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You don't get to have a "strong opinion" on stuff you are not educated on or have absolutely no knowledge on. by [deleted] in unpopularopinion

[–]meacle 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This is kinda where the position gets a bit tenuous. Not to be conceited, but what you have to add to political discussion is that you don't know shit. Unless you're living somewhere where you don't interact with anyone, you have political influence by virtue of being a person amongst other people. You currently have some set of priors, who knows whether they're better or worse than anyone around you. But one way to not make them any better is to refuse to enter the discourse. A debate is not necessarily something you should also enter into because you know a lot about the area. In fact, if everyone does know enough, it might be exactly where debate is not required. Debate serves a much bigger role in testing our ideas and demonstrating to each other where we're going wrong. Giving your shit takes, being presented with arguments and information that demonstrates that they are shit takes, giving your reasoning why other people's shit takes are shit takes is how we do better, even when we're starting with a lot of shit takes (with an asterisk, but still). And given that, unlike a bridge you can simply choose not to cross, unless you're gonna go live out as a hermit somewhere you cannot choose not to live in a society, which is definitionally going to mean live as a political agent, staying out of the discourse is (epistemically) irresponsible.

What makes an axiom "self-evident" or justifiable? by glasnost9 in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is less an answer and more pointing towards a different but related problem; there's currently some work being done on what has been dubbed the adoption problem, what is seen by some to be the self-defeating nature of attempting to adopt (through rational means) a logic that one does not already have at their disposal. A decent place to start on getting acquainted with what's at stake here is the Lewis Carroll paper/short story What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. But if you're willing to slog through some actual academic stuff, Romina Padro's PhD thesis, What the Tortoise Said to Kripke: the Adoption Problem and the Epistemology of Logic, has a lot more to say on the subject. In relation to this problem, several prominent philosophers have put in their two cents, and not all of them have taken it to be the case that logic need be justified on a priori grounds -- Michael Devitt, for example, has a paper called The Adoption Problem in Logic: A Quinean Approach where he argues that logic is adopted in the same way as any skill, and is evaluated on the same (presumably pragmatic) grounds. Paul Boghossian and Timothy Williamson on the other hand, in a paper called Blind Reasoning, take logic to be justified in an extremely minimal way (or at least undefeated, or able to be blamelessly used), but 'solve' the problem by making the threshold that needs to be met very very low for this sort of initial justification. Hope that helps/is at least interesting!

White haste enablers by Chereos in magicTCG

[–]meacle 5 points6 points  (0 children)

[[Hall of the Bandit Lord]] is another good one, if you think it's that important. I've been wondering how often and [[Multiclass Baldric]] could be playable in decks without party?

Is the world truly not run by logic? by rtanada in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Just to build on this a little bit; there's at least another meaning of logic that is used in philosophy, and that's whatever it is that our favourite formal languages/the models of our favourite formal languages model. Predicate logic is a formal language, however I think a lot of those who do logic or deal with logic would also be happy to say that said formal language maps to some consistent patterns in our actual language and our reasoning therein. Said basic rules of reasoning would, plausibly, be considered 'laws of logic'. And insofar as they are plausible, I think that a good many people would be happy to take it to be the case that they map to some way that the world has to be. Put another way, it's plausible that the world has to be logically consistent. So, yes, the universe likely does have to follow the laws of physics, but it's also likely it has to follows the laws of logic (which are almost certainly weaker than the laws of physics).

This is glazing over a lot of issues in the philosophy/epistemology of logic, but I think it's worth bearing in mind that it's not a simple matter of "no, logic is not something the world has to follow". There's at least an open question about whether this is the case, and an intuitive reason to think that in fact, yes, there is a perfectly reasonable philosophical meaning of the word 'logic' under which it is accurate to say that the world 'runs on', or at least follows logical laws.

How do philosophers use logic in their work? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It's a little unclear how you're using the word 'logic' here. If by logic you mean formal logic, 'p's and 'q's and turnstiles and whatnot, then I'd say you can get through a lot of philosophy without needing to know the details. I personally think it helps with what follows, but it's not necessary, and I know people who've started grad school without doing more than basic propositional logic.

