User:Dan Polansky/Blog

This blog, in part modeled on other blogs in Category:Blogs, intends to capture ideas that are not immediately translated into articles or article changes. The posts are going to be ordered the latest last (at the bottom) and are going to be signed, as if this were a discussion forum. Polite and intelligent input from others is welcome, on the talk page.

Serious intellectual and argument work requires serious work with definitions. In particular, it must be possible to quote definitions word-for-word without fear of copyright violation. Wiktionaries contribute to that goal. However, Wiktionaries are projects that anyone can edit, including people with reduced intelligence, reduced competence, careless, reduced honesty (mendacious), etc.

This brings me to a related point: the Czech academic dictionary of contemporary Czech currently in the making should ideally be released under a free-as-in-freedom license such as CC-BY-SA, for a similar reason. The effort is being paid for by the Czech taxpayers. I do not see what kind of benefit the taxpayers would derive from keeping the content under a proprietary license.

One may object that it is not a copyright violation to quote e.g. Merriam-Webster word-for-word unless one does it in too great a volume. But it seems to me that, ideally, even the slightest doubt about the legality of quoting definitions is better removed.

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:39, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

(I posted part of this elsewhere.) "Nothing" is a tricky word, a pronoun rather than noun. The contrast between a pronoun and a noun is not just grammatical but also semantical/logical.

Let us take the following statement:

• There was nothing in the box.

The statement is, logically, properly rendered as equivalent to the following one:

• For all macroscopic things, they were not in the box. (Small pieces of dust were possibly in the box.)

In the 2nd, explicative, sentence, the word nothing is gone, replaced with quantification and negation. Using the word nothing on the position of subject is tricky since it does not refer to anything. It can be done and is being done, but merely as something as a macro that hides the proper logical form. (These ideas are perhaps due to Bertrand Russell; I don't remember.)

This may be relevant to certain kinds of philosophy (pseudophilosophy, I would argue), e.g. a work suspectly called Being and Nothingness or the German phrase "nichts nichtet", which construes nichts as an object rather than no referent.

Some languages seem to fear the word nothing, resulting in double negation; Czech is an example. And thus, instead of stating "there is nothing in the box", such a language states the equivalent of "there isn't nothing in the box".

I vaguely remember having read somewhere, (perhaps in Popper) that some philosopher (perhaps Hegel) argues that since the words nothing and something have no differentia (no defining characteristics), they must be semantically equivalent. One can get this kind of nonsense only from a certain kind of pseudophilosophy.

Some of the nonsense analysis relating to the word nothing can be eliminated by replacing the word "nothing" with the separate "no thing", which is syntactically equivalent with "no man" (e.g. no man has ever done so and so). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 06:48, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

What follows is inspired by Kronecker's statement:

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.

Rendered into English:

God made the integers, all else is the work of man.

I have the following objections:

1) It is not clear why negative integers should be equally well God's work as positive integers. Since, negative integers do not on the face of it appear in nature; they do appear in accounting. If anything, I would expect positive integers alone (possibly with zero) be God's work.

2) I am not clear why reals (sqrt(2), pi, e, etc.) should not be part of nature as well as positive integers. What brings reals about is geometry in relation to the physical space. And thus, when I consider three points in space, in general, the ratios of their side lengths are not rational/fractional. And since rotation takes place in the physical space, I expect pi in particular be manifested in nature.

2.1) One could object that this thinking pertains to the Euclidean geometry, which does not perfectly accurately represent the physical space, and I admit I do not know enough about the kind of geometry that underlies Einsteinian physics, but I would be surprised if moving away from Euclid would bring us exclusively rational ratios of point distances.

2.2) Another objection could be that the space is in fact quantized. I struggle to understand how this could possibly work since objects in the physical space are amenable to rotation. When I take a pixel image and rotate it by a general angle (in a computer), the result is a deformation (on the orthogonal pixel grid). By contrast, rotating objects in physical space does not lead to any deformation or damage, apparently. Any proposal of quantized space would need to deal with the problem of rotation. (Of course, my body is undergoing rotation together with the Earth as I speak.)

(I got these ideas when I was reading Jak vidím svět from Einstein (The World as I See It in English) and O povaze fyzikálních zákonů by Richard Feynmann (The Character of Physical Law in English). One of them or both discuss the possibility of quantized space.)

I vaguely remember a video from Edmund Weitz (in German) stating that some of the things we now call numbers used to be called Grössen, quantities or magnitudes. It would be interesting to find about more, and whether this would have any bearing on the question whether real numbers are number and are not a mere man's work. (From what I recall, Weitz himself took something like a constructivist rather than Platonic stance in one of the videos, but I am unsure.) --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 11:49, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Recently, I was reading Jak vidím svět from Einstein (The World as I See It in English, Mein Weltbild in German). In chapter Židovské ideály (Jewish Ideals, Jüdische Ideale), Einstein talks about search for knowledge for its own sake, Jewish love of justice bordering on fanatism and effort to bring about personal independence. He talks of being faithful servants of truth, justice and freedom. He also talks about something like love of all living things.

Albert Einstein died on 18 April 1955, which plus 70 years yields 18 April 2025. Therefore, the German originals should be free from copyright in 8 days.

Links:

• The World as I See It (book), wikipedia.org
• The World as I See It, books.google.com
• Mein Weltbild, gedankenfrei.wordpress.com

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 06:30, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Modified. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

That is a great news, from my perspective. I sharply criticized the extension, although I do not remember where I did so. Another extension that I intensely dislike is LiquidThreads, which was once deployed in the English Wiktionary on some user talk pages.

Links:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Structured_Discussions/Deprecation

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:01, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

This is a subject/topic I want to look into. As a first sketch, I will write something from memory about what psychological manipulation could be. Later, I plan to do research in literature to find out more. This is the Pirsigian Lila methodology: first find out what you can figure out for yourself from memory and deliberation, then check the literature and find your misconceptions corrected (assuming one trusts the literature).

What actions could constitute psychological manipulation? Here are some candidates:

• Intentional misrepresentation of facts (approximately, lying).
• Intentional fallacious/wrong argumentation. (This does not seem to be a species of the above item, but I am not sure.)
• Skewing the picture by stating facts selectively. Avoiding this perfectly is often hard. But some omissions of relevant facts are easily avoided, and when they are not avoided, a blame seems appropriate.
• Interrupting and talking over someone.
• Providing fake emotional cues, e.g. insicere smile or insincere crying.
• Refusing to answer questions, or answering them in a non-answer way (evasive, etc.). (I have some doubt about this being manipulation, but it does come to mind.)
• Trying to make someone feel guilty when in fact there is nothing they should feel guilty of. This may be a species of the misrepresentation of facts. However, a relativits could object that guilt is relative to a normative standard, and without that standard being stated, guilt is not a matter of fact.
• Talking off topic (more or less) or adding extraneous detail to sentences, making them unnecessary burdensome on the attention of the other person. Turning a sentence into a paragraph. Using sentence structure that overloads the implied stacks of the sentence parsing capacity of the other person.
• Using unnecessarily difficult terminology, making it harder for the other person to understand what we are talking about. In this vein, one can argue that the medical profession as a whole is engaging in a massive manipulation of the patients. (They also seem to be in the habbit of lying to patients especially when they consider the lie to be a white one.)
• Refusing to define terms; never defining any term.
• Requiring the other person/party to make a decision immediately on the spot instead of giving the other person time to carefuly decide. I am reminded of the case of Šmejdi from Czechia in which some "entrepreneur" was selling greatly overpriced cooking equipment (cutlery?) to vulnerable old people, taking them to a trip and then asking them to buy the cooking items while on the trip.
• Requiring things to be decided or delivered before an arbitrary deadline that has no connection with objectively existing needs or constraints.
• Refusing to use tangible/recorded means of communication (email, instance messaging, SMS, etc.) and insisting on the non-recorded ones. This is not always wrong, but sometimes or all too often it is.
• Etc.?

Wikipedia's Universal Code of Conduct seems to use the term "psychological manipulation" to refer to gaslighting, in the more formal sense rather than the vague one recently popularized by the media. From what I remember, this consists in taking steps to make someone doubt their own grasp on reality, including dopubting one's perceptions (visual, auditory, etc.).

Recently, YouTube has been offering me short videos of a cartoon character called Veronica. It seems to me that what Veronica is often combating could come under the head of psychological manipulation. For instance, a business manager asks Veronica to work on a weekend day, and later calls her that Veronica should take a day off or time off to erase the overtime; Veronica responds something like the following: no, it is your responsibility as a manager to know the corporate rules and options; you must have known or should have known that you were unable to pay for the overtime. Another case is Veronica handling a customer who comes in an as if crying tone that the customer has been mishandled by an employee. Veronica indicates that she is going to check the audio record of that communication. The customer's tone changes completely toward a slight anger, stating the checking the record is not necessary.

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:09, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Expanded. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 05:45, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

I was being taught Czech in Czechia from 1983 to 1995, for 12 years (part of it was actually Czechoslovakia).

I learned things I could not possibly care less about such as inflection patterns as if I could not inflect without them. I learned how to name certain linguistic phenomena such as přístavek, přívlastek holý and rozvitý, which clause was of which kind, and other arguably useless stuff. I got almost no stylistic advice; the only one I remember is that I should not use words repetitively. For writing assignments, I only got a grade from 1 to 5 (as if A to E) and no other feedback. I never received feedback from classmates on my writeups. We never compared our writeups for a given assignment. We were never asked to look up definitions of words in a dictionary. We never looked into a synonym dictionary. Writing assignments were vague, with no specification of requirements. We were not taught revising. We were never asked to turn in two different writeups for a given assignment. Outlining was not practiced.

I feel I learned much more about language from English classes, that is, English as a second language. Here, semantics was king since there was no way around it. We had a meaningful closer look at grammar, e.g. modal verbs. English tenses presented a challenge, being much more plentiful than Czech ones. One had to figure out English articles, a feature absent from Czech. We had English conversation classes for two yeas, with native speakers, around 15 kids per class, unlike the usual around 30 kids per class.

Fortunately, learning to write does not depend on school education. One has to learn it by doing anyway, the hard way, the only way. One can buy great reference works such as Roget's thesaurus and great definition dictionaries, many of which are now online. One can buy great guides such as the one from Gary Provost. Even so, I feel all the years of education of Czech present many hours lost, an opportunity wasted.

On the positive side, the speaking exercises and writing exercises were perhaps not entirely useless. Even if the writing assignment is poorly titled and specified and even if the feedback is largely unhelpful, one gets to practice something which one perhaps would not practice otherwise.

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 11:03, 8 May 2025 (UTC) (First version is from 6 May 2025.)

Popper's falsificationism is a theory providing a demarcation criterion between science and non-science. The non-science part includes logic, mathematics, philosophy, astrology, etc. An example of a theory not falsifiable/not testable at the point of its inception is the Democritean atomism, which probably gave birth to testable variants much later. Popper's falsificationism is at least in part a response to the logical positivism of the Vienna circle and other kinds of positivism. Popper is not an enemy of philosophy (and metaphysics in particular); he does not consider non-falsifiable statements meaningless and non-falsifiable theories worthless.

