Maverick Philosopher

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It's About Time

Typepad has finally secured its hypertext transfer protocol. My URL now sports an 's': https.  That's reassuring to me and to you, dear reader. Now they need to work on their on-board back-up utility to expedite the back up of huge blogs like mine.

Henry A. Kissinger on the Threat of Artificial Intelligence

Yes, that Henry A. Kissinger.  Not very good, but I don't have time to explain why.

Texting Their Lives Away?

I am currently reading, among other things, Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Invisibility, Little, Brown & Co., 2017. A treatise on cyber-security, it strikes me as slightly alarmist, but Steve Wozniak recommends it.  I don't have to tell you who he is. The following, however, caught my eye and pricked my philosopher's skepticism:

A recent study found that 87 percent of teenagers text daily, compared to the 61 percent who say they use Facebook, the next most popular choice. Girls send, on average, about 3,952 text messages per month, and boys send closer to 2,815 text messages per month, according to the study. (pp. 72-73)

Could this be right? If you divide 31 into 3,952 you get 127.48.  So is the average girl sending that many text messages per day?  I don't believe it.  

Mitnick in a foonote sends us to this Pew Research page where we read something rather more plausible:

The number of text messages sent or received by cell phone owning teens ages 13 to 17 (directly through phone or on apps on the phone) on a typical day is 30.⁵ The number of messages exchanged for girls is higher, typically sending and receiving 40 messages a day. And for the oldest girls (15 to 17), this rises to a median of 50 messages exchanged daily.

And notice that the Pew figure is for messages sent and received, while Mitnick speaks only about messages sent.

So how much credibility does Mitnick have? This little spot check of mine suggests that he slapped his book together rather quickly.  But there is plenty to be learned from it.

We all need to slow down, unplug, and look at things.

One of my aphorisms gives good advice:

How to Look at Things

Look at them as if for the first time -- and the last.

 

 

 

 

Of Hyperlinks and Hyperbole

Mark Zuckerberg ". . . has destroyed the most powerful bridges that perhaps ever existed in the human history, the hyperlinks." Hyperbole to me, but you decide.

I Used to be a Human Being

Andrew Sullivan recounts the perils of life in the information superhighway's fast lane.

But our man certainly is verbose.  One would have thought that all that smartphone use and all that manic tweeting and updating would have induced a bit of pithiness into his writing.

I love the Internet and use it everyday except when I'm on retreat.   But I have never sent a text message in my life; I do not have a Twitter account; my Facebook page languishes; I do not own a smartphone; my TracPhone account costs me a paltry $99 per year and I have thousands of unused minutes; I have a laptop and an ipad for backup but rarely use them;  in the wild I use map and compass, never having bothered to buy a GPS device; I am never out and about with something stuck into my ear.

I know people who begin their day by checking text messages.  You do what you want, but I say that's no way to live.

More Sage Advice in How Not to Begin the Day.

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The Big Unplug Starts Today

Any Advice re: Firefox Browser Crashes?

Mainly I blog, but today I bleg.

I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day.  Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version.  I take it that others have this crash problem.  Any suggestions?

Quirky Spam Filter Warning

A commenter  asked me to check if a comment of his had been sent to the spam corral there to languish in cyber-obscurity for all eternity or until the demise of this site, whichever comes first.  Sure enough, there it was cheek-by-jowl with other good comments some of them from commenters whose other comments got through.  So I sent them to their rightful places.

I'll have to check the spam file more often.  I apologize for not doing so.  If you submit a good comment and it doesn't appear, you can always shoot me an e-mail about it.

NRO: One Crappy Website

Not because of content, but because of presentation.  The content is fine and in some cases excellent.  But if I am reading a piece by Victor Davis Hanson or Kevin D. Williamson  I am immediately put off and pissed off by a piece of freaking advertising right in the main body of the text.  Not on the right sidebar, where it belongs, but smack in the text.  And then there are hyperlinks, right in the main body of the text, to the articles of other writers.  That's an outrage and ought to be protested by any writer who takes his work seriously.  If I were Hanson I would write a nasty letter to the editor and say something like, "You want to publish my work? Then show me some respect.  Get those advertisements and hyperlinks out of my text."

Relevant hyperlinks can be placed at the bottom of the main text.

And of course I am not objecting to advertising.  Just don't assault me with noises and moving images and other distracting clutter.  Isn't NRO supposed to be a conservative publication?

NRO is not unique in its offensiveness; indeed there are sites that are worse. 

Now that my blood is up, I'm heading for the weight room.

Amazon Pricing and a Book Bleg

I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Maria Reicher, ed., States of Affairs (Ontos Verlag, 2009).  I didn't find it in the ASU catalog and so I headed over to Amazon.com where I found a used copy for the entirely reasonable price of $9,999.99 plus $3.99 shipping and handling.  I kid you not.  You might think they'd throw in free S & H on orders over $5,000.00.

Maybe it is like this.  The whole world is Amazon's oyster, and in that wide world there are quite a few ontology freaks, your humble correspondent one of them, and probably a couple crazy enough to fork over $10 K for this collection of essays.  So why not ask a ridiculous price?  You just might get it. 

Does anyone in Ontology Land have a copy of this collection that he or she is willing to part with?

I will put it to good use. I have been invited to contribute an essay to a volume commemorating the late David M. Armstrong.  My essay is tentatively entitled "Facts: Realism, Anti-Realism, Semi-Realism." So I need to be en rapport with all the latest literature.

Update (9/3).  My explanation three paragraphs supra  is mistaken.  See Mark B.'s comment for a much better one.

Related articles

Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change: Can Relational Ontology Do Better?

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák's Argument Against Them

Fused Participles and Ontology

Constituent Ontology Versus Relational Ontology and an Argument Against the Latter

E. J. Lowe on the Distinction Between Constituent and Relational Ontology

Beware 'Illegal Use of Software' E-Mail Scam

I just deleted a suspicious looking e-mail that claimed that I had to appear in court in Costa Mesa re: illegal use of software.  I of course did not open the zip file that would have invited a trojan horse or some other piece of malware into my motherboard.  One dead giveaway was that while Mesa is not far from here, Costa Mesa is in California.  I am a native Californian. (Which fact implies, by the way, that I am a native American!)

It is hard to fool a philosopher. We are trained skeptics.  It is especially hard to fool a philosopher who knows his Schopenhauer.  Homo homini lupus, et cetera.

Never click on any link thoughtlessly.  To be on the safe side, delete suspicious looking e-mail from the subject line.  Don't even open them.

Another rule of mine is:  Never allow your body or soul to be polluted.  So if I get an e-mail with a nasty subject line, I delete it straightaway.  If the subject line is OK but the first line is hostile or nasty, same thing.  Go ahead, punk.  Make my day.

More info here.

Companion post:  Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

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Black Top Mesa, Western Superstitions, 21 April 2013

I Feel the Earth Move Under my Feet

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Big Sur, the Movie

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday

Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.  Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco.

So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good.  15 May saw a surge of 2298.  And a few days ago I passed the 2.5 million pageviews mark.  Presently total page views for this third  version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008, stand at 2,503,919. 

That averages to 1,235.28 pageviews per day.  Total posts including this one: 5098.  Total comments: 7018.

I thank you for your patronage. 

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Two Million Pageviews

Typepad Downtime

The Cyberattack on Typepad Continues

Future Shock is Upon Us: Reefer Hacked

Holy Crapola!

Computer Problems Continue

I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting, but no fix yet. But adversity is good, up to a point. I have been forced to learn how to use this iPad Air. And I have learned more than I wanted to know about device drivers. Blogging from the iPad, however, is a royal PITA.

Addendum (1/16).  Solved the problem myself yesterday with the help of a man down the street and in the process saved myself a lot of money.  Good old American self-reliance can come in handy.    Learned  a lot by doing it myself, but I won't bore you with the details except to say that part of the trick is to think about the problem as carefully and systematically as possible, trying all the obvious solutions first.  Turned out to be a hardware problem internal to the computer.  But the fix was as easy as inserting a new network adapter which only costed a few dollars.

Computer Problems

Trouble with my desk top machine forces me to learn how to blog from this, my first tablet, an iPad Air. I hope to be back in the saddle some time tomorrow.

On Linked-In Invitations

Due to the various Linked-In scams, my policy has been to ignore all invitations.  I received one that appeared to be from a man I know, but when I contacted him, he said he hadn't sent it.  The ways of the scammers are as multifarious as they are devious, so to save time I delete first and ask questions later.

What may appear to be rudeness is really just caution.  It is in the nature of the consevative to be cautious, as it is in the nature of the leftist to be reckless and foolish and to make a mess of things.  Example: Obamacare.

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Why I Rarely Allow Comments

LinkedIn Invitation ~ Diane Waters

Who Built the Internet? Obama's Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" -- really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about -- you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

Duck Duck Go

A search engine that claims not to track your searches.

Does My Front Page Take Too Long to Load?

A reader complains that my front page takes too long to load, on one of his machines, as long as five minutes.  That must be one Jurassic machine running some superannuated browser.  I am wondering if others are experiencing similar difficulties.  A while back I made some additions, including a Facebook button, and I am wondering if these add-ons are slowing things down.  The Facebook button, though, is a nifty utility: when conditions are right, the thing 'goes viral'  and I get an avalanche of page views.

