Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/2:15 PM
Now that you know them, you can answer.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/2:15 PM
P.S. When you let words just flop out of your lips willy-nilly, it shows me you have a floppy brain. The only way to impart the "substance" of your argument is by saying exactly what you mean. Otherwise the dear fellow you're arguing with only has the foggiest idea what you're parping on about.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/2:11 PM
I can hardly accept the "arguement" when I don't know what it is. You want to simultaneously hold: 1. Closed-minded people reject propositions solely for reasons other than their content. 2. Closed-minded people reject propositions because of their content. Doublethink is an admirable talent, but I don't think it's helping.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/1:06 PM
Remember, a Truth-teller could be just as stubborn about the question. You: Why are you eating snails for breakfast? TT: Well, it's not because the square of two is four. (Goes on until lunch-time). Liars and Truth-tellers have no advantages over each other in how easy it is to communicate. The only difference is that a Liar must either remove or add an odd number of negations from every proposition he wants to make.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/12:57 PM
(I assume the Liars are simply Liars, not Liar-Confusers, who would try to withhold all information. But at that rate they wouldn't answer your alphabetical questions either.)
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/12:51 PM
Of COURSE the Liars can't communicate easily with an outsider, unless the outsider has learned the way Liars communicate. Neither can an Englishman communicate easily with an Dutch, except by learning the crude grunts that form the Dutchman's natural mode of expression. The Liars have absolutely no difficulty communicating with each other. And you have STILL not grasped the point that it is EXTREMELY EASY to get information out of a liar. It's exactly as easy as getting information out of a truth teller. In your example: You: "Why are you eating snails for breakfast rather than eggs?" Liar: "It's not because they were the only things in my fridge" You, mentally translating: "Ah, it's because they were the only things in his sodding fridge." Reader: Sighs in exasperation, then heartily parps.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/12:47 PM
That's not the same at all as what you said. It's the Exact Opposite. I quote: "It rejects information because of the source or the manner of presentation rather than content." Tell me truthfully, have you been at the Royal Jelly again? Answer in the form of a parp.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	4-Apr-05/9:48 AM
There are two -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.s in this discussion. Look at the IP addresses to find out which is which. And for the second time, NO ONE IS SAYING THAT DELIBERATELY DECEPTIVE LYING IS CONVENIENT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. I merely pointed out that if two Liars WANT to communicate, they can very easily do so by simple negation: "What did you have for breakfast?" "I didn't have scrambled eggs"; and if they don't want to communicate, i.e. they are actively trying to deceive eachother, then the alphabetical method would work. All this is entirely academic anyway because even if they couldn't communicate, so what? Rocks don't communicate and they exist. Loners don't communicate and they exist. And the fact that we have now established that Liars could communicate doesn't mean they do exist, or would ever exist. In fact, it doesn't fucking matter either way. It was just a hypothetical example. If I said to you "What would you do about the Catholic Church's stance on contraception if you were Pope?" you'd probably say "I'd never be Pope because I'm a woman." Saying "Liars wouldn't exist because they can't communicate" is not a reasonable answer to the question "If there were a race of Liars, would it be closed minded to reject the propositions they spouted?"
Re: late night delirium by not_a_philosopher	3-Apr-05/8:38 AM
Right now you're in the transitional phase between Judaism and Christianity. Keep reading the Bible, and keep praying. You'll get there in the end, and when you do you'll know what it means to be at One with Jesus. Thank you and God Bless.
Re: Prayer For The Church by sliver	3-Apr-05/8:33 AM
If you don't pray to St. Joseph, will he neglect to guide us through this time of transition?
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/8:23 AM
Do you agree that the alphabetical method I outlined above could be used to extract any information you wanted from Liar-Confusers, and similarly (with the obvious minor adjustment) from Truthteller-Confusers?
