However, I found the advice section at the end valuable and actionable; especially the following:
> Continually check your thoughts, actions, purchases and posts. Do I actually like this? Do I actually believe this? What do I actually think?
> Read old books, preferably books published before the 1900s
> Go outside, seriously go outside. Look around, it’s great out there.
Also, of course, everything about reducing smartphone/screen exposure.
edit: How appropriate. The very first post quotes Deleuze who was perhaps not intentionally writing in this way, but is strongly associated with the tradition. Out of curiosity did some additional digging and found that indeed this blog is what I believe it to be: https://twitter.com/meta_nomad/status/1187046976950587398
This is going to bias a reader, who is ill-prepared to approach their reading on a socially-critical level, towards patterns of thought that are socially archaic. Cutting out pre-20th century work is going to cut out almost everything written by anyone who wasn't a well-off white man, unless one makes a purposeful effort to look into translations of Eastern works. There are plenty of books publisher in the last 100 years that are valuable. With this rule, you leave behind Sinclair's The Jungle, Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and every Hugo Award winner. (Shadow rec: John Chu's short story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" @ https://www.tor.com/2013/02/20/the-water-that-falls-on-you-f... )
I think there's some truth and some good advice in the essay, but I'm somewhat wary of how committed he (presumably, he) was to his argument despite having little to show in ways of citation and support. It reads to me less as an overview of empirically tested knowledge than a synthesis of other writings and conversations whose veracity I find indeterminate and whose origins I would be very interested in discovering.
Kind of one of the points the article's trying to make I think. Our attention spans are shot to hell. I just read it in about 10 minutes with a couple of interruptions from the kids. Too verbose?
> Our attention spans are shot to hell.
I agree. My comment was mostly on the presentation, not on the substance of the article.
There's also a big difference between me comitting a few hours to reading a book by my favorite author, or a set of articles from news outlets I respect, versus some anonymous blogger linked on Hacker News.
Reality is more something related to trust, if you want a hierarchy to reality, you can trust more your direct testimony of an event from your senses that someone's account, and it's much better when you shared reality with a third party. «Did you see that ?»
Everything's real, the only point is whether it fits in your belief system or if you trust the information enough to adjust it.
Everything else is conjecture. If I look back at photos I've taken, I can conjecture that they appear to be an accurate record of what I was seeing when I took them, and that no one has surreptitiously hacked my phone and altered them. If I look at a photo of a grandson posted by my daughter, I can reasonably conjecture that it is also a faithful facsimile of his appearance at that time and place. If I look at a video of a third person posted by my niece, there is zero assurance that it represents reality.
So the default position has to be that the colored dots are for entertainment only, and not to be taken seriously, unless there is some valid reason to believe otherwise.
Similarly, how do you know you're not a brain in a jar? etc.
GP's point, that there's a hierarchy to truth/reality, is probably more useful. All we have are observations, and we can use those observations to draw conclusions about the state of the world. We must always be aware that it's always a map, though -- we can never know the territory.