COVID-19 - appropriate government response?

[brimstoneSalad]

The opposite of hard science isn't easy science. Hard does not refer to difficulty, but something more like firmness. A hard science can be easier or more difficult than a soft science.

I'm curious, what would an example be?

Would you say difficulty is subjective? Or does it have to more do with how interested you are in the subject and the amount of time you dedicate to it?

Difficulty depends on the person, sure, but I don't think it's completely subjective. There are various degrees of complexity and various amounts of data that require memorization. Soft sciences can also be more difficult to attempt rigor in because there's no extant framework... like trying to invent calculus from scratch.

There are hard sciences that are pretty easy. I would say, aside from the advanced mathematics that come up in field calculations, physics is pretty easy. You could probably learn all of physics minus that in a solid year. But with the same amount of study it's not clear if you'd be able to become proficient in a single language. It's just that physics is pretty simple and there aren't that many variables, constants, and equations to remember and it's *such* a hard science that outside of the bleeding edge there's no a lot of ambiguity or unknown there. Like there are physics "cheat sheets" that basically contain ALL of physics on a single page. You couldn't include all of a language on a page and have it be remotely legible. Making *advances* in physics is very difficult, though, in a way making advances in say documenting an undocumented dialect is not. So there are different ways to be difficult or easy.

I thought he already said he denied it before? Or am I misremembering?

Not sure he did. I brought it up as a stupid example of conspiratorial claims of "coincidences" in names.

Do you think the US should outlaw Holocaust denial? People are pretty dogmatic about freedom of speech here.

Not sure. I think only the obvious cases such as fear mongering about vaccines which does measurable harm are unambiguous.
I do not think politicians should be allowed to lie.

[teo123]

From what I can tell, the sole reasoning for keeping him here is that the forum doesn't have enough active members and he is an active member.

And don't you think I am one of few people on this forum whose ideas have some intellectual merit? Saying "I think bombs don't exist, because 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says that a system can't do work from its own internal energy, and bombs would have to do a lot of work with very little energy input." has some intellectual merit, it proves I actually thought about the issue, rather than just accept what I was being told. Even if I ended up being wrong, I was just one step away from the solution. Saying "You are stupid for not simply trusting the authorities." is basically the equivalent of saying "Who cares if bombs exist or not?!", that's what most of the people on this forum are saying, and it holds no intellectual merit.
And have you made some videos promoting veganism? I have recently, here is my video-response to Peer Ederer's arguments against veganism.

Publishing is easy, whether your paper is good or not is aside from the fact.

Well, after all, you can read it yourself and decide. To me it seems that it's undeniable that it takes a lot effort to research and present something like that.

Now I have to ban you for a week.

Well, I think that's very unfair. First of all, one year has already passed. Second, I don't see how can a rule be remotely fair if it applies only to me, while everybody else is allowed to talk about soft science. Third, I think it's based on a misunderstanding...

The opposite of hard science isn't easy science. Hard does not refer to difficulty, but something more like firmness.

I know. The point I was making is that even when it comes to mere facts (no predictions), linguistics is still more firm than political science is. The claim that "šišmiš" means "bat" in Croatian is a lot more firm than whether or not Bernie Sanders said in 2011 that the American Dream was more easy to achieve in Venezuela than in the US. If somebody believes something like that "šišmiš" means "bat" in Croatian, he is a lot less likely to be wrong than if somebody believes Bernie Sanders said something like that. Political science actually uses facts from linguistics to determine those things. If linguistics is wrong about what "achieve" means, then political science facts based on that are also wrong.

it just literally is not important enough for a footnote

And if most of English-speaking people don't know that the name "Croatia" denotes a country, what's the point of calling Croatia "Croatia", rather than simply calling it "Hrvatska", which is the Croatian name for Croatia? If about the same number of people will understand you...

Of course you deny Tiananmen Square.

So, you think it really happened? Why?
I have three reasons to think it didn't.
First, the Chinese government denies it, and governments are, in spite of all their flaws, usually reliable sources about stuff like that.
Second, if it really happened, what has happened to the dead bodies? How come nobody has found the mass grave?
Third, the name "Tiananmen" appears rather ironic, as you yourself note. Why would somebody call a part of a city "gate to heaven"? Though, admittedly, it's not nearly as ironic as the names Vukovar (city of wolves), Grabovo (apparently from the root "grab-", meaning "to chase", compare the word "grabežljivac" meaning "predator" or "carnivore", and the possessive suffix "-ovo", so that it means "belonging to one who chases" or something like that) and Ovčara (meat from sheep) are. You really burst into laughter when you read about Vukovar Massacre in Croatian because of those names, and Vukovar Massacre apparently really happened.
I mean, obviously, I am not an expert in te field, there is nothing which will make me qualified to talk about Chinese history, so I can't be certain.

Current politics in China are trending to more conservative Confucian ethics, Maoism is all but dead, it was buried a long time ago by capitalism.

Well, Marković'es reign was a period of economic liberalization of Croatia.

Obviously there is a point of resistance that can result in arrest, and a point in resisting arrest that can result in you being killed.

Then the policemen who killed you would end up in jail. Or do you think that doesn't matter? Isn't then that a sort of double standard? I mean, you say journalists ending up in jail for criticizing Croatia discourages them from criticizing Croatia, and that jails existing discourages psychopaths from murdering, but you seem to imply the fact that a police officer ends up in jail if he kills somebody doesn't discourage police shootings.

This is what happens when there's no political will to enforce a law.

And you think there is political will to incarcerate people who insult Croatia?

It's only chance whether you happen to be right because you can't recognize when you're wrong

Well, I recognized that I was wrong when I thought the sorting algorithm I came up with and implemented in my programming language will be faster than the "sort" function in standard C++ library. I was able to determine that via experiment, though, and there is no such experiment with which I can determine whether the story of Gordan Duhaček is true.

