unapologetic

Enco, wasn’t it Noam Chomsky who said that the human brain is biologically primed to learn languages?  Any functioning human language.

I’m sure there is a story to why the various language families write left to right or right to left.  I believe the Russian Cyrillic alphabet was made as a Russian version of the Greek alphabet, by St Cyril (…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
English two is from the exact same ancestor,

We have two, twin, twine, between, etc.

Well, I seem to have got that all wrong.  Sc- words are from the latin caedere, meaning cut, str- words are from the Pali Indo-European root

strenk – “tight, narrow; pull tight, twist” (see string (n.))

Jake,

I just checked and English and Arabic don’t belong to the same family, so they are put together very differently.  English and Hindi are in the same family.

The root system sounds a lot like Sanskrit.  Many of the Sanskrit roots exist in English, like the sc- sound for cutting, e.g., scar, scythe, scissors; and str- for long thin things l…[Read more]

Jake – ruby, rust, russet.  In Europe we’re surrounded by a bunch of related languages, all with the same roots.

Apparently though Finnish is a strange outlier that doesn’t bear any relation to the other European languages.  According to Wikipedia it’s Uralic rather than Indo-European in its family.  I went to Norway for 10 days once, and they se…[Read more]

Jake – yes, Rus, rose, rouge, red, etc.

jakelafort wrote:
Vikings went all the way into Russia

Apparently Russia is named after the red hair of the vikings.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
each state must ensure its own survival.

They also need to work together to ensure their own and each other’s survival.

We can argue about how Putin’s perception of this ‘threat’ being irrational or morally wrong but from Moscow’s standpoint, ignoring such a development would be irrational.

What is irrational about P…[Read more]

@jakelafort – it doesn’t take a lot to destroy the feeling of “I feel your pain”.  All it takes is if we don’t approve of someone, so for some reason, they are not “deserving” of our empathic concern.  A set of people we don’t approve of is hated out-group members.

Strega wrote:
But that’s not what stops us from randomly killing annoying people. We don’t think “I want to throttle you but I’d better not because it’s wrong”.

Well, this is true I agree.  There’s no such thing as moral obligation, having to do things because it’s the morally right thing to do.  We follow moral principles because we don’t like…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Many hope that AI will discover ethical truths.

In principle, we can make a complete description of the way morality works.  But this still would give a multiplicity of correct answers, according to multiple moral principles or domains; it couldn’t resolve dilemmas such as the abortion issue.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Many hope that AI will discover ethical truths. But as Gödel shows, deciding what is right will always be our burden.

I think it’s impossible to get “moral truths” (such as “murder is wrong”) with the same truth-status as “2 + 2 = 4”.  I think this is because the two kinds of “truth” are about different things – m…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Adjust my understanding based on new info does not prove me wrong, it only improves my interpretation of how the world works. I get a clearer picture.

Yes, being shown to be in error makes me ask questions, which is always a good thing.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe.

That’s a very interesting finding.  Conspiracy theorists, as a whole, have an over-inflated sense of their own cognitive abilities, leading them not to question the fact that they might be wrong.  That’s one reason why they cling onto bullshit beliefs, that…[Read more]

I find that AI is good at summarising textual information, and keeping meanings largely intact, based (apparently) on the philosophical idea that the meaning of a word lies in how it is used.

I had it summarise my book in Adobe pdf reader, and it didn’t tell me anything new, just made a good hierarchical summary.  Maybe if someone started asking…[Read more]

Cluster B people are known for being thin-skinned: “emotionally unstable”, “impulsive”, and “intolerant of perceived slights or insults”.  If you’re a narcissist, you’re perpetually at odds with and competing with everybody; and human beings are not competition machines, we’re not built to cope with that, so it hurts personally when someone…[Read more]

Yes, it’s frightening how quickly all the rich and powerful (except Rupert Murdoch) are spinelessly caving in to kiss the orange arse.  After Trump’s reign is over, they will be called collaborators.