flomble

This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money?

My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.

So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.

The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.

"Slander" entails making false statements, whereas this was just a statement of fact, free even of condemnation. People who read it make their own value judgments.

> Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time.

I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.

> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.

This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.

It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with your statement in a previous post that their arguments are incoherent, particularly the early exponents like Foucault or some of the Frankfurt school. I'd also point out that much of the Enlightenment tradition is not ontologically materialistic; in particular, German Idealism embodied in Kant, Schopenhauer etc. stands against materialism.

Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?

Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?

> freedom of press and similar rights are a uniquely western phenomenon that are ... derived from christian values

This is incorrect. Europe is quite unique in that since the advent of Christianity there has always existed a church separate from the state acting as a counterbalance thereto, and offering an alternative foundation of moral authority. Despite this, brutal suppression of all dissent and criticism of the political structure was almost always supported by the Church, which generally allied itself with dominant regimes (i.e. feudal rulers).

It wasn't until the flurry of neoclassicist-inspired philosophising of the Enlightenment and the emergence of monied elites in a position to pressure the state to grant them rights that said rights were slowly granted. They often couched their arguments in terms of Christian doctrine, but this is just the incidental result of the dominance of the Christian religion in society at that time.

I think the problem here is that you're not seeing that 'politics' encompasses an incredibly broad spectrum of things, and the only time that something is labeled 'political' is when it reaches a certain level of controversial for the relevant society.

For example, selling a hamburger would have been an obviously political act in the Soviet Union. We don't see it as such because vanishingly few people believe that commercial transactions between private parties should be forbidden. But whenever someone advertises a hamburger, depicts the purchase of one, or leaves a review of one on a website, they are engaging in an act that we only view as apolitical because of the status quo that we inhabit.

I find the point about "ugly" syntax interesting, because I'm generally quite indifferent to that sort of thing, but my experience tends to indicate that it's very important to people.

Facebook created ReasonML, which is just a different syntax for OCaml (I think the AST parsed from it is interchangeable with one parsed from OCaml), purely because it's less alienating to people who are used to writing C-style code.

I'd say though, that generally, people who are interested in "niche" programming languages are less likely to be put off by syntax than people who have only been exposed to the more mainstream languages, which is why their preferences are less likely to be the ones reflected whenever mass adoption is a goal of language designers.

Yes, absolutely!

In particular there's evidence for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...

The idea is that if your sexuality is not innate, then it can be changed. There's long been a desire to prove that homosexuality is genetic in order to counter the claim of bigots that they can turn people straight through shame and abuse.

It's frustrating on several levels. One, there is an element of the naturalistic fallacy; many people feel that homosexuality being "natural" (e.g. occurring in many animal species or being immutably determined by genes) is a strong defence of it (as opposed to the preferable argument of "it's not hurting you, so you have absolutely zero grounds to object to it"). Two, many people want to be able to point to a single gene as the causative factor, when genetics is rarely so simple, and other prenatal factors may contribute (e.g. something that happens during gestation).

I read the statement and to me, the future progressive seemed to be the most apt way to phrase it. When I tried to find examples to illustrate why, it occurred to me that the future progressive predominates when delivering bad news. For example:

"Unfortunately, we won't be renewing our contract with you"

or

"We regret to inform you that we will be going with another candidate"

Changing those to the simple future makes them sound much harsher to my ears, so I would venture that the progressive is a mechanism for softening the impact.

This sort of construction is reminiscent of topic-prominent languages, e.g. Japanese, but English is a subject-prominent language and phrasing it that way would sound awkward to a native speaker.

This and the comments below are missing the source of this disagreement. The way that conditionals are most commonly structured in English has rapidly shifted over the last 10 years. The simplest way to explain is with examples.

Old style: "If I had tried, I would have succeeded."

New style: "If I would have tried, I would have succeeded."

The extra "would" style used to be restricted only to adding strong emphasis, as in "if you would just LISTEN to me...". Slowly, this extra "would" has crept into other areas, like replacing the subjunctive as in the example:

Old style: "It would be great if this were done."

