Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
So the thing is, the question of consciousness is fundamentally prior to everything we discover through consciousness in the physical world. In Kant, for instance, the question is something like "what are the conditions of possibility for us to experience the the world, with minimal assumptions about the world", whereas physicalists (your choice of term, not sure about the scare quotes, it's a fundamentally metaphysical theory and has to hold up on the level of metaphysics) just make an absolute shitload of assumptions about the mind because, you know, if you give someone a brain injury it does weird but consistent things to them. As for "dualism", it is and has always been intended to be a dirty word, but it also presupposes a lot of assumptions you can just discard by stepping outside of the frame.
Why do you find parsimony dispositive except as a heuristic? It seems to me that parsimony is valuable in making snap decisions, but the reality is that the world is complex. If you're a general making decisions on troop deployment with parsimony as your high heuristic, you're going to lose the battle. Likewise, if you're a scientist using parsimony as your key criterion, you'll get stuck in a local maximum of whatever your field of study is. The world is big and tangled and not all that amenable to parsimony, as useful as it is as an anti-bullshit heuristic.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Man, I appreciate the thought, but you can't just say "given all the important parts of my argument as axioms, here are some consequences" and make big claims based off that. I could go into some big thing explaining Kant and phenomenology and philosophy of science and so on but it's late and I'm cooking and it won't help you.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Casual everyday clothes are more attractive (at least in this, uh, particular context) than Dressing Up.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
To quote one of my previous posts:
there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).
A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The Hakka are the obvious analogy, even within China.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Red Mars is a pretty decent book,
The Road is a great, great read and deserves your time. Also very readable, not some ponderous tome that may Improve you. Read No Country For Old Men if you "enjoy" it.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The economy somehow not crashing, some deflationary effects happening, and interest rates booming, would save the bacon of the tech right/abundance liberals - i.e. the only people seriously interested in making building housing a political issue. It's only a first step to making housing more affordable, but it's an important one, when you consider the political factions likely to benefit from an economic crash.
Looks like they got him, it was the same guy, and he's a 48-year-old Portuguese Brown student. Some kind of academic beef with both his institution and the professor in question? We'll see. Edit: he was a physics grad student 22 years ago who withdrew early from the program. An odd one, but that connects the two shootings.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists. There was quite a bit of leftist criticism at the time, I recall, although the antiwar left was already marginalized and so didn't make it into prestige institutions. Now that "line" mostly matters insofar as it points out liberal hypocrisy when they claim Trump crossing much lesser ones is completely unprecedented.
GWOT probably did more to completely normalize line-crossing as a matter of government procedure than anything else - but that's how it works, if it's a matter of government procedure, then by definition it isn't crossing a line.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
If your background is math/econ you could take a look at government jobs related to your blue-collar profession, if there are any.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
My take is that those who don't have to spend 90-hour weeks as a junior analyst if they wish to get their bonus don't really have much right to complain about the financial sector.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players. AI deflationary as the cost of production go down. AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down. Low inflation will cause low interest rates and high asset price inflation. The economy is going to have wind in its back over the next decade as productivity rises. Government is going to be worse at utilizing AI than the private sector leading to an increasing view of the government as incompetent and falling behind.
From your lips to God's ears...
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I have met some older Red Tribe Republicans who see Obama as having crossed various lines with whatever scandals were prominent for the Tea Party, and some young online Republicans are now taking minor cracks at Obama revisionism. For the most part, the attitude I see in online and urban Republican circles towards Obama is that he was a bad president, but basically a figurehead for a bipartisan process of frog-boiling America that goes back well before him, which accelerated under him, but without major qualitative shifts or line-stepping during his presidency (partly because the architects of this process also draw all the lines).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It would be interesting to do a study to see which ethnic/religious group's men are most likely to inconvenience themselves and/or accept risk in order to protect an unknown woman. If I had to guess, I would not put Uzbeks anywhere near the top of the list but I'm just speculating.
It depends on the context, I think. There's a strong culture of hospitality to the invited stranger, loyalty to traditional obligations, self-sacrifice within the group. I have been to a lot of poor countries, and Uzbekistan (Central Asia in general) stood out instantly in both how safe it felt for its income level, and the lengths people would go to to do right by me as a point of principle, even if it cost them money. I would not put them at the top of the list of people to pull a Daniel Penny, but close to the top of the list of people who would fight for those they consider in their ingroup, for a definition of that wide enough to include casual acquaintances. I'm sure a social psychology study on undergraduate volunteers would definitely capture that, though - "do a study", this is why we had colonial administrators to send back reports on the national characters of strange countries.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start. At first you'll feel like you suck because you don't know anything; when you get better, you feel like you suck because you should know more. At first you feel like you suck because everyone is better than you; when you get better, you'll feel like you suck because he's better than you and started after you, or because you're just at some nowhere gym in PA anyway.
