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 Discussion on answer by keshlam: Why …

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Graham
Jul 18 07:44
@Syed "Not a single speck of life, much less intelligent life, has been observed elsewhere." Why should that matter? We know it has happened once, because we're here, so we are asserting this with evidence of a positive sample of 1. You can use whatever statistical tools you like to put bounds on probability, but that's all. The probability can only be zero if some mechanism actively makes it so, and then the onus would be on you to explain that mechanism.
Graham
Jul 18 07:44
@Syed If you reject the idea of a Creator directly meddling in their creation, then life originated from random processes. (Even if Earth was seeded by aliens, life somewhere must have originated from random processes.) Then the probability of life spontaneously occurring must be non-zero, because we have an example of it happening. Logic dictates that there literally isn't an alternative - it's a theorem which isn't open to opinions. Now the probability, that is open to opinions, and then you're discussing how likely it is to happen more than once in the universe (and time).
 

 Discussion on question by Stefan: Can…

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Graham
May 31 15:38
I don't understand all the VTCs. It's a perfectly valid question - perhaps with iffy naming for "objective", but it's still valid.
 

 Discussion on question by Dev Not Tak…

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Graham
May 7 18:36
Your last paragraph suggests a solution which must, by your own definition, start from an ideal case and add modifiers for non-Ideal cases. Which means you need to know the ideal case - which is what you're being taught! Further down the line you'll learn those non-ideal cases, and they're often complicated so you learn them second. If you can't process the simpler ideal case though, you aren't ready to think about next-level problems.
 

 Discussion on answer by Italian Philo…

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Graham
Apr 24 19:57
@Eloff Perhaps that's what he says, sure. But all those cases, again, explicitly treat your allies as enemies. That's the real truth of MAGA though - that everyone not like us is the enemy. He's already done the internal version, persecuting people who are gay, trans, Hispanic, not Christian, or voted differently. This is just the country-level version.
Graham
Apr 24 19:57
@Ludo Since 2 of those 3 are members of NATO, that'd be a direct declaration of war on all the other NATO countries. And ironically, not long after everyone upped their defense budgets because the USA under Trump has abdicated as "leader of the free world". Trump may be happy to be petty king of a wasteland, but no-one on his team would go for that.
Graham
Apr 24 19:57
@Eloff Whilst that may apply for China, it's not true at all to Canada, Mexico, Australia, the UK or the EU. On 9/11 the US invoked NATO's mutual defense clause, and all those countries backed the US. Trump is certainly doing great work in creating adversaries from those allies - but that change of relationship is entirely his responsibility.
 

 Discussion on answer by user182601: W…

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Graham
Mar 14 04:33
@ItalianPhilosopher At least that the only ones still around are almost all very small states with little power. The obvious exception is Saudi Arabia, but that's an accident of economics (or geology!) which allowed a traditional absolute monarchy to transition into a modern absolute dictatorship simply because it ensured the oil kept flowing.
 

 Discussion on answer by Buffy: How to…

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Graham
Mar 13 14:40
@ÆzorÆhai-him- The OP is pretty clear that to his knowledge, sufficient good-quality female speakers do not exist, and his colleagues don't believe that this is the situation he's in. So neither of your proposed ways to counter it are possible. And sure, it's not a high-profile job, but a junior colleague might see it as a step up.
Graham
Mar 13 14:40
@ÆzorÆhai-him- Of course, he sees the issue. But he's describing a perception from other people that he doesn't, and as a man he has no way to counter this. And it's also possible that even though he sees the issue, he may still have an unconscious bias - or perhaps there may also be other candidates in touch with his female colleagues whose work he personally is less familiar with. As far as "lumping the work on women" goes too, you could see it as that - or you could see it as giving advancement to a female colleague. YMMV.
Graham
Mar 13 14:40
@ÆzorÆhai-him- Considering that archetypal gender issues are those which someone of that gender can't necessarily see themselves - or at least the perception is that - I'm not sure how else this could be addressed?
 

 Discussion on answer by Maarten Buis:…

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Graham
Mar 10 20:56
I don't know who discusses that as a reason, but physiotherapy requires far more physical strength than any surgery, and physiotherapy is so overwhelming a female profession that the first one I went to in the mid 2000s had a class photo of 20 women and zero men. They have a few more men now - it's now 3:1 women to men.
Graham
Mar 8 09:33
@quarague In the list given by the OP for this question, not one job requires physical strength, so that part of your statement is irrelevant. Your claim then that the imbalance is merely down to a "difference between men and women" - in other words, that women are somehow innately unsuited for STEM - is the part which is somewhere between contentious and blatantly false.
 

