yrimaxi

So you’re just going to whine about tone? Not even try to argue for or against what I have put forth?

Chances are that you spend more time than that feeling resentful that the big bad strangers on the internet don’t feel even a pang of shame just because you told them to.

Most patrons of a store are not the store owners’ peers.

but I can’t understand deciding it’s ipso facto irrelevant because you’re a programmer.

The negation of “everyone should know this” is not “no one should know this”. I can understand that someone would protest to a claim about how “everyone should X” by giving a blanket statement like “no I shouldn’t”, but I interpret that as hyperboly in this case.

You went from Eugene Debbs to fairytale-spinning court jester in the span of four paragraphs. That’s impressive.

Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)

It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?

EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms.

That’s what the poors need; noblesse oblige oligarchy.

Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.

Everything I know is personal. Most of it is not something I want to share, nor is it useful to anyone else.

I haven’t made a personal wiki before but I do keep a fair amount of personal notes (without any cross-referencing rigor).

It’s an analytic science.

This is a very Reddit-esque response.

You may speak as you will, I do not deny that the current usage of the word “man” has acquired a secondary meaning of “adult male human” opposed to it's historical meaning of “human" and if you wish to use it as such, then I'm confident I can usually discriminate by context.

You mean primary.

I said mundane topics... I won’t bother with the rest.

Not terribly pertinent, then. One is more likely to fall into conversations about mundane topics with uneducated people than to stumble upon existential conversations with educated philosophers, even though the latter might produce a large corpus.

One would also think that “man is evil” would be preferred by the erudite philosopher to the more ambigious “men are evil”, although one can never overestimate the fondness that an educated person might have towards pedantry, frankly.

Singular man is more likely to be gender-neutral.

Good example: “man is evil” clearly means people, since one would say “men are evil” if referring to males.

We live in economies that rely on consumption. So it isn’t exactly strange that we make the “behavioral choices” that we do during normal times.

There’s been plenty of fretting regarding slowing down the economy, and for good reason.

What percentage of the world's car owning population lives in a place with a restriction like that?

Interior USA?

Additionally, it belittles the consistent effort and energy spent by these individuals to train their minds.

If we have to choose between these two dichotomies, “nature” “belittles” it more.

> I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room.

Being a genius is a good thing, and also not having “ego” motivations is looked upon favorably. So this is like an egoless brag.

Also: look at what I managed to do indirectly/without even trying.

Shooting yourself and then later going out to lunch is simply impossible; it is not a paradox.

A paradox is when two contradictory things are true at the same time.

The grandfather problem is a paradox if time travel is possible. If it isn’t possible then it is simply an impossibility.

And for largely the same reason: both scenarios violate causality, so the universe can't be shaped that way.

So you agree that time travel is impossible. Great... we agree. However I was discussing this with someone who apparently thinks that it is concievable... I wasn’t merely making up impossible scenarios; I was demonstrating how their theory gives rise to paradoxical scenarios.

It is entirely irrelevant what it is. The point is that if the system is immutable it is impossible to represent a combination of state transitions that alters an existing state,

Alters? Aha! But you cannot alter that which is immutable! Seems that you still don’t get the concept.

See how silly it is to language police people on such subjets?

would in that case [only include those] where the time travel does not introduce a paradox that depends on change.

Highlighted the problematic part with brackets. This is just hand-waving. “Only those”? Your theory would have to be able to explain concrete examples like the grandfather problem, or else it doesn’t rise to the level of being a theory that can explain the paradox.

The same way the timeline does not include any states where I fold an elephant, because it's not possible to do so.

Irrelevant unless there is an actual elephant folding paradox that I’m missing. Impossible things can be explained; paradoxes cannot since they reveal a contradiction in the model.

You have not presented any paradoxes that can work with an immutable space-time other than perhaps if said space-time introduces divergent timelines at any point of mutation, in which case the paradox can also easily be resolved.

This is the first time (?) you’ve mentioned divergent timelines or hinted at non-just-straight-line-time. And yes, that would probably be perfectly adequate, and is the best answer you’ve given thus far.

