Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[DSMatticus]

Kaelik, two problems.

1) You are pretending, again, that I'm throwing around definitionless words. Consciousness. Glad we cleared that up.

2) Your failed definition quibbling aside, your inductive arguments are just flat out bad. They do not affect the likelihood of the question we're analyzing. Induction is about taking specific examples and generating from that a general rule. This means that the general rule should describe objects which are as closely fitting to the inductive sample as possible! I tried to illustrate this with the example of penguins and birds. Using penguins to make inductive claims about birds would lead to the following statement: "Birds are flightless aquatic predators who prefer cold climates." If your inductive sample is "the consciousnesses we have observed," then your general rule should only be about consciousnesses we have observed. E.g., if you want to claim I'm not omniscient because all observed human consciousnesses are not omniscient, that is inductively valid. But making claims about consciousness in general using a very specific subset of consciousness is broadening the inductive claim so far as to make it useless. It's the same reason you can't use penguins to make inductive claims about birds. A subset has more specific properties than the encompassing set.

Inductive reasoning, as you do it, is the caricature they would show you in an early philosophy/mathematics course on logic to teach you why inductive reasoning is dangerous. Interpolate, don't extrapolate. Keep your claims inside your evidence.

is a good example how Sharia law may in fact violate the principle teachings of the religion it purports to come from.

When's the last time you forced a woman to marry her rapist, or stoned an adulterer to death? Never? Why are you violating the principle teachings of the religion you purport to follow?

Both of your religions are fucking stupid, and the institution has been very careful to gradually divorce itself from the parts that are socially unpopular and adopt parts that are socially popular. Pretending that change makes religion not a religion means Christianity hasn't been a religion for at least a thousand years, and those institutions owe a shit ton of money in taxes they haven't been paying. Actually, you know what, I suddenly like Tzor's argument a whole lot more. I agree totally.

[PoliteNewb]

You're positing a claim without significant evidence. I'm not going to hate or prosecute you for it, but yeah, I think it's dumb.

And if my claim was used to do anything that affected you, I would expect to put up or shut up. But it doesn't...so who gives a shit?

And feel free to think it's dumb; everyone's entitled to an opinion.

I think most of the hostility on the topic comes from the fact that institutionally (as in, not you or your personal beliefs, but the beliefs advocated by the Christian institutions of the world to its members, which you may not agree with at all), your religion is ruining tens, hundreds of millions of lives right now and holding back the progress of humanity and that is not even an exaggeration that is the depressing reality of it.

This is a tremendous strawman extrapolation of what I said.
First, I never mentioned "my religion"; just that I believe in God. For all you know, I pray to Baal.
Second...there is a huge difference in criticizing someone simply because they believe in god, and criticizing them because of what people are preaching and doing. I have zero problem with criticizing christians for destructive beliefs and policies. "God exists" is neither.

Atheists want society to adopt a disrespect for religion because it will be healthy for us. When Rick Santorum starts babbling about how important following God's will is for America, and everyone gets up and leaves the room in disgust, that will be a better world. And I think you agree with me when I say that (or I'm giving you far too much credit).

Honestly, I do agree with you there. But the problem is not that Rick Santorum believes in God. It's because he's a lunatic who is incapable of holding a personal belief that he does not immediately try to universalize. And the answer is not "disrespect for religion"; it's disrespect for calling for poor decisions based on ephemera, which I'm all in favor of.

While I support Rick Santorum's right to believe whatever idiocy he wants, the minute he tries to bring it up in government he shouldn't be walked out on...he should be driven from the room with stones.

Maybe you're an innocent victim in that particular battle, but I personally don't mind if you get your feathers ruffled because people stop respecting your particular brand of baseless assertion because it's the R-word if it means that when Christian instititutions tell us how bad contraception is we collectively tell them to shut the hell up and fuck themself.

For fuck's sake...you can already tell them to shut the hell up. People have been doing it on this very forum, and they're right to do it.
Again: if somebody advocates a stupid action or policy, heckle the shit out of them. Religion does not mean that anyone needs to accept your baseless belief as a reason for doing anything.

Just, if people aren't doing that, I feel it doesn't twist your dick in any way for them to quietly believe in the man in the sky.

It's not about you needing to suck Atheist dick; it's about calling this religious justification bullshit for what it is. Religion is not something that is intrinsically entitled to respect. When Christians advocate terrible things for Christianity, society should not say, "it's okay because it's for Christianity," we should say "fuck you, that's terrible," and our refusal to do just that gives a shit ton of power to these insane evangelicals.

