Are you proposing the existence of monopolarbears?

This image implies they could also be mutually attracted to rub their butts together.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point

Basically, its a mathematical function where if you start at 0,0, you might falsely believe you are at the (or a) maximum or minimum of the function, as the slope at 0,0 is 0.

But, if you go any direction in the x axis, your function value rises, any direction in the y axis, your function value falls.

Thus a saddle point is an illusory, false impression of being at the extreme extent of a function, when in fact you are not.

The idea is that there is more to determining if you’re truly at a global max or min of a function than only finding a single point where the slope is 0.

Wait till this guy sees a frontal MRI of a human head.

Obviously scientists don’t want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.

Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?

Expanding on this concept: Do any of these programs aimed at architects have a capability of easily exporting to blender, such that they could be imported into Unity or UE?

Apparently the longest ever recorded glide is 45 seconds.

Fish don’t have lungs, so the analogy is kind of busted, but some humans can hold their breath for 30 seconds, some 2 minutes, some 5 minutes, but overall it doesn’t take long for brain damage/death to occur.

I’d guesstimate that a flying fish would be probably irrevivably dead after 3 to 5 minutes out of water.

I tried to look up more specifics on flying fish respiratory systems vs other fish back when I posted this, to see if they have measurably better ability to remain alive out of water for longer than other fish, but I couldn’t find much.

What Heidegger is saying in your excerpt is that in ancient times, it seems that people widely believed in a kind of unseen, parallel world of spirits, which Plato was using as a basis for his ideas, as opposed to wholly inventing his philosophy entirely on his own, without any precedent.

He is pointing out that Plato’s metaphysics can be seen as inspired by, developed off of the foundation of earlier metaphysics, as opposed to Plato just wholly inventing them out of nothing.

When Heidegger gave that lecture, Europeans had very recently actually discovered or deciphered/translated actual empirical, physical evidence for the worldview or metaphysics of many peoples and cultures outside of Europe/The Mediterranean Coast or within that region going back further than Socrates.

They were fairly early into discovering and beginning to translate and understand much of what we, nearly 100 years later, now have widespread access to. Archaeology was still a young field at this time.

The lecture you are quoting was given in 1935 in German, and not even translated into English until 1959!

Heidegger was trying to connect what were at his time, newly discovered dots, toward tracing out the development of various forms of human metaphysics.

Heidegger is not saying that our modern concept of metaphysics is identical to those of shamans thousands of years ago.

He is instead tracing… the history… of widely varying, changing and differing metaphysical theories and ideas, either provably held or postulated to be held by many different groups of people over large time scales.

The entire point is that metaphysical theories change over time.

‘Metaphysics’ is not a single theory, any more than ‘Biology’ or ‘Astronomy’ is a single theory.

Those are all container terms which describe bodies of knowledge and thought within specific parameters, and they’ve all developed over time and place.

Plato has his metaphysical theories, as does Aristotle, and Kant, Leibniz, Hume, and these Perennial Shamans are proposed to as well. They are not all the same ideas and they are often in conflict with one another.

Anyway…

If John Woo Woo shows up in shamanic garb and you find this more convincing that him not being in shamanic garb, I would take the post modernist approach and just tell you that you find this more convincing because you have been conditioned by modern media to associate ancient shamans with purity, innocence, righteousness, spirituality and wisdom.

Also thats basically the most textbook, case-closed instance of cultural appropriation I’ve ever heard: John Woo Woo is dressing up in another culture’s dress and adopting their mannerisms despite not being from or substantially connected to that culture, and he is doing so purely as a marketing technique to sell you useless bullshit within his own internalized capitalist paradigm.

If the commercial on TV has an actor wearing a doctor’s outfit, does this imply the untested supplement you are being sold has any actual medically beneficial effects whatsoever?

Or did you just fall for a marketing gimmick?

In closing: There’s science, and psuedo-science, ie, charlatans adopting some of the garb or mannerisms or vocabulary of science, but which does not actually follow the core concepts of empirical testing, falsifiability, often directly contradicts actual known science, and generally acts as a wolf in sheeps clothing, for personal profit.

To close this with what I was originally going to open this with:

It is not that healing crystals might work because the LHC has yet to discover how they work.

