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dchacke's comments

dchacke | 8 days ago | on: Web-Haptics: Haptic Feedback Comes to iOS Safari

Yeah Tahoe is buggy af. When I worked at Apple, my manager liked to remark that Apple is great at making hardware and mediocre at making software. I think it’s still miles ahead of any other OS though.

dchacke | 5 years ago | on: Artificial-Intelligence Breakthrough? “The Neo-Darwinian Theory of the Mind”

I'll respect your wish not to spend any more time on it, and will leave you with two closing comments:

1. Like I said, the article is aware of and addresses the tautological nature of neo-Darwinism generally.

2. The part you quoted is not useless because, if true, it refutes other (en-vogue but false) theories about "reasons for belief," such as higher/lower numeric credences, stronger neuronal connections, etc.

dchacke | 5 years ago | on: Artificial-Intelligence Breakthrough? “The Neo-Darwinian Theory of the Mind”

You didn't answer my question about which claims you find meaningless and why. But now you've changed to calling the claims "extraordinary," which is quite different from "meaningless"--one might argue a claim couldn't be both at the same time. Which is it? Or which claims are which and why?

Btw, neo-Darwinism generally has been criticized for being tautological (the "better replicators spread better" stuff). The article even addresses that. Do you find neo-Darwinism generally to be a logical mistake because it contains this well-known tautology? Or do you only find the tautology problematic in this particular instance because it's a new application of neo-Darwinism?

If you found logical mistakes in the rest of the article, I'd be interested in hearing them.

dchacke | 5 years ago | on: Artificial-Intelligence Breakthrough? “The Neo-Darwinian Theory of the Mind”

> The examples in the article are totally meaningless.

Which ones and why are they meaningless?

> An idea is _not_ better accepted by some _because_ it replicates better in their brains. That's a tautology.

I'm not sure it's a tautology, as the same phenomenon could be explained (poorly) through updating of "credences," for example, or other explanations. In any case, if you think that acceptance of an idea must involve replication (or is indeed synonymous with successful replication at the expense of rival ideas), isn't that an argument in favor of the theory?

dchacke | 5 years ago | on: Dairy-rich diet linked to lower risks of diabetes and high blood pressure

Link just means correlation. Correlations are easy to find and don't mean much.

They don't explain why and how dairy would help reduce risks of diabetes and high blood pressure. So they're not doing science.

Note how they say:

> This is an observational study, and as such can't establish cause.

It's not like you could ever establish a cause anyway. Causes are explanations and they are conjectural in nature. They could have just guessed that dairy helps reduce those risks and then try to explain why. That data from all those different countries could then maybe be used to refute that explanation. But the explanation should come first.

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