I have no argument with the most of that, particularly the part I bolded.
When I referred to "sucking atheist dick", I meant when an atheist goes out of his way to tell me what a moron and so forth I am, when I haven't done anything terrible and don't support doing anything terrible and in fact, speak against doing terrible things. There are atheists who will immediately disregard anything you say or do (even if you are espousing something right or good), simply because "that person is an idiot who believes in nonsense, so trust nothing they say".

Listen, do atheists like it when christians harangue them about how "they're going to hell"? I know you don't believe in hell, but that kind of shit is tiresome, isn't it? I feel like people shouldn't do that.

It's not that Atheists try to ram their dicks down your throat. It's that Atheists are sick and tired of having to suck yours, because you're a precious little hothouse flower whose entire morality and beliefs can't survive a light rain shower.

This is the kind of bullshit that annoys me. Me asking people "is the namecalling really necessary?" is met with "FUCK YES, WHY DO I HAVE TO SUCK YOUR DICK".

I don't demand anyone do diddly-fuck because I believe in God.

Last statement: everybody has free speech, and everybody has a right to call me a moron because I believe in God. I never disputed that. I just stated that it annoys me, and I don't see why it's necessary. And "we must mock the shit out of religious people, so they'll learn that we're right!" is one of the dumbest arguments I've ever seen.

[Kaelik]

1) You are pretending, again, that I'm throwing around definitionless words. Consciousness. Glad we cleared that up.

And then you immediately declared that I'm not allowed to attribute any of the characteristics of consciousness. So clearly you don't really mean consciousness, because you think that god's consciousness is somehow super magic different and has no qualities in line with any other consciousness.

2) Your failed definition quibbling aside, your inductive arguments are just flat out bad. They do not affect the likelihood of the question we're analyzing. Induction is about taking specific examples and generating from that a general rule. This means that the general rule should describe objects which are as closely fitting to the inductive sample as possible! I tried to illustrate this with the example of penguins and birds. Using penguins to make inductive claims about birds would lead to the following statement: "Birds are flightless aquatic predators who prefer cold climates." If your inductive sample is "the consciousnesses we have observed," then your general rule should only be about consciousnesses we have observed. E.g., if you want to claim I'm not omniscient because all observed human consciousnesses are not omniscient, that is inductively valid. But making claims about consciousness in general using a very specific subset of consciousness is broadening the inductive claim so far as to make it useless. It's the same reason you can't use penguins to make inductive claims about birds. A subset has more specific properties than the encompassing set.

Inductive reasoning, as you do it, is the caricature they would show you in an early philosophy/mathematics course on logic to teach you why inductive reasoning is dangerous. Interpolate, don't extrapolate. Keep your claims inside your evidence.

You are an idiot who doesn't know what induction is.

Tomorrow is outside my evidence. Yet I will inductively state that the sun will rise tomorrow* even though that is outside my evidence. I can do that because the entire point of inductive reasoning is to make statements about things outside our evidence based on things inside our evidence. That's literally all inductive reasoning is. If the only bird you've ever seen is penguin, it is inductively appropriate to assume that no bird flies. Likewise, it is inductively appropriate to assume that human beings in China cannot fly because all the humans I've ever met cannot fly. The difference between those two inductively appropriate arguments is that in one I am missing relevant information, and in the other, I am missing relevant information.

If X is claimed to have consciousness then it is appropriate to make inferential arguments on the nature or likelihood of that consciousness based on all observed consciousnesses. Exactly like if it is claimed that X is a star, it is appropriate to make inferential arguments on the nature of X or the likelihood that it is a star based on the observed nature of stars.

*Technically, earth spinning, ect. Turn of phrase.

[DSMatticus]

Tomorrow is outside my evidence. Yet I will inductively state that the sun will rise tomorrow* even though that is outside my evidence.

Umm. Fucking what? An event you haven't measured is not a separate category from an event you have measured just because you haven't measured it yet.

"Today" is a day. "Tomorrow" is a day. "The day after tomorrow" is a day. If you have strong evidence concerning "days," you can make inductive statements about "tomorrow" because tomorrow is very clearly related to the grouping you have collected evidence for. Unless you are proposing that tomorrow is in some meaningful way categorically different from today, tomorrow is actually within the category of phenomenon for which you have collected evidence.

Perhaps my use of the words interpolation or extrapolation confused the issue; it has nothing to do with the temporal nature of the data. It has to do with the categorical nature of the data. You use specific evidence within a category to make general claims about that category. Specific evidence that the sun rises every observed day is categorically relevant to what the sun will do tomorrow.

