Yet authority figures set a standard, whether one is able to meet it or not. If they had been sneaky, then I might sneak around sociopathically for the rest of my life, without a twinge of guilt. This could easily mar both my life and others.
Yes. And the parents who sneak out to smoke aren't just teaching their kids to smoke: they're teaching them to be sneaky. It would be better to smoke openly and say, 'Please don't follow my example. I regret having started.'
>I get a sort of "movie in my head" when I'm reading
I think this means you're doing it right! In Polanyian terms, your subsidiary awareness is on the particulars of the typography and the words allowing your focal awareness to be on the fun bit, i.e. on the meaning.
This ability, I think, depends just as much on how interesting and enjoyable the content is as it depends on your reading skill.
For more Michael Polanyi I recommend this superb (audio, non-fictional) lecture:
>I don't read non-fiction like that, though. It just doesn't happen, and I don't know how to make it happen.
This may be because the books are boring. For instance, textbooks. Here the reading is mainly about searching for the relevant material, so the focal awareness is on the text itself. However, Feynman's Hairy Green Ball Method seems applicable:
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two halls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, “False!”
We don't know what Socrates said because it wasn't written down.
He relied on his followers to improve on his ideas and transmit those improved versions, and perhaps they did. However knowledge does get lost (e.g. how to read Cretan Hieroglyphics). It's good to insure against that.
There are advantages to live discussion but it doesn't preclude making occasional records in the form of books. Why not do both?
Contra the article, books do contain knowledge. It's knowledge in the form of 'know that' rather than 'know how to'. Yet if we could somehow obtain science textbooks from the future, we could use those books to recreate advances in knowledge in a much shorter space of time, i.e. we could bridge the gap to know-how. So books do have value beyond entertainment and recording historical facts.
This misses that it might be a rarified form of egotism to privately reject great prizes such as Nobels, knighthoods, and Oscars in the knowledge that this voluntary refusal will probably become public knowledge, sooner or later.
Yes, however, do you think that music should be beautiful? And is beauty easy, or hard, to apprehend? If your answers are 'yes' and 'easy' then I think you'll naturally appreciate simplicity or the emergence of simplicity from a complex background.
Yes. To me it seems that great players find something new and relatively simple in the music and then find a way to communicate it in performance.
Likewise, the best music is simple in its core. Starting with melody. If I can't remember the tune, perhaps it was too complex. Apparently it's hard to compose simple melodies. They're like mathematical theories: much easier to appreciate than to discover.
And there is a darker side to complexity. Many in the audience will entertain fantasies about becoming great players themselves and occupying the place of the soloist now on stage. To them, complex technical feats are glamorous and worthy of slavish emulation.
The reason these scams seem so crude and obvious, as I learnt from Daniel Dennett, is that they're designed that way. They filter out the vast majority of the population. The scammers can then focus on trying to reel in potential victims, in a series of verbal/written exchanges, from the tiny pool that remains.
>Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work.
Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being able to explain why).
An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally imitate other people. Rather, they guess the meaning of other people's behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.
For people to learn to cook poisonous plants safely, a lot of other people must have died from food poisoning. So why did they eat bad stuff? Well, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. And people frequently got very hungry in history. The clever part is where somebody remembers who died or got ill and passes on the information.
>I found it remarkably sensitive toward transgenderism.
Yes, although it does give Reg the last word, who claimed that Loretta was struggling against reality.
Regardless, that scene would I'm sure be regarded as too offensive to be released nowadays. The BBC article either didn't notice or they simply ducked the issue. My original comment, an innocuous statement plus link to a YT clip of the scene, was flagged and removed by HN.
Yes, for instance Life of Brian itself contains a scene which mocks transgenderism.
It seems that we haven't outgrown blasphemy. We merely go from one regime to another regime. And specifying the new blasphemies can itself be blasphemous.
Most infectious bugs can't survive outside the human body for more than a day or two. Bugs prefer non-porous surfaces. Most books have porous pages, which is good, but of course the covers are non-porous.
I think the phrase quality time emerged in the 1970s at which time the Sexual Revolution was well underway and divorce was sky-rocketing. It's really a euphemism for scarce parental time with children (e.g. a father's visitation period).
Agreed. One suspects the concept of quality time came in with the rising incidence of divorce.
Where quality time implies some kind of performance or role, which is stressful, hanging out with one's children is wonderful. I find that the compensations more than make up for the difficulties.
I enjoy the company of people who are totally open and forgiving. I get the profound satisfaction of watching them learn. I re-experience and understand anew certain aspects of my own childhood.
Yes, there's work involved, but children like helping too, and can actually help significantly as they get older.
Yet society seems to have things the wrong way around. The zeitgeist has it that marriage and children are something to be put off until one is ready to 'settle down'. Children are an inconvenience and a financial burden which interfere with socialising and career advancement. For example: