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A gentleman by the name of Dan Willard, who recently passed, was a pioneer in a relatively unexamined area of mathematics: Mathematical frameworks that are just trivial enough to bypass Gödel. That is, mathematical frameworks that can prove their own consistency. He did so for a reason which may be...
Evil is not just a goodness minimization problem. For example, considering the trolley problem, what is more evil - doing nothing, and thereby letting five people die, or acting to change the course, thereby killing one person? Notice the use of the passive voice there, which may help to illustrate...
If you want to convey the coordinates [-1.0219,18.7172,.3181,182132.2290], what is the minimum amount of information you must convey, in order to be certain that the recipient of the information understands it? Well, supposing there is a monument there, you could give somebody the name of the monument, and the time....
Aella writes about how contextual pride is. Her primary focus is on pride, but shame comes up, as well. A quick refresher of the concept - this is not a summary, and you will lose information if you use only this description: Pride is a sense of relative superiority to...
I have a fundamental objection to the way a lot of people do utilitarian morality, which is that most people's morality is context-dependent; copy and paste somebody from one context to another, and the morality of their lives and choices can become entirely different. Somebody who lives an ordinary life...
I've been pondering something for a little while, which is that the standard take on political takes might be slightly off; I hear a lot about how people tend to listen to the (metaphorically) loudest voices in the room, drowning out the sensible discussion that is actually taking place. And...
Imagine, for a moment, living in a society in which toddlers routinely stab infants with knives, and adults routinely smash toddlers with rocks. You, naturally, are horrified by this state of affairs, and are thus flabbergasted when everybody suddenly notices that toddlers stabbing infants with knives is a bad thing...