bookmarking, and watch the rest later.

the idea that the climate could have a rubber-banding sort of effect, by reaching some threshold at which a trend rapidly reverses, is definitely not out of the realm of possibility.

and here's a little thought experiment to consider, as you watch this.
if you fill one icecube tray with warm water, and one with cold, and put them both in the freezer, while will be fully solid ice first?
please do NOT simply reply below here with what you think, or know, the answer to be.
the point is that, counter-intuitive though one of the answers may be, you can still think of plausible scientific theories why either outcome is possible.

>> ^Crake:
my point is that democracy works on the assumption of free will, and if you start trying to second-guess (yeah yeah, a favorite republican word, but hear me out) the voters' motivation or level of ignorance, you encroach on the assumption democracy rests on: that the common man knows what's best for himself.

There's a great humorous thought experiment in "The Dilbert Future" that goes something like this...
Compare the voting record in a given election of the most intelligent 10% of the population to the rest of the population and you will come to one of two distressing conclusions:
1) The results are the same for the two groups, meaning that intelligence is irrelevant to democracy.
2) The results are different for the two groups, meaning that intelligence is relevant, but democracy negates its impact.

Sure it's not logically sound, but it's still funny.

"'It's like this: when mathematicians began fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound results.'

'Or at least internally consistent results,' Rudy said.

'Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps.'

'It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really TRUE or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?'"

- © Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

my point being that the rigour and internal consistency is not enough, the connection to the real world is essential for it to be called a science... And a lot of the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences or whatever, deny this real world, and just think up thought experiments - they might as well be studying Klingon.

(PS: the taxonomies of disciplines is different from place ot place, so what i'm critisizing is not a certain discipline, but an attitude)

"The burden of proof should be that by the community to convict, not by the accused to exonerate himself."

Yeah, except that there's a fundamental disagreement about what the burden of proof here ought to be, which was one of the points of my post. I think you are setting it way too high in asking for incontrovertible evidence; evidence the kind of which is rarely found in real life, or in our past instances of banination here on the Sift. If you want to start using that as the metric, then so be it. You should know, though, that you risk indicting yourself as a hypocrite when you do it. After all, we certainly haven't been so timid in the past, and if we want to keep this place from going to hell in a handbasket, I suspect we won't be in the future either. Do you see why? Because as you well know, banning is an indispensable tool in a forum like this, and as it grows you will undoubtedly have to fall back in important instances on less than 100% certainty in the future if anyone is going to get banned at all. In other words, you, in your capacity as an administrator, are setting yourself up for some serious inconsistencies in how you structure--and allow others to operate--the banning procedures around here. You are making yourself into someone who believes one thing about when people ought to be banned, but has followed another thing in the past, and will revert to that same (now rejected) thing in the future if the Sift is going to remain anything like what it is today. Methinks this is not so desirable.

And it is not overly demanding to expect people to be able to give an account of themselves when circumstances seem (more than a little) fishy, nor is it somehow unfair to think that when they can't--when there doesn't seem to be a plausible alternative explanation that they or anyone else can offer in their defense--that this might be strong evidence of their guilt. I'm prepared to argue at length for this, and to generate some thought experiments that will help demonstrate the case. However, since I already said my last comment would be my final (public) input on this, I'll limit that to private messages to you--and then only if you're interested in hearing them.

"I suppose I'm just naturally inclined to be less accusatory whenever it involves a member who has been here and worked long enough to earn themselves a star."

This misses the point. Precisely what's at stake here is whether or not MrFisk earned his star through legitimate means at all. Our star point system is fantastic, and should be both defended and relied upon to inform our decisions about Siftquisitions. But if the question is whether the person has done what all the rest of us had to do to earn our stars, or instead cheated, then that changes things. You can't have a functioning ranking/privelege system based on star points if we can't be sure that the attainment of those points wasn't tainted. It just won't do anyone any good to rely on stars at all if we allow the foundation of the system to be eroded through sock-puppetry. The stars simply won't mean anything at that point.

Alright, I know I'm annoying the shit out of everyone, so I'm gonna stop now.

The 'collapse of the wave function' is a mathematical term relating to a measurement being taken of a quantum system. NOT that they don't interact - this is wrong, the opposite in fact is true.

It is real world *predictions* from the mathematics that cannot be made, due to the uncertainty of knowing initial conditions - which is heisenberg uncertainty. This is the basis of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment which is a quantum system linked to a physical real world event.

^ That's because most people don't understand (yet) what the role of thought experiments is in moral philosophy, and how they are supposed to illuminate and challenge our fundamental moral intuitions. As this stuff starts to get more popularized, people will become a bit more savvy.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
The provocative part of the experiment is asking yourself if vibrations traveling through a medium are sound, or do they only become sound when perceived?

