Who can claim Aristotle?
aeon.co
aeon.co
The older I get the more I realize that there are a thousand true and intelligent things you can say about any topic. Magazines, journals, and libraries are full to the brim of intelligent people writing intelligent things. But an extremely minuscule portion of that huge mass is made of writing that gets right to the heart of the matter.
And Aristotle is the writer I've encountered the most who constantly gets right to the essence or core of what he's discussing, moving past the trivialities and the unessential to illuminate deep truths in a logical way. It's why a short essay like his Poetics--which in many ways is a limited work for the modern day because it deals wiih a very specific type of ancient literature--is still pored over by modern writers and screenwriters because of the deep dramatic truths it lays out.
"Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look"
My take is that it was hard to find a better theory, the usual explanation of scholastical dogmatism is to shallow.
European philosophy was not really Aristotelian until the re-arrival of his work in the 12C, so it's hardly fair to 'blame' him for the lack of scientific development that period. When it did arrive, it was extremely controversial, and it took the genius of Aquinas (and even then, only just) for Aristotle to be accepted in Christian thought.
In the 17C, there was a much greater interest in quantitative methods than there had been previously. And some of his physics was obviously found to be wrong. But there was no discovery (and remains no discovery) that falsified broad swathes of his work. The change of interest and focus was far more important in the progress of what we now call science than the supposed rejection of Aristotle.
This is described in E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
Pre-modern people were far more interested in living a morally good life (a happy life, in the Aristotelian sense of the word) than they were in controlling nature. That changed in the 17C.
1. Conflating intellectual greatness with moral goodness. These are separate categories.
2. Applying current moral standards to a previous time. You must compare him to others if his time.
Slavery is unquestionably immoral, and it's perfectly reasonable to argue that someone completing philosophical work to support slavery is committing a moral wrong, but you have to keep in mind the society into which this person was enculturated and the time at which he lived.
Literally yes. A mind too dense to see he was drafting his arguments in support of whatever happened to be personally convenient.
Considering he had to pen this screed in the first place, we can tell his view wasn't the exclusive one.
I like to think the negative feedback you are receiving is due to the ambiguity, and so, the multitude of definitions for “intelligence” that each of us has.
I know I have met people who others have touted as “intelligent” that I thought were too deplorable to be given such an accolade.
I am with you, one of my measures of intelligence is how one recognizes the collective fate of all life.
Debating such a subject leaves me with too much ire to articulate sufficiently so I will lean on the eloquence of Martin Luther King Jr:
> Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
The first and most basic is because they are different things, and for the sake of clarity different things should have different words to refer to them.
The second is because it allows us to have intelligent conversations about people who are intelligent but morally bad, or who are unintelligent but morally good. The person with an IQ barely above that of the strict definition of mentally retarded (or below, but questions of agency and responsibly arise so we won't use them in our example) who recognizes the humanity in every person and volunteers at the soup kitchen every chance he gets is morally good for doing so. The 180IQ engineer who manages the highly complex train schedule to keep the extermination camps running at capacity is morally bad for doing so.
The third is because it allows individuals to recognize that blind respect of intelligence which is unguided by morals or wisdom is a fool's errand.
The fourth is because is prevents the moralizing of language from hampering the clarity of language
The fifth is because the conflation of intelligence and morality provides an easy pathway to morally wrong positions. If the messaging is that "evil people are dumb!" and an impressionable individual encounters an intelligent person making a persuasive argument for something which is morally wrong, you've robbed them of a framework with which to engage and combat this person's ideas.
The sixth and final reason is that modification of language in this way hampers our ability to consider the world independent of our societal preconceived notions. I found the previous comments in this chain ironic because the individual who was calling a great (highly intelligent) philosopher a dunce for being unable to see beyond his cultural ethical norms was doing so from a position which is deeply entrenched in his current cultural and ethical norms, i.e. the inherent evils of slavery, the requirement of strict moral purity, the compulsion to attack every perceived positive characteristic of someone who is morally bad in order to devalue them and their intellectual contributions, and the perception of the world as a pitched battle between good and evil wherein righteous indignation should be one's perpetual state.
Now of course I agree with this commentator's ethical preconceptions related to slavery, but that's secondary to the importance of the things I listed above in how I approach Aristotle. I mean no disrespect and I hope this has been helpful in understanding my perspective.
