TheVat

Chuckle. Some thought provoking posts all round. Greed, power seeking, and tribalism seem to be strong currents in the hominin brain. Mankind seems to be a nonstop war between the altruism/sharing/compassion pole and the greed/power/tribal pole. Ideologies, economics, techs, and religions all can serve as amplification mechanisms at either pole, though historically (see "somebody or other" et al) they tend to serve to the bad one more, given that power tends to hoover up as much of the memetic systems as possible and co-opt them into systems of crowd control.

And has a clever sense of humour... An El of a tale.

My translation remains ambiguous as to whether or not Odysseus gave up gluten. Matt Damon did, in order to better fill his character's shoes, or sandals. There is a fragment which has been attributed to Homer, "sailing upon the wine-dark sea to another land where none may partake of wheat or barley, and each man having minimal torso fat thereby..." Though not usually included in translations, as some scholars hold it to be a later forgery, it's possible Mr Damon drew inspiration there.

Probably not, but the way it has become trendy here in the States in the past decade or so makes it feel more neo. In my neck of the woods, no one spoke of mouthfeel until recently. In any case, my post was jocular in tone and not prescriptive.

The fine particulates theory has been a strong contender for quite some time, so maybe not as fresh as the article makes it sound. I was reading about dust-blocking asteroid winters back when Sagan et al had published their famous TTAPS paper (1983) on the mechanism of a potential nuclear winter, with parallels being drawn between the two. The OP paper said something about SO3 predominant. Let me look... If so, then far less radiation blocking by SO3 than SO2. SO2 is a relatively stable gas in the upper atmosphere. It persists long enough to disperse globally and acts as a precursor, reacting with water to form highly reflective sulfuric acid aerosols. But SO3 is highly reactive in the stratosphere, it reacts with water vapor almost immediately to form sulfuric acid, which limits its ability to spread evenly. Also, when exposed to solar radiation, certain byproducts of SO3 can break down, also cutting reflective effect.

Potus: my thanks to your agency officials for basically admitting the administration violated the Constitution! AP NewsWhite House admits it used keywords to kill billions wort...Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVIt’s an admission that lawyers for the research professors say is proof that the agencies illegally cancelled nearly $2 billion in grants. And that’s a major development in a lawsuit filed by UC researchers against the Trump administration to permanently get their grants back. The researchers’ legal team is now asking the judge in the case to skip a trial and formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing on whether that’ll happen is scheduled for Oct. 20. The federal agencies made the admission about the keywords in signed stipulations filed in federal court last week in a case called Thakur v. Trump that’s been ongoing since last spring. The stipulations in the court filing show the agencies “did not terminate any grants based on alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant” and instead used “general criteria, rather than grant-specific assessment of each award’s compliance, or performance,” the lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote. Lawyers for the UC professors now contend that the admission proves three wide-ranging constitutional violations: (...)

Yes. It has been overused. I'm sure there are better ones, like all triangles have three sides. A priori statements often contrasted with synthetic ones, like "All swans are white," which Karl Popper used to example as one which could be falsified empirically by the sighting of just one black swan (which eventually happened somewhere in Australia IIRC). And as Popper et al also pointed out, no amount of white swan sightings would ever have been sufficient to achieve certainty.

He said "crumb structure" - that's real science talk! Lay people call it "texture." While I'm on the topic, here's my least favorite food neologism: mouthfeel

Like, erm, "certainty"? 😉 That might be ol' Manny K's analytic truth - things we know with certainty because they are á priori truths which can be known without empirical support. All bachelors are unmarried. I stepped away from the thread for a while, mainly due to being a right-brain lefty who wearies of word fetishes and semantic wrangling. (is that why I like palindromes and wordplay? they tend to subvert the whole word game) (Like a bottle of JD, right?)

Some of the confusion was maybe with your line... "IMO "truth"is ultimately unattainable and is therefore reduced to a personal outlook, so discussions about whether it changes or not are moot..." ....came from perhaps the way you are using "truth" in a broad coverage of assemblages of true propositions, where some might prefer the word "paradigm" or "settled theory" or SLT. In philosophy, statements and propositions can be true or false, whereas assemblages of them would be rather a body of knowledge or what have you. So in the domain of this forum actual facts and true statements are quite similar things, and not at all about personal outlook. To be sure, personal outlook would be relevant when a statement is made about the relative proximity of (to revert to my example which makes inner 12 year olds giggle) Uranus and Cleveland, Ohio. But if my statement acknowledges my outlook (my geographic and solar system location) then it can still be universally agreed upon beyond my own subjectivity. In this time and place, Cleveland will always be closer. But here your idiosyncratic take will let you down, semantically. If a truth is not factual, then it never was a truth at all. If true has real meaning, then it shouldn't need the scare-quotes.

