there  could  be  snakes  in  here

I got a temp job in an official statistics department at the age of 23. Somehow; while I was nominally educated (economics & philosophy), I'd never written any code, never simulated anything, never calculated a PDF , and never actually analysed more than 50 rows of data. Most notably, I'd never heard of principal components analysis (nor any unsupervised learning, tools with which one can discover the ' joints ' of nature without really putting one's mental framework into the mix). We (they) built a PCA model of childhood poverty, letting the algorithm find the most important parts of the phenomenon, making them fall right out of the data, heedless of the Marxism or Malthusianism or indeed mindlessness of the modellers. Despite my tiresome anti-realism and anti-quantoid convictions, I could see the philosophical implications were huge. So here I am.

"This isn't right . Imagine: we give them a loss function, without a utility function. They can't feel good; only less bad." "It's the same with us, tho. What we call utility is just the absence of loss." "I'm not sure that's true. Pride feels to be more than the absence of shame; love is more than absence of loneliness." "There's a fairly big gap between your two examples. And it's hard to think clearly when strong pleasure or pain is implicated." "Nevertheless, yours is the view requiring a mass redefinition of natural language to make two entities become one." "I don't mind. Even if they're not identical, we can still capture most of all value by reducing harm." "I don't see how you can know that." "Obvs I don't know it infallibly, but anyway it can't hurt ." "You might be more ambitious than such moral hedging." "Yes, as so...

If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. This excludes 80% of the world - mostly nonwhite people. So developers who don't handle different character encodings are racist. And we do not associate with racists. So we need our own, non-racist versions of all ASCII software; yes, this may take all our lives, but the cause is just, and when it comes to justice there is no calculus, no compromise possible. Are you with me? Or If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. It's silly and extremely inefficient to limit your software's reach so much for the sake of two missing functions. The cost is an hour or two of development; the payoff is increasing your potential userbase by a factor of 6 . This will also expand the pool of potential contributors to your project enormously. And besides, glyph encodi...

(c) Andrew Wyeth (1957), "Brown Swiss" It's easy to mock preppers - that is, people who buy off-grid rural land, a stock of imperishable food, and guns, while honing skills in expectation of the harsh and pre-modern world soon to come - but it's plausible that they're actually providing a public good: redundancy , for the species, against certain awful tail risks . Let's begin by inventing a distinction: call the ideology "survivalism" and the practice described above "prepping". People often point to creepy far-right tendencies among survivalists (e.g. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, violent libertarianism, Red Dawn paranoia) and speak as if this were an argument against prepping. No matter how self-interested or politically unsavory the practice supposedly is: competent, geographically spread-out prepping could still help ensure that future generations come to be. "The species", in some sense, and also maybe modern ...

Four years banging your head against philosophers does not necessarily result in answers . You leave with a lifetime's supply of questions, though (as many as you can carry). But maybe only certain kinds of question. Some of the best and most probing issues were intentionally not addressed by my lecturers. When they did come up, they were dismissed as hand-wavy (i.e. vague, naive, poetic, unrigorous, excessive, off-topic) . What this really means is that they require rare breadth and synthetic intelligence to handle - a candle, not a laser - and that even then, the answers to them are open-ended, indexical and speculative. This is why something like Continental philosophy - in spite of all its obscurantism, cultishness and breathlessness - is necessary: it isn't afraid of reaching a little way past 'the' world at the expense of certainty. what is our fundamental relation to the world? what is value? how much of all this was inevitable? (is anything itself necessarily...

(c) Honoré Daumier (1865) 'Crispin and Scapin' I can only suggest that he would combat false consciousness to awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the people snore . - Erving Goffman All interesting theories accuse us of being brainwashed: "You lack information; now, open your eyes": Tectonics (on solid ground) the unconscious mind (you're so unconscious you don't know you've a massive unconscious) Relativity (space-and-time is squishy; no space without objects; no one thing can move ) the Everett interpretation (all possible things actually happen) the germ theory of disease (the world's so dirty you've no idea how dirty) Radical feminism (you're so oppressed you don't know you're oppressed, and/or you're so sexist you don't know you're sexist) Or more generally Critical theory (you're...

[LINE BREAK] Note that all this works for Kantians too. The point is: what artists to spook their audiences, philosophers live amongst. Also: setting your film in a dream excuses most sins (plot incontinence, blunt catalepsis, hysteron-proteron, narrative-time/discourse-time looseness). " Inception is proof that people are not stupid, that modern cinema is not trash, and that it is possible for blockbusters and art to be the same thing ." - Mark Kermode N'aww.

"[ x ] started using Causes . Causes strives to empower people from all walks of life to have a positive impact on the world in which they live. We allow Facebook users to organize into communities of action focused upon specific issues or nonprofit organizations ." - Facebook Causes " Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it ." - George Monbiot's blog motto I recently wrote in defence of protesting against diffuse, complex, faceless social issues. (I concluded that, yes, it's silly, but so's everything else.) We are subjecting activism to a lot of sneering and scepticism of late. And so we should. Anything this vulnerable to tokenism and ignorant "Yeah! What she said!" posture deserves the scrutiny. What about delusory, guilt-displacing, one-click " slacktivism "? What good does raising consciousness do against: what happened to Stephen Lawrence...

