intellectual dishonesty bro -
2015-11-21 at 8:59 PM UTC in Are illogical thoughts an evolutionary advantage?It seems obvious that a logical agent will always have the advantage, in the limit, compared to the illogical agent. It's not "logical" to ignore potential survival risks unless the cost of reacting is greater, on weighted average, than ignoring them.
None of our ancestors and none of us are purely logical agents though, so among a field of "illogical" behaviours there are clearly some which confer advantage. So like our heuristic response to multi-arm bandit scenarios (e.x. do I forage the same place as yesterday where I found food or do I experiment), there's a logical optimum but you need pretty sophisticated mathematics to work it out. If some of our ancestors had the necessary mental abilities and had behaved as logically as possible then they would undoubtedly have survived better than those using the typical dopamine fueled reward/novelty tradeoff strategy. But like, that wasn't an option so what we get instead is "instincts" that work pretty well.
Since I'm claiming that higher logical capacity is going to almost always be a survival advantage I anticipate someone saying "then why didn't we evolve to be more logical" and the answer should be obvious. Evolution is not a process which produces global optimums, there needs to be a series of mutations/recombinations from some ancestral state to some future state wherein each generation has non-negative non-negative advantage relative to it's parents. Evolution by natural selection doesn't really provide a mechanism for descending from a local optimum to reach something higher. This is the same idea that irreducible complexity rests on (which gets bashed unfairly, it's actually a perfectly valid argument it just doesn't work out a posteri), having eyes costs something in complexity/energy consumption, if eyes evolved by natural selection then every phase of proto-eyes had to confer some survival advantage and it's hard to imagine a spontaneous mutation that produces a useful proto-eye (eyes being very complex, requiring changes in the brain as well as exterior physiology). -
2015-11-21 at 8:33 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?Glad to see you admit you were wrong.
Rainbow objectivity triumphs again. I'm gonna go down to the castro and tell everyone the good news. -
2015-11-21 at 8:30 PM UTC in The hard problem of consciousnessThat depends on what the meaning of is is
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2015-11-21 at 8:29 PM UTC in Do fast food workers deserve a $15 wage?
Serious Question: If minimum wage workers deserve an increase in minimum wage to $15/hour, do skilled workers who are already earning a higher wage deserve an equivalent raise?
If minimum wage were to increase by 40%, does a worker earning $40/hour deserve a 40% increase in wage as well?
No, because it's not the absolute earning of a given person that dictates spending power. The problem minimum wage helps to address is income inequality. If everyone's wages increase then income inequality isn't addressed, and wage increases across the board would actually result in universally increased costs of living (unlike basic income or increased minimum wage). -
2015-11-21 at 8:21 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
No, actually all you have done is made the claim that colour has an objective existence regardless of how differently it can be perceived subjectively.
You're right in that I have made an argument for the objectivity of color. We are, after all, talking about what the word "color" means. The difference, however, is that I've supported my position. I've given you a definition from the dictionary that supports the notion of color as a property of either light or objects, I've demonstrated this is common usage, and I've given you examples of rigorous technical usage that, in order to be coherent, require a definition of color which is different that the subjective perception of color. You on the other hand linked to a pop-sci article and tried to claim it demonstrates something it does not.I maintain that the fact people perceive colour differently demonstrates that colour is not objective
Yes, you've said that many times now. What you haven't done is addressed my argument for why "color" and "perception of color" are not synonymous.and I believe that it is a mistake to define colour as a property of an object considering the fact that different people will see different colours when viewing the same object. It is a mistake to define colour as a wavelength of light, considering the fact that the same objective wavelengths of light will appear to be different colours to different people.
Why? Again, people might perceive lavalamps differently, we have interesting cases of people perceiving faces differently (failing to perceive distinguishing aspects of faces), this does not make faces or lavalamps non-existent.These definitions are confusing the subjective phenomenon of colour
While you personally may be confused, the rest of us find a definition of "color" as a property of light to actually be quite natural because it captures common usage very well, while your definition doesn't capture it at all. What would be confusing is if every time anyone ever talked the color of an object in the world they were actually forming an incoherent though, we'd be left to wonder why we seem to be able to communicate effectively about color if the majority of our discussion if it were inherently self-contradictory, which is what would be the case if we accepted your proposed definition of color as correct.Colour may be commonly defined as an objective property, but simply being a common practice doesn't save something from being wrong.
