huetius

Would this put concepts from classical philosophy like formal and final causation back on the table? The article seems to imply that it’s possible, but I’ve learned that journalistic summaries can be low-fidelity.

This is a curious paper, as it seems to come at a time when the philosophical postulate of meliorism has been problematized precisely by the trajectory of historical development, which had previously its own criteria of success. It might interest the author to know that this was basically the prediction of Vico, one of the most valuable (and misunderstood) philosophers of the not-so-distant past.

I openly love meetings. With a good, well-planned and thoughtful meeting, I can save myself and my team weeks of engineering work. Just last week, by asking a simple question to the right person, we canned a heavy, ~2dev*sprint story for something a developer was able to achieve after the meeting with no code changes. The customer was thrilled.

Depends what you mean by “this.” This exact project is, I think, not ready for prime time, as I said in my post. If by “this” you mean “ways to make more of our own stuff on a smaller scale,” I am currently in my fourth month of waiting for a proprietary part for my tractor, when if I had an economical and legal way to either machine the part myself, or have it machined by a competent neighbor, then I wouldn’t have this problem. In a time when we are experiencing the consequences of over-specialized, over-connected, over-optimized supply chains, I think that a more fractal, scale-invariant, redundant approach to production has real value.

(It also, in general, makes humans feel good to make and then use something).

The responses here are critical —- some useful, some not so useful.

I’m happy to see this project and would like to see more like it, even if this is not quite ready for show time. The possibility of using advances in technology and open source methods to allow people to make more stuff for themselves and their communities in a way that is efficient and feasible is exciting to me.

A friend of mine has a similar story. Still searching for his good ending. I’m glad you’re better.

I feel like we’re at the beginning of the opioid wave again, and the obvious and foreseeable negative consequences are just being shunted aside. We never learn anything.

This is obscurantism. If there’s no difference between marijuana and food, what’s with all the excitement and advocacy?

OP’s point seems to be pretty reasonable to me. If marijuana is outcompeting established anodynes it implies they are in the same category.

I’m going to answer as if you’re arguing in good faith.

In the theology of Antonio Rosmini, God places within humans the principle of universal being, by which we participate in the light of reason, which enobles us with the ability to think about concepts that are beyond our quite limited selves.

Of course, there is also something mysteriously wrong with human beings, such that our own efforts always betray the infinity of which intuitively conceive. This ought to give us pause as we try to create machines with human-like or super-human-like qualities.

I think this poster has an axe to grind, but there is definitely significant overlap between symptoms of child abuse/neglect and early signs of ASD and other mental disabilities. I am on mobile, and cannot right now give a compact source, but the lists on Mayo etc. have a lot of overlap.

Not doubting this, but it seems to cut both ways. I can just as easily justify an overreaction by claiming to have averted some worse outcome. It seems to be a general problem of counterfactuals.

Honest question: what is worrying to you? Is it the idea that infectious disease being used as the pretext to create an environment of fear and compliance, such some unwanted social transformation which is actually predicated on ulterior motives can proceed over objections? Is it the idea that people overestimate the degree of control people can actually exert over these diseases, leading to hubristic reactions? Do you object to being alarmed about infectious disease as such?

This is an intellectually consistent view, which is good.

It seems to me to be relativistic to the point where I would call it nihilism, but it is, at least, consistent.

I wonder what the venn diagram looks like between “people who are responding to this in the negative” vs “people who believe human rights are real and serious.” I’m not trying to be flippant here, I just really don’t believe that people think through the consequences of their beliefs very well.

With the collapse of the SSRI hypothesis, I feel like there was a missed opportunity to interrogate what it is about the affluent, technological society that makes such a staggering number of people so depressed. It seems that we will instead (characteristically) plow forward with even more powerful drugs.

Not knowing all of the details of your situation, this seems like the kind of thing working agreements are supposed to help with. If you can get the parties involved together, you may be able to come up with some explicit guidelines for communication. For example: “assume good intent.” This would apply to you (you will not assume that your CS are personally attacking you) and them (they will not assume you are indifferent to the customer). If either party steps out of line, you can come back to the working agreements, point out that this is not how any of you want to work, and hopefully correct the behavior, or else resort to discipline in the case of repeated violations. Hope this helps.

My neighbor, who is my rival, wants to get a Red Rider BB Gun. I do not want this to happen, because this threatens my status as the cool kid on the block. If I just buy myself a Red Rider BB Gun, he will call me a copycat and make me look bad. So instead, I buy a Red Rider BB Gun for the dorky kid down the corner, who is not a threat to me. I get to look magnanimous, my rival is thwarted, the dorky kid has a cool toy. It seems that what I have done is certainly good for me, and the dorky kid has for sure gained something, but have I really done a good thing? Or have I done a selfish thing — using the dorky kid as a means to achieve a selfish end (thwarting my rival)? And if we are to say that my intent does not matter, we have to also accept that this has tremendous knock-on implications, especially problematic for concepts upon which we regularly depend, like merit and guilt.