It seems to me that some of the core ideas of falsificationism can be extended beyond the empirical application. One such extension was made by Lakatos when he tried to apply these ideas to mathematics. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, even a mathematical theorem initially considered to be proven may turn out to be in need of correction, in some cases.

A key claim of (empirical) falsificationism is that a theory that is formulated in a way that makes it immune to all empirical refutation/refutation is non-scientific. A generalized falsificationism could claim that a theory that is formulated in a way that makes it as hard as possible to criticize the theory (where the criticism does not need to be empirical) is non-serious, a step toward intellectual fraud, etc. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 11:11, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

I hope I will be forgiven for listing links to Czech lecture notes on computer science despite this not being Czech Wikiversity. It seems to me that this could be tolerable as long as it is not in the mainspace but only in the user space. I will remove this post on request.

Some lecture notes follow (See also One man's lecture notes on computability theory).

From ktiml.mff.cuni.cz (Lecture notes - Department of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic):

• Lecture notes -- various lecture notes in computer science, some in English and some in Czech, ktiml.mff.cuni.cz
• Computability theory: Vyčíslitelnost, lecture notes from lectures by Antonín Kučera, compiled by Ladislav Strojil, in Czech, ktiml.mff.cuni.cz
• Computability theory: Vyčíslitelnost, lecture notes from lectures by Antonín Kučera, compiled by Kyrylo Karlov, in Czech, ktiml.mff.cuni.cz

From fi.muni.cz and is.muni.cz:

• Petri Nets: https://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/kucera/teaching/pn/pnets.pdf
• The Semantics of Programming Languages: https://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/kucera/teaching/semantics/spj.pdf
• Mathematical logic:
  • https://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/kucera/teaching/logic/log.pdf, slides; propositional logic, first-order logic and Gödel's incompleteness theorems
  • https://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/kucera/teaching/logic/logika.pdf
• Automaty a formální jazyky I by Černá et al., 2002 (Automata and formal languages; Chomsky hierarchy, etc.)

Other:

• Automata theory: Studijní opora k předmětu Teoretická informatika (speciálně v oblasti teorie jazyků a automatů) by Petr Jančar, 2003, cs.vsb.cz
• Computability theory: IN13 Vyčíslitelnost, Státnice na FI MUNI, statnice.dqd.cz, in Czech
• úvod do teoretické informatiky by Zdeněk Sawa, 2021, cs.vsb.cz (an introduction to theoretical computer science)
• Úvod do teoretické informatiky by Petr Jančar, 2007, cs.vsb.cz (an introduction to theoretical computer science)
• Složitost algoritmů by Karel Richta a kol. (Algorithmic Complexity)
• Úvod do složitosti a NP-úplnosti by Vladan Majerech, 1999
• Poznámky k přednášce NTIN090 Úvod do složitosti a vyčíslitelnosti by Petr Kučera, 2025 (An Introduction into Complexity and Computability)

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:44, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

This one is by a Czech but in English:

• Formal Verification, Model Checking by Radek Pelánek, fi.muni.cz

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:08, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I think this is just perfect:

• Stephen Covey: Indian Talking Stick, youtube.com

I am not sure that Covey is reporting accurately about an actual Indian practice, but that does not affect the effectiveness of the technique.

I am thinking of a simplified variant of the technique: he who speaks holds the stick and no one can talk before he grabs the stick. And thus, the stick is a physical representation of who holds the "word", as we say in Czech ("máte slovo, paní Jílková", you have the word; "já si na okamžik musím vzít slovo", I have to take the word for a moment). Covey's above reported variant is a bit different: the other people can talk: they can ask questions; but they cannot make their points. Very interesting.

In online communication via text, the problem addressed by the talking stick seems to largely disappear. When I am writing a post, no one can interrupt me or talk over me. I compose my post and then post it. The talking over manipulators/dominators have it so much harder, online. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 04:04, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Initial questions:

• What grades are used in the Czech school system?
• What labels are used for them?
• Is something similar used in Germany and Austria?
• What are the grades used in the U.S.?
• Are the grades used in the U.S. labeles?
• And slightly off-topic: are grades a bad thing, as Pirsig suggests?

Czech grades, from memory:

• 1 - výborný, excellent
• 2 - chvalitebný, commendable
• 3 - dobrý, good
• 4 - dostatečný, sufficient
• 5 - nedostatečný, insufficient

This is how I remember it from all levels of education, including elementary school (8 years), grammar school/high school/gymnázium (4 years) and university (5 years). Walldorf schools (there are some) seem to be more relaxed, sometimes (or often? nearly always?) avoiding the grading.

The Charles University reports to use 4 grades^[1]:

• 1 - excellent
• 2 - very good
• 3 - good
• 4 - fail

I need to figure out whether my memory from Masary University fails me in this regard; perhaps they also used 4-grade system.

The Austrian system is the following per Wikipedia^[2]:

• 1 - sehr gut, very good
• 2 - gut, good
• 3 - befriedigend, satisfactory (sounds like hedonic language, interesting)
• 4 - genügend, adequate
• 5 - nicht genügend, unsatisfactory or insufficient

The Czech system is reminiscent of the Austrian one but uses different labels; it is likely to have originated as a modificatin of it.

The most commonly used system in the U.S. seems to be a 5-grade one, believing Wikipedia^[3]:

• A
• B
• C
• D
• F - fail

No labels seem to be indicated except that F stands for "fail"; it would be E otherwise. Other systems as used as well in the U.S., per Wikipedia. However, subgrades with + or - attached are also used.

The matter is somewhat reminiscent with grading in finance; the labels are different.

Grading in school seems to be part of some kind of social game. It seems hard to provide something like objective rating, properly comparable between schools, but some are apparently trying, even in Czechia. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily make it a completely futile exercise.

The other questions are yet to be clarified.

Links:

• Academic grading in the Czech Republic, wikipedia.org

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:50, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

I remember to have received the following advice in one university course: the use of workaround is in general inevitable, even if one should strive to avoid them. But when one uses a workaround, it should be properly documented and clearly marked as a workaround.

This seems to match my experience. The risk of the above advice is that one accepts a workaround too easily. But stringent/unconditional avoidance of workarounds is in general not workable.

Related terms include "kludge" and "hack".

Links:

• Workaround, wikipedia.org
• Kludge, wikipedia.org

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:32, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

From what I remember, Popper wrote that two times the peace movement helped bring about a world war. A link to a possibly relevant article is in the link below, but I have not found the relevant passage (nothing found under "Friedensbewegung"):

• »Kriege führen für den Frieden« - DER SPIEGEL, 22 March 1992, spiegel.de (in German)

I think the matter is rather complicated. As a slogan, to wage a war for peace may be too pro-interventionist. But there is also being too anti-interventionist. The Ancient Greek fellow has something about moderation; Czechs say something about the golden middle way. Neither too war-ready, not too war-hesitant. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 14:43, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

The statement "nothing is nothing" was made by another (indefinitely blocked) editor, and I find the question whether the statements means anything quite intriguing.

Naively, one could think that since A is A for all A, it follows that also "nothing is nothing". But nothing is a pronoun that, arguably, fails to refer but rather activates something like a macro that transforms the sentence into an underlying logical form. Put differently, it is not clear that "A is A for all A" applies to placeholders A that fail to refer. The construction "Nothing is A" is not necessarily nonsensical for some placeholders A, e.g. "nothing is as useful as a good theory" (a slogan that is not quite true and that I heard from a university teacher, possibly in a slightly different form). The construction "A is nothing" looks more suspect, although it works of A being "There".

One can try to render "nothing is nothing" as "no thing is no thing", as in, no thing has the property of being no thing. Let me pay closer attention to the predicate. We can meaningfully state "that person is no man". We can also state "a person is no thing" for a narrow meaning of thing, equivalent to "a person is not a thing". Using a parellel reasoning, "nothing is nothing" becomes "no thing is not a thing", which is true enough, that is, each thing is a thing (rather than being not a thing). (Note that from the last statement it does not follow that there is at least one thing.)

When "nothing is nothing" is naively translated into a programming language, it seems to work well enough: in C, two null pointers compared by == operator yield true; in Python, both "None is None" and "None == None" yield true. I argue that the pronoun nothing in natural language does not work similarly to a null pointer or the None object.

I sense I have brought not as much clarity as I hoped. The statement "nothing is nothing" seems to be a neat cognitive sink (is that the right term?), a nice tool for confusing oneself and others.

Further reading:

• https://iep.utm.edu/metaphysics-of-nothing/

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 07:58, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Eventually, I will want to write an article on this. Now just a blog entry.

Moravec's Mind Children, extropians and transhumanists are candidates for believing that it is fine fore humans to go extinct and be replaced by robots. Marvin Minsky makes the point explicit (see Mind Children). Weizenbaum mentions that such view is common in AI research^[4]. Yudkowsky expressed pro-extinctionist view (see the talk page of my article on extropianism).

Technological singularity is another subject that could identify such people. Kurzweil is a candidate, as well as Vinge. Finding what they actually support would require careful analysis; until then, this is just a conjecture and starting point.

I vaguely recall Elon Musk accusing Google founders that they accused him of specieism. Musk declared himself to be a specieist, but whether this was sincere we do not know. It is quite possible that Musk does not believe that humans can colonize Mars, but he could believe that robots could (this is just a speculation). Indeed, "[...] Musk is planning to send humanoid robots called Optimus to Mars by the end of next year."^[5] He says it is to prepare Mars for humans; whatever the case, he plans to send robots anyway, whether for humans or not. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 12:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

I recalled McCulloch: "I don't particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all the animals. I don't see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn't take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun, invent better games than we ever did."^[6]. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

What follows are introductory thoughts on what is consciousness, as a philosophical/analytical exercise.

Consciousness is the state of a human (or other applicable entity) being conscious, aware of things (that does not tell us much, but that is a start). A human who sleeps or is in a coma is unconscious, bar perhaps dreaming. Long-term memory is not necessarily in the consciousness. There is some kind of immediacy in the concept of consciousness.

Consciousness must appear during the development of fetus. The exact point is probably arbitrary, but it does not seem to make sense to say that the single fertilized egg cell is conscious.

Consciousness is interesting from physicalist point of view, as something to be explained. One would think that consciousness is some kind of consequence of the brain and its activity, perhaps an "epiphenomenon". It leads to the question of what it is about the brain in sleep that leads to the consciousness being off. Moreover, it is not clear why the brain's different configuration alone should lead to the subjective experience of consciousness. The latter could be explained by positing an additional non-material entity that is not identical to the patterns of firing neurons but rather is in some way synchronized/interacting with with them; Popper and Eccles present something of the sort (I don't find it particularly convincing, but there it is.)

If consciousness is a consequence/manifestation of the human brain, it seems credible that chimpanzees also have something like consciousnes, perhaps a semi-conscioussness or quasi-consciousness.