I think at higher levels, students learn the actual fucked up shit.

Well, in my experience, our high-school history textbooks were a lot more pro-Croatia than our elementary school textbooks. For example, if I correctly remember, our elementary school textbook said that around 130'000 people were killed in Jasenovac, while our high-school textbook said that around 60'000 people were killed there. For some reason, our high-school textbooks also presented Stalin and Mao as the good guys, while our elementary school textbooks presented them as bad guys. Our high-school history textbook, for instance, doesn't mention the Great Chinese Famine, it says that Mao solved the problem of hunger in China. Our elementary school history textbooks mentioned not only the famine (killing the birds), but also the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square (I distinctly remember the weird phrasing "u krvi je ugušio ustanak").

Yes I trust Google more than I do you.

I mean, the translation you gave is wrong, but you need to know some Croatian grammar to understand why.

Vague laws favor those with more political pull

What? One of the basic principles of law is that unclarities in laws are interpreted in favor of the party that's been accused.

This in the norm in oppressive countries with poor protections for free speech like Croatia.

OK, now, it's obviously not a norm even if one in millon people do end up in jail for criticizing the government, it's more of an isolated incident.
Though, to be honest, I am having trouble believing that jails exist. I mean, yeah, my mother was in jail for a year, but I often think that it was some kind of a dream, that it didn't actually happen. I mean, that concept of jails seems so incredibly incoherent to me. How can anybody honestly think they help? And when I try to make sense of how my mother ended up in jail, the story seems just so incoherent it seems like it can't be a part of the fundamental reality. Maybe I am being irrational for thinking about it that way.

There are also arguments for and against free speech.

Well, yeah, obviously it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, we are bombarded with evidence that lack of free speech can be harmful. On the other hand, we know that the only place where significant progress has been made is, well, in science. And science is not based on absolute freedom of speech, in fact, one of the main reasons science is so successful is because of the censorship system called peer-review.
However, I think there are key differences between peer review and government censorship. First of all, peer review is usually done by competent people, government censorship usually isn't. Second, government censorship nearly always has an unintended consequence of making people more interested in things that are being censored. The information the government is trying to hide finds its way to people, and it gets twisted up on that way.

State media is not. Speaking Korean doesn't give you any special insight

But if somebody speaks Korean, they can look for linguistic signs that the stories reported in the Korean state media are made up. If a story is made up, there will generally be very few grammar mistakes, but the word-choice will sound weird. If somebody reports what he believes to be a true story, he will naturally make some grammar mistakes, but the word-choice will sound natural. Of course, it won't be 100% accurate (no method for telling if somebody is lying is even close to 100% accurate), but it works better than chance, and it's enough to tell us how reliable some medium is.

it only gives the Journalists the ability to infiltrate the country

Well, I am actually writing this from Croatia, I am living in Croatia, I am a normal part of the society in Croatia, yet you don't trust me about matters of Croatian politics. So, why would you trust the journalists who have been to North Korea any more than you trust me?

Being 100 years behind is really a terrible prospect both socially and in terms of infrastructure.

I mean, living in North Korea today is not really comparable to living in the US 100 years ago. If you live in the US 100 years ago and you want modern agricultural machines, you need to invent them from scratch, for the idea about how they can be made (and that they even can be made) didn't exist back then. If you live in North Korea today, you only need to build them from raw materials. Which is hard, yes, but not nearly as hard as inventing them from scratch is. Computers and mobile phones didn't exist 100 years ago anywhere in the world, but they are a common place these days in North Korea. To access the Internet from North Korea today, you don't need to invent it from scratch, you only need to be tech-savvy enough to bypass the censorship.

But with the same amount of study it's not clear if you'd be able to become proficient in a single language.

Now, obviously, you don't need to know multiple languages to master linguistics. There are some rather well-known linguists who speak only one language, such as David Crystal. And how many languages did De Saussure know? As far as I know, he knew only French and some Lithuanian, and he had his Lithuanian texts proofread by Friedrich Kurschat because he knew he wasn't speaking Lithuanian well.

Like there are physics "cheat sheets" that basically contain ALL of physics on a single page.

Well, that reminds of what Richard Feynman said:

It is therefore absolutely obvious that a simple notation that just hides the complexity in the definitions of symbols is not real simplicity. It is just a trick.

Also, you can say Newton's Laws are summary of classical mechanics, but that doesn't mean somebody who knows them knows the Euler's Laws of angular motion, even though they actually follow from Newton's Laws. It takes a lot of effort to actually understand them and what follows (or doesn't follow) from them. You can say the Snell's law is the summary of geometrical optics, that doesn't means knowing it somehow makes you understand all of geometrical optics.

[brimstoneSalad]

The opposite of hard science isn't easy science. Hard does not refer to difficulty, but something more like firmness.

I know. The point I was making is that even when it comes to mere facts (no predictions), linguistics is still more firm than political science is. The claim that "šišmiš" means "bat" in Croatian is a lot more firm than whether or not Bernie Sanders said in 2011 that the American Dream was more easy to achieve in Venezuela than in the US. If somebody believes something like that "šišmiš" means "bat" in Croatian, he is a lot less likely to be wrong than if somebody believes Bernie Sanders said something like that.

If you're talking about certainty of any given fact claim, that depends on the specific fact claim and the evidence behind it, not just on its domain in science (or history, as is more the case of the question of Sanders making that claim).

If you have a video or audio recording with a credible chain of evidence, then the fact of him saying that can have a very high degree of certainty. Likewise, if Sanders has confirmed having said that, and even repeated it many times, again that adds to the certainty. A large number of witnesses with no reason to lie can also add to the credibility.

