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merjet

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Correction, My earlier figures (for the African continent) were wrong, sorry - 1.2 million is the case number in Africa.

The most recent figures, the deaths total ~ 30,000.

And here's Bill's dire warning for Africa back in Feb: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/15/coronovirus-bill-gates-warns-10-million-deaths-virus-spreads/

The epidemiologists have a useful term for their own inflated predictions: "severity bias". Yeah, that helps a lot, thanks. ;)

Then the WHO and the UN. Original African estimate 3.3 million, later down-rated to 190,000 - and still way off. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/02/868209675/new-who-model-forecasts-a-different-coronavirus-spread-pattern-in-africa

Is this the "expertise" one should trust, or countries base measures on?

Edited by whYNOT
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That book is weird, but so is Sullivan's review.

It seems that both of them are somehow stuck thinking that intelligence means IQ. They both miss how the bigger problem is equating grades and test scores with intelligence. Sullivan wants to defend the value of intelligence (and does a bad job at it by the way), but accomplishes that by arguing about school performance and IQ. The book argues about the overvalued of intelligence, but accomplishes that by arguing about school performance and IQ. They both miss the more obvious issue: the tools we used to measure intelligence are a mess and don't measure what we think they measure.

The same reason people want to get into Yale for undergrad. It's not that going to Yale means you are smarter than most people. It's just a way to signal your social standing. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is "settling" supposed to explain what goes on between deciding and acting? I'm not sure it helps defeat the determinist, who might argue that one's experience of "settling" a matter oneself is merely an effect of introspecting mental operations. Yes, you settle matters, the determinist might say, but that "settling" itself was caused by factors beyond your control. You're merely introspecting the goings-on.

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"The moment of settling is when the agents decides and acts and hence settles the matter in a particular way" (p. 39).

This was included in A Metaphysics for Freedom #2.

Steward alluded to the determinist hypothesis when she wrote the following that I quoted in #3. "An algorithmic or functionalist view of the earthworm’s behavior can only go so far." But I will look for a more extended passage where she says why she disagrees with determinism. 

 

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20 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

Yes, you settle matters, the determinist might say, but that "settling" itself was caused by factors beyond your control. You're merely introspecting the goings-on.

When I wrote A Metaphysics for Freedom #1 on Nov. 2, I didn’t include much from pages 9-12 in order to emphasize her argument for free will rather than her argument against determinism.  This morning I added an addenda to #1 that will hopefully satisfy MisterSwig for the present.

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