If the only bird you've ever seen is penguin, it is inductively appropriate to assume that no bird flies.

You realize the shit you just said is hilarious, right? It makes my point. If the only bird you've ever seen is a penguin, and you use this to inductively claim that no bird flies, you turn out to be wrong. When you decided to make your inductive claim broader than "penguin," you introduced bias into your argument. Why? Because penguins are a biased subset of birds. When you make an inductive claim about something broader than penguins using only penguins as evidence, that bias shows itself in the inaccuracy of your claims. This is why inductive arguments have to be tightly constrained to things which are as similar to the evidence base as possible, OR you have to demonstrate that your evidence is a fair, unbiased representation of the category you are making claims about.

Here's a good example of this problem in play: "All observed life originates on Earth. Therefore, all life originates on Earth." Now, given the sheer size of the universe and the mathematics of it, and given that you're probably a scientifically-minded individual, I bet you think the possibility of life elsewhere is pretty high. But this sort of naive inductive argument tells us we should think the universe is empty. It has low predictive power because, as beings constrained to Earth, the subset of life we have observed is incredibly biased. A more proper inductive argument: "All the life anyone has ever observed originated on earth. Therefore, all the life I have ever observed originated on earth." You can make an inductive argument that DSMatticus is not an alien, but you can't make an inductive argument that aliens do not exist. You can make the inductive argument that no one you've met is omniscient, but you can't make an inductive argument that omniscience and conscience are contradictory.

Now, you might be able to make a deductive argument about omniscience, because omniscience and consciousness are both very poorly-defined terms and you can find contradictions in certain proposed definitions pretty easily. But that has nothing to do with how stupid your inductive arguments are.

[JonSetanta]

Hello.

Who's still alive?

[Koumei]

What a fascinating shitstorm, and all from one throwaway comment. In hindsight, I should know better than to even mention gods* or religions**. I keep forgetting that that is enough to spark such things.

*or spirits***, djinn, pixies, goddesses, unspecified deities, magic rocks etc.

**or myths, legends etc.

***aside from the potable variety.

[Kaelik]

"Today" is a day. "Tomorrow" is a day. "The day after tomorrow" is a day. If you have strong evidence concerning "days," you can make inductive statements about "tomorrow" because tomorrow is very clearly related to the grouping you have collected evidence for. Unless you are proposing that tomorrow is in some meaningful way categorically different from today, tomorrow is actually within the category of phenomenon for which you have collected evidence.

And the consciousness of every single person we have analyzed is a consciousness, and your proposed conscious entity also has consciousness, so we can make predictions about this proposed entity based on our analyses of people.

There might be something categorically different about tomorrow, in that perhaps the sun will go supernova before then. We can find it unlikely inductively even though we can't prove it is impossible, because the entire point of inductive argument is that it is about making predictions that something you do not know enough about is not going to be categorically different from some things you do know enough about.

To the extent that you tell me the god's consciousness is different from all other consciousness in some undefined way, you are making it an undefined thing. To the extent that it means the same thing as other consciousness, I can make inductions based on it being practically similar.

You realize the shit you just said is hilarious, right? It makes my point. If the only bird you've ever seen is a penguin, and you use this to inductively claim that no bird flies, you turn out to be wrong. When you decided to make your inductive claim broader than "penguin," you introduced bias into your argument.

No, when I made my claim broader than Penguin I introduced induction into the argument. Inductive arguments can of course be wrong. Absolutely. Valid inductive arguments can be unsound. That doesn't make it not valid.

A more proper inductive argument: "All the life anyone has ever observed originated on earth. Therefore, all the life I have ever observed originated on earth." You can make an inductive argument that DSMatticus is not an alien, but you can't make an inductive argument that aliens do not exist.

You are an idiot, that is a deductive argument, not inductive. I really don't understand how you manage to so completely not understand induction. Inductive arguments by their very nature extrapolate from things we know are true to things we cannot possibly know are true because we don't have all the information, and we are assuming that the information we don't have doesn't contradict the similarity.

[JonSetanta]

What a fascinating shitstorm, and all from one throwaway comment. In hindsight, I should know better than to even mention gods* or religions**. I keep forgetting that that is enough to spark such things.

*or spirits***, djinn, pixies, goddesses, unspecified deities, magic rocks etc.

**or myths, legends etc.

***aside from the potable variety.

I'm going to ignore them, and respond to you, because I've always liked you, and hate run-on attempts to draw negative emotional reactions disguised as "logical discourse".