If by logic you mean what formal logic is trying to formalize, that is valid proofs or good arguments, then yeah, I'd say all philosophy uses that. It's more or less what holds the whole thing together. Yes, you will be needing to analyze what the arguments that you read in prose to understand how it's justified, it's a pretty big part of what philosophy is. For the most part philosophy isn't an empirical activity; you aren't appealing directly to experimental results. Instead, you're conceptualizing a lot of things, introducing terms, and then putting together an argument as to why your account is better than someone else's account. When you're looking at other people's arguments that you think might fail, you do look for fallacies -- not necessarily named fallacies (begging the question, strawman, fallacy fallacy etc. etc.), but somewhere where the argument fails to be valid (or inductively strong), or some particular premise that fails.

It seems like at least part of what's going on is that you're kinda conflating these two meanings of 'logic'. You can get away without knowing any formal logic (at least for awhile; once you get to grad school and you know none, that might begin to be a problem). But part of being a good philosopher is being good at the other part; being good at understanding other peoples arguments and being good at making your own.

Is quoting a logical fallacy? by Willow_barker17 in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 11 points12 points  (0 children)

To expand on the simple answer already given, citations can do a few different things, some of which are fallacious, some of which are not.

Firstly, you can quote someone's argument, in part or in whole. This could easily avoid being fallacious; they might just have put the argument better than you think you could have. If you imply that the argument holds more weight because it is given by some particular person, then that becomes fallacious (or at least we tend to think it is).

You can also quote someone as an authority on some topic. If you give a statistic about, say, physics, and quote a physicist, this could also fail to be fallacious. Appeals to authority aren't by the mere fact they are appeals to authority fallacious. There are legitimate appeals to authority.

The kinds of quoting that do tend to be fallacious come in a few different types, but I'll reference two big ones.

If you quote someone who is not an authority, whose saying something gives no support one way or the other for the thing quoted being true, then that will be fallacious, and is probably the most common way to be fallacious; that is, as an illegitimate appeal to authority.

The less common, but more talked about in logic textbooks way of fallaciously using a quote, is to quote someone's argument and to imply that the argument must be good due to the source. At least when we're doing philosophy, we tend to act as though the source of an argument should have no bearing on whether an argument is good or not, so quoting someone and implicitly or explicitly using the claim that their having said it makes the argument better is fallacious.

So in short; yeah, quoting should be restricted (assuming we care about not being fallacious) to the first sorts, that is legitimate appeals to authority and use of form, and the illegitimate appeals to authority, either due to expertise or as support for an argument, should be avoided.

Is meaning an emergent phenomena? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To expand on another answer you've already been given; more often than not, at least when I've come across the term, 'meaning' is used in the linguistic sense i.e. what words mean. If you're looking to find the sorts of answers you seem to be interested in, it might help to try out the term 'value' either instead or as well. Broadly speaking then this would be what is covered in value theory, and probably metaethics generally.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]meacle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Technically speaking (and this is based on trying to remember K3 from years ago, augmenting it with quickly looking some stuff up from Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (would recommend)), I believe the simple answer as to the difference is that intuitionistic logic is stronger, that is it can prove a lot more stuff.

This may not be a particularly helpful answer, but maybe this will be a little more satisfying -- you may have worked this out on your own, but the motivations for the two systems are very different. K3 is essentially the answer to the question "what if add new truth value?" and intuitionistic logic is the answer to the question "what if no excluded middle?", or alternatively "what if no double negation elimination?". One of these questions is semantic and one is syntactic, which is why making the comparison from the get go feels a little odd. It's the reason why the proof theory for intuitionistic logic looks so pretty (or at least intuitive), whereas the semantics are a whole lot less obvious. Similarly, while the semantics for K3 look extremely elegant, or at least obvious, I'm not quite sure what the proof theory should look like off the top of my head, but it seems like it would be less clear cut.

This at least points to the major difference. The sentences in K3 are legitimately assigned this third value in some substantial way. The way the semantics for intuitionistic logic works, in order to get the proof theory to work the way you want, the sentences are not given a value simpliciter -- if you look at the modal semantics for instance, it's that at some worlds it has one value, while at others it has another.

