• 1 Post
  • 249 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 8th, 2022

help-circle







  • I’d argue Hanlon’s razor is not a very good heuristic. It ultimately presupposes the user of it is the mental superior in the situation, and does not take into account polarized and ambiguous controversies. It also encourages energy wasting by presupposing the issue lies with mental capacity or education, suggesting that you could educate your opponent out of their stance.

    I’d recommend moving towards more energy-conserving practices. Rather than arguing your points directly, it’s better to first understand why the opposition would be taking their current stance and adjust your argument based on what common ground you both share.

    Possibly the greatest skill is to just learn when it’s no longer worth your time to argue with them.




  • Reminder about Henry Lee Lucas, who would just confess to any murder because he kept being provided amenities in prison for doing so.

    Do we have any significant evidence that Sam Little definitely committed these murders? To be clear, Little is definitely a serial killer. I just have my doubts that he isn’t just being used as a scapegoat since HLL.

    From Oxygen

    The FBI confirms Samuel Little is “the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history,” and says he has been “matched to 50 cases” of the 93 murders he claims he has committed. The FBI also releases a timeline of Little’s life and crimes in hopes of identifying more of his victims.

    So half are still unconfirmed, and the other 50 are ‘Matched’ to him by some unknown criteria, which involves sketches







  • Title’s hard click bait. It leads up to talking about Arrow’s Impossibility theorem, which sets forth some explicit rules for defining a fair election, and communicates that all finite-vote systems are dictatorships that fail to meet those criteria, including ranked choice voting. Arrow’s theorem also uses ‘dictatorship’ in a pretty weird technical fashion, meaning that one individual can technically sway any election with their sole choices.

    Directly after, though, Veritasium does acknowledge that Duncan Black pokes holes in the actual value of Arrow’s theorem, by showing that many ordinal voting systems will still favor majority preference, and that Arrow’s theorem does not apply to rated voting systems like approval voting and STAR voting.

    It’s pretty bizarre that he decided to make such a click-baity title and front-load only skim over the better solution at the end, right near election month.




  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltomemes@lemmy.worldDeep thoughts.
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    57
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I think it’s kind of hilarious some of the insanely close conclusions some ancient philosophers got to being correct.

    For example, Xenophanes observed that there were fossils of fish and shells, and correctly concluded that Greece was at one point underwater. He also had a bunch of insane claims on top of that, but the underwater part was correct.

    His teacher, Anaximander actually said humans came from fish, which is hilariously close to correct despite the incorrect reasoning.

    Empedocles is probably the most interesting. He concluded that humans and animals originated from these disembodied organs, which found each other and would form wholes. The catch was that many weird forms came about, like people with heads in the center of their bodies, and any other creation you can think of from just slapping animal organs together. He asserted that the forms which were unfit for life died out, leaving only the ones which worked to continue living. Empedocles almost describes a concept adjacent to multicellular organisms forming from single-celled symbiotic relationships (obviously Empedocles didn’t know about bacteria or cell theory), and then goes on to pretty accurately describe the mechanisms of natural selection.