Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?

If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,

right?

You're probably right, but my main point was that it's funny that people who have been spoon fed propaganda about something always think the opposite of what they now believe is the actual propaganda

Honestly, pretty impressive by the russian government how they are able to do that

Then again, in many cultures (even in more tolerant ones like here in the netherlands) there's always somewhere a latent hatred and/or disgust towards LGBT. So maybe it's nit that hard to bring that back to the surface after all

There are thought experiments where the various Planck units (or, times some small power of pi or 2pi) pop out quite naturally.

The theoretical entropy for a Schwartzchild black hole is nicely expressed using the Planck area.

So…

No. Your assertion that they have no value in theory, is wrong.

(Also, like, angular momentum is quantized in multiples of hbar or hbar/2 or something like that.)

It may be true that they aren’t a good system of units for actual measurements, on account of the high uncertainty (especially for G).

But, there is a reason why it is common to use units where G=c=hbar=1 : it is quite convenient.

I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.

My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.

and yet, here you are, indirectly swiping at something instead of just saying what you mean :)

You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.

People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.

Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.

The good cops, such as they are, get run out if they try to challenge the institutional problems in police forces. This radically restricts how good a cop can be while still being a cop.

Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?

Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.

And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.

Well, who votes for politicians? The public. Are all members of the public therefore culpable?

Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.

Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.

You might have a point if we actually had an anti-police-corruption movement led by police officers - but we don't. The people who are supposed to be protecting us and enforcing the laws are really just bullies who like to abuse people, or they'd do something about it. They keep voting for union leaders who will cover up their crimes.

I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.

One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".

The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.

As much as I understand ACAB due to their systemic corruption and acting as a gang to provide their friends and family with more “justice” than others, I disagree with ending the war on drugs.

While it would be nice to think we can live in a world where everyone can be healed from mental problems (including drug addiction), I don’t think it’s possible to come back from the hardest of drugs (on a population level). The only thing you are inviting is chaos into your neighborhood.

I understand your concerns about this (living outside Portland OR) but would counter that there's plenty of chaos with the current system.

I lost my brother to heroin decades ago and the laws on the books did nothing to prevent it, and a better system could have helped prevent it.

It would have to be done "holistically" (coordinated with the legal system, policing, health care, etc) but it's technically viable. The only thing stopping us from doing it is, um, us.

Even if it wasn't truly legal, it could be vastly overhauled if it actually was about doing what it pretends to be about: protecting us from the dangers of drugs.

Sorry, I think I replied to your previous comment too quickly without reading it carefully enough.

I was trying to defend my previous comment, and didn’t adequately consider your point.

All good -- I just wanted to clarify.

Police reform would be simple to implement if we could all agree on what that looked like.

Pardon, but, huh? I very much thought that Lorentz invariance was built into the assumptions of string theory.

Concluding from “A AND B” that “A”, while it does reach a conclusion that is distinct from the assumption, is not impressive.

If string theory does not bake SR into its assumptions, wouldn’t that make the way it is formulated, not manifestly Lorentz invariant? Don’t physicists typically prefer that their theories be, not just Lorentz invariant, but ideally formulated in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant?

Of course, not that it is a critical requirement, but it is very much something I thought string theory satisfied. Why wouldn’t it be?

Like, just don’t combine coordinates in ways that aren’t automatically compatible with Lorentz invariance, right?

If you formulate a theory in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant, claiming to have derived Lorentz invariance from it, seems to me a bit like saying you derived “A” from “A AND B”.

If string theory isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, then, I have to ask: why not??

Lorentz invariance is built into some descriptions of some stringy theories. For example chapter 1 of the Polchinski, you have the 26-dimensional bosonic string which is constructed to be Lorentz invariance. Obviously in this case it's not a "prediction", but then again, it's just a toy-model. Our Universe doesn't have 26 dimensions and doesn't have only bosons.

Ok, so I looked into it a bit, and here’s my understanding:

The Polyakov action is kinda by default manifestly Lorentz invariant, but in order to quantize it, one generally first picks the light cone gauge, where this gauge choice treats some of the coordinates differently, losing the manifest Lorentz invariance. The reason for making this gauge choice is in order to make unitarity clear (/sorta automatic).

An alternative route keeps manifest Lorentz invariance, but proceeding this way, unitarity is not clear.

And then, in the critical dimensions (26 or 10, as appropriate; We have fermions, so, presumably 10) it can be shown that a certain issue (chiral anomaly, I think it was) gets cancelled out, and therefore the two approaches agree.

But, I guess, if one imposes the light cone gauge, if not in a space of dimensionality the critical dimension, the issue doesn’t cancel out and Lorentz invariance is violated? (Previously I was under the impression that when the dimensionality is wrong, things just diverged, and I’m not particularly confident about the “actually it implies violations of Lorentz invariance” thing I just read.)

> losing the manifest Lorentz invariance.

