I'll try to engage with the text.

Take this part of the exchange:

>BENTHAM. Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes.
MUGGER. Don't. This transaction will be our little secret. You have my word.

Say we accept the Mugger's claim. Wouldn't the Mugger repeat the threat of self-harm immediately after? The previous 10£ is already lost. What matters to Bentham is the future, so his moral calculus would be the same. That is, on the second iteration of the threat, Bentham must hand over another 10£. And so on...

So we run into an infinite regress. Say Bentham considers this option already at the first threat. He then does a calculus that assigns a non-zero probability to that the threat will continue until Bentham is required to give the Mugger more than what a finger is worth (assume a finger has finite utility). Bentham can then rationally reject the threat on basis that accepting the threat, we end up on a slippery slope that after some finite number of threat iterations of finite time leads to negative global utility.

The Mugger could then commit to that if given 10£, that would be the end of said threats of self-harm, to Bentham or anyone else. Now wouldn't we say that Bentham is right to fork up the cash? I'd say so. 10£ seems like a small price to pay to make the Mugger give up all future threats of self-harm (we assume here the Mugger is truthful). So maybe the Mugger should up the price -- why ask for a measly 10£ if it only can be done once? And now we are in familiar, but arguably unavoidable, "icky" territory of assining cash value to the physical well-being of individual humans. What price should Bentham (or the community) be willing to spend in order to prevent a certain self-harm of a certain individual among us? And we are back in territory where utilitarinism works pretty well.

So.... how well did I do? I think these one-shot moral dilemmas are tricky in that the reason they often conflict with our intuitions is because we think about the next step, the step after that etc. If the Bentham stand-in truly could know, or at least expect (given assigned probabilities) that there is one finite cost to accept for the removal of a negative utility, then our moral intuitions would line up with utilitarianism: there is a cash value we should be ready to depart from when that act removes a quantifiable moral ill.

No solution, only more or less convincing arguments.

I do not think the question is as clear cut though as objective vs subjective. It is possible also to argue that morality is a social property. To see morality as a matter of the individual subject would then be wrong. However, neither would the morality be founded in a universal nature. The social laws and conventions are then imitated, adopted, reproduced through the individual human. In a sense that is an objective morality, not a choice or something individual, but neither is it universal.

If we accept this one can debate depth. For example, if our moral intuitions about who or what to blame for an unprovoked murder, or different moral status of children, can be traced back to some conventions from millennia ago, what does that imply for the present? Can we elect to switched the moral system that plays out within us or not? There is a bootstrap problem here, which I know some philosophers like Agnes Callard are thinking of. Questions about the truth in traditions are also found here, truths that are not simply matters of scientific scrutiny.

I find that many deeper debates about morality end up in questions about purpose or telos. Is everything arbitrary, or has the human creature been imbued with some purpose. Even the Sam Harris approach to look at biology and survival and reproduction ends up there, attributing meaning to suffering. It makes the God question also inevitable. Alasdair MacIntyre has looked into telos and why some given feature of the universe we live in is likely to have granted us with an objective purpose.

Lots more can be said, my point merely is that once we look deeper into the question you pose, another set of issues are encountered, which challenges the question and what morality is or can be.

The question in OP allows for some interpretation. Even if there was a crater formed in 1178, I doubt Ceasar would be shocked by the appearance of the present-day moon. So I am trying to think of what could be recognized as different by a keen observer (yes, fuzzy definitions, but history is full of dudes that stare into the sky and see things, so imagine one of those characters).

But you can see some "texture" on the moon surface. Especially when the moon is about one week after new moon, it is not yet that bright that you only see a bright disk in the night sky. This assumes you are in a relatively dark place to begin with, so far from a city, and that the sky is clear. Even then, the craters have to be pretty large to be observable as pattern, hence the many small craters that form are irrelevant even to the keen observer I imagined.

One thing that in principle can be different is the crater patterning. However, it seems unlikely that has changed in any meaningful degree in human history.

Certainly not all craters have been dated, but a decent number has. You can access a crater Excel sheet on this page. I shortlist two that stand out:

• The crater named Giordano Bruno has an interesting history. In 1178 there is a well-documented event on the moon where "fire, hot coals and sparks" burst from the moon. It has been thought this was when an impact caused the creation of this crater. That would have been a change to the lunar surface that a keen observer would have noted. So at least Ceasar would have looked at a different moon than today. However, this theory has been doubted since there is no record of an associated meteor storm on Earth, as would have been expected. So this is at least a young crater, but probably not as young as 1178.
• The crater named Eimmart A is noted in the database as "very young". It is a small crater, however (~7 km diameter), and when the lunar people say "very young", they mean it is "probably less than 100 million years ago". So sure, maybe it might have formed early during the human era. Still, not that likely.

From what I can tell, a major crater formation that would change the appearance of the moon viewed with eyes would generate a great deal of meteors on Earth, like when comet debris hit Earth. I do not know enough obscure history, but if a major crater formed while there were literate humans on Earth, then maybe they would have recorded that as some great mystical event.

So in short, my best guess is that major crater formation that would alter the view of the moon during human civilization is unlikely, but possible.

My guess is that light pollution from cities are a bigger difference in how the moon appears to us and to Ceasar.

As far as I know, not a problem. That’s how we used it a few years ago.

In the past I used the free desktop version and it was sufficient. They used to have specialized addons, which you then paid for (there are specialized chemistry nodes I know). So at first you can download the free version and see where that takes you. I honestly doubt it’s all that expensive if you want their corporate support and special addons. It’s a nice small company.

