- Sign up for TechSoup to get discounts on many software programs.
This is the only link from this post where I saw a referral tracking code on the URL; the srsltid parameter is from Google Merchant Center.
And a lot of TechSoup's software partners look like proprietary/lock-in companies that a young and innovative organization might not want to cultivate a dependency on: Microsoft, Adobe, Norton, Autodesk.
If your organization has IT capacity, you might consider orienting it towards open-source and community-based software instead.
Taboo "pseudoscientific". Here are some things we could ask instead —
- How was this instrument created? Was it created through a process that looks like iterative hypothesis testing, or was it created through a process that looks like ostensible experts writing down their existing beliefs and elaborating on them — experiment, or authority?
- Does it work? What do the promoters of this instrument claim that it will do for you? Do these claims bear out in reality? Are there reasons to relate the specifics of the instrument to those outcomes, or would a completely different instrument (different questions, different axes) be just as effective? (Here I'm thinking of the criticisms of acupuncture which claim that using a random map of acupuncture points yields the same effects as the "traditional" maps.)
- Do these axes "cleave nature at the joints"? Do the resulting "types" represent clusters? What does principal component analysis, k-means clustering, or other data analysis have to say?
- Why these specific axes and not others? What other axes were considered and rejected? Were they rejected because data doesn't support them, or because they didn't fit a preconceived notion, aesthetic, etc.?
- Are any of the axes or types redundant with one another, and included not because they are supported by data or outcomes, but because they fit a preconceived notion, aesthetic, etc.?
- To what extent does this instrument cohere with other approaches to the subject, especially ones that started from different theories? (Does it approach the same reality as others, albeit from a different direction?)
- How is the instrument treated by those who do believe in it? How do they promote or defend it? Is it treated in a manner more resembling a medical diagnostic or other scientific instrument, or in a manner more resembling a practice like palm-reading or horoscopes?
My housemate found a dish soap that contains lipase, protease, and amylase; enzymes that break down fat, protein, and starch respectively. I have dubbed it "poker soap" because it wins with three "-ase"s.
1You're arguing that the definition of gambling is that there's a house moderating wagering on an outcome
Not at all. I am, first, saying that "everything is gambling" is a mistake, a failure of reasoning; and, second, saying that there are important distinctions to make about different kinds of risk-taking, one of them being whether the risk is being offered by a negative-sum extractive system.
If everything is gambling, then nothing is gambling. The point of words is to make distinctions.
There is an important difference between taking a chance on something (like a new project) and making a bet in a system that has been set up for the express purpose of extracting money from bettors.
When you take risks in real life, there's no "house". There's nobody who's set up the entire arrangement to extract from you. When you engage in casino gambling, sports-book betting, or the state lottery, there is a "house"; there is someone more powerful than you who has constructed the system in which you're playing, and who expects to be able to reliably extract value from you and other bettors. You can tell they're in this position because otherwise the game would not be there to be played.
You've misconstrued or misunderstood what I meant by "common cause" above. I meant the causality sense of that expression and not the political sense. I don't mean the sense of "having common cause with someone" meaning sharing goals, but rather "two effects having a common cause" meaning A causes both B and C.
"Chatbot can't be made to follow rules at all" causes both "chatbot does not follow politeness rules" and "chatbot does not follow safety rules".
Also, as I've pointed out before: if the reason that you can't get a chatbot to avoid being rude in public is that you can't get a chatbot to reliably follow any rules at all, then the rudeness is related to actual safety concerns in that they have a common cause.
The worried voice in my head says:
"Doesn't this all just add up to negative-utilitarianism and extinctionism? If all action is rooted in desire, if 'everything is suffering', then eliminating 'desire and suffering' means eliminating the motives for action, which ultimately means eliminating life."
To which a reassuring voice responds:
"Think about eating habits. There is such a thing as healthy eating. But a lot of people's eating habits are dominated by craving and gluttony; or self-loathing and bingeing; or other cycles of self-reinforcing suffering. Healthy eating doesn't look like eliminating the action of eating, that is, starving yourself! (But it certainly doesn't look like pigging out and hating yourself, or getting envious over whether your gourmet meal is less cool than the other guy's, or eating whatever maximizes the profits of the food industry.) Attempting to starve yourself would be part of one of these cycles of suffering. Healthy eating entails eliminating those cycles. The same thing applies to other sorts of suffering."
Worried voice again:
"Okay, sure, eliminating specific intense knots of 'desire and suffering' makes sense to me. But what about the limit case? If the theory says 'everything in life is suffering', then after you eliminate those knots, the theory is still going to aim at eliminating everything else in life. That's extinctionism right there. Hey wait a minute, doesn't nirvana mean extinction to begin with?"
Reassuring voice:
"Hey, hold on, I like that 'knots of desire and suffering' idea. You're thinking of painful knots in a muscle, where it's tense and it's keeping itself tense, and causes you pain. But there's a big difference between relieving a knot in a muscle, and never putting any tension on that muscle at all. Healthy muscle motion isn't a knot, but it also isn't disuse and atrophy. Unknotting the knots is part of getting to healthy motion. It doesn't mean the end goal is to go totally limp and relaxed all the time. But if the reason you can't relax at all is because of painful knots, then worrying about disuse and atrophy is the wrong cognitive behavior."
W:
"Yeah, I was also thinking of Knots by Laing, and the idea of self-reinforcing interpersonal suffering. But seriously, what about the limit case?"
R:
"We are so far from the limit case that it doesn't make sense to worry about it! If we set out eliminating knots of suffering, the heat-death of the universe would come long before we actually got to the limit case where it makes sense to worry about extinctionism. Extinction is going to happen anyway eventually, but it's so very far in the future. And by reducing suffering, we would have had a happier future."
W:
"So, you agree that present-day extinctionists are just wrong? That eliminating human life isn't the correct way to eliminate human suffering?"
R:
"Yeah, definitely. They're bonkers bozos and always lose. Entropy happens but there's no point in worshiping it!"
W:
"Okay, fine, I'm a little bit more on board with this Buddhism stuff."