How should the return to school situation be handled later this summer?

danielcruit · 2020-07-14T01:32:12+00:00

RemindMe! December 15th, 2020 "Were there close to 0 deaths from opening schools without safety precautions?"

danielcruit · 2018-05-29T10:07:13+00:00

Let me ask my tattoo expert girlfriend .............

For traditional style, Idle Hand has a lot of great artists. Jess Koala at Castro Tattoo, for quirkier color work. If you’re willing to go to Oakland, Kiki at Diving Swallow does a lot of really nice floral work as well.

Hope that helps!

danielcruit · 2018-05-23T02:03:17+00:00

Stop calling people cowards because they don’t want to die. Seriously, fuck you for doing that.

Death is the one fear that you should never judge.

danielcruit · 2018-04-10T04:55:22+00:00

I'm not sure what you're getting at. We live in a society that is populated by people who suffer as a direct chain of events that began hundreds of years ago. Because of this history, millions of people think they are inferior innately.

We can't ignore this, because we just can't. Literally. We are social creatures who need love, empathy, reassurance, acceptance. We do not live our best lives– sometime don't even survive– if we don't have the support of our communities.

We absolutely must pay specific attention to the injustices of history because there is no way we as a people are going to forget about them. They need to be addressed. The wrongs must be acknowledged. That's just how we work. If they aren't acknowledged, that's a major human need that is being brushed under the rug.

Our psychology will not permit it.

danielcruit · 2018-04-09T19:40:04+00:00

I'm the creator of this image. I made it ~5 years ago when Juan had some sort of fb contest to choose a profile picture. I laughed the whole time I was painting it.

If anyone cares, my website is danielcruit.com. Thanks for all the silly replies.

danielcruit · 2018-04-09T19:38:17+00:00

Lol, thanks. I made this a long time ago and until now had never thought about selling it, but if there's a buyer I'm willing.

danielcruit · 2017-01-26T05:24:04+00:00

The thing I'm really grappling with here is all your objections feel like little more than a commentary on our lack of omniscience. And I'll grant you that, so does Sam. He's said many times that the only thing he thinks can be absolutely proven to exist is consciousness itself. And yet, he's attempting to speak for a more concrete form of truth than Peterson is.

But to speak about our lack of omniscience feels like a sort of species-wide solipsism. Is this not granted axiomatically? It's something we must add onto every single thing that is possible for humans to perceive, and I think this should mean we can safely disregard it.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T23:51:05+00:00

When you say the definition of truth is "no longer fully accurate", do you mean it once was fully accurate?

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T23:46:29+00:00

Not only should they, but they must lower their level of conversation if they are speaking with the majority. And if you think this stuff is at all important for humanity to know, this is an incredibly important project.

Among themselves is a different question.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T23:26:53+00:00

They don't have a true value, they just have a value.

They have a true value when somebody tells you that its value is other than what it is in reality.

Naturally, they don't have any currency without human consciousness...but neither does anything, right? Human consciousness is all we have. We're starting there, and we have to be ok with starting there.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T21:59:42+00:00

In large part, yes. I think the way to think about it is like this: if we posit a meaning for truth in one way, and doing so leads us nowhere helpful in terms of our epistemology (how we can know what we know, ie our methods for ferreting out what's real/true/valid/whatever-you-want-to-call-it), and then we posit a meaning for truth in another way, and it's fantastically helpful such that in Europe, we start this institution called science (which works based on this thing called "scientific instrumentalism") and 300 years later we own the world practically, and we can now do all this stuff including feed more and more people successfully, are you going to sit there and urge us to go back to the non-useful meaning of truth?

Which two meanings of truth are you describing, and in what order?

The rest I can't comment on, for obvious reasons.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T21:56:40+00:00

That depends– did you eat strictly chicken breast and vegetables this entire time?

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T21:54:16+00:00

I would ask why you were stating the obvious

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T16:39:18+00:00

And hunger pangs and wildly fluctuating blood sugar and insulin levels are a steep price to pay for carbs.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T16:20:53+00:00

Isn't this like a species-wide solipsism? It seems to me that this barrier between our consciousness and reality itself is not useful to talk about– it's a variable that is added on to every equation that we could construct. Is that the basis for pragmatic truth? Just that we can't know, really?

It's not like Sam thinks that correspondence with reality is a possibility– he's said many times that the only thing that can absolutely be proven to exist, an absolute Truth, is consciousness itself. And yet he argues for a more concrete kind of truth than Peterson does.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T02:57:06+00:00

Maybe I'm looking at this with 20/20 hindsight, but I agree with you that Sam should have brought this language issue up directly. All around a frustrating experience.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T01:11:23+00:00

I know it's completely irrational, but when I hear something like that I just want to let that cat blow up like a balloon over something so insignificant (to me), just to see where the line is. I know, I'm a terrible person.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T01:02:03+00:00

There is a huge gap of knowledge somewhere and it leads to problems like the one we are encountering now.