It is that many, many empirical, scientific studies, published and peer reviewed, have repeatedly and unequivocally found that they do not work, that they have no effect beyond placebo.

Maybe a more decent definition of a metaphysical theory would be:

The rules which give rise to a world which we can describe in more detail with other, more specific rules.

Or from another angle:

The rules which are followed by all of the rules of physics.

‘What organizes all physical matter’ is just a definition of physics, without the meta.

…

I think you have not had much exposure to more successful woo woo peddlers, and you’re missing still the key point I am making of conflating meanings of a word.

Its more than just using the word in a vacuous or spurious sense, as with your ‘metaphysically’ example.

It doesn’t really add any meaning whatsoever to just throw ‘metaphysically’ in front of the rest of that sentence (with your definition of metaphysically), beyond ‘whoah, fancy word.’

You can just throw on fancy sounding words to a sentence or concept, but I am talking about a different and more insidious manipulation tactic.

…

Repetitive conflation of words with multiple meanings breaks down an ignorant audiences ability to understand that they are being lied to by making it unclear that different definitions are in fact different.

Its using a word with meaning A, in a sentence, then in sentence 3 you use meaning B, then in sentence 4 you use meaning A, so on and so on, such that an uniformed or ignorant person who has only heard this word a few times or didn’t pay attention in school is functionally now being educated by woo woo peddler such that they now think the word has a kind of nebulous melding of meaning A and meaning B, and that this is the singular undifferentiated meaning, when in fact this is not the case, there are two distinct, context and domain specific meanings represented by the same word.

You could conceivably do that with the word ‘nuclear’, by switching between the phrase ‘nuclear family’ and ‘nuclear energy’ to the point that, in a long monologue, you might be able confuse some people into thinking that there is a literal subatomic nuclear strong force holding together families, or that quarks and electrons literally have feelings toward other quarks and electrons in their family/atomic unit.

…

Its basically the kind of phenomenon where you can tell that someone does not actually know what a word means, that they never looked up its definition and instead just read or heard it, assumed its meaning based on context, and just carried on using this word, usually wildly incorrectly, because they do not actually know what it means.

It creates an unconscious cognitive dissonance that collapses painfully if one tries to actually suss out what the word actually means, which heavily biases the woo afflicted person toward not attempting to do that.

Woo woo peddlers are successful when they can basically brainwash a person into believing an entire alternate worldview, and basically always this worldview is incoherent, contradictory, that ultimately relies on any cognitive dissonance being reconciled by the woo woo peddler.

The point is to basically brainwash ignorant or desperate people into a whole lifestyle of mystical nonsense where the ultimate authority, source of comfort, who you become dependent on, answerer of questions, arbitrator of disputes, is the woo woo peddler.

Thanks!

… You are not understanding me. It seems you stopped reading at the part you quoted and disregarded the rest of what I wrote. Let me expand:

In one context, in one kind of usage, ‘metaphysical’ is an adjective referring to a very technical outline or system of logical reasoning.

In another context, in another kind of usage, it is a vague catch all term for fantastic things that seem to defy logic and reason.

Because these two valid but nearly opposite meanings of the word can be switched out, or conflated, woo woo peddlers love to use this term, as it easily convinces those who do not understand that is what they are doing, and sounds grand, wise or profound.

Its the same with ‘energy’ and ‘frequency’. Both of these terms have valid definitions that are highly specific and empirical in a scientific context, but also have commonly used, colloquial meanings which basically indicate a vague notion of pleasantness or unpleasantness, or maybe enlightened vs unenlightened.

Woo woo peddlers also love to use these words and conflate their two different meanings.

Most people think that the phrase ‘good/bad vibes’ means that you feel good or bad about a person or situation’s attributes, qualities or what not.

But a person who has been listening to too much woo woo peddlers will believe that there is some kind of actual, literally real, energy or frequency surrounding or exuding from a person or situation they find pleasant or unpleasant, because they are so used to the empirical/scientific concept being totally equated to the whimsical concept that they do not understand that there even are two distinct meanings.

The point I am making is not that metaphysical is a woo woo word that means nothing.