If somebody said he said it and there's no credible source behind that, obviously that's a matter of low certainty. This is a matter of history, and historians deal with credibility and sources all of the time. History IS a softer science than linguistics if you can call it a science. This doesn't have to do with political science, which deals with models and predictive frameworks, not hearsay. Political history can have some relevance to political science in that it can help provide information to form hypotheses from -- like if we learn that the fall of a society was correlated with some kind of political change -- but it is not in itself the subject of political science. Linguistics is MUCH more tied up with history, modern political science actually does experiments to test hypotheses in contemporary times, like running pilot programs and evaluating them based on objective metrics such as employment or income.

Political science actually uses facts from linguistics to determine those things. If linguistics is wrong about what "achieve" means, then political science facts based on that are also wrong.

1. Stop confusing political science and history.
2. That doesn't make linguistics a harder science. It's easy to say "Assuming X means Y, then..." the truth or falsehood of that assumption then becomes irrelevant to the study beyond that. By that logic physics would be a softer science than linguistics too because physicists use words sometimes That's completely absurd.

If you keep doing this you'll need to be barred from discussion of soft/hard sciences for another year.
I really think that's enough already and that you can't productively do it yet. I'll let @Red decide.

And if most of English-speaking people don't know that the name "Croatia" denotes a country, what's the point of calling Croatia "Croatia", rather than simply calling it "Hrvatska", which is the Croatian name for Croatia? If about the same number of people will understand you...

Slightly fewer people would understand it. And nobody would know how to pronounce it, and it would be very difficult to remember for English speakers, meaning it would be more difficult to teach people about Croatia. I don't think Hr even has a phonetic equivalent. You could try Carewatska or something, which might be more comprehensible and pronounceable.

If you want to promote knowledge of Croatia, then you need to do so in a phonetically comprehensible way for English speakers, and you ideally need to use an established term so searches/etc. can get people to new information. Carewatska isn't going to get a lot of Google results, so you're starting from square one there.

Of course you deny Tiananmen Square.

So, you think it really happened? Why?
I have three reasons to think it didn't.
First, the Chinese government denies it, and governments are, in spite of all their flaws, usually reliable sources about stuff like that.
Second, if it really happened, what has happened to the dead bodies? How come nobody has found the mass grave?
Third, the name "Tiananmen" appears rather ironic, as you yourself note. Why would somebody call a part of a city "gate to heaven"?

Third point, if you want to pretend to be a linguist, have some idea what you're talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen
That's the part of the city you idiot. Is and has been long before the massacre. The place wasn't made up and nobody denies that.
"Gate to heaven" is also a shoddy translation that ignores the history and its use as a deity itself rather than just a place.

It's also the largest/central significant square in Beijing, which is the capital of China, so it's an obvious place for a protest.
Nobody denies the protest either, it went on for days and was well covered.
If you knew anything about Chinese naming convention you'd also know that isn't weird at all. Celestial themed names are very common. This is something I already told you. You're a terrible excuse for a linguist, so damn lazy and ignorant.

Second point, you have to LOOK for a mass grave before determining that it doesn't exist. If independent organizations do not have access, that's not possible.
Also, it's not clear how many people died, so there's not any reason to believe the grave would even be very big or anywhere near there. Considering how many people the Chinese government executed regularly in Beijing, the bodies could easily have been a rounding error. Since it happened in a major city, there would have been plenty of places to move the bodies -- indeed, many people actually died in hospitals, because ambulances showed up right after (many accounts of this). They were probably confiscated and buried by the military later. Many or most of the bodies apparently fit into a bicycle garage (which would be maybe 150 square meters) according to a witness who saw them at a hospital.

Improvised mass graves are more of a mark of remote massacres with little infrastructure. This was not one of those cases.

What you do find is PLENTY of survivors and families who have missing family members:
https://womensenews.org/2000/07/mothers ... ccounting/

Low ball estimates based on families with missing relatives are in the few hundreds. It's not a death-toll that would be hard to hide considering the scope. It's plausible that a few escaped and just hid for some unknown reason without letting their families know, but not that many. There are too many missing people.

Denying deaths in the thousands is barely plausible, but believing that there were no deaths is not reasonable and would involve a very large conspiracy by disparate groups of people with no good reason to do so -- and a conspiracy that launched in a matter of hours and created a mass panic.
It's also plausible that there were thousands of deaths, due to the censorship and political environment in China it's reasonable to expect MOST families would not risk speaking up, so having that many suggests there are many more.

There has been no public attempt by the government to make a true accounting. It may be decades more until there will be, but very likely they know where they are and may have records of the numbers.
Beyond fear of reprisals, including prison, due to nationalism alone it's even possible that some parents may have even been ashamed of their children who vanished in the massacre and not even wanted to speak out. Keep in mind that there was a large generational gap there.

First point, Chinese recognize the crackdown: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48489002
While they do not talk about it, the Chinese government recognizes that SOMETHING happened at the square and defends the actions of the government in vague terms. If the account of the people being dispersed or arrested and there being no deaths were true, the emphasis and defense of the actions doesn't make a lot of sense.

Public denial of deaths at the square came about very soon after the event. In recent years it has become more of a subject of quiet national shame and suppression, vague claims about biased foreign reporting. The Chinese government has apparently realized that vocally denying the events doesn't help, and it's common knowledge in China that there was a massacre there that nobody talks about because you get arrested for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... men-square

This was in the middle of Beijing. I don't think you get that, you've never seen a big city in your life. This is an event that was impossible to hide, even for the very powerful Chinese government. There were reporters from around the world in the city that night trying to cover the event.
Plenty of photos from right before:
https://www.npr.org/sections/picturesho ... -for-china

I mean, obviously, I am not an expert in te field, there is nothing which will make me qualified to talk about Chinese history, so I can't be certain.

Obviously you are not, but you're still talking out of your ass about it and wasting my time.

Read those links Teo, or I'm going to have to ban you every time you talk out of your ass like this with NO evidence and nothing but wild speculation that could be EASILY dismissed with the most basic research.
I have a feeling that at this point @Red and @Jebus would probably back up a week ban every time you go off like this without doing the least amount of homework before you contradict consensus.

