voidstar

What?! Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

what's wrong with suicide? all of us die at some point. i'd rather die at a point of my own choosing. so suicide is the best death option (for me!), and since i'm going to die, it's best if i (eventually) commit suicide. Now there's this problem of committing suicide "too early"...presumably the right cutoff point would be the point when life stops being worth living. which then raises the problem of knowing when that is (i.e. teenagers getting dumped and assuming, erroneously, that life is no longer worth living). thus, having a web app for calculating that point would be REALLY convenient (hint hint!)

my god, you're right. that's why i'm no longer on okcupid. /sigh...

I'd heard that procrastinators were perfectionists, and so all of their tasks loom like enormous projects because they envision all the thousands of tiny details they'd have to get just right, while normal people just have this rough idea of the task that doesn't look so hard. So then the procrastinators put it off because they just don't feel like taking on an enormous project. Which is funny, because in saying this I'm reminded of pg's essay that talked about starting with easy small projects rather than big earthshattering ones, because you'll never actually finish those.

i think it's precisely the opposite. analytic philosophers try to say clear and precise (yet admittedly, often trivial) things while continental philosophers take on grandiose-sounding concepts and discuss them nonsensically (but with FEELING). And so I think pg's arguments don't apply to highly-regarded philosophy done in the past 30-odd years (highly-regarded, that is, by other philosophers). I don't think Lewis was confused about how he used words when he developed functionalism, or modal realism in On the Plurality of Worlds. Nor was Kripke in Naming and Necessity, carefully separating epistemology from metaphysics in his theory of reference. I don't think searle was confused about words in his Chinese Room argument, and I don't think Parfit is confused about words in stating his ethical paradoxes and reductionist account of personal identity in Reasons and Persons. Nearly all of these arguments are terribly controversial, indicating that their conclusions actually matter to people, yet they are considered paradigms of good philosophy, and all were written in the past 30-odd years. Chinese Room was in fact a direct response of sorts to john mccarthy's argument that his thermostat can have beliefs. So the point is that there is good philosophy being done out there, even if it may be too recent for pg to have been exposed to it in college, and may be more cautious and exact (and therefore, far less grandiose) than the old "proofs of god's existence."

ha, this is true. i go to rutgers for 4k/yr after a certain ithaca ivy wanted 43k/yr or whatever it was, so i get to keep a college fund's worth of seed money for whatever i do post-grad. and the "elite college" types i meet in the summers are no better-educated than me (and incidentally, drink a lot more...)

these evolutionary explanations aren't falsifiable and therefore belief in them is as rational as belief in any explanatory heuristic you can dream up, always salvageable by postulating whatever new ad-hoc assumptions can help the theory. besides, if men are hunters, and hunters want meat, and meat is reddish-pink, then men should go for that color too, right?