Notices by John BS (johnabs@qoto.org)

@freemo @cobratbq

Oh, weird, lemme send you this video, this is how I’ve usually heard the argument. You can also include William Lane Craig, Red Pen Logic, and a bunch of other theologians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYZ1ByzWY9U

@freemo @cobratbq

Back to the original post: the actual argument most intellectually consistent religious folks make is that atheists cannot justify their morality. Not that they cannot act in a moral way without God/the threat of hell/something else.

In fact, if we take the Christian ethos, the crux is that nobody can merit salvation (including Christians) hence “being a good person” by human standards is insufficient to merit divine intercession on our behalf. Hence why salvation is called grace, or unmerited favor, and is a free gift that need only be accepted. Additionally, most people don’t argue that atheists are incapable of behaving in a moral way by human standards, as we believe that God’s moral law is written on the hearts/minds of everyone (the conscience) and serves as the way by which we can know right from wrong, thus, can obey or violate the moral law by making decisions based on our innate knowledge of it.

Additionally, (again, from the Christian perspective), it is not that we attempt to “be good people to avoid hell”, it is that we understand that we deserve hell (as all have fallen short of the glory of God), and that because of Christ’s sacrifice for us that we love Him, and it is our love for Him that drives us to keep his commandments. This is actually a critical distinction, particularly in my own life and faith, and within the Bible as well.

Finally, the justification point: either morality is objective or it is not.

If it is objective, it does not change over time: that is “thou shalt not murder” is universal for all people of all times, regardless of culture or other complicating factors. Then the question becomes, “what is the source of this immaterial, unchanging source of moral truth”? This, in many people’s view, points to God since many people have such a strong sense of the moral and immoral.

If morality is subjective, it is necessarily unjustifiable, as the changing whims of society, the ruling class, etc can then dictate what is and is not moral at any given time. Definitions of murder can vary, for example. Thus, the atheist is faced with the conundrum of being unable to condemn or affirm any given behavior as moral or immoral, only that they think it’s moral or immoral (or really it boils down to: I like that vs I don’t like that). This follows, because if we’re being logically consistent in a morally subjective universe, the conclusion is that there is no morality from which we can reference, thus everyone can behave as they want.

Of course, there are arguments for group-constructed/consensus morality, but these are fundamentally subjective as well, as they will vary as the group does.

@freemo @wjmaggos

Replace leftist with "low decoupler" and I think you're about 95% right. And I'm not saying anything about the correlation between left/right and high/low decoupling, but I think that people who can't independently evaluate the logic of an emotionally charged claim are more likely to exhibit this kind of behavior.

@freemo That's only a subset of UK accents, but yes, some people do that lol Here's an good video on it.

https://youtu.be/wDdtdeHZ4pI?t=97

This guy is also an excellent resource on interesting quirks of various dialects of English https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/videos

@freemo @trinsec Not with that trivalent carbon you aren't. :P

@freemo

Right, but keep in mind that there is an inherent risk to having a "bad" man interested in you (as in, one who is unwilling to respect your decision if you don't consent to sexual or romantic behavior), so women are more risk averse (on average) in this area than men are, and with good reason since men (on average) are much stronger than women.

So for you touching may be where the line of discomfort is but that may be because you're confident in your ability to put a stop to things before they get out of hand. Now, imagine the woman staring at you was built like a 7 foot linebacker that had poor social skills and didn't understand the word "no", and who had a non-zero chance of forcing herself on you with you not being able to put up the necessary resistance. Perhaps at that point, you would be less comfortable with the staring too, because of the potential implication that it could go further than you want if not nipped in the bud.

@freemo No problem.

As for the question in terms of how she would feel: it depends on if she likes you. And this isn't a woman only thing.

