104400+ entries in 0.028s
mircea_popescu: so then the greeks are the british and the work with hands the zulu ?
mircea_popescu: all philosophies are dead in this sense ; next you'll be asking "what is the sun's utility to us"
mircea_popescu: well wtf argument is this, "they died". sure, constantinople fell to the turks, and rome fell to odoacer. hurr ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i met two kinds of women in this life ; the kind that'd hang out with anyone just as long as they didn't go to jail/starve/whatever ; and the kind that'd hang out with me if it meant underground.
mircea_popescu: traditionally, as well as here, the value of trying aristotle is that it allows one to expose his own cluelessnes, which is generally beneficial.
mircea_popescu: the problem being that no - circular motion is NOT linear ; much like a taylor sum is not an integral. yes they can be made arbitrarily close, sure, whatever.
mircea_popescu: ahahaha! ok this is sweet : "Now he's waist deep. Yes, you can describe all motion as a compound of linear and circular motion. For that matter, vectors treat all motion as combinations of linear motion."
mircea_popescu: and after aristotle was invented, the greek world had what, -20 years of life left ?
mircea_popescu: moreover the "physiologists" (term of art) went through anaximander's ionians AND pythagora's italics before socrates was even invented.
mircea_popescu: s a macedonian not a greek and spoke greek like you speak french ; whereas MOST greek life happened in constantinople, a good third to a half of it ~under turkish rule~. so... whatevers, not quite so simple.)
mircea_popescu: (also it should prolly be pointed out that aristotle was not that much of a star of the greek world, if for no other reason then because he was born realtively late. he was a major star of ~scholastics~, and discussions of aristotle esp in translation are more a discussion of early christian europe than of "the greeks" - which incidentally are also a complex thing, alexander for instance, who caused hellenism, was nevertheles
mircea_popescu: the first gives youy ballista AND REDDIT ; and the other gives you praxitelles and alf-s-gentoo
mircea_popescu: no, the other gives you eg statues worth keeping around.
mircea_popescu: and sure, the greek style of deductive logic, from the all downwards lost in the field to the latin method of inductive "from the parts is made the ballista". i have no objections, but also can't pretend the alternative never existed.
mircea_popescu: when you go to school in 3rd grade or w/e the teacher tells you a line is "blablabla EXTENDS TO INFINITY"
mircea_popescu: should be pretty evident that a dimension defined in terms of divisibility is very fundamentally not the same thing as the latin notion of dimension-as-extensibility.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: there's many problems ; it's not even the case that the greek notion of "dimension" at all maps to anything here extant. the discussion is carried on trilema on easier things such as "power" etc ; but in any case, it's rather like having lisp types arbitrarily sloshed around. you don't just add 5+5 like that, if they're different types.
mircea_popescu: (there is no such thing as an inaccessible physical system by the definition of the terms.)
mircea_popescu: note also that all sorts of insanities are "the most parsimonious know model" for various otherwise-inaccesible psycho-systems.
mircea_popescu: yes ; but its rejection does not actually constitute "circular logic". it's more like defensive skepticism than anything.
mircea_popescu: yes, but the proposal to discuss a space one may never walk into may be seen with the same eyes
mircea_popescu: there you go - i haven't translated, but at least discussion allowed us to build a sufficient basis so at least a meaningful summary could be devised.
mircea_popescu: here's the thing : structure of knowledge and content of knowledge are different concerns. dutch erroneously represents a problem with the content in terms of problem with structure.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i;m not sure you grasp the point here. read it again!
mircea_popescu: (contrary to common belief, supernumeray probabilities are a major problem in theoretical physics ; much of the nature of the problems aristotle was struggling with in his discussion of heavens)
mircea_popescu has better greek fu than dutch, which allows him a better emulated aristotle than dutch's, which is neither here nor there.
mircea_popescu: it's likely what he'd have said, especially if older and thus mellowed.
