151–160 of 262 posts
I would be happy with just opinion free and divisive speech free headlines. If the big outlets could simply start with that, it might be attainable. Words matter. In the meantime. https://legiblenews.com/
I get the point of long form, and all that, but sometimes you just want the gist of it instead of digging in a 5k word article which starts from the childhood.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kin…
It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…
Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.
This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies. I can't think of a good reason to do that. And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.
It's customary in some contexts to italicize "loan words". The terms for the fallacies come from the Latin. Ergo ... As for your second point, I think it's pretty clear from both my comments and their context why I'm pointing out those fallacies. That said, in the case of " non sequitur ", I was actually referring more to the literary sense of the term — "Where the hell did that come from?" — than the fallacious "doe…
When you respond twice in a row in a comment chain saying that they are using a logical fallacy, and nothing else, you've done nothing to add to the conversation, but are playing the role of Logic Studies 101 Professor. That's probably what they meant by the looking back on on your writing comment.
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In general, you can sell 3 things: 1) fear, 2) greed, and 3) sex. 30% percent of Internet content is porn. So you have number 3 covered. Selling greed is hard, so lets do fear.
Wait... index funds, e*trade, 'you can day trade your way to retirement at 29!'... quants and HFT, the fact that there is a Wall Street after 2008... Money still sells most of all. Fear is just catching up now that the "news" is instant.
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Advertising is a fact of life, though. Without it, there's no way to inform potential customers of a new brand or product. I mean, imagine if it all disappeared tomorrow. Wouldn't people just stick to the megacorps and established brands they already know? Wouldn't this make it even that much tougher for a Netflix to compete with a Comcast, or an Uber/Lyft to compete with an entrenched taxi industry? How would Dollar…
It's a matter of push versus pull though. If I know I want a product, I can search for reviews and recommendations, (half of which I assume are astroturfed, but I'm counting those as "ads" which would disappear in this hypothetical.)
I wouldn't, until someone else told me about it. And they wouldn't tell me about it unless they found out somehow. And how could you possibly differentiate between grassroots interest and astroturfing, particularly online?
Besides, how many months go by with you happily using your razor before you sit down to research whether there are better options? The vast majority of people choose to spend their time on more important things, thus further entrenching the status quo.
It'd only make all the things people hate about megacorps worse. We've already got this dearth of creativity and risk-taking in Hollywood. Imagine how much worse it'd be if they couldn't advertise something new!
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kin…
It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…
Sure, you can then say that if all your thought processes are deterministic (modulo some inherent randomness), then even the outer stuff isn't really choice, is it? But the fact is, from your perspective the way your life will unfold is completely unknowable to you. And so, you get to experience the unfolding of your life and the "choices" inherent in that.
Freedom means the freedom to express who you are[1], right? Whether they are philosophically "real" choices or not is irrelevant. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of building something?
[1] Some people might call it the freedom to ~decide~ who you are, but one could say the difference is just a matter of perspective, depending on how much you see determinism playing into it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…
On the contrary dude, I don't think you've gone deep enough. To dismiss the parent comment on some vague existential bemusement seems near insidious in intent. At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?
We'll that is why I asked people to talk me out of it ;)
Most people that I meet either assume 2 from the get go, reasonable because that's how everything appears to us at first glance.
3 Basically means we don't even exist, in the sense that you can't have agency/identity/whatever you want to pinpoint as 'you' if everything is predetermined. The closes analogy to 'real' (this is always a problem when discussing such things) people in our world is the experience a film character 'has' when it's played (none, it's not an agent).
Basically from 3 follows that, however counter-intuitive it seems to 3-type-people, you have no agency, no thoughts, no freedom, no choice I'd argue that you don't even exist or alternitively that you have always existed. Can you even say that causality exists if every location of every particle/wave/force/field/w\e has already been predetermined? AFAIK science does not really know if this is the case, and the only science I understand is the layman's tl/dr. But the general consensus, again AFIAK, seems to be: do more experiments, we're unsure as of yet.
I only know that we live in the macro world, and in the macro world the case for predeterminism is pretty darn strong.
I'd prefer 2 over 3, because 2 is the only place where a possibility exists for ethics and/or freedom. I can't be ethical if I can't 'do' anything. I can't 'do' anything if 'I' don't even exist (which I'd argue is the case in 3).
Just an FYI - you will probably cringe when you look back at how you used to type and form sentences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…
I recall studying free will in Intro Philosophy class, and Hobart [1] had a good argument that free will vs. determinism was a false dichotomy stemming from a misunderstanding of what it means to "choose" something. His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically: Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually…
The problem to me is that that machinery does not exist. It's not there, how can something (anything at all in them most extreme sense, a human, a 'system', an AI an animal the hidden machinery in the human brain, a bunch of particles or whatever) 'choose' when there's no alternatives? Real hard predeterminism implies that there's nothing to chose at all. Doesn't the theory of conservation of information tell us that information is never created or lost, so that on a grand scale, basically nothing is happening at all? All information that existed at the big bang is still there, and always will be. There's no place for hidden machinery to make more, or make choices. The 'result' of that choice must have existed/been known before, because otherwise information would have been created at that magical 'choosing' moment.
As a kid, I grew up in a country with almost no advertising. Repeat after me: No ads in the streets, in the TV, in the radio, nowhere. One day we found a magazine (from another country), which contained ads. Two people smoking cigarettes in a strangely alien world, some kind of jungle - or a safari, maybe. This image was so strange in many ways: Why is it there in a magazine, that was about something completely diffe…