The distinction between consciousness and firing of neurons can lead to a kind of solipsism that does not deny physical reality (does not claim the perceptual impression of it is merely generated by something like Matrix/Descartes demon). This kind of solipsism would posit that there is only one psyche/consciousness, but there are multiple brains with their firing neurons; there is only one psyche attached to these firing neurons. Whether anyone takes this idea seriously is unclear; it is interesting for realizing that the idea that there is only one psyche/mind/consciousness does not necessarily lead to the denial of physical reality, which seems to be the usual presentation of solipsism.

A relation of consciousness and mind should be clarified, especially whether it is the same thing. The phrase "you were always on my mind" constructs the mind as something like consciousness that excludes long-term memory (since always being in the long-term memory is unlikely to be meant).

If firing of neurons alone suffices to lead to consciousness, then it is not clear why electrical activity of a complex elecotrnic computer could also no lead to consciousness.

One gap between consciousness and the brain is that there being consciousness is in principle more certain/less speculative than the existence of the brain. If it turned out that our (or my?) conscious experience is created by Matrix/Descartes demon, it could turn out there is nothing like the brain shown in an anatomical atlas (or a tank in a laboratory?) and we (or I?) have been fooled about human anatomy all along.

Applications of this or similar analysis: can robots become conscious? Does it make sense to talk about "uploading" consciousness into an android? And does it matter whether the result is consciousness or does it suffice that it is something like consciousness? If someone wants to backup consciousness on Mars, are they going to be content with there being only a non-biological machine on Mars?

Links:

• Consciousness
• Wikipedia: Consciousness

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 12:03, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

I have a Google Blogger account and it does not seem to support incline referencing. By contrast, MediaWiki support for inline referencing is excellent, even if only via an extension of the wiki platform.

It seems medium.com does not support it either, but I am not sure.

It is a great pity. Inline referencing invites text authors to cite their sources, by making it reasonably unlaborious. I find it too laborious even in MediaWiki, but that is mainly the consequence of having to fill the reference details; only providing a bare URL is reasonably unlaborious/cheap. The referenced sources not only improve/cheapen verification on part of the reader but also often make for excellent further reading.

As something of an aside, I am surprised that more websites do not use something like a wiki technology, full with revision histories, text markup and excellent text-based diffing. From my perspective, these websites seem technologically backward.

As Gemini points out, one can use normal HTML hyperlinks as a workaround for inline references, but they usually lack the publication detail (title, author, year), so are far from as convenient (I saw people/articles put a hyperlink on a sentence referenced or a part of the sentence, which I dislike). Moreover, one does not get an automatically generated list of all referenced sources. Gemini indicates some people use HTML superscript manually to create the desired effect. This is even more laborious and still does not provide the convenience of MediaWiki inline referencing. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 06:35, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I am shocked by the killing/murder/assassination of Charlie Kirk and by some of the responses available online. I am trying to figure out why. Candidate characteristics: 1) political murder; 2) political murder of a non-politician (or politician who is not an office holder?); 3) political murder of a right-wing/conservative anti-transgenderist non-politician engaging in public debate. It seems I somewhat take it personally, whyever. Relatively recently, there was a murder of a Brittish MP, from what I remember. This should be an absolute no-no in a democracy, a scandal. In case of Charlie Kirk, I seem to interpret the intentional killing as a brutal attack on freedom of speech, going far beyond the usual American canceling.

From what I remember, Charlie Kirk repeatedy emphasized that we need to talk to those who disagree with us, especially instead of using violence. I find it very relatable. If it is true that Charlie Kirk was instrumental in getting Donald Trump elected, and if Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are vile Nazis engaging in literal genocide (engaging or contributing to transgender genocide), their assassination would only seem rational/acceptable. Here's one of the problems.

Kirk is reported in the media to have been a close ally of Donald Trump. Given that, the murder can be interpreted as a proxy murder of the president, which unlike the previous two attempts succeeded.

Links:

• Killing of Charlie Kirk, wikipedia.org, currently under the proposal to be moved to "assassination"

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:04, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

The title of the post provides a rationale for releasing highly incomplete artifacts, e.g. stub pages in Wikipedia or half-baked software. I have very personal experience with this. I am a major contributor to FreeMind, a free mind mapping software. But I don't think I would ever have started FreeMind. The way I worked on FreeMind was one small step, one small fix or enhancement at a time. There was no plan. I could not tell how much effort I was going to spend and what outcome I was going to achieve. I took something half-baked and made it a little better, then again, then again, and then again. Release early and release often. On one hand, under the hood (as for the code and its achitecture), FreeMind 0.4 released by Joerg Mueller was rather impressive. But for the user, it was barely usable. Czech diacritics did not work; there were no long nodes (only oneliners), no hyperlinks except to local mind maps, no search function, no export to HTML, a bug made unfolding of larger branches painfully slow (making it unnecessarily quadratic in the number of nodes), etc. But if Joerg would have been too ashamed to release his half-based product, there would have been no FreeMind.

On the other hand, one can overdo this approach. FreeMind 0.4 was approaching being a minimum viable product. By contrast, many of the junk pages in Wikiversity are not and are better moved away from the mainspace.

I was thinking along similar lines in the English Wiktionary. First aim at making a minimum viable product, and avoid all low-priority items such as pronunciation and inflection tables. A minimum viable product is a Czech-English translation dictionary with reasonable coverage of vocabulary. It is not a dictionary of, say, 1000 pages done very well or comprehensively. I avoided adding quotations of use since after I tried it, I found it was too laborious. The approach worked rather well, I think; I created over 26,000 entries there, mostly Czech lemmas, and the result is now somewhat usable as a translation dictionary, albeit with the gap to be covered still being a bit too large. But I do not miss pronunciation and inflection tables. But then, as the title says, some people like to enhance what someone else started. Someone added inflection tables systematically with the support of Lua module doing it largely automatically. When a minimum entry is there, those who like to enhance things can arrive at it and make the kind of enhancement they are interested in. And thus, someone can specialize at pronunciation and further reading/external links if that's their thing. Someone can do etymology only. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:03, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

They seem to be left-wing. Some indications:

1) They seem to be pro-transgenderism/gender ideology.

2) They seem to be at least somewhat hostile to larger apartment holders.^[7][8]

2.1) Yellow-journalism publication Blesk accused Pirate Hřib of problematic or contradictory conduct in relation to real estate^[9]; caveat: yellow yournalism; independent or better verification required!

2.2) Pirate.cz page states^[10]: "Zařídíme 200 000 domovů pro lidi, ne pro spekulace Důstojné a dostupné bydlení je nutný základ pro kvalitu života. Za 4 roky zajistíme 200 tisíc nových domovů, z čehož bude až 40 tisíc k dispozici jako obecní nájemní bydlení." Here, they state what they want to achieve but not how, with no link to a more detailed exposition.

The English Wikipedia uses the "liberal progressive" label.

If the international Pirate Party (is that a thing?) aimed to abolishing or reducing copyright (did it?), that also would seem left-wing or non-conservative.

Further reading:

• Czech Pirate Party, wikipedia.org

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 14:06, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Expanded. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 05:01, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

I liked Charlie Kirk, although I disagreed with him on some issues (for instance, his statement that college is a scam, while having some truth to it, is overblown and not entirely accurate?). I like that he was celebrating open debate; he said that we need to talk through our disagreements instead of using violence, or something close.

What I found a little troubling is that Charlie was coming to the debate professionally prepared and trained for debate, and the young students could hardly have been a solid match for him. That was not equal fight; it was a heavyweight against people will not much experience and sophistication. But now we can consider what happens in the classroom. There too are persons without much experience or sophistication (students) against a professional (teacher). They are usually not in the opposition to oppose what the teacher is "teaching" them. And even if they are, their overt opposition can easily earn them bad grades at an exam. Thus, it seems that even if Charlie had something like unjust or not completely fair power to influence, the unfair power to influence by the educators is so much bigger. Charlie provided something of a counterbalance to the (ideologically rather monolithic?) educational institutions.

Let us celebrate Charlie and open, reasonably respectful debate of ideas, even ideas we disagree with. Let us also recall the champion of free speech, John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian (Millian utilitarianism is a form of collective hedonism). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 06:23, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

The following is based on my reading of Sociology by Calhoun et al. years go. They report someone investigated a correlation between social integration and suicide. The guy designed an operational definition of social integration (and also suicide?). That is, there was some scoring method for degree of social integration (how much contact with family, friends, "community", etc.) From what I recall, higher social integration was positively correlated with lower rate of suicide. That is, it is pretty clear on conceptual/vague level what social integration is. But for the purpose of the study, we need a scoring definition. And that definition will be somewhat arbitary; it will involve some arbitrary decisions (it is similarly somewhat arbitrary to legally declare someone an adult at 18 rather than, say, 19). The study had to state the somewhat arbitrary definition it was using.

I am wondering what kind of objections I can figure out for using somewhat arbitrary operational definitions. That's maybe for later. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 07:32, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

I have often wondered whether secret services (CIA, etc.) are editing the wikis, e.g. paying some long-term active editors who show some suspectly dubious behavior. Such a thing seems remarkably difficult to investigate; a skilled operative (e.g. former Putin) would be skilled at presenting himself as a half-normal individual, perhaps a little odd, but not all that outstanding.

Which wikis would most likely be impacted? I see the English Wikipedia as the most likely subject of the operation; it is probably the most widely read wiki, in the present lingua franca, the language of the world (Chinese services could want to impact the Chinese Wikipedia, though). Wiktionaries are probably of much lesser interest, but even here, an operative could cause significant harm to the objective of building a reliable dictionary. Wikiversity is a backwater, probably of little or no interest.

Which areas/domains/fields would be most impacted? I guess math, physics and engineering would be of not much interest. Articles about political events and topics would be of interest.

One candidate for a secret service agent is a user who pretends tobe very stupid, uncomprehending, "more stupid than the law allows", to borrow a phrase from a Lars von Trier movie, or as the Germans would say, so blöd sind Sie auch nicht (but I find only a few hits of the phrase! Something's wrong.). The overty very stupid editor can nonetheless be present on the project for a long time and cause non-trivial amount of harm.

But there is one more thing. It is the concept of quasi-operative, based on my speculative theory of agents/operatives in the unconscious (see also my A human as multiple persons). The quasi-operative is not really paid by anyone and does not necessarily expressly communicate with other quasi-operatives (but it can). The quasi-operative decides that it is a good plan to cause disruption. This is relating to the concept of Internet troll, except that the metaphor involved in the word troll is ratehr unhelpful. Quasi-operatives can quite possibly recognize each other and cooperate. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:34, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

This is relating to #Manipulation by secret services of the wikis, as strange as it may seem (and I will try to articulate later). An example of a disruptive editor who has later revealed a mental disorder diagnosis is User:Abd^[11]. Abd is claimed by RationalWiki to have been "terminally online". Many such people could have inordinate time to spend in the wikis, and there, they would have an outsized influence, not always for the better of the wiki. At least a minor/borderline mental disorder or deviation is suggested by the many crazily styled user pages, crazy/wild user signatures and crazy/wild user names (alternatively, are they reflective of some left-wing/neo-Marxist theory of unique self-expression if there is such a thing?). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 05:34, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

(This should be later tunred into a separate article, "A look at gaslighting" or "One man's look at gaslighting".)