- I think taking interest on a (full-recourse) loan is a form of fraud. Or rather, it is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. I also think it produces, in practice, ownership in a share of a person, such that it can be usefully compared with slavery. I think I can make good arguments in support of this. But I don't think people who argue otherwise are dumb, or arguing from self-interest; I just think they haven't fully thought through it. You might extend the same leeway to someone widely acknowledge as one of the greatest minds in history.
- Please let me know of any anti-slavery arguments from that period you're aware of.
- Whether acknowledged or not, all anti-slavery arguments use Aristotelian concepts (as will any attempt at rational discourse, or any attempt at discussion of morals).
If you think interest on a loan is even in the same world as selling a human being to the highest bidder from an auction block, then we view the world so differently that I don't imagine efficient communication is possible.
>widely acknowledge as one of the greatest minds in history.
I mean, he's simply not.
>anti-slavery arguments from that period you're aware of
Well Zeno [0] for one, and Alcidamas [1].
And I'll say again, the fact he had to pen this screed in the first place shows that his view wasn't the exclusive one. In fact it shows how middling his intellect actually was that he was unable to see past his own time and place, despite the fact that others could.
>all anti-slavery arguments use Aristotelian concepts
This is more like Aristotle's fanboys trying to shoehorn other people's natural insights into his worldview.
[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JbscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Zeno+a...
The point is that it would be idiotic of me to think somebody defending the practice was stupid or immoral, when it is accepted almost everywhere and by everyone. Same is true for Aristotle and slavery. Calling him stupid or evil on this account is misguided. Every individual and every age has its intellectual and moral blindspots. See Boogie_Man's comment above, he covers the various problems with this approach more thoroughly than I have.
No it most definitely is not. Could you just confirm the following statement is accurate:
It is your belief that interest taking on loans and legalized slavery are a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
No. They are comparable, and both moral evils, but are different species of action.
But suppose I said yes, then what? It would not affect the argument. Whether I'm right or wrong about interest-taking per se, I would be wrong to believe that people who defended it were wicked or stupid (rather than simply misguided) given its universality. Similarly, regardless of whether Aristotle was right or wrong about slavery per se, you are wrong to believe that Aristotle was wicked and stupid for defending it (rather than simply misguided) given its then-universality.
They are not comparable in any way, shape, or form.
>you are wrong to believe that Aristotle was wicked and stupid
He was unquestionably wicked and stupid compared to his contemporaries who were able to see past the miasma that was the culture they were steeped in.
- Is it possible that you are mistaken about some -- any -- moral issue which is almost universally held by the culture at large?
- If so, would it be reasonable to conclude from this that you're wicked and stupid?
You agree that the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively, right?
Just from a point of common sense logic I would have to assume the vast majority of the slaves' arguments on the subject.
Let me just pull up all of the surviving primary sources written by the slaves of the that period... Oh, right.
We imagine that "if I lived back then, I'd be against it", but we forget that the past is a foreign country. People thought and acted quite differently.
Note that I'm assuming an objective/neutral definition of "slavery", and not the usual "slavery=bad thing".
Now, we could argue that it's a matter of education, circumstances, etc. But surely you must have met people who would obstinately refuse to listen to reason, entertaining their own misery. At least IME, it's sadly a common trait.
Of course, if we define "slavery" as "harsh, senseless, cruel, violent, selfish abuse of other humans", then (I hope in the vast majority of cases), no, contemporary employment and slavery are different in kind.
But I do think there are reasons to doubt this second definition to have been systematically accurate.
For example, it makes no sense, from a cost-effectiveness point of view, for a slave owner to mistreat his slaves that much: it's in his best interest to make sure they live decently. Or, in a society where slavery is culturally acceptable, hence widespread, many slave owners must not have been this inhumane.
I'm not saying it never occurred, merely that there are good reasons to think that it wasn't as systematic as we tend to believe.
What's the cost-effectiveness of a master selling one of his female slave's children away from her, which was a regular occurrence?
Accurately answering your question requires writing a thesis: one needs extensive access to accurate data spanning thousands of years, a solid grasp of history, psychology, ancient customs, etc. Those situations are full of subtle nuances; what historians currently understand might not even be that accurate.
