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Steve D'Ippolito

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Everything posted by Steve D'Ippolito

  1. Um,,, WTF? Over? How did you jump from criticizing modernistic art as denigrating the importance of skill, to deciding that Objectivists approve of that? And from there to asserting we don't understand the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Or is this directed at some specific individual participating in this thread? (In which case I still don't see what the DOI and Constitution, and alleged Objectivist misunderstandings of them, have to do with the subject at hand.)
  2. Hairnet: I am assuming you are referring to this post (if not, please give a post number so I know we are both talking about the same thing.): If that is the case, Dr. Peikoff could clear this whole issue up by clarifying it. And he should--by which I mean I cannot see how it could possibly be in his self interest not to do so, not that I have some right to demand it. Why a professional intellectual very familiar with the importance of the meaning of words would choose to leave a vague, confusing statement as his published view on a matter is beyond me. Unless he simply does not care if people understand him or not, but if that is the case, why bother to say anything at all? Sure, one can argue that it's extemporaneous, but he subsequently published it on his website, thereby "blessing" it as his opinion, at least until corrected or clarified.
  3. Nope, it's a trinary. Alpha Centauri is a double star separated by a couple of billion miles (if memory serves), and Proxima orbits the pair much further out.
  4. I was speaking on a volumetric basis, not a mass basis. I know photons are massless. As for assuming life must be carbon based... well, I suppose not. But given the relative abundances of the elements, and the properties thereof, carbon is the way to bet; I would be greatly surprised if most life were not composed of carbon compounds. Even if it were gaseous. Water I did assume, if only because it's an extremely convenient and common polar solvent; I don't know of another good candidate at temperatures we would find comfortable, but of course there are plenty of temperatures we _don't_ find comfortable. I'd say that's the thing I would be most likely to be wrong about. Now I won't, and didn't, make any assumption that the specific biochemistry would be anything like ours. It might not be DNA that carries the genetic information...though it does seem like a lot of the "pieces" are easy to create in pre-biotic chemistry. And even if it is DNA, the amino acids could be different. Or perhaps what's different is the specific code of which triplet of base pairs goes to which amino acid--as near as the biochemists can tell, that's pretty much arbitrary; any of the possible codes could work; it just so happens that the common ancestor of everything alive on earth today settled on the code we happen to see today. In fact the commonality in the genetic code is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that all extant life on earth has a common ancestor; if we found something on Mars, say, with the same code, we'd conclude it descended from an earth organism transported to Mars or vice versa.
  5. I imagine he is thinking of something a bit more recent than Dawkins was thinking of, or even a bit more recent than St. Augustine. Still wrong, however.
  6. For the record it's "Fallingwater" one word, stress on "fall". At least, that's how everyone who works there today pronounces it.
  7. That's a far more interesting question, Wotan. With respect to evolution, I think she just hadn't troubled to look into it. Science was not an especial interest of hers though she appreciated many of the results. She didn't believe she knew enough about it to judge. Relativity and the Big Bang are trickier; I don't know _specifically_ what she thought about them. Perhaps similar to her attitude on evolution, perhaps not. But many Objectivists today don't merely doubt them, but vehemently deny them on philosophic grounds (also true of quantum mechanics).
  8. Trebor, Do please check out the response by Dr. Hsieh: http://blog.dianahsieh.com/2012/01/on-some-recent-controversies.html
  9. Fair enough as far as it goes. It's silly to require explicit verbal consent every time, for every advance... I mean, do you have to ask before each thrust? But that's not what is at issue here. The key part is this: she said, "No, I don't consent." You cannot do that. You have given every evidence that that is what you are going to do, and it's too late at that point to say, "Sorry but no." Peikoff is not just saying that sex can happen without explicit verbal consent. Such would not be controversial except perhaps in some of the more ridiculous feminist circles. Instead, he's apparently forbidding explicit verbal withdrawal of consent. I am sorry but I cannot think of a context where that is legitimate.
  10. You've ignored my post #72 then. I was willing, for the sake of argument with the unimaginative, to forgo the claim that Peikoff's stand logically implies an endorsement of rape and focus solely and concretely on Peikoff's claim that a woman is not allowed to change her mind during sex. Hell, I even totally ignored the part where she only has to be in the room (with her clothes still on?) under certain circumstances to have consented irrevocably to sex. That is what Peikoff actually said, and I argued in #72, not that it led to rape (even though I think it does) but that it was mistaken on its concrete face. Now defend it. Don't prate to me about how Peikoff isn't endorsing rape; I am willing to pretend (so that you cannot use the non-existence of the word "rape" in Peikoff's statement as an excuse to declare I am mischaracterizing him) that I don't think rape is an inevitable consequence of the principle LP enunciates here. Address, please, what he did say. He did say that once a woman shows up in a hotel room, it's too late for her to refuse the man sex; she may not change her mind. Defend that specific statement, then, since you are too concrete bound to infer its consequence and decide from the consequences that maybe as a statement of principle, it's utterly abhorrent. Defend that specifc, concrete statement, if you can. Now, if you want to state the LP didn't mean this and clearly it's careless on his part, GREAT. At least then you'd be admitting that the statement was wrong. I hope he doesn't think this way. I really do. But if he did publish this egregious a mis-statement of his opinion, I cannot see how it's in his interest to simply allow it to stand, no matter how extemporaneous it might have been. It's now published. (And if he chooses to stand by it...)
