Biologist learning MATLAB. Any good resources on matrix math you recommend?

Bethamphetamine · 6 days

Gilbert Strang! (here) and (here).

Also, Hal Caswell does very cool matrix-based population dynamics modelling in this book. He's a little more demanding, but maybe it'd show yo more of exactly what you're interested in. (?)

youtubehead · 7 days

The military is cutting.

MrJosiahT · 8 days

This might be way wrong, since I've never actually read more than a few dozen pages of Camus... But I thought that this was the goal of Camus' myth of Sisyphus. If you watch from the outside and scrutinize, pushing a rock uphill for all eternity looks like torture. But Camus' remark "we have to imagine Sisyphus happy" seems to mean that he thought you have to sorta lose yourself in the process. Sisyphus is actually there, resigned to doing his task. Not hopefully looking for meaning, as we are from the outside.

Minotauren · 8 days

I thought I was the only one! No seriously, they stopped selling it at my local grocery store. Do other people love this stuff? Why would they do that to me then?

pencilcup · 9 days

On one hand, an abnormal person won't be as representative of the "common man" - they might be a crackpot. But on the other, they may have something unique to offer the rest of us, which we otherwise wouldn't have benefit from. Then they're a genius.

Midasx · 18 days

Oh [wo]man. Did that make any sense? I'm so happy. I'll try and come back some day and say it clearly. Thanks for the encouragement.

Midasx · 18 days

In philosophy, people sometimes talk about "webs of belief". In the metaphor, each node in the web is supposed to correspond to a belief, and the strands that connect them, the logical relations between your beliefs. This has the interesting effect that the same event can be construed differently by different people who have different "webs of belief". This sort of talk is motivated by skeptical work in epistemology - it seems to have proven impossible to choose an agreed-upon set of foundations for starting philosophy. But we can still talk sensibly about having coherent webs of belief. (Of course, we can also criticize particular foundations as better or worse than others, but that's beside the point here). But one major implication of the idea of maintaining a "web of belief" is that the same evidence can be understood differently by different people, with both people being rational. (Think Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shifts" as an example of this).

At first, such realizations¹ might seem to suggest that you're right on the money: Dawkins (or anyone) has no right to criticize these different belief systems; it's just hubris to assume that just because one particular belief of a [religious person] completely fails to fit into your web of belief, that it can't possibly make sense in any web of belief.

But that doesn't seem to be true of the real world at all. In reality, it seems that there are many people who have very jumbled and "tangly" webs of belief - they believe in (at least, think they believe) in modern science and rationality and their religion and many other things, even though that jumble of belief doesn't form any coherent whole. None of us is "logically omniscient" - that is, we can't immediately see all the implications between of all of our beliefs immediately, and easily. For anyone with that particular combination of beliefs (that is they believe "science" and "god" and haven't yet thought hard about the relationship between the two), Dawkins' style of argument seems to be very effective in first pointing out to them that there's actually a tension between those beliefs - they cant' all be true - and second to encourage them to drop the "religion" part, as opposed to the "science" part.

As effective, coherent and reasonable as all those arguments are, none of them should change the mind of a fundie. For the more thoughtful fundies, their webs of belief are coherent, despite that fact that they're probably even more wrong. I still have trouble believing that their whole worldview coheres nearly as well as a scientifically-informed worldview does. But that possibility is actually harder to rule out than the more obvious fact that many people contain very blatant contradictions in their own webs of belief. I mean, that set of beliefs is just so incomprehensible to me. If they believed what it sounds to me like they believe, then I should be surprised any of them can tie their own shoelaces. But they can, so to some extent, their worldviews must be somewhat internally consistent, but very incompatible with a scientific of rational one. So yeah, for the case of fundies, Richard Dawkins can probably not do a thing to change their mind. But there are a lot of minds that he seems to have reached very strongly.

1 (These "realizations" may still sound fishy without doing reading on things like "coherentism" or trying to understand some Quine. But some digging around can help you understand them and the problems that motivate them.)

