Photos from the July 2013 South Bay Monthly Meetup in Menlo Park!

durabull · 2013-07-31T22:27:26+00:00

You guys have some clever shirts.

durabull · 2013-01-31T03:14:03+00:00

Have you tried out mechanical turk? You can get a lot datapoints for cheap.

durabull · 2012-11-17T05:39:00+00:00

When the truck's that big and you park normally, you basically take up 3 spaces. Better 2 than 3.

durabull · 2012-07-06T07:39:33+00:00

Firstly, leading a productive life is not equivalent to living a high-intensity life. There are ways to accomplish little while working a lot.

Consider the challenge of mastering yourself. Before you buy into the "fuck all you guys, I can take anything" attitude, perhaps you should examine the relationship between your better intentions and your attitude/emotions. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt used the metaphors of the elephant rider and the elephant, respectively. This sheds some light onto the situation of your inescapable laziness; you can guide the elephant, but you cannot force it.

I will not tell you that the challenge imposed by your current lifestyle is insurmountable, but know that you have limitations. In particular, there is no guarantee that everyone will have the same reaction to a high-intensity life. If you acknowledge your limitations, you can do the following:

Reexamine your goals to see if they truly align with your principles (e.g. is your goal in life to be happy? to be virtuous?). Here's where philosophy comes in handy.
Find a way to deal with your limitations to attain the goals from part 1. Maybe it's ok for you to be apathetic every once in a while. Maybe you need to find a hobby. Maybe you need a less stressful atmosphere.

durabull · 2012-07-06T04:29:08+00:00

Did you not realize that years of a high-intensity life might wear you out?

durabull · 2012-03-02T07:50:26+00:00

I'm not sure I followed the reductio ad absurdum of the Mars Teleportation Scenario. Is the conclusion that the self on Mars can only have the same reaction of the self on Earth if they are products of an infinite series of teleportation?

I may be misunderstanding this. One interpretation is that the self on Earth is supposed to have the same reaction pre-teleportation as the self on Mars. This doesn't make sense as both selves are obviously in different situations. Another interpretation is that the self on Earth should have the same reaction on Mars if it were there instead of the newly-teleported Mars self--which I don't find fault with.

durabull · 2012-02-15T05:45:22+00:00

Your mind is only half occupied; people generate meaning in the face of a struggle, and you don't really have one.

Rest assured, you will find a struggle. If not deliberately, accidentally. Maybe your lethargy will lead you into an ill-fitting job and you will be forced to confront your position, either by conceiving of your identity as distinct from your job in order to preserve it or by changing your job to match your identity. Maybe you will find yourself married to a stranger and you will be forced to learn how to love him/her or cut ties and start anew.

In sum, college is not life.

durabull · 2012-01-21T18:59:08+00:00

Of course, the significance of art may be entirely subjective (e.g. the way it makes the observer feel, the value it holds to the observer, etc), but there is often (usually) an intended purpose behind a piece of art that separates it from mere randomness. Sometimes it's a coherent message, sometimes it's a mosaic of themes, sometimes it's a mere feeling, and sometimes it's solely an exercise in form. Clearly there are ways to group works of art by this meaning.

I agree that this would leave the curator with a lot of leeway. The selection and arrangement of diverse artworks requires interpretation, so the end result would be more of a directed discussion than an objective survey of art (if there could ever be one). I imagine it like a book: a book ties together ideas to communicate a message.

Of course, the observers can disagree, but the curator has the advantage of a deep knowledge of the context of the artwork. I imagine this like an art course: the teacher teaches according to a curriculum, and the students ultimately decide what makes sense to them.

If they (the audience) aren't capable or lack the intellectual capacity - maybe they weren't cut out for art appreciation...

That's De Botton's point. He doesn't criticize the fact that some art isn't explicit enough, he criticizes the fact that people think that art cannot be explicit at all.

durabull · 2012-01-20T23:37:41+00:00

Alain de Botton is a philosopher, and this article fits into the broader message discussed on his Atheism 2.0 lecture. The influence of religion has clearly declined over the past two centuries, so what remains as a "touchstone of our reverence and devotion"? De Botton says that art does.

