Interesting articles thread

[Skepsis]

Why contemplating death changes how you think

I've been contemplating death since I was a young boy. So many people don't seem to and don't want to talk about it, which is a shame. No one wakes up thinking today is my last day, unless they are committing suicide or are actually in their death bed, but for most it comes as a shock. It is that moment when you realize you are dying that gives me anxiety, to be conscious of the fact, and for it to be completely unexpected. One fear is that I am driving home from work, get into an fatal accident, while realizing that I likely only have moments left to live. I won't be able to see my kids again and all will be gone. The fear is pointless though, but it is hardwired into us for survival.

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
― Epicurus

[Metamorph]

I've been contemplating death since I was a young boy. So many people don't seem to and don't want to talk about it, which is a shame. No one wakes up thinking today is my last day, unless they are committing suicide or are actually in their death bed, but for most it comes as a shock. It is that moment when you realize you are dying that gives me anxiety, to be conscious of the fact, and for it to be completely unexpected. One fear is that I am driving home from work, get into an fatal accident, while realizing that I likely only have moments left to live. I won't be able to see my kids again and all will be gone. The fear is pointless though, but it is hardwired into us for survival.

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
― Epicurus

I feel like the problem is people are somehow both too afraid to believe in spirits and too afraid not to believe in spirits so they have to ignore it and waste their time eating and watching dumb TV shows to keep themselves too dumb to ignore it. If you're smart, make the people around you smarter instead of bailing out. I think that can be said to pretty much everyone on 16t and many other places on the Internet.

[Metamorph]

Why Game of Thrones is Making Us Stupid

[Metamorph]

Are you hooked on competence porn?

[Metamorph]

Why Are So Many People Snobby About Fantasy Fiction?

[Muddy]

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories...b_are_marxist/

[Metamorph]

How to be More Loving in a Cynical World

[Metamorph]

Is The Internet Making You Cynical?

[Metamorph]

American Cynicism: In Nobody We Trust

[Metamorph]

Please Stop With The Cynicism

[Metamorph]

We Have Never Been Disenchanted

This is the second thing I've ever read after Sexing the Body that I loved skimming and hated reading. Are intellectuals paid by the word nowadays? Seems like it.

[Metamorph]

Young people 'immature because of university'

[Metamorph]

Adults are acting like kids, and it needs to stop

[Metamorph]

How To Build A Culture Of Dignity, And What Happens If You Don't

[Metamorph]

The Dignity of Labor

[Metamorph]

The Truth Is… Maybe You Just Suck?

[Metamorph]

The odiousness of the distorted Godwin's Law

[Metamorph]

Love in the Time of Capital

@Sol @Beautiful sky @Aylen @Subteigh

and anyone else who's seriously invested in any form of psychology

[Metamorph]

Instrumentalism in Linguistics

@Grendel @mu4 or anyone else who has any investment in philosophy of science

[Grendel]

Instrumentalism in Linguistics

@Grendel @mu4 or anyone else who has any investment in philosophy of science

I have no interest in linguistics but I'm internally screaming reading this, wtf. Predictive validity is the only reason science ever worked, and allowed us to engineer progressively more complex machines that in turn fed back into our ability to conduct science more accurately. It's the only reason we're operating in the world as we now see it and our technicians and engineers are actually serving as cornerstones of running a modern community. Meanwhile, all the usefulness of our secular "priests" like activists and humanities professors and even most of our historians are entirely socially constructed and meaningless. It's why we're not in a fucking Dungeons game with local squads of mages maintaining civic spells to keep their villages running.
Do these people also think babies' brains are just born with a precept of internal consistency, rather than gradually uptaking the concept of it by repeatedly seeing phenomena like objects keeping their permanence after they've left their field of vision?



Fuck truth, we only evolved curiosity because there are types of knowledge that confer a direct advantage in upping survival odds. Life's about reshaping the world, not pretending you can ever touch another of which you have no undeniable evidence.

[Metamorph]

I have no interest in linguistics but I'm internally screaming reading this, wtf. Predictive validity is the only reason science ever worked, and allowed us to engineer progressively more complex machines that in turn fed back into our ability to conduct science more accurately. It's the only reason we're operating in the world as we now see it and our technicians and engineers are actually serving as cornerstones of running a modern community. Meanwhile, all the usefulness of our secular "priests" like activists and humanities professors and even most of our historians are entirely socially constructed and meaningless. It's why we're not in a fucking Dungeons game with local squads of mages maintaining civic spells to keep their villages running.
Do these people also think babies' brains are just born with a precept of internal consistency, rather than gradually uptaking the concept of it by repeatedly seeing phenomena like objects keeping their permanence after they've left their field of vision?