You understand that this have nothing to do with actual Lorentz invariance, yes? It sounds like you don't really understand the meaning of those terms you're using.

Do you understand what "manifest Lorentz invariance" means?

Yes? It means the Lorentz invariance is automatic from the form of the expression, does it not?

Yes. But when "Lorentz invariance isn't automatic from the form of the expression" it does NOT follow that you don't have Lorentz invariance.

Of course. Did part of what I said suggest I thought otherwise?

I guess the part about the “when you quantize it after fixing the gauge in a way that loses the manifestness of the Lorentz invariance, if you aren’t in the critical dimension, supposedly you don’t keep the Lorentz invariance” part could imply otherwise? If that part is wrong, my mistake, I shouldn’t have trusted the source I was reading for that part.

I was viewing that part as being part of how you could be right about Lorentz invariance being something derived nontrivially from the theory.

Because, the Polyakov action (and the Nambu-Goto action) are, AIUI, typically initially(at the start of the definition of the theory) formulated in a way that is not just Lorentz invariant, but manifestly Lorentz invariant,

and if there is no step in the process of defining the theory that isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, I would think that Lorentz invariance wouldn’t be a nontrivial implication, but something baked into the definition throughout,

so, for it to be a nontrivial implication of the theory, at some point after the definition of the classical action, something has to be done that, while it doesn’t break Lorentz invariance, it “could” do so, in the sense that showing that it doesn’t is non-trivial.

And, I was thinking this would start with the choice of gauge making it no longer manifestly Lorentz invariant.

I trust you have much more knowledge of string theory than I do, so I would appreciate any correction you might have.

I suspect what they mean is that there is no outcome of an experiment such that, prior to the experiment, people computed that string theory says that the experiment should have such a result, but our other theories in best standing would say something else would happen, and then upon doing the experiment, it was found that things happened the way string theory said (as far as measurements can tell).

But there are such experiments. String theory says that the result of such experiment is: Lorentz invariance not violated.

> but our other theories

This is not how scientific research is done. The way you do it is you a theory, the theory makes predictions, you make experiments, and the predictions fail, you reject that theory. The fact that you might have other theories saying other things doens't matter for that theory.

So string theories said "Lorentz invariance not violated", we've made the experiments, and the prediction wasn't wrong, so you don't reject the theory. The logic is not unlike that of p-testing. You don't prove a theory correct is the experiments agree with it. Instead you prove it false if the experiments disagree with it.

There are no such experimental results satisfying the criteria I laid out. You may be right in objecting to the criteria I laid out, but, the fact remains that it does not satisfy these (perhaps misguided) criteria.

In particular, predicting something different from our best other theories in good standing, was one of the criteria I listed.

And, I think it’s pretty clear that the criteria I described, whether good or not, were basically what the other person meant, and should have been what you interpreted them as saying, not as them complaining that it hadn’t been falsified.

Now, when we gain more evidence that Lorentz invariance is not violated, should the probability we assign to string theory being correct, increase? Yes, somewhat. But, the ratio that is the probability it is correct divided by the probability of another theory we have which also predicts Lorentz invariance, does not increase. It does not gain relative favor.

Now, you’ve mentioned a few times, youtubers giving bad arguments against string theory, and people copying those arguments. If you’re talking about Sabine, then yeah, I don’t care for her either.

However, while the “a theory is tested on its own, not in comparison to other theories” approach may be principled, I’m not sure it is really a totally accurate description of how people have evaluated theories historically.

And, I think, not entirely for bad reasons?

> But there are such experiments. String theory says that the result of such experiment is: Lorentz invariance not violated.

This is not a new prediction... String theory makes no new predictions, I hear. I don't understand why you need to be told this.

To your point, there exist various reformulations of physics theories, like Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which are both reformulations of Newtonian mechanics. But these don't make new predictions. They're just better for calculating or understanding certain things. That's quite different from proposing special relativity for the first time, or thermodynamics for the first time, which do make novel predictions compared to Newton.

It has delivered falsifiable postdictions though. Like, there are some measurable quantities which string theory says must be in a particular (though rather wide) finite range, and indeed the measured value is in that range. The value was measured to much greater precision than that range before it was shown that string theory implies the value being in that range though.

Uh, iirc . I don’t remember what value specifically. Some ratio of masses or something? Idr. And I certainly don’t know the calculation.

It does, but a number of alternative theories of quantum gravity do not. So, if Lorentz invariance is shown to be violated, this would favor those over string theory.

For some senses of “wanting things”, I think it might be hard to make a powerful AI that couldn’t be easily modified to produce one that “wants things” in some sense.

So, if it would be bad thing for one to be made that “wants things” in any reasonable sense of the phrase, then it would probably be bad for J Random to be able to take a copy of a powerful AI and modify it in some way, because someone is likely to try doing that.

Of course, perhaps the best way to make sure that J Random doesn’t have the ability to do that, is to make sure no one does.