Reality is Objective

Reality is objective. What's true is true for everyone, regardless of what people believe.

You'd think this would be obvious. And yet, it comes up. Particularly in debates about the supernatural. People will say things like "Well, maybe ghosts don't exist for you, but they do exist for me." I've never seen anyone apply this sort of reasoning when doing something mundane, like say, crossing the street. No one ever says "That bus might exist for you, but it doesn't exist for me." People know there either is a bus there, or there isn't, regardless of what they believe, and if they want to not get hit by it, they ought to have beliefs which match objective reality.

I think the idea that reality is different to different people might come from the thought that our senses are infallible. If I see something, that means it's there. If I see something, and someone else sees something different, well our realities must be different. But our senses aren't infallible, and we frequently see or hear things that aren't there, or fail to see or hear things that are.

It seems to me much easier to explain occasional discrepancies in our perceptions in an objective reality than to explain the ubiquitous consistency of our perceptions. How often do people disagree about whether it's day or night, whether they're inside or outside, whether they're sitting or standing, whether there's a bus in the road or not? If reality were subjective, why would such consistency be so common?

Justified True Belief?

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy interested in the study of knowledge. One of the foundational questions of epistemology is "What does it mean to know something?". A common answer is that knowledge is justified true belief. In order to know something, you have to believe it, have a good reason for believing it and it has to actually be true.

That sounds pretty good, but there are problems with it. It's possible to construct scenarios in which all three conditions are apparently met, but it doesn't seem like anything was "known".

There's also the question of what counts as justification. But I think there's another, more fundamental, problem with this definition. One I don't think I've ever seen anyone else point out.

No definition of knowledge should include the condition of being true.

To do so is to make the term inapplicable in any situation remotely resembling real life. The reason for that is because of the answer to another fundamental question of epistemology: "Is it possible to be absolutely certain of something?". The answer to that is no. (Of course, others disagree, and I should probably write another post explaining why I think that.) All we can do is get more and more evidence for something, getting closer and closer to 100% certainty, but never actually reaching it.

In toy examples, whether a given fact is true or not is simply assumed/given. So if a hypothetical character has a justified belief, we can say whether that character knows it or not, because of our god-like omniscience. But in real life, no one has that omniscience.

Consider the same question - Is a belief knowledge or not - applied to yourself. Do I know the sun will rise tomorrow, or do I just believe it? Well, I certainly think it's true that the sun will come up. I wouldn't believe it if it I didn't think that, tautologically. But if that's the standard, then I ought to consider every belief I have to be knowledge. If I didn't believe they were true, I wouldn't believe them.

And if we apply that standard to other people, then our evaluations of whether someone else knows something or merely believes it, simply becomes a question of whether they agree with you or not.

I propose a simpler definition: Knowledge is belief that is held with a high degree of confidence.

This definition fits very well into a Bayesian framework. Degree of confidence is simply probability. If you believe something is true with a probability greater than, say, 99.9%, you can be said to know it. This also handily deals with the question of what counts as justification - that's just Bayesian evidence.

AlDraw Wiki

Ever wish there were a wiki focused on AlDraw for you to learn from and contribute to? No, I didn't really think so. Nonetheless, it now exists - behold, AlDraw Wiki!

Right now there's not a lot of stuff specific to AlDraw. I've been focusing on the Construction techniques category. I have instructions on simple techniques, such as how to construct a midpoint, intermediate, such as how to inscribe a circle in a triangle and advanced, such as how to construct a circle that passes through two given points and is tangent to a given line. And I'm adding more every day.

Is something confusing or unclear? Ask and I'll write it better. Do you see a mistake I made? Edit it!

Edit: I've just added the pentagon. This page describes both how to construct a pentagon inscribed in a circle (which is easy to find elsewhere online) and also how to construct a pentagon from a given side length (which is harder to find elsewhere).

Extraordinary Evidence

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -Carl Sagan

 Some people don't like this quote. They say it's too subjective. There's no objective standard of what's extraordinary. And other rather silly objections.

I would generalize the saying to be something more like this: "All claims require the appropriate amount or degree of evidence.".

The ordinariness/extraordinariness of a claim is not a binary feature, but rather a sliding scale. If I said I had eggs for breakfast this morning, that's a perfectly ordinary claim. You'd probably need no more evidence than my word to believe it. If I said I saw a zebra in my backyard, that's a little bit extraordinary, since they don't live anywhere near here. You'd probably need a photograph, or a news story about a zebra that escaped from a zoo to believe it. If I said I saw a unicorn, that's even more extraordinary. You'd probably need to see the real live thing to believe that. If I said neutrinos can go faster than light, that's even more extraordinary and will require lots more evidence. And then of course, there's always God, which is about the most extraordinary claim imaginable.

Another important thing to note is that belief too is not a binary value. Rather, it's degree of certainty. Probability. Which is nice, because that means this saying can be formalized by using Bayes' Theorem.

Bayes' Theorem is a mathematical formula that lets you calculate how probable you should consider a hypothesis after seeing some evidence, given your prior probability of that hypothesis, how likely you are to see that evidence if the hypothesis were true, and how likely you are to see that evidence if the hypothesis were false.

How extraordinary a claim is, is simply how low your prior for it was. This doesn't totally eliminate claims of subjectiveness, but it's no less subjective than any other belief, and if you're doing Bayes right, it's really a lot less subjective.