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/8:19 AM
I did not mean *YOU* had confused negative correlation with 0 correlation. I meant that anyone who satisfies your definition of 'closed minded' has clearly confused negative correlation with 0 correlation. How can there be any question about whether or not that's a bad thing to do? "Your hypothetical race of Liars could not communicate with each other in the practicalities of ordinary life because of the cumbersome nature of the process. By the time you extract from your man what he had for breakfast, it would be lunch time or dinner time and purpose for asking would have passed." Where in Sodomy do you get the idea that I thought adopting a stance of deliberately deceptive lying was a convenient way to communicate? You asked me how Liars would communicate, so I thought of a way. The method works not only for friendly Liars, but also for Liars who actively do not want you to know the truth.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/8:07 AM
"You did not address my first paragraph." This is the original -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. who posted the comment in question. I asked you to "Read it again" because I thought you had either overlooked it, or merely read the original version. It was not an attempt at trumping you.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/7:05 AM
You may imagine another race of Liar-Confusers, who a) Only ever tell falsehoods, b) Try to confuse you. You may also imagine another race of Truthteller-Confusers, who a) Only ever tell truthhoods, b) Try to confuse you. Neither race has any advantage over the other in terms of the confusion they can produce. If you can't see that, you deserve to be plucked.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/7:02 AM
You fail to address my paragraphs all the time, either because you didn't like them or because your brains are made of Cottage-cheese. Liars: Read this carefully, because even though it's absurdly simple, you will have the greatest of difficulty absorbing it. LIARS TELL FALSEHOODS. NOT MISLEADINGHOODS, NOT CONFUSIONHOODS. FALSEHOODS. APART FROM THAT, THEY ARE THE SAME AS TRUTH-TELLERS. THEY ARE JUST AS HELPFUL. THEY ARE JUST AS FORTHCOMING. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS THAT THEY ONLY EVER SAY FALSE THINGS. IN OTHER WORDS, THEY WILL ALWAYS SAY THE NEGATION OF WHAT THEY WANT TO COMMUNICATE. Do you understand what a negation is? Do you understand how a race of liars could easily communicate, by simply saying the negation of whatever they wanted to say? "I'm not going to the shops now." "My favourite colour isn't blue." "You're not thick." Trying to explain anything to you is like trying to force a broom head-first into a cat's anus.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/6:56 AM
Double-dim: Your description of closed-minded people omits the crucial feature of them, which is that they refuse to consider CONTENT that conflicts with what they already believe. You've never understood anything properly in your entire life, have you?
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/6:52 AM
Dim, dim, dim. A race of truth-tellers could also easily create confusion, by saying true but irrelevant things. A race of liars simply needs to say the negation of whatever they want to communicate. Dim.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	3-Apr-05/4:21 AM
Of course truth can come from an unreliable source. By definition, an unreliable source is one in which there is very little correlation between the fact that the source has asserted a proposition, and the proposition's validity (a race of Liars has perfect negative correlation. A race of Randoms has 0 correlation.) Now your definition of a closed mind is one that asserts all propositions from an unreliable source to be false, apart from those that are obviously true. This is just someone who has confused 0 correlation with negative correlation. About the hypothetical race of Liars. I think it is possible to establish truth from someone who always lies. The test is to see if we could find the answer to any question. As an example, suppose we want to know what the Liar had for breakfast. If we just ask him "What did you have for breakfast?" that wouldn't help because he could just say "I had Ely Cathedral for breakfast" and we've learnt next to nothing useful, because, as you say, there are unlimited possible untruths he could spout. But we can be more cunning than that: suppose I said to him "Consider the shortest possible description of what you had for breakfast. Is the first letter of that description an 'A'?" If he says "No" we know it begins with 'A', and we move on to the second letter of the description. If he says "Yes" we know it must begin with B...Z so we ask him "Is the first letter a B?" and so on. Do you agree I could establish what he had for breakfast by adopting that approach? Clearly it is applicable to other questions.
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	2-Apr-05/12:46 PM
"A race of Liars is unimaginable. How could they communicate?" By mentally negating every proposition they receive from a fellow Liar. "You say we should “embrace accepting false propositions.”" No, I said we should embrace REJECTING false propositions. Read it again. "A closed mind does not necessarily make assertions based on insufficient evidence. There may be good evidence in a person’s thinking that Negroes are an unreliable source of information, for example. He is closed minded if he rejects information from that source." Think about what we mean by 'reject' in this case. By rejecting a proposition P, do we assert that P is false, or merely that we do not know that it is true? Consider a computer program that inputs a proposition then randomly returns true or false. It is clearly an unreliable source of information. But that's not to say it is always wrong when it asserts a given proposition to be true. Clearly our assessment of whether or not the proposition is true is independent of any answer the computer gives us. And so it is with Negroes. Suppose there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Negroes are unreliable sources of information. Therefore in interpreting a Negro's remarks, we must rely on external knowledge before drawing any conclusions. Your definition of a closed mind seems to be: any mind that asserts that all propositions uttered by an unreliable source are false. This is clearly an example of making assertions based on insufficient evidence. It's obvious that one shouldn't do it. Unless you live on Planet Gay.
Re: a comment on stab in the dark by not_a_philosopher	2-Apr-05/9:16 AM
I'm a neoconservative.