Then the policemen who killed you would end up in jail.

No, that's not how it works Teo. Stop making things up.

you seem to imply the fact that a police officer ends up in jail if he kills somebody doesn't discourage police shootings.

First, they rarely to never end up in Jail. They usually get put on leave for a month or so.
Second, don't you dare misrepresent me on this "murder should be legal" claim of yours again. Re-read the thread if you have to.

And you think there is political will to incarcerate people who insult Croatia?

Apparently there is, and as nationalistically delusional and conspiracy prone you are, I can only imagine that's common there.

Yes I trust Google more than I do you.

I mean, the translation you gave is wrong, but you need to know some Croatian grammar to understand why.

I don't think you understand Croatian grammar better than Google does, no. The translation Google gave also makes more sense.

Vague laws favor those with more political pull

What? One of the basic principles of law is that unclarities in laws are interpreted in favor of the party that's been accused.

Like how the North Korean constitution guarantees freedom of press.
Except this is just a general principle people follow when convenient, not even a constitutional mandate.

No, laws are interpreted based on convenience and beliefs of Judge and Jury. A good defense attorney can argue that, but people get prosecuted with and convicted with vague laws all the time. The prosecution will just claim it's not vague and it means X and X means guilty. No law defines itself as vague or admits to being so. Again a good defense can put the law itself on trial and sometimes that works, but it's not a guarantee and people get locked up on vague laws; always have.

This in the norm in oppressive countries with poor protections for free speech like Croatia.

OK, now, it's obviously not a norm even if one in millon people do end up in jail for criticizing the government, it's more of an isolated incident.

You think you know how many people are in jail for that? You think your government publishes those statistics?
And it's the norm if people are scared to speak for fear of being imprisoned. If a crime is rare then so are the prosecutions for it.

Though, to be honest, I am having trouble believing that jails exist.

Teo...

Maybe I am being irrational for thinking about it that way.

Or insane. You need to institutionalized.

There are also arguments for and against free speech.

Well, yeah, obviously it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, we are bombarded with evidence that lack of free speech can be harmful. On the other hand, we know that the only place where significant progress has been made is, well, in science. And science is not based on absolute freedom of speech, in fact, one of the main reasons science is so successful is because of the censorship system called peer-review.
However, I think there are key differences between peer review and government censorship. First of all, peer review is usually done by competent people, government censorship usually isn't. Second, government censorship nearly always has an unintended consequence of making people more interested in things that are being censored. The information the government is trying to hide finds its way to people, and it gets twisted up on that way.

Finally you put together two paragraphs that are not entirely insane.

As China has learned, it has to do with the way in which censorship is enforced. Very loudly denying the Tienanmen massacre has that Streisand effect, but making few very vague and defensive statements that don't outright deny it, then engaging in a massive and very efficient campaign of censorship that just aims to outlast and tire out people seeking to spread the information without riling them up more, appears to work reasonably well. They don't arrest very many people for it, but when they target people they apparently destroy them completely.

The point is that censorship can backfire, but it can also mostly work. Depends on your resources and how you do it. It also depends on the motivation of the speakers. People trying to stop you from literally abducting them off the street and genociding them are much more motivated to speak than people trying to mourn family members who died 30 years ago or people trying to spread racism but who lead very comfortable lives despite their imagined oppression.

In many ways, the worst effects of censorship are mitigated by the magnitude of consequence overwhelming censorship efforts when the outcome is dire.

If you want to start a thread on free speech, that's ACTUALLY an interesting topic. If you want to keep going on about how the Tienanmen Square massacre didn't happen, that's NOT an interesting topic and it's just annoying people and wasting everybody's time.

State media is not. Speaking Korean doesn't give you any special insight

But if somebody speaks Korean, they can look for linguistic signs that the stories reported in the Korean state media are made up.

No, that's what nutty conspiracy theorists like you do. Look for correlations, and if you look hard enough you'll find some even if they don't mean anything. In that case, NOT knowing the language is better.
You're like a biblical numerologist. You imagine that you're looking for secret codes in the reporting that people hid in there to let you know it's a conspiracy. Yeah Teo, you're Nick Cage in National Treasure trying to find secret knowledge here.

If a story is made up, there will generally be very few grammar mistakes, but the word-choice will sound weird. If somebody reports what he believes to be a true story, he will naturally make some grammar mistakes, but the word-choice will sound natural. Of course, it won't be 100% accurate (no method for telling if somebody is lying is even close to 100% accurate), but it works better than chance, and it's enough to tell us how reliable some medium is.

Like polygraphs, you mean?
https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph
Methodology like that is so bad it's much more likely to result in false confidence about something.

it only gives the Journalists the ability to infiltrate the country

Well, I am actually writing this from Croatia, I am living in Croatia, I am a normal part of the society in Croatia, yet you don't trust me about matters of Croatian politics. So, why would you trust the journalists who have been to North Korea any more than you trust me?

The journalists are more objective than somebody suffering from nationalistic delusion, but I'd trust a random Croatian over you because you have an amazingly bad track record of being wrong 90% of the time. You thought the Earth was flat, denied the existence of airplanes and bombs, deny massacres on the regular, and just generally make an ass out of yourself constantly by being reliably wrong.

It's like getting a zero on a true or false quiz. How can you do that unless you know the answers and choose to answer wrongly?

No Teo, I don't trust you about anything, especially not Croatia.

Like there are physics "cheat sheets" that basically contain ALL of physics on a single page.

Well, that reminds of what Richard Feynman said:

It is therefore absolutely obvious that a simple notation that just hides the complexity in the definitions of symbols is not real simplicity. It is just a trick.

Also, you can say Newton's Laws are summary of classical mechanics, but that doesn't mean somebody who knows them knows the Euler's Laws of angular motion, even though they actually follow from Newton's Laws.

