Complaint to Sainsburys

Just made a complaint to Sainsburys.  I put the following:

I had a grocery order to be delivered today.  Originally it was over £40 and had a delivery charge of £1.  I deliberately chose a saver slot to minimise this delivery charge.

I did make an alteration to my order yesterday.  It shouldn't have taken me below £40.  But, I now realise that the 10 bags of jelly beans (50p each) I had originally ordered must have been taken off my order when reordering.  I never realised this as the reduction in cost was more or less disguised by a £6 increase in delivery charges.

Hence, when I received my receipt today it was claimed that everything was there that I ordered and that my delivery charge was £7 (not £1 as I expected).

I was confused by this until I noticed the jelly beans weren't there on the receipt.  And when searching the site, they are no longer available.

Why was it not brought to my attention:

a) That the jelly beans had been taken off my order?
b) That due to this, my delivery charge had increased from £1 to £7??

Now I've had to cancel my order, and reorder the very same groceries for tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I have virtually no food left in my house.  I am very dissatisfied and will be writing up about this.

I think it's a bit rich for them to cancel the jelly beans then increase my delivery charges by £6 into the bargain and not inform me of any of this!   I actually rang up and cancelled the order as they refused to rescind the £6 extra delivery charges.  I never complained at that point as I thought I must have made a mistake.  It was only after the phone call that I noticed the jelly beans are not on the receipt.  I feel irritated, and I have virtually no food left!  

My predictions regarding self-driving cars have been correct

I've just read the following article:

How self-driving cars got stuck in the slow lane

Article says:

I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year,” said Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, in January.For
anyone who follows Musk’s commentary, this might sound familiar. In
2020, he promised autonomous cars the same year, saying: “There are no
fundamental challenges.” In 2019, he promised Teslas would be able to
drive themselves by 2020 – converting into a fleet of 1m “robotaxis”. He
has made similar predictions every yeargoing back to 2014.

Anyone
with any sense wouldn’t take notice of anything Elon Musk says. I too
started making predictions regarding autonomous cars back in 2014. But
rather than saying autonomous cars are imminent, I suggested they’ll take over the world by 2060.
The idea that they were about to take over the world within a few years
always seemed to me to be ridiculous, although most commentators back
in 2014 agreed with Elon Musk. Indeed, by 2018, I had become convinced that fully autonomous cars (i.e level 5 cars) will never be able to share the same lanes in roads with human drivers.

There’s the video of a car in FSD mode veering sharply into oncoming traffic, prompting the driver to swerve off the road into a field. The one that shows a car repeatedly attempting to turn on to train tracks and into pedestrians. Another that captures the driver struggling to regain control of the car after the system prompts him to take over.

Going back to 2017, I was leery of this claim about how safe autonomous cars were, and I hadn’t seen any of those videos!

There’s
reason to believe that the videos that make their way online are some
of the more flattering ones. Not only are the testers Tesla customers,
but an army of super-fans acts as an extra deterrent to sharing anything
negative. Any reports of FSD behaving badly can trigger a wave of
outrage.

Yes,
Musk fanboys. I’ve been attacked by someone saying look at what Musk
has achieved in his life compared to myself. What a loser I am.  Who do I think I am, etc.  He seemed entirely indifferent to
the fact I am mostly right and Musk is almost always wrong.

[I]t’s not just Tesla that has missed self-imposed autonomous driving deadlines. Cruise, Waymo, Toyota and Honda
all said they would launch fully self-driving cars by 2020. Progress
has been made, but not on the scale anticipated. What happened?

“Number
one is that this stuff is harder than manufacturers realised,” says
Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research.

Nothing happened, they were always preposterous
predictions. It is a consequence of people's mistaken notion of what we
human beings are (i.e essentially computers), and so it shouldn’t be
that difficult to get computers to emulate and indeed surpass human
behaviour, including the driving of cars. But computers are not
conscious and never will be. They operate according to rules rather
than any understanding. And generating rules to help navigate a real
world environment that we encounter on roads in city centres will be
incredibly hard.

Carmakers
General Motors and Geely and AV company Mobileye have said people may
be able to buy self-driving cars as early as 2024.

No, I’m afraid they won’t.

Is there much point in arguing with others?