Fuck truth, we only evolved curiosity because there are types of knowledge that confer a direct advantage in upping survival odds. Life's about reshaping the world, not pretending you can ever touch another of which you have no undeniable evidence.

I think that article might've needed some context he didn't provide. I think the keyword is empirical tests. As in, generative linguists are judging their theories based on their ability to predict very specific phenomena even when it makes incorrect predictions in other areas and then hand-waving it away as "well, we'll fix that later." For example, Noam Chomsky's minimalist theory infamously predicts that the order of words in a question sentence in Mandarin Chinese should be the same as English when it isn't, it's just like "You saw the Oscars?" instead of something like "Saw you the Oscars?" So he just made up a rule that applies to Chinese and nothing else that's technically consistent with his theory to save it. The problem is that the field is being geared towards solving very specific problems at the expense of saying lots of things are just unanswerable and it ticks off everyone, first of all the United States government which paid him a lot of money for things he couldn't do (machine translation.) So then they just decided machine translation was outside the scope of linguistics. The author is just calling for people to cut back on trying to solve specific problems until there's a generalized theory that can at least account for most of the data instead of handwaving away things as big as machine translation and AI as not in the domain of linguistics or thinking that Chinese should look more or less exactly like English but with a different vocabulary for a list of very technical reasons that don't make sense without linguistic jargon.

[Singu]

Predictive validity is the only reason science ever worked, and allowed us to engineer progressively more complex machines that in turn fed back into our ability to conduct science more accurately. It's the only reason we're operating in the world as we now see it and our technicians and engineers are actually serving as cornerstones of running a modern community. Meanwhile, all the usefulness of our secular "priests" like activists and humanities professors and even most of our historians are entirely socially constructed and meaningless. It's why we're not in a fucking Dungeons game with local squads of mages maintaining civic spells to keep their villages running.
Do these people also think babies' brains are just born with a precept of internal consistency, rather than gradually uptaking the concept of it by repeatedly seeing phenomena like objects keeping their permanence after they've left their field of vision?

Predictions isn't actually the main point, because you'd first need to know what to predict, or even what it is that you're supposed to be looking for.

Imagine that there's a computer that could magically predict anything, as long as you input what to predict. That would be the ideal Instrumentalist machine. But what are you supposed to be predicting...? If you want to predict whether a spaceship will liftoff or explode in mid-air, then you'd have to first build that spaceship, then test whether it will liftoff or explode. And in order to build a spaceship, it requires knowledge, which is not just knowledge about predicting things. And even if it does indeed predict that it will explode in mid-air, how would we build a spaceship that won't explode? We wouldn't know how without understanding how a spaceship works.

So what this magical computer is actually doing is that it's just replacing human experiments with perfect hypothetical experiments. It still requires the creativity and the imagination of human beings to come up with new theories to understand how things work, which will be done by understanding how reality actually is and using theories to uniquely solve problems. And if you can understand how things work, then you will automatically be able to predict things. So understanding comes first, then predictions later.

Instrumentalism is about using theories as an "instrument" to predict things. It says that its content doesn't matter, perhaps other than as some "useful fiction". Logical Positivism is an even stronger form of Instrumentalism that says that any statements that are not about predicting observations are meaningless. But then what is Logical Positivism itself...? It considers itself to be meaningless.

[Grendel]

Predictions isn't actually the main point, because you'd first need to know what to predict, or even what it is that you're supposed to be looking for.

Imagine that there's a computer that could magically predict anything, as long as you input what to predict. That would be the ideal Instrumentalist machine. But what are you supposed to be predicting...? If you want to predict whether a spaceship will liftoff or explode in mid-air, then you'd have to first build that spaceship, then test whether it will liftoff or explode. And in order to build a spaceship, it requires knowledge, which is not just knowledge about predicting things. And even if it does indeed predict that it will explode in mid-air, how would we build a spaceship that won't explode? We wouldn't know how without understanding how a spaceship works.