People like to make lists of the good things humanity's been getting up to. But they always jabber exclusively about natural-science: hard tech . This is probably because physical apparatus is louder, and life-saving in an obvious way. So: some quiet ( Heideggerian ) technology that was also massive: Grandest findings of the human sciences (broadly construed) in their first century: 1931: Maths is not logic. This doctrine, "Logicism", or "Fregeanism-with-respect-to-the-foundations-of-maths" was a highly impressive attempt to make the world make sense. It consists in the two linked theses: 1. mathematical concepts can be defined in terms of logical ones (no math-primitives) and 2. mathematical principles can be derived from axioms (given definitions of concepts). Why does this matter? Why did people want it to obtain? Why is Gödel's incompleteness theorem so renowned? I suppose logicism matters because we live in a world where the mo...

" Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done ." - Yes, Minister An idea for a very lazy academic book: email a bunch of linguists & philosophers of language, polling their top 5 Worst Equivocations (in terms of: Whorfian damage to the world's consciousness, source of misunderstanding, or just plain distaste.) Everyone gets what they want: they to moan about polysemes, I to have a free book. Here's mine: "God" So vague - but the speaker always has a determinate cosmocrat in mind. This allows much smugness in otherwise sincere discussion. I'm sure other languages but English and other cultures have their own "real" deity name. There's no excuse for it, but veiled, self-superior syncretism ("Well, you mean my god when you say 'God'"), either: - Allah has loads! - But not as many as that one . - The African ones , rarer and rarer... - Hinduism makes long bloody lists and sings the...

A friend said he wished to improve the world. Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world . - Wittgenstein vs Is [existing] not an act of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? … I fear for all the violence and murder my existing might generate. I fear occupying someone's place . - Levinas Observation statement #1 : The Shanghai district government is offering postgraduate scholarships to foreigners (even philosophers). Observation statement #2: I am relatively poor and want to know Chinese. Observation statement #3: The Chinese government publically -but- secretly executes about 6000 people a year, putting to shame the rest of the world, who are only unspeakable 2000 times a year put together. Observation statement #4 : The Chinese government covertly tortures lots (illegally, even by their own fucking law ). Observation statement #5 : There is in place, in this "Communism", a hereditary class order (rural/urban) rem...

What various people said the most fundamental part of the world was - the bottleneck through which the rest of reality flows. (Or does now, after their work done unbunged it.) ARISTOTLE: Begin with the first causes and the principles of things. "what is being qua being?" (metaphysical priority). DESCARTES: Begin with yourself, with only the most evident things. "what is known?" (epistemic priority) KANT: Begin with the interface of active subject & world: "how do we have knowledge"? (apperceptive priority) RUSSELL: Begin at the most basic facts: "what are the real átomos?" (logical priority) HUSSERL: Begin with the universal impression of consciousness: "what does the a priori shape of our experience say about the objective?" (phenomenological priority) HEIDEGGER: Begin with the meaning of Being: "why something rather than Nothing?" (fundamental-ontological priority) LEVINAS: Begin with the Other: ...

“ When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity...When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination .” - Graham Greene "WE ARE ALL HOSTAGES WE ARE ALL JEWS WE ARE ALL SURVIVORS WE ARE ALL CANNIBALS WE ARE ALL SAINTS." ********************************************************** [ cmd:/run {existence} ] ---Welcome to Being! ---You usurp {Djellali Mohd}. What gives you the right to do that to him? You take {200} Shame Points! ---You see Dave, the guy who always gives you hassle about your hair! [FACETOFACE ENCOUNTER!] ---You see {9} Responsibility Points! [ cmd:/take 9RP ] ---You receive 9000 Shame Points! [ cmd:/give sandwich: Dave ] ---Dave is {still hungry}! ---Shame total {8999} ---Through Dave's Face, you realize you are related (always-already asymmetrically non-subsumptive divinely) to all Thirds! You now have {6.999999 bill...

Now academized here . Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself. - John Searle Sometimes the obvious is the enemy of the true . - Gabriel Stolzenberg I'm away to go study Derrida, mostly because I really want to know if he's the most brilliant comedian to ever work in academic philosophy. But the first thing about him one has to face is not his rejection of power; not his work in developing structuralism; nor even that he was continually demonized as a nihilist: no, the first thing about him is that he could not (or would not) write well. And, bizarrely, this foible is at the heart of the most popular dismissal of the unsettling work that Derrida and other postmodernist theorists have flung at us. Taking Searle's maxim (above), the critique goes: they're obscure, therefore they're all speaking shite. It is suggested that there is a subculture ...