mircea_popescu: and aristotle could read this log, smile broadly at alf, and say "hey, suppose someone comes up with a superunitary probability ; and you disqualify it for you know, being out of the defined bounds. my my aren't you a circular logician just like me!"
mircea_popescu: the question before you is, were you trying to understand the greeks, or were you trying to explain to yourself why you aren't trying to ?
mircea_popescu: now we understand each other. dutch can't be "wrong" about aristotle per se. it is a fact he didn't much understand what the other said ; and it is a fact that in the dutch system, dutch's observations stand, however vaguely greek flavoured they may be.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: is she going to be disqualified from queenhood if she fails this multiple choice test ?
mircea_popescu: suppose you excavate tomb in valley of queens ; suppose you find ~live~, talking, cogent queen in there. suppose you take her to the shelf of items, and give her a questionnaire. she is to select "dildo spatula or hat" for each present item.
mircea_popescu: as generally happens, mongols will comprehend the bums better than the middle class.
mircea_popescu: i didn't say that. i said - that dutch's writing is interesting as of dutch ; not much as of aristotle.
mircea_popescu: and no, it's not at all harder to talk nonsense via diagram. more generally : there's no methodological salvation ; you won't go to heaven through not swearing ; you won't produce science by following "the science method" and so following.
mircea_popescu: which he did sound like ; and which is why he doesn't figure as proeminently among the greeks of his time as he does among moderns.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform euclid was considerably more portable, ironically, because he was considerably more alphabetic. he eschewed ~most~ of the power of greek at his time, and ate the downside of sounding like a literal retard.
mircea_popescu: so then : in order to go from a string in greek to a string in english, one has to reconstruct the conceptual underpinnings, the "source code". and this is not trivial.
mircea_popescu: because no, words don't "have meanings". your meanings for ANY WORD are a function of ALL THE OTHER WORDS YOU KNOW. which is why my definitions regularily blow out english dictionaries, wikipedia and other sources of "wisdom" out of the water - i know more words, and in this knowledge i know all the words i know ~better~. infinitely and irreproducibly so.
☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎ mircea_popescu: now - translation operates not on the object code (ie, the string quoted, or a string quoted) but on the whole program : any string plus ~the totality~ of conceptual content of the brain that produced it.
mircea_popescu: and as to the problem of translation : source code and object code make together a thing. an item can not be said to be a program without either. their relationship is particular, you can go from one to the other, and ~to a very limited degree~ from the other to the one.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform as per usual, it depends on what is is. so - yes, pissed. you piss idem, when you say things to the tendency of "work - for tractors ; not humans". your dislike of perl and his dislike of "observation" in the sense of "handiwork" are very close ; and closer to my eye than alternatives.
mircea_popescu: jurov this is not actually true. but the falsity of the equivalency would be harder to pinpoint.
mircea_popescu: i hasn't the patience to go into detail as to echonton eisin & friends. not aristotle's fault.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform to be precise : i can't turn the greek string into an english string for you for the same reason you can't turn trb into lisp code for me. "but alf, it compiles! a lisp version must exist!" hurr. i don't propose "because you can't take object code and make me lisp source it follows no c sources existed" do i ?
mircea_popescu: this is not exactly correct. they despised what you despise, which is to say sitting there and deleting 30-40 spam accounts/day
mircea_popescu: let's approach this from a more hospitable angle. dutch makes the charge (unsourced, but it's sheer anglicanism) that the reason the greeks didn't build ironclads is that they (like the chinese, natch) despised manual labour.
mircea_popescu: σίν." somehow comes to "There is nothing else beyond body (three dimensional solid) because if there were, then there would be something else beyond body." which... it doesn't.
mircea_popescu: (but no, steve dutch's reading of aristotle is not interesting qua aristotle, or qua greek thought. it's strictly the case of dutch speaks english and found an english translation of aristotle, so he imagines that "τῶν γὰρ φύσει συνεστώτων τὰ μέν ἐστι σώματα καὶ μεγέθη, τὰ δ' ἔχει σῶμα καὶ μέγεθος, τὰ δ' ἀρχαὶ τῶν ἐχόντων εἰ
mircea_popescu: this is pretty easy a criticism to make universally, "from you knowing x it follows that x exists ; but from you not knowing y nothing follows about y".
