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Forum Bugs, Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Fun with the new forum!
« on: April 11, 2011, 06:39:29 pm »
I think negative karma has returned with this new reputation system; it's now possible to "disagree" with a post.
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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Feedback
« on: April 11, 2011, 06:34:48 pm »
I would agree to a moratorium on posting until both decks are up in a battle report thread. Also, promptly posting decks should be enforced on the threat of a penalty.
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Forum News and Announcements / Re: BUG: Some users temporarily blocked from the forums.
« on: April 11, 2011, 06:23:26 pm »
SG, just a suggestion: you should be able to send a PM to all forum members - it's probably a good idea to let them know about stuff like this if/when it happens.
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Forum News and Announcements / Re: New and improved Card Ideas and Art section
« on: April 07, 2011, 10:55:37 am »I already got the tables done before you posted Daxx. ^^;; Was there a discrepancy I missed though?You got it right. I just didn't read the tables before posting, my bad.
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Forum News and Announcements / Re: New and improved Card Ideas and Art section
« on: April 07, 2011, 09:26:24 am »| Name | Cards in Forge | Cards in Armory | Cards in Reliquary | Competition Wins |
| Daxx | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
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Religion / Re: Pascal's Wager
« on: April 07, 2011, 09:24:01 am »
I find claims of the paranormal about as suspect as spirit healing and other forms of "supernatural" activity. It's an interesting topic though, and might be worth starting another thread about.
The problem with the paranormal is that we don't actually have any evidence to suggest it exists. Anecdotal accounts are for the most part easily explained by psychology, and no actual evidence has appeared when this stuff is actually tested for by disinterested scientists. I would lump this "evidence" in with the same "evidence" that people use to explain their personal relationships with their god or gods.
Just as a matter of opinion, it seems vastly more probable to me that given the brain's tendency to be wrong and occasionally just make shit up, witches/demons are more likely the result of sleep paralysis-induced hallucinations, angels the result of wishful thinking, fairies the result of an active imagination, and the "holy spirit flowing through a person" as crowd psychology (as examples, not a comprehensive list).
Which is another interesting topic that we could pursue if people were interested. Who in this thread who has/has not hallucinated (drugs, sleep paralysis, etc.)? What were your experiences? (Again we could start another thread for this.)
The problem with the paranormal is that we don't actually have any evidence to suggest it exists. Anecdotal accounts are for the most part easily explained by psychology, and no actual evidence has appeared when this stuff is actually tested for by disinterested scientists. I would lump this "evidence" in with the same "evidence" that people use to explain their personal relationships with their god or gods.
Just as a matter of opinion, it seems vastly more probable to me that given the brain's tendency to be wrong and occasionally just make shit up, witches/demons are more likely the result of sleep paralysis-induced hallucinations, angels the result of wishful thinking, fairies the result of an active imagination, and the "holy spirit flowing through a person" as crowd psychology (as examples, not a comprehensive list).
Which is another interesting topic that we could pursue if people were interested. Who in this thread who has/has not hallucinated (drugs, sleep paralysis, etc.)? What were your experiences? (Again we could start another thread for this.)
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Religion / Re: Pascal's Wager
« on: April 06, 2011, 12:38:25 am »
Oh hey, that's the guy that wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, right? Awesome dude.
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Religion / Re: Pascal's Wager
« on: April 05, 2011, 09:54:37 pm »
I would say that it is a misuse of the razor to some extent but not entirely.
I actually don't think it's completely unreasonable to consider the probability of any given god existing as similar if not equal to the probability of another infinitesimally different god existing - given an equal amount of evidence so satisfy each claim, there is no practical way of differentiating their probabilities. Of course, this is certainly not conclusive because absence of evidence (in terms of the existence of a differential) is not evidence of absence.
On the other hand, the probability of the non-existence of a god is entirely different because we have a method of differentiating this hypothesis from a good deal of other hypotheses - we can perform testing. For instance, we test the claim that God will kill me for writing the word "snarfle" by writing the word "snarfle". Since I am continuing this sentence, we can reasonably assert that we have disproved a hypothesis that asserts the existence of a God who is metaphysically incapable of not killing anyone who types the word "snarfle". One down, an infinite number to go.
By iterating this process we arrive at a definition which has died a death of a thousand papercuts, as the domains of hypothetical gods are restricted more and more through continuous testing. See also the Invisible Gardener.
This is only one method by which the probabilities can be determined to be unequal. There are probably others, but I believe this is sufficient to illustrate my point.
I actually don't think it's completely unreasonable to consider the probability of any given god existing as similar if not equal to the probability of another infinitesimally different god existing - given an equal amount of evidence so satisfy each claim, there is no practical way of differentiating their probabilities. Of course, this is certainly not conclusive because absence of evidence (in terms of the existence of a differential) is not evidence of absence.
On the other hand, the probability of the non-existence of a god is entirely different because we have a method of differentiating this hypothesis from a good deal of other hypotheses - we can perform testing. For instance, we test the claim that God will kill me for writing the word "snarfle" by writing the word "snarfle". Since I am continuing this sentence, we can reasonably assert that we have disproved a hypothesis that asserts the existence of a God who is metaphysically incapable of not killing anyone who types the word "snarfle". One down, an infinite number to go.
