Briggs

Ireland’s Same-Sex Gmarriage Vote: Or, The Snakes Return?

Update See Saturday's post for results. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has "no wish to stuff [his] religious views down other people's throats"---is that done with a shillelagh?---and so he won't…

Statistics

Are Wars And Violence Decreasing? Taleb’s New Paper Reviewed

The vale of tears I've been asked by several people to comment on Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's paper (thankfully, not peer-reviewed, unless you count this) "On the tail…

Culture

Democracy And The Global Warming Consensus—And That New Arizona Survey

Guy named Jonathan Overpeck who makes a living ensuring people are nervous about global warming conducted a survey of Arizona residents and discovered three-fourths of them are nervous about global…

Culture Philosophy

Vote For Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan For President: It’s The Intelligent Thing To Do

I normally don't vote in presidential elections because the choices are between flavors of progressivism---D-type, R-type, etc.---and I desire none. But scrappy "transhumanist" Zoltan Istvan has changed my mind. He…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: God Knows All At Same Instant

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. God is…

Culture

This Week In Doom: Grade Deflation

This week's doom: "higher" education, art, and sex. Racism's return It may be time to rethink the idea of academic freedom. Seems this professor blurted out a series of racist…

Culture

Encyclical Delayed, Possibly Downgraded To Lesser Form?

The encyclical might be downgraded to some lesser form of "statement." This is the rumor as reported to me from "sources." Given the excitement the encyclical generated on the left,…

Culture Statistics

The New Pew Religion Survey Isn’t What You Think (Probably)

Lot of chatter over the new Pew survey of religiosity, "Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow". Main result: Christianity down, "nones" up.…

NLR on AI & Chess Both Produce Pre-Coded OutputJune 18, 2025
One might wonder why, after billions of dollars spent building up infrastructure, paying workers to program and "train" (calibrate) this…
Briggs on AI & Chess Both Produce Pre-Coded OutputJune 18, 2025
Michael, No, it's the code. The code says "Take this X and do this and such to it," where X…
Michael 2 on AI & Chess Both Produce Pre-Coded OutputJune 18, 2025
The Large Language Models (LLM, ChatGPT kind of thing) use code to process training data. The output is NOT determined…
Hagfish Bagpipe on The Hubris Of Experts: NIH EditionJune 17, 2025
HagFISH. Sheesh
Hagfush Bagpipe on The Hubris Of Experts: NIH EditionJune 17, 2025
Briggs, watching you work is like watching an expert woodsman split wood. You have a keen eye for the natural…