Literally the dense cheat sheets include these laws. Not just the basic ones, but all of the derived principles and laws. Usually there are different ones for optics and field stuff and general relativity, but still they don't take up a lot of room. If you image search you'll see they have a lot of wasted space. You can cram all of that on one page and IIRC I saw one like that a couple decades ago.

[Red]

brimstone, why are you bothering with this clown? Don't you agree he's just wasting your time? You've even said as much.

I agree that it's hugely entertaining, but I do not think it's very productive. I can understand refuting people even if they themselves don't change their minds, since it's more of a matter of winning over the spectators, but Teo's beliefs are so fringe and wacky, I highly doubt anyone would be 'on the fence' about them.

I think the reason why you keep trying to change his mind is because you don't want his wackiness to be associated with veganism, but I've lost hope that he can change his mind on these things. Maybe he isn't stupid; Politics brings out the worst of even the most intelligent and compassionate people. There are ways of changing political views, as hard as it can be.

But I'm not sure with Teo. According to Teo, his life sounds like it was pretty bad (I wouldn't be surprised that if Teo were brought up under my circumstances, he'd probably be more intelligent than me.); Does that excuse him when he says the ignorant and offensive things he says? I don't know. Maybe a ban should be in order. I think the reason why you don't ban him outright is because he's (unfortunately) a more active member. But do you think that the reason why we don't have as many people on here is because of him? He's pretty alienating, and he says some pretty offensive things. I know if I took a look around this forum for the first time and saw Teo's posts, I'd be like 'Fuck that, I'm not gonna risk getting stuck in a debate with this guy.' I won't deny I'm reluctant to do too many politics related posts because of him.

Teo's problem isn't that he's so wrong on virtually everything, it's that his way of thinking remains basically stagnant. Sure, he may have changed his mind on flat earth (I think), but the type of thinking what led him to that still remains planted in his head. I dunno if you were following the other thread about how kept insisting to me how murder should be legal; I tried everything, but he kept moving goalposts, pulling ad hoc claims out of nowhere, making demonstrably false claims at every term, and not backing up anything with sources. My favorite part was when I showed him most murderers do not have any history of mental illness, then he just said that it's more reasonable to assume the authorities failed to properly diagnosed them. That's why I stopped responding to him; it doesn't seem as though he can learn.

If you keep doing this you'll need to be barred from discussion of soft/hard sciences for another year.
I really think that's enough already and that you can't productively do it yet. I'll let @Red decide.

If he hasn't changed at all (and is probably even worse now) after a year, I don't see why you don't ban him indefinitely from the subject. So go ahead, ban him for a year. But I doubt it'll make a difference.

I have a feeling that at this point @Red and @Jebus would probably back up a week ban every time you go off like this without doing the least amount of homework before you contradict consensus.

How about make it cumulative; First a week, then two, then three, then a month, then two months, etc.

Though, to be honest, I am having trouble believing that jails exist.

Teo...

I'm not sure if Teo believes a lot of what he says; he may try being provocative, or he doesn't really think it through.

If you want to start a thread on free speech, that's ACTUALLY an interesting topic. If you want to keep going on about how the Tienanmen Square massacre didn't happen, that's NOT an interesting topic and it's just annoying people and wasting everybody's time.

I'm not sure why Teo denies Tienanmen Square. I thought only Tankies denied it? And isn't Teo an ancap? Didn't he flirt with Holocaust denial? He may have confused Wikipedia with Metapedia.

Teo may be a Hoppean; Basically a culturally right anarcho capitalist.

He is probably gonna ignore me on this, but I think this should be said. Teo, I can understand the feeling of excitement of learning a new field, but before you learn anything in it and start publishing papers, you have to take a step back and understand you know nothing about it. According to the Dunning Kruger effect, maximum confidence comes in when you just barely start learning it, and fail to realize just how much you have left to find. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to be active in the field with research and stuff, but acknowledge your papers and especially amateurish ones aren't gonna make any groundbreaking discovery. We've reached a point in human history where it'll be difficult to get your name in the history books because of a discovery (how many people can name the latest Nobel Prize winners in science?).

I think Teo needs to have a moment of self doubt. As some people on this forum know, last month I was in a slump of depression and self loathing, doubting my abilities in literally every field, and just wanting to give up on every goal I have and go move to the Midwest, go back to eating meat, become a Republican, work in farming or something, do away with books, education, and every intellectual thing I've learned, and become a complacent blue collar fool. But I know that isn't me; there are many things I want to do, and we take them one step at a time. Once you have that self-doubt, you can more level-headedly view the world and yourself.

[teo123]

If you have a video or audio recording with a credible chain of evidence, then the fact of him saying that can have a very high degree of certainty. Likewise, if Sanders has confirmed having said that, and even repeated it many times, again that adds to the certainty. A large number of witnesses with no reason to lie can also add to the credibility.

Sure, but, either way, that claim is less certain than that "bat" means "šišmiš" in Croatian.

Linguistics is MUCH more tied up with history

I don't think it is, not even historical linguistics. I think the knowledge of history helped us minimally, if at all, to decipher or reconstruct ancient languages. The first sentence of Hittite that was deciphered read "Bread (Sumerian loan-word 'ninda') you will eat (a word obviously related to Latin 'edere'), water (a word obviously related to English 'water') you will drink.". Nothing about history will make this likely. In fact, historians back in the day argued that Hittite was most likely a Semitic language, possibly hindering the progress. Similarly, historians back in the day argued that the language of Linear B was almost certainly not Greek, almost certainly hindering the progress.
To be fair, the first fragment of Old Persian that was deciphered read "King Daurish...", that was guessed based on a historical context of the inscription. But if it were not for it, it would be something else.
Historical sources, as far as I can see, often give us misleading clues. Quite a few historical sources tell us Etruscans came from Anatolia, but now there are very good linguistic reasons to think this is not the case. There have been quite a few ancient attested languages in Anatolia, none of them appear to be even remotely related to Etruscan. Historical sources suggest that a language related to Latin was spoken in Troy, when historical linguistics strongly suggests it wasn't the case. Historical sources made no suggestion that Sanskrit is related to Latin and Greek, it's linguistics that gave us that information.
Now, admittedly, the part of historical linguistics I am rather familiar with, the study of the meanings of names of places in Croatia, is a bit more tied with history. Still, the main source of information is the comparative method, and not historical sources. And I have also tired to apply the combinatorial method.

