Great article! I note you mentioned "laissez-faire economics" but this is not the whole story. Due to conquest the land in Ireland was held by English landlords. Although there were some modifications via the Catholic Relief Act by 1778 Catholic land ownership was down to 5% - several laws were intended to change this but two hundred years of repression created a poor class of Irish tenant farmers with no capital.
In the period of The Famine (1845-1852), Ireland continued to export large quantities of beef cattle and grains even as millions of Irish people starved or emigrated. Anglo-Irish landlords raised cattle and grew grain as cash crops for the British market. The stream of food leaving was protected by British troops with troop numbers reaching around 30,000 by 1847-1848. There were numerous incidents where starving crowds tried to prevent food from being exported, only to be dispersed by troops. Many of those arrested in incidents or for taking a salmon or a deer or a hare were transported to Australia.
The generally accepted estimate is that approximately 1 million people died during the famine years (1845-1852), though precise figures remain debated. Some historians suggest the toll could have been as high as 1.5 million. Deaths resulted from both starvation and famine-related diseases like typhus, cholera, and dysentery.
Between 1845 and 1855, an estimated 2 million people emigrated from Ireland. The emigration continued at high levels for decades afterward, with millions more leaving through the rest of the 19th century.
Ireland's population fell from about 8.2 million in 1841 to approximately 5.8 million by 1861 - a decline of nearly 30% through death and emigration combined. These figures represent one of the largest forced migrations in modern history, this reshaped Irish society and creating an Irish diaspora that influenced the development of multiple nations.
As an Irishman here in the North of Ireland is it any wonder that we detest the British?
Wow, guys! Nice collaboration. Pieces like this are what make this site so fun, unique, and an enjoyable part of my day.
And I basically just want to echo what Brenden already said and that collectively it would be nice if people learned to delight in understanding multiplicities.
Thanks! We had a lot of fun in this one. I'm drafting another longish post like this but on different moral systems. It's taking longer than I expected but I hope it will be similarly comprehensive.
I enjoyed this piece. Good stuff. Instead of seeking a singular, rooted truth, we should embrace multiplicities and differences. Objective and subjective truths aren't binaries but intertwined plateaus. The challenges of self-referential claims and formal systems underscore the need to move beyond representational thinking. Our quest shouldn't be for an absolute truth, or objective truth, but for understanding the assemblages of truths, always in flux, always becoming.
Great article guys! I enjoyed how it put all these difficult concepts together in a coherent and easily understandable way. What a marvelous and playful world we live in 😀 Something may want to unfold the path of time to see what happens!
It would have been much more boring if we could define a big T truth, don’t you think?
Self reference is tricky because it can be much more subtle and still contradictory. For example if I say "I will edit all articles whose authors don't edit themselves", then what happens with the articles I write? This type of self reference lurks beneath any sufficiently expressive language, that's why we need to ditch self reference all together if we want consistency, but then we have to throw away the baby with the water and forgo some potentially useful and true claims.
Since Trump took the language game of politics to a completely other level, with the normalisation of alternative truths and -facts, supported by 75 million adult American voters, truth has become more of a commodity than an indispensable tool that supports the politicians in their decission making proces and their actions.
The question I propose is: why do we so desperately cling on to the human factor where the decission making proces is conserned? What is the balance between human trustworthyness and that of AGI short and midterm? Taking in mind that the power lies more and more with the multi billionairs, one of which is Peter Thiel, who recently claimed that in the future roughly 80 percent of humans are to be considered disposable. Not replacable, but disposable. In his view AGI does not have to save humanity.
Is what he says the one and only really important truth or is it just one of many? Just an opinion?
I've said many times before the world doesn't need billionaires, and I still have to find an example of one who's been an indisputable net positive influence for humanity. That's probably one of my most unhinged opinions, billionaires are unnecessary, and most of them actually do more harm than good. They all suffer from survivorship bias, they believe they are somehow genuinely better than the rest, and not just the lucky winners of a lottery ticket that tends to favor the selfish more than the gentle. But let's make the thought experiment of restarting history, perhaps only 2000 years before, and ask in how many iterations the same people end up in the same positions of power.
re "The claim that specifies which scientific claims are true is itself not a scientific claim. Falsifiability is not falsifiable!" surely you can revisit any experimental evidence that disproves a theory and find bad experimental design, mistakes or even fakery?
Thanks for the comment. Yes, you can falsify any general empirical claim. What you cannot falsify is the epistemological claim that “falsification is the right way to determine the truth value of any general empirical claim”.
Yes, absolutely, but that's not what I'm saying here. The argument here is that falsification itself as an epistemic theory also makes some claims that can be evaluated. The main claim is precisely the definition of empirical truth, which is something like "empirical claims are true to the extent they can be falsified by evidence, and there is sufficient evidence that they are not". This claim in itself is not an empirical claim but an epistemic claim and thus cannot be falsified. Falsificationism is not self-contained (luckily).
Woo hoo!
True story: it has been over 2 years since we worked on this!
Good old times. We gotta repeat it.
The Irish Famine (1845-1852)
Great article! I note you mentioned "laissez-faire economics" but this is not the whole story. Due to conquest the land in Ireland was held by English landlords. Although there were some modifications via the Catholic Relief Act by 1778 Catholic land ownership was down to 5% - several laws were intended to change this but two hundred years of repression created a poor class of Irish tenant farmers with no capital.
