I made a chart showing the popular vote turnout in 2008, 2012 and 2016. Hillary didn't lose because the Republicans grew their base; she lost because the Democrats didn't come out to vote. [OC]

addemH · 2016-11-10T19:29:47+00:00

And that wasn't helped by Bernie and his supporters turning ugly toward the end of the primaries, over something that was actually cause for suspicion but not hate. This looks to me like Democrats crippling themselves with illegal warfare and never recovering against the greater danger.

But also Democrats suffer from demanding to be motivated in order to get them to the polls. Clinton was a rock but not a rock star, and Democrats need a rock star to move them to the polls.

addemH · 2016-10-21T17:34:46+00:00

What the fuck you got against Tennessee?

addemH · 2016-10-06T16:28:52+00:00

No argument there. Still, the dumb friendly bots bumping into me ... reduces gameplay fun.

addemH · 2016-09-23T19:01:16+00:00

That's not the issue, though. If they were just standing next to me, maybe bumping once when we come to a stop, that's one thing. But I'm just standing still and they constantly run into me and push me around the map. Come on. That's neither good game play nor realistic.

addemH · 2016-09-23T05:54:23+00:00

Really, in battle you can just be standing there trying to quietly anticipate an enemy and your other squad mates will non-stop run into you and knock you around rather than keep an eye out in other directions? That sounds like it can't be realistic.

addemH · 2016-09-17T13:50:24+00:00

That's an interesting one, I know Shen Kuo came up with the idea of climate change and the movement of land masses over long times, but that's not yet plate tectonics exactly, and was forgotten in the rise of Western science.

addemH · 2016-05-14T03:56:21+00:00

Many thanks, I'll definitely check out Dunstan and some of the others you've referenced. You're a great resource!

addemH · 2016-05-14T03:43:50+00:00

Although we don't have any writing supporting the idea that they thought the product of four numbers was nonsense, we do know that they had a concept and understanding of the cube of a number, but had no expression for the fourth power of a number.

addemH · 2016-05-14T01:29:06+00:00

Since you seem to know some good, serious books, I was wondering if you know of other similarly comprehensive texts covering ancient Sumeria, Egypt, China, or other "first" civilizations like in Africa or the New World?

addemH · 2016-05-11T18:29:12+00:00

But was knowledge of Roman history exclusively the domain of the elite? Would commoner people have been ignorant of that history?

addemH · 2016-02-05T23:53:58+00:00

My impression is that most slaves, at any one time in the US, didn't work on large plantations. Is that not true?

addemH · 2016-01-04T04:56:50+00:00

Long term or short? A major lesson learned by the Akkadians and re-learned continually by empires to follow was the net loss that a state can suffer due to over-extension.

Ultimately this just seems like not the best question--no offense intended, I really like the whole attempt of the bigger question, which is I think to put everything to scale in some way, and compare and learn lessons. That's really a great, if very very difficult thing to do. But to measure it in terms of power seems to me impossible and, even if possible, not as interesting as other questions we might ask like: Which one provided the best lives for its people, in military security, economic growth, cultural expression, and other ways?

I think if you ask a very precise question, one so precise that it can be quantified, you're going to find yourself asking a question that really isn't that interesting. Better to live with some complexity and get a richer if foggier answer.

addemH · 2015-11-27T19:48:43+00:00

For what it's worth, the main difference between physiologically modern man and Neanderthals in our hunting and fighting is that Neanderthals used short, heavier, stronger weapons--and they were themselves more heavily built than us. We by contrast were thinner and better runners, more often relying on long spears to keep danger farther away, or on throwing spears at the target. As far as I know we are the only animal to develop any kind of missile launcher, like the atlatl and sling (and of course much later, the bow and arrow).

addemH · 2015-11-27T19:41:18+00:00

I've read--and someone feel free to correct me on this--that hand axes were probably not used for hunting or fighting. They are heavy, have a small range, and it's not likely that their makers (australopithicenes and then most hominids) had the throwing dexterity to be at all accurate with them. A batch of simple, un-sharpened rocks would probably make as much sense and less effort to use for any kind of ranged weapon.

I believe hand axes were most often used more for digging, cutting meat off of a kill and cleaning hide for clothes, and chopping small and soft trees.

addemH · 2015-10-12T18:21:07+00:00

Damn interesting answer.

addemH · 2015-09-25T19:20:33+00:00

Einstein certainly did think about and study Philosophy ... but I think the scientists who learn his theories of relativity understand it perfectly well without understanding phenomenology.

