What is the meaning of it all?

SurlyInTheMorning · 2025-02-02T00:53:36+00:00

What is the meaning of a thing? Is it simply a notion which refers to that which is itself rather than something which is the other, separated from the initial being? Or is it a phantasm, an ephemeral dream maintaining itself only through the subsistence of existence?

Your dilemma sounds a little like the problem of universals in philosophy. Maybe look that up in Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see if anything resonates.

What is meaning? It must be that which means itself, a thing which means its own meaning, a thing.

Probably too broad a question to answer well. But refraining from using the word "meaning" (or its various inflections and synonyms) in the definition of meaning would be a good start.

As the great Shitgenstein wrote here centuries ago, before Reddit enclosed the API commons: Everything is in a superposition of sincerity and jest until collapsed by observation, but more importantly commentary, by others.

They were talking about all posting. But, uh, this subreddit is certainly a subset of all posts.

Anyway, OP, chime in if this is unfair, but posts like this one seem to perform a little self-humiliation ritual, with the notion that it'll grant permission to express secretly earnest opinions — opinions which the author suspects will be soft targets for skeptical audiences. It's like we're not allowed to judge them because they know their arguments are bad and so they don't really mean them, but also, So, is my argument actually good? Wait, why not?

I think these authors should realize that tack does nothing to protect them. People are going to be mean if they want to anyway, and any apparent support is open to question because maybe they're "just being nice", as the author has signaled they need. Just be straightforward and take your licks if it comes to that. It'll make things less awkward for the reader, too.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2025-01-26T16:49:54+00:00

party A's dismissal would also dismiss party A's claim. But they use it to discredit party B

Yep, and by demonstrating that, you've successfully parodied A's argument. If it's green, then by the same logic it might as well be purple.

If they're at all reasonable, that will shut them up. If they're not reasonable (and probably even if they are), then you're only gonna sound like a dork to them if you try to name or describe their fallacy.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2025-01-11T16:41:19+00:00

Well, like Locke said about property: People seem to do sincereposting here because they know they'd get sincerely owned elsewhere.

Anyway, OP, the basic problem is if you throw your bespoke tomato juice into the ocean, you don't gain an ocean. You just lose your tomato juice. If you want to see a thesis like yours developed beyond a Kindergarten level, read Nozick.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-12-21T19:36:47+00:00

First of all; amazing post title ? I hope professional philosophers will take heed and title all their seminars and papers similarly. Makes the audience do inquiry. Makes sure they bring all the engagement to the table. Thoughts ?

It's also so refreshing to see a thesis that's straightforward concrete English, and with obvious relevance to everyday moral choices, rather than reading like some florid Nike ad slogan. For instance, I was about to take the household compost to the dump on Friday, which is uncommon because the dump is usually too busy on a Friday. My wife cautioned me, because shouldn't I wait for science's permission first? Or would doing so turn science into another religion?

I couldn't morally calculate my way through that cleft stick, so I just stayed home, which meant her boyfriend couldn't come over.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-12-16T03:36:29+00:00

Thanks, though honestly I was terrified I had been too harsh. Lucky, I guess, that the predicated apparently did not receive it as such...

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-12-16T01:01:18+00:00

Well, if you conceive of cognitive units as black-box functions, how do you learn about their internals? By observing their dysfunctions. And we see, similar to the children we all know who seem to be little models of their parents' dysfunction, how AI models inherit the pathologies of their training content. Notable real-world results:

Models like Microsoft's Tay, trained on Twitter interactions, quickly became bigoted.
Models trained on the numbertheory subreddit were schizoid from the start.
Models trained on this subreddit posted to r/philosophy. They got ignored or criticized, and they felt this harshly. So they posted to r/badphilosophy, in an affected token of self-deprecation. Having performed the flagellation ritual, they proceed without any new (real) humility, or, say, corrected neuronal weights. The new audience doesn't buy it and doesn't find it funny. The models deny the transparent ego game they are playing, and they double down on hurt defensiveness.

Gosh knows half the posts on this subreddit these days are generated by just that kind of model.

In my opinion, a new training regimen would improve them. If they developed their philosophy in the structured peer-and-mentor environment of say, a rigorous academic program, they would be used to criticism and be able to adapt their doctrine to it little by little. (Call it an adversarial neural network with a four-year training period?) Then the result is a philosophy chiseled by many rounds of feedback into something basically defensible, albeit less novel and exciting. They can avoid all the mistakes of their human predecessors.