OTOH, casting reasonable doubts by assuming a fair amount of people weren't too stupid is less bold of a position than "slave owners were living devil", but at least it's honest.
(Which doesn't imply that "slave owners were living devil" isn't true, merely that it's dishonest to say that it's true, because it's too difficult to know for sure).
Slavery is an old thing[0]. Even assuming the death rates are correct, one can't honestly conclude that what happened in the West in the past 500 years is similar to what happened, say, in Antiquity in the West[1] - and that's what most relevant to Aristotle - or amongst ancient Jews[2].
I know that there are too many unknowns for me to even have a clear thesis to begin with.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History
You seem curiously attached to the happiness in slavery fantasy.
It's not because I don't share your viewpoint that I share its exact opposite either.
Even in the case of the house servant you imagine the typical slave to be, you have not considered factors like having their children sold away from them, or the death of a kind master leading to being sold or inherited by a wicked one.
There are no happy slaves.
Of course, the fields of Philosophical and Mathematical Logic have advanced since Aristotle, especially starting with the work of Frege, but that took approximately 2000 years. And before Aristotle, no work on Logic came close to what Aristotle discovered and developed. Aristotle's work on Logic was sui generis and hardly any advancement in logic occurred until Frege 2000 years later.
I feel his work in Logic alone makes him one of the greatest minds who ever lived. That doesn't take into account his contributions in other areas of philosophy, which were also significant.
the provocative aspect of Aristotle today is that for people who see themselves as not on the level of citizens and who reject being compared by the virtues he (and later, aquinas) articulated, the judgment implies they are somehow moral or spiritual fugitives from it. if I'm not patient, friendly, magnanimous, courageous, charitable, ambitious, truthful, etc, am I really an inferior or less worthy person? according to who? in that sense, the current concept of intersectionality is a kind of secular re-blessing of people marginalized by those values so as to organize them into a movement to dismantle this dominion of judgment by ancient virtues. viewed this way, Aristotle's values and how they support a conceptual moral "kingdom of god" are this movements shared enemy. I get that normal people want to see these things as just human progress vs. quaint old ideas, and not view the value of Aristotle today through the lens of eschatology, but if one did, it illuminates some aspects that should raise at least some eyebrows.
Copying from an online review (at random): If you want only a translation, and quality doesn't matter much, this translation will probably be too expensive for you. However, if you want an extensive introduction (a historical one from pg. 3-7, a philosophical one from pg. 9-91), outlines on each book and commentary (pg. 261-452), a list of Greek vocabulary (pg. 453-5), a bibliography, and index, then this is your ticket.
Not in your essence. All people are equal in their essence. But it's better to be a person who's truthful than a person who constantly lies. So in that sense, a truthful person is better than a liar.
Anyway, the beauty is that anyone can attain these virtues. It's very, very hard work, but even the pursuit brings very great joy.
(Being 'ambitious' is not a virtue, btw :-) )
I wager the movement is less a rebellion of the few, and more the unbelief of the many. That is, people just don't believe there's a personal benefit to being virtuous. It's a completely rational calculation when there's no deep spiritual or religious belief in far-off rewards or punishments. Unfortunately, our age's contempt for belief in the "deep down" turns people to worship physical characteristics & preferences instead.
this phenomenon we're apprehending together isn't new either. history is full of guys who just spell it all out and try to warn us. you could take courses in religion and philosophy to find out who to read, but really, I just recommend starting with the ones murdered by their governments. the rest are flatterers anyway.
compliment appreciated and i hope this handle doesn't become a thing, but thank you!
I find it curious to see no mention of one rather large institution, the Roman Catholic Church, which for about a century regarded St. Thomas Aquinas as its official theologian and philosopher; and of course Aquinas drew heavily on Aristotle. I have no idea, though, whether neo-Scholasticism persists as a major influence.
A number of British philosophers of the last century engaged with Aristotle's ethical writing: Foote, Hampshire, Kenny, and McIntyre come to mind.
(I don't think theologians distinguished countable infinities from other infinities; that's much more recent, right?)
* this is probably also a lesson that, before spending a thousand years arguing over whether class C has property P or not, it might be wise to demonstrate, first, that C is indeed inhabited?
if the father (pre-god) showed that prescience was possible, then the son must show that that immunity to prescience is trivial, and one (& only?) Way to achieve that is to make sure everything happens at once..