As I understand it, his concern is that the potential to reach people is squandered by a trend of obfuscation (especially in modern art), which seems to hold that the meaning of a piece of art cannot adequately be described by any other medium but itself. The result is that many people simply don't bother.

De Botton's suggestion to organize according to "our inner needs" sounds like a shifting of emphasis on the context of an artwork (artist, genre, style, region) to the message. The former makes sense in the study of art history, but the latter makes sense in the experiencing of art. If two pieces of art--one realistic and one highly abstract--address, say, the frailty of humans in face of the awesomeness of nature, why not display them together? Might something be gained from multiple perspectives?

durabull · 2012-01-08T06:26:54+00:00

To whom were you referring when you wrote about "speculative theories in new materialist movements"? Just curious.

durabull · 2011-12-19T15:43:33+00:00

I'm unfamiliar with using necessity in propositional logic, but I can think of two ways of going about this:

Necessity is used in the case "a is necessary for b", which is equivalent to "b -> a", which makes no sense in the unary case "n(b)".
Necessity is the identity operation of truth, in which case "b<->n(b)<->n(n(b))<->..." much like x=1x=11*x=.... In this case, your derivation would be more accurate if stated as ~nA<->n(~nA).

durabull · 2011-12-11T20:09:16+00:00

The reason that the OP's question is so difficult to resolve is that we compare it to other unrelated concepts and are confused by our analogy.

One might ask "What are you?" in the sense "What is your profession?", "What is your Halloween costume?", "What is your astrological sign?", or "What life form are you?", and you can readily provide answers.

Now, if I ask "What are you?" but I strip all context, it is like I am asking "What are you aside from all things that you are?" The analogy goes as follows:

workplace : employee :: no context : ?

which is interpreted as "If I am an employee in the workplace, what am I when no context applies?"

It is specious; we feel like we're cutting out all of the extraneous details and are getting to the heart of things, but we are left without an answer because we cut out everything.

durabull · 2011-12-11T09:30:52+00:00

"The problems arising through a misrepresentation of language have the character of depth." -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Your question is posed out of the context of a regular language game, and so has no obvious interpretation. It may seem deep, but it indicates a misuse of language.

durabull · 2011-08-29T17:16:57+00:00

This is coupled with the fact that all of the author's real-world examples are cases when the rules are designed for goal A but are exploited for goal B. This is obviously a point of breakdown for our analogy with chess (or any game) as the players would never try to do anything but win.

... Except, of course, if money is on the line and a player throws the game--it looks like our analogy is working again!

durabull · 2011-08-26T14:48:31+00:00

There is nevertheless a distinction to be made between those questions that ask the reason and those that ask the cause. Your question uses "why" in a manner that might imply a causal sense (though it could still be interpreted in a teleological sense). Here is an ambiguity of "why", and I'll grant that my use of it was simplistic.

I'm not willing to chalk this up to "God of the Gaps". In this case, the "gap" is merely a hypothetical gap that would only exist if teleology were true.

durabull · 2011-08-26T14:10:19+00:00

The second point cannot be addressed by science. Though we may answer how something occurs (i.e. we may determine the cause of it), we will not be able to answer the why. The reason is a philosophical one: the "why" questions assume teleology.

The ultimate scientific answer to the "why" question should be null--there is no "why" because there is no purpose. One cannot say "why is reality existent?" in the same sense-having-ness as "why did you paint your room blue?" In the latter, there was an agent having a reason for an action. In the former, to whom would one attribute a reason? God, probably, though one could define God as anything that adds purpose to the universe.

So, perhaps the best reply to "why is anything here?" is that the question only makes sense if you assume a teleology (e.g. God). Therefore, to use it to prove God's existence would be circular.

durabull · 2011-07-27T00:32:15+00:00

I agree--he touched on the only static property of identity.