 Discussion on question by user2741831…

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Graham
Feb 22 15:51
@leftaroundabout Security on who you allow to commit, sure. Checking whether anything happened over that time period, sure. Discarding your entire codebase, no. Discarding all PCs in the building, categorically not. And only when there is proof that this has happened. The OP has clearly said that absolutely all they have is "unease", not even evidence that anyone did ever access their systems, never mind did anything.
Graham
Feb 22 15:51
@user2741831 No company would go to those lengths, not even if they had actual proof someone had accessed their network, and they have far more to lose. Your post doesn't say you have any evidence this even happened, but you've spent hundreds of dollars and many man-days of time in it, for something with no significant consequences for you. What you've done so far, never mind what you're suggesting you might do, is not appropriate.
Graham
Feb 22 15:51
I'm afraid the answer to "am I too paranoid" has become not just "yes", but also you genuinely should think about talking to someone about these thoughts. I say this with love and concern as someone who has many neurodiverse friends and family, because this has all the hallmarks of a catastrophising spiral.
 

 Discussion on answer by Philomath: In…

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Graham
Feb 8 17:05
@MichaelHall Being "mentioned in a book" establishes an understanding of a hypothetical entity's nature. It isn't the only way to convey that understanding, but any hypothetical entities described in books have comparable levels to which readers are able to understand their nature. The degree of someone's belief in the existence of those entities is then obviously not related to the ability to describe those entities, but on other factors: of which most obviously we must consider the motives of the authors or publishers.
 

 Discussion on answer by bob1: Can MAP…

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Graham
Jan 19 19:15
@TomasBy And you think that because it's small, it can't be at a higher pressure? I hit Google quickly, and a supplier of MAPP-Pro quotes 110psi. Per the link above, the canisters you know about are 36psi. So your stove (and all its parts) have 3x the pressure to deal with. Do you know for sure that they can handle it, when until now you didn't even know that canisters with higher pressures existed? Like I said, hopefully you'll only be a danger to yourself.
Graham
Jan 19 19:15
@TomasBy What knowledge you have may be based on very low gas pressures which need no extra pressure regulator. You haven't indicated in comments that you're aware of the difference, so I have to assume you aren't. Leaks at higher pressure can be a lot more than just "annoying".
Graham
Jan 19 19:15
@TomasBy That gas, sure. With your specific stove, pipes, seals, and so on? Are you, personally, competent to check all that? And do you know for sure that they were, or only that they got away with it once? If you don't understand the comparison, you aren't able to understand the risk of fire and explosion. If you're lucky, you'll only be a danger to yourself and not anyone else.
Graham
Jan 19 19:15
@TomasBy Yes, it's exactly like saying a bridge might fail. If I built a footbridge, I'd design it for light loads. If you look at it, recognise it's a footbridge, and still drive an 18-wheeler over it, you can't claim "but it's a bridge, it should have been built to take it". You're doing stuff that's not what the designers intended. Unless you personally have the expertise to assess every element and confirm they're safe, you're taking a risk where the outcome could be a fire or an explosion, with reasonable odds that it will fail, and you would bear 100% responsibility.
 

 Discussion on question by bahhaar: Ho…

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Graham
Jan 2 09:47
"Some argue" Citation needed, or at least would definitely help! Most ethical systems base morality on a moral actor's actions towards entities which can experience pain and pleasure. Whether the other entity reciprocates is not relevant in many contexts. You need to be much more specific about this question.
 

 Discussion on answer by infatuated: W…

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Graham
Dec 27, 2024 09:14
@infatuated ... I haven't even started on the immense number of cases of Christian sects teaching and practicing fundamental evil, of course. I could start a list, but we all know far too many cases. Sure, many people do good in the name of religion, but many people do evil too. If you get both good and evil acts with and without religion, that's simple proof that religion is at best irrelevant.
Graham
Dec 27, 2024 09:14
@infatuated Except that assumes the rules laid down by your sect (and, crucially, their interpretation by your priest) are good in the first place. If both are not, all you get is God used as a motivation for evil. And since it's supposedly ordered by God, opposing it is not just a temporal issue but (supposedly) a threat to your soul. Consider the Mayan/Aztec tradition of human sacrifices, the Hindu tradition of sati, various religions sacrificing slaves to go into the afterlife with a king, or the many religions requiring some kind of mutilation of children.
 

 Discussion on answer by littleadv: Wh…

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Graham
Dec 19, 2024 00:35
@barbecue It depends on whether the crime is merely intended to hurt one person of that racial group, or whether there is a wider intent to incite fear within that racial group as a whole. In the latter case, they absolutely are considered terrorists these days - google "right wing terrorism" for plenty of examples.
 

