Reddit comments from December 2024

Abstract seems very interesting. I think the missing piece here is tying the gradient of Islamic hermeneutics to a wider theory of cognitive biases and multiple-intelligences. There seems to certainly be an multi-dimenstional…

Is there any kind of data analysis for how many narrators or how prolific those narrators are about whom major biographical information is taken directly from asanid and not from other sources? There's certainly a historical problem with relying only or primarily on asanid to determine information about people for Rijal literature that is then used to evaluate those asanid.

But how often did this happen and how important are those narrators, and how much information is being extracted from asanid to go into Rijal compilations?

It would also be interesting to dissect how much of this is coming from narrator comments or sub-narrations (when a narrator's comments on a narration also become a part of the chain itself).

Anam 74
Araf 138
Ibrahim 35
Maryam 42
Anbiya 52, 57
Hajj 30
Shua'ra 71
Ankabut 17
Ankabut 25
Saba 13

Critiquing "aṣnām", "awthān", and "tamathīl".

I don't think you need to go to anthropology or history to ask this. It's a pretty well documented sociological and psychological phenomenon across cultures that children develop a rudimentary monotheistic conceptualization of a "God" or Higher Power regardless of religious upbringing. Look up research on "natural religion" or "intuitive theism." It seems that there's a kind of developmental predisposition in children towards a kind of monotheism, although I don't know of any scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

Since I got downvoted: * [https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/2004\_Kelemen\_IntuitiveTheist.pdf](https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/2004_Kelemen_IntuitiveTheist.pdf) *…

* [https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/2004\_Kelemen\_IntuitiveTheist.pdf](https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/2004_Kelemen_IntuitiveTheist.pdf) *…

Do you agree with the research that indicates that this is a pervasive cross-cultural phenomenon rooted in human psychology and not a learned belief? If so, then we can agree monotheism likely predates polytheism from a psycho-social perspective and is likely the default stance. I am not arguing that this belief is valid, I am saying that current research indicates the vast majority of people intuitively have this belief at a young age.

I sent scientific research based on reproduced studies. You tell me why you disagree with it based on some kind of speculative historical argument that cannot be tested experimentally and is mostly based off of constructing a narrative with limited data.

I don't see how this is a discussion because you didn't engage with my evidence.

Have you looked into research around the Quranic discourse pertaining to Jewish accusations of Mary? The specific idea of a Roman soldier being the partner isn't mentioned but the insinuation that she was accused of adultery is elsewhere in the Quran.

This is definitely a reach to say the least

For the most part Salafism is colored by a skepticism of the occult and esotericism, along with a fervent desire for scriptural fundamentalism. Salafism is anathema to the occult.

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab didn't even use mnemonics. He just numbered points in his short treatises. The Three Principles, the Four Matters, the Six Principles. The author somehow associated bullet points with occult numerology, which is much more sophisticated than that in Islamicate magic.

Most people today and throughout history did not learn prayer from hadith. They learn it from someone else who knows the prayer.

Pg. 650 of Sinai's "Key Terms of the Qur'an" defines it as:

"al-aʿrāb pl. | the Bedouin"

The word for Arab is العرب. The most Arab of the Arabs are the bedouins, hence their being called الأعراب.

Ibn Taymiyyah was considered probably the fourth or fifth most influential Hanbali jurist within a century after his death. But as Jonathan Brown notes in "Misquoting Muhammad", the Hanbalites were always a cloistered exclusive madh'hab -…

The word الأعراب has always been a synonym for بداوي, before the Quran and after it. You don't get to change what words mean.

People did call themselves Arab before Islam. What are you talking about?

His students were all pretty well received but nowhere near as popular as they are now. Ibn Kathir's tafsir was not given the kind of de facto prominence it has now, to the point where it has supplanted classics like Tabari. Ibn al-Qayyim's Madarij and other Sufi works were seen as kind of neutering Tasawuff and missing the point. Al-Dhahabi's approach to hadith was not widely respected.

After ibn Taymiyyah became the imam par excellence his students also gained a lot of secondhand prestige.