So what this magical computer is actually doing is that it's just replacing human experiments with perfect hypothetical experiments. It still requires the creativity and the imagination of human beings to come up with new theories to understand how things work, which will be done by understanding how reality actually is and using theories to uniquely solve problems. And if you can understand how things work, then you will automatically be able to predict things. So understanding comes first, then predictions later.

Instrumentalism is about using theories as an "instrument" to predict things. It says that its content doesn't matter, perhaps other than as some "useful fiction". Logical Positivism is an even stronger form of Instrumentalism that says that any statements that are not about predicting observations are meaningless. But then what is Logical Positivism itself...? It considers itself to be meaningless.

Human ingenuity should serve humanity, not the other way round. If you expect us to funnel all our creative energies into finding higher-order truths that will not directly benefit us in any way except """"contextualizing"""" our surroundings, I don't know what to tell you, you'll just end up endorsing a secular papacy.

In fact, I'd say the only great existential contribution the past couple centuries' scientific achievements yielded to us, was the fact that the universe acted in many ways like the simple engines humans created, and that a grand anthropic design is not in fact necessary for explaining many phenomena we'd offloaded to some vague intelligent creator in the past. But I'd also argue that this is a null position to take, and the only reason we've thought differently is the social inertia of having gone all these generations in this weird arbitrary framework that's the product of ancient religions.



When you're at risk of falling to predatory animals all the time, you want to focus your intellectual energies into making better tools to fight them, not into understanding the grand design. And even when you're not, you want to focus your intellectual energies into getting a surplus out of your farms, so you don't starve if a drought comes, not understanding the grand design. If this wasn't the reasoning of our ancestors, we wouldn't have made it past the stone age. The achievements that give our society strength now cause us to forget how fragile and vulnerable we still are to unanticipated natural phenomena we have no idea how to handle.

And I can see religion's social utility as a great unifier, but many past religions are redundant or obsolete now. Our spiritual sensibilities have become alienated from our desire to maintain our own society's infrastructures and truly take care of our own. And frankly, I don't see the masses flocking around a secular church of philosophy, all eagerly clamoring to understand the great mystery enough so that this institution can have unifying social utility. Our closest thing to a secular religion with high social participation is secular humanism, but this doesn't really have much of an epistemological stance, only the doctrine of valuing net human life over all else with no respect to other mechanisms of the world.

So I don't frankly see the point of trying to understand truth for truth's sake alone anymore. If you focus too much on the "why"s when issues of "how" are bubbling up, your lack of a "how" will make you unable to handle the issues that can destroy you, and all your society's abilities to handle the "why"s in the first place.

[Metamorph]

Understanding the Labyrinth: Noam Chomsky’s Science and Politics

This is long but it's a good summary of what I think is wrong with Chomsky's politics (though superficial, it doesn't get into his anarcho-nationalism or really criticize his general worldview at all since it doesn't attempt to really put together his science and politics) @Raver and everyone who was involved in the discussion of Chomsky's politics


@Grendel Here's a quote that'll put that article in a better context for you:

Knight describes how Chomsky selects data that fit into an intellectually satisfying explanatory system, and sets aside data that don’t fit, claiming that this is in fact how science works (171 – 72). This keeps him safe from what the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley called “the great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact.” Perhaps the most important function of scientific method and of peer review is to counteract bias, especially confirmation bias, seeing what you expect to see.23 However, it is many years since Chomsky’s writings in linguistics have been subject to formal peer review prior to publication, and he derides scientific methodology as data-bound empiricism.

Lines up with a short but important line in the linguistics article I linked:

Instrumentalism being an appropriate attitude for some people in a mature science, like chemistry, does not mean it should be the default attitude for people in a nascent science, like linguistics.

The problem according to the author of the article is the science is too young to be focusing on specific applications. If you have quantum mechanics and general relativity contradict each other, they're established enough that this doesn't mean to just toss them out. But if you have linguistics contradict itself, you don't keep going with creating pseudo-applications (premature instrumentalism) to try to support your personal worldview.

[Singu]

I don't think you can serve humanity without searching for truth.

You might go the Instrumentalist route and say that the whole point of science is to predict things and not to search for the truth. But the only reason you can predict things is because you have grappled with the truth, at least partially and imperfectly. It's like saying that the whole point of science is to do experiments, when the whole point of doing experiments is to check whether our description of reality via a theory is true or not.