 Discussion on question by hehe123456:…

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Graham
Oct 21, 2024 21:14
@vsz Yes, in a field overwhelmingly full of straight white middle-class men (that's not a slur, that's simply demographic fact), they're trying to get one person who bucks that trend. One person. They are saying nothing negative whatsoever about the majority, merely that they want to also employ one person who isn't purely from that majority. I would love to hear your examples of multiple companies where the events you claim to describe took place.
Graham
Oct 21, 2024 21:14
@vsz As a straight man, there's no dog whistle. More than that, I'd be concerned about that attitude by anyone I worked with, in exactly the same way as anyone twisting "Black lives matter" to mean "Other lives don't matter". I'd be more concerned if the end result was that candidates were accepted who weren't good enough, but that's always going to be a concern with positive discrimination, even when the result is a good thing for the field as a whole.
 

 Discussion on answer by Alexis King: …

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Graham
Oct 13, 2024 02:38
@AlexisKing BASICs back in the 80s were pretty muchunsafe. And if we put the condition of a "safe subset" on it, then C++ with the STL meets your needs, doesn't it?
Graham
Oct 13, 2024 02:29
@kaya3 The question clearly relates only to high-level languages, which are not processor-related by the definition of a high-level language. And no, as soon as you deal with any kind of hardware, defining what's a "hardware register" becomes very much harder. I've been doing embedded systems for 30 years, and this just isn't something you can build into a language.
Graham
Oct 12, 2024 20:56
@kaya3 I'm sorry to be rude, but you've never done any embedded or low-level work. Memory-safe languages simply do not allow this - or if they do then (like C#) they give you the option to make it memory-unsafe. Languages are by definition processor-agnostic, and hence by definition cannot ever have any idea of what's a hardware register and what isn't. Hardware registers are used to hold state - otherwise how would you get the results of multiples and so on? And when you add DMA, everything in your concept goes sideways.
Graham
Oct 12, 2024 20:56
@AlexisKing Regarding "table stakes", that's only true if you have no intention of using your language to work with any kind of hardware. If you ever need to talk to hardware registers, by definition you cannot be memory safe, because the language itself can't save you. The language can have features which let you be safe, but it needs to let you be unsafe when you need to be.
 

 Discussion on question by pie: Is phi…

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Graham
Oct 6, 2024 09:24
@Hudjefa A simple reason for whether to teach it at the university level is the question of whether 3-4 years of learning only that (and nothing else) will benefit your life. There is significant growth in applied philosophy though - medical ethics for example. But all these areas start from a humanist perspective (which is the only justifiable basis for ethics in a multicultural/multi-religious society) and that means much of the rest is pretty irrelevant and only of historical interest.
 

 Discussion on question by David Gudem…

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Graham
Sep 25, 2024 09:35
-1, did not do basic research before posting.
 

 Discussion on answer by DogBoy37: Sho…

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Graham
Sep 3, 2024 08:38
@Mark I saw NCSA Mosaic installed on our uni machines in 1993, back when the cross-Atlantic internet dropped to single-digit bytes per minute during the day. :) Google was good, but I still wouldn't say it was miraculous. In many cases it got "I'm feeling lucky" results through less pages indexed. Mainly I remember the benefit being bandwidth, which was a massive deal. A home page under 1KB meant it loaded in seconds instead of minutes.
Graham
Sep 3, 2024 08:38
@Mark But that's a perfect example of why "best" is not technical. The reason Google won was purely because their search engine didn't slow itself down with ads, whereas every other search engine did, at a time when bandwidth was a major limitation. Literally no other reason. It had nothing to do with their search technology, which was on par with their competitors but not significantly different.
 

 Discussion on answer by Groovy: Evil …

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Graham
Jul 4, 2024 09:30
@HamSandwich You need to widen your definition of "everyone" to be more than just your church group. Here in the UK, 52% of the population have no religious belief.
Graham
Jul 4, 2024 09:30
@DKing The story of Job hinges on the fact that he is punished very specifically because he is following God's commands so diligently. You may say that this isn't "punishment" because he gets it all back again, but this is patently false. Suppose I went and killed your wife and children? Would you consider yourself "blessed" if I found you another woman and you had children with her? No harm, no foul - after all, it's not like you loved your original wife and children. As I said, this can only ever make sense to a sociopath who is incapable of caring about anyone else.
Graham
Jul 4, 2024 09:30
@gs That's not the question though. I can't find any question marks other than in the title, so answering "what if this type of god exists?" with "hey, here's a religion with exactly this type of god" is a perfectly good answer.
Graham
Jul 4, 2024 09:30
Job's situation illustrates the OP's point even better. When Job eventually says "nope, this is bullshit", God shows up and literally says "I've done all this stuff in the past, so you aren't allowed to judge me for the crappy thing I just did". God also treats Job's family and servants as NPCs, to be killed merely as tools for testing Job's tolerance; and "replaced" afterwards, as if you could ever replace one child with another. It's a story that could only make sense to a sociopath.
 