The word gaslighting is used in the popular media (including YouTube) rather informally/loosely as of late; and thus, MSM were accused of "gaslighting" during the George Floyd BLM riots. The subject of this post is the more formal meaning, relating to a manipulation by which the attacker tries to make the target/victim doubt their own perception and sanity.

Introductory questions:

• What are specific examples of gaslighting technique? Moving furniture around? Production of strange sounds? Anything else? Production of sensory inputs that, in the absence of gaslighting, would suggest a hallucination?
• Can gaslighting make an otherwise relatively healthy subject insane?
• Specifically, can gaslighting cause psychosis, including hallucinations and delusion?
• Which secret services used gaslighting? German Stasi? Any other secret service?
• Is the Zersetzung by Stasi something like gaslighting?

Instead of answers, let's start with collecting links below.

Further reading:

• gaslighting, britannica.com
• Gaslighting, wikipedia.org
• The Effects of Gaslighting on Mental Health, 2023, harbormentalhealth.com
• Can gaslighting cause someone to feel crazy, even if they are not?, quora.com (very unreliable; user-contributed content)

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:01, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Let us have a look. Let's consider the following, perhaps rather naive/initial take:

1. Left-wing: people need help. Let the state provide state-paid education, healthcare and social services. Bad things happen to good people, including hard-working people, and private insurance is not good enough to help.
2. Right-wing: people should be responsible instead of depending on the taxpayers do handle their issues. Instead of being lazy and reach to the state for help, they should work hard, take risk-mitigation measures, scrimp and save, etc. Everyone should be personally responsible for how well they are doing in life.

Starting from here, are open borders left-wing or right-wing? If anything, they could be right-wing, but certainly not left-wing: open borders are very likely lead to overload of social systems and their eventual collapse.

One could make a different characterization, by which one would associate racism or white supremacism to right-wing (rightly or wrongly). Then, right-wing would reject open borders, not because of overload of social systems but because uncontrolled immigration would lead to intake of people whom the right-wing would consider genetically or culturally inferior.

Taking the above into consideration, open borders would seem neither left-wing nor right-wing but something-else-wing (Marxist-wing? Anarchist-wing? Cause massive disruption to the society and economy to bring about a revolution? The worse, the better? I don't know.)

Interestingly enough, the pre-1990 socialist block, including Czechoslovakia (where I was born), did not have open borders. To the contrary, after 1989, socialist Czechoslovakia was critcized for not allowing the citizen to freely emigrate. There were no open borders even within the Soviet Bloc/Socialist Camp, from what I understand.

On the other hand, one could tak a global view, in which the redistribution from rich to poor should not take place only on a country level (within a country) but on the global level, which can be schematically characterized as from the rich North to the poor South. Even so, immigration of people from South to North is no such redistribution: the riches remain geographically in the North. What is such a redistribution, although rather limited in scope, is e.g. international help to the South. Arguably, free as in freedom software and Wikipedia are efforts that de facto redistribute to the South in so far as they make information artifacts largely created in the rich North available globally (including China) at no cost.

That's how it seems to me; others may differ.

(Potential issues: is the term "social systems" well chosen?) --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:04, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I am not sure what the word wisdom (Czech moudrost) means exactly and how it differs from knowledge (Czech poznání, znalost and vědění). My hunch is that wisdom could be knowledge of principles (or a talent for discovering principles?). A statement of principle features a certain degree of universality. No all statements have this property; a statement of the length of the Nile River has no universality and knowledge of the length is not wisdom.

I could compare this to definitions in dictionaries, but I do not feel like doing so; it is quite a bit of work, especially how to avoid copyright violation.

As something of an aside, the English word wisdom looks cognate to German wissen (to know), on the face of it. (Sure, I would ideally check etymological dictionaries. Perhaps later. Phaedrus was such a poor scholar; unlike Phaedrus, I am trying to be a good scholar, but there is a time of rest and the blog seems like a good place for it.)

One motivation for this question is to increase confidence in the statement form "X is wise". Another motivation is the pseudo-definition of philosophy as love of wisdom; I wondered what is it that philosophers are alegged to be in love with.

The above could work for a wise man, but much less so for a wise deed, on the face of it. Perhaps a deed would be wise if it revealed wisdom on part of the one who did the deed or ordered the deed. The combination/collocation with deed also provides a point of difference to knowledge; there are no *knowledgable deeds, I think.

See also Wisdom. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:25, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Many years ago, I downloaded some Hegel in English and started to read him. From what I remember, Pirsig mentioned Hegel as being logical to the last comma, or something of the sort. I gained no such impression. I could not figure out what the heck Hegel was talking about. After a short while, I put Hegel aside; life is too short. I had no such difficulty with philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Saul Kripke, Thomas Kuhn, Wittgenstein, etc. Nor did Czech philosopher and the first Czechoslovak president Masaryk resemble Hegel in any way. Hegel's style is what I might want to call half-comprehensible terminologically challenging, grammatically hard-to-parse (for use of complex sentence structure for no appreciable benefit) babble.

Later, I read Popper's Open Society, both volumes. Popper really had only bad things to say about Hegel (Popper was much nicer about Marx, and he even praised him to some extent). Popper quoted Schopenhauer completely blasting Hegel. Hegel was a charlatan, pure and simple, spewing nonsense to advance in Prussian academia. Popper analyzed some specific fairly revealing quote. Popper and Schopenhauer were both native German speakers like Hegel (I am a Czech native speaker, reading Hegel in English, so there are two language switches involved), so it seems unlikely that something important would be lost in translation for them.

I am not sure. Perhaps if I spent enough effort reading Hegel, I could get something from him. After all, I got quite a bit from Pirsig despite the often dubious character of his philosophy. But as it stands, the working hypothesis is that Hegel is a charlatan.

Recently, I hit upon the following YouTube video:

• Hegel’s ideobabble is the basis of Marxism and Fascism by TIKhistory, 6 Feb 2024, youtube.com

The comments under the video match my sentiments.

It is quite possible that Hegel is in part responsible both for Marx and Hitler, as the above video suggests. A responsibility for Marx is very plausible; as for Hitler, that would require a deeper investiation. If that is true, what a stellar performance! That would make Hegel not only a pseudo-philosopher but rather one of the greatest intellectual mass criminals who ever lived.

A relating question is whether Marx is one of the greatest intellectual mass criminals. That would require more investigation. One thing is certain: Stalin and Mao did incredible crimes in the name of Marxist pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-economics and (pseudo-?)sociology. Whether Marx is to blame for what they did in his name, again, requires a closer investigation. Marx is spoken of positively by Calhoun et al.'s Sociology textbook, indicated as a major and very influential sociologist (from what I remember).

Britannica online speaks fairly positively of Hegel; he is ranked as a philosopher, not a pseudo-philosopher^[12]. I found no Criticism section there. Nor does Wikipedia: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel contain the word "criticism". --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:23, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

I had a friend who had something he called deníček on the Internet, which I would perhaps translate as a diary (the word journal could also refer to a scientific journal, so is perhaps a worse fit). The page is now long gone. He suggested that was no blog.

Questions:

• What exactly is a blog?
• Does the word blog have multiple meanings? Especially, can the word also refer to a single post?
• How does a blog differ from a web diary?
• What are blogging (and microblogging) platforms?

I do not know what a blog is exactly, but I have a hunch. I will take Blogger as a paradigm case, where I have an account.

In Google Blogger, one can publish posts or little articles, and they get published under a date, where the the year and the month of publishing are in the URL (are there cases, where day is added for disambiguation?). There is a discussion feature under each post. Guido van Rossum has a blog there^[13], so Blogger is taken quite seriously, or was perhaps and was perhaps eclipsed by other platforms (I do not really know). Sabine Hossenfelder has a blogger account^[14]; while she is notable, I would not call here serious.

Facebook can perhaps also be thought of as a blogging platform. There too one can post various texts and get discussion responses, as well as likes.

X/Twitter is called microblogging platform. From what I recall, there was a short limit on a post length. When someone wanted to post longer text, he posted a numbered series of short posts. One trick was to include an image; then, one could pack quite a bit of information into an image. X/Twitter supports retweets; my guess that, internally/technically, the tweet is not copied by value to the retweet but merely referenced in some way; but I do not know. I recall that in 2020, there was a Swedish guy heavily using Twitter to post articles about Covid with charts, as multiple posts; he then also linked to some tool showing the series as one page. This was quite cumbersome. He must have found some features of Twitter preferable to e.g. Google Blogger (which has no such limitations). Could it be that Blogger makes it harder to insert images? (Adding them is possible^[15].) Is Twitter's retweeting the deal breaker? Or people being able to give "likes"? That is, is Blogger worse as for the social networking aspect?

Medium is another blogging platform, supporting publishing articles with comment feature. I do stumble on articles there once in a while; the Pueyo Covid-19 article was there.

WordPress seems to be another blogging platform.

As obvious from this very page, Wikiversity supports blogs in user space. It is greatly superior in some ways. But English Wikiversity user space is not indexed by Google since December 2019 (why did the English Wikiversity decide to exclude the user space from Google indexing?). One point of superiority is the publically visible revision history of posts; Blogger does have something as a revision history, but as far as I know, they are not visible by the readers. And then, if the blogger wants to make changes, there is the fear of misleading the reader about the original content of a blog post.

I am not clear to what extent one can place/upload images into the posts on these platforms.

It seems that blogging stands in contrast to professional journalism. That is to say, a professional journalist typically publishes for money in a venue that is not labeled as a blog. By contrast, a blogger is perhaps usually not paid and perhaps lack the talent or experience of a professional journalist. Maybe.

Links:

• Blog, wikipedia.org
• Blogger (service), wikipedia.org

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 07:25, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Expanded and modified. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:23, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Some time ago (years ago, I think), I was researching what is lexical item and lexical unit (it arose in an attempt to improve a Wikidata item, I think). My initial hunch was that lexical item was any of a word, phrase, or even an idiomatic/supracompositional sentence (e.g. a proverb). It was therefore a syntactic (or morphosyntactic?) object, not considering its semantics. Later, I discovered a definition of lexical unit that suggested it was something like a pair of a word and one of its semantics. That was suprising since Wikipedia seemed to claim that the two terms were synonyms. Perhaps someone was using lexical unit as a synonym for lexical item in the mentioned sense, while someone else was using the term differently. The pair meaning would be from SIL^[16]; framenet seems to have a similar definition of lexical unit^[17]. A confusing thing could be the Czech term lexikální jednotka, which Czech could be translating into English as lexical unit; perhaps Czechs were to blame for part of the confusion? What were the Germans doing? I will perhaps look closer at it when I find more energy. It is not a particularly important or burning terminological question.

A relating Wikidata item is Wikidata:Q2944660, with both labels lexical item and lexical unit. It links to Czech authority database item https://aleph.nkp.cz/F/?func=direct&doc_number=000001571&local_base=KTD; it has some question raising definitions, I think.