Let's imagine the inverse scenario: you're wearing fairly tight shorts and *insert movie star/celebrity you find attractive here* walks up to you, eyes your bulge for "a solid 2 seconds" and then continues talking to you respectfully. Well, if you consider a lot of factors (e.g. are you married, is she married, do you find her attractive, etc) you'll come to a conclusion as to whether you appreciated the gesture (note this happens in milliseconds and is not a conscious decision). Now, imagine instead of *movie star/celebrity you find attractive* we have the human personification of Roz from Monster's Inc do the same thing. You may not appreciate the same gesture, because you may not find her attractive.

Now, let's imagine that in either of these scenarios, the woman in question asks you "hey, can I look at your bulge for a few seconds"? I imagine most men would respond either internally or externally in the following ways: a) is this a prank? Is she serious? Why would she want to? b) That's a really weird question to ask, and the fact that she did so means I kinda don't want her to, or c) Sure, ogle away. Though I suspect most people would fall into categories a or b.

So, overall, all people judge behaviors, particularly ones in a semi-intimate context, based on how the evaluate the person. If they like the person or are interested in them as a potential partner, this helps "smooth over any rough edges" the person in question may display. However, if a person has already judged you as someone they are either ambivalent towards or actively dislike, this magnifies the impact of behavior that is close to "the line" and may even move the line further away from this sort of behavior.

All this to say: you can't apply the same behavior to different contexts with different subjective personal preferences and expect the same result, so the question is kinda pointless unless you're directing it to a specific individual with a specific target and context in mind.

@freemo 2 whole seconds?? At that point just take a picture, it'll last longer :P

The general rule is "If the amount of time you're looking would damage your retinas from looking at the sun at noon during summer, it's too long of a glance". There is a difference between "noticing", "looking", "staring", and 2 solid seconds is straddling the line of the latter two, and the first is universally fine, but that's like 0.5-0.75 seconds.

As an aside, nearly all (more on this below) women know what they're signing up for when the go out dressed a certain way, so don't ask, don't stare, but a passing glance, even if she notices, is likely acceptable, though this depends on the woman and her understanding of male psychology as a function of her dressing habits.

I had to have this conversation with my (then girlfriend) wife about how she was drawing attention to herself with her very tight fitting crop-tops and short shorts. Her mom did some strange parenting to her daughters, so my wife didn't know until I spelled it out and then she was mortified at how men were looking at her. She just thought they were "being friendly" 🤦♂️

@freemo Gotcha, just wanted to double check what units since the typo was ambiguous.

I used to teach dimensional analysis problems from the perspective of baking/buying stuff, and I got some of my nursing/agriculture students working out estimates mentally pretty quickly! It improved one girl’s test scores by a whole letter grade after the tutoring sessions, so I took that as a win :)

@freemo

morality of an acid.

Seems like you took a trip from chemistry into ethics with that one, though please do tell how you derive ethical maxims and cracked the “is-ought” problem 😂

(But forreal, did you mean molarity or molality? They should know that well before O-Chem…)

@freemo While I like the idea considering the STEM focus of the group, I would argue the name of the group demands a more philosophically oriented logo.

Perhaps something like Qo | ɟo where the t and o are mirrored, indicating the selfie reflective nature of the intended members, as well as the barrier that exists between coming to personal understanding of truth and conveying it to the rest of the world.

I can sketch something up later, but it’s my bedtime soon lol.

@freemo I have to say the kid’s not wrong if you look at the absolutely astronomical toll that technical debt and the lack of financial support for keystone FLOSS projects until a bug causes everything to fall apart (see log4j, for example). That’s not to say that some level of technical debt isn’t acceptable, but we have accumulating debt due to running a near constant technical deficit, which is bad for literally everyone and everything except the bottom line.

I suspect the kid (and I) would prefer a “software as craftsmanship” mentality, where you can still charge for your work, but you are compensated for the quality and time spent on a well designed, extensible, thoroughly tested solution rather than on the first PR that makes it into prod that ends up breaking everything because of strict deadlines. This rushed mentality prevents people from actually engaging with and understanding the problem and solution spaces thoroughly and being able to take true pride in refining their work. Imagine comparing custom woodworking from real wood to ikea and preferring the latter because it’s cheaper, even though the latter breaks under some very light loads by comparison.