No, it being a common practice does actually made me right. Because that's what a definition of a word is: how it's used by the body of people who use it. I've demonstrated how both common and technical usage is contrary to your absurd attempt at redefinition.Colour is also defined as a perception
Nope, it isn't. I've shown you the actual definition of color in this very thread. You're simply lying at this point.For your information, colour is defined as perception on both the wikipedia page for colour as well as in the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition for colour.
From the MW page:Full Definition of COLOR
a : a phenomenon of light (as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects
b (1) : the aspect of the appearance of objects and light sources that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation for objects and hue, brightness, and saturation for light sources <the changing color of the sky>; also : a specific combination of hue, saturation, and lightness or brightness <comes in six colors> (2) : a color other than and as contrasted with black, white, or gray
At best you can make the argument that we can use "color" to talk about both the perception and the objective property of light. Which doesn't help you because it means that we can say some color, that is the color that is the property of light rather than a perception, is objective and as such rainbows, producing both the subjective (perceptions) and objective (light of given wavelengths) varieties color still has an objective existence in the form of the objective sort.Those terms are just labels for different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Sure, but then every word in our language is just a label for something. This doesn't mean the things those words describe are subjective. "lavalamp" is just a label for a certain arrangement of a lightbulb, fluids, and glass. This does not make lava lamps subjective.What is the colour of radio waves Lanny?
We probably don't have specific names for bands of radio waves, just as we don't have specific names for every color in the visible spectrum. For example, #FFFFFF is white but #FFFFFD doesn't have a similar name, it's just a color that we describe as a RGB triplet. So we could name specific frequencies in the radio spectrum or we could just refer to them by wavelength.So far all you have done to support your claim that colour is objective, is define it as such.
That's right, because the topic at hand is "what is the meaning of the word 'color'", so I've given an argument for why color, or at least some varieties of color (including those produced by rainbows) are objective. I didn't pick my definition out of thin air, I'm using a definition that exists in dictionaries, which is in common usage, and in technical usage.I have now shown how colour can also be defined as a perception, and I have demonstrated that different people/animals do perceive colour subjectively.
That isn't even a coherent sentence. If color is perception then you've just said "I have demonstrated that different people perceive perceptions subjectively". How on earth could two different people perceive (the process of generating perceptions) a perception differently? What does it even mean to perceive a perception? One perceives objective things in the world, one does not perceive perceptions.Are you now able to demonstrate that colour is objective, beyond the common practice of defining it as such?
No, but there's no other way to say "X is objective" than to talk about the common usage of the word X. We're not even talk about the same thing otherwise.Of course a mirror objectively exists. But the mirror image I see when looking at the mirror is just an apparition.
OK, so let's just admit your definition of color as a perception for a moment. Now I can say "Of course rainbows objectively exist. But the colors I see when looking at a rainbow are just an apparition". How is this any different? By what criteria are mirrors objective and rainbows not?I am saying the phenomenon that leads to the mirror image (the reflective surface of the mirror) objectively exists, but the phenomenon of the "mirror image" (the appearance of a "mirrored version of me and the world around me") does not. Likewise, the phenomenon that leads to the rainbow (viewing water droplets exactly 42 degrees from the direction opposite the light source) objectively exists, but the phenomenon of the rainbow (the appearance a colourful arch) does not.
Great, so now you're trying to change the definition of a rainbow. It's no longer the phenomenon that results in us seeing colors itself, it's the actual colors. That's top tier retarded. So lava lamps again. There's a phenomenon that results in me perceiving lavalamps (a physical structure, the emission and reflection of light) but that's not what lava lamps are. Lava lamps are now the perception of that phenomenon, they're seeing that light or feeling that heat when touching them. And everyone knows we see and feel things differently. QED lavalamps are subjective.
By your niggertarded pretzel logic I can concoct some bullshit to demonstrate how literally every word you can come up with doesn't exist objectively. -
2015-11-21 at 8:05 AM UTC in "I'm an alcoholic"I drank for the first time in two weeks tonight. Booze is cheap and it's never caused me a problem so I'm really trying to quit but I find an alcohol tolerance has a tendency to mess with better drugs so I'm trying out a dry-out period followed by a drinking period and so forth. Not drinking for a year seems... exorbitant. Like they say, all things in moderation.
