Glen -
Thanks for throwing down here. While I agree with your point made a
while back that we could drive a truck or a train through our likely
differences in opinion about this and that, I appreciate that you seem
to have a similar bandwidth to my own... it doesn't seem to phase you to
sort through the relatively high volume of this list, and more pointedly
*my* high volume.
I believe that some of the discontent being expressed on this list,
perhaps most acutely attributed to Doug, aka TrollBoi (grin), is
roughly predicated on the assumption that there is a whole lot of
*talking* going on and not (necessarily) a whole lot of *doing*
Well, you also have to consider that this is a mailing list. If I still
lived in Santa Fe, I'd meet with y'all on Fridays and I like to think
there'd be more doing from my end. ... or maybe not. But on a mailing
list, what else is there but talk? There can be _links_ to projects,
and with other tools, there can even be collaboration. But it seems to
me that anyone who subscribes to a mailing list shouldn't expect
anything more than talk.
Yes, of course... which is why I brought up CarefulThought(tm) later...
but of course *that* begs the classification issue you so nicely
illuminated.
Expecting something else would be akin to insanity, like expecting your
hammer to get up and dance for you.
I've seen it happen... but I think I was using a sawzall to cut through
the 1x8 it was sitting on at the time.
even (perhaps?) in the form of *careful* thought, which in my book is
a form of *doing*.
That's a consideration. It seems to me that it's the _type_ of talk
that irritates Doug, not that talk is the only thing that exists on a
mailing list. But because Doug almost never participates in the
discussion (other than to ridicule it), it's difficult to know what type
of discussion he would prefer.
<grin> Doug, IMO (as a meat-space friend) prefers to have lots of talk
going on around him so that he can cherry-pick particularly egregious
(or not) things to make fun of, often to good effect. I'm used to
it... just as his cats are used to his game of "cat bowling"... animals
in general but mammals (and birds) in particular seem to be quite adaptable.
Eric's foray into the relationship of
the Higg's mechanism to the cosmological constant seemed well-tuned. It
would be exciting to see Doug (or anyone else) launch into potential
mechanisms for inflation or related to metaphysical hypotheses for what
might go on outside our universe.
Personally, I'd love to see people smarter than me discuss David
Deutsch's multiverse.
Yes, me too...
I share Nick's hope (more a belief) that there is in fact a dialectic
ongoing within these frayed and tangled threads...
Well, FWIW, I learn quite a bit from this list. To me, it's less about
mind-changing and more about fleshing things out in a way not previously
conceived.
referencing forward again, I also appreciate the serendipitous factoids
others offer up, but in my case, it includes entirely new ways of
thinking about something as opposed to simply hanging more hats on the
existing coat tree that seems to be my mind. Alternative structurings of
said complex adaptive coat-tree if you will.
Doug alluded to there being no shortage of *pontification* here, and
while I think I *do* feel that from time to time, here and there, what I
suppose I feel I hear more of is *speculation* which I happen to hold in
high esteem...
I don't feel the need to classify interactions as "pontification" or
"speculation" so much. I do _try_ to classify things, but mostly for
whatever tiny audience I might have. If it were up to me, all
classifications would come with a time/space/context caveat, because
they're always false. As a result, pontification is not pontification.
Agreed. While someone may speak authoritarially and conclusively (in
tone) on some topic which I happen to already know plenty about or
perhaps on the opposite end, have little interest in, I understand that
to others, the same stuff may be excruciatingly illuminating and
interesting.
To invert the focus, if a classification I made remains stable for a
long time or across many contexts, then I begin to worry that I'm stuck
in some hobgoblin hyper-consistency rut. I've either stopped learning
... or perhaps I've become God. And if I were to bet on which is most
likely, I'd take the former. ;-)
It is the nudging me out of hyper-consistency ruts that I value more
than simple additional factoids and even minor parallax offerings
(referring back to Nick's interest in dialectic). I think I share with
you a general preference for, or appreciation of, a "many worlds"
interpretation of sentience. Each one of can/should/and-defacto-does
live in a separate universe (or even multiverse in some cases)
constructed of our own experiences and intrinsic nature. Nick may hold
high some ideal of a convergent unification of those within an
individual and a group and perhaps across all humanity or sentient
beings, while I (and perhaps you) prefer a cross-fertilization and
combinatoric relation between same? We are more of the 6 mutually
contradictory ideas before breakfast camp to frame it in Alice-World terms.
I think the key to happiness is stated well by Nick's outburst:
Just do your thing. Don’t feel judged when other people do a
different thing, don’t feel slighted when other people don’t want to
do your thing, don’ t judge others for doing something you don’t
understand. Just do you damned thing. It’s really quite easy.
Yes, Nick stated that well... thank you Nick!
One side issue, of course, is sheer volume. You can't read/hear/see
everything. So, you have to filter. You can rely on others to filter
for you, or you can filter yourself. For some reason, I'm comfortable
filtering things for myself. I can hear speeches from Obama, Bush, or
Ahmadinejad and decide for myself what to believe and what not to. I
enjoy reading "false flag" nonsense from the nutjobs on the internet.
