Prometheus

On 9/24/2020 at 1:53 PM, studiot said:

Poetry aside, one of my reasons for wanting to opt out of the EU is that I don't want my children or grandchildren to be involved in Europe's next war.
I'm sorry to say the same old pressures are building up again.

I wanted to stay in for the very same reason (except i guess it'll be me fighting in the war) - the EU was formed primarily as a peace keeping entity by tying economies so tightly together war between members becomes unfathomable. 

What old pressures do you see? Russia? Serbia? Whatever the pressures, surely the approach should be to stick together not divide. 

If anything the EU seem very reluctant to go to war, to the point that they should have done more in the Balkans a few decades ago. 

On 9/24/2020 at 1:53 PM, studiot said:

In my view, the correct action for the UK government would be to take no action except to promote good relations.
A border is not necessary.

Isn't that what the EU is pursuing, but most Brexiteers want a border between it and the EU (Eire) - wasn't that the whole point of leaving, to regain control of our borders and all that jazz?

17 hours ago, studiot said:

As a reasonable question asked in a reasonable manner; yes I think they were.

What exactly about the GFA worries you ?
What do you think I am suggesting the UK should / will do ?

I don't know about the GFA nearly enough to comment. My point is only that US diplomats can reasonably claim to have a stake in process. In a similar vein i believe the UK has a moral obligation to stand up for Hong Kong citizens against Chinese measures. China can rightly claim we are interfering in their politics - i don't see that is necessarily a bad thing. 

15 hours ago, CharonY said:

Remainers, especially if being honest realistically could only offer business as usual and indicate the economic harm of leaving.

I agree with Studiot on this one. The Remain campaign should have opened with various Churchill quotes favouring European integration, even coining the term United States of Europe, and ended with an excerpt from one of England's great poets, John Donne: 

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.

Weren't the Americans important in brokering the Good Friday agreement? If so it seems they can reasonably claim to have a stake in the matter. 

Can someone give me sanity check. I've been doing PCA in matlab and python with sklearn and been getting slightly different results. Here's a toy dataset to illustrate:

In Matlab:

ty =

  -1.383405780000000   0.293578700000000
  -2.221898020000000  -0.251334840000000
   3.605303800000000   0.042243850000000
   1.383405780000000  -0.293578700000000
   2.221898020000000   0.251334840000000
   3.605303800000000  -0.042243850000000

[~, ty_sc] = pca(ty)

ty_sc =

   -2.5821    0.3192
   -3.4260   -0.2174
    2.4038    0.0184
    0.1787   -0.2954
    1.0226    0.2412
    2.4030   -0.0661

In python with sklearn:

from sklearn import decomposition
ty = np.array([(-1.38340578,  0.2935787),
          (-2.22189802, -0.25133484),
          (3.6053038,   0.04224385),
          (1.38340578, -0.2935787),
          (2.22189802,  0.25133484),
          (3.6053038,  -0.04224385)])
pca = PCA(n_components=2)
ty_pc = pca.fit_transform(ty)
ty_pc

array([[ 2.58213714,  0.31918546],
       [ 3.42598874, -0.21739117],
       [-2.40383649,  0.01842077],
       [-0.17871932, -0.29536446],
       [-1.02257092,  0.24121217],
       [-2.40299915, -0.06606278]])

Notice how the scores in the first columns are identical but for the sign. If all the signs were flipped i could understand, and it would make no difference to follow-up analyses, but just having one column flipped seems weird. This makes a huge difference when you feed these scores into an LDA classifier which i'm doing with the real data. 

As far as i can tell both techniques are centering and scaling the data in the same way. Any ideas what's going on to produce the difference?

If we're talking terminators, i.e. assassination, then something like the imagined slaughterbot is a more realistic goal.

You're just missing a pair of square brackets.

On 6/13/2020 at 10:28 AM, Strange said:

The most popular machine learning frameworks seem to be TensorFlow and PyTorch. These are both based on Python.

Recently tried both these frameworks: Tensorflow is nothing like Python, it's like another language embedded in Python. Pytorch has much more 'Python-like' syntax, if you're familiar with numpy, Pytorch will be simple. However, the community support for Pytorch is currently paltry compared to Tensorflow. Either way, Python is a good start.

I don't think the language matters as much as learning the fundamental concepts of ML though.

12 minutes ago, Ken123456 said:

I do not know of more than one creator God.

Here's a list a well over a hundred.

16 hours ago, joigus said:

Ok. It seems we disagree about this, even if only mildly. The arguments I've heard or read that have convinced me that some rituals and religious practices may have played a positive part in the remote past are those that contend that some kind of centralized authority, plus a set of rules to decide what to do could have been an efficient way for a group of people in which disagreement can easily emerge, to take a decision and stick to it.