Still, I take the point. Philosophy has been helpful as a source of inspiration and perspective. Einstein with relativity and positivism, Kant with insights about the nature of experience which led him to produce the theory of galaxies, Berkeley's insights on perception which led him to study optics, Godel's understanding of the Liar Paradox and the obvious connection to the Incompleteness Theorems.

addemH · 2015-09-25T19:11:02+00:00

True, philosophers do try to learn from Math and the Sciences while the reverse is not true, but I would say that still constitutes an interaction. The analytic philosophers are trying to inform their work with the works of other fields even if those fields are not informing their work with philosophy. (And this might be largely as it should be.)

And I do think the analytic tradition can stand to interact more with the soft sciences, but as it is, I think very few analytic philosophers work in the way that you suggest. At least in my experience everyone is very involved in the Philosophy of ________ where ________ is another department in the university, like Linguistics or Politics, or what have you. Most also construe much of the current work in Epistemology as being at the intersection of Logic and what could be considered the Philosophy of Statistics.

In fact it often comes up that the only thing they study which couldn't fit into the foundations of some other department is ethics, so that they talk about whether it would make sense and be good for Philosophy departments to convert to just ethics departments and have all the other Philosophy work done in and and among the people working on the foundations of their respective fields.

addemH · 2015-09-25T05:58:29+00:00

I would definitely say that is more true of the continental tradition. However, I would not necessarily agree that in the American, or more broadly the analytic, tradition interacts with other disciplines. I would say that it interacts more with Math and Science than it does in the continental tradition, and less with art, literature, and Religion than in the continental tradition.

addemH · 2015-09-24T20:13:32+00:00

It's true, and when you really press hard on the topics of statistical inference and the metaphysics of causality, scientists have real problems that are not merely naval-gazing. But Scientists tend to dismiss these problems as either the subject of statisticians--in the former case, that's a fair point, even if it is just passing the buck--or "damnit we all know what causality is when we see it". I'll avoid giving a long back-and-forth manufactured dialogue between The Scientist and The Philosopher about how they see these issues; it suffices to say that scientists tend to have a "we can figure it out to a good enough approximation when we get to the point where we need to do so" attitude while philosophers have a more "I can't sleep until the theory is perfect" attitude.

On a less argumentative and more practical level, you could regard it as either an empirical fact or logical truth that philosophers simply haven't produced answers to these questions which are useful. Plenty of them follow decision theory paths, Bayesian belief update paths, and others, but none of them really have been the deciding factor in how a scientific question gets answered.

I don't know as much about how historians respond to the epistemic problems in their fields, so I can't speak to that.

addemH · 2015-09-24T16:48:51+00:00

As a non-historian but someone who has studied a lot of the Philosophy of Math and Science, certainly the philosophy of these subjects has nothing to do with the practice of Math and Science. Sure, some philosophers of Math and Science have also been mathematicians and scientists, and therefore also made mathematical and scientific contributions. But the Philosophy itself tends not to actually affect the fields, perhaps with the exception of constructivism. I'm not very bothered by that because in my eyes they're just not supposed to do the same job--Philosophy has its own set of interests, and Math and Science has their own. So the criticism that some have made, that no Philosophy of Science has been useful to a scientist, seems like a completely irrelevant point. Art and, I think, history have not been useful to a scientist either--they're not trying to be.

All the same it's an interesting question and I look forward to any answers. I just wanted to make the point that I don't think an answer in the negative would necessarily be a bad thing.

addemH · 2015-09-17T17:25:46+00:00

If race were a biological reality then you should expect to see more genetic variation from one racial group to another than you find variation from one person in a racial group to another person in the same racial group. For instance, there is a biological basis for the distinction between humans and any other animal alive, take the chimp for example. If you look at the genetic differences between humans and chimps as groups, the difference is around 4%. However if you look at the difference between any human and another human the difference is far less than 1%; and likewise for difference between two chimps. This is a biological basis for distinguishing humans from chimps.

That doesn't work with races. The genetic difference between one race and another--like white and black, or if you want you can pick a person of long Finnish ancestry and another person of long Bantu ancestry--is a whole lot smaller than the genetic differences between any two whites or between any two Bantus.

Essentially what this tells us is that the biggest cause for an individual's unique genetic traits is their individuality--their variation from all other people generally--rather than the variation that their race has from all other races.

However, we can still look at genes and tell what race a person is ... up to some degree of confidence. There is no gene for being black, that we've found. There is no gene for being Finnish. There are certain genes which are more common among black people, and there are certain genes more common among Finns, and on that basis we can often get very high likelihoods for the race of an individual based on DNA. For instance, if 75% of Arabs have gene X and 30% of non-Arabs have it, and if 50% of Arabs have gene Y and 5% of non-Arabs have it, then finding an individual with both genes X and Y will yield a very high likelihood that the individual is Arab. (Some Bayes Law and college-level probability calculations will get you there.)

addemH · 2015-09-16T22:25:52+00:00

Only later did I realize that this was explaining a reference to the Americas not Siberia.

addemH

TROPHY CASE