OTOH there are more people than ever earnestly doing all those things. If we take the barrier to entry for publishing being as low as it is as a factor in you and many other professionals having written top quality technical books then I for one am thankful for this process you speak of.
Doritos are bad because poor people can afford them. Making your diet mostly organic greens is good because you need lots of money to afford them and you will be underweight and incapable of performing peasant style manual labor.
The cognitive dissonance here is striking. A growing man needs a shit ton of calories to grow to their full potential. You might as well fill your caloric needs with "junk" food otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.
>otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.
This is a myth, healthy whole foods are way cheaper than any ready-made “meal” and that is not even taking in account the future savings in healthcare!
Because the idea of class interest being split along easy to understand lines like billionaires versus everyone else or rich people versus poor people is a fallacy. In the real world your economic interest relies more on exactly how you make your money, in what industry, in what region, what your assets are, etc, etc. A teacher in California might have close economic interests with billionaire group X and a truck driver in Wyoming might have close economic interests in line with billionaire group Y.
Everything else is just propaganda to try and give a compelling narrative to these unintuitive groups. Because what we are actually talking about is essentially a classification problem in highly multi-dimensional space there really isn't a coherent narrative. The only way the propaganda narratives make sense to you is if you have shut down your critical thinking skills. Being confused means you aren't a brainwashed partisan.
Mind-body dualism has nothing to do with this. The point is that, as Descartes observed, the fact that I myself am thinking proves that I exist. This goes directly against what northern-lights said, when he said that we have no proof that reasoning exists or that we do it.
Kant addressed this Cartesian duality in the "The paralogisms of pure reason" section of the Transcendental Dialectic within his Critique of Pure Reason. He points out that the "I" in "I think, therefore I am" is a different "I" in the subject part vs the object part of that phrase.
Quick context: His view of what constitutes a subject, which is to say a thinking person in this case, is one which over time (and time is very important here) observes manifold partial aspects about objects through perception, then through apprehension (the building of understanding through successive sensibilities over time) the subject schematizes information about the object. Through logical judgments, from which Kant derives his categories, we can understand the object and use synthetic a priori reasoning about the object.
So for him, the statement "I am" means simply that you are a subject who performs this perception and reasoning process, as one's "existence" is mediated and predicated on doing such a process over time. So then "I think, therefore I am" becomes a tautology. Assuming that the "I" in "I am" exists as an object, which is to say a thing of substance, one which other thinking subjects could reason about, becomes what he calls "transcendental illusion", which is the application of transcendental reasoning not rooted in sensibility. He calls this metaphysics, and he focuses on the soul (the topic at hand here), the cosmos, and God as the three topics of metaphysics in his Transcendental Dialectic.
I think that in general, discussion about epistemology with regard to AI would be better if people started at least from Kant (either building on his ideas or critical of them), as his CPR really shaped a lot of the post-Enlightenment views on epistemology that a lot of us carry with us without knowing. In my opinion, AI is vulnerable to a criticism that empiricists like Hume applied to people (viewing people as "bundles of experience" and critiquing the idea that we can create new ideas independent of our experience). I do think that AI suffers from this problem, as estimating a generative probability distribution over data means that no new information can be created that is not simply a logically ungrounded combination of previous information. I have not read any discussion of how Kant's view of our ability to make new information (application of categories grounded by our perception) might influence a way to make an actual thinking machine. It would be fascinating to see an approach that combines new AI approaches as the way the machine perceives information and then combines it with old AI approaches that build on logic systems to "reason" in a way that's grounded in truth. The problem with old AI is that it's impossible to model everything with logic (the failure of logical posivitism should have warned them), however it IS possible to combine logic with perception like Kant proposed.
I hope this makes sense. I've noticed a lack of philosophical rigor around the discussion of AI epistemology, and it feels like a lot of American philosophy research, being rooted in modern analytical tradition that IMO can't adapt easily to an ontological shift from human to machine as the subject, hasn't really risen to the challenge yet.
This critique misses the point of Descartes. It can be reformulated as something like "a thought has happened, therefore we can know at least that something that thinks exists." Getting caught up in the subject-object semantics has no bearing on Descartes approach to objectivity. This is no more tautological than seeing a car and then concluding that cars exist.
Remember, this is about Cartesian duality (mind-brain duality), so the key question here is not whether a brain exists, but whether the mind exists independently of it.
