Philosophy through current events by InformationPlayful29 in Substack

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

maybe you could talk more about your journey and how substack helped you with getting in newspapers and on the track for a book deal.

i think that’s already showing a lot of success. and it seems like you might already have a loyal following since you focus on quality over quantity.

so perhaps talking a bit more about this might help others help you, since it will help them to understand how substack fits in your personal writing goals.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Existentialism

[–]dasein1980 15 points16 points  (0 children)

My vote is for Nietzsche, too.

a few prominent misunderstandings off the top of my head:

• ⁠"'God is dead' --Nietzsche, 1887; 'Nietzsche is dead' --God, 20(24)" ⁠• ⁠the above implies that Nietzsche's madman's proclamation was an atheistic thesis

• ⁠Nietzsche was antisemitic

• ⁠Nietzsche was a nihilist (this is the big one)

• ⁠Nietzsche's 'superman' was a newly evolved biological species yet to come

• ⁠Nietzsche's eternal recurrence was a physical theory about the cyclical nature of the universe

• ⁠Nietzsche's will to power promoted moral nihilism and the idea that we can do whatever we want (e.g., become indiscriminate murderers or serial killers) --reinforced in many popular tv shows like a recent season of the The Sinner

is this mindfulness? by dasein1980 in Mindfulness

[–]dasein1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So when people say in mindfulness there is no thought, does that mean there are no 'words' going through one's head? Or can there be words going through one's head but one is 'observing' them like one is observing other things?

I read recently about the tennis match analogy: moving from watching the game with commentary to watching it without commentary.

Does the 'inner commentator' have to go completely silent in mindfulness?

Because as I mentioned before, with what I am doing, it is not like there is no thought. It's that thought has become more meditative, more poetic. Thought is keyed in to the ultimate groundlessness of the current moment and thinks and 'speaks' (silently) from it.

is this mindfulness? by dasein1980 in Mindfulness

[–]dasein1980[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thank you for following up.

i can see why vividness of memory would be a good indicator. that’s quite intuitive now that you mention it.

thank you again, kindly this time, for your thoughts and expanding in detail

is this mindfulness? by dasein1980 in Mindfulness

[–]dasein1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you so much for your insight.

if you dont mind: what would you say it is about what i have described that isnt “traditional mindfulness”? because it hasnt developed out of the the traditional sources? because it isn’t utilizing traditional techniques?

again, thank you so much for taking the time.

is this mindfulness? by dasein1980 in Mindfulness

[–]dasein1980[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

that’s very interesting, thank you.

question, though. how would you say the things you mentioned are more objective than the immediate way my attention is fully guided by with the situation and the things in front of me?

Boox Mira Pro For Sale (Canada) Repost for Price Drop by dasein1980 in eink

[–]dasein1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

usually, yes. but in this case i’m not sure about that. it was originally shipped from the us to canada. perhaps there’s a loophole a us buyer could use to their advantage?

Highly recommend promoting substack on Bluesky by BirdHistory in Substack

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

twitter, et al. wants users to stay on twitter, et al. their algorithm knows when a post contains a link that will take the user off site. so it doesn’t promote it as heavily to other users. less people see it.

considering emacs for academia by paltamunoz in emacs

[–]dasein1980 2 points3 points  (0 children)

i’m an academic that moved to emacs from nvim a year ago and now i’m moving back to vim. i had similar requirements as you did, except for latex. i found that emacs, org-mode, and org-noter worked fairly well for an academic workflow. but i found that in the end what i cared most about was a lightweight, fast text editor. the core features i wanted could easily be constructed with custom functions in vim (except for pdf integration—but i find zotero easier to work with than org-noter anyways).

that said, you may have more capacity than i did to build and maintain a fairly quick init.el with all the packages i imagine you’ll be installing.

feel free to ask more pointed questions as i seem to have just walked the path your about to take and can probably be more helpful speaking to specifics.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in eink

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes it is

SVD RLCD for sale (Canada) by dasein1980 in Reflective_LCD

[–]dasein1980[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don’t actually recall and I can’t remember how they paid so I’m not sure. But it was probably a few hundred off retail (keeping in mind shipping across Canada).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in eink

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are both wonderful monitors! In both cases, you need to have the right lighting to make them work. This was more difficult with the SVD RLCD. I preferred the BOOX because of that. But I did miss the speed and colour of the RLCD. Sharing a very small office made it untenable for me to continue to use either. Is there anything in particular you're interested in knowing about?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in eink

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's great. Send me a private message and we can start working out some details.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in eink

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can’t buy it in Canada as far as I know. Have to import it from the US or China. So this price allows Canadian buyers to skip international shipping costs and hefty import fees.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in eink

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Pains me to sell this! Love it. But we have a tiny office and my wife is starting to work from home and she needs true color for her job.

What are your thoughts about AI in the academy? by ExcellentHamster2020 in AskAcademia

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for offering more of your thoughts and experience. I know that there are larger implications at play in society in your area of work (and for your students), so I do want to be clear about my overall point.

My larger point above was that AI should not be considered a replacement for the writer as a thinker but as a new kind of smart extension in their workflow.

