It's the same in the Netherlands. It's a great system I think. Sometimes you can see kids haul all their books on a bicycle, which is quite a challenge even for the Dutch
I wrote a Todo application in Idris that compiles to Javascript (https://github.com/leon-vv/Todo). I used the dependent type system of Idris to embed a small part of SQL in Idris, which means the type system can proof certain things about my queries (for example that fields accessed are actually part of the (joined) tables).
This is the root of the problem. The fact that his content is on YouTube does not imply that it will proliferate.
> How are we going to solve it
Critical thinking skills are apparently undervalued. This is a problem that is hopefully solvable by education and public debate. Even if not, the situation in which a small part of the population believes in David's ideas seems preferable to me than one in which a small group of (non democratically chosen) people decide what is acceptable content and what is not.
> It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others.
I agree, but different people will have different definitions of value.
> And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.
I agree, but censoring someone goes much farther than to disabuse. Too far, in my opinion.
The root of the problem seems to be the inability of people to correctly judge the likeliness of David's arguments to be true. This is not a problem that we're going to solve by banning David's content.
You seem to imply that it's okay for YouTube to censor content as long as the content is 'factually incorrect'. What is your definition of 'factually' incorrect content? More importantly, how do you prevent YouTube from coming up with their own definition of factual correctness and start banning content at will.
Maxima is also an amazing tool for symbolic maths, and is free software. I especially recommend the wxMaxima interface which is close in spirit to jupyter notebook
What a beautiful piece of writing. I always saw terraforming Mars as a technological challenge, it's great to see someone consider the ethics of the project. The following paragraph stood out most for me.
'Another reason for believing that terraforming would involve hubris is to consider how we treat Earth, a place we might call our “proper place” or “home.” If we think of our home as a place which nurtures us and in which we grow to maturity, then a case could be made that until we learn to treat our own planet better, any attempt to reshape another planet and call it our “home” would be hubristic.'
Whenever we apply technology people talk progress. Intuitively I would say that progress implies a destination and that progress is about getting closer to it. But can we really say we're making progress if we do not know the destination: how should people live together? When we agree to terraform Mars we do so in the belief that it's a good idea. But 'good' implies an answer to the question. It's very interesting to try to find these implicit answers and see if we can turn them into an explicit answer. Maybe then we'll find that often technology looks like progress, while it's not getting us closer at all.