hackandthink

Norvig has strong arguments, but this in bad faith: "Chomsky has a philosophy based on the idea that we should focus on the deep whys and that mere explanations of reality don't matter. In t…

I agree. Start with reading: https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

This is paywalled: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-crap-on-the-wall …

Maybe you are right and I am naive. There's propaganda everywhere and it is hard to get the real picture. I checked the Russia/Ukraine Peace negotiations of 2022 (Wikipedia). Russia seemed t…

Saul Kripke is a nice example here. He did mathematics and philosophy. His later philosophical work (Kripkenstein) had a wider scope and was less mathematical. (maybe Wittgenstein fits as well: from …

Mathematics has a philosophical bent. Philosophy tries to make implicit understanding explicit and usually fails in interesting ways. (A part of) Mathematics tries to get the essence of numbers, calcu…

I see Russia as aggressive middle power with nukes which tries to be a regional hegemon. (sorry for the Mearsheimer jargon) You can't fight it down completely, because of nukes. You can't de…

It is so depressing. There is disgust of war and there is disgust of injustice, everybody is rationalizing.

Maybe I'm wrong. But I think John Mearsheimer got it right in 2014: "Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow,…

No country deserves to be ethnically cleansed. I meant "western" geographically here. I'm sure Russia won't invade the Baltics. But I'm not sure that Russia will never invade …

I do not support any party in this war, though I'm not really pacifist. It's not worth dying for NATO membership or an ukrainian Crimea. And nobody should be forced to fight in any war. It i…

Something seems to be rotten in the state of science. Who decides about the money? I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let&#x…

OK. She detailed her point with the Higgs boson. There was an internal inconsistency and the Standard Model needed the Higgs boson. There may be different point of views: your particle is random but m…

I think Sabine Hossenfelder is right. Random hypotheses (here particles) are not good science. I am not sure whether Popper is the right reference. Karl Popper: "a theory should be considered sci…

The stakes are higher now. How many people should die for: 1991 borders (including Crimea)? 2014 borders? Feb 2023 border? Survival? NATO Membership?

(when following Wald's work on rearranging series) This is a nice riddle: Is summing the series: 1, -1, 1, 1,.... 0 = (1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)....=0+0+0... or 1 = 1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)....=1+0+0+0...…

I think before the atomic bomb radioactivity was widely considered as healthy. (maybe it was not as crazy as I thought) This is wild stuff: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/…

David Spiegelhalter of BUGS fame: "So a total of 50,000 bottles of gin among these 1,600 people is associated with one extra health problem. Which still indicates a very low level of harm in drin…

They talk only about Tcl. A more lasting contribution: Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf] (gatech.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17297325 …

The best argument against "The US blew it up" is the political risk for the US when the truth comes out. As CIA guy I would not trust Biden to keep the mouth shut.

A german book by Precht/Welzer argues it's the other way. The media became a power by itsself and it's the media which influences the government. And they analyze how the media synchron…

Yes, it seems really hard to keep things secret. I guess it would be easier for a country known to kill journalists (thinking of Russia here, Assange is alive). And everything is recorded nowadays. (…

I once read (Don DeLillo?): The John F. Kennedy assassination could not have been a conspiracy, some conspirator would have spoken sooner or later (maybe on his/her death bed). This is obviously …