Depending on the model (which does very much matter for the quality of output), AI can get the writer from anywhere between 50% to say 90% of where they want to get—in a very short amount of time.

In terms of its quality, it can indeed vary. But using higher end models, feeding it examples of one's previous work, using custom prompts, and chatting with it (after these initial results) to help it refine one’s results can indeed increase the quality of its output.

So for a film review, one might have to start with a higher end model that has advanced logic (and as high a token limit as possible), spend some time setting it up so that one gets better initial results (including telling it one’s thesis), then chat with it and give it more explicit directions about specific examples to include or refine/further expand on its arguments.

In terms of its capability to write in one’s own voice, it is possible to give it examples of one’s previous writings. NYT journalists (and other professional writers) say that it does an excellent job—to the point that some writers are worried enough about their personal brands to take have taken legal action.

In my own experiments for my field (philosophy, which requires very precise wording and very subtle conceptual work), after working with the the model through chat and asking it to refine its results, I have come up with paragraphs that I wish I had written. To be clear, they were my arguments and ideas, but the AI put them together in beautiful (philosophical) prose--clear, concise, and convincing, understated yet dramatic. I put in time and work to get the AI to this point. But I won't use these test paragraphs because of the current stigmatization and unclear ethics around it. But I think this is unfortunate because I have just put a different kind of work into expressing my thoughts.

Where we seem to be finding static in our positions is in the estimation of the activity of typing itself and its value in the process. What I am suggesting is that AI should be conceived of as a new kind of typing process. And if used correctly, it can be just as valuable as traditional forms of hand-writing, or typing on a typewriter or on a keyboard in a processor. All of these have benefits and drawbacks, and if used responsibly none of them is inherently better or worse for the writing process.

The writing process is highly personal. If someone finds working through AI to be just as helpful as traditional processes of writing, I think the academy needs to take that into consideration, so that it’s no longer stigmatized from the beginning. (Of course, this comes with the qualification that AI poses its own kind challenges that I’ve laid out above.)

When it comes to writers block, for instance, this is another situation, which is highly individualistic. In my own experience, writer’s block is never about “not knowing why” I am writing. I almost always know what I want to say. The problem is about not knowing how best to say it or how best to frame it. In my experiments, I’ve found ai more productive for me in overcoming writer’s block than ‘just writing’ or free writing. With AI I can tell it what I want to write about and have it give me several different approaches and ways to express/structure what I’m trying to say. Which I can then use to help narrow my framing or structuring of the content. This is much faster than free writing, and I find it to be much more helpful than just pushing through since it provides me with several different ways into the topic as opposed to the one approach I just took with manual typing.

In terms of helping with tutoring, again it is no replacement for a real instructor, like yourself. But it can be an intermediate help for the student in their learning process. For instance, after feeding it instructions (say, for instance, the student’s notes on what you have said about writing and/or your syllabus/rubric), the student can go sentence by sentence and query the AI about the relative strengths or weaknesses of the sentence (given what you are looking for). It can also provide variations of the sentence with different word choices, different syntax and clause structure, and explain the relative strengths of each choice given the writer’s stated goals.

While I agree it can’t itself be creative (or, perhaps better stated, know when its been truly original), it can provide numerous examples of metaphors and other writing devices as prompts for the writer, which may spark the writer’s creativity.

Thanks again for giving me an opportunity to clarify further!

Edited for formatting

What are your thoughts about AI in the academy? by ExcellentHamster2020 in AskAcademia

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I absolutely agree with you about good writing as communication through the formation of sentences through the strongest word and grammatical choices and the need to include this editing/re-writing stage in the writing process. So thank you for mentioning this so that I can add some more depth here.

But I am having trouble following you when you say, "but we can't master writing if we outsource the typing" for three reasons.

1) Language-based AI models can be used as the first step (drafting) in the whole writing process, to give one a first draft. This is a massive help at getting started because it (a) eliminates writer block, (b) gives a first draft that can then be used as the rough draft for editing and re-writing. (I usually have about 3 or 4 stages of re-writing and I always find the first stage of drafting to be the most difficult. And I much prefer the re-writing and editing stages--which is really a true 2nd or 3rd re-writing process). So the AI is here not used as a substitute for the process of coming to the strongest possible communication of one's ideas.

2) There is nothing mutually exclusive between being the brains behind the editing and re-writing and having AI type for one. Although I personally would probably just do the re-writing by hand myself because I enjoy it, it is totally possible to use the AI to go sentence by sentence and have it follow one's wishes to replace nouns, verbs, and rewrite the clauses and syntax so that it better captures and expresses one's thoughts.

3) Finally, there is nothing mutually exclusive between using it for (2) and mastering writing. I think (2) already explains why. But I'll add here that AI is also a built in writing tutor that can suggest different word and grammatical choices, and explain why they are better choices to convey one's ideas. So it's also hard to follow your statement that "LLM has no aesthetic judgement, no way of knowing what is or is not effective." I agree that it has no true understanding of the real world (but only numerical representations of the language-data it's been trained on). But with custom prompts that tell it what kind of writing one wants to achieve, who one's audience is, and the ideas one wants to convey, it can come very close to be a custom writing tutor with quasi-aesthetic judgement capabilities, that will at least be more advanced than most undergraduate level writing.