The point I am making is that there are many terms with nearly contradictory meanings, where one is associated with objective, ordered, rational, logical, complex concepts that can be studied and meaningfully argued over, and another meaning that is fantastical, defies empiricism or logic, and is highly subjective.

These terms are woo woo terms not because they mean nothing, but because they are often used by woo woo peddlers who jump back and forth between these different meanings to confuse people.

Quantum is another one. So is ‘AI’, at this point.

Just think of the Cambrian as Life being roughly a multiplayer Spore-like game doing an open alpha test or an early access release.

I mean, you probably should throw it like a paper airplane (with form, and not stupendously forcefully), or at least put it back in the water. It is a fish, it will asphyxiate if you just keep holding it.

Metaphysical is a fun woo woo word, because one definition of it is basically as you have said, a synonym for supernatural (ie, physically impossible), whereas the other definition of it relates to metaphysics, the philosophical approaches to understand the rules that govern or give rise to the rules/laws of physics.

So you have one contextual usage that means ‘weird unexplained spooky impossible nonsense’, and another that means, ‘logical structures that seek to explain the nature of reality as understood empirically, often by academics.’

Thus its a perfect word for mystical woo people who love to conflate different contextual meanings of words and pretend they are not doing that.

Kirby is like an eldritch god, but kawaii.

Because MSFT long, long ago abandoned the concept of giving users choice, or just in general not treating them like idiot babies.

Brings me back to when I was contracting with them, same time Win 8 came out.

MSFT does what they call ‘dogfooding’, ie, every worker is alpha/beta testing basically all MSFT software all the time.

My team was managing SQL servers and running queries. SQL Manager, and a whole bunch of other shit completely broke when 8 came out.

It initially did not even have the ability to go back to a Win7 style interface.

They truly believed that limiting all office workers to a UI where they could have, at max, one pane on 1/3 of the screen and another pane on 2/3rds would be completely fine.

We effectively could do no work for about 1/3 of our contract.

Working at or for MSFT is a curse I would only wish upon my worst enemies.

I actually had to quit another, earlier contract as my manager expected me to work overtime without pay. Before that, my one cool boss just showed me that I was being paid about 1/3 of what MSFT was paying the contracting firm for me.

And that is to say nothing of the massive racism that all the American employees just looked the other way on: Pretty common for Indian employees of a higher caste to treat Indian contractors of a lower caste like total dogshit, and the line from HR was ‘its their culture!’.

They could actually show you a command prompt / terminal readout, which shows warnings and errors when things just outright fail and the process is borked… but that would scare people, apparently.

https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Math/Paquin/GeomSeriesCalcB.pdf

Here’s a standard introduction to the concept of the Convergence/Divergence Theorem of Geometric Series, starts on page 2.

Its quite common for this to be referred to as the convergence test or rule or theorem by teachers and TA’s.

The ellipsis notation generally refers to repetition of a pattern.

Ok. In mathematical notation/context, it is more specific, as I outlined.

This technicality is often brushed over or over simplified by math teachers and courses until or unless you take some more advanced courses.

Context matters, here’s an example:

Generally, pdf denotes the file format specific to adobe reader, while in the context of many modern online videos/discussions, it has become a colloquialism to be able to discuss (accused or confirmed) pedophiles and be able to avoid censorship or demonetization.

0.999… is a real number, and not any object that can be said to converge. It is exactly 1.

Ok. Never said 0.999… is not a real number. Yep, it is exactly 1 because solving the equation it truly represents, a geometric series, results in 1. This solution is obtained using what is called the convergence theorem or rule, as I outlined.

In what way is it distinct?

0.424242… solved via the convergence theorem simply results in itself, as represented in mathematical nomenclature.

0.999… does not again result in 0.999…, but results to 1, a notably different representation that causes the entire discussion in this thread.

And what is a ‘repeating number’? Did you mean ‘repeating decimal’?

I meant what I said: “know patterns of repeating numbers after the decimal point.”

Perhaps I should have also clarified known finite patterns to further emphasize the difference between rational and irrational numbers.

EDIT: You used a valid and even more mathematically esoteric method to demonstrate the same thing I demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, I have no idea why you are taking issue with what I’ve said.