And how extraordinary evidence is, is simply how much more likely that evidence is to occur if the claim were true than if the claim were not true.

Going back to my examples, the prior probability for me eating eggs for breakfast is relatively high. You already know from past experience that eggs exist and that people commonly eat them for breakfast. So the evidence doesn't need to be very strong. I'm more likely to say something if it's true than if it's false, but lying isn't unheard of.

The prior probability of me seeing a zebra in my backyard is lower. You still know that zebras exist, but you also know they don't live in the wild here. So, on just my word, it might seem more likely that I'm lying than that I actually saw a zebra. The prior probability for the unicorn is even lower, because you already know they don't exist. A photograph isn't sufficient here because it's more likely that I faked it than that unicorns actually exist.

Stronghold 3

The original Stronghold was an excellent game. It's easily the best castle building game I've played (though that's not really saying a lot) and even outside that relatively narrow genre, it's still one of my favorite games. So, I was very excited about Stronghold 3, which came out just a couple weeks ago.

Unfortunately, Stronghold 3 has been very disappointing.

When it first came out, it was buggy as all hell. It was pretty much unplayable. Fortunately, some patches have been released. They're now on version 1.2.24396. It's not usually a good sign when the version number is in the tens of thousands. That's a lot of bug fixes.

But at least now you can actually click on things, and your troops will go where you tell them. (Well, most of the time. My guys still occasionally get stuck on nothing, but ordering them backwards and forwards again will usually get them unstuck. (Sadly, that's still better than it was before))

But even without the bugs, it's still disappointing. The change from earlier games that I dislike the most is happiness. As with earlier games, if happiness is above a certain level, peasants will come to the castle, and the higher the happiness, the faster the come. Conversely,  the further below that level, the faster the peasants will leave. However, in earlier games, influences on happiness level were related to the rate of change of happiness. Raising taxes wouldn't make the peasants unhappy, it would make them unhappier and they would keep getting unhappier until you did something else to make them happier. In Stronghold 3 the influences on happiness are direct, and immediate. This can make for an unfortunate situation if anything happens to your farmers. If you run out of food, people will immediately start leaving the castle, and the farmers can't be replaced.

Another thing I don't like is that strongholds seem a lot less strong in this game. In earlier games, archers on top of walls or towers had an incredible advantage over those on the ground. They could shoot farther, and they got some protection against enemy arrows. In this game, there's no protection from enemy attacks. Enemy arrows never miss and bounce off a crenelation. And though there is a range enhancement, it's pretty small. In fact, archers on a wall instead of a tower don't seem to get any extra range at all.

Beyond the big things, there are lots of little irritations too. For example, peasants eat a lot. You can only attach a wall to the very end of another wall, not in the middle for a T-shape. Troops default formation is no formation. Etc.

Stronghold 3 isn't all bad. There are a few things I like about it. One is what they've done with housing.  In earlier games, it didn't matter where you put hovels, so it made sense to make them far away from the rest of the castle. That way, they wouldn't get in the way, and they wouldn't be in harms way when enemies attacked. But it also wasn't very realistic. Now, the closer you put your hovel to the keep, the more people it can hold.

Another thing I like is that now you don't place buildings on a grid, and they can rotated very finely.

The Death Penalty

Yesterday, two people were executed. One was probably guilty. One was maybe not. But even if they were guilty, is justice served by execution?

I say no. Killing is a bad thing. Regardless of who dies, death is bad. Killing may sometimes be the lesser of two evils (for example, self defense), but that doesn't make it good. Another solution that didn't involve death would be better.

Moreover, killing accomplishes very little. The victims of a murderer aren't brought back to life by his execution. It doesn't undo the damage that's been wrong. The only positive things I can think of are that it prevents the criminal from committing future crimes, which can be done through other means, and that it gives the survivors revenge-inspired happiness, which isn't really something that should be encouraged, in my book.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Justice isn't achieved by hurting someone who hurt you. Justice is achieved by healing hurt and righting past wrongs. Sometimes that's not possible, but that doesn't make vengeance right.

Literally Misused Words

Words have no inherent meaning. They mean only what they are understood to mean.Of course the intention of words and language is to communicate, so words ought to aid that endeavor. Commonly used and unambiguous words do that. Words that no one can agree what they mean do exactly the opposite. Which is why I partially agree, and partially disagree with this.

I agree with their usage of ambivalent. There's no other word that closely matches it, and if you want to say indifferent, you can say indifferent (or apathetic).

As far as literally goes, I've never seen it used it to mean figuratively. Never. It's used as an intensifier. Frequently used in the same way as really. But never figuratively. At best, it's used in a figurative sense, but that's not the same as saying it's used in the place of figuratively. That would mean you could replace the one word with the other, and the phrase would mean the same thing. That doesn't work. Though I do think, for the sake of clarity, that literally should retain its literal meaning, rather than being used as an intensifier.

Funnily enough, enormous used to also mean wicked. You don't see anyone complaining about people misusing that anymore...

And by my authority as a blogger, I officially remove the word nonplussed from the English language. No one knows what the word means. Even if they do, they don't know that people they're communicating with understand it the same way they do. It fails to communicate clearly, and should not be used. Besides, look at it - nonplussed. Clearly neither definition given is correct: It means subtracted.