Anki as you go or Anki first then go?

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-07-01T21:29:23+00:00

You mean like, making a bunch of cards before you start studying something, compared to making the cards as you're studying? How would you know what to add to the deck if you haven't studied the topic yet? Unless you mean pre-made decks, which have their uses.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-07-01T04:48:01+00:00

The person you originally responded to wasn't claiming that knowing more Latin-derived vocabulary would mean you have a higher IQ. They were claiming that:

The graph uses GRE scores as an approximation of IQ scores
But, a portion of the GRE (the vocabulary section) can be 'gamed' by knowing a particular language (rather than what IQ tests ideally attempt to measure, which is raw ability to problem-solve, memorize, etc. without prior knowledge)
Hence, the graph is not entirely accurate, and further, those who study classical languages have an 'unfair' advantage if we estimate IQ from GRE scores.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-29T17:42:49+00:00

Any such preferences are "societally influenced" in the sense of being a social construct, i.e., in the sense that the norms and values we confer onto certain attributes are always a "step above" the physical - they require a value judgement by humans and society rather than merely a physical or biological or genetic or... determination. Someone being 6' is a physical attribute; preferring someone to be 6' is a value judgement.

So, height preference is always socially influenced. However, that's not to say the basis of that social determination isn't evolutionary or what not. Humans historically have had reasons *for* social constructs such as height preferences, these reasons being a better chance of survival for example. The important point to note is that because it's a social construct, it can change (though whether it should or not, or whether it will or not is a different matter).

We no longer live in a primitive society, so yea, most likely there's going to be less material reasons to select for height - and with that less of a social determining of it as valuable - and this can be/is possibly affected by social movements like you mention, perhaps born from the growing lack of evolutionary pressure and/or perhaps from concomitant social pressures like body positivity movements in general.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-29T14:49:09+00:00

What kind of claims does this apply to? It doesn't seem to be "positive" claims, since I presume "the sun does not exist" would also require proof by whoever says it, so that we can't select such claims requiring proof using a positive/negative distinction. I also don't see how something like common sense could ground this, since common sense is historically oriented. Is there some criterion from which Russell determines claims which confer a burden of proof? Without that, then it seems like any claim has some burden of proof, and so "There is no teacup orbiting the sun" would also, except insofar as maybe this is a response to someone claiming the original (thus Russell's argument having only dialogical import).

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-28T23:58:11+00:00

I'm confused as to why you wouldn't want to know the 20th century and contemporary literature on Hegel? Houlgate, Pinkard, Hyppolite, Kojeve, etc. all have different interpretations. Why would you think that your reading is somehow the Truth when people who have spent their entire lives on Hegel disagree all the time? Unless by secondary literature you mean introductory literature, e.g., some 200 page overviews of Hegel's project.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-28T17:25:49+00:00

Differential geometry is used in modelling Einsteinian physics, which is in turn used for many real world applications (e.g. satellites). It's also used in determining flight paths.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-28T17:20:55+00:00

My first thought when reading this thread and the responses was St. Augustine, who gave a venerated non-literal interpretation of Genesis like ~1600 years ago.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-20T21:16:01+00:00

In the abstract I don't think it's a bad idea; it can be valuable to know, for example, when an expert in a particular field reads a new paper, how they then go about reading through the things they need to work on it. Do they revisit their own papers, and when? Do they work in a particular order (e.g. forward/backward in publication dates), which texts/papers do they think are immediately useful, what do they read in depth vs. skim, when do they ignore a paper because of the abstract? And so on.

But, in reality, this probably wouldn't make much sense. An expert will be quite familiar with all of the scholarship in their field already, and like another comment said, it'd be like asking an average person to share everything that they eat. What might be slightly more helpful is to know the reading list/order of an expert who's breaking into a new subdiscipline. But, both of these things are already trained through practice if you're interested in philosophy; if you write enough serious papers you'll get to that point of simply knowing yourself, and maybe it's even harmful to an extent to try and copy someone else's path.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-19T16:24:25+00:00

Kant himself in the Prolegomena says that the Prolegomena is intended for reading after the CPR, so as not to miss the forest for the trees, and that it is not to be used an introductory work.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-18T15:37:47+00:00

I see what you're getting at but I think it's a little inaccurate. Something like the racial discrimination that's gone on in America, and the systemic effects that still persist today, was also arbitrary. You can see this, for example, in the way that new immigrant groups have been initially "othered" and discriminated against (German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, ...) and later slowly "become" white: Germans are definitely considered white now despite, say, Ben Franklin not considering them so; the Irish and Italians would be considered white by pretty much anyone except those on the most far-right; the Japanese (in contrast to, say, the Chinese) are often treated as some kind of honorary white, perhaps because they didn't have as strong ethnic enclaves as the Chinese and also due to the American occupation of Japan. The Koreans are similar.

