Hah no worries. Thanks for being so reasonable yourself lmao.

Fair points. The latter case is basically where my concern is.

I think you are assuming a level of competence from people that I don’t have faith people actually have. People absolutely can and do take “you cannot prove a negative” as a real logical rule in the literal negation sense. This isn’t colloquialism. This is people misunderstanding what the phrase means.

I have definitely had conversations with idiots that have taken this phrase to mean that you just literally cannot logically prove negated statements. Whether folks like you get that that is not what the phrase refers to is irrelevant to why I’m pointing out the distinction.

If you subscribe to classical logic (i.e., propositonal or first order logic) this is not true. Proof by contradiction is one of the more common classical logic inference rules that lets you prove negated statements and more specifically can be used to prove nonexistence statements in the first order case. People go so far as to call the proof by contradiction rule “not-introduction” because it allows you to prove negated things.

Here’s a wiki page that also disagrees and talks more specifically about this “principle”: source (note the seven separate sources on various logicians/philosophers rejecting this “principle” as well).

If you’re talking about some other system of logic or some particular existential claim (e.g. existence of god or something else), then I’ve got not clue. But this is definitely not a rule of classical logic.

So you’re saying that because a religion allows you to choose which of God’s commandments, carefully passed down through every generation, you personally want to follow based on your gut feeling, can’t be shamed?

No, that is not what I said.

Why should the ones who choose to deny parts of their religion be seen as representative of it over those who’ve chosen to uphold them?

I definitely answered this in my original comment.

Because if the majority of people following a particular religion reject a prior view as false or wrong, then arguably that view is no longer part of the religion.

Religions aren’t crisp, unchanging, monolithic entities where everybody believes the same thing forever. If we’re talking about judaism in the sense of the views and practices jewish people actually subscribe to, then that seems like we are referring to beliefs they actually hold in a mainstream/current sense, not beliefs they previous held but now reject?

Given that music boxes are very very old it is plausible that beethoven could have made a remark sharing his opinion on this exact issue. I don’t mean to agree/disagree with your point, I just find that kind of interesting.

You’re getting downvoted but you are right. Stuff like this is a super cool example of exactly the type of thing you are talking about imo.

There’s a lot of AI generated art that sucks. But that does not imply that in skilled hands an artist can’t use those tools in creative/interesting ways.

Arguably a lot of these tools are designed specifically to reduce the effort a human has to put in to create the art they want to make too.

The joke is that I’m implying they want to fuck this version of jesus.

There’s definitely a bit of “forcing” these people want to do with this version of Jesus, they just don’t want to admit it.

Hell yeah

Hell yeah.

Why should the government support someone’s bad eating habit when they don’t support someone’s alcohol habit, or cocaine habit?

I’m not a doctor at all, but for certain addictions, people can die from the withdrawls that occur if they just stop. I’d imagine in those cases rehab and treatment requires supporting the habit via the drug itself or a safer analog in order to keep the individual alive so that they are able to draw down and eventually quit whatever the source of their addiction is.

For example:

1. Administering benzodiazepines to alcoholics.
2. Administering methadone to opiate users.

Machine learning techniques are often thought of as fancy function approximation tools (i.e. for regression and classification problems). They are tools that receive a set of values and spit out some discrete or possibly continuous prediction value.

One use case is that there are a lot of really hard+important problems within CS that we can’t solve efficiently exactly (lookup TSP, SOP, SAT and so on) but that we can solve using heuristics or approximations in reasonable time. Often the accuracy of the heuristic even determines the efficiency of our solution.

Additionally, sometimes we want predictions for other reasons. For example, software that relies on user preference, that predicts home values, that predicts the safety of an engineering plan, that predicts the likelihood that a person has cancer, that predicts the likelihood that an object in a video frame is a human etc.

These tools have legitamite and important use cases it’s just that a lot of the hype now is centered around the dumbest possible uses and a bunch of idiots trying to make money regardless of any associated ethical concerns or consequences.

People talk a lot about stackoverflow for figuring out bugs and miscellaneous coding questions but the whole stackexchange project has a lot of other very excellent websites.

if the Palestinians are blameless then why arent they rounding up hamas cultists and giving them to the Israelis?

This point specifically is bat-shit fucking stupid enough to deserve its own comment. It makes absolutely no sense at all for random Palestinian civilians to take on the dominant military power of the region they live in in the middle of an armed conflict and trying to use that as justification for your earlier points is stupid.

You should learn to distinguish between systems of governance, political parties in power and the innocent people subject to these things. It is incredibly stupid to use this faulty reasoning to justify hatred for millions of innocent people and you are a piece of shit for choosing to do this.

Also, your point about the “Palestinian government” knowing who “each and every Hamas member is” juxtaposed by you talking about “studying history” is pretty funny. You realize Hamas is the defacto controlling political party governing the Palestinian territories right?

There’s approx 14 million Palestinian people. To claim all of them are as bad as a group like Hamas is either incredibly stupid or incredibly bigoted.

Helping “bad people”? There’s nothing inherently more bad about Palestinians than any other nationality.