There is another Wikidata item I created during the investigation, Wikidata:Q115862390 (label lexical unit), which I defined as "pairing of a word or phrase with one of its meanings (lexical semantics)".

There are some relating questions that I find quite interesting. Is word meaning part of a word or is it merely associated with a word? Do some languages see a word as a container whose meaning is the content (or do they imply that in the terminology or lexicalized metaphor)? One might claim that morphemes are part of a word, not meaning. A word would be like a hook on which to hang meaning like a coat (coat is not part of a hook). Let me add that being part of and being contained in are two different things; a cup handle is part of a cup, unlike tea, which is contained in the cup.

One application of this terminological distinction is in counting (as part of reports about, say, dictionaries). If someone asks how many lexical units there are in the dictionary, the answer depends on the choice between the two possible meanings; there are fewer lexical units/forms than lexical units/form-meaning pairs. This can have an implication for Wikidata: it is quite possible that many editors are not paying close attention to item definitions and merely go by the label. They can then report a count (in a Wikidata item for a dictionary) in a unit that they did not really intend.

During the investigation, I must have placed some quotations of use of the two terms in the English Wiktionary, in wikt:lexical item; there are no quotations in wikt:lexical unit. One qualm I have is that these are typically without giving a definition (since that would be a mention, not use), whereas I actually prefer to work with explicit definitions or even encyclopedic analyses that go beyond a definition. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 18:58, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

(This is a cheap, conversational article. Creating a decent, well structured article for the mainspace would perhaps be too much work, bloking the effort from proceeding.)

I must have already posted parts of what follows somewhere else, perhaps in One man's look at upper ontology or at my user talk page in Wikidata, Wikidata:User talk:Dan Polansky#Being, essence and existence.

Initial questions:

• What does the word exist mean?
• Could it be that for a concrete entity to exist (e.g. that cat over there) is something quite different as for an abstract entity to exist (e.g. the number 5)?
• Do numbers (positive integers, for a start) actually exist? What is Platonism in relation to that? What does Weitz think and in which video (in German)?
• Does the word exist originate ultimately from something like Arabic philosophy?
• Can existence be contrasted to being? And thus, can I say that X is Y and at the same time X does not exist?
• How can I at the same time succeed in referring to an entity and then manage to predicate of it that it does not exist?
• What does Quine say about the matter? Does he get rid of classes, only keeping sets (extensional objects)? Does Britannica say something to that effect?
• Does Chomsky say something to the effect that events do not really exist?
• What does Betrand Russel have to say on the subject? Anything from Frege?

I will not answer all the question but rather provide some initial or preliminary deliberations. First, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that the existential quantifier is not the only possible explication of the verb to exist. And thus, it can make sense to state, E x: not exists(x). And thus, the second possible explication is the predicate exist. Alternatively, as a minor technical variation, one can state, E x: not hasProperty(x, existence). The trick is that, quite possibly, the existential quantifier ranges over all entities in the domain of discourse (AKA universe of discourse), which includes e.g. Bilbo Baggins, as well as various gods, including those of monotheistic religions; and even if one belives e.g. the Christian God to exist, one may still deny existence to Allah and the Greek gods (but all those are in the domain of discourse and can be predicated about). Then, in an importan sense, we can state, not hasProperty(Bilbo Baggins, existence). The issue is a bit tricky. Formulations of the matter in language can sound a little weird or crazy. But if one pays enough attention, things can start to make sense (as long as one has background in first-order logic).

Let's tackle the question whether, say, number 3 exists. I find it quite plausible to think that if it does exist, it does in a manner fundamentally different from, say, the cup over there. In a sense, the question is extremely theoretical/philosophical; I think quite many mathematicians could not care less, and proceed to say things like "there exists a positive integer with a property so and so" without pausing to think whether there could be some trouble lurking in that pronouncement.

I must have heard someone state the following criterion: a thing exists if someone (or some entity) is conscious of it. I find it very unconvincing/uncompelling. I do not think that, for the sun to exist, a human mind has to be aware/conscious of it. Of course, supporters of this criterion conjure up a universal mind/spirit and that saves their criterion: even if no human was born yet, the universal mind is aware of all that exists. Well, unless you make up bizarre criteria, you do not need to save the day by inventing universal minds/spirits.

Noting Heidegger's(?) Dasein (there-being?) and Sosein (so-being?) is perhaps in order. The existence vs. being is the existence vs. Sosein´. The existence would be the same thing as Dasein, I suppose. But I do not know Heidegger. Dasein could refer to existence in the empirical world (which I think some German guy calls the real world or something of the sort, and Popper calls world 1?) Again, I don't know and do not feel like getting a headache by reading a continental philosopher. But let's give credit where it is due: the names Dasein and Sosein seem fine.

As an aside, I vaguely remember the following statement: You don't exist; go away. Something similar is in the Flight of the Amazon Queen computer game, from what I remember: the main character has to explain to some animal that it only lives in Africa, not South America (I think); when the animal realizes as much, it disappears. (That was on note for a bit of levity, for this dry subject.)

The above considerations have some significant applications. They make it possible to state that certain medical syndroms do not really exist despite being in the domain of discourse. One can then state: you cannot define things into existence (as some do state, I think). Your having refered to a (putative) entity1 and indicated that entity2 has it does not magically conjure up entity1 into existence, merely into the domain/universe of discourse (and that is no real universe, really).

Some idiomatic manner of expression complicate the matter. One can state, X only exists in one's imagination, not in reality. But then, the verbal form suggests X does exist and is located in the container that is the imagination. But that cannot be a literal mode of speaking; a cat that exists in reality cannot really be the same entity as the cat in the imagination (and a plaster cat is no cat, really or technically).

Could we ban all imaginary and similar entities from the universe of discourse, bringing existence closer to being in the universe of discourse? That would be rather impractical. We can use formal logical reasoning about imaginary entities as well. For instance: 1) Bilbo is a hobbit; 2) all hobbits are mortal; 3) therefore, Bilbo is mortal. Similarly: 1) Christian God is able to perform all actions; 2) jumping into a lake and getting wet is an action; 3) therefore, Christian God can jump into a lake and get wet. While the reasoning was presented in natural language, translating it into first-order logic is straightforward.

More is for later, when I figure out what else I want to say.

Links:

• TBD:SEP
• TBD:IEP
• TBD:WP
• TBD:Brit

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 14:20, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

I want to remind myself about search engines. There is Internet Fundamentals/Search Engines by Dave.

I use Google. Major alternatives include Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo (good privacy?). Between 1995 and around 2000, I must have used Alta Vista, now apparently long forgotten. There is Yahoo. For Czech (my native tongue), there is Seznam. Since I primarily search English pages, I have no strong incentive to use the Seznam search engine (but I use their maps; they have great tourist maps with Czech tourist route marking); I can search Czech pages with Google as well.

I rather often search in Google Books, whether for English or Czech, as part of my Wiktionary work. Google Books is considered to be permanently recorded media by the English Wiktionary, unlike general web. (One may ask whether Google Books are part of web; as long as they are presented as web pages in a web browser, they are.)

As for privacy, I have to accept that Google knows me very well, from my web searches, YouTube, etc. I struggle to figure out anything bad Google could do to me. I think the impact of Google ads on me are minimal; I shop rather little (there is still a bit of environmentalist heart in me, although the struggle with entropy in the form of the environment-damaging/biosphere-damaging technological civilization seems to be in vain and one person can hardly make a difference.)

In Google, I sometimes use the "site:" directive; that is very useful. I rather often search for fairly long word sequences in quotation marks and find them in various sources.

In relation to the English Wikiversity, Draft space and User space are excluded from indexing by web crawlers since December 2019. Other than that, I find that my articles in the English Wikiversity are often indexed. There must have been some project about the English Wikiversity indexing (where is it?). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:52, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

I covered the topic of entity in One man's look at upper ontology. The coverage is rather philosophical. Why would a non-philosopher want to use the word entity? It is in part because the word thing (a candidate alternative), in general parlance, does not serve a purpose. And thus, one would say that a person is not a thing, as implied in the phrase "people and things" from a Beatles song. If one does not care to indicate what sort of entity some entity is, entity serves well: it labels the broadest class/category/whatever-it-is possible. For instance, instead of saying "a person, or a group, or an organization, or a department in an organization", one may simples state "entity", and in many sentences, it works well enough. One may be tempted to use the word person, but one may realize that is too narrow. Alternatives include agent, operative, etc.; that is much lower in the ontology than entity. But agent is used much more narrowly in common parlance; it would perhaps be strange to refer to user accounts in a wiki as agent. Here, it is well worth reminding that a user account is not necessarily controlled by a single person, so referring to the operator as a person is making a leap.

I expect the word entity to be used as a label for the root node in WordNet, a hyponymy-based thesaurus (e.g. in the English Wiktionary thesaurus), a thesaurus in the sense of information science, etc. I may want to list specific examples with refs after I find gumption. Meanwhile, there is a relevant Wikidata item, Wikidata:Q35120 (which lists thing and object as alternative labels, which I find problematic, since Wikidata also has an item speficically for object). One can learn quite a bit from investigating the item and trying to understand its statements.

Entity can be contrasted to object; it is so in Wikidata, I think. I proposed that all referents are entities, that is, e.g. "the right half of the cup (which has good integrity, not broken)" is an entity, but possibly not an object. I would like to find more in serious sources.

In the term "ERD", entity is contrasted to relationship. But that has to be a different concept of entity; in the above concept, everything is an entity and everyone is an entity; and therefore, also a relationship is an entity.

We may want to get specific and move down in the ontology from entity to object. And then, one may wonder whether agent is a subclass of object. In general parlance, my guess that people would be quite surprised to be objects. But they would perhaps also be surprised to learn that they are agents. That is the problem with the general/common parlance; it is non-technical and ontologically naive. The challenge is to figure out what labels to use so that both lay people and ontologically sophisticated people are happy.

As an aside, it seems that Wikidata provides revolutionary tools for ontological analysis and considerations similar to above. I suspect I have not yet fully understood what Wikidata does in the upper ontology, and I wish to find out more. Also WordNet with its hyponymy relationship is a major driver of increased understanding, but Wikidata with its metastatements does so much more.

Above, I hinted that entity could be a class, but there seems to be dispute about that in the philosophical literature (which one?). Sure enough, entity is not a result of classification; on the literal level, one cannot say that "entity is X such as Y"; on meta-level, one can say that entity is the most general category or that it is the root of ontology (my favorite characterization).

While I have a master's in computer science, I do not recall any class on knowledge engineering or ontology in the sense of computer science/information science. I am trying to figure things out using learning by doing and figuring things out for myself, so celebrated by the Americans (I think). I have quite a bit of exposure to relational dabatases but this knowledge graph business in the style of Wikidata is something still rather new to me. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:50, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

I love being able to edit wikis (Wikiversity, Wiktionary, etc.) in small edits. I write something and then I feel the need to save it. I do it again, and again, and again. For a page that has, say, 80 KB, that is quite embarassing: each edit leads to a full copy of the page (AFAIK); the wiki does not store only diffs (unlike e.g. MPG format, which uses differences between frames, I think). Some of the largest articles I wrote in the English Wikiversity have ca. 200 KB (much more should probably lead to subpaging). It is actually quite nice to be able to think in small units of work. I think it was Git (from Linus Torvalds) that resulted in much smaller commits than would otherwise be the case (in CVS, Concurrent Versioning System?).