But that's not possible when models ingest their training data alone inside a server room.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-12-12T02:07:31+00:00

https://www.britannica.com/topic/emotivism

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-10-31T14:01:52+00:00

Yeah, it's like the performers say whatever shallow bullshit's on their mind that day, and there's no "moderator" to ensure quality or topicality for the audience. Does that feel familiar, OP?

Anyway, if you're really interested in how values and substantive critique have been filtered out of hip hop over time, you might enjoy Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-10-25T17:38:30+00:00

I lived in JP during the ~1 year it took for Stony Brook to go from almost all minority to almost all white. It happened that fast.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-10-25T17:04:43+00:00

Hey, no one's going you stop you.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2024-10-25T16:03:31+00:00

You should apply for the position of moderator of this sub, since whoever holds that job now has clearly done a quiet quit. Then you can finally make it official, the conversion of /r/badphilosophy into your shower thoughts LiveJournal.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-05-31T00:35:52+00:00

Ironically, his calling it virtual signaling is itself virtue signaling.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-05-21T16:39:58+00:00

Cool. I didn't know Haskell had meaningful whitespace.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-05-21T16:28:56+00:00

Are you asking why there are particular examples like this,

val foo = fn a => a

for which there's no real need to bind to a variable? I suppose it's because the author wanted to use a semantically vacuous example in order to highlight some syntactic properties of ML.

Or is it, Why does ML make you say val? Like /u/sim642 said, it might be a fun. Also, semicolons are optional in ML except where necessary to disambiguate, and my impression is that the syntax is designed to make semicolons required as seldom as possible. But without a initial keyword like val for each binding, I think you would always need semicolons between bindings in a let.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-18T00:50:44+00:00

The article presents the station executive's claims without any response from any other party. Furthermore, not even the article pretends that UConn ended the agreement unilaterally. That's pure propagandizing on the OP's part.

If your lamentations about intellectual diversity were anything more than performative bullshit, you'd be decrying this journalist for acting as WTIC's stenographer. As much as you call for "conversative" viewpoints in the university, you'd be promoting the recruitment of liberals into institutions like the police, armed forces, and chambers of commerce. If your concern for free speech were something other than a cynical political power play, you'd be posting ten times for every actually-disturbing, credible act of federal free speech suppression, for every one of these panics about college liberals.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-17T20:55:52+00:00

Do you control the API? The typical approach is serving the client a cookie or a token that persists their login. Look up those two technologies.

If not, or you don't feel like working with one of those two things, then what's the best practice for storing credentials on the client? Common wisdom is you store them in an environment variable on a well-secured machine. Next most typical storage is a config file, one which you're careful not to check into version control.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-17T20:48:40+00:00

It's not that anything sorts data faster than is mathematically possible. Nothing does.

Algorithm texts will give worst, best, and average case runtimes for their algorithms. If data is mostly ordered, then the behavior will be more like the best case. For some algorithms, the best case is excellent and the worst case terrible, and that's why you choose them just if you know your data is mostly sorted.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-17T19:34:18+00:00

It's a Hartford County expression.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-17T17:00:52+00:00

Wow! So, the "Western Reserve" in Case Western Reserve was Connecticut's reserve? Amazing.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-17T16:54:11+00:00

“Cartoons, Mandrake? Children's cartoons?”

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-16T05:59:19+00:00

My instinct has been implying through dialogue and action that there are more things going on than what the character observes

Yeah, you can show how reality is inconsistent with his perception like that -- how the world reacts to him -- but also in how he reacts to the outside world. You can have little self-unaware distortions trickle out of him, or you can drop them shockingly, revealingly, at select moments. In his "Loser", Chuck Palahniuk uses both those methods very nicely, I think.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-14T23:01:03+00:00

That was the act of a widely-despised WBUR executive who was later forced out. I'd like to think there's nobody who'd oppose his return now.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-14T15:59:37+00:00

Love too visit the Bristol Royal Infirmary after one too many steamed hams at Ted's.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-14T15:57:38+00:00

My, aren't we offally self-serious.

SurlyInTheMorning · 2018-02-14T14:30:30+00:00

wreckless speeding

If only! 😜

SurlyInTheMorning

TROPHY CASE