EffortPostMcGee [any]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2023

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  • I’m not really confused about what you’re saying here exactly, and since the original post is deleted, I can’t really even see what was originally said, but I was confused about this:

    (like the real number that that sequence converges to given the standard topology of the space of real numbers).

    Why make mention of the standard topology here exactly? It’s not exactly clear to me why this has anything to do with what you two are discussing.






  • And for the purposes of traversing our globe a 3rd dimension is unnecessary so why include that in your model?

    How would you begin to describe points in the spaces we are discussing? I feel this is a fair question, because in an earlier reply you suggest to picking a point and walking there.

    For the surface of a sphere, the most natural way many people would choose to do this would be using the tuples (x,y,z) in R3 and restricting this space to a subspace by the equation X2 + Y2 + Z2 = r2, were r is the radius of the sphere. Give a model which can describe points and lines on the surface of a sphere with less than 3 dimensions; i.e., define a space for the surface of a sphere with fewer than 3 dimensions.

    The problems with trying to do this by defining a conformal map from 2 dimensional projective spaces to 3 dimensional surfaces is the reason whole books are written about projective geometry.

    And even if, its blatantly obvious that the OOP is asking for a straight line in a 2d perspective, not on a map, but on the globe itself because any projection of a globe into a flat space will take the straightness out of a straight line.

    This doesn’t make sense. Which projection? The natural one? Such a map is guaranteed to not be a bijection and is potentially not well-defined. Without a clear way of doing this map, you can’t say anything about what happens to lines under the image of such a map.

    No we dont live in a 3d space. That’s a mathematical model used to model reality so as to be able to ignore details deemed unecessary for whatever the model is for. It’s a tool to approximate reality not reality itself.

    I agree with this at least, I too am tired of the mathematical platonism dominating the public discourse.



  • I reject that framing.

    I mean you can reject it all you want, it doesn’t change anything about what you actually said. I believe you when you say that you are “legitimately concerned about nuclear contamination…” in waterways and that you believe they are making a wrong risk assessment. But what you have done is lumped all nuclear fission energy sources into one category and then went “well all those scientists and engineers think this thing is safe, but I’m built different and I know they’re wrong.” You should seriously investigate why you think this is a rational method of analysis, or from what place this superior understanding you have comes from.

    … these **roulette ** machines…

    Things don’t just randomly happen and it is simply not materialist, in the mechanical materialist sense, to discuss these events in this way, moreover it is just not productive. You have a N = 0 sample size for this reactor, which makes this statement even more absurd. Furthermore, I shouldn’t have to tell you how unrigorous or unscientific lumping in things in some general and vague way to attack them is. This is a specific reactor with a specific design, iterating on other designs. You don’t need to be on the R&D team for this reactor to be able to say “well from what we have today, these reactors would need to be improved in such and such way if we want to deem them safe…”. I’m not even an expert in my academic field and even I do this sort of thing when reading papers in my field.

    Another absurd statement is this next one:

    No nation, engineering firm, or corporation is going to book smart out Murphy’s Law.

    Murphy’s Law states that if anything can happen it will happen. It doesn’t work in the converse direction. So if it is simply not possible for this reactor to melt down then Murphy’s Law doesn’t magically make this happen. You don’t weigh up ways in which any of the modern reactors can fail and this is the crux of why I’m frustrated about reading your post.

    Essentially I want you to justify these things your saying both because I don’t know how nuclear reactors work, and you seemingly want us to believe that you do, since you start off the original post trying to build your credibility. So use that to talk about this reactor from the perspective of how it is engineered or the theory surrounding this reactor and/or other designs similar to it or in the modern era. Otherwise you are using this simply as a cudgel to attack the work these people have done, and I cannot understand why you’d do this unless you think think that you simply just know better than these people, which I’m sorry to have to explain, is the criterion for what defines chauvinist thinking.

    There is no need to get into a personal accusatory slander or sea lioning troll fest over this.

    I have nothing against you personally. Calling out liberalism and reactionary thought is important to me, so I spend the time doing it when [I think] I see it and have the time to talk. I don’t really appreciate the attempt to belittle my concern over the reactionary content of your post as “accusatory slander” or a “sea lioning troll fest” and I think that speaks more to your sense of self-importance to think that you cannot be prone to reactionary thinking. For what it’s worth, I hope you’d call me out if I was being chauvinist or reactionary and I’d hope I have the perspective needed to learn from it.


  • As someone who grew up entirely in the US, had hardly zero contact with my German family members, and who fluently speaks, reads and writes German, I have to say your description of German people (on social media) agrees with a similar thing that I think every time I go read what is happening on “German” social media, namely, that some Germans have a very peculiar way of being smug and wrong, such that it is literally indescribable.

    That’s why when people I know in the US tell me that they’d like to live in Germany because of how much more “radical” German politics are, it so directly contrasts with my own experience that my brain disassociates for the next 20 minutes to protect my Ego from having heard something so absurd.


  • So are you saying that in your opinion, all nuclear reactors, which includes this one developed by this team of researchers and engineers, are unsafe because you’ve seen the careless disposition of other people in the workplace(s) that you worked in? What exactly about this qualifies you to make all the other claims you’re making?

