Flat earth conspiracy theorists have become a loud (if not very large) group since the turn of the millennium. While there are many specific arguments for a flat earth, which are not worth debunking here, all such arguments rely on an underlying principle that one’s senses are trustworthy and we should believe that things are…
How do you graph something in 4D?
This post is a brief explanation for non-experts of a graphing technique you might have seen but not completely understood. As always, we’ll go over some necessary concepts first. Complex numbers If we want to solve an equation like x2+1=0, we get stuck because we need to take the square root of -1, but no…
Thinking about infinit(ies): The math tea argument
Are there undefinable numbers? Numbers that exist, but that we can’t identify or talk about? According to one argument, there must be such numbers, since there must be more numbers than definitions. Preliminaries First, some background about infinity. We’ll start by talking about the foundations of math using set theory. A set is an unordered…
Osteopathy’s public image in the wake of widespread medical misinformation
A few weeks ago (late summer 2023), YouTuber Owen Morgan published a video about Sherri Tenpenny, a former doctor whose testimony before the Ohio legislature about COVID-19 vaccines went viral in 2021. Notably, Tenpenny has claimed that the vaccine was making people magnetic, that this had something to do with 5G wireless communication, and also…
Naïve realism and American folk science
The following post is a critique of a particular class of worldviews and perspectives. What is naïve realism and what do I mean by folk science? Realism is a class of philosophical positions that assert the bona fide existence of certain objects, or that certain objects have certain discernible properties. The definition is vague because…
The imperfect Chinese room (a note on the conditions for AI consciousness)
First, a note about the obvious racism: western philosophy has long used China as the prototypical example of the foreign. In the Chinese room thought experiment, the Chinese language is used because it is not understood by the person. Ultimately, Chinese is being likened to machine code, notoriously unreadable by humans. This is not the…
Why do unlikely things happen?
I find that people often seem to have trouble understanding how an unlikely event can occur. I have heard people ascribe supernatural causes to such events, and I have also heard people express incredulity at the event occurring at all. This is one of many ways in which probability can be counterintuitive. We usually expect…
Owner, chairperson, CEO, president: Who’s really in charge of the company? An expository essay on corporate governance in the US
In a publicly traded company, the shareholders actually own the company. The shareholders collectively appoint members of the board of directors according to an agreed upon process, and the board of directors controls the company for the shareholders. The board then hires C-level executives, including CEO (chief executive officer), to do the actual work of…
Stories in the history of written language (Part 2)
In Part 1, we looked at the early development of writing, the spread of different scripts, and the historical example of ancient Egyptian. In Part 2, we’ll look at a modern example of written language, some scripts that were invented in unusual ways, and how writing has been used as an art form. The history…
(A little bit of) the math of AI
Artificial intelligence is a vague term for computer applications that carry out some kind of decision making. In general, we’re more inclined to call something AI the more sophisticated and independent its decision making capabilities are. AI are usually designed for a single task or a small collection of related tasks. Many tasks we would…
thoughts on mind 