You can experience it that way, but your "do something" step 2 would be deterministic and could not possibly include steps that introduced a paradox.

“Determinism” is either irrelevant or non-sufficient. “Could not possibly” is pure hand-waving as there is nothing which makes sure that you are able to do something benign (like greet your former self) but not do something like kill yourself.

You're still thinking in terms of a mutable space-time. I did not talk about time being immutable,

Wow, I have to hand it to you. I did mention “space-time” once (although only once) and I utterly failed to be rigorous and spell out the whole package deal, namely space-time. What an utter embarrassment.

Not that it changes my point in any way.

My original comment gave immutability as an example of a possible solution. Time travel with paradoxes is not possible.

You can’t resolve the Barber Paradox by simply saying that the Universe wouldn’t allow the barber to shave himself. That’s effectively what you’re doing here, only using vaguely hard science terms with a seasoning of “you still don’t get it”.

This explains absolutely nothing. “Will simply do what was already done in his past” is the non-sequitur: if they shoot themselves in the past then that was what was done in the past. Sounds paradoxical? Because it is, and determinism can’t stop a human from shooting a gun any more than free will can because this has got nothing to do with volition.

This explains absolutely nothing. You time travel back and kill your former self. Paradox. How to resolve? Determinism.

That’s just invalid.

“Knowing” here just referred to the magical force that will keep time travel suicide from happening. But without a magical force you’re even more stumped!

And I’ll reiterate: I accept all of these premises! I’ve never denied them! All you and Eli have managed to do at this point is try to nitpick the linguistic deficiencies of my explanations, which are inevitable anyway since I’m not a physicist with a specialization in space-time theories.

And whether I “get it” or not is secondary to the point of whether you have truly managed to confirm or disconfirm the time travel paradox, which I still claim you have failed to do. It is simple to wave away a time travel where you do something compeletely benign, like frickin’ wave or greet your former self. Try dealing with something of consequence, like killing your former self (as in: the person in that point of time-space which carries the mutable signifier of “yourself” which is younger than yourself) or giving yourself a kilogram of gold from the future, which I think would violate the law of preservation of energy or whatever.

Is time travel backwarks possible or not? If it is, see the questions in my previous comment.

No. That was not the premise.

And yet if time travel backwards is possible you simply cannot deny that one would experience (!) that time travel as steps 1–3. Temporal experience. Hah!

There’s absolutely nothing hard about the concept of time being immutable; that’s how children’s cartoon handle time travel, not as two timelines where the first one gets erased right after the second one “happens”. (Okay, okay, they probably use both of these tactics.) The true puzzle is time travel which introduce paradoxes, which your original comment says absolutely nothing about. But maybe you’ve answered that in another comment (I have only kept up with this subthread). If not, you should probably try to do that instead of dewelling on this minor philosophical insight of yours.

Yes of course, except for the last part. Their temporal experience, if they went into a time machine, is:

1. Time machine backwards

2. Shoot themselves

3. Time machine forwards

And that’s how they would have experienced it. The whole premise seems to be that this is allowed:

1. Time machine backwards

2. (do something)

3. Time machine forwards

Of course step 2 always happened since it’s the past. And yet they shot themselves. But they couldn’t shoot themself and exist now as well. And that’s the paradox.

Two choices at this point:

1. You can’t really do anything in step 2. In which case time travel is impotent, and hence why even dignify calling it time travel at all?

2. You have some potency in step 2, but you can’t do things that lead to paradoxes. But then how would you handle those special cases?

Just stating that “the past is fixed” doesn’t solve the paradox, it restates one of the premises.

Ok. I guess verb tense falls short in this case. :-)

I don’t think this really gets at the paradox. What if you shot yourself?

Your comment is orthogonal to my comment.

I have no idea how you're going to accomplish this with centralized economic planning, but there's a much better shot at it with a free market approach.

1989 called, they want their dichotomies back.

I think free will is orthogonal to mutability/immutability of time.