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So you don't think your belief that the scientific mindset is a preferable mindset is a philosophic belief rather than a scientific belief? Because it is, since that is a belief that can't be proven empirically, rather it is reasoned to philosophically.

Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being reduced to the brain.

Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion. Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of matter.

You also can't account for universals and particulars on that view and solve the problem of the and the many.

In that article, from an 80 old day comment of mine, you did not understand my comment. You told me to read the article. You don't understand what I mean by justification. There is a difference between prescription and description. That article was descriptive, not prescriptive. You cannot justify universals if you believe only particulars exist. You can only justify universals if you are willing to accept a metaphysical reality and provide a grounding for the metaphysical. Not everything is proven in the same way. The scientific method is good for studying particulars, but it cannot prove a universal. For example, science assumes the laws of logic in its process, which it cannot prove or provide a justification for. Also the scientific method cannot justify the scientific method. You on the other hand will probably say "because it works." Something working is a value-judgement, and that is not independent of ethics. It also assumes induction and regularity in nature, but you obviously haven't heard about the problem of induction. Science cannot provide a justification for induction. Science will also claim things like we know things from observation or what is in the sense data. Did we observe that or sense that in our sense data? I would say not everything is proven the same way. You can use science for some stuff, but not everything.

How do they justify such claims of an abstract universal concept given most scientists hold the naive empiricist worldview in which only particulars exist?

do you think an iPhone built itself? I don't. Don't tell me the only reason I say that is because I am looking for patterns.

Not true at all. Look up the story of Apple University. Jobs can't run Apple from his grave. He tried his best to leave Apple with the right culture and leadership in his view. And for the most part, Apple has done really well since he passed. No one is going to get 100% of things right 100% of the time, and Jobs is no different; things would have inevitably gone wrong under his leadership, too.

Don't take his use of the word "retarded" so literally. People might take offense to the word but understand that he doesn't mean it as an actual slight toward people with real mental disabilities.

@crazytony, if your startup is already working out, influential people will come to you.

Also, where did I explicitly state that YC was only about money? I don't even think you can say I implicitly meant that or assume it was the gist of what I said.

One way is to get NGOs to adopt it for their volunteers and to have volunteers get rep from people they help and or serve.

yeah, if we had known about all those ideas, we wouldn't have bothered with pplrep. There was another similar idea called "honestly" or something. Our YC application, it wasn't even serious and they asked us to make a video last minute yesterday cause we never bothered with a video. I made one in my dark apartment on the spot. Honestly, if pplrep was actually working out and we had impressive user growth, we'd never apply to YC because $11,000 or what have you for 7% is not something I'd be interested in.

check out my social network, pplrep.com, and unlike other networks, it's not egocentric. Email verification not required and we never email users, unless they request their password if they've forgotten it. Also not in bed with the NSA.

It's horrible. I think they should actually watch the normal user use their site. Once they see a loading screen, they're likely going to x out of the site.

There's a big difference between learning syntax and learning to code.

I have a few apps I use on my iPhone everyday: reeder for rss, alien blue for reddit, news:yc app for hacker news, tweetbot, and instapaper. These apps alone make me not want to leave iOS for android, otherwise I already would have.

I ha

Not a surprise cancer hasn't been cured. Most diseases have not been cured, yet. Even bacterial infections. People can still die from staph infections.

I agree. Comparing those devices to the iPhone is just laughable. The iPhone took everything Palm could do and made it much more elegant and intuitive to use. It did it in such a way that made the older palm devices look so incredibly archaic.

This is a pretty awesome article, IMO. I agree not everyone is meant to be incredibly "successful." Success is rather subjective. In the end, for most people at least, the attainment of happiness is the ultimate goal of life. And if that means being a lazy pothead or whatever it may be, why the hell not?

All Linux distros I have seen look tacky and gaudy compared to OSX. I guess that's just your style, though.

I think the author of the article is pretty inaccurate in his analysis of students at Harvard. I think the article reflects poorly on Harvard, to be honest. The author is about as smart as my shoe.

Usually, the ones who continually ask questions and run their mouths in class are the ones who are extremely interested in their respective field of study. Interest creates curiosity and excitement, and both are required for someone to continually want to ask questions and learn more about whatever subject.

The other students who do not continually ask questions are either shy or are just going through the motions at college, so they do not really care.

If you are a student at Harvard, you probably have above-average fluid-intelligence, regardless of what you accomplish with it. The more you ask questions and the more interest you have in a subject, the more knowledge you will gain in that said subject (crystallized intelligence). But it doesn't mean people who do not continually ask questions have any less fluid intelligence.