How are you Koumei?

[RobbyPants]

What a fascinating shitstorm, and all from one throwaway comment.

I didn't really think anything of my comment, either, other than "holy crap! I had that exact same thought!"

[DSMatticus]

FBMF: you should probably cleave at least Kaelik and I's bitching at one another out of this thread. We've sort of pissed all over this one.

Alright, Kaelik, I am going to try to pare down the quantity of what I am saying, because you never respond to the fun parts.

1) We don't have to hypothesize a categorical difference (magical supernova!) that may or may not exist between today and tomorrow in the consciousness example. We can demonstrate the categorical difference. Earth-derived consciousness has the example properties: limited size of state, a highly specific structure and chemistry, and shares a common point of evolutionary origin, and those are nontrivial properties which do not match the general definition of consciousness. This is why I gave you a link. So you would stop bitching about how consciousness is asdfghjkl;.

2) Induction is seriously not a tool for extrapolation. Induction works best with the form "X is a Y. All Y's observed so far have property Z. X has property Z." If you can't tell, the more bias you have in your observations of Y, the less accurate your induction is. Your bias may or may not be obvious, but either way when you are making an inductive argument you should strive to match the argument to the limits of your evidence. This is why extrapolating from penguins to birds is stupid; if you know that...
1) Penguins exist.
2) Birds exist.
3) Penguins are a subset of birds.
4) You have evidence concerning penguins.
5) You have no evidence concerning birds.
... and still extrapolate from penguins to birds, you're being retarded. Your induction is completely, unnecessarily error prone. Now if you simply don't know that anything but penguins exist and to you penguins=birds, as in the sets are the same thing, that is a valid induction that turns out to be wrong anyway.

And in the specific example of consciousness, the fact that Earth-derived consciousness is a subset of consciousness is obvious (because the property differences between the set and subset are partially known), and to unnecessarily extrapolate from one to the other without considering those differences in properties is willful ignorance of a potential bias because it's inconvenient to the conclusion you like.

I think my paring down failed. Whatever.

Edit: Fuck it, spoilered and last post about it here. I promise. It got obnoxiously longer than ever intended.

[Kaelik]

nontrivial properties which do not match the general definition of consciousness.

Non trivial properties which do not match the general definition makes it a different fucking thing. If you can't tell me what those differences are, then you are spelling out undefined differences. I agree it is impossible to come to any conclusions about undefined things, but I also don't care, because anyone who wants to talk about something without defining it, IE, you, are fucking stupid.

"X is a Y. All Y's observed so far have property Z. X has property Z." If you can't tell, the more bias you have in your observations of Y, the less accurate your induction is. Your bias may or may not be obvious, but either way when you are making an inductive argument you should strive to match the argument to the limits of your evidence. This is why extrapolating from penguins to birds is stupid; if you know that...
1) Penguins exist.
2) Birds exist.
3) Penguins are a subset of birds.
4) You have evidence concerning penguins.
5) You have no evidence concerning birds.
... and still extrapolate from penguins to birds, you're being retarded. Your induction is completely, unnecessarily error prone. Now if you simply don't know that anything but penguins exist and to you penguins=birds, as in the sets are the same thing, that is a valid induction that turns out to be wrong anyway.

???? Are you retarded? Yes, I specifically said in the very first instance that the induction is only valid if Penguins are the only birds you've ever seen.

But you are also still retarded for the additional reason that you don't understand how categories work. First off:

"X is a Y. All Y's observed so far have property Z. X has property Z."

X=god's consciousness
Y=consciousness
Z=any property at all.

Secondly, your premises contradict themselves. If you have information about Penguins, then by definition you have information about birds.

Thirdly, categories are arbitrary, declaring that you can never make an inference outside a category is retarded, because all categories are arbitrary. Have I mentioned that categories are arbitrary? Knowing that all the Penguins you have observed cannot fly would, under your stupid logic, would still not allow you to make the induction that any penguin outside your observed set cannot fly. It might be a different species of Penguin that fucking flies.

The relevant factor is whether the unobserved thing you are inducting about is likely to be similar with respect to your observation. You of course cannot convince me that a god's consciousness would be practically different with respect to it's interaction with omniscience, because you would have to present some arguments about the nature of a god's consciousness and back that up with good reasons to believe that the nature of god's consciousness would have those differences. Which you can't do, because there are no good reasons.

