I learned a new HTML tag today.

Make that two.

Morality

There is a new yahoogroup called You Poor Dear. The purpose is comfort and support without problem solving, debate, or criticism. How will that work? Approximately like this:

You, my dear reader, are a brilliant person. You're good at everything you try, and always persevere through misfortune. You're witty and fun, and a pleasure to be around. If you have any problems right now, which seems unlikely, I'm sure they are nothing for one such as you. If you are in school, you have my sympathy.

Best Wishes,
Elliot Temple

If you're objecting that the above is rather meaningless, you're right. I don't have a clue who you are, I just made it all up. How will the list avoid this? Easy. The participants will give out personal information to a public internet forum. This is a safe way to meet people and make friends, and I highly recommend it extremely dangerous. The more personal information one gives out, the easier it is for the other posters to hurt her/him. (To hurt someone with words, one must know enough about the person to know which words will hurt. Also, giving out personal information tends to lead to being hurt accidentally, if people talk about what one does give out without knowing everything else, like one's sensitivities.)

Anyway, the group doesn't allow saying mean things anyway, only nice ones. So when people post support it will be genuine totally meaningless, because it was the only type of reply possible.

Inverse Theory

One may wonder what view based on the theory "No other theories are true" approaches as it becomes a complete worldview. Prima facie, it cannot quite get to the empty view, because it, itself, will always remain. However, with no other supporting theories, it will be completely meaningless gibberish, because the person will not be able to understand it any longer. And so s/he will reach the empty view.

What about "No other theories but this one, and the ones necessary to understand this one, are true" (will refer to this as the flagship theory of a view)? This will include knowledge about not accepting false theories, and knowledge that truth exists, so it cannot go to the inverse or empty views. Can it go to the good view?

You may think it is not compatible with the good view, because the theory that the War on Terror is right isn't necessary to understand the flagship theory, only to avoid contradictions. Well ... knowledge is interrelated, so I'm going to take the position one couldn't claim full understanding without the complete good view.

Oh, also, for those people who like foundations: in physics we determine the truth of theories by how they conform to physical reality. In morality, we can now determine it by how they conform to the good moral worldview.

Morality

I've commented on this thread at Samizdata.

Morality

Reviled in Many Places Around the World, Americans Are Adored in Kosovo

"Two years ago, after a U.S. soldier's weapon accidentally killed a 6-year-old boy, the grieving father publicly forgave the soldier and said he considered him part of his family."

The father is a Muslim living in Kosovo. Although the accident is sad, it is very nice to see such reasonableness over a collateral damage issue, by the victim. And doubly nice to see a demonstration that Islam is perfectly compatible with morality.

Morality

I hear there is a biology professor who won't write recommendations for creationist students. I wanted to comment in general:

If I ask Joe Dirt to write a recommendation letter for me, he is perfectly right to refuse. People needn't write letters for anyone they don't want to.

However, in a school setting, students are required to have these letters. And professors are expected to write them. Refusing to write students a letter hurts them. And such a blanket refusal is morally wrong.

Refusing letters over a student holding some theory, only makes sense if the theory directly interferes with the student's studies, and makes her/him significantly (meaning "enough to matter" not "lots") worse at them. This basically means refusing letters for incompetence (math major who thinks 2+2=5; politics major who thinks "democrat" is a type of fish).

So what about biology and creationism? Well, if you want to be a doctor, you learn how human beings are, and about medicine, and it doesn't matter. If you want to be a vet, and you disagree about why vestigial organs exist, but know the same facts about them, it again doesn't really matter. If you want to be a zoologist, and study the evolution of animals, it does matter.

So my view is, to be moral, the biology professor must refuse recommendations on a case by case basis, and only in very specific circumstances will refusal for belief in creationism be acceptable.

Math

In base 2, 19 is 10011. In base 1/2, 19 is 1.1001

In base 10, 19 is 19. In base 1/10, 19 is 9.1

The trick is to write the number in reverse, and in the fractional version, put a decimal point after the ones column. This is because decimals have negative exponents, so the fraction gets flipped.

Fractional bases that aren't 1/something seem like a real mess to use.

Also, I wanted to count in balanced base 3. I will use -, 0, and + for my digits.

+ +- +0 ++ +-- +-0 +-+ +0- +00 +0+

You'll notice that you *can* count be incrementing the one's column repeatedly. You just have to remember to reset things to - not 0, after they overflow.

Will count from -1 to -5 now:

- -+ -0 -- -++

Notice it's the same as positive, with the -'s and +'s reversed, and 0's untouched. And you can count by decrementing the one's column, and when it overflows, decrement the next column and reset things to a +. I guess I should point out that you can add as many leading zeroes as you want, which is how decrementing a column that doesn't exist works.

Math

After a comment on the last entry, I will now work out a bit about numbers in base -2. To start, I'll convert a random number to base 10. 101 would mean: 1*(-2)^2 + 0*(-2)^1 + 1*(-2)^0 or 5. From right to left, putting a 1 instead of a 0 is worth 1 -2 4 -8 16 -32 64

So, to get the number 2, we have to write -10. It seems very confusing, on a human level, that using a minus sign has nothing to do with whether the number is negative or not. I guess a computer wouldn't care about that, except that we often work in positive numbers, and can use unsigned numbers to save space.

Now I'll count to 10 in base -2:

0001 -0010 0111 0100 0101 -1110 -1001 -1000 11001 -1010 which is really jumpy, and a total mess for humans, and it's very strange to need more digits to write 9 than 10. I think it would be slow for computers to do addition with this. In positive bases, using digits from 0 to base-minus-one, adding is nice, because you just increment the one's column repeatedly (and each time it overflows, reset it to zero, and increment the next column). There are tricks, like if you have two numbers in the same base, you can add various other columns directly to each others. There may be tricks with base -2 also, but I still bet it's inefficient, because you can't just increment the next column when one overflows.

Morality

I was just considering posting some jokes as an entry. Many of the jokes I like are, to some people, offensive. Blonde jokes, dead baby jokes, religious jokes, racist jokes -- these don't go over well with everyone. And I want readers, lots of readers. So, unsurprisingly, it occurred to me that posting the jokes might be a bad idea. Of course, if I don't post anything that might be offensive, I'll never post anything interesting. So what should I do?

There is a moral principle that tells us, if we imagine some stone-age people, who want a society with lots of washing machines, their best bet is not to campaign for them, and try to invent them, but rather to become capitalists and try to act morally. Similarly, the Arab world, if it focussed more on acting morally than acquiring weapons, would have more weapons than it does (just like the US has lots). Of course, in that case, the Arab world also would not want to use them to kill civilians... Also similarly, if one wants to be happy, one should not focus on trying to become happy directly, but should try to act morally, and happiness will come as a side effect.

If I want readers, I should not focus on how to get readers, but rather on creating a good blog, which means writing what I want and like.

Even if we imagine in the limit cases with perfect foresight and calculation, a focus on morality would still be superior to a focus on readers. Either, they would be the same, or the readers approach would result in more readers ... at the cost of acting badly, and I certainly don't want readers that much.

As to jokes, as I'm ambivalent about posting them, I won't for now, but may later.