olavk

59 ms·

601.
by olavk 10y ago
"The study of God" is useless, but the study of people believing in God or gods is useful and quite interesting. These are two different things! The theology of Newton was the former - he literally believed the Bible was the word
602.
by olavk 10y ago
Insulting to theology or to alchemy? Alchemy is basically chemistry done with a strong philosophical framework based in the thinking of Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistos. "Making gold" is just a naive interpretation - it was rese
603.
by olavk 10y ago
I'm just guessing here, but I suspect PG doesn't care what "most people" think about theology. He is probably writing from the perspective from an educated person who see the enormous influence of Newtonian physics, and
604.
by olavk 10y ago
Yeah alchemy seem like a completely different field than astronomy today, but at the time it was considered deeply connected - the metals was corresponding to the planets and so on. Because the heavenly order was considered reflected in the
605.
by olavk 10y ago
So why do you know the scientific method is the best method or even a valid method? Any answer you give to this question will be a philosophical answer. You are doing philosophy whether you like it or not.
606.
by olavk 10y ago
Science and logic are products of philosophy, so I would hardly call philosophy useless. By "armchar" I presume you mean philosophy is not empirical. This is true to some extent, but you could level the same criticism against math
607.
by olavk 10y ago
I tend to avoid the term unit -test since there is some disagreement about what "unit" mean. Some think it means testing everything down to the level of individual private methods. This will indeed lock you down. And if it paired
608.
by olavk 10y ago
Yeah you can have bad architecture with or without tests, having tests does not mean you don't have to think about design! I disagree that tests lock you down though, it really depends on how they are written.
609.
by olavk 10y ago
If the code is designed following the single responsibility principle, and tests are written to test behavior rather than implementation details, then each requirements change should only affect the tests which specifically test for the beh
610.
by olavk 10y ago
So if strong AI is achieved, this would prove God does not exist?
611.
by olavk 10y ago
In the Bible, Paul justifies marriage as a way of controlling the sexual desire so it does not lead to the sin of fornication. But he does not seem to care about procreation.
612.
by olavk 10y ago
Just to mention one thing, Aristotle more or less invented formal logic. Without this we probably wouldnt have modern science or computers. If you want to argue he was an idiot and doesn't have any impact, you will have to make a bette
613.
by olavk 10y ago
So, what makes you consider Aristotle an idiot?
614.
by olavk 10y ago
Have you actually read any Aristotle? I don't think anybody could read Aristotle and come away with the impression he is an idiot. Obviously he is far from modern levels of scientific knowledge, but that doesn't make him an idiot.
615.
by olavk 10y ago
The everybody would just complain about Scheme now.
616.
by olavk 10y ago
But it is not about what theory is most likely. If two theories or models generate exactly the same predictions, they are equally true. Occam just says that in this case we should chose the simpler. But if the theories produce different pre
617.
by olavk 10y ago
Pure FP languages are still pretty niche, but what has happened is the big mainstream languages like C# and Java has adopted more functional features like higher order functions, lambda syntax, increased focus on immutability and so on. So
618.
by olavk 10y ago
Dante has a solution for this: There is a place in the upper section of hell with no punishment or torment, reserved for "just heathens" like Socrates. So technically he did not go to heaven since he is denied the closeness to God
619.
by olavk 10y ago
You wouldn't write a unit test to assert an object implements a method. You would test if the method works as expected. This will of course also fail if the method is not implemented at all. You test for functionality, not types.
620.
by olavk 10y ago
But if you develop without flowtype, do 95% of your JavaScript unittests consist of type checks?
621.
by olavk 10y ago
When you are writing unittests for JavaScript, does 95% of your asserts check that values are of the correct type?
622.
by olavk 10y ago
I shouldn't have used the term "conservative", since it is being interpreted as the political position, but I just meant the deists typically saw value in religion and God as a concept, while often being critical towards the
623.
by olavk 10y ago
Well I shouldn't have used the term "conservative" since it is too politicized, but I'm thinking of sentiment like Voltaires statement that "if God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent him". This i
624.
by olavk 10y ago
I think the point of deism is you can still justify religion as an institution, so it was favored by "conservative" thinkers who believed religion was necessary for morality and for society. Atheism has historically been associate
625.
by olavk 10y ago
> I would say religion is compatible with anything: The is only the case for the particular religion called Deism, which believes the creator god created the universe (including natural laws and all) but apart from that is totally hands-
626.
by olavk 11y ago
Haskell, like Perl, is optimized towards writing code rather than reading code. I would like a language which is to Haskell what Python is to Perl.
627.
by olavk 11y ago
Almost every movie depicting famous artists have the problem that they rarely show the artist actually working - because this is really boring to look at. Performing artists like musicians, dancers etc. are more entertaining to look at, but
628.
by olavk 11y ago
The movie Amadeus is about god-given genius versus mere human skill, and Mozart and Saliere are used in the movie as archtypes representing each. It is not intended to be historical, and the relationship between the two composers were total
629.
by olavk 11y ago
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
630.
by olavk 11y ago
Would you say that Angela Merkels CDU "never won an election"? That would be a misleading statement when talking about a multi-party system rather than a two-party system. The Nazi party itself did not have an absolute majority at

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