montefischer

Boethius was a Christian. He wrote a book explaining the Trinity, for example (De Trinitate). The work for which he is most famous today, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not mention Christ by name, which have led some to speculate that he lost his faith later in life. There is an absence of direct evidence for that claim.

This could be a great thesis topic for a Main’s degree in sociology.

Very nice! I’ll check it out.

One feature I would love is the ability to automatically generate the table of contents / “outline” metadata for a pdf. I run across a lot of old book pdfs without that metadata, which makes navigation annoying. Kybook3 has a version of this that doesn’t quite work. Maybe in the age of LLMs, this is now feasible.

Islamic fundamentalism and cult rationalism are both involved in a “total commitment”, “all or nothing” type of thinking. The former is totally committed to a particular literal reading of scripture, the latter, to logical deduction from a set of chosen premises. Both modes of thinking have produced violent outcomes in the past.

Skepticism, in which no premise or truth claim is regarded as above dispute (or, that it is always permissible and even praiseworthy to suspend one’s judgment on a matter), is the better comparison with rationalism-fundamentalism. It is interesting that skepticism today is often associated with agnostic or atheist religious beliefs, but I consider many religious thinkers in history to have been skeptics par excellence when judged by the standard of their own time. E.g. William Ockham (of Ockham’s razor) was a 14C Franciscan friar (and a fascinating figure) who denied papal infallibility. I count Martin Luther as belonging to the history of skepticism as well, for example, as well as much of the humanist movement that returned to the original Greek sources for the Bible, from the Latin Vulgate translation by Jerome.

The history of ideas is fun to read about. I am hardly an expert, but you may be interested by the history of Aristotelian rationalism, which gained prominence in the medieval west largely through the works of Averroes, a 12C Muslim philosopher who heavily favored Aristotle. In 13C, Thomas Aquinus wrote a definitive Catholic systematic theology, rejecting Averroes but embracing Aristotle. To this day, Catholic theology is still essentially Aristotelian.

I have wondered this too. I think there are regulatory constraints.

Do you have links to the text only news sites?

And despite the huge size of 52!, it is possible with basic motor skills to produce a random deck. For those with the background and interest, there is a great book: The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards by Diaconis and Fulman, published 2023.

Those interested can read Mark Conger's thesis to learn about the mathematics of repeated cards: https://websites.umich.edu/~mconger/thesis.pdf

For an example of this, I recall reading a proposal that acts of Congress be strictly limited to be at most (say) 5 pages in length. This would be a natural form of regularization of the legislative power.

What do you think about Ellul's arguments in that book?

If you're interested in things like this, you might like to read the paper of Diaconis, Holmes, and Shashahani on sampling from a manifold. https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6913

A far more practical idea is to internalize the practice of 'metacognition' so you can apply it to the vast corpus of books that already exist.

It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina

What is your favorite alternative medium?

The thrust of this article is its final sentence: "that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas."

Be careful of non-approved thinking!

Also strange is how caring about the future is dastardly 'longtermism', but caring enough about this generation to work on longevity is 'insane'. Really the only acceptable goals are averting climate catastrophe (presumably by stopping oil and gas consumption) and helping the global poor. It would be interesting to know whether the author thinks the global poor should be prevented from using fossil fuels to better their immediate economic situation at the expense of our long-term climate.

I'm not sure we would be any more advanced. Anyone to whom binary conversion is relevant has sufficient intelligence to not need the convenience of base 8. For practical needs, convenient representation of repeated doubling and halving are of limited use. Much more relevant to the daily needs of actual people for most of history was the ability to reckon measurements using common objects such as the human body, hence the bewildering diversity of different measurement systems across different peoples, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_weights_and_measures. The base of the number system was a non-factor.

I use Dvorak, although I regret the choice to learn it instead of Qwerty. If you don’t remap, and I don’t, then you need to use two hands instead of one to navigate. Not a dealbreaker for me though, since by coincidence the places hjkl ended up on Dvorak that makes navigating with them tolerable.