New style: "It would be great if this would be done."

The new style is "incorrect" English as of a couple of decades ago, but its usage is increasing. It still sounds terribly wrong to my ear, but what determines whether grammar is "correct" is the way in which people actually speak.

Sounds like Yes-And (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...), accepting the premise and expanding on the joke.

Tell your wife you're using a proven comedic technique.

The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjustified.

I'd say that the way I conceived of it, I was making a distinction between events that were determined by antecedents (physical or otherwise) on the one hand and events whose outcome was uncaused, or random, on the other. In my mind the two are dichotomous and exhaustive.

"Empathetic understanding of others."

Empathetic understanding of others should make one hesitate to tell them that being primarily focused on doing what they're passionate about is "self-centred crap", rather than using a less needlessly excoriating phrase. It touched a nerve for me specifically because I feel I, like most people, have prioritised doing things that other people need and are willing to pay for, and then felt attacked for my wish to be doing something I actually enjoy and have an aptitude for.

Edited: to be more empathetic to others.

OK, so my initial response to the title was anger; the video which is the substance of this post, however, has a much less contentious message. Your "passion" is the intersection of what you love and are great at. The concept of "Ikigai" is that it is also important to consider what others need and are willing to pay for, a self-evident idea wrapped in provocativeness, condemning people for being concerned for their own wellbeing and fulfilment.

The final sentence of the article is somewhat nonsensical: "feelings are exactly the things that distract us from our wantings". "Wantings" are feelings!

I want to jump in because while I agree with the separateness of the ontological from the phenomenological problem of free will, I also want to point out it's not necessary to have a determinist stance to point out that ontologically, free will is an incoherent idea.

Taking physicalism to be true, imagine that determinism is false. What is non-determinism but randomness? And how can one's actions being partly random be called "free will"? So regardless of whether one's actions are pre-determined or not, they're not "free" because that notion breaks down under close examination. Either actions are determined or they are wholly or partially random. This is the case if you're a physicalist, but also if you're a dualist. If the mind exists in some realm other than the physical world, that realm operates either deterministically or partly or wholly randomly. The same line of argument applies to neutral monism.

Emergentism is the only one that works differently, but I don't put much stock in gesturing vaguely at the morass of mind and matter and saying "the explanation is somewhere in here". In any case, if an emergentist can give a description of a component of mind that isn't reducible to matter, the same argument will apply to it.

Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person".

You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書).

Sure, you can make distinctions between "classifiers" vs. "measure words" vs. units of measurement, but it feels like the same construct to say 一位人 ("one person"), 一群人 ("a group of people") or 一斤人 ("half a kilo of human"), as grisly as the last one may be.

> You either like strongly typed object oriented langs or you don't.

Sorry, but this argument doesn't pass muster anymore, when there are abundant examples of strongly typed object oriented langs which don't exhibit these flaws. C# avoids getter and setter boilerplate with `get` and `set`. Kotlin and Swift, unlike Java, actually are strongly typed, because objects aren't implicitly nullable. And the many conveniences afforded by modern language features add up to improved productivity, provided the programmer using the language doesn't rigidly refuse to learn to use them.

It's confusing to use the hypothetical of 100% in one sentence and in the next acknowledge that the optimal rate of taxation for maximising revenues is not at 100%.

The question is whether tax revenues could be raised by raising tax rates to the point that revenues exceeded current expenditure. Whether or not that is possible is uncertain.

It's not circular because "freedom" can't really be used to refer to price (e.g. "freedom of beer"), so it actually disambiguates. I wouldn't personally default to assuming a political motivation for the wording in this case.

Good question. If the recognition of others is a deciding factor, then Taiwan was previously a nation (when its government was internationally recognised) but no longer is, which is a strange conclusion.

Partly, it depends on whether the debate over nation status is a merely one of linguistics and categorisation or whether we're making ethical arguments.

When Japan annexed Korea, did the Korean people cease to constitute a nation? When Japan annexed Taiwan, did Taiwan cease to rightfully belong to the Chinese government of the time?