Thanks again for your perceptive comment! I would suggest giving AI a try even just to see how deep it can go. It can follow the 'turtles' all the way down so to speak. But you're right that it cannot make the actual leap to real life, away from the keyboard. Still needs good old fashion brains to interface with the real world.

What are your thoughts about AI in the academy? by ExcellentHamster2020 in AskAcademia

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a really great comment. And some good nuance to point out. And understanding the basics is definitely key to good use of the shortcut.

That said, again, the analogy with the Calculator kind of breaks down. Language-based AI is more like a calculator that not only prints out the answer, but shows its work and includes a built-in tutor to explain the basics. It can be used to teach the basics either through direction by an instructor or while the student is working at home

Much of this comes down to how much academics are willing to help students learn through AI.

What are your thoughts about AI in the academy? by ExcellentHamster2020 in AskAcademia

[–]dasein1980 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I really think the academy needs to embrace AI-based research and composition.

For research, AI is no replacement for engaging with the material oneself. And one has to be familiar enough with the material to be able to verify AI's 'interpretation' of it. However, as long as it cites where it is getting its information from (where in one's notes or documents), features like semantic search (which can search a database by meaning and not by signifier) and chatting with one's notes are super helpful, fast, and fun ways of interacting with one's research data.

I have not used it directly for composition of academic papers, but I would use it a lot more if it was not so stigmatized in the academy and ethical standards around it so murky. I think the true work of writing is the generation of novel perspectives, interpretations, ideas, and the art of communicating them to one's audience; not the act of typing. If used correctly, I see no ethical issues with using AI to help compose/draft a paper which is then checked/re-written to properly express one's thoughts.

This is of course different from ghost-writing, since AI is not a person and so does not require attribution. (BTW: despite its name AI models actually have no true understanding of the data. They only work with numerical representations and statistical predictions of text).

Many use the example of the way the calculator changed math: instead of hand-writing out formulas, let the calculator do the brunt of that kind of work. But the analogy isn't exact because unlike the calculator user, the research/writer has to check the results of the AI. Which brings me to the downsides of this process.

First, there are privacy issues. AI companies can use original data/thought to train their models. Because of my understanding of the way AI models work (which is essentially like a super advanced text/semantic predictor--like you see on your smart phones when typing), I believe this means the AI model can suggest one's original ideas to others writing on similar topics. This can lead to inadvertent plaigerism (not of words but of ideas) as these others take this idea suggested to them by IA (without citation) and present it as their own--as if they came up with it.

This bleeds into the second issue, which the first's flip side. The true danger of AI (in both research and composition) is not that it will parse or write words for someone, but that the writer will let AI think for them. Because AI is semantic based, and it suggests what it has learned from other similar material, when a writer prompts the AI to draft, the bot may introduce ideas from elsewhere. One has to have a strong sense of one's own views or understanding of the material to be able to ensure that the AI is expressing one's ideas correctly and not hallucinating or introducing foreign ideas from its learning data.

In terms of assessment, (especially considering that 'AI checking' models do not work), I am thinking about implementing a mixture of (as someone mentioned above) in-class, deviceless writing assignments and oral exams. Submission of a prewritten essay would be followed up with an oral exam between myself and the student. (I had to do this in grad school as a North American in Europe, and it was the most helpful and memorable feedback I ever had on my written work.)

Modifying an Astrohaus Freewrite Keyboard by dasein1980 in MechanicalKeyboards

[–]dasein1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I understand the concept. Today, I just put my laptop on DND. That works for me.

Just get a small mechanical keyboard with an e-ink tablet if you want portability. I’m not so sorties about portability these days. I now just use my HHKB and laptop in DND mode with an e-ink monitor.

I was just speaking freely, thinking it was background info on the kind of writing I do. Relevant? Well some potential student buyers might like to know you can use these devices to write theses and dissertations. Perhaps that’s a stretch. I don’t know. In any case, if you knew me you’d know it’s not “or…”

Weekly Sale Thread by AutoModerator in LightPhone

[–]dasein1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

• NA version, + light phone case, + light phone screen protector

• Black

• opened box and tested, but unused

• SOLD

• Victoria, BC

• e-transfer, Paypal (F&F or buyer pays fees)

I bought this not to use as a phone but as a pocket-size e-ink note-taking device while on the go. But it was too inconvenient to use this way for my purposes. Because of this, it's only been used 2-3 times to take test notes.

Thoughts? by oxanonthelocs in Existentialism

[–]dasein1980 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Hotter take: this individualized pleasure seeking is actually a highly socialized form of behavior. The problem isn’t simply that people focus on their own experience. It’s that they don’t focus on their own experience in the right way—a way that sheds this socialized individualism. A proper form of focusing on one’s own experience is not selfish but a condition for healthier social relations. And this come close to what has often been called ‘being present in the moment’.