So... first of all, I'd like someone to look up the logical positivists and say what it is they actually believed.
A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic is brief, to-the-point, bold, and fun to read. All of this to the extent that you may forget why you dislike reading philosophy. I'm pretty sure that Eliezer and Scott would enjoy their time reading it and would get something out of it.
I wish I remembered where I heard about this. It was a long time ago and seemed convincing to me at the time, but now I don't remember the details, and a little googling doesn't turn up much of anything to confirm this. I should probably dial back how I describe this until I can verify it.
I try to maintain my concentration on what I see, and so deliberately don't pay attention to other sensations.
I haven't experimented much with the other senses in this way. I wonder if you could get similar results by concentrating on bodily sensations (or some other sense) that I've gotten by concentrating on the visual. Seems like it'd be a good avenue for experimentation.
When I've been aware of such sudden-jerks, it's been around Guidepost 6, just as I'm about to slip into sleep, and is usually accompanied by a micro-dream in which I need to suddenly move for some reason (usually, it's that I missed a step on a staircase or something like that; but once I remember flinging my arm out in front of me to catch a baseball coming my way).
Some of this may be as you theorize: that sleep paralysis is lagging dream-consciousness and so your body doesn't know that it shouldn't actually move when your dream-consciousness tells it to.... (read more)
tl;dr: By focusing in a counterintuitively alert way on your hypnagogic hallucinations you can use them as a sort of biofeedback mechanism, following them as they change their characteristics in predictable ways in a direction that leads you out of insomnia into sleep.
alternatively: By reading this prolix description of hypnagogia, your eyes will glaze over until you find yourself nodding out.
The spreadsheet is a LibreOffice doc I could send you if you're interested.
Thanks for the idea of making a sequence out of these. Here it is: Notes on Virtues
Thanks! I remember that Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue made the surprising claim that Jane Austen was the last thinker of note in the Western virtue-oriented tradition of ethics as it was dying out (before its more recent revival). I should go back and reread some of her books with that in mind.
I hadn't intended this post to be at all karma-related, but now I'm very curious about how you would connect karma and amiability.
I was surprised at how shallow and uninformative the article was, especially after so much time had gone into it, and how it had attracted so much pre-publication interest. The article shows the reader almost nothing about what makes SSC interesting, instead spending most of its paragraphs hunting for or alluding to evidence of possible wrongthink. There's a quality pop-news profile to be written about Scott, his blog, and the community that respects it, but the New York Times didn't seem to even try to write it. A missed opportunity and a blot on their reputation.
Yeah. It really made the New Yorker piece shine in comparison.
It can be an interesting exercise to try to find patterns, regularity, structure, commonality among the virtues. I like your insight here.
When I tried to do this, I ended up categorizing virtues as those involving Temperament (e.g. initiative, independence, frugality, spontaneity), Social Virtues (e.g. kindness, honesty, generosity, leadership, wit), Character (e.g. humility, honor, benevolence, integrity), Attitude (e.g. hope, serenity, temperance, patience), and Intellectual Virtues (e.g. imagination, rationality, know-how, curiosity). Looking back at th... (read more)
I'll start ;-)
The best exercise program is one you actually do. Darebee is a site that has a bunch of exercise programs that you can do at home (no special equipment needed). It's free, and ad-free (donation-supported). It's useful particularly for those of us working from home who have good pandemic-related reasons to stay away from the gym.
drumming/tapping, received by ears or touch possibly faster than spoken language, because precise sounds can be very fast. I don’t know. This doesn’t really sound good.
That sounds like Morse Code. Telegraph operators had developed a set of codes and abbreviations and emoticon-like conventions during the heyday of the telegraph... give it enough time and internationalization and it might have developed its own grammar. There was a case of a POW who blinked in Morse code during a propaganda video he was forced to make:
I can relate. I also had a dream in which I suspected I was dreaming, attempted to do some tests to rule that out, ruled it out to my satisfaction, and later woke up from it. Disconcerting.
I believe they did a follow-up study to try to adjust for this. In the follow-up they were able to surreptitiously note the results of the coin flip (without the flipper knowing). The people who flipped the coin but ignored the result because it didn't go the way they wanted still rated themselves more fair than those who did not flip the coin but just decided to make things go their way without going through a coin-flipping ritual first.
I drew a blank.
I found the cake-dividing and roommate algorithms promising. If I'm in situations in the future that seem isomorphic, I'll be sure to do some research to try and find a fair division method that's most likely to make everyone feel they got what's coming to them.