(As an aside, I think that no-one talking about the Taiwanese company's involvement in IP theft is a pretty good example of how the press is incentivised to lead with a sensationalised narrative that inflames sentiments, how people focus on facts that fit a pre-existing narrative, and a general bias against China).

With respect to Taiwan: what is it that constitutes a nation, if not the common belief of its people that they are a nation, combined with the reality that they are under the control of a government which they recognise as their own?

I apologise for the generalisation. That was too broadly and absolutely worded. But I would stand by the idea that "people on the spectrum are more likely to have difficulty intuitively learning social conventions".

Is that still a nebulous statement?

> No wonder people leaning towards the Asperger/autistic spectrum of brutal honesty would state that; such is their nature.

Actually, it is not "their nature". The nature of people on the spectrum is to have difficulty understanding social conventions. Having a system whereby social conventions are explicitly spelled out in detail is likely to help people on the spectrum adhere to them, because they no longer have to be inferred.

People on the spectrum deserve understanding (like everyone else) when they break social norms or say hurtful things due to not understanding that they're doing anything wrong. When they know that what they're doing is not acceptable, they are as responsible as anyone else who knowingly acts like a jerk.

I'm also highly skeptical of the idea anyone outside of a tiny minority would be unaware that "garbage" is an intentionally insulting term, especially given that it is a metaphor. Even "completely fails to meet standards" is vastly better and more descriptive (outside of the emotional content of "garbage").

When I picture a person in tech successfully running for office, I imagine precisely someone who has excelled at "profitably dismantling what's left of the old paradigm". Unfortunately, technical ability, business savvy, ability to understand social, political and bureaucratic systems in motion and strong, reasonable ethical convictions are all mostly orthogonal and rare qualities.

>nebulous

Delightful.

I think you get right to the reason for the distinction in language. The two things weren't unified in your conception until you were inside a cloud, which until recently was impossible except by climbing to high altitudes. Fogs and clouds are usually experienced in very different ways, so it seems natural to me that people came up with different words for them.

Portugal is constrained by international conventions on drug policy (largely pushed by the United States). Legalizing the production or distribution of drugs would engender serious adverse consequences, so they've tiptoed as far up to the line as they can without breaking the rules that bind them. While their policy relieves harm associated with addiction, it can't undermine the incentives for the criminal drug trade because absurd conventions prohibit them from doing so.

The interesting thing is that in Haskell, the equivalents of Python's `A(B,C)` and `A(B)(C)` are identical: `a b c`. This is because of currying: you're allowed to supply one argument to a function at a time, and you get back a function that takes one fewer argument. So if `add(x,y) = x + y`, then `add(5)` is a function (let's call it add5) so that `add5(y) = 5 + y`, or in Haskelly notation, if `add x y = x + y` then `(add 5) y = 5 + y`. If you write `add (x,y)` in Haskell, then it means a function that takes a single tuple `(x,y)` as an argument.

A(B(C)) would be `a (b c)` or `a $ b c` or `(a . b) c`. The first is the most vanilla way, the second is convenience (basically "evaluate everything after $ first, then plug it in") and the third uses the function composition operator `.`.

The implication being that the only reason I could disagree with the idea that there is no human nature is that I have never encountered critical theory, structuralism, or postmodernism. Actually, one can acknowledge that we are all immersed in social structures that shape our thought in ways that we can't objectively understand, that communication is fraught with signs asserting cultural preconceptions, that there is a close connection between knowledge and power, etc., while repudiating the idea that external reality is illusory or unknowable, or that human behaviour is purely a function of context.

Human beings are animals, and thus the product of evolution. We are not blank slates, but highly specialised machines with innate tendencies and potentials. Almost anyone could, with minimal difficulty, list any number of phenomena universal to any human society: pain (and aversion thereto), communication, laughter, anger, etc. It is avowedly extremely difficult to separate ourselves from our inculcated norms when reasoning about human nature, but that does not refute its existence.

Of course, suggesting that human beings have no natural tendencies evolved for their survival ignores an overwhelming preponderance of evidence accumulated by biologists over the past century. But you know that, having clearly studied the field.