Viewing profile — folksinger

Thank you for such a charitable interpretation. This is basically what I was trying to get across. Depression is a son of a bitch that I have also known at times and it really is a…

What your life is missing is meaning. Meaning is action. If a word means anything at all it is because it is in reference to some kind of actual experience. Blogs, books, and media…

Bouncers are fooled by people wearing paper masks of the people depicted on a photo ID? When bouncers let people enter a bar with a photo ID that does not match the person in quest…

How dare you be the one to assert what is fruit and what is poison?

Do you think you could fool a human intelligence with some paper printouts taped to your face?

Once you become aware of how many people on HN are part of that LessWrong AI immortality cult it becomes pretty obvious why they are so defensive.

Trust? This word depends on context. Do you trust your spouse? Do your trust your waiter? Do you trust the news? Do you trust that the sun will come up? I will grant that both Bitc…

This is exactly the kind of comment that confirms my hypothesis of the anti-philosophical spectrum.

At least we can both agree that we are talking about how we interpret and react to hypothetical utterances on the internet.

Think of a triangle. At one point is "philosopher", at another "asshole", and the third "idiot". Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "idiot" to be "innocent love". Consider…

Those tradeoffs are as chilling as a nationalized postal service. The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that yo…

We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc. And then we …

This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expa…

> Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true. There are two volumes of Songwriters on Songwriting and I guess I could introduce you to all my songw…

Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art…

The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones. Perhaps an analogy to songwrit…

> A particular medium is not (necessarily) to blame. Even the proliferation of what can be perceived as low quality examples of a medium isn't purely to blame. A large part of it i…

Yes, and before recent innovations in prescription drugs, all that people had was heroin. That's what fentanyl and oxys are replacing, and it's a huge improvement.

I'd say that books and museums are problematic in very similar ways. Neither of those institutions are focused on reality. Both are contrary to human dialog and an unmediated exist…

You mean the same Andrew Gelman who did not predict the election of Trump and took the time to reflect on the issues with polling methodology? http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/08/19…

Let's take a recent election as an example: A Bayesian pollster began with a certain set of prior probabilities. That the college educated were more likely to vote in previous elec…

"The more information the better". This dogmatic and unqualified belief must be revised by the technology industry.

The actual solution is to go for a walk in the woods with some friends or family members. The actual solution is to invite your neighbor over for dinner. The actual solution is to …

The Facebook logo is everywhere. On the side of delivery vans, pizza boxes, business cards and paperback books. Public spaces are littered with people staring down at their phones.…