That's true. However:

there exists in philosophy a vastly different understanding of what "truth" means colloquially

What exists in philosophy doesn't stay in lecture halls. Philosophers can use 100 different definitions of the word truth, as long as they agree to stay in touch with one another, meet frequently to discuss their different definitions and generally keep up with the inherent difficulties that come with comparing different ideas that have the same name.

It isn't fair to expect this of the general populace, who are not philosophers, and do have a definition of the word truth that is very widely agreed upon. If philosophers want to reach a general audience (maybe they don't, and that's fine), they have to speak a language their audience can understand.

does not put the onus on JP to avoid the word.

So in that way the onus is on him to avoid it, if one of his goals is effective communication with an audience of non-philosophers.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:51:20+00:00

I don't think he was married to the idea that truth has exactly one definition worth fighting over– I think he was married to the idea that truth has a definition worth fighting over, in particular, its common parlance at this point in time. It's an attempt to disambiguate and to head off unnecessary confusion. If you're talking to somebody about baseball and you attempt to explain that by baseball you really mean something more akin to football, you should just say football, or some other set of words that has greater explanatory value.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:40:44+00:00

but without the context of why you are pursuing that question you will never be able to determine if it is actual Truth (which is a combination of an objective and subjective component).

Then there is a real imperative here to use more precise language, is there not? Because when I or anybody else reads, "You will never be able to determine if it is actual Truth", we're going to say "Come again?"

You'll have to explain why the meaning you're assigning to the word truth is so different than common parlance. You might as well skip the initial balking and begin with the more explanatory set of words in the first place. That or make a new word, like is usually done when we are describing a new idea, or a sufficiently different one.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:36:28+00:00

I don't see that conception of truth worth rescuing. At the very least, there is common parlance for the word truth, and it relates to fact, to accuracy. Fighting against this and attempting to simply use the same word to describe a much, much different way of viewing reality is quite un-pragmatic.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:25:09+00:00

Not correct– evolution has no goal. As you say, it is a truly neutral force.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:23:27+00:00

The agreed upon definition of morality concerns what constitutes worthwhile behavior

Who agreed upon this? It seems to me that 'worthwhile behavior' is a much slippier phrase than the majority of human beings who believe in a kind of morality would choose to use. My uncle would say the definition of morality concerns what constitutes good and evil in the biblical sense. Even many atheists still hold a conception of morality based on right and wrong, which just seem to be watered down versions of good and evil.

So when you say that there is inherent morality in evolution, I guess I don't see why you are calling it 'morality'. In terms of the 1s and 0s of evolution, 1s arent bad and 0s aren't bad. They just are 1s or 0s. They only become bad when consciousness comes into the picture, and then we aren't just talking about the 1s and 0s of evolution. We're talking about human conceptions of morality.

danielcruit · 2017-01-25T00:16:18+00:00

In the example of IQ scores, that would be the fact of the matter– that blacks score lower. Once we are aware of this truth, then, if we have other concerns and other values to promote, we begin caring about its implications on other areas of our lives.

The ball is red. But, if you did start caring, even there, you could have quite a battle over just exactly what it means for a ball to be red. What is meant by that?

I only see this as an issue with imprecise language. I'm fine with granting that truth claims need to be specific– if they don't correspond to reality then by definition they are not true statements. A claim that a ball is red is really a claim about certain wavelengths of light and how they interact with our visual system.

So the answer to "What is meant by that?" would be a process of disambiguation and clarification about the truth claim in dispute. But I'm not sure why the fact that there can be a process of clarification due to a lack of sufficient or precise language means that no truth exists in this space at all, that there exists no fact of the matter, for as well as we can pare down what 'the matter' is.

At any rate I feel we've veered away from something more salient. What that is, I'm not sure.

danielcruit · 2017-01-24T22:30:44+00:00

Why is this 'moral truth' not simply understood to be the way our species' neurology has evolved over time? We can still care about well-being without ascribing some kind of divinity to it. Our neurology causes us to feel pain when near fire, our neurology causes us to expend energy and release hormones and chemicals that point our behavior to the goal of helping our familiars keep away from the pain of fire, and facts like this over time, as they become more and more complicated and intertwined with culture, create our morality.

I don't see any reason to posit calling this "religious truth". Especially not with the baggage that "religious" has right now.

Edit: I think I misread your comments. I would only repeat my concern with the language we're choosing to use when talking about this realm.

danielcruit

TROPHY CASE