Maybe we're seeking truth for its own sake, or maybe we're serving an even higher goal. We don't know yet, but we won't know unless we search for the truth. But it does seem like we're trying to satisfy our curiosity of wanting to find out what the truth is, even though we can never get to finding "the ultimate truth", so we'll always have something to work on.

[sbbds]

I don't think you can serve humanity without searching for truth.

You might go the Instrumentalist route and say that the whole point of science is to predict things and not to search for the truth. But the only reason you can predict things is because you have grappled with the truth, at least partially and imperfectly. It's like saying that the whole point of science is to do experiments, when the whole point of doing experiments is to check whether our description of reality via a theory is true or not.

Maybe we're seeking truth for its own sake, or maybe we're serving an even higher goal. We don't know yet, but we won't know unless we search for the truth. But it does seem like we're trying to satisfy our curiosity of wanting to find out what the truth is, even though we can never get to finding "the ultimate truth", so we'll always have something to work on.

Wow a non-annoying Singu post.

[Metamorph]

WHY DO SPIRITUAL & SELF-HELP GURUS INSPIRE GERMANOPHOBIA?

This article is way too edgy in how it refers to the "Holocaust" (Shoah, which is an event that definitely happened and was mostly driven by antisemitism even if the particular "Holocaust" narratives you hear in American schools are bullshit and evil and the attempted genocide wasn't successful at being an actual genocide at all since Jews as an ethnicity are still going strong) so if you're in Germany be careful reading it so you don't get arrested but besides that it's pretty insightful. If you live in America rather than being a German who is interested in self-help movements, I'm pretty sure anti-Bernie-ism is very closely connected to modern Germanophobia even if no one's even thinking about whether Bernie Sanders is ethnically German or not.

Anti-German Hysteria and the Making of the “Liberal Society”

(This isn't accessible to the public but it's the source of my second comment. If you look at Bernie Sanders' policies they're a direct descendant of policies from the parties that Karl Marx himself supported in Germany even if Wikipedia considers them closer to "Social Democracy" than "Democratic Socialism." Marx's policies seem to have been influenced by some sort of Burkean conservatism in Germany somehow and this isn't equivalent to any social democratic or democratic socialist policy that's been put in place in any existing state so how it's labelled seems sort of immaterial except for the direct connection to Marx which is huge.)

[Metamorph]

Economic antisemitism

[Metamorph]

Jews and Finance

[Metamorph]

BEING SPECIAL ISN’T SO SPECIAL

[Metamorph]

HOW TO START A CULT AND SAVE THE WORLD

[Skepsis]

Sticky Science: Evolution of Spiderwebs

[Metamorph]

Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade
Our obsession with the “cult of the entrepreneur” has gone too far—and here’s why

The first one is interesting if you're someone who tends to be alarmed and/or fascinated by fascism and postmodernism (or loving or hating on social media and/or 16t.) The second one is more obvious from the title.

[Metamorph]

Two last articles on Chomsky. If people want more criticizing Elon Musk or any other famous people people tend to like way too much, I'll post them too.

Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian
Noam Chomsky, Closet Capitalist

[Metamorph]

How to survive Trump: End the cult of the presidency

[Singu]

What this whole argument boils down to is Realism vs. Anti-Realism. Anti-Realists would say that scientific knowledge, or even knowledge in general should be limited to what is observable and predictable. While Realists would say that knowledge should also include metaphysical claims about reality, that at least contain some grains of truth.

Well even that very Anti-Realist statement is problematic, because the theory that you should limit knowledge to what is observable... is not observable! So it becomes self-refuting. Anti-Realists have been trying very hard to expunge any metaphysical claims from areas of science and even to all forms of knowledge, only to have it self-destruct by its very nature of not allowing any metaphysical claim, which in itself is metaphysical.

And if we're talking about Anti-Realism like Instrumentalism that is more "agnostic" in that it says that it doesn't really matter what what it says, as long as it's useful or it can correctly predict something, then well you're still going to need theories that make metaphysical claims about reality in order to create new knowledge that would allow us to predict things. The whole point of science isn't to just predict things, but it's to create new knowledge. And the philosophical question is, "How? How should we successfully create new knowledge?".