But things that stay with us don't have to be good. Parasitic entities have their own evolutionary "agenda." They grow and prosper among us. The only mistake they must avoid making is being so damaging to their host that they manage to extinguish it.  Examples of it from biology are the common cold or the measles. Examples from the world of memes are faith-based religions and the Flat Earth Society.

Genes also have their own evolutionary agenda - was that not Dawkin's great contribution to evolutionary theory, that the unit of replication is the gene not the organism?Wouldn't memes be the same? Therefore i don't think it's useful to think of some memes, like religious ones, as particularly self-serving - they all are.

But we can think of memes that better serve the organism, in this case the cultures they exist in. Perhaps some religions are more suited to secular societies than others. But then evolution is a blind process and what constitutes better? By some metrics religious countries do very well.

My guess is that the changes to the memetic landscape that social media brings, and the click-bait maximising algorithms that appeal to our reptilian instincts which drive it, will change the selective pressures towards favouring extremist religious interpretations. But then i favour the Greco-Roman tradition and they're known Cynics.

12 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Then would you please do me a favor and forget about the literal, and convert the following statement into a sensible framework?  Thank you.

God the father was so upset by A&E's sin of disobedience, that He barred all people from heaven, until His own son would be born and die a hideous death to please Himself.  This is comparable to the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan belief in blood lust of their gods, who craved human sacrifice.

I've already given an account of the Genesis myth. The Jesus myth is from several centuries later. If you see how terrible and inconsistent the Star Wars prequels/sequels were compared to the original 50 years later then i can well understand why the Biblical mash-up so poor.

A generous reading of the Jesus myth is that human sacrifice is no longer needed, because god has sacrificed himself/his only son for us. I'm not going to defend Christianity too much though, i think it was a regressive step even 2000 years ago when compared to the Greco-Roman traditions to the west and Vedic traditions to the east,. In the bible sacrifice comes up many times (Abel and Cain, Jacob and Jesus). Each instance demands that the best of humanity is demanded. But in the Greek myth Prometheus urges mankind to keep the best for themselves, tricking Zeus to take a lesser sacrifice. The Greek myths challenge mankind to aspire to godhood  - which is the greatest sin, Lucifer's sin of Hubris, in the Christian tradition.

My interpretation is that the blossoming of man is regarded as terrible in Christianity (although i don't think that's true of the Jewish myths), but as glorious in the Greco-Roman tradition.

11 hours ago, joigus said:

I think religion is very much like a skin tumor...

Why the Bible took the form it did, I think can be understood largely in terms of history and archaeology.

If we think in evolutionary terms, meme theory, then religion must have served quite a strong survival function. If it was so malignant, it developed so early in mankind it would have been like getting a childhood cancer - not something you survive in the natural world. I think a more accurate analogy would be to compare it to something like the appendix: something that helped us survive in the past, which became thought to be useless in modern times, but has been found to still serve a function for some people.

Religion can can understood in terms of psychology and sociology too. The Greeks said that you can know a people by the idols they revere. Religions have their idols, as does the secular world. 

8 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

How many people are trying to tear those statues down?

At least one Gandhi statue has been removed in Africa, and a new one stopped from being put up in the UK, due to his well documented racist opinions of Africans.

1 minute ago, MigL said:

IOW, next to useless.

Depends on what else happens, but i fear it could be worse than useless. On the one hand authorities and individuals can simply start removing monuments, hence being able to say 'look we tackled racism', while doing nothing to address current problems that disadvantage various communities. It could also provide recruitment material for far right groups (i'm sure the recent defacing of a Churchill monument will feature heavily in their propaganda). That's not a reason not to remove monuments, but since they will ensure there is a price to pay, what we get in return should be worth it.

9 hours ago, Airbrush said:

I think this is the basic story, the basis of Christianity.  Correct me where I go wrong:

The mistake, for the religious or non-religious alike, i think is to take the stories literally. Taken as frameworks they make more sense.

The forbidden fruit ( Milton's Paradise Lost solidified it as the Apple) symbolises knowledge, particularly of good and evil. The first thing Adam and Eve notice after eating it is their nakedness - they can now discriminate between themselves and a potentially hostile world and so seek to place barriers between it and themselves. The most interesting aspect of this story is that this coming of knowledge is cast as a bad thing. (Also interesting to note is the role of the serpent - later interpreted as Satan - in bringing about insight in humans. There is a theory that snakes provided the selective pressure that developed the human visual system to such a high degree. Perhaps a hint of how ancient these myths reach back).

