Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Eyeballs on TOF

All time most-popular TOF posts

Aug 24, 2013, 38 comments
 views
45750








Sep 1, 2011, 50 comments
15931








9895








Apr 12, 2017, 10 comments
6537








Mar 28, 2014, 5 comments
5750








Mar 6, 2017, 8 comments
5543








Feb 13, 2012, 40 comments
5515








Apr 2, 2017
5027








Mar 1, 2017, 14 comments
4931








Mar 31, 2017, 1 comment
4834

13 comments:

  1. Mr O'Flynn, I've been reading over at Feser's blog and someone keeps on saying that JS Bell's article "against measure" offers a better study for modern account of causality than Aristotelianism. What would you say to this? Just curious as I'm a teen interested in philosophy.

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    1. Don't know anything about it. The last I heard, the modern account of causality, following Hume and Popper, was that causality was an illusion and all we really have is correlation. I read through Bell's paper here http://www.tau.ac.il/~quantum/Vaidman/IQM/BellAM.pdf and found that it did not address causality at all, only measurement. It seemed to express awareness that the measurement apparatus is necessarily a part of the system that produces the observations. I first encountered this in an old SQC Handbook from Western Electric: that all observed variation in manufacturing is combination of the variation of the manufacturing process and the variation of the measurement process. But it was fascinating to read Dr. Bell's account of the many disagreements and logical incoherences of the state of QM, at least in 1990.

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    2. Ok, I just wondered because the guy you were debating over at Feser's blog left me confused with his notions of macro objects and human conceptual artifacts. What do any of those terms mean because I can't find it anywhere on the internet.

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    3. He's just a troll. They do not likely mean anything.

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    4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    5. I think he's talking about a very different concept of causality than us for he say that Popper and Hume' s account of causality is just philosophical notions and not scientific like what he's talking about.

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    6. Robert Koons actually has a couple of articles about QM in the upcoming Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science that shed light on this.

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  2. Anything on the list surprise you? (ie you thought it was good enough to post but never would have thought it an all-time top ten)  Contrarywise, ever post anything you thought would be a sure-fire must-view post and have it wind up bottom decile?  Sir Paul McCartney was (is?) famously unable to predict which of his/Beatles' songs would be hits -- some of the pieces he thought of as just another song turned out to be the big smashes.

    At a cursory glance, number of comments doesn't seem to correlate closely to number of views.  What are your most commented posts?  Is that easy to statisticate?

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    Replies
    1. It surprised me that both the table of contents and the first installment of the Great Ptolemaic Smackdown are in the top ten (#3 and #1, resp.) but none of the other chapters were. Among more recent posts, America's Next Top Model III placed in the top ten, but not I or II or IV.

      Two posts on my story "Nexus" are listed in the top ten, but no posts on any other stories.

      I never post with the notion of racking up hits. I just post things that strike me as interesting or amusing. "Donut Things" was a complete surprise; but I can see why it would get many views but few comments. It's a YouTube short film; what more is there to say?

      I don't know how to get a tabulation by number of comments. But such a number would be troll-sensitive and not always a measure of its interest.

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    2. Then we must work up a Quality-Adjusted Comment metric. This calls for a government grant -- or maybe we can eucher Alphabet out of a googol of cash.

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  3. I bet your series on the religion of peace would get launched into that rarified atmosphere if you finished it.

    Just sayin'.

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  4. My own highest rated would so far be between your first two. I'm below your tenth well before coming to mine, I think. By my fourth, I checked. Unless my little list has reached more readers since back a year ago.

    Hmmmmmm ... I need to note this page, some of your most read stuff I haven't read yet!

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