Delta1212

Out of curiosity, what definition of crime are you using there?

As someone who did some work with "thought reading" machines and software in college and who is presently studying modern AI in his spare time, no one has anything even remotely close to the technology you are describing right now. There are numerous major obstacles that would need to be overcome in order for that to be accomplished and none of them are trivial, so we're not even talking "under wraps government project ten years in advance of what's publically available" type technology, let alone something that a large number of people would be capable of casually using in conversation with a random person off the street. I would do some research on cold reading, which is a psychological technique that gives the appearance of mind reading, often even very detailed mind reading, without actually doing any mind-reading. It relies heavily on manipulation, observation and a vareity of cognitive biases that the practioner to cue in on signals that people don't realize they are providing in order to walk them down specific lines of thought and probe for reactions that will cue them into successes and failures and then emphasize the successful guesses and downplay or redirect the failures before their target has had time to fully process when a mistake has been made, so it 'feels' like a constant stream of very specific successes when it's really mostly guess and check work done artfully enough to disguise itself from a normal person's perception.

While there are devices that can be used to extract some limited information from brain signals, most of them require extensive training of the device for the person, all require some degree of contact or very, very close proximity with your head and the amount and fidelity of the information that can be extracted is extremely limited. You can't read someone's thoughts directly and you can't extract anything without it being immediately obvious that they are doing it since your head is either inside of a machine or hooked up to a series of sensors. There's no way to covertly find out what someone is fantasizing about with present technology or even anything close to present technology.

Thinking about it, when someone says that something seems logical informally, that is actually what they mean. They actually are saying that something appears to follow from a set of axiomatic premises. The problem is that the judgment is often rendered without taking stock of what all of the relevant premises that went into that conclusion are, and is almost always offered up without also offering up said premises so that someone else can check to see whether the conclusion really does flow from those premises and also whether those premises are true. "It is logical that" always means "It is logical, given X, Y and Z, that" but you run into trouble when people don't take stock of their own X, Y and Z that lead to the conclusion, because it often results in them taking for granted that everyone agrees with those premises and that there is no fault in their (usually not very rigorous) thinking.

As long as we're analyzing this scientifically, might I put forward the hypothesis that the politics section getting so much traffic is a relatively recent and quite possibly transient phenomenon with a direct cause of at least set of causes? This is an English-language site. This year has been, for various reasons, very politically tumultuous for the two most prominent English-speaking nations in the world. There has also been quite a bit of difference between what has happened all during the course of the year and what one typically expects to happen in politics along with a run of major forecasting misfires not just on a punditry level (which always happens) but even down to polling and modeling. In both countries this has lead, directly or indirectly, to an unexpected change in leadership. That all comes together to make for a lot of discussion fodder both on an opinion level as far as how people feel about the changes that have taken place or, really in most cases, are set to take place and what they will mean long-term, but also what all the events that have taken place mean overall from a political science perspective, and how do we incorporate and account for all the things that have happened in future modeling and conceptualization of political events, and also what historical events might give us a better guide as to what is going on right now both at home and abroad. This is pretty much a peak time for political discussion so I'm not surprised that the political forum has gotten a lot of traffic this year and especially in the last couple of weeks.

There are lots of almost perpetual motion machines if you're defining that as anything that would run forever if it had no losses.

The right to public protest is a fundamental American value dating back to the Revolutionary period and I support anyone who chooses to do so regardless of whether I support the particular thing that they are protesting.

I would not be too quick to assume that generational and demographic trends hold across all countries.

"If you want to change it, amend the constitution" is not really an answer to the question of whether or not it should be changed.

You need to consider all evidence in the context of other existing evidence. Taken by itself, a piece of evidence can mean many different things. It is then tempting to go with the simplest explanation that can explain that piece of evidence. In fact, that is usually the best strategy. However, adding a second piece of evidence complicates things, especially if that evidence isn't compatible with the simplest explanation of the first bit of evidence. We don't make these situations complicated for fun. They are complicated because the evidence is complicated, and to really understand why we model things the way that we do, you need to look at all of the evidence that we have not just to one piece or even a small subset of it. Because taken one piece at a time, there are many possible explanations, some of them much simpler and more straightforward. But taking the entire body of knowledge we have accumulated, the simple explanations no longer satisfy all of the requirements that evidence places on an explanation. The tricky bit is that unless you dedicate your life to the study of a given field, it's quite likely that you will never have enough information to be able to truly distinguish between good models and faulty models that are missing critical pieces of evidence that you simply aren't aware of. You can rememdy that to an extent by asking questions about why such and such an explanation doesn't work, so I am not criticizing you for that and hope you don't take me as doing so. However, it's important to try to reserve judgment a bit and avoid leaping to the conclusion that you have found a serious flaw in the model and that you have a better explanation that is simpler and makes more sense in light of the evidence, because it is highly likely that you don't have all of the relevant evidence to base that judgment on.

Two things: There is no actual evidence that Trump had any influence on Ford's decision. However, even if we assume that he did: He claimed that he negotiated with Ford to prevent them from moving a plant out of Kentucky. What actually happened is that Ford decided not to move production of a specific line of Lincoln's out of that Kentucky plant, which they were considering doing in order to allow them to produce more of a different line of Ford cars at that plant. So at no point were any jobs at that Kentucky plant on the line. It was only ever a question of which product the plant was going to be producing. Yet Donald Trump explicitly claimed that he saved the plant itself from being closed down and moved out of the state.