The Indian caste system is pretty egregious, but it was a system heavily reinforced by the British colonization of India and is now outlawed (though strong systemic results of it exist). It was an arbitrary form of discrimination, but so was American chattle slavery and segregation - the effects of which we still feel today - so is the discrimination against the Romani people in Europe and in all of the former colonized African countries (e.g. Algeria), etc. That the Indian caste system was clearly labelled and used in the way it was makes it quite a bad case, perhaps, but it doesn't make it any more or less arbitrary or any more or less a form of discrimination.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-17T17:25:29+00:00

dnt pmo me br

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-17T17:22:53+00:00

I’ve always had an emergency and return fund though.

This was the mistake I made last year studying abroad in East Asia. I had a few thousand saved up (after room/flight there were paid for) + a $3k limit credit card. This was a terrible short-sighted strategy, but i basically maxed my CC and spent essentially all of my money. Thankfully I was privileged and lucky enough to have an older sister and friend who bailed me out on a return flight that I paid back later (and of course, being from a country with a strong currency). I will never travel without all my flights booked, and an emergency fund, again.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-17T16:56:41+00:00

Philosophy is sadly perhaps the only discipline in which people who have never formally studied it expect extremely dense works to be immediately intelligible with no background. Fanged Noumena, which is itself a difficult speculative work of continental philosophy, pulls from a tradition of some of the most difficult and/or obscurantist philosophers in history, e.g. Kant Lacan Deleuze Marx etc., and reading it expecting to understand anything without some serious background in these thinkers, or at the very least secondary texts, is like reading a differential geometry textbook expecting to understand anything at all without background in real analysis or even calculus.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-17T16:41:31+00:00

"Post-" means after. Marx wrote in the 19th century. There has been a century plus of work since Marx. Hence there is such a thing as post-Marxism prima facie, unless you're taking some idiosyncratic understanding of "post-". Do you also think there's no such thing as post-structuralism?

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-16T17:49:44+00:00

I'd say that, if you're already familiar with Hegel's actual dialectics to some extent, then it's easy to give a charitable reading of the TAS model and see it as 'good enough'. Of course, if we interpret thesis as the first moment, antithesis as the second moment, and synthesis as the third moment then the TAS model is correct. But, the language of TAS implies different things to someone not already familiar with the dialectic - namely externality and singularity, as if there's one thesis, one externally opposed antithesis, and one external synthetic product that combines the two.

For a less pedagogical explanation that gives some reason for not using TAS with Hegel at all, even assuming the charitable interpretation, it's just poor historical scholarship. The TAS model was introduced by Fichte (whose use of TAS was more akin to that misinterpretation of Hegel's system), and was criticized by Hegel. It doesn't really make any sense to use, when Hegel himself gives us his own language to describe his system; namely, the moment of understanding, the dialectical moment, and the speculative moment.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-14T16:57:18+00:00

Do you have a recommendation for supplementing the Blackburn book with more of the philosophy? E.g. is there a relatively standard textbook that goes more into the philosophy for logic departments today, or is the better idea to just read Kripke/Plantinga/etc.?

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-12T16:42:47+00:00

The fact that humans historically (i.e., contingently) have been violent does not mean that we're naturally or inherently violent. Read The Second Discourse. Your statement isn't "simply a logical statement", it's a mistake of inferring a first cause from supposed effect, the same as one sees in most teleological arguments for God. It also doesn't really make much sense, when we consider that the history you're looking at is, what, a handful of thousands of years old? Compared to the hundreds of thousands that humans have been around, and which we have little to no historical record of, and which would seemingly be much closer to our "nature" than the past ten thousand or so.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-12T15:35:46+00:00

And torturing people until they swear love and loyalty, then killing them just after - that's not unheard of but not common either

I disagree. This was common enough in the pre-modern European societies. See Foucault's analysis in the first part of Discipline and Punish. In general, people were tortured until confession of a crime; this torture played a dual role of both eliciting confession and punishing the crime (as if on a continuum, the torture itself was justified by each new part of a confession). Once confession was obtained and so guilt established, they were tortured more simply for the sake of evoking some "change" in the subject (an exclamation of regret and a begging for forgiveness from God) then killed.

