yelsgib

WTF are you talking about? A body of research? Are you out of your mind? This response actually sounds like a form response for when anyone disagrees with you.

To answer your question by deconstructing it: which one of my claims could possibly be supported by empirical research? The fact that I like gloom, nostalgia, and complex forms of pleasure? Or perhaps the idea that it's extremely hard to disambiguate the contribution of your circumstances to your happiness from your own contribution? Or maybe my own personal observations regarding the bay area?

Seriously, what type of research are you looking for?

"Scientists find that yelsgib likes gloomy feelings."

"Sociologists determine that the bay area concentrates on positive feelings to the exclusion of negative ones."

"Cosmologists determine that we are a very small part of the universe."

Are you actually this obtuse? My good god. I seriously cannot believe your response. It seriously blows my mind. I don't even know why I'm responding. It bothers me that I'm even responding. Are you trolling me?

The first line of your response is that "disagreement males (sic) you question your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." What assumptions did I make you question? How was your understanding of "the issue" strengthened by my response? Did you say these things because you meant them? Or do you just say whatever pops into your head without regard to whether it makes sense or you actually believe it? Did you even read what I wrote?

Holy christ on a cracker.

I guess this comment is going to be pretty unpopular, given the comments that most have left before it, but I find this post creepy in the extreme.

For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault" is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most exciting times/places ever.

For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration, comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner.

Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time - feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic.

I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes.

The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail.

PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out! Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.

You have no idea whether the author has "met enough variety of people." You have no idea if people are innately able to program, learn calculus, or "think in three dimensions" (btw - driving is a 2d problem). I don't. You don't. No one does. We do not have a framework for discussing the fundamental (genetic) basis of human intelligence. We do not understand even its most basic components. Some people seem to have "good memories" or be "fast at computation" but that's about all we can actually, honestly, meaningfully say. Culture is so ridiculously complicated and so powerful that it's impossible to impossible to distinguish between what is innate and what is imprinted. The fact that basically no one is able to predict the intellectual abilities of future humans is an indication of this (e.g. what would a mathematician from the 19th century say about the "fundamental" mathematical abilities of his fellow humans?).

The point of the article is that coding is in some sense a core/intrinsic skill. That anything you do is actually deeply tied to coding in the sense that "something you do" (technology, in the general sense) is equivalent to "algorithm." Weaving is coding. Playing a game is coding. Building a house is coding. Painting a picture is coding. Proving a theorem is coding (Curry-Howard Isomorphism). Sure, they're different, more intuitive, weird types of coding, but the fact that you can't see that they -are- coding implies a limitation on your ability to abstract the concept of "coding" sufficiently.

The fact is that coding is a deeply human activity, and that by understanding coding we are really understanding ourselves and the fundamental means by which we -collectively- understand reality. The fact is that we need some shared understanding of ourselves, of our logical facilities, of the basis of our ability to produce and thrive and know how to interact with the universe. Without a shared framework, communication is useless/impossible.

The point of the graph is that it doesn't matter how or why people die, after a certain age. This is clear from context, though not explicitly stated.

A law is only a law if it is enforceable. Copyright is not enforceable since every copyrighted object is a requirement on the government's resources, and such objects are (basically) infinitely easy to create. Therefore, since the government has finite resources, it is simple to create a system where it cannot protect all (supposedly) copyrighted objects, namely one in which (# objects)*(resources required to protect an object) > governmental resources. It is a fundamentally unenforceable law and therefore not a law.

In response to #3 - isn't it very very strange to you that J.K. Rowling is able to have a billion dollar Harry Potter empire? I don't think this defense of copyright actually stands up to any rigorous examination. Why do people need to be able to make billions of dollars from children's books? From software? From art? What would people spend their money on if everything like this was essentially free?

You mention physical security, food availability, and shelter as this little boy's three major boons in life. But does he have access to an intellectual tradition? Does he have access to any figure who can teach him anything? Does he have hope? Does he have freedom?

Your caricature of a person with a "really" miserable life crucially forgets that in many ways this person might have had a much more rich than someone living in poverty in the inner city. Namely, in terms of freedom, in terms of connection to his family and community, and in terms of his independence. People (not just the impoverished) living in cities with high population density have a fairly unique set of psychological stresses, historically speaking. This set of stresses seems to be particularly crushing, for whatever reason.

I mean, what I really don't understand about your comment is the tone of it. That somehow this child has all of these benefits, but still fails? What are you proposing? Can you really not see that the child must ALSO have some deficits that cause him to fail? Are you proposing that he's a bad person? I just really don't get it. What's your answer? What's your idea? That he's just not "trying" hard enough? What's the difference between a person who tries hard enough and one who doesn't?