That doesn't seem too bad to me. It isn't trivial to prove the earth is flat. 10th percentile IQ seems to be around the functional illiteracy threshold. The military won't take them because as much as they have tried they can't seem to get that 10th percentile trained in just about anything. If such a person looks out into the distance, sees that things look flat and not like a sphere, and then watches some video with half-baked reasoning telling them they are right then I'm not sure how you could realistically convince them otherwise.
The assumption that everyone has equal capabilities can cause a lot of needless struggle and suffering. Similarly assumptions that an individual can't or won't grow or learn or improve can also lead to a lot of unnecessary struggle and suffering.
Both things: that everyone's capabilities (and limits) are different and individuals can increase their capabilities can be and are true.
So I can understand someone's concern that we have flat earthers, as well as your lack of concern.
It is trivial to prove the earth is round though which makes it trivial to prove the earth is not flat (which does makes it impossible to prove the earth is flat).
Travel to any large body of water. Mark a boat with lines showing how high above the water each line is. Have somebody else pilot the boat out to sea. You observe that the lines show the boat as if its sinking. They observe the lines staying at a constant height. It's because the earth is curved and the water between you is blocking sight of the lines.
To be convinced the Earth is flat is ridiculous on so many levels. You say they watch a youtube video confirming they're right in their primitive observation. OK, what about the easy availability of videos to the contrary?
It's not enough to be stupid to be a flat-earther. You need to deny official authorities, believe in a conspiracy, and have an arrogant attitude of thinking of yourself as smarter than other despite being an idiot. So this is not a problem of some people simple being born with inefficient brains.
More importantly, you seem to ignore the 9%. To seriously consider the earth maybe is flat is already pretty damn ridiculous.
> It isn't trivial to prove the earth is flat
Of course, because it isn't. If you meant it isn't trivial to prove it isn't flat, well, in general it is hard to disprove an idea that isn't specific. But take any actual model of flat Earth, describing the movement of the Moon on quite a low altitude and it's trivial to prove it's wrong simply by looking at the Moon and always seeing the same side regardless where you live.
Let's do a thought experiment. Floating in an otherwise completely empty region of space is a bomb. It explodes. For quite some time after the explosion entropy will be decreasing in that region. I really don't see the mystery here.
The point is this: say we see a video of an otherwise completely empty region of space, with two masses orbiting each other for a while, that then fly off in different directions. We reverse the video and see two masses coming towards each other until they get into an orbit. Can we tell which of the two videos was the original and which was the reversed one? The answer is that we can't.
However, say we receive a video of a billion billion such masses all starting in a single point, staying more or less still for a few seconds, and then moving out at high speed away from each other. It is obvious that this video is almost certainly playing forward in time, since the reverse, a billion billion balls all coming together to form a single object, is very very unlikely.
It is actually very easy to correctly assert certain statements outside of your domain as long as the domain you are butting in on is obviously fraudulent, pseudoscientific, full of charlatans, practitioners don't have any skin in the game, is almost entirely funded by political money (and wouldn't be funded otherwise), or is heavily based on some sort of mysticism, and I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Turns out that is a lot of domains of human activity.
Use a fume hood or extractor and really learn how to solder properly. It sounds like you are either running your iron too hot and/or you are trying to melt your solder on the iron and pass it to the joint. The pros use a TON of flux because it practically solves the oxidization issue and helps a lot with spreading the heat to where you want it to go. Half of your temperature issues can be solved by either preheating your boards or spot heating with a hot air rework tool.
Flux in flux cored solder is rosin, rosin is distilled from pine sap and is a permitted food additive. It’s as a glaze on chewing gum and pharmaceuticals.
Rosin is also used on violin bows to increase friction, and it’s the white powder you’ll see gymnasts and baseball pitchers apply to their hands to improve grip.
Rosin vapour is a lung irritant, so avoid breathing it by using a fume extractor, and for some people it can cause contact dermatitis.
Yes it’s horribly sticky, that’s the worst part about it really. Isopropyl alcohol will dissolve it.
Piracy is very cool. It allows people left out on the price-consumption curve to enjoy what everyone else is enjoying. Usually children, students, and people living in third world countries with low incomes or bad exchange rates. I pirated tons of software when I was younger, you probably couldn't price software cheap enough that I would (or could) actually buy it. Now it simply isn't worth my time to pirate.
I still pirate roms and games that aren't sold though :)
I just finished my Retro Arcade catalog earlier this evening. I'm setting up a pi5 in our living room. It's super exciting to be able to expose my children to my favorite childhood games all the way up to the PlayStation 1 on a single device.