This will always depend on how fancy you need your ML to be. But I had a similar problem some time ago where I wanted to give persons who knew very little programming something more advanced than dumb Excel charts to filter, analyze and explore their data.

I ended up with KNIME: https://www.knime.com

You can create pretty advanced data selections and analysis by "programming" logic units by an interactive interface and mostly simple configurations. They have free versions that are pretty OK, that you can run on your desktop, which contains basic to medium ML methods. It worked in my case, maybe it can work for you too.

The author provides good edge cases where theories once labelled as conspiracy theories proved to be correct. The conspiracy was true. And since many legitimate theories, in science for example, turns out to be wrong, the author asks: "Why do people pick on conspiracy theories?"

I think there is a problem in wording here. A conspiracy theory is, literally speaking, a theory about a conspiracy wherein bad intentions have led to error, lies and falsehood.

The key here is the charge of bad intentions. When Lamarck formulated his nowadays (mostly) refuted theory of evolution, I doubt anyone ascribe to him bad intentions. He was acting in good faith and did what a good scientists should do: show his work, enable refutation and critique. When someone suggests that the Face of Mars was covered up by a conspiracy, it is no longer a question if there truly is a depiction of a human face on Mars or not, but rather about someone's bad intentions.

So a conspiracy theory is a moral judgement of some social actor masquerading as a theory of facts. Moral judgements can be good and proper, but they can also be bad and uncomfortable, and they can challenge the self-image and narrative of a given society. That is true regardless if the specific factual statements are correct. To throw out an "edgy" and admittedly dubious suggestion: if the degree of falsehood in the justification of the Iraq War had remained hidden, maybe current distrust in US/Western governments would be reduced and contemporary polarization and conflict would also be reduced. As I said, I do not claim this to be so, but if it was true, then with some utilitarian moral philosophy, we might say we would be better off if the conspiracy theory never gained a following. It is not about the facts, but about the disruptive nature of the implied moral judgement of the conspiracy theory.

Therefore some conspiracy theories are easier to accept. The occasional tinfoil hat and manic street preacher adds to diversity and a nice urban aesthetics. A revolutionary uprising and terror not so much.

So I think the author has a few good points to add, but that the author's argument is too narrow when the conspiracy is viewed as only a conflict over facts.

In hindsight I should have used a better example to illustrate the point that the apparent durability of a covalent bond also depends on a relative free energy, where that delta can be highly dependent on environment, which in turn means that any ranking of bond strengths implicitly assumes some environment. I could have used, as you note, a host of other examples rather than a biological process with multiple intermediates etc. Since I stand by my bigger point in that comment, and it would be a substantial edit to correct the details, I’ll hope you’re helpful corrective will suffice if a fellow redditor wishes to dig into the details. Thanks.

I disagree. That energy you quote for NaCl assumes the two ions are pulled apart in vacuum. If we then move the respective ion into water, there is a favourable solvation free energy. So the free energy of the final state of separated NaCl in aqueous solution is different than had it been done in vacuum. Any intermediate state stabilization, that only alters the kinetics, is not relevant.

The O2 example is, I admit, a bit different in the details. But in vacuum, if I do a homolytic cleavage of the covalent bond in O2, the two radical oxygen atoms of the final state are far from stable. So any other reactant that can combine with the two oxygen atoms make that final state stabler. The tricker part is that the path from start to finish include at least one transition state. In biology and chemistry, we can alter the kinetics of this cleavage, while leaving the final state the same, by adjusting any catalytic component. That is a more subtle point. My argument is much simpler. In vacuum, O2 is a strong bond because the final state after dissociation is unstable, while in the example system, O2 separates more readily mostly because the dissociation does not generate two free radical atoms, but one where the atomic oxygen binds to iron.

Hence, the strength of a bond must either be defined with a common reference state (vacuum typically as I mention), but then bond strength is a more abstract quantity and less informative of practical questions of stability, robustness etc, or we consider the problem in full, i.e. the stability of initial and final states are part of the analysis.

Yeah, "bonds" is a fuzzy concept. We also have "intermolecular bonds", but they are even farther from a well-defined structure and require analysis in terms of a distribution of relative configurations.

But I suppose these terms arose historically and are based on some phenomenology of human experiences. Say stuff that sticks together at room temperatures might be understood as "bonded together". So then only gases are understood as lacking bonds. With our molecular level understanding nowadays, that puts very different things in the same conceptual bucket. But history is hard to rewrite...

Bond strengths are relative energies. That means you must consider two states: what you have with the bond intact and what you have without the bond intact. The latter state especially can be highly environment dependent.

So, for example, the ionic bond between sodium and chloride ions is quite strong in a dry environment (melting pure salt takes a decent amount of energy). But put salt in water and the bond breaks spontaneously. That is because you alter the energy (or free energy to be precise) of the latter state. Similarly, the covalent bond between two oxygen atoms is pretty strong when O2 is floating as gas. But, thankfully for us, inside our bodies, near hemoglobin especially, that bond can be broken at very reasonable energies. Again, the difference is in the latter of the two states.

So a categorical statement that one bond type always is stronger than the other is not possible. What often is the case is that these energies are considered in vacuum as a reference environment. But that says by itself little about what applies in everyday applications. Because salts tend to be more dependent on whatever solvent we surround them with, as a matter of experience, really strong materials we interact with tend to be more covalent in their bonding. However, metals are an interesting challenge, since say Tungsten is relatively easy to deform, but extremely hard to melt… so even in the vacuum reference environment, these material properties are not as easy to place on a single weak—strong axis.