Editing in small edits seems rather common in the English Wikiversity. I saw some custodians do it. I never saw anyone getting complaints on their talk page for doing it.

One solution is to use the wiki sandbox. Then, the only thing being copied is going to be the text of focus (a new blog post or the article section being edited). And the text of focus is so much smaller than the whole page, e.g. in the wiki blog.

An alternative would be to store blog posts in separate pages, and perhaps transclude them. I don't really like that, but it would help. I prefer bigger pages to small, highly modular pages. After all, C libraries with multiple functions are usually approximately in one file per library (or more, but not too many files?) rather than being one file per function?

This does not need to be only for the blog. I can also copy a section of a longer article, edit it in the sandbox, and then save it again. One problem can be with named inline references thereby getting out of scope; there is no problem with unnamed inline references.

The problem being solved is not just storage; it is also revision history, which becomes so much easier to overview with having a smaller number of larger edits. In articles that only have me as the single author, as is usually the case in my editing in Wikiversity, that is perhaps not much of a problem, but in an article/page with multiple editors, eliminating intermediate edits seems to be worthwhile.

A con of the sanbox method: the article text can be changed by someone else in the meantime, resulting in a need of merge. However: 1) not much of a problem for me in Wikiversity, where I mostly edit my articles; 2) even in Wikipedia (which I hardly ever edit), the risk is often very low, except perhaps for articles documenting current events and thus subjects to frequent edits; 3) merge is more work but is not impossible.

One can ask why the wikis (MediaWiki) do not make it possible to merge subsequent edits from a single editor. If people consider small edits a problem (as Czechs definitely do, much more than the Anglophones), surely there would be an incentive to solve the problem on the technical level rather than the self-discipline (and in the Czech case also other-discipline) measure? In Czech wikis, one often gets a message requesting one to use the preview function when one uses small edits. I must even have seen some editors being threaten with a block unless they stop using small edits.

One can also draft the text in Notepad, Notepad++, etc. (Vim and Emacs for the brave-hearted) and only use the wiki for previewing. Subjectively, I do not like that but I do not know why. Strange.

One alternative is to use a local MediaWiki installation. I do not have it on my new computer. It is not so hard to install, but one gets lazy. One has to install Apache web server, PHP, and MediaWiki, provided one uses nanoSQL (or whatever it is called) instead of a "real" database such as MariaDB. Installing all the items is something a non-technical person (I am technical, but also forget things, and get lazy) will be disinclined to do.

Even in the sandbox, someone may feel embarassed to expose their inability to edit in larger edits to the world. I guess I am a little embarassed. But at the end of the day, the thing is this: how can I deliver the best value using the human resource I have at my disposal, that is myself? Surely all those lazy and incompetent people can think what they want; I should not want to care. And the industrious and competent people who do not need small edits will know that I am not like them. I will be exposed for my frailty. I can either accept it or pick an alternative (Notepad++, local MediaWiki installation, etc.)

A benefit of sandbox can further be that it removes part of the embarassment, resulting in a much more thoroughly edited/elaborated text. And that is no little thing.

One concern is double/duplicate publishing. With the sandbox technique, the same text becomes publically viewable first in sandbox, then somewhere else. I am not sure why it would matter/cause trouble, but there it is. Could someone be using sandbox for leaking something? I don't know. And, on a paranoid note, someone could copy the text from the sandbox into another wiki and claim authorship; that wiki would show an earlier time stamp than the destination page in the edited wiki. This risk could be mitigated by indicating in the edit summary of the final publishing edit that the text came from sandbox so and so.

It would be nice if MediaWiki software allowed a special page whose deletion is really a deletion, with no storage impact. Since, even sandbox has some storage implications.

Items under consideration: wiki edit, small wiki edit, storage, MediaWiki storage approach, revision history ease of overview, single author vs. multiple authors, merge, wiki vs. plain text editors off-wiki, local MediaWiki installation, etc.

Something of a reverse outline, created after the fact and probably incomplete:

• Many small edits
  • Problems
    • Storage taken (page size around 100 KB is not unusual, and 200 KB is still quite workable)
    • Revision histories made harder to investigate
  • Possible solutions
    • Use wiki sandbox online and then transfer to the final location
      • Problem: editing patterns and limited competence exposed to see by anyone, leading to a possible embarassment.
      • Paranoid problem: someone copies it and claims authorship
    • Edit in a plain text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, Vim, Emacs, etc.) offline and place online when done
      • Problem: no neat preview. One can be copying the text into a preview, though (but that is quite cumbersome).
      • Note: I used to use a self-made MediaWiki syntax mode for Emacs. It set headings in larger font etc. It was quite neat.
    • Edit in FreeMind, which can be seen as a tree collapsible plain text editor with extra features
    • Install local MediaWiki (requires Apache web server, PHP and MediaWiki, as a minimum)
      • Nice, somewhat emulating the online wiki, but the installation is quite laborious and not trivial for a non-technie.
      • Inline references require an additional installation; they are not in MediaWiki per default (I think).
    • Find MediaWiki markup previewing software easier to install than MediaWiki (perhaps an executable installer, done).

This very post was drafted in the sandbox. It resulted in less than 5 KB (?), not the embarassing 80 KB. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 20:14, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Later: One benefit of using many small edits in a sandbox is proof of origin. That is, if someone enters a fairly complete text into a wiki, that can be a copyright violation. By contrast, if one edits the text in many small changes, the detailed history of origination strongly suggests no copyright violation is going on. Perhaps someone very ingenious could figure out how to fake a many-edit revision history for a "stolen" copyrighted text, but the possibility stretches my imagination (who knows what is possible in the age of GenAI).

Yet another benefit is instructional as for the art of writing or composing text. It lays bare how decent texts often actually originate, in long series of small changes, revising, rewriting, etc. Sure enough, the idea is often stated in Anglophone guides to rhetoric and composition. But in the wiki, we see actual examples of text being revised, not just a statement of principle. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 06:06, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Expanded. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 15:31, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

From some source I must have obtained the idea that string theory is not testable and that its opponents are sometimes labeled Popperazzis. Is that true?

I guess I would be able to find a YouTube video from Sabine Hossenfelder, but that is not a serious source, given her videos often exhibit considerable yellow-journalism features.

Some relevant links (Gemini helped):

• String theory#Criticism, wikipedia.org
• Is String Theory Testable? | Not Even Wrong by woit, 17 March 2007, math.columbia.edu
• Will We Ever Prove String Theory? by Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz, 29 May 2025, quantamagazine.org
• String Theory vs the Popperazzi by Massimo Pigliucci, philosophersmag.com
• The string theory wars show us how science needs philosophy | Aeon Essays by Massimo Pigliucci, 2025, aeon.co

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 19:41, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

I must have seen some Wikipedia editors refuse to engage with people whose responses look like overt GenAI slop. Wikiversity is starting to see a similar problem: at the beginning of Oct 2025, I interacted with someone who threw at me GenAI slop. A problem with GenAI slop in interaction (as opposed to in articles) is that it is often very verbose while saying little, it often overexplains and it is quite often inaccurate, which the user does not notice. Another problem is that it masks the unability of the editor to communicate in "normal" (grammatical, understandable, coherent, etc.) English (or the language of the wiki under consideration).

Initial questions:

• Is there a Wikipedia policy that simplifies dealing with users who communicate using GenAI slop?
• What are examples of Wikipedia users refusing to engage with GenAI slop?
• Is there a Wikipedia policy that addresses negative impact of GenAI on articles?
• Can the English Wikiversity adopt the policy that, in interactions, editors are disallowed to place GenAI output as their own words, or the like?

Wikipedia has W:Category:Articles containing suspected AI-generated texts, and the corresponding W:Template:AI-generated. The template links to W:Wikipedia:Large language models, which is an essay (they seem to elevate a mere essay into the de facto policy status by linking to it from a template). As ofr 4 Oct 2025, W:Category:Articles containing suspected AI-generated texts from September 2025 features 1,327 pages; that is quite a lot in 4 or even 3 days of October.

In the Czech Wiktionary, someone was trying to enter GenAI-generated examples of use (back in 2023?). I think there were also fake citations to sources. From what I recall, this was rejected and the examples were removed; I was one of those opposing insertion of GenAI-generated examples. (Opposing fake references goes without saying.) I must have created a discussion in Pod lípou (general discussion forum, like Beer parlour in E.WT. and Colloquium in E.WV).

My hunch is that the most impacted language is going to be English, given how many people around the world speak it as a first or second language. Many people from around the world with less than stellar English may want to compensate for the lack of skill with GenAI. Czech Wikipedia will perhaps not see that much of a problem. But I spoke too soon: there are some articles in Wikipedia:cs: Kategorie:Údržba:Články napsané umělou inteligencí. The corresponding Wikidata item only links to Wikipedias (no Wikiversity, Wikibooks, Wikisource, etc.).

See also One man's look at generative artificial intelligence.

Links:

• LinkedIn post by Marshall Miller (Senior Director of Product at Wikimedia Foundation), linkedin.com
• Wikipedia editors fight AI-generated mistakes, 8 August 2025, washingtonpost.com

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 19:38, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

(Relating article: The acceptability of the use of the Church-Turing thesis in mathematical proofs.) In teaching of computability theory/recursion theory, what is known as proof by Church thesis seems often used. It is on pragmatic grounds; it is believed that the fully formal proof actually constructing in technical detail the formal machine considered (e.g. the Turing machine) adds almost nothing to certainty and is not particularly revealing. I find this plausible enough, although incorporating an empirical thesis into a mathematical proof seems, on the face of it, as logically dubious to me as it was back in 1995 or 1996 when I was first exposed to proof by Church thesis.

But it raises the following questions: why do you even bother to define a formalism when you then, in computability theory, do not actualy use it? What is all the fuzz with Turing machines when we have a pretty clear idea of what we mean by algorithm and algorithmically decidable anyway?

My response is this. Above all, while the Church thesis is not mathematically proven, it is corroborated. That is to say, the thesis is not taken as obvious but rather as something that was found out in something that can be interpreted as attempted falsification (in the sense of Popper and here actually Lakatos). Perhaps the intent of the researchers was not really to falsify/refute the thesis, but their effort of showing that the various mechanisms/formalisms for computation are equivalent as far as what can be computed could have resulted in a discovery of non-equivalence, thereby threatening the thesis with a potential refutation. But in order to show that the mechanisms are equivalent, we need the mechanisms in the first place (Turing machine, lambda calculus, register machines, etc.). Without a formal mathematical definition of a mechanism, no formal mathematical proof of mechanism equivalence can be made.