Whatever the topic it seems to be a pretty much universal tendency for those who oppose a particular stance or position, to only address the more naïve and weakest arguments for it. And even when engaging with more thoughtful opponents, they tend to attribute to them a more naïve or simplistic position than the one they actually hold and attack that instead.

When challenged on this, they tend to defend this strategy by claiming that many, if not most people, do actually subscribe to the belief in question for the very reasons that they are attacking.

Of course, most people might well believe something for weak or misguided reasons -- or  indeed, often for no reasons at all. But I do not see how this has any relevance to the truth or falsity of a more nuanced stance on the belief in question.

For example, many people believe that evolutionary theory holds that we humans descended directly from apes, or even monkeys. But would attacking such a notion and showing how implausible it is, have any implications for the actual mainstream evolution theory? Obviously not, since attacking such a wrongheaded notion of evolution doesn't touch the idea that both humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor (humans didn't evolve from apes!). But this type of attacking of the more naïve stances taken on a belief happens constantly, for example when attacking the notion of an afterlife.

If we want to show a belief is foolish, we don't achieve this by attacking and ridiculing the weakest reasons and/or evidence, even though many people might be convinced by such weak reasons/evidence. Rather we should seek out the strongest reasons or evidence and attempt to show that it is lacking.

I think the main goal when people argue is to get back-slapped by their supporters and increase their status and prestige amongst them. But I also think they themselves become convinced that they have genuinely confronted the best reasons and evidence. People actually self-deceive themselves that they have genuinely engaged with the more powerful arguments and defeated them.
This seems to be pretty much universal, even within the academic community.

Cost of living for certain poor people will be wildly in excess of 10%

The following applies to the UK where I live.

I read the following article regarding yesterday's spring statement (mini-budget) by the chancellor. 

The article reports Paul Johnson, who is the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, as saying:

[Those dependent on benefits will see] [t]heir benefits [rising by] just 3.1% for the coming financial year. Their cost of living could well rise by 10%.

This is simply not correct, their cost of living will rise vastly more than just 10%.

Let's take, for example, those under 25 years old who claim universal credit. According to this website, currently it's £257.33 per month or £3,087.96 a year.

Now the energy price cap is going up by 54% in a week's time (from the 1st April 2022). For an average property, this is an increase of £693 from £1,277 to £1,971.

Let's assume that only energy has/will increase in price (we'll ignore the price increases in food over the past year etc). So, in order to have the same purchasing power, their original £3,087.96 a year, will need to increase by £693. £3,087.96 + £693 = £3,780.96.


To have the same purchasing power expressed as a percentage (and don't forget, only taking into account energy price increases) it'll be £3,780.96 divided by £3,087.96 = 1.2244.  Therefore a 22.4% increase in their benefits will be required for the same purchasing power simply considering energy price increases alone. Comparable figures can be derived for the over 25's who claim universal credit.

If we then also take into account the considerable increase in price for food and petrol, then perhaps a ballpark figure of something like a 30% increase in their income is required for those on such benefits to have the same purchasing power.  This, of course, is much higher than the current inflation rate of 6.2% and higher still than the 3.1% increase they will actually be getting.  The fact that this 30% figure is so much higher than the inflation rate reflects the fact that a vastly higher proportion of poor people's incomes are being spent on energy, which has undergone mind-blowing price increases in recent months and will continue to do so.

I see this whole situation as calamitous and cannot imagine what will happen to the poorest people in our society in the coming months (not just those on benefits).   

Incidentally, after typing the above, I realised I talk about the very same Paul Johnson here!

Judging whether you like someone even though you've never met them

I hate it when x makes disparaging remarks about y to z when z has never met y, and then z forms a negative opinion about y.

z is scarcely likely to be getting an impartial objective account of y!

I never like to form firm opinions about people I've never met or heard of from a third party.

Calling Teachers A***holes

“If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.” 

― Noam Chomsky

Ugh, no, I just can't resist the temptation. At one point at University, one of the lecturers threatened to beat me up! I never called him an ar**hole, I was just arguing with him (in private not in front of the class) that he didn't know what he was talking about (about Plato's forms I think). 

The degrading of our mental faculties as we age

I know I keep banging on about the same topic, but I just find it extraordinary that people (mainly skeptics, but also some believers) think the degrading of our mental faculties arising from a dysfunctional or impaired brain will also apply in any afterlife.  Hence, if someone is suffering from dementia at the time of their death, then they will also be suffering forevermore from dementia in any possible afterlife.  For example, Bill Nye said:

"People my age have a lot of grandparents and parents who are not as sharp, certainly not as athletically capable or physically capable as they were when they were younger.

