• 7 Posts
  • 110 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • You have to be really careful to distinguish between the position that the canon is temporarily, functionally closed and that it is closed permanently. You can definitely find plenty of people who support the strict position, but I believe that it is less popular than the looser position overall, especially when looking outside of Christian apologetics circles.

    There’s a few good reasons to think that the canon is only temporarily closed, not permanently closed:

    1. The Bible wasn’t canonized or seen as a single book until after Revelation was written, so it is unlikely that John had the whole Bible in mind.
    2. Revelation says that the restriction is on “the book of this prophecy”, i.e., the book of Revelation itself. Even if you correctly consider that “prophecy” is more than just foretelling, there are parts of the Bible that don’t count as that.
    3. If you read them carefully, you’ll see that Deuteronomy and Proverbs do not say anything against saying God’s words in a different way or recontextuallizing them to apply them to a different situation. The problem only comes about if you change the meaning of the message.
    4. At least according to both Claude and GPT, the idea of a strict closure didn’t take root until the Reformation (about 1.5 millennia later).
    5. A non-strict interpretation fits better with the fact that the story of the Bible is not yet finished. If the story is unfinished then it’s likely that God will do more works which ought to be recorded. For example, it would probably be helpful to the people living through the great tribulation to know what the actual history was that led up to that event.






  • linguists have estimated something like 31,000 languages have existed in human history (and that’s the lowest estimate). Currently, there are roughly six thousand languages spoken in the world. We don’t know exactly, because we’re just beginning to classify some languages in remote locations. But using conservative figures, something like 81% of all human languages have become extinct.

    What worries linguists, however, is the current rate of language death in the world. Over half the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers; that’s about like the population of Wasilla, Alaska. Around 82% of languages have fewer speakers than there are people in Waco, Texas. Linguists estimate that at least half the world’s languages will become extinct in the next one hundred years. That means, on average, a language is dying about every two weeks.

    Taken from a page on the University of Houston’s website.


  • I get where you’re coming from because people and those directly over them will always bear a large portion of the blame and you can only take safety so far.

    However, that blame can only go so far as well, because the designers of a thing who overlook or ignore safety loopholes should bear responsibility for their failures. We know some people will always be more susceptible to implicit suggestions than others are and that not everyone has someone who’s responsible over them in the first place, so we need to design AIs accordingly.

    Think of it like blaming an employee’s shift supervisor when an employee dies when the work environment is itself unsafe. Or think of it like only blaming a gun user and not the gun laws. Yes, individual responsibility is a thing, but the system as a whole has a responsibility all it’s own.






  • I remember watching parts of the original trilogy and thinking they were interesting but were ultimately full of that boring interpersonal drama stuff. When the prequels came along, they really got me into the world building aspect of the story and gave me a love for Star Wars as a whole. After that and getting older, I gained a greater appreciation for the older films as well, even though I’m still not much a fan of interpersonal drama stuff (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, movies in general.)

    From what I understand, the sequel trilogy doesn’t fit very well with the established world building, and is iffy on the interpersonal drama as well, so I don’t have much desire to watch them.