31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus
Insights on Being Well-Read
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i... 1 
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notes29 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
Modern Propaganda Exhausts Critical Thinking
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. 1 notes
notes03 JUN 2016 by ideonexus
"No Man's Sky" as Humanist Adventure
The true value of No Man’s Sky lies in something both incredibly simple and breathtaking. The point of the game is to discover and share knowledge with the other inhabitants of the universe. It’s almost as if the developers took the Enlightenment-era Encycloédie and turned it into a science fiction video game; a true testament to the best qualities and powers of the Information Age. While the sheer size may overwhelm some or risk boredom for others, players shouldn’t ignore the larger... 1 notes
notes31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Point
Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesso...Folksonomies: perspective dimensions
Folksonomies: perspective dimensions
1 notes
notes21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Faith-Based Empiricism
Before you judge the analogy with theology as being too harsh, conduct the followingexperiment.
Randomly select one of your own publications from a year or two ago
and think about what would be involved in reproducingthe results. How longwould
it take, assumingyou would be able to do it? If you can’t reproduce those results, why
do you believe them? Why should your readers?
Our inability to reproduce results leads to a debilitatingparadox, where we as
reviewers and readers accept highly em...Folksonomies: empiricism reproducibility
Folksonomies: empiricism reproducibility
1 notes
notesSo much important information is left out of journal articles that often the results are not reproducible.
22 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Beauty is More Important than Accuracy
I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation .... It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete ... 1 notes
notesInteresting argument: beauty in an equation is more important than having it completely fit the reality.
12 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
State of Mind in a Marathon Coding Session
The peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during the hours before, and even during the hours afterward, a hacker attained a state of pure concentration. When you programmed a computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousands of bits of information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict—and exploit—the effect of all that movement. When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into th...
1 There is a point where you have the whole program in your head at once, one with it, and you don't want to let it go, so you keep working in a marathon burst of energy.
31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The FIRST Principle for Effective Punishment
Effective punishment FIRST
“F” stands for firm. The punishment must mean something. It has to be firm and aversive to be effective.
“I” stands for immediate. The closer the punishment is delivered at the point of infraction, the more effective it is.
“R” stands for reliable. The punishment must be consistently applied whenever the noxious behavior is displayed. Inconsistently applied rules are confusing and lead to uneven moral development.
“S” stands for safe. Th...
1 Firm Immediate Reliable Safe Tolerant punishment is best for children, when there is not opportunity to praise good behavior.
29 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Computers Illustrate Our Slavery to Memes
nfestations of mind viruses that chain us to information terminals, frantically aiding the replication of information, may well take over if we don't intervene.
Do you think it's a far-fetched scenario of the future that humans could become slaves to a race of computers? Look inside any large office building and see how many people spend eight hours a day following the instructions on their display screen to the point of damaging their vision and injuring their hands from the strain. What ar... 1 notes
notesWe spend all day pushing and replicating memes online, slaving away at our computers.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Books Changed Everything
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could
read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except
for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed
on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over
tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be
distorted and lost.
Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit
us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of
our species; to understand ... 1 notes
notesThey made it possible to interrogate the past, see other view points, and communication across time.