I am open for comments regarding technical aspects of this site.  If, on the other hand, you have a beef about the content of these pages, then I invite you to fill out the following:

Khan Academy

60 Minutes last night did a segment on the Khan Academy, an online source of short tutorials in mathematics, science, and other subjects.  A wonderful resource for homeschoolers and anyone interested in filling in the gaps in his education.  I viewed a couple of algebra and a couple of probability lectures last night and found them to be of high quality.  Recommended by Bill Gates.

Facebook 'Like' Button Added

Mike Valle recommended that I add a Facebook 'Like' button to the footers of my posts.  Done.  I also added Google + and Pinterest buttons.  Pinterest, I take it, is the newest kid on the social media block.

Should You Trust Wikipedia?

Ed of Beyond Necessity asked me my opinion of the following passage from the Wikipedia article, Destiny.

In daily language destiny and fate are synonymous, but with regards to 20th century philosophy the words gained inherently different meanings.

For Arthur Schopenhauer destiny was just a manifestation of the Will to Live. Will to Live is for him the main aspect of the living. The animal cannot be aware of the Will, but men can at least see life through its perspective, though it is the primary and basic desire. But this fact is a pure irrationality and then, for Schopenhauer, human desire is equally futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so is all human action. Therefore, the Will to Live can be at the same time living fate and choice of overrunning the fate same, by means of the Art, of the Morality and of the Ascesis.

For Nietzsche destiny keeps the form of Amor fati (Love of Fate) through the important element of Nietzsche's philosophy, the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), the basis of human behavior, influenced by the Will to Live of Schopenhauer. But this concept may have even other senses, although he, in various places, saw the will to power as a strong element for adaptation or survival in a better way.^[3] In its later forms Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power. Nietzsche eventually took this concept further still, and transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power as mankind’s destiny to face with amor fati.

The expression Amor fati is used repeatedly by Nietzsche as acceptation-choice of the fate, but in such way it becomes even another thing, precisely a “choice” destiny.

Ed tells me that the above strikes him as "gibberish."  Well, if not pure gibberish, then very, very  bad.  First of all, the writing is awkward and inept and in places incoherent. 

In the first sentence the author mentions 20th century philosophy and then immediately goes on to speak of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both 19th century thinkers.  Could the author be so clueless as not to know when these gentlemen lived and wrote?

"Will to Live is the main aspect of the living."  Sentences like his are part of why I rejoice in no longer being a professor.  First of all, Will cannot be described as an aspect of anything: 'aspect'  suggests a view, an appearance, a representation (Vorstellung), a phenomenon.  Schopenhauer's Will, however, plays in his system the role that the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)  plays in Kant's.  Will is noumenal, not phenomenal, and so cannot be coherently described as an aspect. One ought to have gathered this just from the title of Schopenhauer's magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  Second, Will is what everything is at bottom, not just living things.

I won't continue through the passage.  It is bad throughout.  What I hated about teaching was having to wade through garbage like this.  How does one explain to an incompetent writer what competent writing is?  It is like trying to explain to a nerd why his pocket protector is a sartorial outrage or why pulling your pants up too high is 'uncool' or why socks with sandals don't make it.  Or how do you explain to a socially lame person why she is socially lame?  What do you do? Give her rules to follow?  But such rules come too late.

I do not take as harsh a view of Wikipedia as Ed does.  There is much of value in its pages, and plenty of the material is arcana that cannot be found elsewhere.  But one cannot really trust anything one finds there since there is no way of knowing who wrote what and what his credentials are.

Let Caveat lector! be your watch-phrase, then, when you make use of this online resource.

Addendum:  Mark Anderson recommends The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

I saw an advertisement for this voice-recognition software.  I was intrigued and was thinking of asking Mike V., a relatively young whippersnapper who is en rapport with the latest gadgetry.  (When he visits my house he makes fun of my Jurassic electronics.)  But then I wondered how useful such a speech recognition application could be to someone who writes about arcane topics and uses high-falutin words.  Would the spoken 'animadversion' display as 'animal diversion'?  Would 'transcendental deduction of the categories' appears as 'transcontinental deportation of catnip'?  Would 'inverted qualia objection' show as 'involuted quails of Omaha'?