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform pretty much reduces to "the greeks went wrong in being traditionalist, ie, expecting their negative space is universal negative space".
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes ; but coherence is also a very slippery thing. for one thing - the ask.fm cowsies are very coherent. bitcoin is ??
mircea_popescu: moreover - the real killer - this "catching up" needn't happen in any finite time. the atomists of athens never got the support coming their way ; it was a risible sect in the place and time.
mircea_popescu: eventually "actual" science caught up with them and backed them up and here we are - but in other cases it didn't! the recon squad that sees enemy fortifying and raises a flag and calls for reinforcement may get them, and create a turning point in the whole war. or may not get them, and create half a dozen fresh graves.
mircea_popescu: just the problem of optics in the time of galileo - none of that shit worked in any sensible manner. very much like in the case of string theory - they dispensed with reason. they did.
mircea_popescu: i'd rather go far because if i stay close it looks too much like genuine science.
mircea_popescu: and people DID spend their life hunting ether winds. irl. yes. last century.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform imagine someone who actually went to the trouble of rescuing - from an intellectually powerful, epistemologically informed position - all the insanities of history. "witches weighing doesn't work because witches don't have a float mass"
mircea_popescu: the fundamental reason weighing photons works and weighing witches does not work has nothing to do with anything inside the science ; they tried both, much like newton tried alchemy.
mircea_popescu: so, yes : science, and i don't here mean, globalwarmism or pseudoevolutionism or lulzgametheory or such ; but - physics. astronomy, things of serious. these didn't develop methodically, in history, but exactly through a process of "try random batshit and it sometimes works".
mircea_popescu: he tree, and you have no guarantee at all points you will have to resolve an epistemological dispute you will also have the political class available.
mircea_popescu: trinque the problem with feyerabend isn't even that he's an asshole, or whatever else. the problem is, his criticism of methodological science actually stands ; contrary to what people like to believe galilei's stance was a lot less defensible than the church's at the time ; yes he won, and yes he's from our party, so fuck the church - but this political approach to the problem is weak specifically because it tries to go up t
mircea_popescu: trinque yeah, the problem is not that it does that ; just that sometimes, it goes about it ineptly.
mircea_popescu: (and if you're wondering - the hallucinatory perception of the other known objectively as "puppy love" is precisely an implementation of this principle. as it exists in all cultures [that i'm familiar with] it seems likely to be the definitionally human trait. man is the beast who, when confronted with a shortfall, dreams up a compensation.)
mircea_popescu: which is why insanity is usually the escape valve for desires incomesurate with possibilities. as alf says, nothing novel here.
mircea_popescu: but in any case - alienation and self-realization stand in an inexact opposition - if for no other reason then because derealisation often appears as a viable alternative self-realisation. "i am a pretty special snowball" is exactly the self-realised derealized individual, satisfied with his own self image in a wholly imagined world. while by definition maximally alienated ; he also is maximally self-realized.
mircea_popescu: evidently there's some expectation somewhere that the batshit insane terms of the empire will be taken at face value. by someone, somewhere. i have nfi.
mircea_popescu: yes, but "ask.fm has 150mn users" and shopify trades as NYSE:SHOP for 40bux and then some guy wants to discuss things about you know, "MPEx has no volume you have been warned!!11"
mircea_popescu: and basic numeracy is not perfectly adequate for being a ceo.
mircea_popescu: you'd expect basic numeracy to also be "perfectly adequate for all kinds of everyday work", except the kinds of everyday work in question are no longer done - the kids all see themselves you know, CEOs.