But then, was not all that obvious from the start? Did the mathematical formalization bring any added value? I do not know. But sources indicate (double check; SEP on Church Thesis?) that Gödel originally was not so certain of the Church thesis (also known as the Church-Turing thesis). What in retrospect may seem obvious was not so obvious from the start.

The Turing machine formalism seems rather useful in computational complexity theory, perhaps much more than in the computability theory/recursion theory. One use is as a rationale for the capital O notation: we can pack more information into a single character on the tape of the Turing machine, thereby accelerating any Turing machine by any finite integral factor on the formal level. The mechanism also finds technical use in various reduction proofs in the complexity theory, from what I remember.

As something of an aside, it seems rather questionable that the Turing machine brings much to those who would want to become programmers and software makers. They should perhaps rather learn a bit about user interface design and the relevant parts of human psychology and anthropology. But these are no mathematical fields. By contrast, if one is philosophically-minded, the formalization by means of Turing machine provides yet another example of successful mathematization. One gets exposed to additional variety of mathematical proofs, deepening the exemplarist inquiry into the nature of mathematical proof itself. The idea is this: to learn about what a painting is, an abstract characterization of the concept will not do. One needs to sit in a gallery and look at various paintings (as Doctor Bean has pointed out). And to learn what a mathematical proof is, one should look at many examples, as varied as possible, rather than becoming content with an abstract characterization or definition. What the computability theory gives us is a proof of impossibility of something, quite an interesting feat even if somewhat straightforward by reusing Cantor's idea of diagonalization. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 19:38, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

ResearchGate seems to be some kind of (quasi-)social networking site allowing people to upload articles, including under free licenses.

Initial questions:

• Can one upload articles that are not (peer) reviewed? Yes^[18]. (I am not clear what is the significance of the word "peer" in "peer reviewed"; for an article in astrology, the peers would be astrologers, so it would then pass a peer review, no good thing. I suspect I am interpreting the phrase "peer review" too literally.)
• Does the license need to be one of copyleft such as Creative Commons? Gemini says no, it does not need to be Creative Commons, but I struggle to quickly find solid confirming reference. Gemini states: "The primary license governing a published work is the one established by the journal or publisher when the work was originally published." That is plausible enough, but requires solid verification. At least, I witnessed how an article with no license indicated became an article with a Creative Commons license indicated there.
• Do all the uploaded articles need to be publically available or is there an option of going behind paywall or require a registration? Perhaps the articles do not need to be publically available, if I understand my source correctly^[19].

Links:

• ResearchGate, wikipedia.org
• Copyright and ResearchGate, help.researchgate.net

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 19:38, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Considering the party name Motoristé sobě (Motorists to themselves), I cannot help thinking this is in reference to Národ sobě (Nation to itself), a slogan/motto(?) from Czech national revival. This would match their somewhat nationalistic tendencies as well. It would be an analogue of morphological blend, but this would be a syntactic blend if that is a thing.

Could the party marketers be thinking like that? Perhaps. They placed "Ukončit Fialu [...]" on their billboard, which I would render into English as "Finish Fiala [...]" or "Terminate Fiala [...]". I am surprised that this is legal. Sure enough, they would argue the intended meaning was to end the government of Fiala. But to my mind, the double entendre is intentional and is there to bring about the sign of aggressiveness. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 07:37, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Some pages from HHF were moved to user space. However, there is perhaps more to be done and there are some questions:

• Are many of the pages copyright violations, at least for the failure to attribute? There are e.g. pages in Category:JEE 2000 Screening such that when I tried to find word sequences from the items there, I found them on the internet. Is this some kind of India's screening/testing standard that is in public domain, and then, attribution would not be required? Even so, it would be proper to indicate the origin or else it is plagiarism.

Some relevant links:

• Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/May 2012#Reviving Highschool Help Forum - HHF
• Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion/Archives/22#HHF

Targets of the move (possibly incomplete):

• User:Thewinster/HHF
• User:Thewinster/Joint Entrance Examination

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:28, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I am thinking of physical objects and their labels as a starting point for establishment of semantics. I would need a first idea of a physical object for this purpose. And the process could even be represented via photographs. Thus, I would e.g. make a photograph of an apple. There could be multiple objects in the photograph. I would mark the apple by marking its outline using a red outline. And that would select the object by extra-linguistic means. And that is important: first I want to select the object by extra-linguistic means, and then I want to label it, in general by multiple labels. For a start, the labels would be nouns, including common nouns and proper nouns. There would be an expectation that certain kinds of object usually do not carry proper names. And thus, the expectation could be that labeling an apple by proper name does not make much sense, so any label is interpreted as a common noun. Going from there, I would have a large collection of photos with names/categories for the photos. That should be somehow at least partially determining what these names stand for, that is, for what concept or being do the names stand for. This was done without genus-differentia definition and without reference to the form of the name. And thus, any morphological structure of the name, etymology, any choice of letters, or sounds, none of it would matter. The only thing that matters is to tell when are two names the same and when are they distinct. The names would not even need to be names in the sense of words; they could be numbers, e.g. Q-numbers, like those used in Wikidata. And this would be an introduction into what denotative means, I think. Even here, someone could want to play some game of non-literal/non-denotative interpretation. Someone could want to put the word "love" as a label on a photograph of a symbol of heart. This complicates the matter. And one could want to place the word "cat" on an image of a pretty woman, referring to the Czech idiom of "kočka". And thus, it is here not perfectly elucidated what denotative refers to. One could even claim that since the sense of "kočka" denoting a woman is lexicalized, it is also denotative. But the initial idea of the labeling exercise was that the names will be unambiguous. So this goes back to the idea of a pure language of concepts and how to establish its semantics. And one way to establish semantics is by means of axioms. But other means is by giving examples, via photographs and drawings. Both ways have nothing to do with spelling, phonology, phonetics, morphology and etymology. A point: connecting the hints coming from the mentioned aspects with semantics is not always futile, but seems unnecessary in principle, to get to semantics. But the catch may be that I had concrete objects in mind, such as this apple, that cat, the hamer over there, etc. These could be on a photograph. But other entities would not so easily be on the photograph.

In establishing the semantics referring to and describing non-physical objects, e.g. texts, metaphors can prove rather useful. For instance, what sketch is can be established by visual examples, in reference to certain visual objects, painting-like or drawing-like. Then, it is rather easy to metaphorically carry this over to textual objects. And this may be more helpful to establish the semantics than the examples, although they can also be quite useful.

Coming back to the provocative statement "everything is a metaphor", which seems to be a misinterpretation of Pirsig's "everything is an analogy", we can now firmly reject it: we can establish some semantics by means of axioms and examples. Once we have that, we can create more semantics by metaphorical and metaphor-like processes. A beauty of metaphorical designation is that it can serve an initial analytical role before a proper technical axiomatization takes place. It is not just any arbitrary designation, like via a Q-number; it is a way to point to an analogy, to some initial pre-theoretical model, to be replaced later with something better.

See also:

• User:Dan Polansky/An unambigous pure language of concepts
• User:Dan Polansky/Some notes toward a theory of interpretation

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 10:03, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

See also User:Dan Polansky/Exemplarism. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 18:42, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

As a possibly related note, I see Peano axioms as something like an ostensive definition of positive integers (with zero?). I must have made the point elsewhere. That aside, we can probably use the labeling kickstart for semantics with integers no less than with physical objects, e.g. object:XXX -- label:3; object:aaa -- label: 3; object:ooo -- label: 3. We are cheating a little: what we are labelling here is something manifesting itself in/present in the object rather than object itself; a proper label would be not "3" but rather "3-letter sequence". --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 19:10, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

Placing copyright violating material to Wikiversity is a clear no-no, but as for linking to it, I am not perfectly clear. I sometimes have an urge to link a PDF that I suspect is a copyright violation. I usually refrain from linking it in such a case. On the other hand, it seems to me that Wayback Machine is a massive copyright violation (I am not a lawyer), and I do not hesitate to link to pages archived in Wayback Machine (nor does Wikipedia). Wayback Machine has an online procedure for requestion items to be removed from its archive. Even if I do not link to an item and only mention it by name/title, it is usually straightforward to use Google to find the item online anyway. On the other hand, the added convenience of linking creates something like aiding and abetting someone seeking to use copyright violating material, reducing his effort to violate. More clarity is needed. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:36, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

This is mentioned at Wikiversity talk:Curators by Dave Braunschweig: "Almost all Wikiversity admins are directly identifiable by their user profiles and subject to intense off-wiki harassment for our anti-vandalism efforts." I find it quite remarkable. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:58, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

Elsewhere, I said the word nothing is to be understood as a macro that results in disappearance of the word and its putative referent upon expansion, with the use of quantification and negation. Thus, "there is nothing is the box" could be rendered as "for all x: x is a macroscopic object --> x is not in the box" (the full logical form is still not given, e.g. "x is a macroscopic object" is not formal logic). But there is an alternative rendering: "content(the box, nothing)". In this rendering, "nothing", a zero-adic function symbol, refers to an item in the universe of discourse. As a result, it seems incorrect to state that a sentence containing the word nothing has one true or canonical underlying form, one or the other. There is at least one additional candidate underlying logical form of nothing: "content(the box, empty set)"; here, the predicate content expects a set as a second parameter.

Similar analysis applies to the Christian God. One option is to treat "the Christian God" as a zero-adic function symbol (a constant symbol) referring to an item in the universe of discourse. Then, to state that he does not exist, we can state "not hasProperty(the Christian God, existence)". Under this rendering, "existence" is a constant symbol also pointing to an item in the universe of discourse. But there is alternative, to treat "Christian God" as a monadic predicate; and then, the rendering would be "For all x: not ChristianGod(x)". It seems to me that using "existence" as an item in the underlying universe of discourse can work reasonably well, but I am not sure. It makes it trivial to make statements about Christian God. Wikidata seems to have this approach. One reason for Wikidata choosing this approach is that its items have to match Wikipedia topics, so it better should have an item.

Some general related remarks: the surface language form as if constructs entities in the universe of discourse or is suggestive of doing so. A mere reformulation sometimes gets rid of them. The form "The Christian God does not have existence" constructs existence as an entity, whereas "For each entity it holds it does not meet the definition requirements stated in the concept of the Christian God" does not construct existence, but it does construct a concept of the Christian God. We can even treat "the Christian God" as a mere text-replacement macro, which would result in a rather long sentence of the form "For each entity it fails to meet at least one of the following criteria: being almighty, being omniscient, [...]."

As yet another example, once we have existence in the universe of discourse, we can have but do not need non-existence. We can say "x has (the property of) non-existence", but the same communicative or representative job seems to be done by "x does not have (the property of) existence".

What to call all that is in the universe of discourse: my initial hunch was "entity". But since the treatment of first-order logic usually seems to call it "object" level, it could as well be called "object", and thus: For all x: isObject(x), as it were. The predicate symbols and function symbols point to predicates and functions and they are on the meta-level, not the object level, and then, they are not objects in that sense. But it seems one can build a derived model in which one incorporates e.g. predicates into the domain of discourse and introduces meta-predicates. For instance, instead of isAnIncrementOf(4, 3), we can write 3adicPred(incrementOf, 4, 3). What previously were predicates and functions are now objects. The process can continue but pehraps to not much benefit? 4adicPred(3adicPred, incrementOf, 4, 3). I don't know; I have not properly explored this subject.