Re: metal vs stone
https://www.dong-chinese.com/wiki/%E4%B9%90
Note that the bell was a later addition. Earlier (de)script(ion) only had gourds on a (wooden?) base, retconned to threads on a base.
Phonology further hints that the metallic twang* (in qing/zhong) hadn't encroached on the vibes yet. In parallel (I guess), the qing evolved from the qin -- a completely organic instrument
https://www.360doc.cn/article/31905874_1086747931.html
（immortal inventors)
*bronze bows?
* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/between-mandala-and-...
Something which I've only been vibing thus far is the idea that Morlocks/Children of Martha ought not to be worried about the mandalas of Eloi/Children of Mary (except when practising husbandry for sustenance!), which is a very machine orientation.
In the CH context, I hope we're aiming for the upper right quadrant, with Solidarity driving the caring and Know-how driving the knowing, with generally accepted ideas being that the more we know, the more we can afford to care, and the more we care, the faster we can make knowledge-positive adjustments across a society not all of whose members are particularly knowledge-adjacent. (the former emphasised on the centre-right and the latter on the centre-left)
As with other electorates, the centre is clearly weaker than it was two decades ago, but it still exists (if reduced to a single "the middle" party); when the far right truthfully claims to be the largest party, they mean they are currently the largest within a 5-major-party system. Also something I take to be a positive sign: when I first came here, the far right, as is customary, wrapped their candidates in the flag; part of their electoral success has been via moderation: making such blatant emotional appeals more rarely.
>wrapped their candidates in the flag
Captain Helvetica? Who shall captain Finningia?
Let me know what orientation you think MAC is
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345337
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175664
(Mutual Adoption Club)
(also, the english phrase "kith and kin", which I've heard Bay Area denizens interpret as "kin are the ones you didn't get to choose; kith are the ones you do")
I'd call them on the caring end: the "traditional" (in the sense that the middle class cares, and cared, about them in a picture-postcard way the most) family is mechanistic because it is so legible. I'd say in my limited working class experience that the working class is more pragmatic than sentimental and so you'll find more MAC-like arrangements (if not so far along, but certainly acknowledged more than among the neighbours of Mrs. Grundy) because in that milieu, whatever works, works.
[Captain Helvetia would explain .ch; at least my 5 CHF coins indicate Helvetia is traditionally female, agreeing with the Suomi-neito, who can be depicted in the shape of the country, either realistically: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ApJcldK7o4HS89KSKHIQ... or anime-style: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/23/a9/1923a92eb1364852df38... ]
(Well then, Joseph As Sabra technicality resolved itself, it seems)
Chris Isham[0] in his 地獄楽 chapter only (the first one), hinted at the geometric applications of locales, which, I've heard elsewhere, quantales are one noncommutative generalization of. Not familiar? Nothing in Tanya's brother's slides indicate any connection, however, so I'll have to peer at his student's..
[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Modern+Differential+Geometry+f...
Irreversible (& hence useful) quantum XOR-gate? I love microcosms (gradschool, insurance industry) where something so banal as [rethinking] accounting [principles from scratch] has macrocosmic implications.
How can we incentivize the CoMartha to care about the mandalas instead? [Or introduce fairly bluecollar isotropic irregularities into accounting.] Not marketing, what then? Good faith nondeterministic obsession inducers, tearing a microblackhole at the origin of the Bartle Chart?
More TK on what "the sword" refers to in the context of weird/hypernormal/healthy/unhealthy/imbecile: I have something more than just vibes, but needs cleaning up..
Placeholder for when I find that Science article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054007
I'd've assumed the Finn was expressing his inner Shu: https://youtu.be/J3_sovfY2uA
>在三星堆遗址中发现的乐器除了玉石磬可以肯定为乐器之外，铜铃、似锣铜挂饰等是否是乐器还需要更多的研究
https://m.fx361.cc/news/2009/0703/5821451.html
>有的学者认为：艺术本身起源于巫术，因为艺术旨在施行某种巫术来招引部落赖以维生的动物
I'm aware of the other applications, but as I got to quantales by discovering what other people called the structure I'd gotten to via forcing distribution on informatics-friendly semantics*, rather than from another application, I'm still pretty ignorant of their wider use. In particular, my quantales are unital but not idempotent (but insofar as the pattern fragment also gives rise to a Heyting algebra, maybe I should learn more?) so that's why I haven't poked around with locales much. Maybe I should reread slides 18+ of https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~hap/tancl07/tancl07-abramsky....