I believe this approach sidesteps the actual intent of the thought experiment. Looking at it in this analytical way implies that you accept the existence of the unobserved, and turns it into a very easily-resolvable question of semantics - that is, do you define "sound" as vibrations or their perception.
Of course, the nature of the question implies that the tree falls even if no one's around, but I believe the purpose is to stimulate a progression of thought back "up the tree," as it were, asking "does something happen if no one knows it?"
Schrödinger's Cat is an excellent example, illustrating the "no" answer (suggesting that an uncollapsed waveform is essentially unrealized), while the vibration\perception position illustrates the "yes" (by accepting the existence of the unobserved).

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
>> ^nickreal03:
the sentence "if a tree falls and there is not one around, does it make a sound?". It is a sentence that most clearly explain what is wrong with human kind. For some f cked up reason humans thinks that the universe go around them. I hate that! I hate that sentence! I am piss to be a human sometimes. Bunch of arrogant self center bastards.

>>>>You might be missing the intent of the question. It's a thought experiment, not unlike Schrödinger's Cat. You have to break it down to get at the crux of the question.

When the tree falls, it introduces vibrations into the air. When these vibrations make their way into the ear of an animal, they are perceived as sound. The animal need not be human, just capable of hearing.

The provocative part of the experiment is asking yourself if vibrations traveling through a medium are sound, or do they only become sound when perceived?<<<<

A sound is a wave traveling throw the air period. Perception is a hold different subject which I don't see how it could possible fit. I belief this question was originally targeted to asked whether the universe exits because of humans rather than regarless of humans. I think is just an old stupid probably religious question that still been echo throw generations for some really stupid reason.

>> ^nickreal03:
the sentence "if a tree falls and there is not one around, does it make a sound?". It is a sentence that most clearly explain what is wrong with human kind. For some f cked up reason humans thinks that the universe go around them. I hate that! I hate that sentence! I am piss to be a human sometimes. Bunch of arrogant self center bastards.

You might be missing the intent of the question. It's a thought experiment, not unlike Schrödinger's Cat. You have to break it down to get at the crux of the question.

When the tree falls, it introduces vibrations into the air. When these vibrations make their way into the ear of an animal, they are perceived as sound. The animal need not be human, just capable of hearing.

The provocative part of the experiment is asking yourself if vibrations traveling through a medium are sound, or do they only become sound when perceived?

I didn't understand the point of the question for many years. At some point, for a reason I don't recall, I saw it for what it was and it has been a much more fascinating question since then.

Now if the question was, "If a tree falls in the forest and no self-righteous, rich, white asshole is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" then you might have a point.

"However, 'playing hypothetical game' doesn't really accomplish anything on a desirable scale."

Bullshit. The examining of hypotheticals serves as the backbone of any good philosophical thought experiment. It is just these experiments that allow us to test our moral/legal beliefs against the standards of clarity and consistency, and often expose their unforseen, unintended, and unjust consequences.

I don't see the damn point of carrying out a thought experiment in the real world. But upvote and playlist nonetheless.

More to the point, it is absolutely useless to carry out this thought experiment in the real world, since the theory behind the experiment states specifically that such a real life enactment can't possibly yield any useful data - the act of any such observation will, by necessity, negate the usefulness of the data. Gratuitous, but the sift gets to stay because it's a passably decent explanation.

I don't see the damn point of carrying out a thought experiment in the real world. But upvote and playlist nonetheless.

I thought someone might misunderstand that, I said the total acceleration. Yes, because the collapse was initiated at the 12 floor and not the top, these impact forces are approximately overwhelmed from the start. If you actually do I thought experiment and represent the forces accordingly you will come to the same result. The force of the impact of the 12+1 floors into the 27th floor(singular) is practically negligible compared to gravity.

If the collapsed was initiated from the top of the building then you might see a non negligible influence of this relatively small force.

Just to give you a nice example. Draw the for diagram for a stationary cup of water weighing 3kg. Now, stratify the cup of water into three layers each weighing 1kg. What is the force diagram for each of the layers? And, what is the sum of these forces?

In reply to this comment by Squidley:

I'm not sure what they're teaching in calculus, physics, statics/dynamics...

I don't buy it. I'm only 30 minutes into the video, but it sounds like Searle is making logical fallacies, with gobbledegook sprinkled in between. I had to look up his Chinese room thought experiment on wikipedia; it's a straw man argument. The system in his thought experiment is a program using a look-up table to pass the Turing test. While at least at face value it seems such a system would not qualify as consciousness, there are ways a program can reach a result besides looking it up in a table. His thought experiment doesn't show his look-up table to be the only way to pass the Turing test, and it doesn't address the consciousness of alternative ways of passing the test. And it doesn't follow that the non-consciousness of a look-up table precludes consciousness for other methods.

I should probably point out that the discussion between Gorgonheap and Gluonium is an entirely unnecessary one.

Consider the following thought experiment: A suicidal man jumps from a high bridge. Now, his journey down to the water may closely resemble that of a man who has been pushed, but that fact is certainly not a good reason to think that he actually has been pushed.