Otto Kretschmer

https://youtu.be/J11uu8L8FTY?si=jU9KlJ-rd8cQ3npm

Today I learned that box occupancy behavior is scale invariant within the Felidae family.

That meme mocks Prof. Kaku's controversial tendency to mix actual science with some dose of science fiction-inspired speculation 😆. Though i am sure you know that. He occupies a strange space between a respected academic and a hype man for the universe.

Veritasium rocks BTW!

I think this could be explained by the Flynn effect - if you gave a modern IQ test to 100 people from 1920, the average score would be around 70 which would indicate intellectual disability. I highly doubt that my great grandparents were stupid (they weren't, one of them actually ran a pretty large estate by the standards of the time).

A similar argument was used in the past to justify social inequality within western societies themselves, i.e. poor people are poor because they are stupid. There was also a supposed hierarchy of races within what is today considered white people, i.e. the British were (unsurprisingly) considered to be at the top of the hierarchy while Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans and the Irish were considered to be at the bottom. This directly led to Hitler's racial theories which combined with Italian Fascism and German nationalism (Volkism) resulted in Nazism. TL;DR: Not the best vibes IMHO.

James Randi supported Social Darwinism BTW. The thing is that intellect and personality are largely independent, the probablility of being in the top 1% of the smartest people (however understood) AND top 1% of people with best personality a the same time is 1%*1%=1 in 10,000. Very few people statistically speaking.

There are two kinds of freedom - negative and positive. Negative freedom = freedom from other people's interference Positive freedom = freedom to be able to actually do something The definition of freedom most commonly used in the US is negative freedom which IMHO is less important - it doesn't matter that you're "technically" free to stop working and embark on a world trip if you don't have the money to do that.

It's now up and running.

Bump. It's still down for me in Poland so I guess it's something much worse than a temporary server outage. Edit: What's up with those huge emoticons?

I can confirm that, I ran a controlled experiment to test this. It's down.

He was likely a narcissist. BTW, go to any communist- or USSR-related subreddit and say something negative about Stalin. Then observe the number of downvotes...

@sethoflagos A curious note - I've just read why Stalinist USSR wanted to ban quantum mechanics. The reason seems cringeworthy from the objective perspective - it was about the observer effect and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Soviet authorities believed that the idea of an act of observation collapsing the wave function is idealist since it's about mind influencing material reality instead of just being a product of it. There was also the second, less important argument relating to the Heisenberg uncertainity principle that operates on probability and supposedly refutes the dialectical materialist claim about the universe being a perfectly knowable, clockwork-like mechanism.

I don't get what you mean. Das Kapital is not a work of philosophy, it's an economic critique of the capitalist mode of production, it doesn't tell you what (or how) to do. Wikipedia is a good summary of what it is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital#Synopsis

You can take Das Kapital and combine it with a completely different philosophical framework, this is what Liberation Theology does (with Christianity), so does Analytic Marxism (with analytic philosophy). Das Kapital is a development of the economic thought of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, it's a separate thing from the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels which are mostly based on Hegel and Feuerbach.

Are there real humans behind these spam attacks? I find it puzzling that someone would put months worth time and effort to flood an obscure forum with spam. This stuff has been going on since July.

Me too, @ArzuOzoguz123 is a spammer.

It's scary to think what the situation might look like in 2030 when AI will be significantly more advanced than today.

Why not require everybody's first post to be approved by the moderation?

Why is this happening? Don't posts by new users require to be approved by a mod first?

For Plato, that was math.

Well... maybe.

According to Plato, our observable world is just an imperfect reflection of the Realm of Ideas which is, well, perfect (this is likely where the meaning of "ideal" comes from). The Realm of Ideas is where the perfect forms of various things exist, including beauty and justice but also dogs, cats, tapeworms or asteroids - since Plato argued that the real world is constantly changing and therefore it isn't a reliable source of knowledge. True knowledge, according to Plato, can only be deduced by pure thought (math and logic, not observation) So, what would the Form of Horse Dung be like? This is a half serious thread obviously.

Marxist analysis of capitalism is really a separate thing from Marxist philosophy, Marxist economics is a development of the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo while the philosophical part is based on Hegel + Feuerbach. There is a think called Analytic Marxism which takes the Marxist analysis of capitalism but combines it with analytic philosophy in place of dialectical materialism.