Earth-derived consciousness has the example properties: limited size of state, a highly specific structure and chemistry, and shares a common point of evolutionary origin

Yes, exactly. And from the fact that all observed consciousnesses have a specific structure, I can inductively conclude that consciousness must have that structure. See how that works? Because ostensibly, if you propose a new consciousness, it should have the same properties as all observed consciousnesses, and if you want me to believe that it has different qualities than the qualities that are required in every consciousness we have ever seen, then you had damn well better give me a good reason, and since you can't give me a good reason to believe anything about the nature of a god, you will fail, and I will be forced to conclude that it is unlikely any proposed entity is conscious.

If you tell me that an entity has consciousness, you must be telling me that it has all the properties that are universal to observed consciousness. Because otherwise you should not use the word consciousness. Exactly like if you tell me an object is red, you must mean that it has all the qualities that are universal to observed red objects, or else you shouldn't use the word red.

If what you meant is that it shares some of those qualities, but not all, then you should have fucking called it pink.

[fbmf]

FBMF: you should probably cleave at least Kaelik and I's bitching at one another out of this thread. We've sort of pissed all over this one.

[The Great Fence Builder puts a hand on DSMatticus's shoulder in a comforting, fatherly way]
Son, welcome to The Gaming Den. While I sincerely appreciate your head's up, this is not a wart on the ass of some of the thread shitting I've been witness to in my tenure.

That's not a challenge. I'm neither inviting nor encouraging you or Kaelik to prove me wrong. I'm just saying that, all things being equal, I'm going to let this one go.
(TGFBpahoDSMsiac,fw]

[Koumei]

I'm going to ignore them, and respond to you, because I've always liked you, and hate run-on attempts to draw negative emotional reactions disguised as "logical discourse".

How are you Koumei?

Well, tooth is being a bit of a bother, looking into getting my brain meds altered, but all right otherwise. Yourself? Keeping well, old boy?

[DSMatticus]

@fbmf, it was less a "we've already covered everything in feces," and more a "Kaelik and I are going to continue flinging shit at eachother for the indefinite future." Though, I suppose if I felt bad enough about that, I could just start a new thread myself, so fair enough.

Kaelik, simple question and let's just be fucking be done with this: is it inductively valid to claim that terrestrial life is the only life based on the evidence that the only observed life is terrestrial life?

If yes (given that terrestrial life is probably not unique), you are highlighting the failure of induction to make accurate predictions when used like you want you use it, and I see no reason to listen to inductive reasoning when you use it like that. Low predictive power -> discard.

If no, wait what?

[JonSetanta]

Well, tooth is being a bit of a bother, looking into getting my brain meds altered, but all right otherwise. Yourself? Keeping well, old boy?

Quite well old bean. I had a root canal and tooth cap recently myself, actually, it went from a 45-degree angle to near perfect (but 80% artificial now)

(EDIT: I'm not allowed to say what I said earlier publically, so content removed.)


I know I've been a tard now and then online but I've kicked the alcoholism and painkiller addiction. I'm ready to serve my country.
So I wait... and wait... and wait... And I think my pickup time is around early spring, if I remember correctly from a year ago.

[tussock]

Kaelik, simple question and let's just be fucking be done with this: is it inductively valid to claim that terrestrial life is the only life based on the evidence that the only observed life is terrestrial life?

I'm not Kaelik, but: we have observed that life on earth was created by normal mechanical processes involving common materials that appear throughout the universe in fair abundance. It's ludicrously improbable for life not to form on anything like an early earth.

The only remaining questions are how common early-earth-like planets are, and how long they variably stay in a chemically viable region given how life tends to both help a planet stay viable and has a surprisingly massive range anyway.

Plus, the same for all the other possible forms of life based on different chemistry.

If yes

No, that's a silly strawman, and you tearing it down does not impress. Ta.

If no, wait what?

Quite. Inductive reasoning uses all the relevant evidence you have, and none of the imaginary sky fairy nonsense.

Much like we've observed a great many creation myths and they all turned out not to be modern astrophysics, geology, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, or anything like what's real at all. The one you "believe" in is no different, YHWH is just as backward of an idea as Thor and Horus-Ra.

[sabs]

At Least Thor was pro Sluts

[tzor]

I'm not Kaelik, but: we have observed that life on earth was created by normal mechanical processes involving common materials that appear throughout the universe in fair abundance. It's ludicrously improbable for life not to form on anything like an early earth.

But that's the key. How common are "early" earths. You need a planet, of the generally right size at the right location in an orbit and then you probably need a major companion satelite to drive the todal forces that allows tidal pools to form and let the chemicals stew a while.

