Scott Adams: Trump “won the election” last night by losing the debate

Viscaria pins it in a paragraph, as always.

Roger, the idea of “let’s try it and see” regarding a President Trump is the most ridiculously reckless thing I’ve read in awhile. That’s not how you science, as EJ said; it’s also not how you weigh in on the future of the 300+ million people living in the USA, not to mention the impact that US foreign policy has on the 7 billion people on this planet.

There’s no mulligans in the real world, Roger. If you give the keys to a tin-pot dictator, we can’t just rewind the clock.

Every reason you’ve given for voting for him is spurious, at best a deflection from the actual reason. He’s not an uncle that says racist shit but is still lovable – he’s a benefactor of nepotism, an amoral oligarchic millionaire with deep ties to hostile foreign powers and absolutely no clue about the world beyond his own selfish desires. Why would you want to give the leadership of the country to that?

My thought was as follows:

You can have a statement about a statement. That means you can have a statement about a statement about a statement, as far as you like.

That means that statements are in the Reals, which makes them Aleph-one.

I don’t have a proof for it though.

Another shower thought, I’m fairly sure I’m thinking of it wrong. A rational is only composed of two parts, whereas a statement is composed of an indefinite number of parts. I can imagine that Cantor’s Diagonal would apply there, making it ℵ(1) and not ℵ(0). My bad!

Technically, “mancy” means you’re using it for divination; that is, to tell the future. That means that looking at the weather forecast is, properly, meteoromancy.

@Alan

Adding ‘mancy’ gives any discipline a nice aura of cool mysticism.

It’s a common English translation of the concept of Feng Shui, although there are other traditions with similar ideas.
@EJ (TOL)

Technically, “mancy” means you’re using it for divination

And astrology could equally be called astromancy. In the case of geomancy, one of the things people are typically divining is where an auspicious place to put a building is. (Added note, technically necromancy has nothing to do with animated corpses, but refers to the practice of calling up ghosts to interrogate for information)

@ dalillama & EJ

Mancy is the divination thing, but what’s that other similar sounding one that just means General Magic?

@ handsome jack

Hold your finger up in front of you. Then close your eyes one at a time. Your finger will appear to move. Move your finger further forwards and backwards and see how much it appears to move compared to the background. The further ways it is the less it will seem to jump.

Now imagine that you’re looking at a nearby star. Mark where it is against the background stars. If you do the same again six months later when the Earth has moved to the other side of the Sun the star will appear to have moved against the background.

Like your finger, the nearer the star the more it seems to move.

It’s as a result of PARalax, and if the star is three and a bit light years away it will appear to have jumped a distance equal to one SECond of arc.

Something like that anyway. EJ care to step in here and explain it properly?

Something like that anyway. EJ care to step in here and explain it properly?

That would ruin Jack’s penance.

@Jack
The sun is about 8 light minutes from us, so that combination of distances doesn’t equal up. I think what EJ is looking for is not the history or definition but why it’s a useful unit of measurement. Hope that helps. 🙂

@ POM

Yes!!! That’s the one I was thinking of. Ta

An eye in a triangle is actually a good way of representing it, ironically enough.

Draw a right-angled triangle. Make one side very short. You’ll notice that as you do so, the other sides become almost the same length, and one angle becomes very small. It looks like a sliver.

Imagine a triangle so narrow that the small angle is one-sixtieth of one-sixtieth of one degree. That’s incredibly small. The triangle won’t look much like a triangle: it’ll look like a line which gets slightly wider towards one end.

Draw that triangle. Now label the very short side “the distance between the Earth and the Sun.” That’s an enormous distance, and that’s only the short side of the triangle. The long sides are one parsec long. It is a long distance, but is expressed in terms that (kinda) make sense to humans.

The nearest star to us is 1.3 parsecs away. Compared to that distance, all the planets are almost touching the Sun. We are in a tiny little island surrounded by nothingness, and are so far away from anything else that they would almost certainly not have noticed us, let alone influenced our horoscopes.

This is the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer: a sense of scale.

Another shower thought, I’m fairly sure I’m thinking of it wrong. A rational is only composed of two parts, whereas a statement is composed of an indefinite number of parts. I can imagine that Cantor’s Diagonal would apply there, making it ℵ(1) and not ℵ(0). My bad!

This reminds me a bit of a conversation I had about whether music and language had the same capacity for unique permutation. Essentially, if they had the same cardinality (I think). My thought was that since language can precisely describe music, but not vice-versa, language would have more unique permutations.

Following that line of thought: since language “contains” (has a way to precisely describe) every possible number in every possible set – meaning we can construct at least one unique statement about any conceivable number – and there’s no upper limit to the cardinality of sets, could we then say that the number of possible statements has infinite cardinality?

I guess it would just seem odd to me if something that we can use to describe these incomprehensibly large sets somehow had fewer “items” than the sets themselves. But “seeming odd” has never stopped math before, so. Also this is way interesting but also way out of my depth, so apologies to everyone who understands this math way more than me, and I hope that if I just spouted off a bunch of nonsense it was at least entertaining nonsense.

Don’t worry, PI. I got you covered.

“Let’s try Trump and see what happens.”

Cut to Roger hiding in a fallout shelter with nothing to eat but cockroaches, occasionally fiddling with the old radio hoping desperately for evidence that someone else, anyone else, survived.

Remember, we told you so.

In the article Bina links to Mr. Trump is quoted saying

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” he said. “The temperament is not that different.”

I rate this as possibly the truest thing he has ever said. He and I, however, have very different interpretations of what this fact means.