It was eye-opening for me to share my closest hobby with a friend and realize this was his meta-philosophy about it. I think it's a very American attitude, and a huge point in Americans' favour. I prefer to just try a bunch of things, find something I'm effortlessly good at, and aura farm there, but people who enjoy being in that place of improvement-oriented awareness of ignorance can bootstrap themselves into anything.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
My read on that is that - if it was in fact an activist, and based off the person of interest's physical profile as a fat schlub who walks funny - we shouldn't necessarily assume some cold-blooded, calculating assassin. Think about spiteful mutant theory, and why Eliot Roger wanted to kill blonde sorority girls.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I think that's easier said that done. A huge percentage of people are some combination of lazy, incompetent, and cowardly and would flake / screw things up.
Sure, but, at the same time, people have managed to do that part successfully many, many times. Particularly in countries with barely-functioning law enforcement like South Africa (or, apparently, the Bay Area). It doesn't mean it's foolproof, and the number of networks capable of pulling that off for political purposes rather than organized crime (who move people around for various illegal purposes and get away with it all the time) has thankfully greatly decreased, but it's not impossible.
Oddly enough the articles I can find on Daniel San Diego's arrest, even newer ones, have exactly zero details of how the authorities found him, which makes me guess they picked him up with some Edward Snowden stuff. Could be wrong and they're just refusing to give details though.
An American who shows up and starts living in a small town in some other country is going to arouse some level of suspicion.
Yeah, but you also underestimate just how backwards some parts of the world are, and how often you find random mzungus who've settled down there. I'm talking regions of people who barely know that the internet exists, if they even do. That does shrink over time, it may be gone in a couple decades, but for now there are still places you can go. The danger would be that if you got tracked to the country or general region, it would presumably cause an old-media sensation there and get into local rumour mills that there's an American murderer on the loose.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I'm not sure that if he leaves the country, they find out he did it, at least not for a lot longer than what happened. But yes, you would want the authorities to lose your trail quickly before you get to the next country. The ideal thing for someone like Luigi is probably to have a few political sympathizers ready to pick you up, hide you, and move you. This guy is obviously way lower-profile than Luigi, but the same idea: how would anyone in rural Wales know about the FBI Most Wanted list or the reward for him?
(I think the other reason people don't do this is that it takes a very specific type of personality to truly disappear off the grid like that, and those people generally drop out of society well before killing anybody, it's more pleasant than being a literal woodlands hermit but still not suited to the vast, vast majority of people.)
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Yes. RIP.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
You don't need a bank account in rural Madagascar. You won't even find a bank. What you would do is, if you were prepared, go up to Antananarivo occasionally and trade crypto for cash, but realistically you wouldn't need to do that much - a competent white guy can find a way to support himself at a subsistence level, which is all that is really available there. I knew of one surfer hippy who ended up being elected chief of the village he lived in, it's very rare but it happens.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Yeah I mostly say that because mass shootings seem to be pretty psychologically comorbid with suicide, and my small-n experience is that STEM guys tend to kill themselves in ways that are more clearly tied to academics, whereas non-STEM kids just kill themselves with drugs or over a breakup. Nobody's snapping and killing people over the pressures of being in Econ 101, but it's also possible there was some psychological motive of targeting the people who the perp thinks have it easy. We shall see (or not).
Luigi didn't even need to go to Canada - he could have gone straight to LaGuardia and hopped on a plane (well, LGA is quickest with public transit or a cab from the shooting), but he didn't have a network abroad or a place to hide, and being a gringo with little money and a crippling back injury is not a pleasant life in the sort of countries peripheral enough to hide in. If he was healthy and had planned ahead, he could have spent the rest of his life off the grid in some distant surfer town (South America, if you're feeling ballsy, but the really secure move would be to fly Newark-Johannesburg and then get to Madagascar. Great place to disappear forever if you like surfing and don't ever want to go near cell service). I don't see many shooters other than him having the mental stability and executive function to pull that off, though. Tyler Robinson definitely couldn't have.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
It's hard to tell right now, but this guy seems to have gone into a building, found a specific room, shot the people inside it, and then left. He probably only had the one gun, he didn't blast away and max out his kill count in the hallways, atrium, etc. That, plus his long wait, seems to me to suggest some kind of targeting - could be political, could be romantic, could be STEMlord snapping during finals, etc., but not the classic kind of nihilistic school shooting. When I wrote that comment, I didn't realize that it was such a large classroom (186 seats), Brown is a small university, but I also have no idea how many people were actually at the study session. We're all speculating in the fog of war for now, and Brown/Rhode Island appear to be trying to hush this as much as possible.
I don't think that's even what libs feel, they just see Bill Clinton as yesterday's guy, doesn't matter to the coalition anymore.
More options
Context Copy link