It feels to me that underlying your comment is a deep blindness to crucial elements of human psychology. You somehow draw an equivalence between humans existing in superficially similar circumstances and then throw your hands up in the air and say "I don't get it!"

Where's the content?

I'd like to hear more about why you think the culture of violence associated with drugs being illegal will not simply disappear after a generation?

Doesn't most violence associated with these drug cartels take the form of fights over supply/territory? What will they be fighting over if they are no longer the suppliers?

Who gets to decide which drugs are addictive? The main claim by anti-legalization politicians is that cannabis is addictive.

Giving any small group of humans the right to decide which properties drugs have and how important/dangerous those properties are is EXTREMELY dangerous. This is not kids stuff. Millions live and die by these decisions. Who do we trust to make such decisions?

Underlying your arguments is the belief that some people are better at making these sorts of decisions than others. The belief that any group of people (no matter how large) should dictate the consumption patterns of another group of people (no matter how small) is inherently anti-democratic.

You claim that the drug situation should be carefully analysed. Well, it must be analysed by someone, right? Who will do the analysis? Who deserves this power? Who do we trust enough to make unbiased decisions in this domain?

Another underlying assumption that you seem to be making is that drugs are bad. You want to allow room for advances in hygeine, medical treatement, etc. but you don't want people to do more drugs.

I want people to do more drugs. I want there to be more and deeper research into drugs. I want people to trip more. I want cocaine and heroin addicts to have easy access to ibogaine. I want there to be less shame associated with having gone through a period of heavy addiction. I want people to smoke weed and do mushrooms and LSD and 2CE on their days off rather than getting drunk.

"Legalize drugs" is not an over-simplification, it is a purification. It is the only position which is consistent with freedom and mutual human respect. It is the only position which has any hope of allowing humanity to move towards a healthy and mature stance on drug use. Your attempt to cast it as a "simplification" is a subtle (and all-too-common) context-switch from the land of ideals into the land of hubristic utilitarianism/pragmatism.

Sorry, actually, I don't feed trolls.

I don't know what you're referring to w/r/t Somalia. Fill me in on your version of the events.

This way of thinking doesn't make sense. No one is claiming that you're responsible as in you need to fix this. We're claiming that you're responsible in the sense that you're part of the cause (or, in the language of Nagarjuna the "dominant condition" -http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/307/nagarlec.htm) of the exploitation of people in third world countries. There are many other conditions besides you, of course.

The most important goal is to deeply realize your position and relation to other people - how you act after you realize this is up to you/your emotional makeup/your virtues/etc.

My claim is that because of the complicating factors (visibility and ineffectiveness) inherent in this situation you aren't able to fully understand this relationship.

If you lived next to a diamond mine, you probably wouldn't buy diamond rings. I say this because I assume you are a compassionate/empathetic person to some degree, and I think it would be very difficult for you to separate out your feelings towards the terrible conditions/bloodshed involved in diamond mining and the shining ring that you just bought from the smiling slave-driver. The only reason that you could ever be comfortable buying such a ring is that you are far removed from the suffering involved in your purchase.

There are two complicating factors here: visibility and paucity of influence. You can't see the bad thing happening and you, individually, don't have the power to stop it.

The interaction between visibility and morality is a complicated one, but the fact is that if people in the most affluent nations boycotted diamonds then diamond mining would cease. If people boycotted Coca-Cola and Fiji spring water then villagers would get their water back.

The fact that you can't control these situations also complicates things. You can stop buying Coca Cola but, unless everyone else does to, CC is just going to just keep on stealing resources.

I think that the thing I really dislike about your comment is that you have the audacity to condemn the wrongs committed, but lack the integrity to acknowledge that you play, at least, some very small part in those wrong things happening. Because you do. If you don't buy that diamond ring then that is real $$$ that the diamond miners don't get. The hole created by your boycott has a non-zero probability of shutting down a diamond mine. The fact is that you don't care. I'm not saying you should - I'm just saying you don't. And the people doing these "wrong" things don't care either. Perhaps you could say that you would do differently in their situation, but my guess is that you are REALLY not in their situation and you have no idea what their situation is AT ALL.

I get it. You're in a comfortable position. There's no reason for you to change. You probably don't care enough about people in China, etc. that you're actually going to significantly, or even insignificantly, change your day to help them out. In fact, it's not even clear that you can. This may sound like a criticism, but I really don't care what you do.

The main element missing from your comment is the answer to "what to do?" My guess is that your answer is "Nothing. There are bad people elsewhere, and I'm not to blame, so I do nothing. Let them figure it out." I guess I hope this isn't actually your answer and that you realize that it's a lot more complicated. These people are "unscrupulous" not because they're full of demons, but because globalization exerts pressure and men sacrifice their better intentions when faced with that pressure.

