true. except ... there’s lettuce and there’s lettuce, just like there’s tomatoes and there’s tomatoes.

My assumption is that given an agreed upon goal and metric(s), a choice which improves performance (with respect to said metric(s) that are used to establish the degree to which the goal is attained) is a better choice regardless of what those metrics or goals are.

As a former triathlete and time trial cyclist, I don’t think it is me who fails to understand the purpose of a time trial. Naturally, you might organize or participate in a “time trial” that has no competitive element. As rare as time trial cycling events are, non-competitive ones are even rarer.

This is like 42-year-old me offering five hundred bottles of nail polish and my weight in scented candles for Prince Harry.

No, we’re not both making different qualitative value judgements. You’re just forcing me into more and more explicit language than I imagined was unnecessary.

All of which translates to: I wouldn’t agree to use the same metrics as you, and thus our use of “better” to describe any of these things would necessarily describe something different.

English is my first language. Both UK and US. I studied philosophy of science as part of my undergraduate studies and began a PhD in computation molecular biology at EMBL in Heidelberg.

Forgive me for using a tautological term like “better”. Science is full of such sloppy language. Yes, it is tautological - “better means a higher score by this metric because a higher score on this metric is better” - but as a shorthand for “better by metric X”, I still think it serves a useful purpose.

Well, certainly. I was just pointing out that one could hypothetically identify one or more metrics associated with writing systems and then claim that a higher or lower score on one or more of these metrics makes the writing system“better”. Of course, this is really all that any “better” claim is - inherently…

If you find any good popular book on philosophy of science, Karl Popper’s ideas on falsifiability will all be layed out in a nice, very easy to follow way. Although there are a number of areas in Popper’s positivism that remain very troubling for many people today, his ideas about falsifiability remain a cornerstone…

Well, to be fair, you might be able prove that RtL is better than LtR. But a simple claim that RtL is better than LtR isn’t, by itself, science, it is just handwaving. By contrast, “It isn’t possible to get the same maximum number of words per minute from an LtR script as an RtL script” is a falsifiable claim.

Falsifiability is a necessary but insufficient condition. It certainly doesn’t act as a barrier to bad science. But if there’s one reason why the autism and vaccine BS is now increasingly recognized as incorrect (above and beyond bad science) is that the BS contained or implied falsifiable claims ... which were…

I think you miss the point. The reason that some things are “not science” isn’t that their studies are all shaky, misinterpreted and/or fraudulent. Far from it. The reason they are not science is that they don’t make falsifiable claims about the world. That doesn’t mean that their subjects are not important either -…

For those of us of a certain age, “dentists in movies” can only mean “Marathon Man”

to be fair, when William Blake wrote “till we have found Jerusalem here in England’s green and pleasant lands” it seems unlikely that he really had anything like the modern day situation that we call Jerusalem in mind.

The braintree APIs are clean and modern, and have now been owned and operated by paypal for more than a year.

BBB is arguably at least as much, if not more, of a scam as PayPal.

I am having a hard time reconciling “not appropriate for a high school prom” and a worthy distaste for policing women’s bodies/dress style. I am not sure how to get from a place where there’s no such policy to a place where that dress can be marked “inappropriate”. Do you have a suggestion? If someone wanted to wear…

Actually, I guess I misparsed Kara’s sentences. I thought she meant that Ephraim operates in and benefits from some external racist system (other than his own).

Ephraim is reprehensible, racist and repugnant.