As for whether Unions are good or not, my answer would be that they are good. They represent a tried, effectual response to the “social question” which emerged in the late 19th Century, avoiding the destructive poles of unconstrained capitalism and revolutionary socialism. It is also noteworthy that independent trade unions have historically acted as a bulwark against various totalitarianisms of both left and right. It is also true that some unions have been guilty of violence, corruption, ideological craziness, and narrow selfishness, but I would suggest that this is not a unique problem for unions.

Strongly disagree with the downvotes on this post.

The phenomenon you describe is real enough, but I’ve also seen teams lament their shortsightedness as they fight with the limitations of opinionated frameworks (cough… Django… cough). It’s extremely hard to choose the right tech. The best engineers I have worked with are just as good at minimizing the stakes of making the wrong decision as they are at making good ones.

So one should stay quiet? And yes. Both at the very bottom and close to the top.

We’re talking about plan to subvert unions. It is one thing to do something that is both good for me and also good for others. It is quite another to do something ostensibly good, but with the ulterior intention of preventing the good of another.

Respectfully, I disagree with the postulate that there is no possibility of solidarity with “the marginalized”, and think this is a good example of why. When you say ask “them,” who do you mean? Ex-convicts, Amazon workers, teamsters, some combination of these, or what? And who are you going to listen to when people (inevitably, even within the same faction) disagree? I think that what this approach does is renders ethical discussions impossible. By denying the possibility of a common rationality in which moral questions can be weighed, ethics is reduced into a collision of interests, and the unsurprising result is that nothing can happen without the approval of the strongest party in the conflict. See Occupy Wall Street for another example of this principle in action.

I totally agree with you about our society’s mistreatment of people who have paid their debts, but I’m not sure I like what Amazon is doing here. It smacks of using people: treating them like props in order to secure private gain.

That sounds like 4chan :)

I’m sympathetic; I believe in the ideals of democracy, but it seems to me that those ideals come from outside of democracy itself, and that democracy cannot function without them. An example is the belief that everyone participates in a common rationality, such that there is benefit to be had by allowing different perspectives to be heard. This belief has been undermined in a very deep way in the US, to the point we can fairly clearly say that it is gone. I am deeply worried about what this means in the future, and am skeptical that there are procedural or technical solutions.

(As an aside, I think that the traditional left vs right hermeneutic is beyond useless to explain how this belief disappeared, but that’s maybe a different discussion).

I’d be interested to see a more serious study of this, but my hypothesis is that it was always a weakly bonded cohort which has by now dissolved into other cohorts. Hipsters generally didn’t self identify as hipsters, and the internal dynamics of that scene tended towards schism (anything liked by too many/the wrong people is rejected).

I humbly submit Einstein’s own words: “The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem.”

The author rightly identifies the educational impotence of our society as a major problem, but his inability to address it as anything other than a question of technique leaves the problem unperturbed.

I wonder if I’ve misunderstood, but as a developer, I like being given problems, rather than solutions. I’ve also found being able to formulate a customer or business problem well enough that others can come up with a good solution is a real skill which (IMHO) should receive recognition.

In this thread: people discovering that the idea of the direction of history necessitates the subordination of ethics to politics.

This one-dimensional approach is especially bad since the emergence of omicron, where number of infections doesn’t even capture the level of COVID danger.

This rings true to me. I was only able to get an intuition for calculus when I was able to conceive of it in geometric terms. I later learned that this was how Newton originally derived it.

This helped me to “trust” it in more advanced contexts where geometric intuition becomes exceedingly difficult.

I love this post, I would only add that “useful” is not the inspiring criteria it is made out to be, as demonstrated by the example of Farmer Bob’s fence. What needs to be resuscitated is the transcendent, aesthetic dimension.

There is lots of good stuff in here. I have battled acedia on and off for my whole life, and am going through it right now. I like St. John Cassian’s teachings, personally, and always find when I am given the impulse to return to them, my acedia goes away. He prescribes prayer and manual labor (not exercise, go fix, plant, or build something with your hands!). If prayer is difficult or objectionable to you, you might find some form of mindfulness helpful.

More from St. John Cassian on the “noonday devil”:

https://www.pathsoflove.com/acedia/cassian-acedia.html

Hope you feel better.

EDIT: Also, sometimes you are just tired and need a break. You know your situation best.