compilation of short music loops I made with the very fine #Caustic music app (somehow similar to #Reason) during the last days, mainly inspired by the tragic life work of astro scientists
All around me, everyone is getting less and less COVID-cautious. When they see me in my two layers of masks while I’m out and about, they say, with a certain incredulous undertone, “Still wearing a mask?!”
I think most of my friends and acquaintances now believe that I am exaggerating, completely overdoing it. Very, very few still share my concerns. Hence I am glad that there remain some voices of reason. Like, for example, the brilliant writer Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) who has a Substack blog called “OK Doomer” and a Ko-fi page.
I will recommend some recent texts to read and consider.
Edgar Morin about Reason / Rationality / Rationalization.
Reason: "Reason corresponds to a desire to have a coherent vision of phenomena, things and the universe. The reason has an indisputably logical aspect."
Rationality: "Rationality, in a way, never claims to exhaust the totality of the real in a logical system, but it has the will to dialogue with what resists it."
When I was a philosophy grad student longtermism hadn't been invented yet. Even now it is, long after I left the field, apparently a fringe area of research. But what I am now reading about it is frankly alarming.
This is an article from a recovered longtermist philosopher. I'll add some quotes and comments below.
@johnwehrle It's on my radar, though that radar is rather crowded ....
As for fringe / cultish things: there is a long history of such schemes existing Largely To Separate Rich Idiots From Their Money, and it turns out that you can also find a through line through much cultish-thinking generally that it's a #MakeMOneyFast scheme.
That's the fundamental problem of forecasting, prediction, and/or prophecy: it's inherently non-empirical. At best you can point to a track record of past successes, though that has some obvious issues:
Sufficiently vague / subjective predictions that judging is a crapshoot. A/K/A the Nostradamus and/or Cold Reading problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading (I suspect that much the success of current LLM Generative AI models has foundations here.)
The Stock Picker's Scam: Find 1,024 marks, send each a stock pick prediction, half saying it goes up, half down. Whichever proves correct, repeat the mailing to the remaining 512, then 256, then 128, then 64. Finally offer your next set of predictions for some fee to the final 32. Each of those 32 has just seen a record of five perfect predictions. What they don't see are the 992 others who received incorrect predictions. So a full prediction history is required.
Beyond that, as noted above, similarities, mechanisms, mathematical foundations (e.g., thermodynamics), etc., are the best guides we have.
Hi, as a #FunctionalProgramming beginner, I'd appreciate any guidance. Links to in-depth discussion, examples, and summaries would be great. I'm pretty fine with #JavaScript overall, and have used some FP features, but strict FP is new to me.
MDMRN Twin 1: Are they supposed to be fighting people?
MDMRNia: What's the word for after the world ends?
Me: Post-apocalyptic?
MDMRNia: Yea, that. This video is like that.
Tales of my kids watching #KPOP music videos with me:
Artist: Dreamcatcher
Song: Reason
MDMRNia: Why do they keep changing?
MDMRN Twin 1: Are they all the same cartoon character?
Me: It cycles based on whose singing.
MDMRN Twin 1: Why?
Me: Cause it's cute
MDMRN Twin 1: But why?
MDMRNia: And whose the person watching them?
Me: The fans
MDMRNia: Ehhh, I don't know.
A website to found out who in the Fediverse blocks who for what reason. (fba.ryona.agency)
If you enter a domain, you will find which instances block this domain....