    But, why has no one pointed out the obvious chauvinism or overt racism in your comment? You are saying that no nuclear reactor designed thus far has been safe, and therefore this one made in China must also be unsafe, or that these scientists and engineers in China must be lying or over hyping the claims they are making. Concerning the technical limitations you are trying to gesture at, you can only come to the conclusion you are coming to if you think that there is something about China, or Chinese people, that forbids it from doing science and engineering better than wherever you come from. Concerning the only thing of substance you make a claim of knowledge for, you are saying that there is something about China or Chinese workers that forbids them from actually giving a fuck about their jobs as nuclear reactor technicians, scientists, and engineers, such that they strictly could not design safer processes or conduct themselves in an appropriately professional way better than wherever you come from.

    Moreover, I don’t really understand why you think other people should listen to your perspective on the matter when you have put basically 0 effort within your comment to give any real justification. Essentially you are saying “I worked with these things, so just simply trust me.”


  • The part I’ve just never understood is why that is a necessary position to hold for a ‘leftist’ political project to be not derided as incoherent/inconsistent, given by the fact that many/a majority of leftist political projects both contain non-vegan comrades that contribute/have contributed greatly to building left politics and of which those projects have not/ are not making veganism a large priority in their political project.

    Do vegans here and in other leftist places claim that the lack of their sufficient account for these two components is a factor contributing to why they have failed? Furthermore, do they believe that if current AES projects were to make veganism a priority, that this would weaken the influence of bourgeois thought and strengthen the revolutions occurring there? If so, that’s fine by me for vegans to hold that position, I just don’t really see then what distinguishes that from the same kinds of arguments that Ultra’s and Maoist’s make about past/current socialist projects and why it’s just veganism that can’t be derided for doing it.


  • The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

    It comes from the Manifesto, where Marx talks about how this represents the beginning of the movement towards class struggle. Still, it seems very prescient to what is happening in the west.





  • There’s many studies “proving” capitalism is the best system. Just because it’s in a study doesn’t mean it isn’t effected by the whole socio-political-economic context in which the study takes place. I don’t think there’s been any studies looking at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th order effects of socialism but that didn’t dissuade you.

    Yeah I think that this is a good point and I really needed to think about this when you pointed it out. I think for me at least there doesn’t seem to be a way to even really “study” this though. Plus I agree that anything that we would think would make progress for kids and their education should be investigated, but ultimately even if socialism fails, we will just simply move past that with whatever would come after it. However if we lose tons of knowledge on something that we could actually study before implementing… I guess I just see it as completely avoidable as opposed to knowing that socialism with always be smothered in the crib by capitalists and thus cannot be put under rigorous scrutiny to be judged on its merits until capitalism dies.

    This entire educational system including homework, the “banking model of education”, is founded upon the idea that we can just force people to learn for ~10-20 years and then they’re good for the rest of their life when we should be restructuring society to provide the conditions for enthusiastic, life-long learning.

    Super agree with this. I think there are lots of things we could be doing better, and all of them deserve to be looked at.


  • Well I believe that the default position is considered to be “homework good” for the same reason that the default position of many things is the status quo. It “works well enough right now” for the purpose that it is purported to serve and any improvements should come with studies that support that it is better with good methodology and examining the impact over multiple generations (in my opinion with regards to education).

    That being said it certainly is possible that that is the case. Even more so I’d say that history likely supports that idea. But could it not be that and still be beneficial to the education of children in regards to the knowledge that we as a society are determining is important to pass on to our children? Further, if that doesn’t sit well with you, then could homework be reformed to not be primarily a coercive measure to make children learn in a society that doesn’t care about personal improvement and collective self-actualization and only seeks to exploit them? And if so wouldn’t that be a more fruitful pursuit than running to the support of a policy position over articles in the German equivalent of Vox news, that aren’t peer reviewed, and which hasn’t examined the social impact over generations of time to show that it will be a net-neutral in regards to our education?


  • Well there are a couple reason why I don’t need to provide that evidence

    1. I’m not advocating for any position about it. I’m granting that homework may be unhelpful for students who already don’t get the material.
    2. I’m asking for studies that study the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects on this which is entirely different from trying to attack JuneFalls post.
    3. JuneFall hasn’t provided any study, just a new article from Der Spiegel which is reporting on a study being conducted, with some preliminary results. But without any peer reviewed study published out of what TU Dresden is doing, Der Spiegel and the people they interviewed can basically say whatever they want and it still wouldn’t have any scholarly weight nor should it. I don’t know why I should be made to put in more effort just because of the content of my post I’ve said.
    4. " … for kids who already don’t get the material" is doing a lot of lifting, since I’m not sure if there are any studies which concern themselves with that issue in the affirmative or the negative, and definitely not over multiple cohorts spanning multiple generations.

    Offering up my thoughts however, I’d also like to just mention that I think that isolating one aspect of the education process and assessing its value solely by that aspect is both lacking in a dialectical analysis and also deeply idealist due to the manner in which the advocates are discussing the issue (as a sole atomic item of consideration, without regard for the manner in which this issue is connected to other issues), so even if I could find such studies which support or deconstruct the position you are asking me to find studies for I would still have my criticisms of the deeply liberal way that these studies are conducted and so I wouldn’t include them in my response because I wouldn’t link to studies for which I disagree with their methodology even if it supports that.


  • Hexbears please stop linking news articles that “reference” studies for which are not actually linked in the article. Anyways do you know of any studies that have explored the 2nd, 3rd or 4th order effects of removing homework from schools? If that has not yet occurred (and I’m certainly not aware of any) then why would you even remotely want to support this as a policy position without pushing for that study first? Because it is definitely possible that removing homework “erodes” the knowledge base of our teachers over multiple generations and gradually erodes our understanding of the topics we wish to teach. We have seen that very dynamic play out throughout history before. It certainly merits further examination and a deeper study of the topic, however.