Yeah, sorry, I didn't at all intend that as a slight against you specifically.
68 karma · joined November 17, 2016
The number of hopeless herbs on here who have so thoroughly internalized "legal == moral" is depressing.
I don't think a startup scene in a city is ever going to really blow up when sticking around in that city is giving up the possibility of building any kind of future for yourself.
Everybody I know who's worth half a damn moved to Seattle.
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Toronto: maybe.
Montreal: sure.
The prairies: "Is Fargo the next up-and-coming startup center?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/64oqth/a_sh...
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to make between "non-physical" and "supernatural"?
What basis is left to make that distinction on, once you've abandoned the material realm?
What distinguishes your "plane of consciousness" from "heaven" or "the astral projection spirit crystal healing field" or "the power of positive feelings"?
Or, rather, always does that, like all of us do all the time, because that's what permits us to continue to live and think in the conditions and on the scale we find ourselves inhabiting, because that's the basis on which our minds work. But does not attempt to claim that any of the distinctions that happen to be useful to me have any fundamental basis in the raw nature of reality.
"Materialism" of this type is the default position in the same way atheism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the claim that there's something beyond material reality, and both dualism and theism are making this claim. It is the same claim. The only difference is the details of exactly what the supernatural thing is.
That is something there is not and cannot possibly be any evidence for, beyond "just take my word for it". In that way, dualism is indistinguishable from the existence of god or gods or magic or reincarnation or any other supernatural thing. To permit the possibility of one is to permit the possibility of the other. And there is no more evidence of one than the other, nor can there be. Again, there is no reason besides chauvinism or wishful thinking to believe in a theory of reality that makes you or something about you special.
I'm not going to extend the slightest benefit of the doubt to any theory of reality which says "I, and people/things/systems I recognize as like me, am intrinsically special and set permanently apart because something about me is fundamentally different from everything else", which dualism always comes down to. Any more than I'd be inclined to trust the objective truth of any theory of politics or economics or anthropology which says "I, and people/things/systems I recognize as like me, am intrinsically special and set permanently apart because something about me is fundamentally different from everything else".
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EDIT: I am definitely, full-heartedly, whatever Daniel Dennett is.
There is no good reason to believe that any ontology you can come up with to help you describe and attempt to comprehend reality, on the time and energy scales you live on, has any basis in the fundamental nature of reality.
The only distinction between atoms and phlogistons, physiology and the theory of humors, is their explanatory and predictive power, but none of those is any more "real" than the others beyond how they help us symbolize the world in a way we can reason about.
There is no good reason to believe that consciousness is any different, other than unexamined chauvinism, or, at best, wishful thinking.
Reality doesn't give a fuck what circles you draw around some fuzzy densities in an energy field, and what labels you write on them. Cars and sandwiches, atoms and quarks, where you end and the air around you begins, these distinctions that only matter to "you". This is the tyranny of the dichotomous mind.
The amount of unjustifiable, and, on the scale of the universe, unearned arrogance that it takes to assert that you or anything about you is set apart from the rest of material reality, is staggering, and just not something that I'm capable of sharing, having seriously considered the alternative.
Honestly, I'm just not sure we can have this conversation unless you can assure me that you have fully considered this to the point of having to pull yourself out of a serious existential crisis at some point in your life.
Any platitudes that come down to "there must be something that objectively privileges the nature of our existence above that of a rock or an endless field of eternal cold emptiness" are just totally baseless, and fail every test that might distinguish it from "god has a plan for me", "love is a physical force that directly manipulates time and space", or "it's turtles all the way down".
I'm not saying that we are the only "conscious" systems, or that "consciousness" is something set apart from the rest of reality. I'm saying the exact opposite of that.
Your point (at least, as I'm reading it) is exactly what I was getting at with "and other systems you recognize as sufficiently like you", which I did not intend to be chemical-biology-centric.
