Language Fun

"I had a book stolen from the library"

-- Can be interpreted in 7 different ways!!! Try it!!


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WTF: The Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Feminist Science.

Modafinil

Has anyone ever taken the cognitive enhancer Modafinil? Does it work?

Please share your experiences!

Explanation as orgasm

When we say we love knowledge for its own sake, aren't we simply saying that we get a kick out of discovering things?
Just as somebody may become addicted to heroin, the serial academic may have become addicted, chemically, to the rush that accompanies the discovery of something profound. Or to the hunt for knowledge..

Morality and Delusion

There is no morally just tax rate. A religious friend once said to me that "as there is no moral good in reality, all that we can hope for is that people are so deluded in their attempts to discover reality, that they think, with a religious fervor, that there IS an absolute morality, which just happens to be welfare maximising...this, they will blindly follow…"
I found this a startling admission - not to mention an odd statement to reconcile with his own religiousness - a very strange life philosophy.
Not to mention how challenging and deceitful it would be to try to bend their own perceptions of some absolute moral good in to continuously-changing "welfare-maximising" outcomes...

Human Nature and Government

I was thinking that various political parties have different conceptions of human nature, which are evident in their policies.

For example, consider attitudes toward charity. When the Australian Liberal party saying we should rely on voluntary donations to charity, they place a (perhaps misguided) faith in participants in free markets to give money to the poor (say, by setting up, and donating to, a charitable institution). In doing so, they affirm that they believe human nature is good enough to ensure that the most destitute will be looked after by the more fortunate individuals. An individual who doesn’t believe this may believe it necessary to charge a higher tax rate than the Liberals would. ie, the Australian Labor party.

Any dimension of policy could be analysed with the respect to the party's implied ideas about human nature.

Chaos Theory of Axioms

I was writing the other day about how strange it is when you start out from slightly different axioms you may end up with entirely different theories, ethical philosophies etc...a sort of "chaos theory of axioms", for a sensitive dependence on the initial axiom

A guy on edge.org writes (and I love the clarity);
"...What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places. Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws. These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences"

Birth-order theory

States that the older child should be systematically different to later children.
On average, they should generally be more conservative, more disciplinarian and more conservative. And, ultimately, more independent.
This is because, amongst other things the parents will probably pay more attention to the first child, being parents for the first time. They will spend more time trying to make the baby "perfect" than their next. They will be more disciplinarian and less lax generally, and will likely make more mistakes, being novices.
Obviously this might apply in a different way - the opposite could be true in some cases.
The point is though that parenting attitudes change over time, and they try to learn from their mistakes, with a probable affect on the children's personalities. Does this apply to anyone out there?

Another woman I respect

Stacey Gelgor.
She picked up on what must have been a Freudian slip of mine?
She's probably smarter than Ayaan Hirsi Ali anyway.
She may be of uncontroversial appearance and has no fatwa against her, but I'm sure she's got some dark ideas brewing, and is definitely busy changing the world. Cheers to Stacey!

Conflicts of Interest

An increasingly complex society = inevitably, more conflicts of interest. To what degree can we expect society to manage this? Say one person M owns shares in X where company X owns a stake in a fund that owns shares in Y and company Y’s CEO’s cousin is married to or in some economic partnership with M. Could that be called a conflict of interest? Ok, that's a little extreme, and nobody wants a new monolithic bureaucracy out there to monitor such things.
But the law seems so dodgy and uninterested in this respect.

I'd be interested to know from anyone out there what standards exist in what environments..I can't find anything on law sites. It seems there are so many other ways in which one's actions could be affected without being directly linked materially or socially to somebody else. What about the trail of nepotism in the suburbs, in company hiring policy...it would seem unfair to demand a business owner justifies a decision to hire his daughter over a million other more qualified people, but...but...argh. Idealism again.

Drugs

That caffeine addicts are not called drug addicts is surely an historical accident. Well, not an accident...There are interests involved. But yeah, you know...All of us coffee people out there....Don't sneer at drug addicts.

**** The word ‘impotent’ indicates only men who get boners feel powerful and are in control of their lives

The Law #2

Why abide the law if there's truly no good reason to?
- Eg at traffic lights (if there’s DEFINITELY nobody around). Traffic lights are there to get people home safely, and to improve the flow of traffic. You don't need to wait unquestioningly for a minute for one to go green in the dead of night after you've stopped and looked around.

Why do people still insist on abiding by them, even in such situations? Is it just out of a habit of general deference to the law that some find themselves unable to apply their own judgement in very selective cases as to the law's usefulness?
Obviously, it's not good to be known as a dodgy person, but, even so, this label rests on the irrationality of those applying it. I'm not saying I'd argue with a policeman who books me for going through a red light when there was no threat of an accident, but I shouldn't have to debate those in a car with me. As a passenger I would only object to a driver who took actual risks.

The Law is not some infallible, infinitely wise doctrine which should not be subject to re-interpretation by citizens. Not to mention all the times where we can get away with doing terrible, but legal things..

Some people have objected that my viewpoint implies that we'll all commit murder whenever we are sure that can get away with it. Wtf? We have a conscience! With good reason, we don't have as bad a conscience if we go through a red light as if we murder somebody.

Fair trade foods

Fair trade foods do NOT help to improve the fairness of trade worldwide.

Economicus Ignoramus individuals who are buying these products - realise that you're actually disadvantaging those you seek to help. They will simply lose money and so will be further away from being able to make improvements to their own economies...

Freedom

A good insight on freedom and justice I picked up from some book recently:
"Cultural conservatives" tend to define freedom economically (as individual economic initiative) and justice socially (as righteous living), "progressives" tend to define freedom socially (as individual rights), and justice economically (as equity)



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Only the most devious priests survived re lying that they hadn’t had sex

Religious people say the darndest things

"When you have a secular society, you have the rapists and the muggers and the family breakers"
- Religious man aggravated at secular society's emphasis on sex, materialism
" I regard evolution to be the greatest menace to civilsation in the world today. It goes hand in hand with modernism; makes Jesus Christ a faker; robs the Christian of his hope and undermines the foundation of our "government of the people, for the people and by the people". People are free in this country to worshop God as they please, but they are not free to do everything the devil wants done.
What the fuck?

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Stop calling God Daddy. Especially in rap songs.

Art and Science

What are the similarities and differences between Art and Science?
It seems to me that science attempts to understand all aspects of the external world, while art attempts to express the internal world; that of the brain - primarily the feelings and experiences of the individual and/or group.

Of course another's brain, to somebody, is the external world. Films, paintings and poetry can convey to me the internal world of somebody else. But then so can (sometimes) brain scans...

I'm not saying that a brain scan is anything like a poem today. But couldn't a heap of information read like a poem to a scientifically advanced creature? Can't scientific information steadily represent more and more of what Art can, as a form of human expression?

Sensibility

A smart girl roughly phrased the essence of sensibility as realising which battles to fight, realising where the public needs to work hard to achieve consensus and freedom from contradiction.
Silly anomalies and other brain-busting irregularities or contradictions always exist in the law, in a culture, in a family, in a relationship; we just have to concentrate our efforts on picking the right battles to fight.
A simple message, but one which every 15 year old should hear, and most 21 year olds need reminding of every now and then.

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In fantasy, the princess kisses frogs, which turn in to princes.
In real life, the princess kisses the prince, who then turns in to a frog. Sorry girls.

Personal Weirdness

I see cars as having faces.
Road ragers have angry car faces, pathetic people at 40km/h have submissive, emotional faces.
Anyone else do this?