Anyway, Anti-Realist thoughts have been prevalent in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but ever since Popper's refutation of it by falsificationism and its slight modification and improvements of Popperian epistemology, Empiricism, Inductivism, Instrumentalism, Logical Positivism and other Anti-Realist thoughts have been dead as a dodo. It just simply isn't rationally tenable anymore, even though these philosophies still stubbornly live on in people's minds, and even in many fields of science.

[Metamorph]

I'm going to have to actually give Popper a chance now even if I have huge problems with other parts of his thought. Anything supporting scientific realism is infinitely better than anything that doesn't even if nearly everything else about it is flawed (which I'm not sure is true of Popper's thought but I can point out a couple of huge problems at least off the bat.)

Oh, and while this article has way too much name-dropping and low-key idolization of the people it talks about it's an excellent introduction to the main alternative epistemology to Kant, which is basically intuitionism. If you're into Jung you should like it too because it is about intuition as a faculty and about Rudolf Steiner's views (so yeah it mentions the occult briefly but come on, it's not like Newton's theory of gravity wasn't based on hermeticism or anything.) Frankly Goethe's epistemology is what I grew up inoculated with probably because I went to an art school for kindergarten to 5th grade and art classes afterwards though it evolved through my actual use of it over the years and it's not like I knew what it was or how discordant it was with the culture around me when I first was brought into it. There are other epistemologies besides Kant and Goethe too like Popper obviously but that's not culturally acceptable either.

Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, GA#2

[Singu]

Well our "intuition" is just a kind of a theory about the world that we have yet to understand how it works, and yet we somehow claim it to be self-evidently true. But if we claim anything to be self-evidently true, then it's just a way to shield itself from any further criticism. What is thought of to be self-evidently true is not always so self-evidently true after all.

So Jungianism is just a mix of Empiricism, Inductivism and Intuitionism. Jung basically just observed a bunch of patients, and categorized them as he perceived them. And he concluded that that must be true, because his sense-perceptions can't be telling him lies, if only perhaps he were truly honest with himself and rid himself of all prejudices and assumptions. The ideal is to have access to a kind of a direct, "pure" experience of reality, if you will, which has rid itself of all sorts of impurities.

So obviously, the Socionists have inherited this view, and they also conclude that the "typings" must be based on self-evidently true intuitions or sense-perceptions. This is why "battletyping" will always just end with "My perception is more right than your perception, because my perception can't be wrong and it can't be criticized because it's self-evidently true. And if it's wrong, then it must be due to some impure influences, such as that we aren't interpreting the theory purely enough."

[sbbds]

Well our "intuition" is just a kind of a theory about the world that we have yet to understand how it works, and yet we somehow claim it to be self-evidently true. But if we claim anything to be self-evidently true, then it's just a way to shield itself from any further criticism. What is thought of to be self-evidently true is not always so self-evidently true after all.

So Jungianism is just a mix of Empiricism, Inductivism and Intuitionism. Jung basically just observed a bunch of patients, and categorized them as he perceived them. And he concluded that that must be true, because his sense-perceptions can't be telling him lies, if only perhaps he were truly honest with himself and rid himself of all prejudices and assumptions. The ideal is to have access to a kind of a direct, "pure" experience of reality, if you will, which has rid itself of all sorts of impurities.

So obviously, the Socionists have inherited this view, and they also conclude that the "typings" must be based on self-evidently true intuitions or sense-perceptions. This is why "battletyping" will always just end with "My perception is more right than your perception, because my perception can't be wrong and it can't be criticized because it's self-evidently true. And if it's wrong, then it must be due to some impure influences, such as that we aren't interpreting the theory purely enough."

Something that’s self-evident isn’t intuition unless you’re referring to common sense.

Intuition consists of peripheral knowledge which the poster below you explained.

[Singu]

Something that’s self-evident isn’t intuition unless you’re referring to common sense.

An Intuitionist would say that a certain kind of intuition is self-evident, therefore need no longer be questioned.

intuitionism

the theory that primary truths and principles (especially those of ethics and metaphysics) are known directly by intuition.

What I'm saying is that an intuition is just a certain kind of a theory or background knowledge that we have yet to understand how it works.

Anyway, there's actually no such thing as something that's "self-evident", it just means that it hasn't been challenged yet and we have yet to have an explanation for why that thing is the way it is, which is a normal state for most things, because we have no ultimate justifications for anything. And we don't need ultimate justifications. We just propose an (unjustified) idea, then we criticize it so that it can be improved.