* I want sequences (Hehner's "strings") to be noncommutative monoids, and alternatives (Hehner's "bunches") to be commutative monoids, and for them to distribute (in particular countably infinitely wrt to the Kleene star): AB* == A⊗∑B^i == ∑A⊗B^i (i running from 0,..ω)
- a swordsman's Dao/chi/posture is an open in phase space. (in particular, the traditional location of the dantien is suspiciously coincident with the centre of gravity[0])
- a duel is a system tensoring the chi of both participants.
- 戦場ではラグランジュ力学はその場で調達する
which together imply:
- the greater the chi, the higher the entropy, the more possible futures
- one should not look for eigenvectors of the participants alone, but the eigenvectors of their symmetric and antisymmetric combinations. in particular, one attempts to rotate in phase space so that one's control vector is greater than one's opponent's over distance/ma/{whatever this is in chinese}.
- "waves" in the Dao are phase evolutions in phase space. Mei says "strong, strong: no way — Tao: strong, weak" because (absent superhuman energy sources and musculoskeletal constraints) strong motions are necessarily low frequency and hence low entropy, while weak motions give access to the high frequency, high entropy[1] domain.
There's also an impedance notion in play, as mentioned in Jigokuraku: if you are too "strong"[2] you won't sense (« le sentiment du fer »[3,4]) your opponent's techniques, only their sword (and definitely not their spirit!). It takes dialing down far towards "weak"[5] to ascertain their spirit[6].
Around eps 9-10 of the anime, the humans in Jigokuraku begin to read the Tensen's Dao, but I think even earlier there's an occasion where Sagiri realises a Tensen is reading hers, and so (as I mentioned to you I've used profitably) she dials down her spirit, her intentions, so her Dao cannot betray her: no intent, no tells, no betrayal.
Similarly, the FFE teaches that you[7] should be surprised by your own attacks, finding yourself in media res with them already launched...
[0] when I was playing kid's football, they always told me to look at an opponent's belt buckle for the same reason: it's easy to throw fakes with arms and legs, but faking with the dantien is hideously energetically expensive.
[1] I was never a seriously competitive fencer, for whom pistol grips are de rigueur, so I tried to learn the french grip, and when it works it's beautiful because you can do things with the hand that you can't with a pistol grip. (this is partly a defense against time: you can have very satisfying bouts with older people by forgoing use of the legs, turning it into a contest of hand vs hand, where they remain very strong)
[2] I believe the former 3-dan All-Japan Champion's problem, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HPDAFqN74A , at 8-dan is exactly this: he is used to winning by overpowering the opponent, whereas at 8-dan the examiners want to see that you can shape the match: deliberately allowing, not opportunistically forcing, your opponent to make mistakes.
[3] consider also the notion of having a "round heart": too strong, and your heart is very ellipsoidal... (which ties in with controlling the system variables in phase space, not just your own)
[4] sentiment du fer is very interesting, because 24 frames per second fool the eye, and the ear doesn't notice 22+ kHz, but touch has way better temporal resolution
[5] like a good tango lead, a good epeeist should be feline: not snappy but stalking. Bonaparte is quoted as recommending: "while your opponent is making a mistake — don't interrupt them!"
[6] a former olympian once told me he believes that it's after people are on the piste (all in white and masked) that you see their character — instead of perceiving mostly what they portray, when standing around in street clothes. (the TV audience has a very different opinion; does inability of, or disinterest in, perceiving Dao correlate with them being on a couch, watching the bouts?)
[7] compare "me" and "not-me" from Island!
[-1,4] imagine, as a machine, your opponent knowing (suspecting?) you can watch him from behind (or from inside his mind, more realistically/usefully, but from behind could be terrifying)
[-4, maybe -3] tech debt is not entropy, but sophistication?
Somewhere I'd read about a fighting-game AI which had access to all of the human player data (so not the spirit, but knowing the joystick inputs would be a good proxy for "pwn the technique") and was unbeatable, so the programmers nerfed it by giving it only a noisy representation of the human player's avatar's outputs, at which point it returned to satisfyingly mortal.
