there  could  be  snakes  in  here

(Not a portrait of me by Frederic Leighton .) Name: Not Clive James, Not Robin Hanson Age: Missed most of the Twentieth Century Address: Almost nowhere, really. Nationality: Not a great deal. I don't participate in Scottish culture any more than I have to by merit of enculturation. Languages: I can't speak Gaelic, Spanish, Cornish, Saxon, nor many many others... Non-interests: Sport, war, conlangs, Tarski, collecting anything, scale-modelling, Dr Who, surfing, bell-ringing, spelunking. Education lapses: At Secondary level: No economics, no philosophy, no gender, no business studies, no psychology, no politics, no French, no Chinese, no grammar (properly). I'm also quite bad at geography. Tertiary: No law, no anthropology, no engineering, no geology, no medicals, no German philosophy to speak of. Code : I don't know any functional languages (unless you count the pariah JavaScript ). I've never used a static code analyser, or rigorous optimisation withou...

(c) Occupy the Amendment (2014), Jeff Hemsley The reason to use quantitative methods wherever possible* is not that numbers are generally better representations — they're not, for psychological or social or art phenomena — but because of what they do to your method: first, they minimise the space that our raging biases get to act in; and, more, because they force the enquirer to think clearly about the Thing. (" What about this Thing can be counted ?" implies the prior questions "What are the distinct features of the Thing?" and "From which of its features arise which features?") * And they are possibly always possible . **************************************************************************************** The quantitative omits most of the lived world; the qualitative includes all of its bullshit. (The former is leashed to one rich dimension, numbers; the latter is leashed to an insensitive kludge , human perception and languag...

Question was " What would the world be like if everyone was like you ?" People took a couple of very different scenarios from that: either physical identity (a world of clones, body and mind) or philosophical identity (a world in which everyone shared your values) or both (because of confusion between those two, or some mind-body identity intuition), or even neither (because focussing on behaviour only). One friend asked if Uma Thurman would have a beard like him, a line of inquiry which got obscene very quickly. Most people assumed that 7 billion people would morph overnight, and that the great new Them would have to deal with the world as it is currently (scarcity, egotism, path dependency, cognitive bias), rather than bending any other variables to make e.g. perfect uniform social justice possible. The intuition pump was for people to report the things they see as essential about themselves. (Can someone have your exact values or personality without also having y...

I reviewed a huge number of things because I was unemployed (Oliver Sacks, China Mieville, Clive James, David Foster Wallace, David Graeber, Ed Glaeser, Daniel Haybron). I argued against a new popular kind of intellectual puritanism. I set out my consequentialism, which tries not to squash other goods than justice (DRAFT!). I talked about my life goals in the context of death and politics (DRAFT!). I calculated the highest wage a strict consequentialist can keep for themselves. I thought about the net-negativity of most jobs. I made a playlist that tries to get you to save yourself. I tried to dress up my maths education in ordinary transcendent meaning. I wrote a poem in pseudo-SQL. I reviewed Rousseau, LeGuin, Giddens, Fukuyama, Gleick. I made a scrapbook of semi-scientific thoughts. I made a scrapbook about epistemology and harm harm harm. I reviewed Chomsky's sloppiest book. I wrote a poem about the impulse of criticism. I wrote a poem about the former. I reviewed Gellhorn,...

Stable breeder in Conway's Game of Life. Original author one ' Hyperdeath ' One of my computer science lecturers does philosophy in passing while discussing superficially unphilosophical things like Harvard vs Princeton and the gubbins of molecular computing. (Molecular as in Hofstadter's comment: "Looking at a program written in machine language is vaguely comparable to looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom.") It is gigantic stuff: "People always define computers as 'data-processing machines' - which they are not and cannot be, because data are mental events. Machines process representations - and all this is is us using the physical world to help us with the mental world we have such limited range within (usually to help us with the physical world we have such limited control over). (This is also why the infinite cannot be properly represented, because there is nothing usably physical for the purpose.) (In the reified field that g...

[WORK IN PROGRESS, noob bashing welcome] Its specification allows accessibilities to conflict. Java lets you control how much of your program can access any given variable or class. However, the default level of accessibility doesn't have a closed specification, that is, it can be 'overloaded'; this causes problems when you have more than two packages and mix certain accessibility modifiers with inheritance between them. (The problem with the linked case is that it's syntactically correct and but the resulting output varies depending on the compiler you use. This matters not for the small number of programs it cockblocks or crashes, but because compiler writers are scarily devoted and prescient, so to see them failing to resolve ambiguity is a blow to human pride and existential security.) Escape characters and directories You can't use certain directories within strings, cos backslash is used to mark escape characters and the beginning of Windows directori...

(c) "The Ship Comes In", JD Fergusson (1931) “ The dark dry questions are breaking heads. And what have the red and blue to do with that dark river in which we swim?" - Iain Crichton Smith In case you haven’t heard, the Scottish questions are “Why independence? Why the Union? Who needs to prove what?” People usually get fixated on just one issue – whether fear of new borders, fear of the Euro, fear of losing arms jobs, boo the monarchy, boo the expenses scandal. I've tried to get all pros and cons into view; as a result, this post stretches on. If you refuse to sit through 4000 words of amateur political analysis, please skip to the punchline here . I was undecided before writing this. This time last year I was dead against independence, on the grounds that nationalism is 1) bullshit and 2) dangerous bullshit. That’s still true, but the first thing to notice is that supporting independence doesn't make you a nationalist . (That sounds obvious, ...