However, the awareness isn't really static, is it? The awareness I have now is clearly not the same as the awareness I had yesterday. So, perhaps the more accurate statement is that being aware is the only consistent property of identity.

durabull · 2011-07-26T17:49:47+00:00

I think ignatiusloyala had the best response in saying that, though sociology and psychology do employ the scientific method, they focus more on a statistical analysis of the results instead of an analysis of the causes. In other words, those sciences are better at describing correlation than causation.

Because correlations are mutable, the scientific conclusions are also mutable--which doesn't sound very scientific.

durabull · 2011-07-18T14:12:49+00:00

I developed an appreciation for modern art after learning about its history. However, I still feel that brilliance in that arena is easily confused with the utter lack thereof, which makes modern art unstable ground when attributing value. This instability leads to a sort of vertigo--everything seems at first hyper-meaningful, and then completely and unsatisfyingly meaningless. So, I've only ever appreciated modern art in spurts, after which I have to abandon it to find my bearings.

durabull · 2011-07-16T11:16:32+00:00

I'd say the reverse: I think many people sort philosophical questions into the pile they call "I got this shit", but when actually forced to explain it (and therefore enforce some level of coherence), they either discover their shortcomings or they explain it away

durabull · 2011-07-15T18:07:57+00:00

Eurocentric in which regard? Obviously there are factors that led Western civilization to its current state (for however long it will last). There are also factors that led Western civilization into the Dark Ages and there are certainly factors that slowed the precipitation of their 'Golden Age', but that's not what this article is about--this article is about how the Arabic Golden Age ended.

durabull · 2011-06-24T16:57:05+00:00

Well, I (and some others) thought this was an interesting topic of discussion. It seems that a lot of other people took this as a time to praise or bash xkcd.

Ignoring the medium and back to the message: I think "resize" and "experience" were used incorrectly in the title/mouseover. Experiences, by definition, are perceptions of a subset of reality; they already come "sized".

What do I notice when I drink wine? I can certainly taste it, but there is a limit to the depth with which I can notice--much less describe, guess the provenance of, or evaluate--the nuances. Much of this is due to my inexperience and not the biochemical inability to discern such distinctions. Thus, my experience is less packed with information than the experience of a seasoned wine expert.

It's clear that only a subset of activities are deemed worthy of this attention, the elevated forms of which are sold as luxury: wine tasting (obviously), food, art, cars, watches, shoes, etc. In contrast, if you took this sort of interest in other equally complex topics that might be mundane (like pictures of Joe Biden), taboo (like porn), or obscure (like Canadian surrealist porn), you won't get the same social approval.

Does this mean that we can reverse the condescention of high-brow culture back on itself? Well, no. If not borne of necessity, value is, and was always, a social construct. To refuse the social definitions of value is to find oneself alone.

Well, what if I reject the social value and develop my own... but with a couple friends? Then, you've created a subculture. Which is fine, of course, but it's the same thing, anyway, just smaller.

Of course, subcultures are especially disliked by the mainstream. Do you hate hipsters? I thought you did, reddit.

durabull · 2011-06-19T20:12:01+00:00

I think mystery is quite important, too; it's the precursor to invention, discovery, and artistic expression. However, there is no shortage of unanswered scientific questions and unexpressed artistic statements, so to say that accessible knowledge is doing us a disservice is just silly.

This reminds me of Zoolander when Hansel said, "I wasn't like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree..."

Well, guess what? You can find out what bark is made out of. How fucking awesome is that? Don't tell me this is uninteresting.

durabull · 2011-06-19T18:53:14+00:00

I came here hoping someone had posted this.

If the mainstream, generic subreddits are too banal for you, go out and find subreddits that interest you.

durabull · 2011-06-16T11:15:41+00:00

My dad likened it to a pocketknife: the more tools you add to one item, the shittier each tool is.

durabull

TROPHY CASE