Keep in mind that there is no intrinsic information about someone that can be told by their age. The reason that age is relevant is because of patterns that have been observed across many people at different ages that allow us to predict what is more likely than not. This still needs to be confirmed by direct testing, age just gives us a place to look and allows us to avoid wasting resources on things that are very common for a given age. This does not help with the universe because even if we knew the exact age because we do not have an accumulated knowledge of the aging patterns of multiple universes. We just have this one. Absolutely everything needs to be tested directly because we have no record of what other universes were doing at the same age ours is at nor a body of evidence telling us what we should expect as a typical universe continues to age. Knowing someone's age doesn't tell you what's going on with them in particular. It just allows you to generalize about what is normal for that age. But since we're dealing with a single universe, there is no "normal." There is just what is and what happens. And we don't need to make generalizations because we only care what is going on with this universe in particular and don't have any other universes that we need to move onto investigating the way a doctor has other patients and can't waste time and resources doing a full battery of tests for everything on every person that walks in the door.

Speeds do not add linearly, although this is really only noticeable at very high speeds unless you are talking about really crazy levels of precision. The maximum speed that anyone can every measure anything as traveling at is c. The maximum separation speed that anyone can measure between two objects that are both moving in your frame of reference is 2c. There is no frame in which any object will be measured as moving faster than c relative to "rest" in that frame.

Two things. First, infinite volume doesn't necessarily require infinite mass, although that's certainly a possibility. Second, if the universe is infinite, it has always been infinite, and the Big Bang is the process by which it went from an infinitely large and very dense state to an infinitely large and much less dense state. If there is infinite mass in the universe, there has been since the Big Bang.

Every election is, to an extent, a cultural referendum as much as a political one. In looking purely at potential political outcomes and objectives, I think you miss out on the possibility of cultural ones. Regardless of the intentions of individual voters who supported Trump, it is a fact that racist and white nationalist groups have been celebrating his victory in a big way and proceeding under the assumption that the country agrees with their views. It's entirely possible and, I think, even rather likely that a primary motivator behind a lot of the protest is as a pushback against this premise, challenging it through vocal opposition both so that those who subscribe to those ideas and those who are afraid of them don't take silence as agreement.

The other possibility, which I haven't actually looked at, is that Democratic leaning states have a larger average number of electoral votes per state than Republican leaning states. The more Electoral votes a state has, the more diluted the amplifying effect of the two extra "Senate" votes gets. A state with 30 electoral votes should tend to have around 28 times the population of a state with 3 electoral votes. So winning a state with 30 electoral votes is liable to net you a far higher vote total than winning 10 states with 3 votes each, even though the total number of electoral votes is the same.

MonDie, 538 did an analysis of past elections to attempt to approximate the electoral vs popular advantage of each party even when both lined up. Mostly by looking at "tipping point" states, defined as the state that puts the winning candidate over 270 if you start counting from the states they won by the widest margin. The theory goes that if there were any overall shift in the national popular vote across all states by fewer points than they won the tipping point state by, all of the states that flipped as a result wouldn't change the outcome, while a change of the margin of victory of that state or more would flip the election. Then you can analyze whether such a shift would flip the popular vote before or after the EC flipped and thereby see who had Electoral advantage. I'm not completely convinced of the accuracy of the analysis just because of the inherent assumption of how individual states would shift if there was a large change in the voting trends across the country as a whole. It's still interesting to look at, though, and the advantage isn't consistent from one election to the next despite Republicans winning when it actually made a difference to the outcome (I don't know whether this is a coincidental fluke or an indication of somewhere to look for the flaw in their analysis). http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-the-electoral-college-doom-the-democrats-again Also, incidentally, the votes for the current election are still being tallied, and it looks like Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in the popular vote is going to wind up being larger than 1%. Not by a lot, probably still sub-2%, but still the widest margin anyone has won the popular vote by and still lost the election.

Calling him out for doing the wrong thing (during the campaign) is what the protesters believe themselves to be doing. I watched his 60 Minutes interview. I thought he did well considering, but when asked about the protesters, he said that they had nothing to worry about under a Trump presidency, but also that many if not most of them were professional protesters and that many of their concerns were fabricated or exaggerated. That seems like a good way to reassure your supporters that people who are against you are just troublemakers without real grievances, but telling protesters that they're being paid to protest you seems like a poor way to bring those protesters into the fold and reassure them that their concerns are being heard. I was not impressed by him as a unifier in the way he answered that particular question. He's got plenty of time to turn my impression around: 4 years, in fact. But so far I remain skeptical.

My problem is not with Trump. It is specifically with many of the things he says he wants to do to the country. On things that I think will be beneficial, he'll have my full support to go do them. I think we definitely need to work on repairing and improving our infrastructure, so I'm glad to hear that is something that is being considered by his administration. At the same time, I'm waiting on the details of what that plan will actually be. I'm also not going to just shrug and say "We need to unite behind our new president" when I hear reports that his advisory team is already discussing the possibility of implementing a Muslim registry.

That quote came up during the primary. I think it was apocryphal, though.

Conservatives do a lot of things that I don't think are good ideas. If I did, I would probably be more conservative.

I think that comment was a mistake. But it's also worth noting that in context, it was a (true) comment that the members of a rather deplorable movement in the United States promoting racism and white nationalism were backing Trump as their preferred candidate, not a statement that everyone backing Trump was a member of this movement, which is how it was spun. One of the real problems with it was explicitly naming "half" of his supporters as being deplorable, which takes it out of the realm of purely factual and turns it into one of those "not meant to be taken literally" generalizations without solid facts to back them up that are so dangerous to play around with no matter who they are directed at.

Why do you feel that way?

But at the same time, you can't always just say that everything is a wash because there are people with in-built biases who believe things without regard to the facts on both sides. Because there are actual facts.

I've got the feeling that you could easily swap out the descriptor "black" for "poor" in that statement. Or you could leave it out entirely and make the generalized group simply become "men." Any single person can be put in a lot of different possible groups. It's important to take a long look at which groups they fall into that one is inclined to extrapolate their behavior for and ask why that group and not the others.