TribalJuju · 18 days

I remember that I brought a cake into the theater. It wasn't an attempt to be sacrilegious (though I figured it may offend someone; it just wasn't the point of bringing it), I had just heard that you can get anything into that theater. Challenge accepted.

During the movie, some big guy leaned over to me: "hey! what are you doing with that cake in here?". Me: "... (oh crap) uhh, I just brought it on in!". Him: "Holy crap! I didn't know you could do that! They got those at the grocery store next-door, right?".

Awesome.

TimberBieber · 21 days

In chess, if you're in stalemate, it's uninteresting to keep playing. Stalemate marks the "end of the game".

I don't really think philosophy is in stalemate, but if it were, I'd possibly be interested in reading to see how it ends, but it wouldn't be worth dancing around aimlessly once I understood how the stalemate came about.

nkLottery · 27 days

So much love for Martyr. IMO, Warp Zone is a big improvement on Hopeless Hopes.

marquis_of_chaos · 28 days

An awfully revealing analogy is given at the end.

And that is what human sentience is: a hurricane—too complex to understand fully by rational means, something we observe, marvel at, fear.

Ullman's analogy is clearly intended to place consciousness outside of all epistemic reach, to make it magical. But it's such a horrible analogy, and completely unmotivated. Animals are very systematically predictable and even following her own "bio-chauvinist" argument, must respond approximately adaptively in their environments. That's hardly a spot to expect chaotic terms to dominate - one should expect stabilizing negative feedback to dominate. It's kind of hypocritical of her, after having spent pages worrying about the shortcomings of other, much better (though far short of perfection) analogies, to offer up this hurricane analogy.

Even as bad as it is, this hurricane analogy fails to make her point: meteorologists have a general high-level understanding about how hurricanes are formed. They can't predict them, but that's not the same thing as not being able to understand them, or even to make them. I suppose if she envisions people literally programming intelligent machines, then her view would make sense. But the plausible belief "a human can't write my soul in fortran" hardly motivates her enormous leap to the conclusion that "souls are chaos trapped in protein".

cdnmoon · 29 days

Stormtroopers may have been involved at some point.

corby_tender · 1 month

Well, I mostly (... roughly, approximately) agree with Harris' position, but I'm not a huge fan of his book. I think the reason fans of philosophy don't like his arguments (me included) is that they don't engage much with existing literature on the topic, and they when they do (say when he talks about Hume's is/ought distinction) he actually shows that he fails to understand its point. If you're interested in being very skeptical and paying close attention to precisely what the words Harris is using mean, it's not a great book because natural language is by its nature very vague. Especially where the words he's using have already been used differently by others before him - that makes him hard to read at times, because it sounds like he's saying one thing, but later it turns out he meant something else. Probably if I hadn't already learned other vocabulary, this wouldn't be a problem.

I suspect there are also some people who disagree with his conclusion or just-don't-like him (maybe they're religious, or just find him arrogant) can smell his apparent lack of awareness of existing literature and can use that to rationalize disagreeing with him before they've bothered to understand what it is he's tried to say (even if he's sating it "wrong" according to some of us pedants).

On the other hand, if you're comparing Sam Harris to William Lane Craig, Sam might as well be the perfect image of rationality, wisdom and truth.

free2one · 1 month

Heh. "Triumphant Arc". I'm traveling there with a buncha Anglophones next weekend. Gonna have to use that one with them!

Ru1138 · 1 month

I definitely agree that any interest group should stay single-interest. Squabbling about other related-but-not-central (since left or right is obviously going to impact tranhumanism-related questions) issues is exactly the way to put a group out commission before it even gets going.

hgf32 · 1 month

To follow up on your MS Word analogy: early programmers did understand the circuits and the bits firing, back in the day. That motivated the construction of machine languages, then assembly languages and then and "2nd-generation" programming languages. The abstractions in 3rd-generation languages (like, say C++) are sufficient for writing word (I dunno if MS uses high-er level languages to write features for word now, bt the core of that application will always be written using fairly low-level languages), but they all grew out of an understanding of what the machine architecture is doing.