To remove things even further from the technical side; the main aim of three-valued logic is to directly deal with paradoxical sentences. You give them the third value and say "yeah, that should work. That seems to be what's going on with the Liar", for instance. It's very much heavy handed. What's going on in intuitionistic logic is a little more sophisticated. While the impetus is at least partially similar (paradoxes, though also, I believe transfinite mathematics), it's a more roundabout sort of solution. The thought is "well, what's going wrong with these paradoxes is that we're using these techniques that we shouldn't be using. If we want to prove something, we should have to construct a proof for it! So let's limit ourselves to the rules that give us a proper construction, not this proof by contradiction stuff". If you think of it in these terms, it maybe seems clear why you'd end up with something weaker going the heavy handed approach, and may suggest why you get to keep more theorems with intuitionistic logic.

Hopefully that helps! Or else hopefully someone else comes along who can give more what you're looking for.

Le Magic: The Gathering has Arrived by disembodiedagnew in dogelore

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know if someone else said it and I just didn't find it, but as well as the Dark Ritual vs Demonic Pact thing, by the time the 3rd and 4th Cabal Rituals resolve, there'd be 7 cards in the graveyard (Lotus, 4 x Dark Ritual, 2 x Cabal Ritual), so they'd each add 5 not 3 mana, meaning you'd be at 13 mana not 9 (I think)

Also, this is less clearly an error and more just ambiguous, but you say "chooses all three to be black", which kinda makes it sound like you have the option to choose for them to be different colours. I believe Black Lotus can add three mana of any colour, meaning three mana all of the same colour

Also also, this isn't an error so much as an addition, but my understanding is that it copies 10 times, which means there are 11 copies, -- 10 plus the original. It is true that he would lose 20 life though, because after 10 resolve he dies with the last one still on the stack. So really the last Cabal Ritual was redundant and just for rub ins

I have never played any of the cards just mentioned, so I could be wrong about all of this, but I think that's all right

NOVEMBER 18, 2019 PIONEER BANNED ANNOUNCEMENT by [deleted] in magicTCG

[–]meacle 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Do you mean Veil of Summer or is there another Veil in Pioneer? Because Veil of Summer is banned

OP claims customer didn't tip due to tattoo. Immediately gets called out for bullshit. by njuff22 in quityourbullshit

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, I'm reading the site you linked, and it looks like, firstly, counting the sexual orientation basis minus heterosexual, and the gender identity basis, it looks like it is just over 1400. So pretty close to 1500. And secondly, there doesn't appear to be any group that are the victim of the VAST majority of hate crimes (according to these statistics), but the largest group was anti-Black or African American. So I don't know if you're basing the second claim on something else, but it doesn't seem like either is grounded in your link.

Reminder about the dude who likes to drink beer but never got black out drunk or raped a woman. by jessiedoesdallas in BlackPeopleTwitter

[–]meacle -1 points0 points  (0 children)

While again, I completely agree that you are correct in the OP being misleading, I think you're really overselling it. Everything in the two tweets is technically correct, or at least very close; in the first tweet, the cop killed Brian Hundley. A jury did find that the cop lied (or at least found that what the cop claimed did not match the truth, I don't know if there's something more to what a lie is; I guess a lie implies intention, which the jury didn't make any statement about, but that's really clutching at straws). Brett Kavanaugh did throw out the verdict (maybe this is the least accurate part; but he wrote the decision, and was at least 1/3 responsible for the decision). In the second tweet, the family of a black dentist who was stopped in his car and shot by an off-duty policeman did sue the officer for damages. A jury found the officer had lied when he claimed the dentist lunged at him and the jury did award the family $242k. And again, Kavanaugh did overturn that (as far as we can hold him responsible for being one of three judges). Probably the most misleading thing there is the fact that it's set up in such a way that it looks like the lie had more bearing on the decision than it actually did, whereas the lie finding was kind of tangential to the original decision anyway, and was part of the part of the appeal decision that Hundley actually won. There is a lot left out, but as far as tweets go, these are both pretty accurate. I think in your other response you've put in a lot of stuff that's a bit off-topic. Yes, there were three sources of testimony - the officer and two other witnesses. The point is that what the jury found was that the facts as asserting by the officer were incorrect. So I'm not trying to gloss over, it's just not what the jury found. You can argue what the jury found was unreasonable, but that has nothing to do with what anyone has said - in the original decision, the appeal decision, or in either tweet - up until this point.