Compare this to the Greek myth of how humans acquired divine knowledge. Prometheus, the bringer of light (incidentally the same meaning as the name Lucifer), gifts the divine fire it to mankind (again, that theme of light, fire is also probably one of mankinds oldest technologies, both bringer of life and death), so incurring Zeus's wrath and much liver pecking. However, the key difference is that this acquisition of divine knowledge is seen as a good thing, not something to be punished. Herakles, one of the greatest Greek heroes, repays Prometheus by rescuing him from Zeus's punishment. However, humans don't get off so lightly, with Zeus tricking Epimetheus and Pandora (the first woman, so equivalent to Eve in that respect) into opening her jar (or box), thus unleashing all the torments man experiences (hope being a silver lining or the final torment that makes you endure all others depending on your disposition).

Both stories cast our acquisition of divine knowledge as the source of our suffering (indeed humans do seem able to suffer in a unique way compared to other animals). However, the Greco-Roman lineage sees that burden of knowledge as our bridge to divinity (through adversity to the stars), the Judeo-Christian lineage sees knowledge as what separates us from divinity - and our ignorance as a return to the divine (man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith).

4 hours ago, zengwl17206 said:

Still, I am eager to develop some insight into human physiology and pathology. In particular, I am mostly interested in pharmacology, neurology, cardiology, and ophthalmology. 

To what end? Do yo want build mathematical models for medical/physiological applications? Do you want to keep doors open so that later you could move into a medical career? Are you just inherently interested in the subject but don't plan on applying any knowledge?

Knowing your goal should help you focus on what you need.

12 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

It looks like a private enterprise achievement but American taxpayers paid for it.

I'm not familiar with SpaceXs financing, but my understanding is that SpaceX treats NASA as a customer and so tax dollars only go to the company via market forces, as opposed to direct funding or subsidies etc... The USA have been paying the Russians through the nose for the same service. Whether that's a good use of tax money is debatable, but SpaceX are just delivering for a niche in the current market.

This is the only one i could quickly find with healthy people. Modern ones focus on fluctuations in the presence of some condition. Use terms in that paper to search for more papers if you like.

This has all the hallmarks of charlatanism though, so personally i wouldn't waste time on it. 

Depends what you mean by god. If you mean a creator god, in the Abrahamic sense, then that only appeared ~500 BC - and only once in humans among the Semetic people. That's far too late to have any evolutionary basis. Therefore i think God far too new a concept to be subject to genetic evolution, though it may have stemmed from older concepts that are rooted in our neurobiology. 

8 minutes ago, joigus said:

I agree that Christianity probably played a positive role during the first centuries when it entered the Roman Empire,

I believe the consensus is that human sacrifice had already largely vanished in most European traditions before the arrival of Christianity, but accusations of such were propagated as part of the subjugation of pagan traditions. 

13 hours ago, boucatry said:

The WBC count increased in 900/mm³.

In one person? 100? 1000?

WBC fluctuates more than that during the course of a normal day. 

Even if true, does it translate to more resistance to covid-19? You'd probably want to measure coronavirus antibodies to make that claim.

13 hours ago, boucatry said:

Is there an easy way it's efficacy could be proven or disproven?

Unfortunately not - medical science progresses slowly for a reason. But they claim to already have data - ask to see it and post it here.

13 minutes ago, boucatry said:

The tests show an increase in RBC and WBC count with a decrease in platelet count while still staying within normal boundaries. How could this data be interpreted? Is there a variation that could naturally happen within that time period?

So there's a consideration of statistical significance and clinical significance.

As you state, there are natural fluctuations in serum biomarkers, even over the space of minutes let alone a day. To prove this increase/decrease in various biomarkers is not simply a result of these natural fluctuations you would need to repeat the test numerous times until you can be reasonably sure that the role of chance has suitably diminished. This is statistical significance. Related issues include multiple hypothesis testing (in this case there are three biomarkers being measured, i.e. 3 hypotheses being tested, unless they are clustering them somehow) and cherry picking (maybe they measured 20 biomarkers but only reported the ones they liked).

Even if statistical significance can be established, is the the finding clinically relevant? So maybe the procedure bumps up your RBC  a tiny bit - from within the normal range to a bit higher within the normal range - so what? It might be relevant for high altitude climbers and other niche activities, but for general health i'm not aware of it making any difference.

Also well worth considering are any side effects of the treatment - any treatment must weight potential benefits against potential harm. You need to know about both to make an informed decision.

Banned by Brazil, eh? The place that doesn't even listen to the WHO? Doesn't sound promising.

8 minutes ago, iNow said:

We talk. We argue the merits of each.

That should be the model - and though i'm not following the case, i'm aware discussions about removing the Colston statue were in progress. 

However, the protestors have precluded any dialogue but forcibly removing it. I have no love for such statues and i'm happy to see them removed if a process is followed - but not by an act of violence. It legitimises vandalism and further polarises the population.