 Discussion on question by Curious: Wh…

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Graham
May 26, 2024 09:43
@Conifold There's no road at all to atheism - because that's the default. We don't need to prove that God doesn't exist - instead believers need to prove that God does exist. Every writing by believers, without one single exception, starts from the claimed "fact" that God does exist and tries to work backwards. That's bad philosophy. Belief in the absence of evidence is fine, but claiming anything different, not so much.
 

 Discussion on question by Bart: Why d…

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Graham
May 2, 2024 10:22
@Bart If you meant something else, feel free to edit your question to make it clear. Your question as you asked in the comment above makes even less sense though. VTC because any answer considering the possibility of what you're asking now can only be opinion-based.
Graham
May 2, 2024 10:22
-1 because the most basic middle-school knowledge would tell you they aren't constant, merely our current best guess.
 

 Discussion on answer by Dale: If micr…

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Graham
May 1, 2024 08:28
@Nelson Audible hum from electrical equipment is, well, audible. A microphone picks it up if it can reach those frequencies, and human ears can pick it up too if you can hear those frequencies. That's very different from electrosensitivity, which is a claim to be able to feel electrical fields which aren't audible - for example, whether a lightbulb is on or off.
 

 Discussion on answer by TheDemonLord:…

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Graham
Apr 16, 2024 23:33
@David ... It also ignores the fact that becoming a monk or clergyman was not a choice to dedicate yourself to your faith as it is today. Back then, it was a career choice in a branch of politics with equal or greater power than kings and aristocracy. Well-to-do families would traditionally have the firstborn going into the aristocracy and inheriting the title and land, the second-born going into the military, and the third-born going into a significant role in the church.
Graham
Apr 16, 2024 23:33
@David There's a slight problem with your concept of "religious people" doing this, which is that there was no alternative to being religious if you wanted any form of education. Whatever country you were in, the local church was the absolute gatekeeper to all education. Whether you believed or not, you needed to say the words.
 

 Discussion on answer by NotThatGuy: D…

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Graham
Apr 4, 2024 09:30
@RussellMcMahon The "unknowable" part is where I diverge from you. As an engineer, you're always looking for solutions - that's just how we're wired. And as an experienced engineer, you're likely used to starting by looking for root causes which would tell you something useful. By describing it as "unknowable", honestly I think you're devaluing your own abilities and experience as an engineer. Outcomes is fine, but it doesn't necessarily mean that all the inputs are significant. That's the problem with unblinded tests, of course.
Graham
Apr 4, 2024 09:30
@RussellMcMahon As an engineer, I've had answers come to me unexpectedly in a moment of clarity too. I certainly didn't ask God for those answers. All this tells us is that inspiration happens for skilled people working at a problem, regardless of religious faith or asking God for help. :)
Graham
Apr 4, 2024 09:30
@RussellMcMahon I agree in principle that that's possible. It does need "manifestly correct" to not be subject to interpretation, of course. But the Vatican does not (so far as I know) declare sainthood on the basis of "I wrote down random numbers for my maths test and scored 100%". Miraculous healing is more the norm - which is a much more questionable result. Of course I'd be fascinated in a proper statistical test of God 's intervention though.
Graham
Apr 4, 2024 09:30
I like that analogy. And to improve it, suppose there are a thousand of you sent in a human-wave attack on the hundred snipers. The snipers get most of you, but a few of you make it to get the snipers. Did the survivors have bullet-deflecting shields, or is it simply what you could expect if you threw large numbers at it? The theist concept of a miracle, by its very definition, flatly ignores the statistics of how many failures there were and cherry-picks the outlier.
 

 Discussion on answer by jaredad7: Wha…

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Graham
Mar 28, 2024 19:58
@MikeBorden Sure, and that's all science should do. Dawkins never argued about life-after-death stuff - he has his views, sure, but he was happy to acknowledge his views were merely based on Occam's Razor. The issue is always the aspects of religion which attempt to dictate, limit, silence or criminalise naturalistic examination (and have often succeeded). If there was no need to oppose religion-based anti-equality, anti-evolution, anti-medicine, anti-abortion, and generally anti-evidence-based-policy pressure groups, Dawkins would have happily stayed in his lane. 😀