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[Loud Whispers]

It's just because you're willing to write too many words. Just throw some snark on the pile and then run away very quickly, and you'll never get into arguments.

A very astute observation made here

[Egan_BW]

also your name is kinda like Mainiac but upside down, so that might make everyone subconsciously salty.

[Gentlefish]

And it's not even ontologically true that Math is absolute; there are plenty of big-name philosophers that disagree that math is even real.

I... Disagree with them, of course, but only because I'm willing to accept the epistemological and ontological faults that come with it, and not the faults that come with math being abstracted.

Of course math is real in the sense that it's a thing we came up with - the argument is that it's all math is - something we came up with, and doesn't exist independently of the mind.

So no, you can't say with absolute certainty that math is ontologically absolutely real. But you can absolutely believe that to be the case and act on it as if it were.

[Max™]

Math is true because it is defined in a fashion that makes it so. Wolfram has some interesting arguments in favor of a computational basis for reality, but it is not to the point where we can state that they are true yet, we don't have a hold of the postulates or axioms of reality last time I checked. It is a lovely and elegant idea, and I certainly prefer it to the alternative where we developed mathematics accidentally and it just kinda resembles parts of the universe and has no real connection or mapping directly either way.

Also, you are misinterpreting a single one line statement to disastrous effect.

It is meant to convey that there are no absolutes, only percieved differences based on frames of reference. Not that everything is everything else too.

Bullshit. There are absolutes. Mathematics is an obvious one. Mathematics gives us an absolute base of truth, infinitely large in scope and magnificence. Science, as built on mathematics, also inherits some of that truthness, though obviously to a lesser extent - but it's still different from things that are either not based on mathematics, or based on the weaker mathematical base - like, for example, climate change denial. Which is one of the core staples of the modern anti-progressivism.

Eh, they don't really go as far as you think, and there's a weird little pocket on the far side where people like me sit: progressive and far left liberals who seek to slay a skydragon. Now, being alarmed over the climate is actually based on programming, since this isn't something where you have an experimental result to look at, nor is there a rigorous attempt to disprove the hypothesis, instead we have models reproducing an aspect of observations in a certain way, and holding the assumptions in those models to be true we can expect certain things to happen. I'm not comfortable holding any assumptions to be true without evidence, beliefs feel like lies with a few extra letters to me.

I despise Trump, and think it is a terrible idea to cut any more funding from climate monitoring, it was enough of a bummer when we didn't get any new webcams on the ice this year, though I suppose this is to be expected since the webcams weren't supporting the whole "things are fucked and we're doooooomed" position very well. Satellites haven't been helping much there either, but hopefully we'll keep getting more to replace the ones that are failing. Thankfully the JWST funding is already allocated as I recall, otherwise I'm sure there would be a massacre after all the nerds marched on the White House, protractors and telescopes don't help much against armed Secret Service guards.

Science wasn't based on mathematics directly, though. Science was based on questions, like, "What the hell is all this shit I see before me?" and "Why did that thing behave as it did?" and so forth.

Our ability to observe the universe is limited, as is our ability to prove our assumptions of it true.

We can, however, prove things to be false! I can experimentally demonstrate in a repeatable fashion that objects do not fall upwards, I can demonstrate that a cold object placed near a warm object does not increase the temperature of the warm object, I can demonstrate that a massive body does not increase the rate at which clocks tick (assuming I define what a clock is properly for rigorousness), and I can demonstrate that creatures do not lack a means of passing on heritable traits. I don't have to believe shit for this to work, so I can sit here in my nice cozy nest of doubt while learning about the universe, via collecting information about what it is not.

Trump is your racist idiot grandfather instead of a cunning genius, news at 11.

We dawn on an age of China- China being the concerned environmentalist state and the US seeking to scorn the good of the whole world for its own development. Development that it doesn't need.

God-money, I'll do anything for you...

Don't open your eyes, you won't like what you see, the blind have been blessed with security, don't open your eyes, take it from me, I have found, you can find, happiness in slavery.

Slave screams, but he's glad to be chained to that wall.

[Max™]

We're trying to plug the leak in reality that resulted in 2016 without realizing that retroactively we're creating that leak in the first place, such is the folly of man.

[Gentlefish]

Did you say heads?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm telling you, we're the quantum immortality rejects universe. Our local spacetime is the end result of all the apocalypse timelines crashing our existences back to something resembling stability, and then here we are.

So in a way, you could consider 2016 to be the afterlife. We're all terrible people, clearly.

[Egan_BW]

So wait, we're all philosophical zombies and this is the one timeline not subject to quantum immortality?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

No, this timeline is the result of quantum immortality attempting to mass undo violent human extinction, with all the assorted side-effects.

I'm certainly not a p-zombie. Now be a good automaton and fetch me more wine.

[wierd]

Worse, we are the universe where shit always almost happens, and somehow we survive.

Not the universe of peace and love.
Not the universe where we discover ultimate truth.

No, this is the universe where we build doomsday device after doomsday device, and wrongly conclude we can't destroy the universe.

[wierd]

Not sure. The odds of electing our first historic orange idiot are quite long though, and yet here we are.

[Gentlefish]

Not really. FiveThirtyEight had it at something close to 50% before the exit polls came through.

FiveThirtyEight was in some sense an anomalous site, but only because they were in the minority.

[Sergarr]

Not really. FiveThirtyEight had it at something close to 50% before the exit polls came through.

FiveThirtyEight was in some sense an anomalous site, but only because they were in the minority.

Oh yeah, I remember when almost everyone in the liberal echo chambers were bashing Nate Silver for "scaremongering" and for being "an amateur who's wrong and cannot into statistics", citing that fucking Princeton University article in response, with their "99% Clinton" chance...

Weirdly enough, I haven't seen nearly enough backlash against the polls and election predicters as you'd expect.

[wierd]

Ipsil:

The existence of strange long term trends is kinda the indicator of an anomalous universe.

[Max™]

This is the year we learned MSH is not to be allowed to predict anything except that we all gain immortal cyberbodies, FTL is discovered, and Toady figured out an easy way to make DF multi-threaded for huge performance gains.