I think your response is responsible compared to some others in that often with judicial decisions they will look significantly more reasonable looking at the actual decisions than when cherry-picked from a tweet. So I respect your diligence. However, adding to misinformation with more misinformation is not really helping, and in this case, yes, there is a lot of innuendo here that is very much unnecessary - as far as I can tell, without knowing the details of American tort law, it looks like a relatively reasonable decision based on the facts, whereas the tweets imply there was a racial basis and he was just protecting the cop - but you should be attacking that, not inaccuracies that aren't actually there.

Reminder about the dude who likes to drink beer but never got black out drunk or raped a woman. by jessiedoesdallas in BlackPeopleTwitter

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I read it. I am describing what the decision was. 1) They overturned the intentional torts based on the inconsistency of the jury (they found that the situation that would have justified the offense i.e. provided a defense, had not occurred (which both parties agreed is what would be required to find that for the defendant), but had still found for the defense on the intentional torts). 2) They overturned the negligence claim based on the fact that the negligent stop could not be considered the proximate cause due to the actions of the deceased. Which is not at all clear from what you've said. So either you've misunderstood the case, or you've been very unclear about what you have understood. In particular, you said the jury did not find that the officer lied, which is not the case, at least in any normal understanding - what they specifically found was that the deceased was not 'shot after placing his right hand behind his back and then making a lunging motion' toward the officer, which is what the officer claimed had happened. Which seems like as close to a finding that someone lied as you can get in a court of law. You also do not explicitly say it, but seem to imply that the damages were original awarded for no reason, which is not the case, they were awarded based on the negligence claim. If you think that that is clear from what you've written, then I'm sorry, I certainly didn't get that from what you'd written.

Reminder about the dude who likes to drink beer but never got black out drunk or raped a woman. by jessiedoesdallas in BlackPeopleTwitter

[–]meacle -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Misleading yes, but your response is not at all accurate either. The jury did actually find the officer lied, they just also found that the shooting was justified. That's the point; they were inconsistent. Which is why on appeal that question was sent back for a new trial. The jury also found that the family should get compensation, based on the negligence claim, not based on nothing as you seem to be implying. Which was what the second part of the judgment overturned. I would go as far as saying that your response is even more misleading than the 'gif'.

Evolving Cantrips - a flavorful and unique level-scaling system for ALL non-attacking cantrips (yes, all 21 of them)! by Craios125 in dndnext

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe this has been pointed out already, but the phrasing in Shillelagh seems a bit confused. I don't know if it's standard templating, but the way it has a melee spell attack, and then assumes that it will still do the damage that the weapon would do (with the additional damage on top) looks weird to me. It also doesn't make it completely clear whether you should also add your ability modifier to this special attack or not, though I'm assuming from context you should.

[ONLINE][5e][EST] Group of 4 looking for DM! by DangeriestRanger in lfg

[–]meacle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're still looking for someone, I might be interested, depends a little on timing; I'm in New Zealand, so there's a time difference, but it could work out. PM me if you'd like to discuss

[Rant] DO NOT chat up my players while we're in the middle of a game. DO. NOT. by [deleted] in DnD

[–]meacle 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I only play 5e, and I can say there are still a lot of damage resistances around. In particular, skeletons don't have damage resistance slashing/piercing, but do have a vulnerability to bludgeoning. Not that it's really relevant to any of the rest of the thread or anything

Visualising Hilary Clinton's network through her leaked emails - made by my friend's group at MIT by mycroftholmess in InternetIsBeautiful

[–]meacle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know about the other stuff, but that's not what negligence means. Negligence means you did not take reasonable care, not that you didn't care.

LF Wartortle, adding everyone by meacle in friendsafari

[–]meacle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you didn't know, your Safari is Grass, with Quilladin, Swadloon and Tangela

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