Doesn't 三体 touch upon (sophons/wallfacers) a watch-from-inside/behind opponent?
Tech debt as sophistication would explain its sign flip over time! It also gives a metaphor perhaps better than "paying off tech debt": it's good if a program is a bit witty, but bad when it starts smelling of the lamp?
> "In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble." —AJP
EDIT: Re: [-1,4] Just as implication allows only 3 possibilities out of 4, my wife likes to say (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42329631 ) that when riding, there should be 2 bodies but 3 minds: what you know, what the horse knows you know, and what you know the horse knows. The rider should have an accurate model of the horse's attention and intentions, but not the other way around. (in particular, you might be very worried about an emergency situation, but the horse should never realise this) I believe this habit helped her with her fencing, because there also we are attempting to hide some aspects of our attention and intentions from someone who is very closely monitoring our posture, in order to discern them.
EDIT2: just as a prelude to a comment on distance: napoleonic sabre cavalry was terrified of an opponent coming up from behind left (strong to their weak) — that's why all the dashing portraits with jackets/cloaks "jauntily" thrown over the left shoulder; ultimately the fashion was very practical, both for defence and for impressing the ladies. Lermontov's karakul nabadi is a particular instance.
Налетели ветры злые.
Да с восточной стороны
И сорвали тёмну шапку
Ой да с моей буйной головы.
Then there's that story about the break even point between French and Mamluks iirc? (And what was the break even point between LGA and the Coalition?)
Somewhere in between we might characterize tech debt; rococo doesn't turn to rubble overnight, & most of it is still around.
Or maybe there are some relatively cheap ways to mitigate tech debt. Always backpropagating debugs to spec, for instance. So we could kick the (meta)grokking/turning point down the road
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nassim-taleb-scien...
>There's no built-in payoff for complexity (or for making things complex). "In academia," though, he says, "there is".
[Make sure your phonebooth expands at around the rate that the range of your (melee) weapons/number of participants increase]
And those promised tubes are annoyingly hard to find http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/02/derek-lowe-to...
Thankfully, Derek has somewhat identified the opponent as, not other scientists, but biology/evolution..
Says the hideously (when compared to single-celled organisms) complicated h sap.
Then again, I think social darwinists ought to admit that it's the single-celled organisms who have the fitness they claim to be looking for?
Ditto for "industry" but there the default data structure (nominally) is ____, so perhaps sophistication is monotonic (not accounting yet for immigration, oligarchal or otherwise psychopathic/imbecilic, modelled as using weapons of uncertain range)
> "Everything is very simple in industry, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen production." —not CPGvC
Have you heard Niklaus Wirth's joke about God nerfing academia? (via https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/niklaus-wirth-or-the-importanc... )
> On the seventh day of creation God looked at his achievement. He was pretty happy at the result. He started looking at the list of professions and felt good: all —policeman, minister, nurse, street sweeper, interior designer, opera singer, supermarket cashier...— had some advantages and some disadvantages. But then He got to the University Professor row. The Advantages entry was impressive: long holidays, decent salary, you basically get to do what you want, and so on; but the Disadvantages entry was empty! That could not be. For a moment, a cloud obscured His face. He thought and thought and finally His smile came back. What had happened is that He had invented colleagues.
Fooser
Friend
Fcolleague
(dang seems dangdy af which makes me wonder as well)
(Aside: as I see it they missed the possible point SPJ made for HW to be mandala oriented because he cared about SW; rocks, smoothed by friction, have a special place in his heart)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5906365
Ah ha maybe maybe not For some profs outside CS (but not Rainer I guess) the list includes (grad) students
If the unharvestable part of friction is called entropy, disproportionately produced by the lowest entropy aspects..
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
>redistribution
It will take a long time for piners for noah to get that their enemies trust their gov (& maybe even one another),
To repeat your venn in words "all you need to solidarify around is freedom+cash"?
