Benjamin Davies
@benjamin-davies·Member since October 2025
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This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:
a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),
or
b) ‘necessarily cannot’, usually in a deductive way.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:
a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),
or
b) ‘necessarily cannot’, usually in a deductive way.
Example: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”
This is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:
a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),
and
b) ‘necessarily cannot’, often in a deductive way.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:
a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),
or
b) ‘necessarily cannot’, usually in a deductive way.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
This might be a difference in dialect. I mean ‘mustn’t’ as in ‘must not’.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.” —> “I guess he mustn’t be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:
a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),
and
b) ‘necessarily cannot’, often in a deductive way.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
California might be the best place on the planet to live in, in terms of climate, but the downside is that you live in California 😂
In terms of climate, California might be the best place on the planet to live in. But the downside is that you live in California 😂
No. If living in the best place on Earth requires me to learn a new language I will happily do so. Thankfully I have an interest in languages so it wouldn’t be a problem for long.
California might be the best place on the planet to live in, in terms of climate, but the downside is that you live in California 😂
#3344·Zelalem Mekonnen, 10 days agoAvoid the US for this. Food quality is worse than third world countries. The food is no where near as organic. Unpopular opinion, but I don't think food should be industrialized.
The current industrialisation of food is problematic, but these are parochial problems. There is nothing about industrialised food production that is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. Problems are soluble!
#3344·Zelalem Mekonnen, 10 days agoAvoid the US for this. Food quality is worse than third world countries. The food is no where near as organic. Unpopular opinion, but I don't think food should be industrialized.
I’ve found that if I stick to Whole Foods type places the quality of food is quite good, including some options that aren’t available in NZ.
But yes, the mainstream food options are crap, including the majority of restaurants.
#3343·Zelalem Mekonnen, 10 days agoAll the areas in the US I have lived in have terrible water quality.
Thankfully the US has reverse-osmosis water filtration options pretty much everywhere.
#3342·Dennis HackethalOP, 12 days agomustn’t
Maybe this is the non-native speaker in me, but do you mean ‘can’t’? I thought ‘mustn’t’ means ‘may not’: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/must_not
This might be a difference in dialect. I mean ‘mustn’t’ as in ‘must not’.
Example sentence: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.” —> “I guess he mustn’t be home then.”
This sentence is much more natural than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”
Maybe juries can be done away with. Not all levels of courts have them, so they mustn’t be fundamental.
Maybe juries can be done away with. Not all levels of courts have juries, so they mustn’t be fundamental.
Maybe juries can be done away with. Not all levels of courts have them, so they mustn’t be fundamental.
My charitable interpretation:
“Less and less possible” means something like “more and more difficult to achieve”, or “occurs less and less often in the multiverse”.
My charitable interpretation:
“Less and less possible” is a loose way of saying something like “more and more difficult to achieve”, or “occurs less and less often in the multiverse”.
My charitable interpretation:
“Less and less possible” means something like “more and more difficult to achieve”, or “a smaller and smaller occurrence in the multiverse”.
My charitable interpretation:
“Less and less possible” means something like “more and more difficult to achieve”, or “occurs less and less often in the multiverse”.
#2084·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoConsequently (they say), whether or not it was ever possible for one person to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now, and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows.
If something already isn’t possible, how could it become less possible?
Isn’t possibility a binary thing? As opposed to difficulty, which exists in degrees.
My charitable interpretation:
“Less and less possible” means something like “more and more difficult to achieve”, or “a smaller and smaller occurrence in the multiverse”.
#2084·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoConsequently (they say), whether or not it was ever possible for one person to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now, and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows.
If something already isn’t possible, how could it become less possible?
Isn’t possibility a binary thing? As opposed to difficulty, which exists in degrees.
“([T]hey say)” presumably means he is paraphrasing people who get it wrong.
#2276·Erik Orrje, 2 months agoBy the same logic, wouldn't neo-Darwinism also disqualify as a strand, since it's subsumed by Popperian epistemology?
Why does neo-Darwinism qualify as a strand, if it can be understood as a component of Popperian epistemology?
#2278·Dirk Meulenbelt, 2 months agoYou say that trade-offs and scarcity are fundamental to biology. I agree, and this implies economics as a more fundamental science than biology or evolution. It still applies in our computer models, where biological details may not.
Economics is simply at the intersection of evolution and epistemology.
While a lot of what’s involved in understanding a language is inexplicit, it is not possible to come to understand a language without ever dealing with it explicitly.
This is what separates explanatory knowledge from other types of knowledge.
While a lot of what’s involved in understanding a language is inexplicit, it is not possible to come to understand a language without ever dealing with it explicitly.
This is part of what separates explanatory knowledge from other types of knowledge.
#2277·Dirk Meulenbelt, 2 months agoUndestanding does not flow from explanatory knowledge the way you imply. I understand Dutch and English, but a lot of my understanding of it is inexplicit.
While a lot of what’s involved in understanding a language is inexplicit, it is not possible to come to understand a language without ever dealing with it explicitly.
This is what separates explanatory knowledge from other types of knowledge.
#2200·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoIn the neo-Darwinian view, any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals. This view is what Dawkins (IIRC) calls the gene’s eye view, and it applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Any adaptation of any replicator is primarily in service of this concern.
So I think the answer to your question, “Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates …?”, is ‘yes’.
… any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals.
Why “at the expense of its rivals”? Isn’t the concern to spread at all, regardless of the outcome of rivals?
#2200·Dennis Hackethal, 2 months agoIn the neo-Darwinian view, any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals. This view is what Dawkins (IIRC) calls the gene’s eye view, and it applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Any adaptation of any replicator is primarily in service of this concern.
So I think the answer to your question, “Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates …?”, is ‘yes’.
… any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals.
Why “through the population”? Doesn’t this presuppose a replicator needs to exist within a population to do what it does? The first replicator spread with no population to spread into.
I am a life-long nail-biter. I am thinking a habit like nail-biting can be thought of as an addiction in this way.
I have an explicit preference for letting my nails grow normally, and an inexplicit/unconscious preference for removing rough/uneven parts of my nails as soon as possible (this part seems entrenched).
I am a life-long nail-biter. I am thinking a habit like nail-biting can be thought of as an addiction in this way.
I have a preference for letting my nails grow normally, and a preference for removing rough/uneven parts of my nails as soon as possible (which I often enact by biting my nails automatically/uncritically/mindlessly).
#3264·Dennis Hackethal, 15 days agoNice, thanks.
Thinking about it some more, I wonder if honesty is more fundamental than some of the other virtues. As I’ve written elsewhere, honesty includes the refusal to ignore certain criticisms. That’s a prerequisite of rationality. Whereas justice, for example, seems downstream of rationality.
Is “the refusal to ignore certain criticisms” not a case of treating ideas justly?
#3264·Dennis Hackethal, 15 days agoNice, thanks.
Thinking about it some more, I wonder if honesty is more fundamental than some of the other virtues. As I’ve written elsewhere, honesty includes the refusal to ignore certain criticisms. That’s a prerequisite of rationality. Whereas justice, for example, seems downstream of rationality.
I’m having trouble with the idea that honesty is a prerequisite of rationality. This seems to imply honesty somehow comes before rationality.
I think it is more accurate to say rationality and honesty are interdependent, and from there you can deduce that rationality depends on honesty (in a way that maybe it doesn’t depend on justice).