Yes

He did not inspire any kind of significant reformist or political movement before ibn Abd al-Wah'hab

I'm not sure this is an academic question it's just a routine Arabic question but yes, zawj can refer to a single or multiple wives. The plural azwaj is used in the Quran as well.

Yes.

I don't remember him making an assertion like that

Third option: AI will do so many tasks for Gen Z & alpha to the point where they aren't functional in the job market and older devs (Zillenials/Millenials) become x10 devs while consolidating jobs.

This is terrifyingly good

Waiting for Woodbridge or Louden...

Are we not getting it?

In Ashburn right? No word on Woodbridge yet?

I'm from Sudan. Why isn't anyone helping the Sudanese? It's not because people particularly dislike Sudanese or Palestinians or Syrians or Uyghers. It's that most people are absorbed in their own lives, immediate problems, and care about their self-interest over anything else. It's just that simple.

Yet Aafia Siddique continues to languish

It was the only Miyazaki film I felt that didn't have to be an animation. It wasn't representative of his talents. Had it been live action or 3d animated it would've been the exact same movie

Let's not debase Sacred knowledge by running it through GPT.

The whole point of opposing Israeli genocide is that it's wrong to harm innocent people and children. This is terrible

Per use or per seat or per month? Like per access of Cocounsel?

There are several free legal research tools. Stanford runs one. CourtListener runs another one. They don't have millions of users. No one cares.

Most Americans don't have the time, interest, or capacity to wade through legal opinions and briefs. It's not a part of our culture because the law HAS been paywalled for so long and only recently has there been an attempt to open source it.

In terms of lawyers, these services aren't always up to date eith the latest judge's opinions. The way lawyers do research is also a bit different and to a large degree professional legal research has become dependent on providers like LexisNexis and WestLaw (the way they reference their cases internally is an expectation in legal filings now).

It's another example of big business serving a function which should probably be a public good but which is privitized. Lawyers would rather pay for the legitimacy these names confer instead of using a free database they're less familiar with.

Any update on this?

This was amazing. Mind-blowing film. So dense with metaphor, meaning, and symbolism. It reminded me of Kubrick in the best possible way

Mind-blowing to watch him speak

In what way is this guy representative of Muslims or Islam and why should we care about him

Outward appearance of religiosity has almost nothing to do with inersexual or relationship dynamics. There are very shy, respectful, and guarded non-Muslims. There are religious Muslims who will abuse the opposite gender. Each case must be taken individually. Yes, ideally, Muslims should have a particular decorum. That doesn't exist in the West.

If a person's outward is bad, their inward is surely bad. However if their outward is good, their inward is unknown. That being said, people's appearance of religiosity doesn't neccesarily correlate with ethical interpersonal behavior - even if they have good in other aspects of their life like hayā or salah or ilm. Nowadays most people have bankrupt interpersonal ethics regardless of whether they wear niqab or bikini or thowb or suit.

Check out Sapience Institute and Muslim Skeptic. They answer all of these

Just give me o1 on the Asisstant API and I'll be happy

The real limit on AGI or ASI... compute costs.

I don't believe LLMs can actually reason and it's still just linear algebra + next-token prediction. But even if AGI were possible, I agree the compute would be too much.

OpenAI tricked a lot of people with o1-preview's "thinking" feature which seems to have just been a very small model quickly summarizing the output o1-preview was producing before it just spat it all out at you. If you compare the speed of 4o to o1 or o1-preview it's clear OpenAI is just withholding the results so you can see this "thinking" summary.

Metrics and performance don't describe reason. The definition of reason,

"The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements by a process of logic."

This requires subjective individual experience (qualia). LLMs do not have qualia. There is no understanding or conceptualizing happening within an LLM. An LLM has no independent concept of an apple, it has only a large amount of vectors connecting the string "apple" to other strings.

There's definitely non-linguistic thinkers and research on non-linguistic cognition.

You just gave an account of cognition which is not only entirely bioreductionist but also unproven. There is no scientific evidence that subjective thoughts, cognition, or consciousness stems solely from neurobiological processes. This is the hard problem of consciousness.

