pastorofmuppets
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girl balances 15 books on her head, recites pi and solves a rubix cube
04/05/10, 03:20
Pfff, do it with e and a square one cube and maybe I'll call. Maybe. |
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Handguns Should Be Strapped on the Hip, Not Concealed!
04/05/10, 03:10
The founding fathers did not give you the right to bear arms against crackheads. Crack didn't exist then, and something tells me you're not big on the whole "living document" thing. |
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Handguns Should Be Strapped on the Hip, Not Concealed!
04/05/10, 03:03
Texas facts:
- one of the few places that prohibit open carry... if they legalize it they'll just be in line with everyone else. I find it weird that they haven't done it already. Even my ridiculously blue New England state allows open carry (with a license).
- There is no crack in Texas. Again, we have it here.
He should move to New England and be a Real American™. |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/05/10, 02:24
NAS: Our worldviews overlap pretty much 100%, FWIW. But take philosophy of ethics: I think it's useful to have a discussion about pure ethics without it always going back to "we're wired for empathy, that's where it comes from." We know where it comes from, now let's see where we can go with it. |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/05/10, 02:21
It's not enough that an idea is testable. It also has to be logically valid, and there is always the thorny problem of undiscovered auxiliary hypotheses (call it bias or worldview if you like). And even if you've met the first two and come close on the third, you still only have a model of the truth. Think of philosophy as being like that -- a search for useful models of truth.
Even if we did have actual truth, I doubt we'd have a framework for expressing it, if I understand Gödel's incompleteness theorems correctly.
I took issue with the specific claim that science didn't come out of philosophy. The scientific revolution was made possible by western philosophy, especially the rejection of goal-oriented explanations for things ("gravity exists because objects want to fall," etc.) Hell, Newton was an alchemist. Inquiry is inquiry. Science is a special kind, and certainly the most useful kind for investigating naturalistic claims, but it's silly to sum up philosophy as tautologies and wanking.
Ok, I've said more than I intended to and I'm sure I made a few enemies... sorry. |
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Dog and Wolf singing duet dubbed
04/04/10, 02:52
Aren't we all, wolf. Aren't we all. |
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Python vs Alligator
04/04/10, 02:50
Wait, they were able to ID the cat by x-ray? That's pretty rad. |
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Handguns Should Be Strapped on the Hip, Not Concealed!
04/04/10, 02:46
Because they go in for stupid rah-rah bullshit? |
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Norm Finkelstein Verbally Annihillates White Jewish Girl
04/04/10, 02:22
Relocating all Jews to a specific place... hasn't that been done before? A lot? |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/04/10, 02:09
sorry, meant notascientist rather than poorwill |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/04/10, 02:06
Konversekid: you're so off with your first statement that I can't figure out where to begin. I've honestly tried a few times now to write a decent response but in the end all I can really say is that I hope you'll read more about the history of science. Science and philosophy were not clearly delimited before the scientific revolution. Men like Descartes did valuable work in both physics and metaphysics. You know how they tell you not to look for teleological answers to scientific questions? Descartes. Epistemological naturalism didn't just fall out of the sky. (Even if it had, that didn't settle much as far as truth goes... otherwise Popper could have saved himself a lot of work.) Look at the early arguments about what gravity "is." They were extremely philosophical, just like the QM interpretation squabbles of the mid-20th c. Or the evolution debates leading up to the modern synthesis.
poorwill: A lot of it's bullshit. But a lot of it is practical. see above. And It teaches us to challenge our assumptions. Ptolemy assumed the planets moved in circles. Pre-QM physicists assumed locality. It's important to think outside the box our worldview creates, even if such thinking is not immediately testable. |
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Philip Pullman responds to a question about the title of his new book
04/03/10, 18:36
That he burned many people alive just makes him all the more badass in my eyes. |
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Hannity calls Tea Party ''Tim McVeigh Wanna-be's'
04/03/10, 14:49
I'd have gone with Unabomber wannabes. |
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Philip Pullman responds to a question about the title of his new book
04/03/10, 14:32
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake! |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/03/10, 14:21
Well actually I watched it up until "Pythagoras was good with numbers," at which point I'd seen enough. |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/03/10, 14:18
I didn't even watch it but I'm going to assume it had to do with William of Ockham. It's possible to do this right, though:
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=58564 |
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Norm Finkelstein Verbally Annihillates White Jewish Girl
04/03/10, 14:15
I'm going to sidestep the whole peace in the middle east thing and just say that I hate it when people refer to arguments as "playing a card." |
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Norm Finkelstein Verbally Annihillates White Jewish Girl
04/03/10, 03:05
Listen, buddy. If you're going to call people Nazis, your goddamn parents have better have been... nevermind, it looks like everything's in order here.
Also: feeling compassion for palestinians is uninformed douchey groupthink. You guys are nowhere near as cool as baleen, who once bounced Noam Chomsky out of a club. |
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The History of Western Philosophy in Under 5 Minutes
04/03/10, 02:46
I'd try to sum this up but that would just be stooping to his level. |
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Prison Inmates Tattoo the Whites of Their Eyes
04/01/10, 03:11
They can patent the eyeball tattoooing technique. That's gotta be worth something. |
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