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I've found that I can have a lot of patience and interest in mental work while stoned, but I forget a lot of it after it's done. Weed is a mild amnesiac, and for someone with otherwise very good memory, this is noticeable. This may be great if you're doing something soul-crushingly boring, but a better strategy is to avoid that sort of work to begin with.

IANAN, but I suspect that in your case, weed is helping because of its indirect action on the opioid system, and despite, rather than because of, the characteristically "weedy" effects. Have you self-medicated with any other euphoriants?

A matchmaking amusement park is also called a bar.

It's boring and easy, but it's necessary if one wants to get rid of it. I don't feel like fighting the good fight myself (or even watching it happen), but I'm glad somebody out there is. Really, it's the same situation as with religion.

AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.

I would actually advise against the MIT lectures. The authors are much better recorded than live, as it were, and the only videos I could find are of very bad visual quality. The book is written so clearly that it requires no further explanation. But, hey, try them--maybe you'll like them.

Don't skip exercises. All the meat is in the exercises. I think there's a bunch at the end of Chapter 2 that make you write a lot of verbose code, to teach you stuff that you probably already understand if you've done OOP. The ideas explained in that section have since got more than their fair share of popularity in the mainstream. Anyway--I skipped those. But many others I thought I'd skip, only to come back to them later and wish I'd done them the first time.

Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.

And where does this "need" come from?

Yes. Making the Roadster was, according to the founders, a move to compensate for the "weak" and inferior image electric cars currently have, before they start making them for mass market.

I think just about everything anyone believes is false, or at least arbitrary and unfounded. We lack the frameworks to examine the vast majority of things that determine our decisions, and are thus de facto beliefs.

Huxley is sci-fi and not reality, and so are your reasons. If you want to avoid a pandemic, invest heavily in biotech. If you want clean energy, invest in nuclear plants and more efficient energy storage and such. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, invest in infrastructure that will allow the world's poor to create wealth and raise their standard of living and not want to kill anybody.

By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.

He's right about the Moon landing being a stunt. But the Mars settlement will also be a stunt. Curing aging--that'd be historic. Creating a drug that will make us all happy and compassionate would be historic. Creating a "first world" country in the middle of an ocean where everyone in the world is welcome, as long as they obey the law and create wealth.

Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car. Evolutionary theory has explanations for this sort of behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

The guy in the video says energy expenditure and feeling good are synonymous. How about with opiates?

Thanks--I'll check them out. I hope it's the kind of stuff that is only called philosophy, but actually falls under the purview of science, which doesn't yet have a framework to deal with it. That's the only kind of "philosophy" I've ever found of value.

You're "not talking about how we build them", but you were responding to my post where I am talking about how we build them. I'm gonna say it again: I don't understand this tendency to shift attention away from the "how"--rather insistently, in your case.

Sweet! I've got this other problem, though--I really enjoy sunshine. Anyone got a cure for that?

Mathematics and physics are products of the mind, obviously. Mathematicians and physicists do their work by using their minds. They don't channel some divine truth--they merely filter what their mind makes through certain criteria. I don't understand this common tendency, exemplified by your comment, to shift attention away from how mind makes things, to the criteria according to which we filter them before we call them "science" or "mathematics". I've studied mathematical logic, and it has been of little use to me in mathematics. Philosophy of mathematics has been of no use at all. The practice of mathematics can get by perfectly well without that stuff. So maybe it's time to put aside the mysticism, and start looking at how our brains actually make what they make. Especially since we are just now starting to understand what brains are and how they've evolved.

Mathematics is a product of the mind; the mind is a product of evolution; evolution is a product of natural laws. If you want answers to these questions, it helps to look at what we are, exactly, and how we came to be.

In fact "simple" mathematics are not simple at all by any objective measure. Starting with any truly formal system, you need a stupendous number of deductions to get to things like elementary laws of arithmetic, or basic plane geometry. Mathematical proofs are not formal proofs--they are instructions for our brains. Evolution made the relevant parts of our brains the same, so same instructions lead to same results. That's why there's never any argument over whether a proof is correct, once a few people got to study it in detail. This also explains Hamming's observation that when proofs turn out to be "wrong" after math has evolved a bit, theorems are still usually correct. We find a new, better route to the same place in our brain, and recognize the hazards of the old route, now deprecated.

Okay, here is the key bit: if evolution made the relevant parts of our brains the same, that means it has arrived at a maximum, or at least a local maximum. What is the nature of this maximum? Physiologically, there are constraints on the amount of brain circuity our body can maintain. Brains consume a lot of energy, take up space, etc. So naturally, evolution ended up with a design where the same circuity can serve the greatest possible number of functions.