In the period of The Famine (1845-1852), Ireland continued to export large quantities of beef cattle and grains even as millions of Irish people starved or emigrated. Anglo-Irish landlords raised cattle and grew grain as cash crops for the British market. The stream of food leaving was protected by British troops with troop numbers reaching around 30,000 by 1847-1848. There were numerous incidents where starving crowds tried to prevent food from being exported, only to be dispersed by troops. Many of those arrested in incidents or for taking a salmon or a deer or a hare were transported to Australia.
The generally accepted estimate is that approximately 1 million people died during the famine years (1845-1852), though precise figures remain debated. Some historians suggest the toll could have been as high as 1.5 million. Deaths resulted from both starvation and famine-related diseases like typhus, cholera, and dysentery.
Between 1845 and 1855, an estimated 2 million people emigrated from Ireland. The emigration continued at high levels for decades afterward, with millions more leaving through the rest of the 19th century.
Ireland's population fell from about 8.2 million in 1841 to approximately 5.8 million by 1861 - a decline of nearly 30% through death and emigration combined. These figures represent one of the largest forced migrations in modern history, this reshaped Irish society and creating an Irish diaspora that influenced the development of multiple nations.
As an Irishman here in the North of Ireland is it any wonder that we detest the British?
Damn, I had some idea it was an extreme famine but this puts it in much better context. Thanks for the comment!
Fantastic article, one I’ve always wanted to read!
Please fix the “Tarki” -> “Tarski” typo. Thanks!
Thanks!
Wow, guys! Nice collaboration. Pieces like this are what make this site so fun, unique, and an enjoyable part of my day.
And I basically just want to echo what Brenden already said and that collectively it would be nice if people learned to delight in understanding multiplicities.
Thanks! We had a lot of fun in this one. I'm drafting another longish post like this but on different moral systems. It's taking longer than I expected but I hope it will be similarly comprehensive.
I enjoyed this piece. Good stuff. Instead of seeking a singular, rooted truth, we should embrace multiplicities and differences. Objective and subjective truths aren't binaries but intertwined plateaus. The challenges of self-referential claims and formal systems underscore the need to move beyond representational thinking. Our quest shouldn't be for an absolute truth, or objective truth, but for understanding the assemblages of truths, always in flux, always becoming.
Well said, and thank you for weighing in, Brenden!
Great article guys! I enjoyed how it put all these difficult concepts together in a coherent and easily understandable way. What a marvelous and playful world we live in 😀 Something may want to unfold the path of time to see what happens!
It would have been much more boring if we could define a big T truth, don’t you think?
Thanks, Alex! I'm super happy to have been a small part. This stuff is so much fun to think about.
Thanks! Yeah, super boring 😁
Amazing
re "this statement is false". It's ambiguous. It can be either:
1. not self-referential: "(This statement) is false" which you rightly pointed out is nonsense cos "this statement" isn't a proposition.
Or
2. self-referential: "(this statement is false) is false".
It made me wonder if such claims only fail if you double parse, so it's a time travel thing like killing your grandfather.
Self reference is tricky because it can be much more subtle and still contradictory. For example if I say "I will edit all articles whose authors don't edit themselves", then what happens with the articles I write? This type of self reference lurks beneath any sufficiently expressive language, that's why we need to ditch self reference all together if we want consistency, but then we have to throw away the baby with the water and forgo some potentially useful and true claims.
Since Trump took the language game of politics to a completely other level, with the normalisation of alternative truths and -facts, supported by 75 million adult American voters, truth has become more of a commodity than an indispensable tool that supports the politicians in their decission making proces and their actions.
The question I propose is: why do we so desperately cling on to the human factor where the decission making proces is conserned? What is the balance between human trustworthyness and that of AGI short and midterm? Taking in mind that the power lies more and more with the multi billionairs, one of which is Peter Thiel, who recently claimed that in the future roughly 80 percent of humans are to be considered disposable. Not replacable, but disposable. In his view AGI does not have to save humanity.
Is what he says the one and only really important truth or is it just one of many? Just an opinion?
I've said many times before the world doesn't need billionaires, and I still have to find an example of one who's been an indisputable net positive influence for humanity. That's probably one of my most unhinged opinions, billionaires are unnecessary, and most of them actually do more harm than good. They all suffer from survivorship bias, they believe they are somehow genuinely better than the rest, and not just the lucky winners of a lottery ticket that tends to favor the selfish more than the gentle. But let's make the thought experiment of restarting history, perhaps only 2000 years before, and ask in how many iterations the same people end up in the same positions of power.
Thanks. Very interesting.
re "The claim that specifies which scientific claims are true is itself not a scientific claim. Falsifiability is not falsifiable!" surely you can revisit any experimental evidence that disproves a theory and find bad experimental design, mistakes or even fakery?
Thanks for the comment. Yes, you can falsify any general empirical claim. What you cannot falsify is the epistemological claim that “falsification is the right way to determine the truth value of any general empirical claim”.
Subtle. Yes, Falsification can never prove, it can only fail to disprove. Which is why science is always "our best guess" rather than absolute truth.
Yes, absolutely, but that's not what I'm saying here. The argument here is that falsification itself as an epistemic theory also makes some claims that can be evaluated. The main claim is precisely the definition of empirical truth, which is something like "empirical claims are true to the extent they can be falsified by evidence, and there is sufficient evidence that they are not". This claim in itself is not an empirical claim but an epistemic claim and thus cannot be falsified. Falsificationism is not self-contained (luckily).