The people who make $1/day stop making $1/day. There is crisis. The crisis is caused by the cessation of a domination-based dependence relationship. The crisis could cause government collapse and mass-death. Out of the ashes will arise a (necessarily) more self-sufficient community.

The fact is that globalization fixes countries as "slave countries." It's very easy to control people by giving them a locally beneficial option. Which sounds better to you:

Make $1/day working 16 hours per day - spend the rest of your time sleeping/taking care of yourself/family.

Making $0/day refusing to work - spend your day working on building up your community in creative ways, but suffer much higher probability of personal/family death.

The option that 99.9% of people will take is #1. However, real change can't occur if everyone takes #1, so we have stasis.

What do you recommend reading to find out more about what's really going on in China/South-East Asia?

Playing football involves running and jumping and being alive. Playing Farmville involves sitting still and clicking the same buttons over and over and over. Football breeds real, live, community. Farmville virtualizes community.

Football intuitively seems healthy, whereas Farmville seems perverse and almost purely destructive.

We can safely say that Farmville is addictive because it is designed to be addictive, and succeeds at invoking addictive behaviors. People who play football/watch football don't seem to do so addictively.

Come on, are you being serious? Are you trolling?

You are seriously conflating "social anxiety disorder" and "introversion." The idea that a concert would "drain you so much it will be hard to enjoy" or that an introvert would have a tough time interacting with a group long enough to go on a rock climbing trip is essentially saying that an introverted person is somehow handicapped, or pushed to their introversion by a type of mental disorder.

I identify as an introvert. I like thinking about mind, experience, truth, math, language, etc. I don't have a social anxiety disorder or any other type of anxiety disorder, so I'm not afraid to join a rock climbing group or any other type of group. I go dancing. I make small talk. These things can be introverted activities, if you make them.

My M.O. with respect to social situations seems to be "create comfort zone -> expand comfort zone." Since I'm an introvert, I tend to bring people into my world rather than go into theirs.

That being said, I vastly prefer spending time with one person whom I really like to a bunch of people who I vaguely like. I also hate carnivals.

I find posts like this very annoying. As swombat points out, the claim that you should "watch your thoughts" leaves one wondering: how do I do that? The answer I assume I would get, were I to ask the author this question, is: "Just do it!" Of course, the author has conveniently left out details regarding what type of support he received from family/friends/coaches.

Anyway, that's exactly why this type of crap isn't useful.

To become excellent at a contingent skill (e.g. swimming, chess, math) you must surround yourself with excellent, honest people who care about you.

To become excellent at a trascendental skill (e.g. "strength," "bravery") you must isolate yourself and go very deep.

There is no other way.

Verified by science! Oh me oh my!

But how do we regulate our metacognitive regulation? And can we regulate that regulation? And ...

Biting your own teeth, indeed.

My point is that you don't know his situation, so you can't judge his actions. You don't know how many "externalities" there are (whatever an "externality" is).

The fact that you can't imagine a worthy justification (in terms of his value system or your own) doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. And no, you cannot categorically deny the existence thereof.

You shouldn't pass judgement on the living.

You can't criticize a decision outside of the context of the person who makes it.

This comment makes me extremely angry. Do you know anything about this man or his family? Do you know anything about the reasons that he was climbing the mountain?

Disrespectful in the extreme.

Is sulfuric acid illegal in Ireland? I would rather have a gun pointed at me than a large man threaten to burn my face off.

I think this statement is funnily self-negating: "I already understand grammatical structure, the relationships between subject/object/verb and the uses of prepositions." This guy must be learning Romance languages (e.g. surprise! he's learning Portugese) since languages outside of this family differ in a lot of ways. E.g. all the things here can and do differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_language#Linguistic_fea...

This sort of euro-centric natural language egalitarianism seems to bleed over into his thoughts about programming languages as well, e.g. those expressed in this statement:

"Learning a new language simply teaches me to communicate the same thoughts and feelings but in a different way."

This is wholly false. Languages differ with respect to their requirements for self-description. These requirements, when propagated into code through the actions of a large community, shape the types of programs that are written and how those programs can be expected to interact.

For instance, part of the reason that Haskell programs can be very short, is that the type system on which Haskell is based is extremely deeply thought out and based on a rich mathematical framework. This framework allows the programs to be self-describing in a consistent and meaningful way and for that self-description to be used to express ideas more clearly.

Ruby is self-reflecting through a sort of imperative set of meta-programming techniques. This allows "conventions" to exist in ruby code which enables a framework like rails.

Etc. etc.

When will people realize that not all languages are created the same? Language shapes culture and culture shapes language. Once you put a stick in the ground and decide where features will be located and how they will be inter-related you are planting the seed for all sorts of complicated emergent behavior.

It's true for natural languages and for programming languages. This guy just seems to have missed the ticket.

What do you mean?

