joigus

I still would like to know whether @Otto Kretschmer means 'motivated reasoning' in a sense that specifically can be phrased as, As defined in https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning

Thank you. I hope people who know more about this than you or me can illuminate the nuances. I must say I tend to see much that's going on among humans (in evolutionary terms) as a product of the needs of small clans having to struggle for survival 50'000 years from now until the present. Agreed. Cephalopods and corvids come to mind too for relatively complex congnitive features. Sea mammals and great apes immediately spring to mind, of course. I also find difficult to believe that dinausaurs didn't develop fairly complex cognitive abilites, given that they we here for more than 200 million years.

Where do you place the starting gun, then? I'm thinking now that I may have misunderstood what the words 'motivated reasoning' mean in psychology. If I understand correctly, it's about emotional bias. From https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning:

My take: For tens of thousands of years humans must have done well enough with mostly inductive thinking: It's always worked, let's keep doing it --in its crudest form. In order to do better than 'well enough', the most powerful driving force behind why people would have been led to motivated reasoning --that I can think of-- is: This time it didn't work. Why? Something like "we've lost two members of our clan, even though we did exactly the same. What could have failed this time?"

Most people, Oceanians, pharmacists and books would find this kind of listings categorically incorrect.

Unfortunately, no. I didn't say it was necessary though. It could be sufficient. It could be neither: only highly correlative statistically. But any illuminating comments on your part are very welcome.

Gravity plays a big part though, somehow analogous to the high stress that the authors of the paper mentioned for the case of fluids.

Brilliant. I didn't know the joke.

This is very interesting. Granules in any conglomerate are several orders of magnitude bigger than molecules, so this suggests that the surrounding processes, playing the role of a re-scaled 'solvent' perhaps? replicate what molecules would do in a fluid, only re-scaled. Does that imply something like landslides being pictured as some kind of re-scaled phase change similar to what the original post by @paulsutton seemed to imply? When I say 'solvant' I include air, water, the vacuum... The vacuum is a solvant, as far as any of us should be concerned.

I don't know, as the abstract doesn't mention what this phase change consists in. I would be surprised that it didn't somehow involve a discontinutity in the velocity field. Eg: They don't mention domain walls either, but I'm sure they are involved as well. Upon further reading, you may be right that it's more about density than velocity. As to the materials, it is my understanding that the fluids they use are mostly polymers, while they also claim the phenomenon is quite universal. I don't see where metals are involved, but again, I could be wrong, of course.

In fact the authors describe a sonic effect too, reminiscent of what happens in the case you mention. I agree on TOEs and quantum hallucinations, etc. This is much more interesting. x-posted with @studiot

Yes, the word "flow" threw me a bit off track. I should have understood that in your use of quotation marks. Sorry. I also said something incorrect. Namely, that fluids do not resist shear, which is incorrect. It's only correct for so-called ideal fluids. Viscosity is defined in a way analogous to a shear. By 'fracturing' and such I suppose they mean the velocity field experiences a discontinuous change. I'm inferring that from the text. But they don't explicitly say that. I don't know what other thing they might be referring to.

Dimensional analysis suggests this to be an exaggeration. At room temperature, glass viscosity is somewhere around 10²⁰-10²² Pa·s. Atmospheric pressure is of the order 10² Pa. The dimensional quantity with units of time that results is the order of 10²⁰ s, which exceeds the age of the visible universe by 3 orders of magnitude. Gravity being implied in atmospheric pressure. With desert temperatures it becomes a tiny bit more credible, but still... Edit: Sorry, atmospheric pressure is not 10². It' rather 10⁵ in Pa (different format for numbers here, I'm sorry). But still...

This has always been my understanding too, for a long time. But I hesitate to tell students glass is a liquid in which every molecule more or less keeps in place, just because there is no recognizable spatial pattern. Another criterion I seem to remember is liquids do not resist shear, which amorphous "solids" do. I would be more favourable to enriching the classification of different phases. It's been a long time since we know of liquid crystals. Planetary science introduces all kinds of different phases of either amorphous or crystalline materials too. Water alone can crystallise in many different systems. If I remember correctly, second-order phase transitions do not have a discontinuous change of entropy (which gives rise to a latent heat) and therefore are continuous. Yet they are still considered phase transitions in some sense.

Neither. But I've been known to say dumb things from time to time, and not to see things that are obvious to others too. It's bound to happen for everybody.

I'm more and more rusty on these things with every passing month, but doesn't the latter require S to be a closed set to be true? At the very least it requires a topology, if I remember correctly. Open subsets don't necessarily have minimal elements. I remember I still have a quiz/riddle on divisibility that you posed months ago pending. I'm sorry about that. Maybe you published the solution?

Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering whether that makes ketchup a smoothie. Common sense is knowing that ketchup isn't a smoothie. Your statement is neither knowledge, nor wisdom, nor philosophy; and least of all, common sense. Science is made of all of them, plus knowing when to drop one when the rest can do without.

Ancient traditions die hard. Peoples' identities die hard. So let me make your phrase a tad more nuanced: By around the 10th century the majority of Persians would be subject to the Muslim rule. Not "be Muslims". That I would agree with. If the local authority forces you to proclaim yourself a toad, under penalty of death, you will enthusiastically trill in response. But that doesn't mean you're a toad. There is a reason why modern Persians haven't forgotten they were once Zoroastrian, even after Alexander the Great burned their sacred book. They still hold a fire, they swear it was never put out, in honour of Ahura Mazda. There is a reason why modern-day Persians who don't necessarily believe in Ahura Mazda, deem it worth laying down their lives on behalf of their identity, quite independent from Islam. Which to me implies not all of these 10th-century Persians were actually that Muslim. Similar things happen in other parts of the world. It doesn't mean "I believe in my gods of old". It means: "You can stick your god wherever it fits in your anatomy".