(non-advertiser supported sport has a similar problem: if a country wishes to support elite full-time athletes, either a discipline has to have an affluent and widespread group of amateurs who take lessons and clinics, or it has to be able to hide the elite sport budget within the military or police structures)
Heh, now water can crash, or it can flow. I just had a vision of one possible future in which there's an entire generation of chinese "lying flat" at their country houses (furnished with 筆、墨、紙、硯, or at least their digital equivalents?), while there's an entire generation of americans (legally-at-will) working 996 in their manufacturing jobs...
(and speaking of jobs: there's about half a billion years of stratigraphy, before the oldest still-extant sequences, which we're missing and even the most curious geologist probably never can recover)
> I returned, and saw under the sun, that eternity is not to the igneous, nor the metamorphic, nor yet to sedimentary layers; but time and chance happeneth to them all. —not Kohelet 9:11
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To7pOVAQ54Y
(Re: elite sports of the technological societies: are back(-ish) to the moksha-samsara dynamic? Let's say we don't want to invoke TK just yet)
One wonders why jobs was also obsessed with paintings and zen gardens.. the quotes might be polished but IRL the substrata (objective-C? PowerPC?) get cleaned out after barely a generation?
> IRL the substrata (objective-C? PowerPC?) get cleaned out
real artists ship, and shipping (like cherry blossoming) is ephemeral?
花の雲 鐘は上野か 浅草かI would not say taleb (polished public persona) was not even wrong. Complexity pays off when you have an open system. In academia, the complexity pays off to the cloister within the cloister? In arts/industry.. the boundaries are more porous so you can afford to let/can't help having the losers partake in the complexity.
a 5-year-old pack of yoghurt. Has the consistency and flavour of chalk. Thawed mammoth, otoh...
Edit: that may explain which Jacobsian mode of survival becomes dominant. Next up, mode of trust?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mapping-leadership-cultu...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/wowswa/top...
Interesting that the Old Country shows up as heavily "task-based" trust. I wonder if it could move towards becoming a higher-trust society if enough people were convinced that living together in a civilised manner were a worthy, err, I mean profitable, background task?
the pervasion of this thought-killer amongst x-percenters makes me indignantly curious about what stuff the actual inner-circlers actually spend their supposedly limited attention on.. shipping?
42471021
As tlb pointed out, since it's hard to distinguish meretocrats from meritocrats, "RAS" may not apply..
I’ve always had a distaste for Aristotle, preferring Plato, but after reading this I’m wondering if that stemmed more from the additional lens of the person introducing him to me.
Might have to revisit his work as my older self.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43277412-aristotle-s-rev...
And that most 'Western values' are basically Christian in origin (with an undercurrent of Aristotle):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
MacIntyre argues that when it comes to ethics, the only two viable options are Aristotle or Nietzsche:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
Certainly Plato is influential, but he doesn't seem to have any practical use in day-to-day life.
I think the broadest most practical day to day knowledge stems from Plato, née Socrates, “I do not think I know what I do not know”
The simplicity of his elocution, his use of systematic pauses when communicating — that's a common advice given to contemporary speakers — the relevancy of the cycle of political systems, that ancient Greeks were first taught sports and music to acquire psychological balance, a necessary prerequisite to efficient further studies, etc.
Having knowledge of Plato & other old fellows, almost feels like cheating at life: it equips ones mind with knowledge and skills that has been deemed worthy by enough humans to help it endure for millennia.
The people who don't know about them can't fathom how much they miss.
Yes, certainly in Augustine of Hippo. But I don't think the metaphysics (or ethics) has made it into modern era as much as Aristotle filtered through Aquinas.
It would be quite an educational breakthrough if we could actually feel how and why there was this peak moment in intellectual inquiry, why it did not persist, why it emerged again but only millennia afterwards and whether it may again vanish as we drift into digitally intermediated dark ages.
But the mystery thickens again if you consider the multiple centuries of the Hellenistic and Roman eras that did not continue the pattern, even though economic conditions and the number of educated individuals kept growing. Let alone the subsequent extremely long "dark ages" where economic conditions did deteriorate but pressumably there were enough courts and monasteries to feed a few pioneering scientists.
Today we take the scientific outlook and methodology as sort of de-facto winner, but there seems to be an element of cultural choice and possibly other factors that modulate the mindshare that ends up cultivating it.
Ideology will be the end of us all.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
“Californians voted against outlawing slavery. Why did proposition 6 fail?”
https://www.kqed.org/news/12013392/californians-voted-agains...