modern political science actually does experiments to test hypotheses in contemporary times

OK, then, what would political scientists from different countries agree on? Political scientists from China mostly argue that democracy is bad, those from the USA usually argue democracy is good. If it were based on science, we would expect them to agree on those things. What do they agree on? Economists from different countries generally agree on matters of microeconomics, even though they don't agree on matters of macroeconomics. Linguists from different countries would agree on most things.
I am not saying linguistics isn't influenced by politics to some degree, it obviously is. A linguist from Croatia is much more likely to believe Serbian and Croatian are different languages than a linguist from somewhere else is, a linguist from Russia is much more likely to believe in Nostratic hypothesis than a linguist from somewhere else is, a linguist from China is much more likely to believe that Tai-Kadai languages are distantly related to Sino-Tibetan languages... But it's not comparable to how much economics and political science are influenced by politics.

By that logic physics would be a softer science than linguistics too because physicists use words sometimes

Physicists use words differently than politicians (or common people) do. In physics, the word "work" has a rather precise meaning, different from the meaning it has in everyday life. It's not a matter of linguistics to determine what a physicist has said.
The only cases in which it's comparable would be, for example, determining what Newton meant in Principia Mathematica in Latin with his formulation of the Newton's Second Law. The words he used back then didn't have precise meanings, and it obviously doesn't literally translate as force being equal to the product of mass and acceleration.

I don't think Hr even has a phonetic equivalent.

Well, the English word "her" (the accusative and genitive of "she") sounds rather similar. Of course, neither Croatian 'h' is the same as English 'h' nor the Croatian 'r' is the same as English 'r'. The Croatian 'h' is pronounced a bit more in front of your mouth (as 'ch' in Loch Ness), and the Croatian 'r' is more like the 'tt' in "butter" in some dialects of English. It's called "Croatia" in English because it came to English via Medieval Latin, and Medieval Latin (as well as Late Latin) didn't have any 'h'-like sound, so they substituted 'h' for 'k' (spelt 'c').

Third point, if you want to pretend to be a linguist, have some idea what you're talking about

Well, I asked on an Internet forum about Chinese about it, here, before posting my last post here.

If you knew anything about Chinese naming convention you'd also know that isn't weird at all.

Well, maybe you are right. When I think about it that way, the names connected to Vukovar Massacre also don't seem that weird. The name "Vukovar" is demonstrably a coincidence, it comes from the name of the Vuka river, and Vuka was called that way since before Croatians conquered Croatia (as I've written on my website, the name was attested as Ulcae on Tabula Peutingeriana), it demonstrably doesn't actually come from the Croatian word meaning "wolf". The name of the part of Vukovar "Grabovo" could come from the Croatian word "grab" meaning "hornbeam", whatever the odd suffix "-ovo" meant. As for the name "Ovčara", apparently meaning "meat from sheep", it's also not too weird once you consider that some part of Osijek used to be called "Bikara", apparently meaning "meat from oxen". Maybe the suffix "-ara" used to mean something different.

I don't think you get that, you've never seen a big city in your life.

And why should that be important? Real knowledge is one that's not based on experience.

that could be EASILY dismissed with the most basic research.

And why should doing that form of research be important, considering that real knowledge is not based on experience? Results of proper experiments, such as perhaps this one, can also be called real knowledge, but doing that form of research is not remotely a proper experiment.

First, they rarely to never end up in Jail.

Well, I haven't studied it that much. While I was living in Donji Miholjac, some young driver crashed into a police car, the young driver didn't survive while the policeman did with small injuries, and the policeman somehow ended up in jail (even though, by all common sense, it wasn't his fault). Though that might not be a representative of what's usually going on.

Second, don't you dare misrepresent me on this "murder should be legal" claim of yours again.

I don't know how I misrepresented you here.

Apparently there is, and as nationalistically delusional and conspiracy prone you are, I can only imagine that's common there.

I am not sure what you mean. If it was common here, how come it's not well-known that such things happen today? The only thing that resembles the Duhacek case that I have heard of before is that the mathematics professor Drago Vukojević, who taught at the Economics Department at the University of Osijek, got drunk and sang some parody of Vilo Velebita in a pub and ended up in jail for 10 days because of that. But that was in the 1960s.

I don't think you understand Croatian grammar better than Google does, no.

Chances are, Google Translate doesn't understand Croatian grammar at all. For most languages (probably still including Croatian), it uses statistic translation, it makes no attempt to make syntax trees.

No, laws are interpreted based on convenience and beliefs of Judge and Jury. A good defense attorney can argue that, but people get prosecuted with and convicted with vague laws all the time. The prosecution will just claim it's not vague and it means X and X means guilty. No law defines itself as vague or admits to being so. Again a good defense can put the law itself on trial and sometimes that works, but it's not a guarantee and people get locked up on vague laws; always have.

I don't know now, that just sounds too complicated to be true.

You think you know how many people are in jail for that?

Well, if there were many people in jail for that, it would be a well-known thing, don't you think?

Teo...

And why would that actually be irrational, yet alone insane? Real knowledge is one that's independent of the experience. And maybe the results of the properly done experiments (maybe something like this) can also be called real knowledge. But me remembering that my mother was in jail is not good evidence that jails exist, it's not a properly done experiment. My reason telling me jails don't exist has more weight.

Or insane. You need to institutionalized.

