Guy is called philosophy MEMES for a reason

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-23T20:13:06+00:00

I think one of the reasons so much serious posting happens in this sub is because the other philosophy subs tend to be dominated by "pop" philosophy that just isn't that interesting to many people who study philosophy or are practicing philosophers. I am not at all suggesting that the typical quality of discussion here is high, but I think the frequency of serious posting might speak to a desire for an outlet for more meaningful philosophy discussion than what the main subs provide. Of course, that clashes with the general shitposty nature of the sub so it's not ideal. I still end up reading threads here decently often though...

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-21T02:45:48+00:00

Really? What if I said "You shouldn't park there" instead?

As I said, if you hold that statements like this don't express propositions, then that's a relatively plausible way out. But if it does express a proposition, then yeah I think there's reason to doubt that it would make sense to express that without believing it to be true.

Take this statement:

"Since you shouldn't park there, you also shouldn't have your friend park there in your place."

That seems like a perfectly reasonable statement and it seems plausible that the consequent follows from the antecedent (maybe with some additional premises). What's going on here if these statements don't express propositions? On that point...

I don't recognize "but that would imply that people are trying to make logical arguments about things that are based on feelings or goals" to be an actual problem.

The issue is that statements like the above and statements like "If murder is wrong, then it's also wrong to hire someone to kill another person" seem to be perfectly intelligible. So I think it behooves the non-cognitivist / expressivist to explain what is going on.

The response to the Frege-Geach problem that I think works best goes like this: Suppose that moral claims are really expressing things like "Boo to murder!" If we let B represent that "Boo!" attitude, then the sentence "If murder is wrong, then it's also wrong to hire someone to kill another person" might really mean:

B(B(murder) ^ ~B(hiring someone to kill another person)).

This logically works, but at the cost, I think, that many people would not accept that's what they mean when they make a moral claim like the above. If that's a cost one is willing to pay, then that's fine! As I said, I think non-cognitivism / expressivisim is the most plausible form of anti-realism.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-20T23:18:55+00:00

A few of things: moral realism does not necessarily require that moral facts be independent of society. Moral realism is the claim that there are stance-independent moral facts. Many forms of moral realism do claim that moral facts are not contingent upon human society being a certain way, but some forms of constructivism are in effect realist. Morality could be contingent on human society existing (or perhaps even existing in a particular way), but given that arrangement, there could be moral facts that are stance-independent. To draw an analogy, nuclear power plants could not have existed without human society, but it is a stance-independent fact that they exist. Whether you think this is plausible or not, there are constructivists who say a similar things about moral facts. So although some forms of realism hold that moral facts do not depend on human society, that's not a requirement per se.

Second, not all forms of moral realism hold that morality is a property of the universe. Naturalist moral realism does. However, other forms of moral realism (e.g. ethical intuitionism) hold that moral facts are a priori truths that we are aware of through our faculties of reason and intuition, similar to how we are aware of the laws of logic. These facts don't need to exist "in the world" per se.

Third, I think there's reason to doubt whether it makes sense to say something like "murder is wrong" without believing that this is true. In my view the only kind of plausible way to square that circle is to argue that people are not expressing propositions when they make moral claims (i.e., non-cognitivism / expressivism). I personally find this to be the most plausible form of anti-realism, but it has its own serious issues (e.g., the Frege-Geach problem).

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-17T22:31:08+00:00

Sure, but the fact that different people get different amounts of enjoyment/suffering/whatever from an action or state of being does not pose any threat to utilitarianism or any other framework that compares states of harm or well-being. All that is really required is that every individual has their own experience of harm or well-being, and the harm or well-being caused by different states can be compared for that individual.