And the possible result is anerobic life. We still don't know how the exact origin of chloroplasts and mitochondria. There is even a theory that the former may have actually evolved far outside the orbit of the earth, given the specific frequencies that they are optimized for. In any event, the existance of life as we know it would be impossible without the switch from anaerobic life to aerobic life.

Life as we know it also needs a lot of heavy atoms, so you need a system that has experienced a couple of supernova in pat history in order to see the heavy atoms into the system.

So, in reality, life as we know it might be exceptionally rare.

Intelligent life even more so.

But life up to the multi-celluar level might be only slightly rare and life at the proto-cellular level might be very common among the stars. I would not be surprised if we find multiple sources within our very own solar system for the later.

[sabs]

The thing is. Even if you have a 1 in a trillion chance, that still leaves a few 1000 planets with intelligent life, just in our galaxy.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Drake Equation!

[Username17]

Seriously though, the claim that the Earth is inductively the only planet in the universe with life on it because all the life we've found has been on Earth is inductively valid. It is also inductively valid to claim that there is other life in the universe because the conditions that created life are apparently all over the place and the universe is fucking huge.

Induction is a funky thing. It is valid to induce from the fact that one out of eight planets in our solar system and there are 50 billion planets that the amount of life bearing planets in our galaxy is approximately the same as the number of humans on Earth.

As we get more information, we can exclude more possible inductions. But the number of potentially valid inductions is always infinity.

-Username17

[Prak]

Does anyone know if punching daggers in D&D are treated as daggers for proficiency?

[PoliteNewb]

Does anyone know if punching daggers in D&D are treated as daggers for proficiency?

Can't point you to a rule, but I believe no. The best reference I have is that the Invisible Blade PrC mentioned having "Weapon Focus: Dagger OR Weapon Focus: Punching Dagger", implying that those are separate things.

Generally, I believe all weapons are assumed to be separate proficiencies unless specifically noted.

[DSMatticus]

I'm not Kaelik, but: we have observed that life on earth was created by normal mechanical processes involving common materials that appear throughout the universe in fair abundance. It's ludicrously improbable for life not to form on anything like an early earth.

As Frank has pointed out, that's a totally separate induction based on totally separate given evidence. Frank (and Kaelik, presumably) want to call both of those statements inductively valid. But they are also inherently contradictory, which is pretty telling that there might be some problems here, either with 1) the definition of inductively valid or 2) assuming the usefulness of a statement given only its inductive validity.

It's also worth noting that "inductively valid" is a dangerous phrase to be using, and if I'm the one that brought it up originally I should probably apologize. In so much as inductively valid means anything, it just means that the conclusion is likely to follow from the premises. If the evidence that supports the premises is biased with respect to the conclusion, then your conclusion will not reflect reality, and you would be mistaken to say that your conclusion is likely to follow from your premises. I.e., given the definition above, it is inductively invalid. Alternatively, I guess you could claim something weird like how the evidence which accounts for the bias is outside the premises and therefore the argument is still inductively valid given the premises, but the premises are incomplete. It's basically an argument about whether inductive validity is a measure against the evidence or the world. If it's a measure against the evidence, then bad evidence leads to inductively valid arguments whose conclusions are occasionally useless. If it's a measure against the world, inductive validity is only certain when the evidence is overwhelmingly complete (or not at all).

But that's really pointless and semantical; it's probably better to just set the words "inductively valid" on fire and talk about the underlying principle, which is obvious. If your evidence is a biased sample, then your conclusion does not reliably tell us anything about what's outside that sample. If you are using "all of the consciousnesses on Earth" to make claims about "all of the consciousnesses which could potentially exist," the potential of that bias is huge and your argument should be discarded for being useless. If you want to call it "inductively valid and useless" or "inductively invalid because it's useless," that's another discussion, but the fact that it is useless is the important part. The conclusion cannot be trusted with any certainty at all. In the same way that using life on Earth to make inductive conclusions ("all intelligent life requires carbon, oxygen, and water") about the universe isn't enough to guarantee the accuracy of those conclusions.

[Prak]

Does anyone know if punching daggers in D&D are treated as daggers for proficiency?

Can't point you to a rule, but I believe no. The best reference I have is that the Invisible Blade PrC mentioned having "Weapon Focus: Dagger OR Weapon Focus: Punching Dagger", implying that those are separate things.

Generally, I believe all weapons are assumed to be separate proficiencies unless specifically noted.

Yeah, I figured. Damn.