2014 – Page 3 – William M. Briggs

Summary Against Modern Thought: Terms Which Can Be Predicated Of God

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. Today some…

Philosophy Statistics

Infinite Surprise And Impossible Events

It's a lazy Saturday, so some musings today on entropy and information and probability. It's about time we started tying these things together. Things like the following are heard: "Given…

Statistics

Uncertainty Is An Impossible Sell

I've never seen the show, but I've heard that the protagonist on the X Files used to have a desk sign which read, "I want to believe." That sentiment characterizes…

Philosophy

Pascal’s Pensées, A Tour: II

Since our walk through Summa Contra Gentiles is going so well, why not let's do the same with Pascal's sketchbook on what we can now call Thinking Thursdays. We'll use…

Book review Statistics

The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels Reviewed

People first Just in time for the Federally-Recognized-Holiday-Of-25-December-That-Shall-Go-Unnamed we have a suitable gift for science deniers everywhere. Alex Epstein's The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels Science deniers? Yes, sir. Those…

Statistics

Can We Predict The Unpredictable?

The most intriguing thing about the new peer-reviewed paper of the same name as today's post in Nature: Scientific Reports by Abbas Golestani and Robin Gras is that it is…

Statistics

Climate Change Causing Short Peruvians!

Who remembers those crank scientists who wanted to genetically engineer human beings so that they would be sprier and narrower and thus have smaller "carbon footprints"? We don't need 'em!…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: Of The Divine Perfection

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. We're still…

hudbwu on Over-Certainty Of Polygenic ScoresJune 11, 2025
I stopped midway to write this comment. What exactly is the difference between polygenic scores and two-layer neural networks? Other…
NLR on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 11, 2025
It's not just that the effects of technology are complex, it's that there's no guarantee that the results will fit…
Cloudbuster on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
"Anyway, murder is illegal, too, yet murder is still with us. So it shouldn’t be strange that forbidding scientists to…
Mike Wooly on Cosmic Radiation, Clouds, & Global WarmingJune 10, 2025
The IPCC report that anthropogenic warming is around 0.2 degrees C per decade. That's two hundredths of a degree C…
Chaeremon on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
IMHO the dot ai bubble, as direct follower of the dot com bubble, is trying to instantiate Gödel's incompleteness theorems,…