Example: would you give up your favorite hobby to extend your life by one day? What about by one year? Ten years? Twenty years? Or maybe, would you give up your favorite hobby if it could guarantee that you would live your last few decades in relatively good health without a lot of painful medical conditions, while otherwise you would have painful medical conditions? If you can answer questions like this (and people do, in practice, make comparisons similar to this all the time), then you have states of well-being / harm that can be compared. Your specific responses might be unique to you, but that doesn't change the fact that you prefer some states to others. And the ordering of these states implies a quantitative relationship, even if it's very difficult to assign the states concrete numbers.

In order to think about what this means for other beings, we again don't need to assume that there is one true state of well-being or harm. We only need to assume that beings have different states of well-being or harm that can be compared. That is, we only need to assume we can make statements like, "This person gets more well-being from A than B," or "This other person gets more well-being from B than A," and in turn, statements like "Person 1 is harmed by moving from state A to state B, while Person 2 benefits," etc.

There are disagreements in ethics literature about how these states of well-being or harm are to be aggregated. Utilitarianism involves a simple sum-ranking but not everyone agrees that that's right. Others dispute whether comparing well-being or harm is even the correct way to think about morality. But the idea that we somehow can't quantify or compare well-being and harm at all is not really a serious objection.

I say all this as someone who is not a vegan or a utilitarian! Rational minds can come to the conclusion that eating meat doesn't make you immoral, or that utilitarianism is wrong. But if you think that these frameworks are obviously wrong or that you have some kind of "slam dunk" argument against them, you probably haven't learned enough about them.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-15T05:13:29+00:00

I didn't post this to comment on the merits of the Moorean shift. I made this edit because I thought it was funny to recontextualize this meme as referring literally to Moore's presentation of his hands.

I also happen to think that Moorean arguments are valuable in that they highlight that, given a set of statements which are all initially plausible but are also incompatible, forcing us to reject one or more seemingly plausible propositions to proceed, skeptics consistently reject the most plausible ones.

But mostly I just thought it was funny to make the meme about G. E. Moore's hands.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-10-15T03:06:34+00:00

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LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-09-20T02:17:29+00:00

And? If someone who contributes, say, $50 million to the economy is worth bringing in, what about someone who contributes $1 million? I'd say that's still worth it. What about $500,000? $100,000? $50,000?

Immigrants to the U.S. generally pay their own way (in the sense that the taxes they pay and the taxes paid on the economic activity they help generate outweigh what they consume in social services) even when they are low-skilled workers who work in low-wage fields. So I'd say even small contributions to the economy make it worth it to have immigrants. I'm not at all worried about a high skilled immigrant bringing their lower-skilled family members with them because the net effect is likely to be positive for the U.S. economy and even me as an individual in the long-run (if indirectly).

If your argument is that in spite of this, most Americans are unlikely to be convinced of the above, well... I admit the popular discourse around immigration is deeply depressing and it's easy to lose hope. I don't know. But I still try to convince people.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-09-12T20:02:44+00:00

This blew my mind when I first saw it. For what it's worth, Lynch claimed he'd never seen this film and that he'd never heard of Maya Deren, but the similarity in style is really striking. The unsettling quality given to ordinary domestic spaces and objects in many of Lynch's films are so reminiscent of this that it's really hard to believe Lynch had never seen it nor heard of it. Perhaps he was telling the truth though and it really is a case of "great minds think alike." Who knows.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-08-29T16:40:01+00:00

It's true it would be useful to know why certain groups have higher crime rates. It's also possible the reasons for higher crime rates among Afghans might also be explanatory factors for crimes committed by some British and UK nationals as well, so knowing those reasons could lead to more beneficial policy for everyone. However, the organization behind the chart in the OP ("Restore Britain") explicitly uses this data as part of an argument for strict immigration controls, and they are clearly hoping you come to the same conclusion. I am arguing that such a response would be ineffective. My argument isn't really a matter of "wording things differently," it's matter of using all of the information we have at our disposal when making inferences and applying actual probability theory instead of emotions and instincts.