By iterating this process we arrive at a definition which has died a death of a thousand papercuts, as the domains of hypothetical gods are restricted more and more through continuous testing. See also the Invisible Gardener.
This is only one method by which the probabilities can be determined to be unequal. There are probably others, but I believe this is sufficient to illustrate my point.
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Politics / Re: Scott Walker vs. The Unions: The Real Public Enemy
« on: April 05, 2011, 09:20:11 pm »A number of liberal blogs and opinion shows spouted the notion that the budget shortfall was somehow Walker's doing, or that Wisconsin had some kind of magical budget surplus, but those who live there know better and these notions have been demonstrated to be false as evaluated by PolitiFact Wisconsin here:I disagree with their take on it largely because they seem to not have taken discounted future tax revenues into account for fiscal decisionmaking. Budgets are not all about a single year; they must be taken in context: the entire economic cycle, or alternatively the discounted future budget surplus/deficit. This is why governments are able to run deficits in the same way that you or I can drop into our overdrafts or run up a credit card bill - because they are capable of borrowing money and repaying it later.
http://politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/18/rachel-maddow/rachel-maddow-says-wisconsin-track-have-budget-sur/
I accept the inaccuracy in claiming that he created the deficit (mea culpa), but he certainly created an addition to the deficit equal to the amount that this bill would save. Fundamentally my point still stands that he is not reducing the surplus across the economic cycle; if he truly had Wisconsin's budget at heart he wouldn't have cut those taxes.
But these aren't unions against oppressive companies, they're up against the government. Their money comes from the people, not some business. What are they going to do, go on strike against the people? Picket the tax-payers house? Unions are good. State workers unions? Not so much.Actually the government is still a monopsonist demander of labour, and can therefore still be responsible for market failure. Public sector unions counterbalance the same sort of problems that private sector ones do. Granted that the problems may not be to the same scale since the incentives facing government employers are slightly different to those facing private sector employers, but the idea that the situation is somehow different purely on the basis that the "taxpayer" is involved is just special pleading.
I'll consider starting a thread when I have a little more free time. If I knew the specific things people wanted to know about, it would make life a little easier. Maybe a Q&A thread of some kind?
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Politics / Re: The US should RAISE taxes
« on: April 05, 2011, 09:01:46 pm »I don't think our military spending is out of control btw. You can agree that we are hemoraging money without facts yet you ask for facts as soon as you disagree with anything. Still I offered facts on the military budget.This is almost insultingly ignorant. Do you genuinely believe this to be the case, or are you just misinformed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures. 40% of global spending? How much of global GDP do we have, 33.3%?! Quit picking and choosing numbers. Our budget isn't as high as it seems.
Not only have you just highlighted how disproportionate your spend is compared to GDP (and you even managed to do so inaccurately, since your GDP is actually closer to 20% of the world's GDP - making the disparity even more obvious), it's worth further emphasising that spend by GDP actually is not a good measure for you since it can be considered to overstate the amount that is relatively necessary. You should also be looking at spend per capita, where you are second only to the UAE and spend nearly twice as much as the next western nation (Norway). For comparison, your spending per capita is approximately 2.5 times that of the UK, 4 times that of Germany, and thirty times that of China. Your military spending eclipses that of the rest of the world not only in absolute terms but also in proportion. This is an unavoidable fact which is demonstrated by the figures you have just presented.
Not only that, but since your political climate does not allow for reductions in military spending, this disproportionate spend which has dragged you into a budget crisis will not end any time soon (NB. there is a very significant difference between a recession and a budget deficit; please learn it).
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Politics / Re: Donald Trump as president?
« on: April 05, 2011, 08:43:02 pm »Which is exactly why we need him... we let him take us out of National debt and then we kick him out of office knowing fully well what happens with buisnessmen with tons of powerHe wouldn't take you out of debt for the precise reason that he would be unwilling to raise taxes on corporations and/or high earners, and given that he'd be running on a Republican platform he would almost certainly not be willing to withdraw from the wars you are engaged in (because he'd lose most of the republican base).
You cannot cut taxes and continue military spending and attempt to deal with your budget crisis all at the same time. There aren't enough non-military government programs to cut, let alone wasteful ones. Yeah, because cutting NPR's funding and attacking collective bargaining rights is going to improve the budget whilst you're spending billions on fighting wars overseas...
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Religion / Re: Pascal's Wager
« on: April 05, 2011, 08:24:29 pm »I had been referring to the non theistic possible reality. That possibility is where no god exists. Hence it would be most accurately described as the hard atheist possibility.This makes no sense. You cannot discount a position simply because it does not make solid assertions. In a (analogistic) sense, weak atheism can be viewed a form of mixed strategy which does not assert a dominating strategy but assigns the greatest probability to the non-existence of God. By attempting to insist on "non-mixed" or non-probabilistic strategies, you're artificially restricting the game space and thereby arriving at an inaccurate answer.
Soft atheism and agnosticism are not positive claims about the nature of god and hence do not match a possible reality 1:1.
You're also still not substantiating how you're arriving at the assertion that the non-existence of god is equally likely to the existence of any given definition of God. In fact, I am willing to bet that you are not capable of justifying this and are simply taking this axiomatically. This is the most fundamental flaw of your position and without it your entire case falls apart.