IsaacL

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-trading-highest-level-...

I wrote a comment about her comment on another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10157608

I remember her writing something about burnout being to do with your brain being effectively trained to associate hard work with failure (but I can't find where she said that, so it might have been someone else). My strategy to self-heal was to put myself in situations or activities where I had many small-to-medium-sized wins.

('post' implies 'better than', but literally means 'not'. Still, Chapman knows a lot more about AI than Eliezer, and has an interesting write-up of his research into AI based on Heidegger's philosophy).

I was saved by Ayn Rand - yes, the person analytical, continental and other philosophers all agree to dismiss - specifically her epistemology and theory of concepts. (The Rand to read is "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". Or click around here: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html)

A year ago I was trying to level up my writing ability and wrote a medium-length article, with proper outlining, attempting to explain an abstract idea through concrete examples (mostly business related).

I sent it to one friend and was told "this is too intellectual, it contains no useful information, no-one will want to read it". No response to the actual subject matter.[1]

I was floored. I didn't want to be the stereotypical writer who gets defensive in the face of criticism, but my friend was so dismissive and patronising that it was hard to maintain my motivation. To rub salt in the wound they later told me "look, you just have to get used to harsh feedback".

[1] (Another friend read it and had some criticisms, but did actually engage with the argument I was making).

I was reading lots of perma-bear/libertarian bloggers, the type who predict impending financial apocalypse. I still think they have a case, which is why I still sock away some of my monthly savings in gold/btc. But I also now realise that you can't bet your entire future on one possible outcome, hence the bulk of my money going into the index fund. If I save up enough that it becomes worthwhile I might look into the Buffet strategy of individual stock picking (he says with a small amount to invest you can make superb returns in well chosen small-caps).

Agile and Lean both contained good ideas, but they've been misinterpreted. "Flexible processes" became "no processes", "rigorously test your assumptions" became "try things at random".

Web and mobile are becoming mature platforms. There's now a long history of web and mobile products to study - the design, engineering and business principles for success in these products should be well-known. They're not because of the rampant ADHD and short-termism in the industry.

"I believe that my position is consistent and the one that most successfully models reality, with the least ad-hoc adjustments."

If reality is only a set of beliefs, why are you trying to model it with another set of beliefs?

I've studied that Owl link in depth, and (though he appears intellectually honest for the most part) he mis-characterises Rand's views. I'll tap out here, but I want to point out that you definitely seem heavily influenced by Kantian ideas.

Interesting. It's probably that most people who consider the question "what do words really mean?" hit on a very small set of possible answers. There's also the fact that his ideas have influenced many other intellectuals in many fields, and you many have absorbed his way of thinking by osmosis.

can only legitimately convince each other, ie change someone': beliefs, through exposing a double standard in beliefs

The primary legitimate way to convince another person is to point to reality -- the simplest way to do so is to point to something observable. If I want to convince you that eggs break when dropped, I drop a bunch of eggs in front of you.

Knowledge is another word for bias.

I can't really make sense of this statement, but it seems you're implying that all of our knowledge is untrustworthy. I definitely dispute this -- we have to have some certain knowledge or we don't have any knowledge at all. Put it this way -- do you know that "knowledge is another word for bias"? Are you certain? How?

"Also I say that the word 'exists' is meaningless unless it is relative to a conscious observer."

But does the conscious observer then exist? Do they have to exist relative to another conscious observer? Existence has to be absolute or you end up in such paradoxes. Otherwise, I agree that asserting the existence of parallel universes is arbitrary.

"I also think morality is relative to someone with a "sense of morality". Absolute morality is like absolute humor. Humor requires a human with a "sense of humor"."

Rand's view is that morality is objective, which she distinguishes from intrinsic. Intrinsic morality would be what you call absolute morality -- things are inherently good or evil, regardless of their relation to other things. In contrast, Rand says things are good or evil in relation some agent. However, this relationship is an objective fact of reality. (E.g., "sunlight is good for lizards", or "friendships are good for human beings").

"I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality."

It sounds like you're influenced by Wittgenstein, or at least his ideas. If you assume all these issues are artefacts of language then there's no way I can give you an adequate summary in any amount of writing, and especially not one comment. Human minds can only communicate by exchanging strings of words, after all.

To give you a straight answer, though: in vipasanna meditation you focus on one thing (typically the breath, though I often used ambient sounds) and attempt to break down your experience of that thing into constituent sensations. One thing you learn from this is how frequently your attention wanders, and by really training yourself to focus you learn how your attention is directed from moment to moment. The main thing you are trying to gain, though, is a first-hand experience of the Buddhist view of reality: that solid objects do not exist, and that existence consists only of flickering sensations, with no permanence or independent existence.

I really can't summarise Ayn Rand, since her writing is already extremely well summarised and essentialised. Click around that website if you want to learn her views on any particular topic. The relevant ideas here, though, are her views on concepts. There's been a long-running divide in philosophy between people who thought concepts reflected something intrinsic to the universe (e.g., that all horses contain an essence of horse-ness, or reflect Plato's ideal horse) -- and the people who thought this was nonsense and that language was therefore an arbitrary human construct (this latter view is currently dominant). Rand found a third position: concepts are human constructs, but they serve an objective purpose, and there are objective rules which determine their formation. ITOE is the only place where you will find her full argument.

To compare the two: Buddha takes sensory experience as the gold standard for reality, and concludes that reality exists, but is ultimately transient and lacks identity. Rand takes perceptual experience as the gold standard and concludes that reality exists, that the everyday objects we perceive really exist, and that therefore reality is logical and consistent.

(As for Wittgenstein, he says human language is just an arbitrary game which can never describe true reality, and ends up in a kind of quasi-mysticism (man helpless in the face of an ineffable, incomprehensible universe)).