Of course, evolution only concerns itself with those functions relevant to our survival and reproduction. But there is nothing niche about those goals. If some general pattern occurs often in our quest for survival, then it likely occurs often in other quests that evolution never knew about--like building airplanes.

Which college?

I'm not talking about "most people". I'm talking about some significant subset of smart people who would love hacking, but don't know what it is yet because they weren't given a proper opportunity. "Most people" will follow when programming literacy becomes the new math literacy.

Programming is only an impressive-sounding "skillset" and not a simple skill, like riding a bicycle (at least in its rudimentary form), because of how awful the interfaces are between simple code you write and things happening that make a difference in your life. Maybe this problem will eventually be solved not by a better Linux UI philosophy, but by things like Heroku.

"A better UI philosophy" wouldn't even have to be anything new. It's just the classic modular Unix way--the thing that makes shell scripts so easy and satisfying. It should have been extended to GUI. I would guess that someone tried, but it didn't catch on. The idea is too obvious.

Here is why this common metaphor is wrong: the only useful thing cars do is get you from point A to point B. Mucking around with the innards is pointless unless you like doing it. Hacking a computer could be both fun and useful for a great variety of smart people. Furthermore, a car is a physical thing with rigid physical constraints on its design. If you want to tweak your car, you need to do a lot of stupid busywork with your wrench before you get to anything interesting. You need to have a wrench, and a garage for that matter. With an operating system, there are basically no constraints beyond the imagination of its makers.

Here is the real problem with desktop Linux: nobody wants to take the only thing that Linux is good at, and make it better. I'm talking about hackability. Ubuntu and similar systems make it worse. There is too much ugly, incomprehensible and plain unedifying kludge between the neat Unix core and the whatever shiny crap is in fashion this year. If a minimal distro is a pool with no shallow end, then Ubuntu is a pool with a shallow end, and barbed wire between it and the deep end. It's hard to make a pool with a shallow end that gradually gets deeper, but as far as I know, nobody is even trying.

Not every potential user is an idiot. There are plenty of people who would learn, if the learning process felt more like lifting weights and less like having drain cleaner poured on your face.

Something like what? Litvinenko was as absolute nobody, without access to any privileged information, and without any original ideas. He is only famous for dying in a bizare way. Putin clearly didn't do it. He may be ruthless, or even a psychopath, but he's not stupid. He gained nothing from that incident, and his enemies gained a lot. Now, who likely did it--people who gained from it, and could only stand to gain from it, or people who lost from it, and could only stand to lose from it?

"It's very simple": journalists mainly do what they think will make them look good in front of other journalists. The author did a good job of elaborating on that, though.

This is an instance of a very broad and very underappreciated pattern in society. Replace "journalists" with "women" in that sentence, or with "university professors", and it's just as true.

I'm not gonna write any more about Russia, because it's probably impossible for someone in a society based on large, reliable (if not always good) institutions to understand a society based on a much larger number of smaller, less stable, and less well-integrated institutions, like Russia. On top of that, Russia's smartest and most ambitious people don't have the option of going into some technical field or academia, because that just doesn't provide a comfortable life. So they aim for power, and as a result the game of power is much more complicated than e.g. in America. For anyone interested in Russia, I suggest looking at more basic things, like what life is like for the average Russian. Actually it's probably a good idea for approaching any society--to try to understand culture first, and politics last.

I want to ask, though--what are the right sources?

In Russia journalists get killed time to time (mostly by overzealous provincial lords); in the USA they never say anything worth killing for to begin with. They wouldn't get killed, but they would get sued and/or marginalized, and that's enough to keep them in line. Is it really freedom if everyone's too afraid to exercise it?

Remember that guy on TV who got fired for suggesting that 9/11 highjackers were in fact not cowardly? Russian media, bad as they have it, would laugh at this sort of culture.

P.S.: I speak Russian and get to see some of that Russian media in action, unlike most of you who only hear rumors about it from your ideology syndicate of choice. There are probably other Russian-speakers here who know more about it than I do. I'd like to hear what they have to say.

A big flaw in that one is that you almost can't tell which name belongs to which station, near the center. This could be fixed as easily as making the names same color as the lines. Dunno why they didn't do that.

And sometimes, people beat each other with sticks to resolve a disagreement. There isn't any objectivity in those arguments either. In my mind, this, and what you said, make a case for objectivity in all discourse, not against. I really can't get any clearer than that.

So where do the supposed limitations of objectivity come in? What value can be attained by switching off objectivity in this scenario?

I mean back in hunter-gatherer days, women were impressed by your animal hides or whatnot, and not your luxury car, but those two things are isomorphic. You can find a lot of such ultimately trivial variation, where you only have to adjust your model a tiny bit. Give me an example of an important social phenomenon not explicable through a minor adjustment to common ev-psych principles.