dgordon

5 ms·

1.
by dgordon 13y ago
"If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter." Not to mention you were predestined to assume so.
2.
by dgordon 14y ago
Those numbers are based on statistics from the 1960s, when transitioning was next to impossible, and are probably a couple orders of magnitude too low. More to the point, that threefold difference seems to be much smaller, if it exists at
3.
by dgordon 14y ago
Not that it excuses this so-called security, but for the insecurity question, you could just lie. Only problem is, then you have to remember your lies.
4.
by dgordon 15y ago
"It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction ma
5.
by dgordon 15y ago
Ah, the old "criminals will rob you if you don't consent to have the government take your money to hand out to them" argument. Often peddled by those who also believe criminals are not responsible for their actions, they're just oppressed/
6.
by dgordon 15y ago
I never had them until my mid-20s, but apparently a lot of people's only experience of brussels sprouts is boiled to death, which allegedly increases their bitterness. I've had them roasted, and they were reasonably good.
7.
by dgordon 15y ago
Good lawyers have surprised me before, but that's so clearly false, as one glance at Facebook will show, that I have to think it would get laughed out of any courtroom.
8.
by dgordon 15y ago
"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them." However, people who apply to universities in this class normally apply to many of them. Granted,
9.
by dgordon 15y ago
Yep, as anyone who watched the World Cup learned: see the phantom foul (no one even knows who it was allegedly on) that took away the US victory over Slovenia, or the referee denying a game-tying goal by England against Germany that the who
10.
by dgordon 16y ago
"A weird-ass cross section of human" is a great description of Carnegie Mellon. Also, for all of the article's bashing of "dumb jocks" athletes at Carnegie Mellon slightly outperform non-athletes in GPA (something like 3.23 to 3.16 while I
11.
by dgordon 16y ago
Which unnecessary body parts are those? The appendix is there to repopulate the intestines with beneficial bacteria when they get wiped out. Extra kidneys, lungs, etc., are there because that's what naturally happens with bilateral symmet
12.
by dgordon 16y ago
The traditional diets (which varied dramatically, by the way) resulted in consistently good teeth for people who never touched a toothbrush. In fact, their results were much better than those of people on processed diets who had toothbrush
13.
by dgordon 16y ago
>That said the study is highly biased. The "native" people are always laughing in the photos and the "modernized" people are looking sad. But this doesn't explain away the order-of-magnitude differences in dental health Price found ever
14.
by dgordon 16y ago
22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.
15.
by dgordon 16y ago
At the risk of being even more pedantic, quicksort with the O(n) deterministic median finding algorithm has a worst-case runtime of O(n log n) -- you use that algorithm to find the median each time and use that as the pivot. The constants w
16.
by dgordon 16y ago
I think so. Logic is only as good as its premises.
17.
by dgordon 16y ago
I can't believe you've played much chess if you think that it's purely about deductive reasoning. Humans can't calculate even the least part of all the possibilities in most positions. Knowing where to look -- which is just one role intui
18.
by dgordon 16y ago
I'd just like to point out the difference between this and some comments below that basically say "LOL NAZIS JUST DID THEIR JOB" -- 134 points and counting vs. -4 and probably even lower in fact. This is how you make this sort of argument.
19.
by dgordon 16y ago
NO U. Whining about downvoting, especially twice, is pathetic. And I'm willing to risk five points to say this.
20.
by dgordon 16y ago
45 million dead in four years. Yep, that's about right for the Holodomor times four. Of course, Stalin and Mao still aren't as synonymous with ultimate evil as Hitler was, and won't be, despite killing quite a few million more people. For
21.
by dgordon 16y ago
That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions involving bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people it, I'm certain that the t
22.
by dgordon 16y ago
Snowflakes are all the same melting inorganic matter as each other. Beauty and uniqueness are simply not automatic for humans.
23.
by dgordon 16y ago
"Not every X is Y" is almost never a relevant or meaningful argument. It certainly doesn't answer "Position X promotes Y-like behavior, and so many "decent, average people" in position X will be Ys."
24.
by dgordon 16y ago
What the banality of evil suggests is that "evil" or in this case "thuggish" behavior is much more a function of social role, and less a function of character, than people thought. (Yes, it really was a radical idea -- recall that two-thir
25.
by dgordon 16y ago
I don't think you can read too much Orwell, nor, in nonfiction, too much Solzhenitsyn or Milton Mayer.
26.
by dgordon 16y ago
"It's the fundamental (and obviously incorrect) assumption that they're some sort of thugs, rather than decent people just trying to do the job they are paid and trained to do, that makes the author a certified douche bag." I don't find tha
27.
by dgordon 16y ago
But impoliteness can tip the scale.
28.
by dgordon 16y ago
In fact, in this case (412 divided by 17) what you did is exactly what the long division algorithm would have you do -- try to divide 41/17, which is really 410/17, and take the closest-without-going-over multiple of 10 -- 20 in this case
29.
by dgordon 16y ago
American football is as violent as it is because of the pads. When you can throw yourself at a guy and not get badly injured yourself, that'll start happening. It doesn't happen in rugby -- there, you tackle to bring the guy down, not to
30.
by dgordon 16y ago
I'm an INTJ. INTJ wins these polls everywhere I've been on the internet. Allegedly only one percent or so of the population is INTJ. This could be since my interests tend to attract lots of people like me, or because INTJ isn't actually t

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