The complicating factor in this is that statues represent different things to different people. Colston didn't have statues erected for his slave trading business but for his philanthropy. Presumably to the people who erected the statue it was this aspect they were celebrating. Now no one really cares about Colston today, but what happens when people want to rip down Mahatma Gandhi statues from Parliament square for his racist attitudes to Africans? He was both racist and a great liberator. I'm happy to have the discussion of whether his statue should remain and hope vandals will not force a singular narrative on what should be a dialogue.

I only looked at the second paper - the one explaining local FDR. I have a little familiarity with FDRs but never heard of local FDR. If i get the chance i'll take the time to look at the first paper and see if i can apply my understanding to it. In normal times i would just ask one of my colleagues... haven't seen them for months now.

On 5/31/2020 at 10:14 PM, Ghideon said:

Tricky to answer. The dice, as I said above, does not have free will. For me it it's about what I know about the dice rolling. If I know that an individual chooses to let the dice decide something, then that is an act of free will. If I know that the individual possibly could want to not let the dice decide today, then free will is involved**. 

These themes are explored in the Dice Man. Good book. I find these ideas are better explored in narrative form.

21 hours ago, joigus said:

I think, is that while you do not accept reductionism, I think @MigL, @iNow, (I'm not so sure about @Ghideon, @Prometheus and @vexspits,...) and I are reductionists.

That's because i'm not so sure about myself. I suspect that the reductionist approach has its limits at that point new behaviors emerge from simpler antecedents. If consciousness is an emergent behaviour then i don't think a reductionist approach is the best way to think about free will. But i'm not sure what the best approach is - Eise offers a compelling alternative, but i'm deliberately sceptical as it contains an emotional draw for me.

On 6/3/2020 at 7:18 AM, Eise said:

And one other confusion: internal and external 'forces' are not just constraints. They are the 'substance' of the choice. Just imagine that there were no constraints for 'free will' at all. Then there neither would be grounds for acting. 'Your' free will is only constrained if the 'internal forces' are somehow blocked to act out by somebody else. Otherwise the 'internal forces', i.e. the constituents of 'you' are free to play out the will that they constitute into the chosen action.

I'm not sure how useful this distinction between internal and external forcing is - brain processes are as much a part of the universe as anything 'external'. However, if by internal we simply mean those processes which i call me by convention i can see some utility - though the boundary becomes blurry when we consider that our gut micrbiome influences neural processes, as do social interactions, our environment etc...

May i ask, since this is the religion forum, if you're position on free will mirrors that of the Buddhist concept of self: a useful concept for everyday life, but there is no True Self that somehow sits outside the universe upon the throne of decision making.

15 minutes ago, MigL said:

By your 'model' of free will, it is equally possible for an artificial intelligence to have free will.
Yet that AI, at some basic level, is controlled/constrained by programming that is provided externally.
Does the 'external' programming, then also become part of its free will ?

If we accept a deterministic universe (which i think all parties here do?), then in what sense could we say that humans have free will and that some AI in the future could not?

AI, even today, can act in ways that are not explicitly coded. It may have a utility function which it seeks to minimise, but it is 'free' to find any means to this end. Identical AI agents can easily converge to different solutions if they are learning agents - the data inputs help them navigate the landscape of all possible actions they could perform, and even slightly different data could lead to a divergence of behaviour. The difference between them would lie in the accumulated weights of their neural networks rather than their code.

My interpretation of the local FDR from that paper you gave is; given a p-value what is the probability that the null hypothesis is true, adjusted to take into account all the pairwise hypothesis tests in the set. But there are lots of nuances in that paper which would take a while to pick apart.

It seems to rely on the independence of the p-values to estimate some of its properties though - is that a reasonable assumption for these kinds of genetic studies?

9 hours ago, vexspits said:

Thank you Prometheus: So with that iterative system we can, with a “probability of exactly 1, predict the outcome” of the next stage (to borrow from Ghideon’s phrasing), and yet there is a property of the structure that emerges from the repetitive process that could quite conceivably be "random" or impossible to predict. Is that fair to say? I’m not trying to drag you into anything. It’s just that, like iNow, I have a hell of a hard time reconciling “freedom” or “choice” with something determined. 

Mathematica uses this exact sequence as a random number generator for large integers. Does that mean it's truly random? I guess that's a question for the philosophy of maths and above my pay grade. But it's certainly impossible to predict - else the prize would have been claimed and Mathematica would have to stop using it as a random number generator.

In terms of free will i'm not sure how a stochastic system offers a better solution than a determined one. That we can't predict an outcome doesn't imply free will (though if we could predict an outcome, that would seem to eradicate free will). If you made all your life decisions by the roll of a die would you say you are exercising free will?