We call the demand that everything be perfect an anxiety disorder. If your claim is that sporting should have been perfected by now in a sense that Esports aren't, then I begin to wonder whether the dispute here is simply concerning a phenomenological difference in performance anxiety. That would make sense, since this isn't sport.

Scientific models tend to express a common computational relationship. That's because we like to quantify things in scientific models, and perhaps unsurprisingly, we have a fairly standard paradigm for quantitative analysis in our mathematical algebraic, geometric and topological models.

The physicists here are discussing a feature of using information theory to generalize how certain fixed parameters can take values at different scales while still preserving most of their predictive structure. That's all.

Science journalists need to stop sensationalizing mathematically interesting results. This is a neat account of scale and pattern matching in applied mathematics, but it's not a "unified theory of all scientific theorising" any more than, say, Bayesian Inference is.

This is a conceptual analysis, so I don't think "unveiling" is the right turn of phrase. "Proposing" is probably a much better line, and it may or may not be "Accepted" by people at a later stage. A conceptual analysis isn't something that you discover, nor is it something that you invent. The idea of someone taking credit for a conceptual analysis of free will just seems plainly silly.

Both Philosophically and Neuropsychologically, the idea that the mind is foundationally more complicated than some kind of Turing machine network is very much in dispute. We're getting loads done by treating the human mind mechanically and exploring its heuristics and biases or its structures and protocols in a mathematically classical background framework. The human brain is a massively complex device, and has techniques for understanding that there are some vaguenesses and gaps in the way we semantically process the world, but to suggest that this is something beyond the reach of any classically constructed system is a powerful thesis that, we might think, there is a certain amount of optimistic inductive reason to doubt.

Fuck off.

My intention was to say that it is wrong, not that it was either "absolutely" wrong or "commonly believed" wrong. The rules are independent of what people believe - they are there in the structures discussed in social science, whether people believe them or not. That doesn't give them any kind of claim to "absoluteness"; something I still don't know what you intend to mean, which I notice you're deliberately avoiding addressing in our conversation.

I disagree with the claim that "if someone is acting extremely morally wrong, it is okay to hate them". You do not need to hate people in order to come into conflict with them on matters of moral judgement, and since that would be the only case in which actively hating people seems justified, I don't think it stands up.

The kind of tolerance being talked about here is one of tolerating the fact that people exist and have personal autonomy, and hatred seems to clash with that toleration. On the other hand, "not hating someone" doesn't mean "letting their injustices go unchallenged".

Basically, this whole diversion should demonstrate two things to you.

First, that you shouldn't play the game of semantic uncharitability without being absolutely semantically beyond criticism. If you insist on being a pedant, fine, but be authentic in your pedantry, rather than just using it as a tool to poke cheap jabs at other people in a debate.

Secondly, that even in accepting the idea that there is a matter of fact about semantic interpretation, you are committing yourself to certain oughts and shoulds. At this point you might trot out Hume's "is-ought distinction", and in response I will point to the idea of semantic protocol (in, say, Gricean semantics) as constituted by conventions and psychological properties of human beings.

If you're going to go play the ethical nihilist, do not try to correct peoples' use of language.

In saying "Otherwise" in that context, you said exactly that. If you didn't mean that, then you shouldn't have said that.

When you said:

Saying that "should" is simply subjective is saying that people can do whatever they want.

When you said:

Saying that the exceptional case is one where I'm "an omnipotent being who decides blah di blah" and otherwise "simply subjective" means that the only way I can possibly change your mind is if I'm God. QED. Sorry.

Yes, I am being a jerk. Sometimes, nice is not right, and right is not nice.

It's a fact of our particular social situation, and about the research surrounding how social situations shift and change in response to equalities of representation. "Absoluteness" doesn't come into it. Or, indeed, anything claiming any kind of legitimacy to scientific practice. Such a vague word, "absolute", don't you think?

It wasn't about making me feel better. It was a correct interpretation of what you said. You stated, specifically, that in any case other than that in which I am a God that decides absolute correctness, you conclude that ethical judgement is simply subjective - by which, on the standard reading of subjectivity in ethics, you take it that it is decided by individual people for themselves. By which, you must, logically, include yourself.

As regards "absolute" morals, I'm not really fussed. Factive ethics is more than good enough for my point to get off the ground, and as mentioned above, that position is well supported by the statistical research of some excellent investigators.

You don't need to argue that people are free to avoid criticism, or even possibly medically motivated intervention, in order to argue that they ought not to be excluded from society. There is a hidden premise tying these things together, which says that societal exclusion is acceptable, perhaps even mandated, punishment for those who refuse to take responsibility for themselves. For the most part, the evidence of our prison systems says that this premise is plainly mistaken.

Who said anything about "Absolute" morals? Being an ethical realist doesn't necessarily involve a commitment to morals being eternally and inalterably fixed. There might be facts of the matter about what the right thing to do is that are sensitive to context. That doesn't mean we are ultimately forced to accept ethical nihilism.

But if you would like a discussion about evidence for ethical limits to human action, you might enjoy cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", where he discusses statistically significant correlations between statistics for violence in societies and the adoption of particular social values, and epidemologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level", where they chart a similar correlation for various indices of well-being in a society, such as physical and mental health, and argue for a causal mechanism in the distribution of income for the correlation they find.

So basically "You're not God, you can't convince me, therefore I can do whatever the hell I want". Not all ethical realism is religious. You'd have both Ayn Rand and Sam Harris to side against here. But yes, even if you're an ethical realist, you can do whatever the hell you want. You'd be wrong at least some of the time, and you shouldn't do the wrong thing, but you can still do it.