I do a lot of programming recently in MATLAB, which is sometimes considered a 4th gen language. MATLAB is cool because it's based on linear algebra; that is, it's supposed to allow me to ignore the realities of the hardware it runs on completely (and it manages 95% of the time). With MATLAB, mathematics is motivating language-design, allowing it to break free somewhat from the typical abstractions that have been motivated by the realities of computer hardware in the past. As someone who was trained in Electrical Engineering (where we learned buttloads of linear algebra, as well as circuits), I have to say that programming in MATLAB can be very very nice, and it tends to help me be much more productive by only requiring me to have insight at the level of the problem I'm trying to solve, never requiring me to think about the hardware underneath. But honestly, it also leads me to do some rather awkward programming at times, when an algorithm just doesn't fit into the linear algebra paradigm, and it sometimes runs as slow as "snot running uphill in the winter-time", as one of my co-workers tends to say when he watches my MATLAB algorithms go.

My point is that MATLAB is really useful, but it's actually quite ugly at times, as well. By analogy, it seems like our existing mental categories are probably useful the way linear algebra is, but they're going to be too ugly at times, when we want to "really" understand what's going on. If anyone at Microsoft ever tries to write a huge, sophisticated (not good, but definitely sophisticated), program like Word in MATLAB, they will be fired immediately. They will use a language that matches the hardware more directly. Churchland's approach (currently like building NAND gates by hand) seems to have a huge amount of room to grow and flower into the sort of language we could write MS Word with. That won't make our mental categories useless (just like linear algebra or poetry or day-to-day discourse) is still great, but it's nonetheless total shit when we want to solve certain types of problems (as with programming in MATLAB, or doing philosophy with our mentalistic categories).

ThirdEye27 · 1 month

Because it was never designed to conform to what you believe you and others deserve from it.

Vanilla_Guerilla · 1 month

geneologies that go on for 20 pages per person.

Hey! I liked The Hobbit.

quite_stochastic · 1 month

I'm a Yvain fan (srsly check it out). I don't think he's had much to say about the "mainstream philosophy, good/bad?" question on there, though.

madcowga · 1 month

Hai gais, I just realized that different philosophical systems can have different foundations! That means they're all equivalent, right?

ExtropianPirate · 1 month

I live in Canada and tend to vote against the Conservative party because of their higher tendency toward anti-science, anti-personal-freedoms and occasionally nationalistic stances than their competition.

I don't strongly identify with any political ideologies. I'd prefer to muddle through each issue as it arises.

Crono101 · 1 month

Yup.

4runfun · 1 month

I have a few friends working in civil/enviro around here. Unfortunately their company is cutting jobs, not adding them.

The major engineering firms around are Stantec, CBCL and SNC Lavalin.

homohominilupus · 1 month

I'm a fan of gay metal.

AtxAxLoss · 1 month

This clears a lot up. Awesome!

Empathy only has value, as you say, if we value it. I don't believe we necessarily have to.

I mostly agree with this. Though the majority of people will class someone as "immoral" if they constantly go against community norms. And after all, from their points of view that condemnation will be just as fair, since your hypothetical psychopath's behaviour will tend to violate many of a community's shared values, as well as those of individual members within it.

I tweaked it because I'm not yet swayed on the subject of biological determinism

You've gotten me wondering if I'm a "biological determinist". There are three attitudes I can imagine going along with the label "biological determinist":

"We completely understand the biological world such that we can determine any fact using biological reasoning."
"It's possible in principle to understand the world using biological reasoning, though we're not there yet and may never quite get there."
"Biological reasoning can reveal truths about animals (including humans)."

All that Singer's position seems to require is (3). I can't imagine how that would be controversial, but there are many people who consider this to be "biological determinism" (which is frequently assumed to be bad). I think a weak form of (2) is actually quite plausible - biological reasoning is very powerful. (It's a long discussion to justify that. We could go there if you like!). On there other hand (1) seems so obviously wrong, since "biological reasoning" tends to require a lot of talk about high-level concepts like "fitness" and "selection", which talk about optimality using simplified scenarios and statistical biases respectively -- that is, stuff that's explicitly not deterministic.

fburnaby

TROPHY CASE

fburnaby

TROPHY CASE

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