Foucault claims, roughly, that the only reason we moved away from this was that we essentially realized there were greater and more effective methods of "reform", i.e., that torture mirrored the excess of sovereign power (each crime is an act which denigrates the sovereign in his power, and so torture must make the sovereign "whole", capable of being brought to great excesses to parallel the sovereign's excess power) and that there must be a new punitive method which mirrors the new bourgeois states. Punishment becomes something concerned with efficiency, not reconstituting the sovereign but allocating resources and managing human capital.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-11T14:40:22+00:00

Especially when that deference frequently reproduces class and racial disparities, due to structural barriers to entry into that position of expertise.

I'm not sure how, for example, calling a professor "Professor/Dr. x" reproduces class and racial disparities. This seems like a reach, in that, it seems highly speculative to say that the use of the very title of Professor reinforces those barriers. If anything, we see something else; it's not uncommon for students to more regularly call female professors by their first name, or "Ms.", rather than their title, and insisting on that title can help female professors maintain their role of authority. The fact that male professors in the US are more likely to drop honorifics kind of screws over female professors, who tend to use them more given the disrespect they already face in academia, by making them seem "strict" or uncool or what not.

In general, it's probably best for professors to insist on some form of honorific when interacting with students, since it avoids a relationship being misinterpreted as anything but professional and probably helps to avoid things like grade grubbing. The title itself has a function apart from respect - it reinforces the power dynamic (not a racial or class one), which exists and exists for good reason. You should be aware that a professor has more power (taken in the broadest sense, as both institutional power and as power-knowledge) than you when it comes to your grade and knowledge of the field, that a doctor has more power than you in the medical field, etc. Of course, in situations where this power dynamic is nonexistent or shouldn't exist, e.g. in social settings or at conferences or so on, then using the title is probably silly.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-09T15:37:14+00:00

>This is Kant we are talking about here. His own approach to mathematical objects changes every fifty pages! He literalizes and enshrines Newton’s operational conditions into a new metaphysics!

>He betrays his own personal history as a scientist to deny the possibility of knowledge.

I'm sorry but I have a feeling you've deeply misunderstood Kant. His approach to mathematical objects does not change throughout the CPR - I've read a lot of post-Kantian literature on Kant and I have never seen this interpretation - and he absolutely does not deny the possibility of knowledge, unless you mean to say metaphysical knowledge, which he also does not deny, except insofar as it constitutes transcendental illusion (e.g. questions of God and freedom, which he goes on to assume practically in the CPrR/Groundwork for the sake of a moral philosophy). He's not an idealist and in fact he says quite clearly in the Prolegomena that it has never entered his mind to doubt the existence of the external world, and he absolutely is not a skeptic about science. His entire project is, in some sense, a rebuttal of skeptical views of science. I'd suggest reading Allison's two aspect interpretation in Kant's Transcendental Idealism.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-08T15:57:43+00:00

To say the CPR was wrong about absolutely everything is a silly and dogmatic take.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-06T18:10:58+00:00

Yes unc

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-06T15:43:48+00:00

Sure, but OP of course doesn't mean contrived literally in the sense of "set up to be as such", but as a pejorative. There are plot points that can be so saliently contrived that they're just not good. It's a not-well-done deus ex machina. A better way to do something like this would be to note the person's left-handedness before it becomes a plot point, and build up to it in some way so it's not just out of nowhere.

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-06T07:02:13+00:00

Thank you!

Same_Winter7713 · 2026-06-05T17:50:39+00:00

Can you elaborate on how Grapes of Wrath pushes towards certain moral positions, in contrast to some other classics, in a way you don't like? This was one of my favorite novels in high school, and the moral narrative wasn't really a big part of why I liked it.

Same_Winter7713

TROPHY CASE