And do you think then that all idealistic philosophers should get institutionalized? Do you also think Zeno was insane?

The point is that censorship can backfire, but it can also mostly work.

If it's a well-known thing in China that Tiananmen happened, then their censorship system does worse than what Croatia is doing. Croatia doesn't invest money in censorship, yet people here appear to be rather ignorant. I have asked a few people about Varivode Massacre, and nobody I asked has heard of it. In 1995, when it happened, the Croatian government allegedly (if Wikipedia is to be trusted about it) openly denied it. Though, the numbers of victims of Varivode Massacre was in tens or hundreds, certainly not in thousands. I have also asked a few people what they think about what BBC claimed at the time that the Croatian government let the Vukovar Massacre happen on purpose, and they also all responded they haven't heard of that. In schools we are told that it's a good thing to read foreign media, but that it's important not to be manipulated by them. And there is probably some truth to that.

Like polygraphs, you mean?
https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph

For some reason, I get the "Access To Website Blocked" error when I click that link. That can't be due to the government censorship, because the HTTPS connection is established and is signed by GlobalSign nv-sa. It seems that the website you linked to rejects my IP address for some reason. If there is something important there, quote that here, it's easier for you than for me.
Yes, polygraphs are not reliable enough to be admitted as evidence in courts. But they do work significantly better than chance, and are invaluable tools in investigations, because false positives are much more common than false negatives. That's why polygraphy is so highly dignified as science.

Methodology like that is so bad it's much more likely to result in false confidence about something.

It's unlikely to result in false confidence about something, because false negatives are exceedingly rare. If the polygraph tells you are not lying, that strongly suggests you aren't. But if the polygraph tells you are lying, the police can't be certain you are lying, because false positives do happen.
Admittedly, there don't appear to be many studies about the reliability of the linguistic sings somebody is lying, but I see no reason to think it would be much different.

It's like getting a zero on a true or false quiz.

I thought we agree on some things, such as veganism, atheism and that I did well arguing against @Sunflowers.

I think the reason why you don't ban him outright is because he's (unfortunately) a more active member.

And don't you think I am one of few people on this forum whose ideas have some intellectual merit? Saying "I think bombs don't exist, because 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says that a system can't do work from its own internal energy, and bombs would have to do a lot of work with very little energy input." has some intellectual merit, it proves I actually thought about the issue, rather than just accept what I was being told. Even if I ended up being wrong, I was just one step away from the solution. Saying "You are stupid for not simply trusting the authorities." is basically the equivalent of saying "Who cares if bombs exist or not?!", that's what most of the people on this forum are saying, and it holds no intellectual merit.
And have you made some videos promoting veganism? I have recently, here is my video-response to Peer Ederer's arguments against veganism.

I thought only Tankies denied it?

As far as I know, communists usually say "Well, that wasn't real communism!".

acknowledge your papers and especially amateurish ones aren't gonna make any groundbreaking discovery.

I don't claim I've made a groundbreaking discovery with my recent paper about computer science, but I think I've asked some interesting questions. Can the number of comparisons QuickSort will do be predicted in linear time, just like it can be done in constant time for MergeSort? I am not aware of anybody having asked that question before. Can that knowledge be used to implement an efficient sorting algorithm for a standard library of some language? Again, I think this is an interesting question that nobody asked. I am not claiming I've solved the P vs NP problem, that would be thinking you've made a groundbreaking discovery and that would almost certainly be wrong.
And similarly with linguistics, my latest paper (which I still haven't managed to publish) basically asks if it's reasonable to dismiss the patterns in the names of places just because they aren't collaborated by the comparative method and, related to that, if the combinatorial method can be used to interpret the names of places.

[Red]

And don't you think I am one of few people on this forum whose ideas have some intellectual merit?

Wow, so almost everyone else on this forum is a fucking moron except for you, huh?

Stop elevating yourself to such a high intellect Teo. You're reminding me of Sunflowers. If I were to rank all the active members we've ever had by intellectual merit, you'd be bottom three.

brimstone does not keep you around for that reason. You're delusional if you genuinely think so.

Saying "I think bombs don't exist, because 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says that a system can't do work from its own internal energy, and bombs would have to do a lot of work with very little energy input." has some intellectual merit, it proves I actually thought about the issue, rather than just accept what I was being told. Even if I ended up being wrong, I was just one step away from the solution. Saying "You are stupid for not simply trusting the authorities." is basically the equivalent of saying "Who cares if bombs exist or not?!", that's what most of the people on this forum are saying, and it holds no intellectual merit.

That isn't offering anything of intellectual merit, that's being so open minded that your brain falls out. Instead of assuming you've figured out something as groundbreaking as bombs not being possible to exist, the intellectual thing to do would have been trying to learn more about it rather than trusting your obviously terrible intuition.

Sure, question things and want to know more about them, but questioning something as absurdly as this isn't a sign of intelligence, it's a sign of idiocy. Disagreeing with an expert in something you have virtually no experience in doesn't help your case either (which is something you've always done).

And have you made some videos promoting veganism? I have recently, here is my video-response to Peer Ederer's arguments against veganism.

I have a few things in the works that will be better edited and well written than yours hopefully, since although my videos aren't great, I want to ensure quality. Talking in front of a camera with minimal script and editing doesn't entertain too many people.

As far as I know, communists usually say "Well, that wasn't real communism!".

...Do you know what 'Tankie' even means?

I don't claim I've made a groundbreaking discovery with my recent paper about computer science, but I think I've asked some interesting questions.

Pretty much every question has been asked already. Even if you do come up with 'interesting questions' they won't be of much value. Don't feel bad again though, it's a universal thing.

My point was that don't feel as though your papers will be contributing much of anything significant.

@brimstoneSalad, @Jebus, @Lay Vegan should we get a ban in order?

[teo123]

You're reminding me of Sunflowers.