Reward quality work over “rate at which you can add new features that nobody cares about except management” and I think we get a better software engineering culture.

@freemo Oh buddy, this is where it gets hairy for me!

I do NOT think bodily autonomy is always sacred, particularly under certain circumstances, and there would be plenty you would likely agree with.

A few examples come to mind immediately:
Should individuals who put dramatically more strain on a healthcare system due to their own choices receive equal care (or equally priced care) as compared to those who don’t? A personal example for me is obesity: I am obese (but I’m down 20lbs so far!!) as is my whole family, and perhaps if it was just us, it would be fine. But since ~40% of American adults (and a great many other countries as well, actually) are obese, diabetic, and have multiple chronic health issues, they disproportionately strain the healthcare system. So the question is: should people be allowed to “exercise their bodily autonomy” to balloon up to 600+lbs while expecting public programs to cover for them (SS/MC), or should people be forced to get preventative treatment to mitigate the far-reaching repercussions of their own self-destructive behaviors?

As a follow up to the prior one: replace Covid with highly transmissible “rabies” that has a 50% fatality rate without vaccination and 0.25% for vaccinated individuals. Does this warrant forced vaccinations to prevent the decimation of the populace and civilization as we know it? Should parents be allowed to prevent their kids from receiving the vaccine (as many have with Covid) or would this be considered child endangerment? If we value life and criminalize acts like Russian roulette (technically exercising autonomy here too), shouldn’t roulette with a virus be equally criminal?

A less extreme example: I take a loan from you and choose not to work to pay it back, and I’m broke so even if you sue me you get nothing. Should you not be allowed to force me (via a court order/legal paths, obviously not kidnapping lol) to work the losses off?

Long story short for my take: bodily autonomy is sacred when it doesn’t infringe on the rights and protected privileges of those around you, and when it doesn’t prevent you from fulfilling your moral obligations and duties. Once any of those lines are crossed, that autonomy goes out the window, and depending on laws/public benefits that you take advantage of, I think this necessarily further constrains bodily autonomy or the system would collapse.

@freemo Thou seem’st to be forgetting the luminary Paracelsus and his discourses on the three principles of salt, sulfur, and mercury. While he always acknowledged the Aristotelians and the groundwork they laid in the philosophy of the 4 earthly elements, these three principled elements are clearly far superior in both contenance and compositionality to produce—in appropriate proportion and preparation—the Philosopher’s Stone.

But water hog day is cool too I guess.

@freemo I mean I can comfortably use like 8+ languages (actually a lot more, I taught 7 in my class lol), but the OO paradigm generally just makes my stomach churn and both Java and C++ tend to fixate on it from my own experience (not to say they don’t support others but I find the other paradigms in these languages rarely employed). To be fair, maybe Java has improved their FP tooling since I last picked it up, but man if this was Clojure (since it runs on JVM) instead it would be much more palatable to me.

@freemo I was super interested until I saw the languages. I have used Java and C++, but man I really don't like to 😭

If you were willing to be flexible there, I would totally think of applying for that Data Scientist role, especially since I teach a lot of that stuff and use it regularly (and we chatted about it when I first joined actually, if you remember 😁)

But I assume that's not the case, and I am now sad, lol

If you have any positions coming up using lisp, julia, etc lemme know, I'll apply once I wrap up my dissertation, especially if I'm allowed to come to NL to work (and redecorate your office like you said 😉 😂 )

@freemo Oh actually it's in the near micromolar solubility so you're fine.

@freemo When I used to teach lab it wasn't, but I honestly can't recall it's exactly Ksp. I'm fairly certain that *technically* all "insoluble salts" are partially soluble to some degree, but functionally I think your boat would be fine...as long as you can find a way to make silver chloride crystals large enough that it'll stay in one piece xD

@freemo Nah bro, *FLEX* on all those less wealthy than you with a Silver Chloride rowboat! Sure it won't look silver, and nobody but us will know, but we'll know 😉 😂

@freemo Depending on which salt you pick, it might not even dissolve when you use it! 😂