This morning I was pleased to hear from our old friend Vlastimil Vohanka who is also wondering about the utility to philosophers of DNS.  He conveys a remark by Baylor philosopher Jon Kvanvig on the latter's Facebook page:

"newest writing venture: I'm now composing using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is amazingly accurate, beginning by trolling through everything on my hard drive to find appropriate vocabulary. So it recognizes 'Chisholm', 'Fregean', 'Chisholmian', as well as all the standard vocabulary in epistemology. And writing is so much faster: 5000 words in about 2 hours."

This is amazing. It implies that, were I to speak my neologism 'paleologism,' it would recognize and reproduce it and not spit out something like 'pal of loggers.' 

 

Vlastimil wanted my opinion of the DNS software, but I haven't used it so cannot comment.  If any reader has used it and wants to comment the ComBox is open.  Comments are moderated and won't appear until I have approved them.  Any that are off-topic will be summarily nixed.

Beware of this E-Mail: 'ACH Payment Canceled'

I received one of these e-mails this morning.  Of course, I did not click on the link.  It's a malware scam and is explained here.

Being a conservative, I am a firm believer in 'blaming the victim' (within limits of course!)  If you allow yourself to be victimized, then you share some of the responsibility for the crime.  So I say you have a moral responsibility to not allow yourself to become a victim, to the extent that this is possible.  You have a moral responsibility to yourself and to others. 

Facebook and Privacy

I don't have a Facebook page and I don't plan to get one, or anything similar.  Some of the reasons are provide by Facebook user Lydia McGrew in her Privacy is not a Setting.

See also Down with Facebook! and With Friends Like These.

 

How I'd Hack Your Password

You should know this already, but just in case you don't. 

Google Chrome

I started using it yesterday.  It's faster but the display is not as pretty.  Must speed be purchased in the coin of a substandard display?

Black Backgrounds

Anyone whose website has a black background should be shot. Perhaps I should qualify my complaint: Anyone whose website is both content-rich and worth reading should be shot (figuratively speaking) if his background is black and/or there is anything in the reader's visual field that moves on its own. Content is king. Avoid clutter and newbie add-on crap. If you must advertise, do so unobtrusively.  Why drive readers away?

Powerblogs Finally Pulls the Plug; TypePad Rules!

It happened around 5 PM local time, yesterday, January 3rd.  It was supposed to happen on the last day of November.  One final bit of incompetence from the Powerblogs team: it took them over a month to shut down their server.   But I used the time to capture more old posts the easy way.  Yes, of course, I have backed up the entire site, comments and all.  (Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly gave me unsolicited advice on how to do this.) I have also backed up the hundreds of partially completed draft posts.  Trouble is, it is a royal pain in the culo to transfer the backed-up material to the archive site.  I have done a little, as you can see here.  But it is an awful chore working with a monstrously large blob of unstructured text, cutting it at the joints.  It's work not fit for man nor beast. My life of creative leisure under the guiding star of otium liberale has spoiled me for mechanical and secretarial tasks.  Being a vox clamantis in deserto doesn't help either.

PhilPapers

I have begun using PhilPapers.  "PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers."  It is proving to be quite useful.  I see that they have scrounged up a few of my papers all the way back to 1976.  Ah, the wonders of the Web!

If only the proliferation of research tools, the multiplication of lines of inquiry, the ever-increasing specialization and technicality were sufficient to put philosophy on what Kant called den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft, "the secure path of science."

 

TypePad ComBox Quirk

I sometimes have trouble getting the TypePad ComBox to accept my comments.  Others have had this problem.  I get the error message: "Sorry, this data cannot be accepted.'  By fiddling around, I have discovered that doing one or more of the following will trigger the system to accept data. (1) Make a minor alteration in the text. (2) Resubmit your name and e-mail address. (3) Copy your comment, open the blog in a new window and input the data via the new window.  It seems that problems arise if you leave the ComBox open too long in a given window or take too long composing your comment.

What I have yet to figure out is how to make full HTML functionality available in the ComBox.

This Site Will Not Harm Your Computer!

Using the Google search engine this morning, I noticed that every search I did brought up sites flagged with the 'This site may harm your computer' warning.  I even Googled 'Google' and got the same result!  Could Google be flagging every site brought up by its engine?  That would be such an obvious piece of fear-mongering and traffic-reducing stupidity that I hesitate to impute it to them.  Any thoughts from the computer cognoscenti?

Despite my catchy title, it is your responsibility take precautions whenever you connect with anything in any way.  I am responsible for the content of this site, including in some measure the content of the comments, which is why I delete stupid and otherwise offensive comments and block those who send them.  But I take no responsibility for what goes on at the server end.

UPDATE: 9:30 AM.  Alexander Pruss informs me that the problem has been fixed.

UPDATE: 1:30 PM. Google explains the origin of the error.