I've noticed a pattern, that wealth is privacy. If you take for example how people live. 1. Homeless, outdoors. No privacy at all. 2. Shared apartment 3. Private apartment with shared outdoor space 3. Private house 4. Gated community 5. Gated private estate Or how people travel. 1. Walking in the street in full public view 2. On a bus or train or aeroplane 3. In a car 4. In a private convoy surrounded my staff, or in a private jet. The poorest are always in public, in everything they do. The wealthiest are never seen, except when they choose to appear. There is a continuum in between of increasing wealth meaning increasing privacy. *** But there are other possible perspectives. Wealth is the freedom to waste. With wealth you can buy many things and leave them idle or dump them. You can travel and live and eat in wasteful ways. You can hire people to work for you, doing things you don't really need. Things which are expensive are (to a large extent) so because their production is wasteful. The rich can utilise more expensive things. So the problem with too much global consumption - too much emissions, electricity usage, mining, etc - is really a problem of too many rich people. There is no point restricting or banning these things - people will just find other ways to be wasteful - maybe even worse ones. The only way to solve these crisis is reduce wealth, by reducing inequality. *** Wealth is power over people. Wealth is required to compel people to do things, to directly pay them to do your bidding, or to access the fruits of hours of labour through purchases. There is also bribery, access to lawyers etc, which allow more wealthy people to exert more power over their peers and society. *** Are there other ways to understand wealth?

Socrates sought out those with reputations for wisdom. Who were the wise men he interviewed?

Socrates sought out those with reputations for wisdom. Who were the wise men he interviewed?


This is actually not stupid. I also laughed when I first heard about it (5 minutes ago). We focus a lot on managing time. But there are other finite resources we have to manage within each day. * mental energy * attention * physical energy * concentration * frustration * creativity * patience * many more You can only spend so much of each one before becoming exhausted. Spoon theory deals with one of these things - physical energy. And the article is well explained. So it's a good introduction to this kind of thinking. *** You can go much further in this thinking than the article. Think about management. You normally assign tasks to whoever has the free time. But people have different amounts of patience to spend each day. So if one of your people has a lot of patience, you should assign him the task, because he can spend a lot before running out. But if you have two tasks requiring a lot of patience, that guy might run out. So you assign the second task to someone else. It's basically very intuitive. But it's helpful to think about it the same way we think about time. To quantify it.

About the internets

Some thoughts for food :)

This thread caught my attention regarding the philosophy of science. I've read through the comments and discussions, but I want to move the arena to lemmy's philosophy community. What's your opinion on the Scientific Method? Do your perceive its usefulness in the practical world? And are the flaws in Science the result of this method or the individual causations of the scientists themselves?

Mind on fire ;)

 # The [Trolley Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) is a cyclical (iterative) experiment, showing how a change in the available information can affect the choices made. To increase the emotional factor in the decision-making process, it is dramatized as a scene where a speeding car runs along a track, and the subject of the experiment (the "player") has to decide whether to divert it to one track or the other.  One of the options is technically easier because it only requires doing nothing. Without player interference, things will (khem, khem) take their course anyway. # The Trolley Problem trap is built of three parts: 1. The experiment has an arbitrary number of cycles. In each consecutive cycle, the experimenter (equivalent to the game master "GM" / director) changes the scope and content of the information available to the player, trying to lead them from a situation of simple and obvious choice to a situation in which the choice becomes less and less obvious. 2. The player is also under increasing tension between the emotional aspect (*Track A: the last panda on the planet; Track B: a psychopathic rapist, the future father of the first feminist president of the Earth Nations Federation*) and the implicit expectation that they will solve the dilemma using rational thinking only. In reality, the only goal of the MG is to drive the player to a nervous breakdown due to an unbearable cognitive dilemma. 3. A subtle element of the trap is the time travel aspect. Each cycle (iteration) begins (in the story world – "in-game") at the same point – after a full reset. However, "out-game" the player is aware of previous cycles and the choices made in them. The human mind tends to become attached to its own decisions. The MG tries to push the player to change his or her decisions for less and less obvious reasons, which adds to the discomfort, as the mind wants to see itself as an "integrated" being, not an unstable one. # How to get out of the trap (and use the experience to strengthen self-determination)? This requires developing several important elements of awareness, which boil down to a readiness to make (and fix) mistakes. **1. Acknowledging the information reset.** When I receive new significant information regarding a previously made decision, it is as appropriate as possible to review that decision and possibly change it. I don't get attached to my previous choices, and it doesn't offend me if I back out of them. **2. Accepting the limitations of rational thinking.** Regardless of the completeness of the decision information, I am always ready for the fact that some things cannot be (especially under time pressure) compared rationally. I am ready to make some decisions (after exhausting other sensible ways) randomly or intuitively, and accept the consequences. **3. Accepting that my knowledge and agency are incomplete – always and everywhere.** I will never have full knowledge of the circumstances of my choices. I will never be fully capable – physically, mentally or emotionally – of making and executing every decision imaginable. ------------------------ **To sum up, the trap of the trolley dilemma is to impose unrealistic and contradictory expectations on the player. And getting out of it requires acknowledging one's own limitations and making more direct contact with reality (bypassing even the most magnificent intermediaries).** The plus side is that it doesn't require rearranging a vase full of glowing coals with your bare hands.... 

Consider two contradictory statements—"All lemons are yellow" and "Not all lemons are yellow"—and suppose that both are true. If that is the case, anything can be proven, e.g., the assertion that "unicorns exist", by using the following argument: We know that "Not all lemons are yellow", as it has been assumed to be true. We know that "All lemons are yellow", as it has been assumed to be true. Therefore, the two-part statement "All lemons are yellow or unicorns exist" must also be true, since the first part "All lemons are yellow" of the two-part statement is true (as this has been assumed). However, since we know that "Not all lemons are yellow" (as this has been assumed), the first part is false, and hence the second part must be true to ensure the two-part statement to be true, i.e., unicorns exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

‘The acceptance or rejection of abstract linguistic forms, just as the acceptance or rejection of any other linguistic forms in any branch of science, will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments, the ratio of the results achieved to the amount and complexity of the efforts required.’ (Carnap)

The Simpson's paradox is a paradox in probability and statistics in which a trend appears in several groups of data but disappears or even reverses when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics and is particularly problematic when frequency data is unduly given causal interpretations. Example: There exist treatment A and treatment B for kidney stones. Treatment A is more effective when used on small stones, and is also more effective when used on large stones, yet treatment B is more effective when considering all stones at the same time. Different levels of overview: [simple.wikipedia.org](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) [plato.stanford.edu](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/)

Popper’s way of demarcating science from pseudo-science is to say that conjectures which cannot be criticised and tested empirically are useless, and not science. He was deeply influenced in this view by two twentieth century intellectual developments, and the contrast between them. After centuries of believing that Newtonian gravitational theory truly described the astronomical universe, scientists accepted the superiority of Einstein’s new theory of gravitation. A theory once thought to be securely founded was overthrown because it could not account for small discrepancies in the motion of the planet Mercury. Popper also saw how in stark contrast psychoanalytic theories seemed impervious to unwelcome evidence, and so he concluded that psychoanalysis was not a science.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/83602 > In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

The enormous impact of Thomas Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution. For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes. Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists. Acceptance or rejection of some paradigm is, he argued, a social process as much as a logical process.