  11. You say something this absolutely silly and wonder why I think you are full of it. A photon is approximately the size of a handful of atoms. How are you going to pack something capable of intelligent thought into a few atoms? *sigh* But I'll respond to your reply to me earlier. You jump from simple biomolecules being common directly to intelligent life as if the one makes the other inevitable, and THAT is where you talk out your ass. You neglect the time factor, the fact that it takes four billion years for that to happen IF it happens (in the one case where it did), and that the intelligence may only hang around for a thousand years after that four billion year wait. We simply do not know how long the average technological (radio-using) species lasts, we don't even have one data point. You also cite "trillions of earth like planets" but forget that that's over the entire universe, where there are ten billion galaxies. Do the math, and there are perhaps a few thousand per galaxy. Even if it's a million, that works out to less than one, on average, within reach of our radio waves (ignoring for now the claim that they are undetectable at 50-100 light years). Or look at it this way, there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. If 10,000 earthlike planets are in our galaxy (which would make 100 trillion earthlike planets in the universe), that's one for every TEN MILLION stars. And that's earth like planets. How many of them happen to have intelligence on them today? That requires a good coincidence of timing to even happen, even if intelligence is inevitable on every earthlilke planet. I am close to banging my head on the table top here, because I have used mathematical arguments on you multiple times and you just come back with assertions that intelligent civilizations must be practically sitting on our door step because there are lots of earthlike planets (but you ignore the much larger size of the universe) and life happens quickly (but you ignore that intelligence does NOT happen quickly and that we have no idea how frequently it happens even given enough time). You are failing, utterly, to account for four or five additional factors that must be considered, and every time I try to point them out you just repeat the same incomplete argument again.
  12. All this is to say nothing of the fact that claiming Peikoff screwed up here is not, somehow, an indictment of Ayn Rand.
  13. I am puzzled. What does any of this have to do with the original question, which was, basically, how to deal with someone who totally misconstrued the topic of a facebook post?
  14. Even without inferring that Peikoff is endorsing rape, what he actually DID say directly is bad enough. And I discussed that in my last post. I do wish people hadn't followed things to (what I agree is) the logical conclusion, because it gave certain individuals an excuse to focus on the "overblown" implications, and to try to blow the real issues off by simply claiming "well Peikoff never said that." Rather than focusing on what Peikoff actually said. Which (again) I discussed in my last post. How about this, Nicky? Defend what he actually said, rather than sniping at people who after all only tried to follow it to its logical conclusion.
  15. You cannot legitimately make the leap from "there are lots of extrasolar planets" to "therefore there must be tons of superintelligences out there". The overwhelming majority of those planets that have been detected aren't even remotely earthlike/habitable. And saying "we were wrong about there being no additional planets" is no guarantee that we are wrong to be pessimistic on any of the other counts. "Non earth life is real." That's a flat assertion. Where is your evidence? I agree that there is probably life out there somewhere but it's ridiculous, given that we've found none of it so far, to assert it's really common, and even if it is--how common is multicellular life? That particular evolutionary leap took billions of years here and apparently was dependent on the fortuitous emergence of a symbiosis between our cells and the mitochondrial cells they swallowed up one day in the past. "ET is out there" Again, I tend to think there is an ET somewhere else in our 13 billion light year wide observable universe... but why the insistence that it must be _common_? You have NO BASIS whatsoever for making that statement with the certainty you did. "super intelligent beings exist" Again, no evidence. None. Thousands or millions? In our neck of the woods (define that, please? A sphere of how many light years radius?) And why must an intelligence continue to evolve to super intelligence? What's the selection pressure that would take us from where we are now to average IQs of 300? Again, we haven't even found so much as ONE truly earth like planet out there. Not ONE. Sure, I expect it will happen soon. But that's only the FIRST hurdle. We have not determined what percentage of earth like planets have life on them, what percentage of life bearing planets have multicellular life on them, what percentage of planets with multicellular life on them have had the chance to evolve intelligence, how many of those intelligences happen to be around today (timing is everything). You are talking TOTALLY out of your ass, making assertions with no evidence whatsoever to back them up.
  16. Why do you assume that intelligent life is that common? We have yet to even detect an oxygen atmosphere other than our own (which would be an unambiguous sign of life), much less show that single-celled life (much, much less multi-celled life) exists anywhere other than on earth, much less in any other solar system. Even if earth is utterly typical, and all earth like planets will give rise to intelligence (a big if), radio-emitting life has thus far existed for only 1/40,000,000th of the age of the earth; even assuming we last 1000 times that long, you can figure only 1/40,000th of all the earth-like planets out there will have a radio-capable civilization on it. But we have no basis whatsoever for any such assumption. It may be that at any given time, there are only a handful of civilizations in a galaxy, which would put average distances at thousands or even tens of thousands of light years. Or it is even possible that there is exactly one per universe, and we are it. The only hard data we have is that it happened once. And we have a bunch of negative data (of course subject to change) that we haven't seen any others, haven't detected any sign of life off earth (much less complex life). Concluding that someone must surely be out there, close enough to know we exist, but is ignoring us, is utterly unwarranted.
