blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 2 years ago

"Covalently bonded bacteria" sounds like something the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have come up with because they heard that "covalent bond" was a science term but did not know what bacteria are actually made of.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

“covalently bonded” bacteria

what an amazing theoretical possibility

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The new location is literally, not figuratively, in the sticky comment on the top post at the old place. But that's probably asking too much of their reading skills.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Personally, I've always found Cromwell's rule a deeply boring proposal for screwing with the axioms. Try doing the Dutch-book argument with surreal numbers, then I'll pay attention. :-P

(I would expect that many subjectivist Bayesians would take Cromwell's rule as an addition to the basic rules that are themselves justified by Dutch book or some such means. Not assigning sharp-edged probabilities out of general prudence is a thing an individual gambler can choose to do, if that's the way their tendencies lie, while not being part of the mathematical definition of the subject itself. But, well, 46,656 varieties and all that. Moreover, it is hard to do physics having chopped off the endpoints of the interval without chopping other structures as well. For example, if you don't even allow 0 and 1 to be available as idealizations, you might end up peeling the skin off quantum state space. Some could cope with this, but not Yud, since he demands that all of reality be a single pure quantum state. Insofar as any sense can be made out of Yud's rambles, he is wanting something stronger than Cromwell's rule, anyway, since he wants to forbid probability 1 even for logical implications, which Lindley allowed.)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 2 years ago

Thanks for taking on that task (I linked to your post to provide further details).

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

For posterity:

The Nazis were very evil, but I'd rather the actual literal Nazis take over the world forever than flip a coin on the end of all value.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

There's a 404media story about it now.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 2 years ago

It is always somehow worse than one remembers.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 2 years ago

I just can't respect a man who is posturing and arrogant yet still fails to go for the phrasing "to whom you are speaking".

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