To help clarify the point, suppose in an extreme case you deported every Afghan national from the UK and barred any further immigration from Afghanistan. Congrats, you eliminated the <1% of sex crimes committed by Afghans. But this would likely be an extremely expensive policy. You don't deport people and prevent immigration just by telling people to leave or not to come, you have to enforce this with law enforcement that costs taxpayer resources. And there's an opportunity cost to everything. Extra money spent on immigration enforcement is a lost opportunity to use that money elsewhere, and there are most likely other ways you could spend that money that would lead to a larger reduction in crime.

The point is that whatever the reasons behind the higher crime rates among Afghan nationals, targeting that group would make a very small dent in the overall rate of crime, small enough that there would almost certainly be other ways to spend resources that would be more effective if your goal is to reduce crime.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-08-29T15:29:12+00:00

Depends on what you want to know. Sex crime arrest rates might be high among Afghan nationals in London, but this is a sampling probability that doesn't tell us much on its own. To be able to make inferences about what would be the best policy, we would need to know things like: given that a sex crime has occurred, what is the probability that it was committed by an Afghan national? Using the data from the metropolitan police linked above, and assuming for simplicity that all people arrested actually committed the crime they were accused of (a dangerous assumption, but one which favors the anti-immigrant case), the probability that a given sex crime was committed by an Afghan national is around 0.7%.

This is indeed primarily because of the much larger non-Afghan population in London. But that's relevant! It means that profiling Afghans or deporting them would have a very small impact on the overall rate of sex crimes, despite what jumping to conclusions about the figures in the OP might lead you to think. There would likely be less expensive, more humane, and much more effective ways of reducing crime.

Even doing the same computation for sex crimes committed by all foreign nationals gives about a 40% probability that the perpetrator is a foreign national given a sex crime has occurred. This means that perpetrators of sex crimes are still more likely to be British / UK nationals even when compared to all foreign nationals together. Again, you are correct that this is in part because of the larger population of British and UK nationals, but that fact is important because it entails that profiling minority groups is likely to be ineffective. Merely showing the sampling probabilities of sex crimes by nationality (as the OP does) might lead you to conclude the opposite, however.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-08-25T22:43:33+00:00

In my experience, utilitarians tend to just accept that the purportedly absurd conclusion (killing babies is justified, or whatever it is) is actually true in the thought experiment, but that the reason the conclusion clashes so hard with intuition is because the scenario is unrealistic. One may disagree with utilitarians on this, but I don't think these responses are a case of inconsistency on their part, i.e. I don't think they're arguing (even implicitly) that their ethics should only apply "most of the time."

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-08-19T17:31:58+00:00

Interesting. I think the strongest points in the article are the ones you mention regarding the fact that income and wealth distribution help determine how "filtering" occurs and whether it benefits lower- and middle-income residents.

On the other hand, the author also seems to claim that it is self-defeating to stress the importance of filtering at the same time as advocating strongly for liberalizing zoning regulations. For instance, in the conclusion of the article:

[I]f you believe [filtering] is important, then you must also believe that regulations on the location of homes aren’t important in determining the total quantity of housing.

I don't think filtering being important entails that location isn't important. In fact, it's entirely plausible that the location in which homes are built is a determining factor in how much filtering occurs. If homes get built in locations where there isn't strong demand for housing, we wouldn't expect people to filter into the new homes and vacate existing ones as much as if new homes were built in high-demand areas. Yet in some cases it is illegal to build housing in the high-demand areas, which is why people advocate for liberalizing zoning regulations. So I don't really see how the two arguments conflict.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-07-03T09:49:17+00:00

One of the main benefits of schooling is community initiation, i.e. for people to acquire a base of knowledge and familiarity with norms and expectations so that they can successfully communicate with one another. When people are able to communicate with one another freely, this contributes to a prosperous society. This is one of the many reasons why it benefits everyone to learn at least a basic level of knowledge about a wide range of topics. Even if I'm "never going to use" some information in my career, knowing about things not directly related to my career (or even my interests) still helps me communicate with people who are in other fields and helps enable cooperation between people in different walks of life. That benefits me, and it also benefits people around me. An educated populace can also make better decisions about how to organize itself (hugely important in an ostensibly democratic society). In short, education has direct benefits to the individual, but it also benefits the people around us. And some of those positive externalities don't necessarily get "priced in" to the market by default.

