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How can we be confident that some of us on this forum are not trolls working to discredit the story?

We can't be.


It seems very likely at least some commenters are paid trolls. If you were running a $1m disinformation campaign for either side, wouldn't you put assign a few sock puppets to hacker news?


That's exactly what a troll would say!

Have some vodka, American friend.


You are absolutely correct. People make mistakes. Even very well trained professionals make mistakes. Incredibly experienced skydivers die. Industrial safety is tough despite well designed processes and constant training. Tradecraft slipups happen. etc etc The weak link is the human being.


Skipping over what others have pointed out - you don't interview a co-founder.

a) ensure this is someone you are going to get along with b) get someone else to assess their technical competence - you can't assess it and the guidelines you provide won't work reliably.


My sense of the available evidence of the behavior of social groups with blatantly mistaken beliefs is that many don't 'see the error of their ways.'


Kenneth Williams used it when a popular comic and nobody straight had the first idea of the gay subtext.


Of course they knew, Britain has a long history of camp in the theater. They maybe didn't know the words' meaning but they knew the gay subtext and overtones.


This sort of application is wildly out of bounds of the true scope of the theory. The relationship between physics (unified or otherwise) can't be resolved with reference to Godel's theorems.


Why? I honestly don't see how it's out of scope at all (majored in mathematics, minored in physics)


Well, you're actually making metaphysical claims more than mathematical or physical ones. One of two assumptions, depending on how literally the sentiment that the universe is a formal system is intended, is being elided here:

1. That the universe _is_ a formal system, rather than being describable in the language of some formal system. It's not evident what the universe being a formal system even means, or how it squares with basic intuition regarding e.g. the fact that physical systems have state.

2. That, dropping the physical system <=> formal system equivalence and given some real system R consisting of some fundamental entities whose behaviors can be described in full in the language of some formal system S, (borrowing a useful construct from Lucas' anti-mechanism argument, even though I don't buy that argument) no machine can be constructed in R which computes theorems of some formal system S' in which all true statements of S are provable, meaning that no state of the system R can be said to contain a description of S', and that S' is therefore not describable by any arrangement of the entities in R (assuming some reasonable predicate over states of R that is true for a state when some arrangement of a subset of the entities in that state describes S'). Intuitively, this doesn't seem to hold up: by analogy, I can describe a universal Turing machine with a computer equipped with only finite memory. You could then attempt to go down the road of claiming that, even if a description of S' is possible in R, that a mind within R would not be capable of formulating that description, but then you're heaping on an even larger tangle of assumptions, unknowns, and things you have to define if you're going to argue the case rigorously.

The point being that confidence about _any_ hypothesis about the nature of reality made on the basis of Gödel's incompleteness theorems is not epistemologically warranted.


Very true. London is an incredibly diverse international city. San Francisco is, by comparison, a village.


Generalizations are not equal to stereotypes.


There is a difference between generalizations, which may have value if shrewdly observed, and shallow stereotypical characterizations. This post was shallow. Pointing that out is every bit as value as snide remarks about Reddit and an equally snide uninformed reading of the piece. Perhaps more so.


How is that stereotyping? He didn't come out saying "all Americans are dumb, iliterate, and about 100 lbs overweight". _That_ would have been stereotyping. By contrast, his post was a fairly mild and inoffensive "in my experience, the Europeans I know are more cultured". Are you reading more into it than is there?


voting down because this sounds like a bad faith reply: it assumes the poster is wrong and demands proof, rather than admitting a lack of understanding and asking for guidance.


I have lived in both for years. IMHO this is a shallow comparison indeed. Not to be relied upon.


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