I predict you will not be satisfied with this answer, because you are following a very misleading philosophical framework, but I wrote it up for the interest of lurkers.

Buddhism seemed to go deeper than many other philosophical frameworkss for this reason. However, I looked into many philosophical systems, and I was extremely surprised to discover that the thinker with the most consistent views on reality and consciousness (both self-consistent and consistent with my own experiences) was drumroll Ayn Rand.

Though she's known for her views on egoism and capitalism, she wrote a ton about consciousness, perception and concept-formation. If you look at my comment history you'll see I talk about her a lot on HN, and that's because I think computer scientists will gain immense value from studying her works. Introdution to Objectivist Epistemology and The Romantic Manifesto contain her deepest writings on consciousness and cognition and are the books I'd recommend. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html is a good taster.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/introduction-to-obj...

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/the-romantic-manife...

I've met a couple of other Objectivists who have practiced meditation - not many but they exist. I was very surprised to discover the connection between the two areas. Hopefully in a thread like this on a site like this, curious minds will read this comment and be persuaded to investigate further. It's a fascinating journey!

https://www.gov.uk/theory-test/hazard-perception-test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdQRkmdhwJs

For people saying business books are all nonsense -- why is business seen as a uniquely luck-based activity? No-one says, oh, some bridges collapse and some don't, so books about civil engineering only reflect survivorship bias. Business can't be reduced to a formula, but it can be broken down into smaller areas, each with its own principles (sales, marketing, recruiting, product development, etc). Amuroso learned these areas very quickly when she was getting started, but made some mistakes when things got bigger and the challenges increased.

If this is true, why the moral outrage towards the professor?

However, we don't know why the professor came to the conclusion that she plagiarised. Maybe they jumped to conclusions on limited evidence, or maybe this paper was written with vocabulary and sentence structure which was inconsistent with the student's earlier work. Either way, it's incredibly unlikely that an academic professor of sociology would be a closet racist.

tl;dr It's unfair to be accused of plagiarism for submitting a paper which sounds "too intelligent", but it's also unfair to be accused of racism for attempting to enforce academic standards.

Unfortunately, this a story which is going to press the internet's hot buttons.

"Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable."

A lot of people seem to take the "romantic origin story" as a template to follow, and waste a lot of time as a result.

"Pfeffer adds estimates of sea level rise due to thermal expansion and ice melting to calving approximations and concludes that SLR by the end of the century will range 0.8 to 2.0 m above present with an emphasis on the lower area of this range (Figure 7)."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level#Sea-level_at_...

[2] http://uk.businessinsider.com/cities-exposed-to-rising-sea-l...

The big threat is from finance. Tech salaries are held up by the huge numbers of devs working for banks, and that would change if there's a major impact to the finance sector. Apparently the City is pretty robust, though, and Euro-related business is only a small amount of their activity.

http://ribbonfarm.com

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/

https://meaningness.com/

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/

Enjoy :)

I later found out that Aristotelian logic held the answers, and modern symbolic logic was a weird set of mathematical formalisms that wrenched out one part of classical logic (propositions) but omitted the theory of terms (concepts), without which, logic becomes a system of meaningless symbol games. This is the book that showed me a world of logic both perfectly rigorous and perfectly descriptive of human cognition: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology... (if the author's name triggers you, obviously this book is not for you, but if you enjoy far-out intellectual adventures, you'll be in for a mind-blowing ride).

I get the sense Burning Man used to attract people like my younger self. From my Facebook and Instagram feeds, I now see many startup scenesters I know attending. If I want know, I feel I'd have to be much more careful to suppress my "weird" side. I can understand why the original attendees feel the event has become too diluted to be appealing.

Not having been, I don't know, but from a distance it looks like a pattern I've seen play out in other communities. One thing I've noticed is that many people who are genuinely cool, interesting, curious, adventurous and so on, don't see themselves that way at all - and many people who see themselves as cool and creative are in reality vapid and shallow.

You sound quite defensive for a throwaway account. (If you're the author, your article has lots of good research on the details of Asian empires, but making broad claims about history is something which should be approached with caution).

That guys blog is also worth a read (the link is in his profile).

This seems to have been around the time the hipster-tech culture started taking off in a big way. I graduated right in the middle of it, and looking back, I realise I'd taken for granted that the professional tech world would follow Joel's more adult way of thinking. Instead we have a cult of youth. No planning (under a misguided interpretation of "lean"), minimum processes (under a misguided interpretation of "agile"), no knowledge of design patterns (TDD supposedly makes this obsolete), weird fake hipster quirkiness (but omg don't make any jokes about killing ex-girlfriends, or Anil Dash will put you on an industry blacklist).

The secret is to rationally analyse your own values, identify why you value what you value, and try to define what unites the different tasks that you have found meaningful in the past.

This post contains some hints of the framework I used: http://aristotleadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/what-is-cen...

What is Nietzsche's solution to the problem of universals? What does he say about the is-ought problem? What does he say about capitalism and individual rights? All of these things are discussed in Rand, none are discussed in Nietzsche, who rejects reason, logic and universal truths.

Sure, read other philosophy, but to really really understand where she's coming from, you have to read her, and not confidently spout second-hand misinformation.

I was heavily into Nietzsche in my late teens and early 20s, before discovering Rand. He definitely influenced her in her early years, but by the time she came to write down her own ideas she'd rejected pretty much all of his ideas. She was an Aristotelian.

> Even Rand herself hated Objectivists.

This is not remotely true. In her later years, she concluded that the organised Objectivist movement had been a mistake, but she still hoped for an informal movement of intellectuals to follow her philosophy.