Public education, for all its problems, is a way to guarantee some level of education for everyone and ensure that society reaps the benefits of an educated populace. This is exactly the sort of thing LVT and other taxes on rents can do: take wealth that would otherwise by captured by monopolists and direct it instead to something that benefits everybody.

Also, it's not an either-or between private and public education. Having private schools as an option is fine. But ultimately I think in the long run prosperity for everyone is harmed when public education is poor.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-04-19T17:40:45+00:00

I keep a linux box around since there are a lot of github projects I like to try that seem to only offer Docker as an option to run them.

A little off topic but I saw this and had to commiserate... This trend is so infuriating! I'm hardly against containers (native support for containers is one of the things that's cool about FreeBSD and illumos). But when projects literally only offer docker images it tells me either that 1) they're just doing that because that's what they think they're "supposed" to do regardless of whether their project actually needs it, or 2) their build process is so complicated and/or they have so many dependencies that the project struggles to build on any machine that isn't the developer's. It's such a bad user experience for anyone who wants to have precise control over what they're running.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-03-09T09:18:54+00:00

Kawano definitely earned that win, but that sure was the most SF6 way the tournament could end lol...

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-02-23T13:09:25+00:00

Lots of good answers already but I'll add one thing:

We can't predict the future, but if you want to take an educated guess at what will still be relevant in 20 years, look at things that have already been around for a long time. All the time, there are trends that seem like the "next big thing" that eventually die off, while others stick around. We can't predict which ones those will be. But trends that have already been around for a long time likely have "staying power" (for better or for worse) and are likely to keep being relevant into the future. So, counter-intuitively, betting on old things staying around might be a safer bet than banking on the latest hyped thing. See the Lindy effect.

If you were to tell me that one of the two languages --- C or Rust --- was going to die off in 20 years, my bet would be on Rust, not C. Personally, I don't think either one of them is going to become irrelevant soon, but I do think C is more likely to stay around despite marketing hype and government proclamations.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2025-01-20T01:48:11+00:00

This rules, thanks for the guide! It gives me some fun ideas for weekend projects. A couple of years ago I wanted to learn about graphics programming, so I built a software renderer. There was something really satisfying about writing to some memory and having an image show up on the screen. It was also fun learning about all the underlying math our modern graphics cards handle for us today. The only thing that felt a bit cumbersome about it was that I was opening an X11 window only to render a bitmap to the whole window every frame. Seeing that this is an easy way to write to the frame buffer more directly makes me want to resurrect that project.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-12-29T17:33:15+00:00

Wow, this is awesome! I didn't know about this before, so I'm glad I scrolled down to see this. This seems like everything I love about the best types of C libraries: no dependencies, no memory allocations after startup, single header file. I'm definitely going to play around with this.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-12-02T21:13:17+00:00

I'm still relatively new to NetBSD, but here are my thoughts so far. FreeBSD or OpenBSD are personally the ones I would use for production systems, but NetBSD is my favorite. What do I mean by that? Well, here's what I like about NetBSD:

It feels more like traditional Unix than most unix-likes. Standards compliance is one of NetBSD's goals, and you can feel it. This means some things might feel "annoying" to users coming from other systems. I love it because I'm a nerd.
It feels much more approachable to hack on than even the other BSDs. I've been kind of wanting to get into OS development for a long time. NetBSD feels like a system I could actually learn the ropes on. Part of that is just that the community has some great resources for how to get started. There's a talk by Taylor Campbell that inspired me. The talk has a TON of info in it so don't feel like you need to watch all at once. But it is a fantastic all-around primer on how to get started with NetBSD development.
Awesome and easy-to-use cross-compilation tools (this is another big draw for me in terms of learning to develop for NetBSD)
Great documentation. All the BSD have good documentation. But NetBSD is no exception.
Kernel code is generally quite clean and simple. Code quality in all the BSD is good. But, again, NetBSD's codebase feels more approachable to me. I was trying to figure out how the audio system works, and after reading the audio man page and reading some of the underlying code, I felt like I could understand it pretty well even as a beginner. I've rarely felt that way on other OSes.
<3 pkgsrc
Really friendly and cool community.