If anything, I am the exact opposite of @Sunflowers. @Sunflowers accuses those who use scientific arguments of "scientism", while I try to base my beliefs on the principles of science. If you say "The Second Law of Thermodynamics means bombs can't exist.", you are obviously trying to base your beliefs on science.

the intellectual thing to do would have been trying to learn more about it

Hmm... Would it be? Or is the most scientifically appropriate hypothesis one which is easiest to falsify? The hypothesis that bombs don't exist is obviously easier to falsify than the hypothesis that bombs do exist.

rather than trusting your obviously terrible intuition.

I don't see how is that "trusting your intuition". Believing the Earth is flat can be said to be trusting one's intuition. Maybe what @Sunflowers was doing was trusting one's intuition, though I wouldn't be so sure (his arguments definitely didn't feel right, which is what trusting one's intuition means). But I don't see how is saying "The Second Law of Thermodynamics proves bombs don't exist." is trusting your intuition.

Talking in front of a camera with minimal script and editing doesn't entertain too many people.

Sure, but something is better than nothing. It's better than people thinking nobody has a response to the Peer Ederer's arguments.

Do you know what 'Tankie' even means?

Well, it's a pejorative term for a hard-core communist, right?

Pretty much every question has been asked already.

Well, they almost certainly haven't been asked in Croatian. Now that I have written a paper about it in Croatian, one doesn't need to read about it in a foreign language to know something about it. And maybe somebody will also publish some commentaries to my paper (hopefully with correct answers to those questions), also in Croatian, and thereby significantly improve Croatian computer science literature.

[Red]

If anything, I am the exact opposite of @Sunflowers.

In terms of claiming to know something you clearly know nothing about, you're one in the same.

@Sunflowers accuses those who use scientific arguments of "scientism", while I try to base my beliefs on the principles of science. If you say "The Second Law of Thermodynamics means bombs can't exist.", you are obviously trying to base your beliefs on science.

You both may have different views on science, but you both easily fall prey to the Dunning Kruger effect. You conduct yourselves your similarly on that front.

Hmm... Would it be?

Yes. Truly intellectual people know that they know shit. You are not that.

I don't see how is that "trusting your intuition".

It's contemplating a concept in your head without seeing what the actual answer is, and assuming you're right, and all of modern thermodynamics is wrong.

BTW you can make bombs at home with the right equipment and materials:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid= ... IwZjQ3ZTUy

Sure, but something is better than nothing.

Not as good as quality content.

It's better than people thinking nobody has a response to the Peer Ederer's arguments.

I'm sure there are others out there who are refuting this person, if you look.

Well, it's a pejorative term for a hard-core communist, right?

Right, so how were you not able to understand the original statement?

Well, they almost certainly haven't been asked in Croatian.

That is the dumbest shit I've ever heard. The idiocy of this statement is so high, I can't even find the proper words to respond to it.

I don't even know why I'm responding to you. If brimstone is unable to change your mind, I doubt anyone can.

[teo123]

In terms of claiming to know something you clearly know nothing about, you're one in the same.

But I think everybody is like that for some things. Think of it this way: there is no science that can tell us whether or not jails should exist, or, as far as I know, even whether or not they do exist. It's not at all clear how it can be scientifically studied. Yet, almost everybody has a rather strong opinion about it. Not only that, most of the people have an opinion that's contrary to what Occam's Razor would suggest.

Truly intellectual people know that they know shit.

And how can it possibly be known with reasonable certainty? Leibniz was without a doubt a brilliant guy. Yet, to him, it seemed that he knew enough about physics to make a theory of everything, called monads. Needless, he didn't realize how much there is to know and he got things completely wrong. The Croatian philosopher Boscovich was also a very brilliant guy and he made a similar mistake, attempting to make a theory of everything based on knowledge that was available back then, he ended up with a theory very different from Leibniz'es one (reviving the theory of atoms), but, nevertheless, he got almost everything wrong.
On the other hand, some discoveries in science were indeed made by people who knew relatively little about the field. Oersted's discovery that compass is affected by electrical current, for example. Should he have just assumed it could be explained by contemporary physics and shut up about it?

all of modern thermodynamics is wrong.

I didn't exactly assume thermodynamics is wrong, I assumed history is wrong, because it's a softer science and it appears to contradict thermodynamics.

Not as good as quality content.

Hey, listen, editing videos is time-consuming, and whether or not it will reach more people because of your editing is questionable. It may even be counter-productive, a web-site with a lot of fancy CSS and JavaScript scripts (and which takes a lot of time to program) generally has poorer user experience than a simpler one, and I see no reason to think it will be different for a video.
Which video-editing software do you use? I used to use Kdenive, but then it auto-updated itself... to a version which is not compatible with the version of Linux I have on my laptop. Now I am using Blender, and, well it's not really a program that's primarily intended for editing videos. It has tons of features which I will never need, and doing the most basic things, such as adding text to the video, is complicated and tedious.

I'm sure there are others out there who are refuting this person, if you look.

I wasn't able to find it. My guess is that nobody bothers to respond to such a video because everybody who is remotely aware of this vegan/vegetarian/meat-eater debate knows Peer Ederer's video is a complete red-herring. But, here is a thing, not everybody is aware of that. Not everybody is aware that the environmental argument for vegetarianism (and, to a lesser extent, veganism) is about super-bacteria. Much less is everybody aware of how we know the surplus of methane in the atmosphere comes mostly from grass-fed cows (that our methane emissions have been decreasing over time).

Right, so how were you not able to understand the original statement?

You compared me to a hardcore communist for doubting that Tiananmen happened. So, I responded that I am not like a hardcore communist in that regard, since hardcore communists generally claim Tiananmen happened but that it wasn't real communism.

That is the dumbest shit I've ever heard.

Do you agree with me that a paper written in Croatian (or some other small language), other things being equal, is worth more than a paper written in English? There are way fewer papers written in Croatian, and Carum est quod rarum est..

[Red]

_