gwenhwyfaer

15 ms·

1.
by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Someone else has come along and downmodded every single post I made in this thread. Result? Instant karma drop of 10%. By one person . Because I said something they didn't like. pg, please delete or disable my account forthwith. I am not p
2.
by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Considering that one of his "results" is a philosophical proof of the existence of God, I'd say he might have gone up a bit of a garden path... > Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they ho
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> Please provide a reference. See above. The books in which I could have located a reference are long gone; but it's in one of her short essays (if pushed, I'd suggest that it might be found in For the New Intellectual... but wouldn't w
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit? I didn't assert that, I implied that in the course of asserting something else. > You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work. Try "all her novels and at least 4 books of essays". In fact, I seem to have read more Rand than many Objectivists. It was a while ago, though, and the books have lo
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Two wrongs don't make a right. I'd say it's more important to stop teaching pseudoscience in science classes than to use it as a justification for teaching pseudophilosophy in philosophy classes. And in general, novels should be taught in l
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
No. Dishonesty is dismissing any argument with which one disagrees as "dishonest" without actually making a substantive counterargument. If you don't understand how people can make the claim, fine - but please do grasp that all this demon
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper? Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read
9.
by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Plus it makes you sound like qwe1234. We don't do that here, either.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
If Rand's fans accepted that she was worthless as a philosopher, but half a century ahead of the self-help curve, they'd be a lot less annoying.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Considering that the people on this site are more or less exactly the kind of people with whom Rand surrounded herself, and anyone who fancies themselves at all creative or exceptional is likely to identify with the Roark or Galt characte
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
No, it's for the same reason that intelligent design isn't taught in biology classes, or that the timecube theory isn't taught in physics classes, or that homeopathy isn't taught in med school. Rand's output was pseudophilosophy.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
How is the Acumen Fund funded? How was it initially funded? Charit y may not work, but there's plenty of evidence that charit ies do; they exist as organisations to convert money into exactly the kind of progress that you argue is necessa
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
As long as it took to demonstrate supporting evidence - more precisely, to verify a prediction made by the Copernican model. Have at it. (ObFrTed: Down with this sort of thing.)
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> I believe that ID gets unfairly maligned. Yeah, those nasty mean judges.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Perhaps, then, you should be applying to churches for funding? They have interests in common with you - in both "figuring out what God is up to" and the "wanting something for nothing". Come to think of it, those ideas might themselves be d
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> "One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they're praised so often that it's what they want to live as--brilliant--not as someone who ever makes mistakes," she said. Exactly my experience. I've
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
I was always in the library, because I had no interest in what I was being taught, and (I didn't realise it then, but) I couldn't bear being in a roomful of people for lectures. I wish I'd done something like an Open University (is there a
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
"Reference ODF implementation" seems like a fair niche to occupy going forward too, especially when considered in the light of the traits you mention.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
It's the beginning of a pattern.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
You're absolutely right, in some aspects. Some things will always be better done locally; it's ridiculous to contemplate writing a 3d game without access to a 3d API, for example. And it's silly to have a ton of cheap processing power sat u
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> the really intensive javascript apps just use way too much memory in Firefox, especially when you have 12 hour Firefox sessions I suspect that huge improvements in the state of Javascript interpreters will really start to change the e
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Oh fuck off. Arrrrr.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Er, no, Oliver Sacks wrote the article. The article is about Clive Wearing.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
I'd contend that the vast majority of the world pretends to be genuinely religious, and is genuinely superstitious.
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Because "asocial networks" tend to be kinda small?
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
> my married friends complain that they feel like hermits I'm a hermit, and I never feel married. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. :)
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Not everyone. Just the people in a position to do something about it. (We need new people in those positions.)
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
Wait until you write the second webapp, and see which bits of the first one you really do reuse without modification?
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by gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
I don't think there's a tech-specific downturn on the way. I think the lessons have been learned from last time, and the arrival of widely available always-on connectivity (some of it at halfway-tolerable speeds) has made the web as valuabl

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