I think that it's very important to separate casual sex as we observe it in our culture and casual sex as it could be. All of your points only make sense if we make tons of cultural assumptions.

Casual sex in and of itself is obviously neither "feminist" nor "anti-feminist." Even here, it depends if you're talking about an idealized, consistent feminism or the perverted reality of modern feminist thought.

"wouldn't it make much more sense to study economics and complex systems to get an idea of what the outcomes of any particular choice of social structure are?"

Ok, well, this is a fine idea in theory, but there are tons of problems:

1.) Actual social structures are way more complex than anything we could ever hope to model - ever. We can't make predictions about them - period.

2.) Even if we could, there is no means, and has never been a means, for manipulating social structures directly. The dynamics of social change are even more complex and less well understood than the structures themselves. At the very least we can classify the structures - the dynamics are a whole other world of complexity. It's not as if we, the intellectuals, are sitting on high and that everyone else listens to us and changes their behaviors accordingly.

3.) Your ideas about economics and complex systems require semantic mapping - they require that we can take a real-life situation, map it into the model, manipulate the symbols, and output a result. Unfortunately, this mapping falls OUTSIDE of the domain of the fields themselves. This is my whole point: one role of Philosophy is the creation of the mapping.

I think you are confusing my -descriptive- claims with -prescriptive- ones. I'm not telling you that ethics is -good-, I'm saying that it is the principal means by which society discusses difficult problems. Ethics, morality, religion, are all ways that society has a discussion with itself, if you want to think about it that way.

Can you give me a good, concrete, example of how you can use math to prove anything about society, without relying on assumptions about what is "good" or "right?"

A large part of what modern philosophy (post-modernism, post-structuralism) (which I am now assuming you are wholly ignorant of) talks about is the boundaries of what we can coherently talk about. A lot of it is hyper-skeptical and actually probably asserts things that you'd agree with (like that we can't claim moral absolutes, they are culturally dependent, etc.). Philosophy now serves as the kind of watchdog of language - it says what we can say and what we can't.

(For instance, the statement "God Exists" is not wrong, it's incoherent. Have you ever thought about it that way? What's god? What does it mean for an undefined entity to "exist?" Does dflskajfk exist? More precisely, it's incoherent in the context of assertions of objective truth. It's NOT incoherent in the context of religious discourse, in which it's taken to be a transcendental truth (axiom). Only by engaging our structural ideas about society can we think about why people "believe in god" and realize that "believing in god" is not a metaphysical but rather a cultural condition)

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"Economics can tell us what are the outcomes of Democracy or Communism or whatever"

No it cannot. This statement is absurd unless you make tons of assumptions.

"like in Democracy, I guess some people will be exploited, but the average is happier, or whatever"

Lots of "whatever"'s here. You really aren't making a good case for "economics." Do you even know economics? Have you taken any graduate courses in it?

"Once we know the likely outcomes, we can apply our values to them and decide which system to use."

Which values do we use?

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""They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC"

I don't think that is true in general."

Do you actually know?

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Look, I don't mean to be mean, but it really doesn't seem like you're interested in Truth per se. You're interested in truth in terms of how you see the world. I guess that's fine (and necessary). I understand what you're saying. I guess problems start to arise when you try to understand what I'm saying (and fail). If you don't want to understand what I'm saying, that's OK too.

You have to understand that from my perspective, your belief in "math" and "economics" and your constant appeals to them as "things" and "bringers of truth and wisdom" seems borderline religious. You might be able to say the same thing about me re: philosophy, but I keep claiming that "Philosophy is not a thing" (and neither is Math or Economics, incidentally), so that wouldn't make sense.

Consider for a moment what it would be like to believe in god. I'm sure you've had arguments about god with Christians/believers. I'm sure they've been frustrating. There's always a sense that you "just can't get through." Consider that perhaps I feel the same way with respect to you. Consider the possibility that you are stuck in the same sort of mind-dungeon that religious people are stuck in. The only tools you have to interpret your world are the tools are you arguing for. You interpret other tool sets in terms of your set of tools. It's like trying to convert someone who uses C++ to use Lisp (have you ever tried?). They say "why should I use that? It's the same! They're both Turing Complete!"

I do not believe that any argument can be non-ad-hominem. We are both people, arguing.

The truth is complex and neither you nor I understand it. The deepest claim I'm trying to make is that I think we should be humble and err on the side of assuming that we don't understand things (until we are absolutely certain that we do). This is what I originally took offense to in your original post - your claim that your "prejudice had been validated." It hadn't been. I don't understand why you are more comfortable saying Philosophy (which you don't understand) is useless and meaningless instead of just saying "I don't understand Philosophy." It's OK to not understand things. (again, I'm not even saying that I "understand" any of these things, but then again I still haven't claimed to)