But when I don't want to read it, it's easy to ignore.
If you haven't developed these ignorance skills, then deluges of
information (high or low signal-to-noise) can be difficult to deal with.
My autistic nephew, in particular, has a very tough time choosing which
information to pay attention to and which to ignore. For such people,
tools like procmail, bayesian spam filters, and peer-reviewed journals
are critical.
I very much appreciate the effective filtering this very list provides.
Despite continuous thread-hijacking/drift, I find that this list gives
me a huge amount of filtering *and* prisming. By prisming, extending
the metaphor, when you or anyone else on the list expresses something
even vaguely different than what I'm familiar with or even prefer, I can
use my (gathered) understanding of where each of you stands to get a
little more parallax (and sometimes chromatic spread). Occasionally
these offerings turn out to offer me something like a rut-jumping
experience, using your metaphor. In fact, it is not filtering as much
as illuminating or reflecting perhaps. Half of what flies through this
list I would never hear of if not for the list, so it isn't just
filtering or prisming, it is gathering/reflecting.
There is a personality type, however, that won't willingly give in to
such constraints. They _want_ to read/hear/see everything, even though
they can't. When/if they miss a piece of information, they feel left
out, anxious, or somehow inadequate. I think it's a type of obsessive
compulsive disorder. One of my previous bosses was like this. He was
so embarrassed when/if you pointed out an article or factoid that he
wasn't aware of, he would either _lie_ and claim he knew about it or use
some defense mechanism (like pretending he was late for something to cut
the conversation short) to avoid the embarrassment he imposed upon
himself. I don't know what to do with these people, except lead by
example and freely, and often, admit my ignorance. [*]
I knew that!
Did you Read it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7VgNQbZdaw
I can't normally watch much Portlandia but this snippet was classic and
so on topic!
Online conversations, in their asynchrony and relative obscurity allow
for a variant where someone says "did you read it?" and the other busts
out their browser, looks it up, skims it and pretends they already knew
all about it.
I've a good friend/colleague in Australia who does this with me
openly... she's a bit younger than I and likes to pretend that she's
lived as long and piebald life as I have... and she openly, during a
(video) Skype session will respond to a "do you know about X?" question
with me by pretending to do something else while she looks it up, skims
it and then pretends she already knew about it. She does this openly
and with an impish grin... and it is very fun and refreshing. Other
times, she just says "no" in a deadpan fashion that connotes "and I
don't care". She matches me by trying to throw me a curveball now and
again (often wonderfully, fantastically contrived) and I go through the
same motions... it is an interesting form of co-learning.
I am not easily bored, but some
of the talk here (probably a near perfect complement to what bores Doug)
bores *me* to distraction.
That's interesting. Nothing here bores me because, as soon as I
recognize that I don't care about some thing, I mark the thread "read"
and move on. (Oh, threaded e-mail readers are also a critical tool.)
Well, to modify that... it *would* bore me if I tried to give it the
same attention I give things that *don't* bore me. I've learned enough
of the regular "voices" on this list to actually be able to
learn/appreciate things (even Marcus' nuances of Haskell and Owen's
nuances of JavaScript, or Bruce's vPython, or HTML5 or WebGL or ...
Doug's ongoing cagematch with Google ). I actually enjoy what some call
Guerin's "Complexity Babble" (not so much here, but elsewhere) because I
know that at the core of there is plenty of insight and deep motivation
even if some of the surface might be questionable.
Sadly these processes are messy. Many mistakes must be made. People
must make silly declarations which they might have to retract or modify
later. Others will have to snark at them to get them to notice.
Unfortunately, snark doesn't work with me. I just view snarkiness as
either laziness or arrogance.
Well, it depends on how well I'm aligned with the snark and/or how
clever it is. As I age, I find myself much more entertained by being
the butt of good jokes. At 8 it confused me, at 14 it infuriated me,
but now it mostly just gives me more parallax on myself as well as the
snarker. I think Rich Murray's response to my (and other's) semi-snark
about Woo Peddling was a great example, I think he may have grinned in
glee at things others would have found barbed!
Alternatively, one of my favorite quotes of all time was a boss of mine
going through her own crisis in life who related one of her aphorisms
(she was working on this, not living it quite yet). "Your opinion of me
is none of my business!"
Also unfortunately, it can take a long
time and a lot of work to bring me to a "teaching moment". That's an
unfortunate consequence of my upbringing. My only solution is the golden
rule. I try to treat others as I'd like others to treat me, which
includes ignoring me when I bore them ... like now, I'm sure.
A good re-statement/reframing of Nick's "outburst" on the topic. I
depend on many here not opening my messages or at least not going past
my first line if they find me tedious or just weird. I'm surprised how
often I get comments/engagement (online or offline) from people who have
actually read as deep (in several senses of the term?) as we are here now.
[*] Of course, it's also useful to be on the lookout for the humility
topos: http://thesecondpass.com/?p=6028
I *think* I get this... in the vein of "The lady doth protest too much!"?
- Steve
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