Presentations, Social Events, CensusFail

[tcpip]

It has been a very busy week and a sense of general tiredness is pervasive. Last Sunday I gave a presentation at The Philosophy Forum on Race Conditions for the Human Species: A Global Perspective (there are a few and our actions are piecemeal and responsive). Two days later on Tuesday night, I presented Is Pantheism an Atheism? to the Melbourne Atheist Society (it depends on experience). On Wednesday ran the Introduction to HPC course which received extremely good feedback from attendees. Classes will of course continue on their regular, weekly basis. Next Philosophy Forum presentation I'm giving is in December, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, following an encounter with a lunatic who believes that their consciousness creates reality. Seriously, there is a special circle of hell for people who misrepresent the Copenhagen Interpretation in such a populist, ignorant, and ill-considered manner.

It has not been all work and now play however. Sunday night was an enjoyable gathering for sebastianne's "thirtieth" birthday gathering at The Drunken Poet (related to such establishment, I have been interested in the series No Béarla - a first-language Irish speaker attempts to tour Ireland without using English). Last night went to see a gothic superhero double at The Astor; Batman (1989) and The Crow, with thefon, who is visiting us from Perth. Gaming-wise we had a session of Eclipse Phase on Sunday which was something like a cross between Avatar and Aliens, a first session of Delta Green Countdown, which has started quiet enough.

Much has been made this week of the almighty collection of failures surrounding the Australian Census. Apart from legitimate concerns on privacy, with various legal discussions, there was the miserable failure on the night it was supposed to be taken. I described it as: "The Census is a self-advertised Distributed Denial of Service attack". It didn't take the long before official claims that it was an actual overseas DDoS attack - to be honest I didn't think they would be so stupid to make such a claim. Still, on the positive side the recommendations that I initially made to the ABS in 2012 and were part of the formal review in 2013 have been accepted. To express simply, Unitarians were previously listed as a sub-group of Christians. Now they are Unitarian-Universalists and are counted under "Secular Beliefs and Other Spiritual Beliefs and No Religious Affiliation".

Comments

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Seriously, there is a special circle of hell for people who misrepresent the Copenhagen Interpretation in such a populist, ignorant, and ill-considered manner.

Philosophers, you mean. <grin>

Besides there is experimental evidence that both the Copenhagen and Everett-Wheeler Many Worlds are non-preferred interpretations of quantum mechanics, even though, like Newton's Method, they still find use because they are lot easier to understand by the lay scientist. [Sorry cannot remember the papers concerned, and it's not my field.]

Incidentally it does look there was a DNS reflection attack during CensusFail, but that the foreign exfiltration fear that caused them to shut everything down was standard protocol traffic. Then again there were a lot of panicked reactions (such as forgetting to sync the firewalls which meant half the system was just sitting there uselessly), that contributed to the problem. Then again given the Abbott Government stated it wanted to shut down the ABS (they have a dislike of the employment figures and other such truthful information that tend to spoil the narrative they wish to project), I wonder if the Census was actually designed to Fail at a certain level (mainly in the sense that something will go wrong if we limit the resources they have to enact it, rather than purposeful sabotage).

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Philosophers are doing the Deepak Chopra thing now? Because I may have to write angry things about it. Which philosophers are doing it?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

> Which philosophers are doing it?<

First year students ;)

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Oh, those don't count. reverancepavane promised us philosophers to burn in effigy, and philosophers I shall have. Otherwise I'll have to spend all my excess reserves of mockery on... I don't know, Trump, I guess. And that's no fun. The man's basically a parody of himself already.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

> Philosophers, you mean.

Philosophers who go down that path are arguably worse that lay people because they should know better.

> Sorry cannot remember the papers concerned, and it's not my field.

If you do find them, I would be very interested.

> Incidentally it does look there was a DNS reflection attack during CensusFail, but that the foreign exfiltration fear that caused them to shut everything down was standard protocol traffic. <

Yes, data going to the wrong place and people panicking...

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Well, through anecdotal evidence, the level of education of the philsopher does tend to correlate with the amount of time it takes them to start convincing themselves either that the universe doesn't exist in the first place, that our perceptions of the universe are in error (especially when we cannot experience it directly), or that we cannot communicate the nature of the universe.

My preferred solution is to install more zebra-crossings around institutes of higher learning.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

> to start convincing themselves either that the universe doesn't exist in the first place<

I've seen that argument from physicists, computer scientists, and philosophers (and sometimes a combination of all three). For example, Hans Moravec, Tom Campbell, Nick Bostrom, and Marcus Arvan all argue that the world is just a giant computer simulation.

(An interesting variation is Berkeley, one of the founders of modern empiricism, who argued the world was there... Because God was observing it )

> that our perceptions of the universe are in error or that we cannot communicate the nature of the universe. <

That's certainly one for the physicists! But yes, long tradition in philosophy for that one as well.

(As someone mostly aligned with pragmatic philosophy, I find it most of these an interesting though experiment but nothing else)