Governments once banned interracial relationships and marriage, homosexuality, women working outside the home, divorce, birth control, dancing, drinking etc, on account of contributing to anti-social behaviour. It's true that they haven't collapsed, but I don't think that's because those things were once banned.
If your point is that what was acceptable in the past is now distasteful, then respectfully I do not care.
The fact that the government cannot create a regulation that works for everyone, everywhere, all at once across time and space is not a winning argument for me since that limitation applies to all actors. We go through cycles where we either change what society generally considers "ok" or we discover that something we thought was ok was actually a great evil after some forerunners on moral thought convince enough people of the righteousness of their belief.
I think you meant the opposite - that what was distasteful in the past is no longer distasteful today.
I think we realised as society that regulating most behaviour, no matter how distasteful we find it, is not a great idea for various reasons - 1. it's subjective, 2. people get tired of prudish cultures and act out in various ways, 3. you end up on the wrong side of history. As a society we're becoming a lot more liberal about letting people do their own thing, as long as they aren't actually hurting others. Playing music out loud is not hurting others, neither is wearing a bikini at the beach, etc.
Of course there are always the hall monitors that want to control other peoples behaviour and they often use the excuse that they're regulating bad behaviour for the sake of society. Thankfully it seems like we are beginning to reject those people and push them out of power.
> I think you meant the opposite - that what was distasteful in the past is no longer distasteful today.
It could be either
> I think we realised as society that regulating most behaviour…
I did not mention anything close to regulating “most” behavior, and I want to call out to you, since you are respectfully laying out your point, that this seems to be a common knee jerk reaction to a large number of people bemoaning any particular issue if I bring up government regulation. That knee jerk reaction specifically being the assumption that being for any government regulations means you are for regulating most or all things.
> Thankfully it seems like we are beginning to reject those people and push them out of power.
It’s only thankful if you prefer the situation. If you are someone who does not want to experience pot smoke and loud music blaring in your ear when someone chooses to do so because they have the freedom to, then maybe you prefer the hall monitor.
I’m not even advocating for one option or the other. This thread started with me pointing out to someone who was upset at people engaging in anti social behavior en masse, that the solution was government regulation.
If you don’t like government regulations in general, or you just think that on net they are a detriment, then the solution is to make peace with the fact that other people are going to use their freedom in a way that you don’t like
Sorry, when I said "most" behaviour I meant it categorically, not quantifiably. As in, most behaviours should not be regulated, not that there are people who want to regulate most or all things.
I don't think the solution to the type of anti-social behaviour described in the article is regulating it. Like I'm not sure how we can make "being Paris Hilton" illegal, unless we do something akin to bringing back Puritanism or something like that. I very much appreciate both the separation of church and state, and also the freedom to live my life how I want even if there are some people who disapprove of it.
> If you don’t like government regulations in general, or you just think that on net they are a detriment, then the solution is to make peace with the fact that other people are going to use their freedom in a way that you don’t like
Yeah I think the lesson is that people need to make peace with the fact that other people have different values and should be free to live their lives the way they want.
You don't need a hierarchy of abstract classes, dependency injected implementations, nested pattern matching with destructuring, etc for any project. If one decides to implement these techniques in an ad-hoc basis in Go to solve problems, that's more to do with trying to apply principles and techniques from other languages in Go.
I think the argument is that philosophy hasn't advanced much in the last 1000 years, but it''s still 10,000 years ahead of whatever is coming out of the rationalist camp.
Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.
Philosophy postgrad here, my take is: yeah, sorta, but it's hard to build your own curriculum without expertise, and it's hard to engage with subject matter fully without social discussion of, and guidance through texts.
It's the same as saying "why learn maths at university, it's cheaper just to buy and read the textbooks/papers?". That's kind of true, but I don't think that's effective for most people.
I'm someone who has read all of that and much more, including intense study of SEP and some contemporary papers and textbooks, and I would say that I am absolutely not qualified to produce philosophy of the quality output by analytic philosophy over the last century. I can understand a lot of it, and yes, this is better than being completely ignorant of the last 2500 years of philosophy as most rationalists seem to be, but doing only what I have done would not sufficiently prepare them to work on the projects that they want to work on. They (and I) do not have the proper training in logic or research methods, let alone the experience that comes from guided research in the field as it is today. What we all lack especially is the epistemological reinforcement that comes from being checked by a community of our peers. I'm not saying it can't be done alone, I'm just saying that what you're suggesting isn't enough and I can tell you because I'm quite beyond that and I know that I cannot produce the quality of work that you'll find in SEP today.
Oh I don't mean to imply reading some classical lit prepares you for a career producing novel works in philosophy, simply that if one wants to understand themselves, others, and the world better they don't need to go to university to do it. They can just read.
I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates would be a bit difficult), but getting to Hegel and these newer more complex authors is almost impossible to navigate unless you are a savant.
I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.
Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.
Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.
And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.
Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.
This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, because it probably is not.
> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.
I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. But I can tell a bot what my background is, and it can make an explanation that is in the right level of complexity.
As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).
On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.
This is like saying someone who wants to build a specialized computer for a novel use should read the turing paper and get to it. A lot has of development has happened in the field in the last couple hundred years.
Yeah it's pretty obvious and not surprising. What do people expect when a bunch of socially inept nerds with weird unchallenged world views start doing uppers? lol
I like to characterize the culture of each (roughly) decade with the most popular drugs of the time. It really gives you a new lens for media and culture generation.
> the extra 50kb gzipped is starting to feel kind of heavy compared to my ~8kb (plaintext) HTML response
I thought we were living in a utopia where fast high-speed internet was ubiquitous everywhere? What's the fuss over 50kb? 5mb should be fine in this fantasy world.
It's not just about wrapping. use-expressions, result.try and result.map eliminate the boilerplate of checking for errors entirely: https://erikarow.land/notes/using-use-gleam
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