It would mean, however, that the state should not be explicitly backing the 'religion' in e.g. public universities, even though that's not the immediate issue at hand in the article.

After you root out these reprehensible people, what do you suggest doing with them?

In fact, Postman went to great lengths to detail the ways in which "print culture" (including books, newspapers, and even public oration) with its great commitment to complex argumentation shaped society in ways consonant with the sustaining of a democratic republic, while warning that the modern replacement of this older culture was perhaps not so well suited to maintaining a self-governing people.

(edit) Social media / the internet more generally enables 2-way communication in a way that was not possible in either print nor TV culture. Conceptually it lowers barriers to entry to near-zero for communicating one's ideas & learning from others. Earlier forms depended much more heavily on gatekeepers. Is a more nominally democratic form of media culture than this even possible?

My favorite passage from that essay:

From all this it may be concluded that thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand: one sees the road the man has taken, but in order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.

From Schopenhauer's essay, "On reading and books":

No literary quality can be attained by reading writers who possess it: be it, for example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naïveté, and the like. But if we are already gifted with these qualities—that is to say, if we possess them potentia—we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses they are to be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination, nay, may have courage, to use them; we can judge by examples the effect of their application and so learn the correct use of them; and it is only after we have accomplished all this that we actu possess these qualities. This is the only way in which reading can form writing, since it teaches us the use to which we can put our own natural gifts; and in order to do this it must be taken for granted that these qualities are in us. Without them we learn nothing from reading but cold, dead mannerisms, and we become mere imitators.

Gutenberg link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...

Also biblio.com, which is not.

Excellent video.

Bill Heinemann, one of the three guys who created the original Oregon Trail game, taught me the basics of the umbral calculus when I was in middle school for the purpose of math competitions. Fitting polynomials to data via successive applications of the forward difference operator, etc. I remember being fascinated and applying difference operators to all kinds of number sequences to see what other rules I could figure out. Ended up majoring in math and now I'm doing my PhD. Strange to think how different my life would be if Bill had never introduced me to the good old forward difference...

It took over a half-century (<=1801 to >=1858) to get France onto the metric system, Wikipedia estimates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system. The systems it replaced were forgotten, but what cannot be doubted is that those "vernacular" systems were hyper-adapted to how ordinary people used measurements in daily life. It was the demands of state taxation and international trade, not the needs of common people, that promoted the creation and adoption of the metric system by legislative fiat.

True. I don't argue for the English imperial system just as I do not argue for the Napoleonic imperial system (metric). I only point to the rich cultural patchwork that has been lost to various administrative imperial projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Historical

Yes, but we could have decided as a civilization to count in base 12 just as we decided to measure things in the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal, so that decimal (dozenal) shifts still work conveniently.

How often does one need to convert miles into yards?

Of course I know about the SI base units, which effectively remove the ability of ordinary people to tinker with, use, and reason about measurements by placing the system in the hands of ultra-experts. Just consider what a diversity of miles used to be enjoyed by the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Historical.

It is impossible to return to the pre-standardization days, and I do not argue that we should. Many people enjoy savoring the differences that other cultures provide in terms of architecture, cuisine, language, etc. and decry the destruction of cultural differences wrought by things like tourism, globalism, capitalism, whatever. I mourn the loss of local measurements just like I do the loss of vernacular languages, architectural styles, styles of dress, foods, all that.

I argue fervently against the metricizers, for they chose the wrong base for their rationalization of everything. They tried to eliminate "arbitrary" measurements and ratios, based on vernacular day-to-day objects (hands, feet, paces, sacks of grain, etc.) but were blind to the ultimate and ironic arbitrariness of the number 10. They rewrote all of society's "irrational" measurements to conform to a number system based on the number of fingers on two human hands.

Should've picked 12, or even 60 as the numerical base.

Casual boxing rings in forests at night with suit-and-tied refs seem to belong more to the old, weird America of Desolation Row than the worn out Walmartland of today.