  17. Go ahead and beat them to the punch by self-immolating. It's what they actually want.
  18. Nicky, of course it's a broken analogy. Your post saying "I don't consent to post here" is deliberately doing exactly what it claims to not be consenting to. Dante's change is more apropos, where you cause your post to be published, then later withdraw consent, but that analogy breaks down too. Sex, unless you are a complete failure at it, is a process that takes time and therefore can be interrupted. A man's obligation, if a woman suddenly says "stop" (or uses a pre-arranged different word or signal), is to stop. Right then. It is never "too late" for her to change her mind, she can indeed do that. It does not matter if she started with the intention of interrupting the act, or just changed her mind for any of the possible reasons Dante mentioned (or others he did not). The man's obligation is to stop when she says stop. Her motivations for doing so might reflect poorly on her or not, but even if it is certain they do, it does not give the man license to continue. "Oh, she's a blueballing cocktease, it's OK, therefore for me to continue" doesn't cut the mustard. (Similarly, reverse the roles if she is on top doing the work.) What she cannot morally or legally do is accuse him of rape because she later regretted the act even though she consented to it at the time. But that is not the situation Peikoff is adressing here. It's quite clear from the quote that LP is stating that at some point the woman is no longer allowed to interrupt the process for whatever reason. He doesn't follow that chain of reasoning to its logical conclusion, but he does not have to. It's clearly wrong. She also cannot cause the act to be interrupted and then claim the part that did happen was rape. As long as the man stops when she indicates "stop", it's not rape. It's possible that that is what Dr. Peikoff was trying to say here, but if so he did a really poor job of expressing himself here. Because it sure looks like Peikoff was saying she's not allowed to interrupt the process at all, that once started, it is "too late." If he didn't mean to say that, then he can certainly correct it. If he chooses not to, then he deserves to be misunderstood because he'd be allowing to stand verbiage that clearly indicates something he didn't mean.
  19. Just point out to the person that you were talking about black and white as in good and bad, not as in races. Find out if they are even interested in talking about pure good or bad or "gray" before launching into a deeper discussion of the issue. If it turns out that they are determined to discuss race with you, you can decide if you _want_ to, then adjust accordingly. I find it interesting that one of the previous commenters decided to talk about moral absolutes, when you weren't actually asking about them but rather how to handle this conversation. Don't do what they did; the person who started talking about sickle cell anemia might not even care about that issue.
  20. In this particular case, I have to agree with Dwayne, but I will elaborate. We do not actually know how inevitable life is, nor how often it becomes multicellular, or otherwise complex enough to become intelligent. We don't know how often it actually becomes intelligent. We _really_ don't even know how common habitable planets are nor how often the (quite possibly different) conditions that will allow life to begin, are. We don't know how long an intelligent species lives at a technological level where it could attempt to communicate with us, at a level where we would be able to understand the message (for all we know, intelligences that have had space travel for more than a century might consider radio waves hopelessly quaint). Now that just goes to say we don't know how many of them are out there. We know of one spacefaring civilization with radio, us. There could be any number.. and I do mean any number.. of others, and only some infinitesimally small fraction of them are close enough to us to realize we are here. Multiplying the total number by the fraction could give a number close to zero, or it could give an actual whole number.. Even given that such exists, we have no idea how they think, or what they value. They may be profoundly uninterested in us, or they may take a "hands off" approach for some reason. Or they may think we are delicious (ok, probably not). But we lack almost every one of the large number of pieces of information we'd need to have to begin to figure this out, which is why it's like flipping cards into a hat. It's fun to speculate, but it's just that. I _do_ hope we continue to learn more about these questions though.
  21. What case? You've made no case. (Edit: I see you're no longer claiming to have made a case.)
  22. Look, it seems to me that you imagine you are defending Peikoff here, but as usual you've presented no actual defense (telling people they should be able to see it is not a defense), but rather you've been at pains to make excuses for the fact that you are not, in fact, actually presenting a defense.
  23. Au contraire... if a LOT of people are getting it wrong, perhaps it's not as obvious as you seem to think it is, and it's something where a lot of people could benefit from an explanation. Or is it that you don't actually have an explanation? But I've seen this pattern before. "It's really, really blindingly obvious to some of us, I am going to condemn you for not seeing it, but I am not going to explain it."
  24. Doctor number nine beat me to it. Nicky, you'd better think a bit harder.
  25. So what is wrong with either drawing analogies for illustration OR following what appear to be the logical consequences of the statement in question? If you don't like the results of these processes perhaps you should identify that you really have a problem with the original statement. If you think that someone has made a bad analogy or incorrectly derived consequences from LP's statement, rather than simply ridiculing their statements, show how they do not follow (or illustrate via analogy) what LP said.
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