But as far as how to cultivate the virtue of fairness... I dunno. The best I came up with was to be much more cautious about my self-assessment of how fair I'm being if I have skin in the game. I should definitely assume that my brain is going to be feeding me some good reasons why fa... (read more)
Is “rhetoric” the discipline you’re looking for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
It used to be a standard part of a good liberal education, and I’d be happy to see it return, retooled for the media of the modern day.
Sometimes the passive voice is more graceful or effective. In those cases, you can avoid the trouble that passive voice usually causes if you explicitly add the grammatically-optional subject.
For instance: "Insider information was unwisely tweeted by Elon." By using the passive verb "was tweeted" you change the order, and therefore the relative emphasis, of "insider information" and "Elon" in a way that may be appropriate to what you're trying to communicate. But by explicitly adding "by Elon" you successfully resist the temptation to leave the subject unstated, and thereby save the day for clarity and precision.
I cover that in my advanced "technical writing in one easy lesson" class ;-)
I'm fond of the "A Very Short Introduction" book series from Oxford University Press. Some very good examples of those include Thomas Pink's on Free Will, Susan Blackmore's on Consciousness, Christopher Janaway's on Schopenhauer, David Weir's on Decadence, Stanley Wells on Shakespeare, and Brad Inwood's on Stoicism.
I'm not as familiar with Christian views on temperance (though I am very fond of After Virtue - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16106951). I associate Christian temperance with "Thy will be done" -- trying to discern God's desires and aligning one's own with those -- but I haven't looked into it very closely beyond that superficial guesswork. Is there any resource you would suggest beyond After Virtue to get the Thomist viewpoint on temperance (without having to read the ginormous Thomist corpus)?
I'm a physics dilettante... a little undergrad 101 stuff and some exposure to pop sci. I was mulling over the explanation of gravity as being warped space rather than a force, such that an orbiting body for example is not being held in orbit by the gravitational force exerted between it and the object it's orbiting but is merely traveling inertially in a straight line in a space that has been warped by a big mass in the midst of it.
Okay, thought I, I can picture that.
But then I tried to apply it to another scenario: hole drilled through the middle of the e... (read more)
This is perhaps tangential to your point or pedantic, but "want" was not always merely synonymous for "desire" in English. "Desire" implies something with conscious awareness of a lack wishing to have that lack redressed. "Want" can mean simply the lack without the consciousness of it: e.g. "this watch wants a seconds hand", or "as he wanted education, his wits were poor." This way of using the word seems to have been dropping off in recent decades, but may explain some of the examples you have seen.
In his book "Among the Dead Cities", A.C. Grayling looks at the Allied policy of aerial bombardment of Axis population centers, including the aims of the policy, how it was carried out, and its results. He concludes that it wasn't justified even in the conventional-weapons era; it was not militarily effective, particularly compared to other possible policies/targets, and it was a violation of even the bare minimum standards that the Allies later considered sufficiently self-evident to use as the basis for war crimes trials. The justification... (read more)
This strikes me as a worthwhile exercise for people to undertake. It can give valuable perspective and suggest important avenues for self-improvement. For what it's worth, here's what I came up with the first time I tried it: https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=28Dec16
Nietzsche isn't a great example. His health was dreadful throughout his life, and it's really astonishing how good his mood and vigor were, given the crippling nature of his ailments (until his ultimate collapse). Philosophy in his case was probably a mood booster and a good coping mechanism.
There are lots of paths you can choose to wander down in philosophy. If you suffer from depression, one of the symptoms is that when you reach a crossroads in this wander, you'll choose the path that leads into the dark dismal swamp of nihilism and a dar... (read more)
If you want to know more about really winning vs. theoretically winning, you might be interested in what Aristotle taught about baseball: https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=03Feb04
There are three categories -- "meaningful," "meaningless," and "tautological" statements -- at least in Ayer's categorization. "Statements which are not testable are meaningless or tautological" would be an example of a tautology: just a definition of terms.
Because if you /could/ test the statement to see if it were true (not absolutely true, but, per Ayer, "probable"), you'd conduct an experiment where you took a sample of statements, tried to come up with tests (ways in which they refer to sense experien... (read more)
I just finished reading Ayer's "Language, Truth & Logic" last night, and from my understanding of it, I think he'd think that your proposal about the appearance and vanishing of a chocolate cake was a meaningful proposal. He said, for instance, that it would be meaningful and reasonable to posit the appearance of wildflowers on a mountain peak nobody had climbed based on the fact that such wildflowers had been seen on similar mountain peaks nearby, or to propose that there were mountains on the dark side of the moon (before it was possible t... (read more)
I don't get how that's faster.