For them (the Islamic regime) it's not about nuking the US. They know that's out of their reach by a loooong shot. They will not nuke Vanuatu either. The way they attack the US, and South America, and European countries, is by infiltrating different kinds of low-to-medium-level operatives (demonstrators, activists, terrorists, etc) and create havoc. "Strike terror in the hearts of the unbelievers", if my memory serves. They will do as much harm leading to destabilising the world order as they can: Israel, UAE, international trade routes, etc, with missiles and drones. Getting ordinary people to shit their pants in terror wherever their missiles and drones don't reach. See? This is the kind of ambiguous statements I honestly can't get past. Which Iranians? The minority in power since 1979, or the huge majority of Iranians whose culture is actually alien to Islam and had this parasitic culture imposed on them nearly 50 years ago? Looks like Ezra Klein is being deliberately disingenuous here. Let's rather talk about what the ordinary Iranians would want, and not what a clique of religious fundamentalists and the hitmen in their payroll would have it be.

Therefore you admit that article 5 of the Constitution of Iran refers to a historical event still to come. Now I ask you, what historical event is this, and why is it so central to Twelver theology? Literally, (from fis.iran.org). "May God hasten his reappearance" strikes me as calling for "speeding up the coming of the last Imam", which is what I said. As I do not read Arabic, nor Farsi, I cannot be sure this version is 100% free of bias, and I've had to rely on this English translation. About article 13: Allow me as well to point out that, "God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not fought against you because of your religion and who have not expelled you from your homes" implies that you can kill anyone whom you consider not to have fought against you. It's only that it is not forbidden not to kill them, not to rape them, or not to inject air in their veins, so they find a slow, painful death (as they have massively done recently). It's just not forbidden. You seem not to be that familiar with fard ayn and fard kifayah. (If others kill them and torture them, you don't have to). Fard ayn is praying five times a day: Nobody can do it for you. IOW: You must do it. Killing infidels, on the other hand, is another matter. That's fard kifayah. Somebody can do it for you. You don't have to kill an infidel today. Relax. That's what caliphates are for. In dealing with Islamic law, it is of the utmost importance that you can read between the lines, otherwise, they're gonna get you with taqiyya. Here: "Islamic justice and equity" = anything that Islamic law (Sharia) considers justice and equity, ie, treating politheists and atheists as scum that doesn't deserve to live, and monotheists as scum that only deserves to live under the Jizya. And be fair and just with all believers. One word can completely change the meaning of a paragraph. Religions, all religions, are a cancer of society. Some are more lethal than others though. All of them should, at the very least, be neutralised. I'm from a country that suffered 781 year of Islamic invasion. Sorry. We have (at least some of us do) a sixth sense to detect their BS. I didn't know this. Thank you.

From recent demonstrations and the savage repression by the regime, leading to more than 30,000 dead, I guess not. I already did. Please read my comment so I can correct any possible mistakes I made. I'm not an expert on the Iranian Constitution. What's more of an unknown is how much power of global annihilation they've been holding and advancing for all these years, hidden from view, knowing as we do they are committed to putting an end to this world. This is certainly my feel. What makes Trump tick is obviously basically money and power. He's only probably found it useful to spice up his political ammo with Christian fundamentalism. In this case of the Evangelist kind. I don't think he's a fundamentalist of anything.

Here: The lack of balance in the analysis. Also in answer to, On the one hand (worryingly, I admit) we have relevant people willing to portray what should be --and IMO essentially is-- a geopolitical/geostrategic affair, however ill-conducted, ill-motivated, etc as an eminently religiously motivated course of events. On the other hand (IRI) we have an echelon of highly influential, be-all-end-all fanatics, religious zealots of the coming of the end. So much so that they included it in their Constitution. Every waking hour they devote to speeding up the coming of the last Imam and are longing for Christ to come back to Earth, and "kill the swine", and "break the cross", and "abolish the Yizya", which, as you can imagine if you know anything about Islamic theology, implies either convert to Islam or die. The latter is not something they (here and there) utter, mutter or confide to others. They've written it in their law, they proclaim it. They accept nothing but it. It's the main reason for their existence. It is arguably fortunate that Sunnis (the mayority) are not in such a hurry to kill us all. The leaders of Iran have been for a while.

Shia Islam, in its Twelver version, demands (as is made explicit in the Constitution of Iran itself, article 5 --> ref. to art. 107 calling for the upcoming of the Mahdi) the coming of the End of Times (as implied by the reappearance of the Madhi), and clearly commends it as a desirable state of affairs. This is un undeniable principle of the Iranian Constitution. The ayatollahs and their acolytes long for the coming of the end of the world, as Christopher Hitchens so eloquently reminded everyone who would read/listen on several occasions. The fact that you are denouncing here to me sounds as the shadow of a shadow of a similar intent from members of the US military, although from a Christian viewpoint, and it strikes me as profoundly unbalanced in its scope, never mind some groups or subgroups of such institution being in synch with such delusional thoughts. "According to a report" and according to complaints made to "a watchdog group", and all of this reflected by "a certain paper", to me, is not enough. IMHO, the situation is bad enough as it is, without anybody trying to make it look like what's going on is another crusade from the Christians against the Muslims. Something it is not. This is playing with fire ideologically. It will take me one week at least to get up to speed with any answers on this thread, so please bear with me. I don't generally participate in these topics, but in this case accuracy is of paramount importance.

Oh, he does many, and always fills them with something of his own. There's a wonderful Rick Beato interview too. Here it is:

It rings a bell: