folksinger

Thank you for such a charitable interpretation. This is basically what I was trying to get across.

Depression is a son of a bitch that I have also known at times and it really is as hard and as easy as just doing anything at all.

What your life is missing is meaning. Meaning is action. If a word means anything at all it is because it is in reference to some kind of actual experience.

Blogs, books, and media of all kind are basically meaningless. Vanity of vanities and all that jazz.

You need to experience life. You need to find meaning through action. You need to become a poet by becoming the poem.

Help your neighbor with his hobbies. Cook dinner for your family. Sing a song for a friend. Do something, anything, for someone else.

Realize the inaction and the meaningless nature of sitting in one place and searching for answers on screen or in print.

If you must read, read all text as a poem, or at least read poetry itself!

The darkness that you see is just a fiction. How could it be anything else? The magic spells are just words on a page. Belief is what makes them seem real.

Go outside. Go for a walk. There is no darkness. It is boring and peaceful and that should put your mind to rest.

Bouncers are fooled by people wearing paper masks of the people depicted on a photo ID?

When bouncers let people enter a bar with a photo ID that does not match the person in question they are not failing to identify a human. They are failing to give enough of a shit to carefully examine the picture in question.

Do you think you could fool a human intelligence with some paper printouts taped to your face?

Once you become aware of how many people on HN are part of that LessWrong AI immortality cult it becomes pretty obvious why they are so defensive.

Trust? This word depends on context. Do you trust your spouse? Do your trust your waiter? Do you trust the news? Do you trust that the sun will come up?

I will grant that both Bitcoin and dollars depend on trust. But both are grounded as well. Bitcoin to physical computing devices and dollars to real estate.

That is, Bitcoin is as real as all of the SHA-256 calculations per second across the network and dollars are as real as the mortgages per square mile across the nation.

This is exactly the kind of comment that confirms my hypothesis of the anti-philosophical spectrum.

At least we can both agree that we are talking about how we interpret and react to hypothetical utterances on the internet.

Think of a triangle. At one point is "philosopher", at another "asshole", and the third "idiot".

Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "idiot" to be "innocent love". Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "asshole" to be "pure knowledge".

The total idiot has all the love and none of the knowledge. The total asshole has all of the knowledge and none of the love. The total philosopher has all the love and all of the knowledge.

Anti-philosophers fall somewhere along the "asshole-idiot" spectrum. Stock brokers, tech bloggers, newscasters, Hollywood actors. You get the drift.

Those tradeoffs are as chilling as a nationalized postal service.

The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that you've read online.

Ask yourself: where did you get the idea that creating new public institutions would have "chilling consequences"? Did you personally experience this in reality or did you read about it somewhere?

What are the chilling experiences that you've had with public roads, the postal service, or the hall of records that holds the deed to the private property you live on? Do these negative experiences align with the "chilling consequences" that you imagine with a public social media?

We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc.

And then we take an active role in their management.

Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button.

Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.

This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.

The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!

Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true.

There are two volumes of Songwriters on Songwriting and I guess I could introduce you to all my songwriting buddies if you're so inclined.

Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art needs an audience.

Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it.

So who do you want to make art for? Who do you want making art for you? Random strangers peicing together art from fragments of digital audio they stumble across while surfing on an endless stream of information?

The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.

Perhaps an analogy to songwriting will make things more clear: how well received are the works of someone who writes rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass songs?

It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.

A particular medium is not (necessarily) to blame. Even the proliferation of what can be perceived as low quality examples of a medium isn't purely to blame. A large part of it is in how you interpret it.

Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Or, “The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines their value.”

- Marshall McLuhan

Yes, and before recent innovations in prescription drugs, all that people had was heroin.

That's what fentanyl and oxys are replacing, and it's a huge improvement.

I'd say that books and museums are problematic in very similar ways. Neither of those institutions are focused on reality. Both are contrary to human dialog and an unmediated existence.

When I'm sitting on the train I'm studying the people and things that I see around me, trying to look for the poetry in everyday life. I'm a songwriter but the approach works just as well with a travel set of watercolors and a sketchbook for the more visually inclined.

I have never seen good art being made by people who spend their time confusing Instagram for reality. If you have I would question wether you have the ability to recognize good from bad art. You must learn how to read before you can appreciate a good novel and the same applies to understanding other forms of art.

Good art will have a profound effect. It will literally give your life meaning and purpose. It will change the way you think about your society and your role in it.

Bad art is consumed like a fast-food hamburger. It might be superficially entertaining in the moment but will leave you feeling worse off after a few hours.

Good art doesn't need to appeal to the art critic or the marketplace but it must leave a deep satisfaction in the hearts and minds of those that take the time to appreciate it.

You mean the same Andrew Gelman who did not predict the election of Trump and took the time to reflect on the issues with polling methodology?

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/08/19-things-learned-2016-el...

I'll have to write another poem about pithy rebuttals that cherry-pick a counter-narrative!

Now, what rhymes with anecdotal...

Let's take a recent election as an example:

A Bayesian pollster began with a certain set of prior probabilities. That the college educated were more likely to vote in previous elections, for example, informed the sample population, because it wouldn't make much sense to ask the opinions of those who would stay home.

Thus, based on priors that were updated with new empirical data, a new set of probabilities emerged, that gave a certain candidate a high probability of victory.

Members of the voting public, aware of this high probability, decided that this meant with certainty that this candidate would win and therefore decided to stay home on election day.

In reality the Bayesian models were incorrect as amongst other factors, a much higher number of non-college educated individuals decided to vote and to vote for the other candidate.

As it is with Bayesian intelligence, shared as much by pollsters as machine learning algorithms:

  Real-time heads up display
  Keeps the danger away
  But only for the things that already ruined your day.

"The more information the better".

This dogmatic and unqualified belief must be revised by the technology industry.

The actual solution is to go for a walk in the woods with some friends or family members.

The actual solution is to invite your neighbor over for dinner.

The actual solution is to volunteer at a retirement home.

The actual solution is to join an amateur sports league.

The actual solution is to take an in-person group class in a subject that you find interesting.

The Facebook logo is everywhere. On the side of delivery vans, pizza boxes, business cards and paperback books. Public spaces are littered with people staring down at their phones. Our politics has been usurped by the machinations of social media.

Pretending like an individual can simply logout of Facebook and not have to deal with the social consequences is what is ridiculous!

I'll go full Godwin: There were probably less swastikas per square inch at the height of Nazi Germany than there are Facebook logos today. The perceived rise of authoritarianism of some political Other is nothing more than the actual authoritarianism of Facebook.

Ah, the age old argument for personal responsibility...

"Oh, is the river polluted? Then don't go in the damn river! Use your head! Don't expect someone, or god forbid the government, to force someone to clean it up just so you can go fishing in the river!"

It doesn't matter if you or I choose not to use Facebook. The rest of the planet is glued to their smartphones and phubbing us every time we leave the house and that affects us regardless of our choices.

Eventually Jesus will come back to Earth and that is where the real magic is going to happen.

You claim to have the facts on the human brain?

My God, the level of hubris expressed by members of the cult of AI has reached a fever-pitch.

Stored procedures and memory?

Newton, in the age of clocks, managed to present the universe in the image of a clock. Is it any wonder that computer programmers present the universe in the image of the computer?

Kant's notion of synthetic a priori knowledge, that is, the innate abilities for geometry in the human mind, the preprogrammed understanding of space and time, seem somewhat related.

The mystery remains for humanity itself: How can we have synthetic truths, like E=mc^2, without direct experience? We may have experimental evidence that implies the formula is correct, but nothing in nature will directly confirm the simple and elegant expression of such a mathematical formula.

Speaking of uncritical readers, you clearly didn't read the same article as I did.

How is it bad advice to avoid gorging the mind and body on garbage, no matter the technology at one's disposal?

Reading an awful novel to avoid the people or duties in your life is clearly as bad as using Twitter for the same reason.

Your argument is basically: "Don't make me think about the ethics of my actions, regardless of the calendar year."

Thank you for the thoughtful response!

Empiricism as applied to theories of gravity is one thing. Empiricism through statistical inference is entirely different.

I can actually reproduce the expected results of the theories of gravity by measurements related to projectiles and celestial bodies. In this way I can directly experience their truths.

However, I cannot reproduce the results of the majority of psychologic, economic, and sociologic experiments for a number of reasons, and for the sake of brevity I'll just refer any readers to a couple of Wikipedia articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misunderstandings_of_p-values

Beyond these issues with methodology are the dissemination to and interpretation by the general public who will not have access to the studies themselves and will always and only be presented with summaries unless they happen to know someone with access to a digital or analog university library. This makes discussions about methodology moot as most people will not be able to examine the nature of the experiment.

Considering the general public's access to academic knowledge is restricted while their access to commercially produced knowledge is promoted and subsidized by advertising, we should be able to see the epistemic crisis in our contemporary age of information.