Thursday, June 20, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Edward Snowden: smears to watch out for
Juan Cole has a nice top-10 ways they'll ad-hominem Snowden. It would be cool to monitor this kind of thing.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Semantics and philosophy
Got into a little discussion about propaganda and semantics the other day, and I decided to look up Heinlein's General Semantics thing I remember from so much of his fiction. Turns out that stuff is Korzybski, so I'm reading his seminal work Science and Sanity. (His earlier work was the Manhood of Humanity, now on Gutenberg.)
Really, the subject matter of this blog, in my life, traces directly back to Heinlein's mentions of general semantics; I had no idea this was based on something that had been important in his own life, but Heinlein was a member of Korzybski's Institute before he started writing. That's pretty fascinating!
Anyway, reading on the edges of that, I was reminded of the fact that the state of my knowledge about philosophy in general stinks; it's great to be an autodidact in most instances, but there is a vast amount of knowledge of which I have only a vague inkling, and the history of thought is one of those areas I'm lacking. Here's a timeline of Western philosophers. There have been a lot of them.
But it's Dave Chalmers's taxonomy (and post explaining it) that really (re-)caught my eye, along with the bibliography of AI philosophy that he started back in Bloomington. Seems like I could read all day long for the rest of my life and still not run out of material. Clearly our knowledge is outstripping our abilities, so it's a good thing we're on the cusp of augmenting those abilities. Oh, here's another one out of Bloomington, with slick JavaScript.
Really, the subject matter of this blog, in my life, traces directly back to Heinlein's mentions of general semantics; I had no idea this was based on something that had been important in his own life, but Heinlein was a member of Korzybski's Institute before he started writing. That's pretty fascinating!
Anyway, reading on the edges of that, I was reminded of the fact that the state of my knowledge about philosophy in general stinks; it's great to be an autodidact in most instances, but there is a vast amount of knowledge of which I have only a vague inkling, and the history of thought is one of those areas I'm lacking. Here's a timeline of Western philosophers. There have been a lot of them.
But it's Dave Chalmers's taxonomy (and post explaining it) that really (re-)caught my eye, along with the bibliography of AI philosophy that he started back in Bloomington. Seems like I could read all day long for the rest of my life and still not run out of material. Clearly our knowledge is outstripping our abilities, so it's a good thing we're on the cusp of augmenting those abilities. Oh, here's another one out of Bloomington, with slick JavaScript.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
The myth of Nazi efficiency
Wow - here's a fascinating slice of 20th history for you: the Nazis were the opposite of efficient.
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