2015 – Page 20 – William M. Briggs

Is God is a Mathematician? Guest Post by Bob Kurland

Coincidentally, Bob Kurland sent this guest post on the day of miracles, a good follow up to yesterday's post. Feynman: "Do you know calculus?" Wouk: I admitted that I didn't.…

Philosophy Statistics

Bread From Something Or Nothing? Or, What’s A Miracle?

We interrupt our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles for this brief message. You've heard of the miracle of loaves and fishes? What's a miracle? How do miracles happen? Read these…

Culture

This Week In Doom: Crunchy Yummy Babies And A New Circle Of Hell

There's not much to enjoy about this week's doom, except to note that things are speeding up. Perhaps we need a pseudo-quantified measure of our acceleration into the abyss? Crunchy…

Culture

The Remnant: Ever Wonder Why Gmarriage Is Only Legal in Post Christian Nations?

Today's post is at The Remnant: "Ever Wonder Why Gmarriage Is Only Legal in Post Christian Nations?" Have you noticed that gmarriage---government-defined marriage---is legal only in post-Christian nations? Why this…

Book review Culture

The Perfectibility of Man: Suicide of the West at 50

It's (past) time we examined James Burnham's under-appreciated classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, a book written fifty years ago. Everybody should…

Philosophy Statistics

More Reasons Not To Use The Precautionary Principle: Update

All probability is conditional and we are always interested in some proposition, call it X. We want to know "the probability of X". Well, there is none: not ever. There…

Statistics

Stream: Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space!

Today's post is at The Stream: "Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his co-authors fail to show their precautionary principle provides any guidance in…

Book review Philosophy

There’s More Than Physics: A Review Of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Guest Post by Bob Kurland

Kurland provides us with a succinct review of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. This will ease us into the week with…

Pk on AI & Chess Both Produce Pre-Coded OutputJune 18, 2025
Suppose I wrote a program to perform multiple linear regressions of varying degrees and varying transformations. The program would return…
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