"And so watching ourselves die is to me, overwhelming evidence that there is no life after death.

"There's certainly no — it doesn't seem to be any reason to think that when you die, you go back to your optimum age at your optimum athletic ability in your optimum intellectual sharpness."

Either:

a) The brain produces consciousness and the self.

b) Consciousness and the self/soul can exist apart from the brain.  However, when the self/ soul is associated with a brain (embodied), the brain affects the self's/soul's conscious states.

If there is an afterlife, at least in the sense of a soul dwelling in some afterlife realm, then "a" cannot be true. So if there is an afterlife we must subscribe to "b".

So assuming "b", any deterioration in our mental faculties that happens as a consequence of a dysfunctional or impaired brain is . .well . . due to the brain and the brain alone... duh... Or, in other words, it's not due to any change in the soul or self. Therefore, there cannot be any implications for our mental faculties in any afterlife. To understand this, consider the following analogy.

Bob has normal visual acuity. One day he puts on a pair of fake eyeglasses that just uses normal glass in the frame rather than lenses.  So his vision is not altered. What if he continues to wear them year after year and never takes them off during this time?  Also, he never cleans the glass nor replaces it? As time goes by, the glass will accumulate dirt and possible damage, and Bob's vision will progressively get worse and worse. But then, one day, he whips the eyeglasses off, and voila! His vision returns to his initial visual acuity.

So why on earth would it be any different for the soul or self? If the brain doesn't create the self, soul, or consciousness, how on earth could the detrimental effects arising from a dysfunctional brain somehow mysteriously linger on when one is in a disembodied state, as in the afterlife?  Our souls will no longer be associated with a brain, hence a dysfunctional or impaired brain cannot possibly affect our mental faculties in any afterlife.  It's just silly to suppose otherwise, and I think people are simply not thinking this through.



 

Self-floating books

Let's imagine there's a stack of books floating in mid-air. There appears to be no reason for it. 

But suppose someone says we can explain why the top book is there. It's being supported by the book beneath it. The 2nd top book, that is, is exerting a force on the top book keeping it where it is.

Likewise we can explain why the 2nd top book is there -- it's being supported by the 3rd top book. And so on.

But what about the bottom book? Perhaps we can say there's no explanation for that. It's just a brute fact that it can float there mid-air!

But if that is the case have we actually provided an explanation for why any of the other books are there in mid-air? Surely not, we've simply kicked the explanatory can down the road, so to speak.

A similar situation exists in physics.  We observe the regularities of the world and say the reason why there are such regularities is ultimately due to fundamental physical laws and/or due to innate forces as revealed by physics.  Why do these fundamental physical laws or forces exist?  We don’t know, they are just a brute fact about the world with no further explanation.  But given that these physical laws/forces exist, we can explain how they give rise to certain phenomena.

It seems to me though that this is the same type of "explanation" as our floating stack of books. 

Going back to the stack of books.  I said that it might be suggested by someone that the top book remains where it is due to resting on the book beneath it, which exerts an upward force keeping the top book in its place.  But why can’t each book simply be self-floating?  The bottom book appears to have the capacity to be self-floating, so if no further explanation is required here, then why would any of the other books be different?

We imagine that forces exist out there in the world.  But, strictly speaking, we always just see events following each other.  We project forces into the world because we like explanations.  But, especially when we consider such forces do not provide a true explanation, do we have any reasons to suppose that such forces literally exist at all?

Consider computer games.  Our character that we control performs various actions in that game – our character perhaps presses a button in that game environment and a building in that game explodes.  But there are no actual forces here, the game does what it does due to following the rules the computer programmer has implemented.  

Do we have any compelling reasons, or indeed any reasons at all, to suppose our reality is different?  Even if there is no analogical equivalent to a computer programmer or "God", perhaps reality simply exhibits patterns that our physics describes?  But physics doesn't tell us why reality is like it is, it doesn't provide any true explanations any more than it does with our floating stack of books.

Related: 

What physicists claim exists can be doubted

The difference between science and metaphysics

Do scientific explanations actually explain?

The Limits of Science