Wikidata: If we treat all items in Wikidata as the universe of discourse, which we seem to, it is worth noting Wikidata has objects contrasted to entities. How it works technically or definitionally I do not know. Ideally, Wikidata would have some links to technical papers elucidating the issues and ontology-technical decisions, but it usually does not seem to have them (I know of an exception, a link to serious paper.) One way could be to treat functions as non-objects but entities.

Noting that the word "nothing" probably arose from "no thing", we may now construct other putative entities, including nocat and nodog. Thus, not only is nothing in the box, but also nocat and nodog, among other entities. This emphasizes the parsimony of the Russellian(?) getting rids of the pronoun nothing by use of quantification and negation, mentioned above. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 20:18, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

I started to continue Marshallsumter cleanup, by quasi-deleting his pseudo-lectures. These were often in subpages, e.g. "Chemicals/Oxygens". One could naively think that the subpages present not all that much of a problem, for being subpages. My position is that what is in mainspace has to be mainspace-worthy, subpage or not. Moreover, Wikidata:Special:Contributions/Dan Polansky shows that my quasi-deletion of his pseudo-lectures (or not even pseudo) resulted in their being removed from Wikidata items, e.g. oncogenetic, Ammonoidea, xenon, thorium, sulfur and phosphorus. This is a somewhat unexpected added value: one of the original rationales for getting rid of Marshallsumter-style pages was that they were landing pages from Wikidata. Okay. I plan to continue with more clean-ups later.

For instance, the oxygen item was expanded by him in 13 July 2023^[20]. Was he already blocked at that point in the English Wikiversity? Yes, he was blocked on 17 November 2022. And thus, he continued in disruptive editing elsewhere even after his harmful conduct was blocked in the English Wikiversity. When was the decision made that his pseudo-lecture (or simply non-lectures alleged to be lectures) were not fit in mainspace? It was in 2016, I think, but I cannot quickly verify it.

See also User:Dan Polansky/Articles by Marshall Sumter. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:53, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

I just moved pages to User:Marshallsumter/Portal:Jupiter. The subpages and their structure look like some big joke. They are listed at User:Marshallsumter#Subpages. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 12:59, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

I was once dealing with something that related to a bivariate normal distribution, two independent normal-distributed variables forming a joint variable. One question that came up was what was the distribution of the distance of the two-dimensional point from the center. It was not normally distributed but rather, the probability density function for the distance (a derived distribution) started at zero at zero, going up and peaking at some distance, and then going down again, approaching zero as it went toward infinity. I found it surprising given the following picture:

That is to say, I expected that the probability of a point lying close to the center was going to be rather high. As it turned out, the point is most likely to lie at a fixed non-zero distance. Two forces combine in the relevant integral: as we increase the distance considered, the probability density of the points at the relevant circle (having that radius) goes down, but the circle circumference goes up. At zero, the circle is 0-radius and thus is not really a circle but rather a point. As we slowly increase the radius, the loss of probability density is at first much less than the gain of the circle circumference. Eventually, the increase of the circle circumference stops paying for the decrease of the probability density.

Links:

• Multivariate normal distribution, wikipedia.org
• Joint probability distribution, wikipedia.org
• https://mathworld.wolfram.com/BivariateNormalDistribution.html

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 09:46, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Here:

• Will Superintelligent AI End the World? | Eliezer Yudkowsky | TED, 11 Jul 2023

I noticed Yudkowsky when researching the article on extropianism (One man's look at extropianism/Workshop#Eliezer Yudkowsky). (Another person warning about AI is Elon Musk.) --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 11:44, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

This is what I intend to figure out in this short post. My first estimate was 50%. It turns out it is more, as per the following:

• Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country, Holocaust Encyclopedia

  "In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million."

If we take 6,000,000 Jews killed per https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution, we get 63% Jews killed. As a caveat, there could be some increase of Jewish population between 1933 and 1938. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:33, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

To maintain my sanity and well-being in the present environment of the English Wikiversity, I probably have to learn to adbicate responsibility and disengage from the venues and processes where disruptive editors roam freely. Three monkeys is the relevant mnenomic symbol (Three wise monkeys). I can perhaps keep my sanity if I learn to pretend not to see the obvious bad things going on. Let us see for how long I can maintain that posture. I have a strong urge to flag problems when I see them, a personality trait that can be quite useful but not necessarily so in all contexts and situations. Be it as it may, I cannot be held responsible for misconduct of others over which I have no effective control/power, and I should not hold myself responsible either. Moreover, I should also learn to take offense (and stop interacting as a result), something that I hardly ever do. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 11:14, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Based on memory, I found this: 'Writers loathe using cliches like “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” But sometimes, it can’t be helped, especially when you’re Christopher Hitchens getting arrested in communist Czechoslovakia.
He tells a very “Hitchensian” story of trying to avoid referencing Kafka in an article while covering an underground movement in Prague. When the police break up the gathering, and refuse to tell Hitchens why he’s being arrested, the first thing that comes to mind, according to his retelling, is that he now has no choice but to reference Kafka in his article.'^[21].

Relating questions:

• Is there a principle in British or American law that the accused must know the accuser?

Relevant link having the actual Hitchens quote:

• https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/267726-very-often-the-test-of-one-s-allegiance-to-a-cause

A link on the right to face the accuser:

• Sixth Amendment, britannica.com
• Confrontation Clause, wikipedia.org -- crowd-sourced, additional caution required

--Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:57, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

It is quite possible that I will be indefinitely blocked in the English Wikiversity, as per the proposal made by user Atcovi at Wikiversity:Community Review/Dan Polansky. As part of a potential farewell, let me review some of the results of my curatorial work that I have done in the English Wikiversity since September 2024 when I was made a curator, over a year ago (Wikiversity:Candidates for Custodianship/Dan Polansky). The work can be seen in part in the action log, Special:Log/Dan Polansky.

Item	Description/Note
Completing the clean-up after Marshallsumter	I have moved ca. 680 pages created by Marshallsumter out of main space and Draft space into user space; ca. 330 were moved out of main space. Data is at User:Dan Polansky/Change request on articles by Marshallsumter. I thus largely completed the important work started by Dave Braunschweig and Guy vandegrift, both unfortunately inactive. I opened a Colloquium discussion for this to make sure there was enough consensus (Wikiversity:Colloquium#What to do with remaining Marshall Sumter pages) and then interacted with Marshallsumter on his user talk page, which lead to discovery of evidence supporting the notion that he is very likely an intentional disruptor and hoaxer. I waited at least a month to make sure enough time was given to collect input. This was a lot of effort and also risk (one can easily make a communication mistake), but the result seems very important, bringing an embarassing chapter of the English Wikiversity history likely to the close. I in fact moved some of his pages before I opened the discussion in Colloquium, but then realized opening a discussion to produce evidence of lack of serious opposition was very much preferable.
KYPark's literature pages	I proposed moving them out of mainspace via RFD and then I implemented the proposal when there were no objections after at least a month (Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion#Literature). These were about 500 low-value pages (a search "intitle:/KYPark.Literature/" finds 482 pages. By my assessment, these pages were an embarassment. The pages are now at User:KYPark/Literature. (I now requested more KYPark's pages from other root page for removal, via another RFD, Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion#Pragmatics/History.)
Smaller clean-ups	I moved a range of pages to user space, as per the move log. Examples include User:Andra Rei/Human Behavior, User:Jaredscribe/Foreign policy from Obama to Trump, User:Ktucker/Start a Wikiversity Project, User:Journey Into the Other Side of Nothingness/Ontorealis. There are many more. Part of it was moving bad pages by User:MarsSterlingTurner to his user space and then requesting his block for block evasion. Example page: User:MarsSterlingTurner/Consciousness. He kept on creating bad pages until he was blocked.
User:Saltrabook pages	I got on the case of Saltrabook, starting an inquiry about a possible copyright violation: User talk:Saltrabook#Possible copyright violation. The English Wikiversity needs to figure out whether the person (or persons) who control that user account could have been able to author the pages inserted; unless the user starts cooperating and properly responding, it is perhaps advisable to delete all pages created by him as a preemtive measure. Dave Braunschweig and Guy vandegrift did some decent work toward limiting problematic conduct of that user account, but probably more needs to be done.

From what I can tell, I was the biggest driver of the English Wikiversity clean-up in 2025 by far. One can review WV:RFD, WV:Request custodian action and WV:Colloquium to in part verify or at least plausibility check this notion, as well as the page move logs (I was usually moving pages without leaving a redirect instead of using the deletion tool). My page move log, 4000 last move actions (all are from 2025): here.

Some good structural things for which I did not need curator tools were the following recent proposals relating to GenAI:

• Wikiversity:Colloquium#Outright prohibition of use of GenAI AKA LLM in interaction, October 2025
• Wikiversity:Colloquium#General ban on direct use of GenAI output with exceptions, November 2025

Unfortunately, there does not yet seem to be enough support; I cannot claim the proposals passed. The first one has no support at all, it seems.

I have also made some mistakes. One learns, just like Popper's beetles, Popper's Kepler or Popper's Einstein (a nod to the great Austrian-British philosopher). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:17, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

1. ↑ https://cuni.cz/UKEN-361.html
2. ↑ Academic grading in Austria
3. ↑ Academic grading in the United States
4. ↑ "KUNSTLICHE INTELLIGENZ" ALS ENDLÖSUNG DER MENSCHENFRAGE by Weinzenbaum
5. ↑ https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/space/2025/04/10/elon-musk-optimus-mars/
6. ↑ The Cybernetics Group 1946-1953 by Steve Joshua Heims, monoskop.org
7. ↑ Máte-li víc bytů než dětí, jste spekulant, říká Hřib - Echo24.cz, 10 Sep 2025
8. ↑ https://www.idnes.cz/volby/zdenek-hrib-rozstrel-volby-rozhovor-byty-rusove-miliardari.A250910_123138_domaci_vov
9. ↑ https://www.blesk.cz/clanek/zpravy-politika/820320/piratsky-sef-zakotvil-u-rybnika-v-kyjich-hribova-vila-za-25-milionu-a-narceni-z-papalasstvi.html
10. ↑ https://www.pirati.cz/plan-pro-bydleni/plan-pro-bydleni/
11. ↑ https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abd_ul-Rahman_Lomax
12. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, britannica.com
13. ↑ https://neopythonic.blogspot.com/
14. ↑ https://backreaction.blogspot.com/
15. ↑ Add images & videos to your blog - Blogger Help, support.google.com
16. ↑ https://glossary.sil.org/term/lexical-unit
17. ↑ https://www.nltk.org/howto/framenet.html
18. ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_ResearchGate
19. ↑ https://help.researchgate.net/hc/en-us/articles/14846037644817-Copyright-and-ResearchGate
20. ↑ https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q629&diff=prev&oldid=1933860630
21. ↑ https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/christopher-hitchenss-best-arguments/