This seems to shift the defined meaning of true to fit your contrast. A true statement about reality can be just as immutable as a fact. Indeed, it's hard to see the difference, except that facts are generally synthetic (in Kant's sense), i.e. empirically based, while some true statements can be analytic, e.g. triangles have three linear sides. We don't need empiricism to state that about triangles because triangles are by definition three-sided. Same with "all bachelors are unmarried." Such truths might be called "hidden tautologies." Again, people are welcome to come up with idiosyncratic definitions of true/truth, but in the forum's domain of logic/epistemology, it seems more productive to use the formal definitions for that domain. Yes! That's the epistemological clarity one needs for finding an agreed-upon meaning. An approximation is true when it references (or implies) its own degree of approximateness.

Seems to be a prevalent notion in the manosphere that testosterone levels strongly correlate with tradmale attitude and physical prowess. (Often paired with the "soyboy" mythology) Doubt that endocrinologists would back that up.

So just toss out science, empirical observations, and other intersubjective agreements and let truth just mean "my opinion"? Toss out Russell? Toss out the dictionary, too? It's just my opinion that Uranus is farther away than Cleveland? Even after 250 years, hundreds of thousands of observations and measurements of Uranus (snicker), and the accrual of a vast mountain of unequivocal evidence... maybe Cleveland is actually farther away? As @sethoflagos and others have pointed out, truth and fact have been used synonymously for the past several centuries, and dictionaries have recognized this. It would seem to me that truth, by definition, is not just your personal perspective.

Seems like it would if the most common definition of truth, correspondence to a state of affairs in the world (Bertie Russell et al), were in play. It's a fact that Uranus is farther away than Cleveland. It's also true that Uranus is farther than Cleveland. In both statements, an ongoing correspondence to reality is key. Neither is just "a narrative," as I understand the word. Unless @npts2020 meant something different.

There seems to be a lot of doubt, actually. Because the symbols used in hieroglyphic writing look like little pictures of people, animals and objects, it's sometimes mistakenly assumed they were meant purely as pictograms, i.e. literally those objects. Scholarly summaries I've seen say some hieroglyphs signify sounds in the ancient Egyptian language, just as the characters in the Roman alphabet do. Others are ideographic signs, which represent concepts but don’t have a sound attached. This means language is being represented, and narratives - not just some procedural waggle dance.

NPREV battery recycling has a math problemFor some electric vehicle batteries, it costs more to recycle them than they're worth. That creates all kinds of problems, which a new Colorado law aims to solve.Colorado wants to get producers to be responsible for a battery's end-of-life path. And ensure that valuable minerals from EV batteries get recycled into new batteries (or if the batteries are still good, reuse them for power storage banks).

Same here - maybe it's that philosophy is a set of tools? As in, one can use them without taking on some identity. I own a blender and this morning puree some bananas and blueberries - it doesn't make me a blender. Good point. Both facts and true propositions can be contigent on time. Ancient Greeks believed the planet Venus was two separate celestial bodies. When it appeared in the east before sunrise, they called it Phosphorus, and when it appeared in the west after sunset, they called it Hesperus. While it was never true, or a fact, that Venus was two separate planets, it is true that Greeks once believed there were two planets and gave Venus two names. And it's also a fact that, due to a former false belief among Greeks, Venus had two names.

Emily advises on electrical engineering and rocket science.... Eva, wet a gap or propagate wave. At NASA, name caps "O," reaffirm riff. Aerospace man a Santa?

Probably. It is just a place for outrage to go, and possibly remind a few career people at the EPA (if their box is flooded) that their agency is out of step with the nation and the world. And that the Lard Turnip hasn't cowed everyone into submission. To your second paragraph: amen. I was thinking tar and feathers, but CECOT works, too. Perhaps both.

The EPA is proposing to weaken regulations on emissions from heavy trucks and buses with diesel engines. You can submit comments at this link: US EPAPublic Hearing and Public Comments: Amendments and Noncon...Comment and Public Hearing Information for Proposed Rule: Amendments and Nonconformance Penalties for Model Year 2027 and Later Heavy-Duty Highway Engines and Amendments to Inducements for SCR-Equippe

Nope. The breakthrough paper on transformer architecture was almost ten years ago. And IBM started messing around with large language models in the 1990s. Do your research. Maybe leave the AI assistant behind when you do.

Maybe his parents were black? 😎

The date bar froze, stopped registering taps, but the first couple guesses worked okay. Some guesses allow common sense, e.g. mud artifacts probably from an arid region. Greco-Roman statuary, stelae, reliefs, frescoes are fairly recognizable.

Glad you cleared that up! I think we can just accept that any true proposition about the world is what you have decided. After all, you're a self-proclaimed philosopher.

Sounds like you're having a go at taking the definition of procedural memory and altering it in some personal interpretation that doesn't really fit with what cognitive science has learned about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory