Posts by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
 (DIR) Post #ATXLxAlEBnJEStTMAq by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2023-03-12T10:44:48Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @alex It isn’t schadenfreude to note that your new-found Too Small to Fail economic wisdom will never, ever, be applied on behalf of families who are about to lose SNAP benefits.Hungry kids just ain’t a “contagion” like that, huh
       
 (DIR) Post #AVdeeTGC8D195NB1Jg by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2023-05-13T20:10:13Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @mcnees This boils down to 2 fairly objective factual realities: 1) Musk leveraged himself to the eyeballs to buy twitter, and 2) Contrary to the hype, he is not particularly bright. Fact 1 meant that he had to cut costs right away, but Fact 2 meant that he did so by firing people at twitter who carried whatever "social intelligence" the Twitter enterprise had managed to accumulate. For instance: legal experts whose job it was to know the law in various countries, and therefore allow the company to buy time before compliance by resisting censorship orders as long as possible.Musk is an powerful idiot, chose to lobotomize Twitter, market it using an entirely bogus "free speech ideology", while simultaneously rendering it unable to defend actual free speech. Consequently, he instantaneously rolled over for Erdogan the day before an election because Painting Themselves Into Corners is what idiots like Musk often do.Not painting one's self into corners is literally "not rocket science". Sadly, Musk is an idiot, and will keep doing dumb and harmful crap like this as long as people continue to bankroll him with social capital, as well as mountains of real capital.And I do mean "sadly", because a "not idiot" in his position could do some real good in the world.
       
 (DIR) Post #AkddMQUOflLceaEeIq by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2024-08-04T23:14:03Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @futurebird I like this question. The way I use a words is an attempt to avoid getting things twisted up while I am talking to other people. So I tend to stick to the rather old-fashioned "justified, true belief" definition of Knowledge.So in that sense, yeah I would say I "know" all kinds of stuff that I have good familiarity with the evidence for (like the absurd time spans involved in geology and cosmology, for example).Where I draw the sharp line is when I talk about what I can Perceive or Conceive. I can, for instance, form a conception of large time scales, but there is no way I can have any perception of them. In math, there are things that I can follow the logic of, so I "know" that they are true results, but have not yet figured out a good way to form a concept of that would allow me to explain them to myself or others in plain language.
       
 (DIR) Post #AkuOtrmc1JehEcYsWO by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2024-08-13T01:22:09Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @futurebird Fundamentalist ants want to know, if they evolved from wasps, why are wasps still around. Checkmate, Sci-ant-ists!
       
 (DIR) Post #AkuUeCht3e9LDjGYvw by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2024-08-13T02:26:33Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @futurebird ...I have always been amused by that "Why are chimpanzees still around?" bit of creationist rhetoric tho.Makes me imagine a hypothetical world that had a type of evolution/life could be where every successive new organism always completely wiped out all the species that preceded it. On that world, there would be only one kind of organism, that occupies all possible niches.
       
 (DIR) Post #AkzuLn8cx5atJ4SDrs by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
       2024-08-15T17:08:05Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @futurebird Having helped someone I love through a major psychosis, I would say that a the moral/immoral frame does not apply in some cases of mental illness. IMO, a person in a mental health crisis who harms themselves or others is very often acting amorally (i.e. without regard to right/wrong).The only people to whom the moral/immoral framework applies to in that situation are those who either choose to, or refrain from, from giving aid and protection when someone is harming themselves or others.I always thought it significant that Christ's "beam in the eye" parable framed morality in terms of first person perception: If one can perceive the beam, then the moral onus is on them.