The entire question of whether AI can truly reason requires solving the hard problem of consciousness.

You're describing a materialist bioreductionist view of experience and memory. I don't agree with that. There's also no evidence subjective human experience is rooted in biology. It's calle the hard problem of consciousness.

That's called solipsism or skepticism. You're coming full circle and doing epistemology/metaphysics. There's no solution to rigorous skepticism outside of using one of the epistemological models (Plato/Aristotle, Islamic epistemology, Hegel, etc.) None of them reduce the brain to bioreductionism, although you can try to read the conclusions of Hegel that way

I don't think it resembles but it's incredibly good at imitating it and can often produce outcomes that are superior at solving objectives. There's no doubt an LLM can do more work faster and better than almost all people. That doesn't mean it is reasoning or has cognition, it just means it's a really sophisticated statistical system predicting the best outcome given certain variables.

Just because the variables are vectorized words doesn't mean it still isn't computational. Human reasoning is not computational.

If what we care about is the appearance of consciousness then we already have that. You can set up a custom GPT with system instructions that speaks and behaves like a person already, and that would fool over 80% of people.

How much do these go for on resale market?

That just describes induction and utility, not truth claims. Most people that believe broadly in "science," including scientists, think "science" actually determines truths about reality and that those truths are also effective - not that science uncovers useful methods which may or may not have any truth value.

You wouldn't want to base the merit of science on pragmatism because of the problem of induction and the underdetermination of scientific theory.

Except technology means we have less time to freely think than ever before...

Empiricsts lost but theologians and philosophers gave up on metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology so as unjustifiable as empricism is they're on the top. It's not going so well, as we can see with climate disaster and the slow freefall of civilization.

Number of Episodes
Season 1: 9 episodes
Season 2: 7 episodes

Total Runtime
Season 1: Approximately 496 minutes (8 hours and 16 minutes)
Season 2: 427 minutes (7 hours and 7 minutes)

Episode Length

Season 1:
Shortest episode: 32 minutes
Longest episode: 63 minutes

Average episode length: ~55 minutes

Season 2:
Shortest episode: 51 minutes
Longest episode: 76 minutes

Average episode length: ~61 minutes

Key Differences
Season 2 has fewer episodes but generally longer runtimes per episode.

The longest episode in Season 2 (76 minutes) is significantly longer than any episode in Season 1.

Season 2 has a more consistent episode length, with all episodes over 50 minutes.

Despite having fewer episodes, Season 2's longer runtimes allow for deeper exploration of characters and plot developments.

While Season 1 had more total runtime due to its higher episode count, Season 2 compensates with longer individual episodes, potentially allowing for more complex storytelling and character development within each installment.

Hopefully a ChatGPT hallucination because that would be unbelievably dumb

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-pluralism/#LogiNihi

Had to replace factory battery with antigravity

Unfortunately a lot of Muslimah's have swallowed whole the narratives demonizing Muslim men and while they theoretically oppose oppression they're too often willing to directly oppress Muslim men or demonize them - not realizing the agendas they're perpetuating.

Gigi is actually a real Arabic name

US was actively involved in fighting all of Assad's enemies until very recently. They never directly supported him but without US involvement, Assad would have been toppled possibly 6 years ago.

I got it thanks

Love the shawls and turtlenecks.

Cake day 😋

Harvey is a GPT wrapper not a vertical agent. I'm not sure why it's up there at all

It's a chatbot with RAG of a legal dataset that sometimes underperforms regular GPT on legal tasks. An AI agent uses AI automations to complete tasks. Harvey always requires a prompt. It's a legal chatbot implementation on top of ChatGPT without agency

It's a big controversy in the legaltech space, this, Cocounsel, and LexisNexis+AI are all chatbots with a legal RAG dataset ontop. There is a lot of negative speculation around Harvey. Yes I've tried them

It's just like ChatGPT just that it is tailored for legal prompting because it has a vectorized RAG dataset underneath, but it frequently hallucinates and the output is often worse than regular GPT