What I am arguing against is "dualism", and its many hidden forms and names (including the one goatlover is espousing). Which is the idea that "consciousness" is some fundamental property of nature, set apart from (really: privileged above) the rest, that exists on some plane beyond material reality.
Which, I argue, there is no good reason, besides pure unexamined chauvinism, or wishful thinking at best, to believe
This is what you are also saying, no?
And, of all the phenomena that might be identifiable as emerging from the fabric of reality, the one that distinguishes you (and other systems you recognize as sufficiently like you) from everything else just happens to be the one you've decided must objectively be set apart.
I'll ask again: in this framework, what remains "supernatural", and why can you reject it?
The idea that there is objectively such a distinction is 100% reducible to any other attempt to assert that some definitional dichotomy "actually exists". It's exactly isomorphic to any other argument about taste. What is a sandwich, what is a car. An argument about whether a fetish is hot, between a person who has it and a person who doesn't. It's all the same damn thing.
Shit like that is why I hadn't stop taking philosophy courses in university. It was just rehashing what always came down to this exact same essentially platonist theory of forms bullshit, over and over and over.
The problem is the opaqueness of it
Which leaves a lot of room for the appearance of capriciousness, and sometimes even (though not so much in this case, this is not nearly that consequential a story) malice.
http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov...
That was one of those threads which just gets opaquely disappeared off the front page.
Which is something I've been noticing happening a lot lately. Really big turnoff from participating in this site.
What is "paid user acquisition"? How would a higher "lifetime value per user" enable you to do it? How is your app monetized to arrive at this LTV? What would it imply for you to have "designed it around monetization from day 1", what would be different? Why can't you change it now?
We have a similar bit of bullshit in British Columbia, where government health insurance is paid through premiums, administered outside of the tax system (which is annoying as hell, and doesn't happen in other Canadian provinces), which are progressive only up until $30k (£18k) annual income, and fixed after that at $900 (£550) /person/year. Which is 3% of $30k/year, but 1% of $100k/year, etc.
... actually laid out like that and looking at the inhuman shitshow in the US, I think I might withdraw my complaint.
But, back to naming because obviously that is what really matters, a regressive tax[0] is still a tax.
A "license" is a permit from the government to do or use something, and carries the implication that it's something that can be denied.
I know it 100% functions as a tax and not in any sense as a license. And the idea of requiring government permission to have a TV carries less weight in the internet age than it would have in the past. But the wording alone still makes my blood boil. It sounds like something you'd find in North Korea.
Give me a single example of something that it turns out is truly better expressed through inheritance, and you will be on the shortlist for a Turing Award.
All of these abstractions, when rarely they are actually needed to express a program, can be naturally expressed within the type system, in a proper functional language.
The fact that there's this encyclopedia of hundreds of discrete things with arcane toxic names that practitioners are required to individually learn and carry around in their heads, is a crime against our profession.
But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.
Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.
Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.
The problem is innocent people who happen onto the conversation, interpret it at first glance, not unreasonably, as some insane asshole saying "only black lives matter", engage in good faith on that basis, to uphold ideals that we can all agree are right... and subsequently are piled on by a mob who agree that the offender has just instantly and irredeemably proven themselves to be one of the worst things they've been taught it's possible to be. With a real, non-zero chance of their real lives being actually, materially ruined as part of this public shaming.
The problem is things like "Black Lives Matter" being used as a shibboleth[0] -- an excuse to form a gleeful lynch mob, giving everybody a pleasurable and community-affirming chance to engage in collective norm-enforcement against The Other.
The problem is an atmosphere where I'm so paranoid about even attempting to have a good-faith intellectual conversation about this that I have to create a throwaway account to remove a not-at-all implausible chance of having my life ruined for even engaging on this topic at all.
And this isn't even getting into the atmosphere that seems to really be setting in, where agreeing to listen to someone has become tantamount to agreeing with everything they say. That's the really frightening one.
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