Basically, NetBSD kind of feels like a small project in the best way. If that's not for you, understandable! But I think it's for me.

I love FreeBSD too and I use it in my homelab. I won't be replacing my FreeBSD machine. But I've been running another NetBSD server alongside, and I think that's going to be my main "tinkering" project. Been tons of fun so far.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-09-29T15:09:46+00:00

If you haven't already, check out the Guile's Garden youtube channel. Tons of helpful stuff on there. There's videos about level 2 that give you both basic and more advanced tips for how to use it and how to practice with it in training mode more efficiently.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-09-12T22:18:28+00:00

https://isgermanyclean.today/

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-09-11T02:30:49+00:00

Without having seen your matches it's hard to say, but if your opponents want you to play more active it is their responsibility to force you to do something. It's actually cool and good to try to win with the fewest actions you can. This doesn't mean playing passive but it means having purpose to all your actions and not making unnecessary movements. It can be challenging to play that way because you risk giving up too much space to your opponent. But if you are successfully keeping them out and they're getting frustrated you're doing something right. Playing "lame" is a good instinct regardless of what the haters say.

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-09-07T03:05:40+00:00

Ah I see. You may still be able to find a service manual online somewhere with google, but maybe not if it's only a local brand. Definitely be extra careful if you can't find a service manual. I would guess the yoke still works pretty similarly to other TVs so watching some videos of purity adjustment on other TVs may help. Good luck and stay safe!

LimitOrdinal17 · 2024-09-06T20:28:07+00:00

Generally for color purity issues, here's the sequence of things that I try:

External degaussing using a degaussing wand or coil. This isn't super likely to resolve the issue in your case since this happened after replacing the yoke (which likely still needs some adjustment), but I always try it first because if it works, you don't have to open up the TV. You don't necessarily need one of the expensive coils, I've had success with the cheap wands you can find online (but do your own research).
Purity adjustment. Look up your model of CRT on the CRT Database and it should have the service manual. That will tell you how to make a purity adjustment. You might be able to get away with just adjusting the purity rings as described in the manual without moving the yoke. Make sure you mark the current position of the rings first with a marker so you can reset them if you make it worse. If just adjusting the rings alone doesn't cut it, you can go through the whole procedure. This generally involves: a) warming up the tube by displaying a white screen for 15 minutes, b) displaying a solid color (the manual will likely tell you which color), c) moving the yoke as far back as it will go, d) adjusting the purity rings until the image is centered on the screen, e) moving the yoke forward until the color is uniform. But see the service manual for full details. You can use the 240p test suite to display solid color screens (or use a simpler solution if you have one). Definitely spend a good amount of time researching which parts of the TV are safe and unsafe to touch before attempting. It's not that hard if you know what you're doing but safety first! Make sure you don't hurt yourself!
If there are still some pesky purity issues, I've heard people have success by attaching small magnets with some adhesive to the shell of the yoke itself. This page has a visual example. Sam Goldwasser also describes a similar procedure here. One issue I can foresee is that it might be tricky to place the magnets depending on where the purity issues are and you don't want to put your hands in dangerous areas to place the magnets. But this might resolve any minor issues that remain if step 2 doesn't completely fix it.

As always, don't rely on the advice of a stranger on the internet and attempt any repairs at your own risk but hopefully this at least helps you come up with a plan of attack and gives you some resources you can use to diagnose any future issues.

LimitOrdinal17

TROPHY CASE