moloch-hai

12 ms·

61.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
> Only English speaking white people tend to be hierarchal? No. But all your experience in the world is in hierarchies. You have no relevant experience to draw on.
62.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Only you and goatszx seem put out. And, really, do you expect a post here to make a case that took almost 600 book pages to express properly?
63.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Pretty representative material. Of course various people differ in detail. https://independent.academia.edu/RichardCarrier Unfortunately he really would rather you buy his books than read his blog posts, so they are hard to
64.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
I probably confused matters with my undefined expression "actual numbers". e and pi are as actual as i or 0. I think Turing introduced "computable numbers" which are a lot like the reals, but countable. You can write a
65.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
This is a strange take. Every last program ever written is a state machine. The number of possible states a program represents is normally very, very large, and the transition rules are very complicated and often mixed up with, e.g., multip
66.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Real numbers almost always give the same result as more cumbersome methods, and we are mostly only interested in such results, so it is surprising when something wacky shows up to remind us of the tightrope we walk.
67.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Read it or don't. If you don't want to read, look it up on youtube. You are not obliged to educate yourself, but pretending to education you haven't will reliably solicit unwelcome responses.
68.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Yucca mountain is, in fact, not an "approved and operating permanent nuclear waste storage facility in the US with all the waste waiting in temporary holding facilities having been placed there". It is not even "approved an
69.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
I am fully on board with considering the value of the text regardless of its provenance, and with measured skepticism about all received documents, ancient or modern. Best evidence is that actual physical existence of a Jesus in Palestine i
70.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
It's the wackiest result I know of, and seems overwhelmingly more profound than BT.
71.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
They are not numbers you have ever used in an actual calculation. You always approximate them anyplace they don't cancel out. There is a countable subset of the reals called "computable numbers". We only ever use a subset o
72.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
I am not a Platonist, or any sort of theist. e and pi arise in axiomatic systems we use to approximate our world. They never appear in nature. They do appear in formulas we find to approximate details of our world. I say "actual number
73.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
The topic is a book called "The Dawn of Everything". Not reading the book, and then insisting that all the examples presented in the 692-page book do not exist, is not a good look.
74.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Presidents, popes, and dictators-for-life exist, too. That does not mean that every organized group of people needs one. If you want examples, read the book. It is right there .
75.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
I expect zinc is still cheaper than magnesium. The surprising figure I recall was that the weight of zinc in an offshore wind turbine installation was close to half the weight of iron in it.
76.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
You now insist that no hilltop pumped-hydro storage without a river exists? It is an odd choice of falsehood to insist upon, when it may so easily be looked up.
77.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
> But those higher prices have to be sustained to keep those additional operations profitable. That is not, in fact, the case. A higher price need persist only long enough to pay the capital cost of developing the resource. The million
78.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
No batteries, anyway. So any generated power not pushed back to the grid is wasted.
79.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
You have an abstract definition of a sequence of digits, and an algorithm that reveals an actual digit from among them. It is surprising that you don't need to approximate an infinite series to get it, but everybody agrees that digit w
80.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
That is the doctrine we are taught, anyway.
81.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
How many of these groups were of people who did not grow up with fixed hierarchies, and so had developed organizational skills that did not rely on one? A hierarchy is the laziest choice among ways to organize.
82.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Jordan Peterson can choose his examples as cleverly as he likes to advance his biases to uncritical listeners.
83.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
That is a symbolic manipulation. Wherever it comes down to actual numbers, you use adequate approximations to infinite summations for x and iy. Even nominally exact rational values are often idealizations of measurements: your house has no
84.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
There have been myriad societies that consciously chose to dispense with hierarchy, others where hierarchy applied only to one sphere (e.g. religion) and nowhere else, ones where different hierarchies applied in different spheres, and many
85.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Finitely many pieces, but on infinitely variable boundaries. It was clever to make the proof allow a finite number in that place. Without, it would have attracted no attention.
86.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
No human or computer has ever used an actual real, transcendental number in any computation. It would take infinitely long.
87.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Hierarchies are not, in fact , "heavily part of human behavior". They appear in certain circumstances, and dissipate when the circumstances do. G&W point out that we are brainwashed otherwise. I see it as a case of learned he
88.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
You miss the point. Yes, hunter/gatherer societies routinely lack hierarchies. But settled populations, throughout prehistory and history, have very often also lacked hierarchies, including in places historians insisted otherwise. An
89.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
We need not pretend Graeber advanced any notion that hierarchies have never existed in undocumented populations. His point is that they were often lacking in circumstances historians routinely assume, and vociferously insist, hierarchy must
90.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
One of the authors dying during editing can reasonably be expected to have some effect.

More ›