burrows

10 ms·

91.
by burrows 5y ago
This ability that you are describing, do you have a recommendation for how we (as scientists) can measure it in people?
92.
by burrows 5y ago
Are the risks associated with invasiveness fixed (eg, there will always be at least a 1/15000 chance that a patient dies within the first year of receiving a neural implant), or can they be reduced with better technology and more under
93.
by burrows 5y ago
Are you sure it’s the same story? Or are we seeing reports of incremental improvements to technologies for communicating with locked-in people.
94.
by burrows 5y ago
> It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it. So, other than paying for it, I don’t have to pay for it? Again, I find this sort of comment confusing. > This is at
95.
by burrows 5y ago
But I think OP does pay for it, as she suggests here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788837 First OP says, “X is free for me.”, then she says, “My taxes pay for X.” It looks to me that says she both does and does n
96.
by burrows 5y ago
> You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from? Thinking about raising a baby from some other father activates my disgust reaction. But maybe i
97.
by burrows 5y ago
> What else could it even be? As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill. If my wife buys a new couch for our home with a credit
98.
by burrows 5y ago
I generally don’t refer to a repair subsidized by my car insurance as free. Do you?
99.
by burrows 5y ago
I do not want to invest significant resources into progeny that is not my own. Doing a paternity test reduces the possibility of this.
100.
by burrows 5y ago
> And in fact for a proportion of the population it is in fact free or nearly so because they have never paid any income tax or the cost was so high that the taxes they did pay plus the proceeds of selling very possession they had and se
101.
by burrows 5y ago
> It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment. Actually I think that’s a pretty good example of what confuses me about this usage of “free”. Usually when I ca
102.
by burrows 5y ago
Okay, you give the government money (taxes) and then the government pays the clinics for your medical care (with the tax money). But doesn’t that mean you’re still paying for your own medical care with the government acting as a middle-man?
103.
by burrows 5y ago
IMO you make a wise point: Doing a paternity test may necessarily or inadvertently reveal to his wife a limit of his trust for her.
104.
by burrows 5y ago
What does the word “free” mean here? I assume the clinical professionals are paid and the researchers were paid and the pharma venders are paid, so that money is coming from somewhere. Is it that someone other than you pays for it?
105.
by burrows 5y ago
What are the compelling reasons not to get a DNA test as a man (when a woman is claiming, “You are the biological father of this baby.”)? Is it expensive or illegal or will your friends shame you or the woman will be angry?
106.
by burrows 5y ago
> Are you arguing that there is no a priori reason to prefer democracy? I suggest these definitions, but am open to revisions. def: a government is the smallest set of people with a (almost) monopoly of force in a particular geographic r
107.
by burrows 5y ago
X is vastly overrated.
108.
by burrows 5y ago
OP might be referring to value neutral labels like “thinking”, “feeling”, “vibration”, “buzzing”, etc.
109.
by burrows 5y ago
Could you please clarify your point? I don’t understand the comment as is.
110.
by burrows 5y ago
Are there truths that are neither tautological (mathematical) nor empirical? I would suggest those statements are only meaningful if in principle we could measure the weight of a faerie. As another example, I suggest that “Every idea weighs
111.
by burrows 5y ago
So then is one of these propositions true? Every North American faerie weighs more than 10kg. Every North American faerie weighs 10kg or less.
112.
by burrows 5y ago
> The point is that just because you can't prove something to yourself it doesn't make the belief incoherent. If a proposition doesn’t make predictions about my empirical experience then what is it saying? And if a proposition
113.
by burrows 5y ago
> You can't but that doesn't change the mechanism of arriving at beliefs. I’m trying to question the coherence of the proposition itself, and not trying to refute an argument in favor of it. > You yourself can also never phy
114.
by burrows 5y ago
Right, I have a low probability belief that a random human won’t have a brain in their head. But in principle, I could open someone’s skull and look for a brain. How would I examine another human body for consciousness?
115.
by burrows 5y ago
Do you believe it makes sense to even claim that other humans are conscious? If conscious is defined as “to have subjective experiences”, then I don’t believe “other people are conscious” is coherent. The argument I hear usually is that oth
116.
by burrows 5y ago
We can do a risk profile for an email with a custom domain versus a gmail domain. Do we need to differentiate between custom email domain with self-hosted mail server and custom email domain with gmail? If I self-host the mail server then I
117.
by burrows 5y ago
Seems like the author is making a reasonable point to me. The risk profile for a gmail email address and a custom domain email address are different and developers may benefit from understanding this difference. I don’t think he’s attackin
118.
by burrows 5y ago
Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled. I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.
119.
by burrows 5y ago
> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever. Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeli
120.
by burrows 5y ago
Would I rather spend money on scholarships for poor children or buy the recipe for a functional net-positive fusion reactor from aliens? How much recipe does each of my dollars get? I’d give away all of my current net worth and take out a

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