Good to Know™
- My personal, opinionated list of ideas, concepts, theories, principles, intellectual skills, etc. that have proven useful, explanatory, interesting, and Good to Know™.
Concepts
- Thought, effective conversations, Good thinking, principles, etc
- Good Thinking
- Intellectual humility, Honesty, authenticity
- contra Bad faith
- contra Quoting out of context or Lying by Omission
- Open-mindedness
- Sources/The Scout Mindset, holding ideas lightly
- Everyone thinks they are a "Free thinker", but I for one know I really am. /s
- Lateral Thinking, Creative thinking
- Independent thought and critical thinking
- Importance and difficulty of truly independent thought and critical thought and the universal human nature to suppress it, Conformity, etc.
- Skepticism
- against Conformity, Sycophancy
- Studies on Conformity and Groupthink
- Contrarianism
- Divergent Thinking
- Metacognition
- Self-reflection, Self-awareness, Know thyself
- The leaps involved in Compatibilism, e.g. about responsiveness
- Non-linear aspects of mental experience and choice such as the Mutual constitution of culture and mind, Reciprocal determinism, and The extended mind.
- Virtue and science of Slow thinking contra the limits and flaws of quick, Intuitive thinking.
- Logic Fundamentals
- Necessity and Sufficiency
- Tautology
- Deductive Logic vs Inductive Logic
- Validity (logic) vs Soundness
- Heuristic
- Inference
- Canonical forms of logic
- Principle of Bivalence vs Fuzzy Logic/Many-valued Logic
- Mu (negative)
- Binary opposition
- 2 sides of the same coin metaphor
- Abductive Reasoning
- Holism
- Limit Bad thinking
- Useful ideas, models, paradigms, etc.
- Scientific Method, specifically its ability to self-correct, adapt, via openness and skepticism and defined philosophy of empiricism, Falsifiability, etc. in a way that is still open to idealism, e.g. not just materialism.
- Microcosm–macrocosm Analogy
- Metaphors, we live by
- Antifragility, Chaos Engineering, 'What does not kill me makes me stronger'
- Process of elimination, Reductio ad absurdum, Binary Search, Reductionism, Neti neti
- Consilience in thought models, theoretical frameworks, paradigms, and conceptual distinctions, principles, strategies, mapping, categories, classification, and abstraction
- Intellectual humility, Honesty, authenticity
- How to have conversations and disagreements, etc.
- Principle of Charity
- Principle of Humanity
- Empathy
- Hanlon's Razor
- Feynman technique
- Be able to say I don't know and to be comfortable in not knowing
- Be able to be wrong and admit it
- Intellectual honesty
- Authenticity
- Logic, consistency
- Good Thinking
- Language
- Language as Meaning as use - understand definitions are determined from context. Limit inertia of language and Linguistic determinism
- Wittgenstein
- Meaning as use contra definition or Prescriptivism
- Theoretical problems as confusion on Meaning, specifically using words outside the context of their intended use.
- Meaning as use contra definition or Prescriptivism
- Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism
- Semantic ambiguity vs Syntactic ambiguity
- Thomas Nagel - What is it like to be a Bat
- Wittgenstein - If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
- George Lakoff - Metaphors We Live By
- Learning, how to learn, how to do focused, concentrated work
- Feynman technique
- self-critical, be able to quiz yourself
- learn via question formulation - a la Stockton's class
- Use variety of sources and perspectives, including very biased sources
- Don't try to memorize many things - technology is shifting even more toward being a system of retrieval of knowledge, and making understanding and other virtues more important
- Deep work (concept)
- Learn by doing
- fail fast
- Teaching and development
- learn as a community
- Kohlberg's theory of development
- Worldview, the power and prefiguring nature of our understanding and sense of My Atlas, Conceptual framework, paradigms.
- Similar to and extended by Nietzsche - in that science makes certain things unbelievable (in a bad way).
- And Wittgenstein's system and Philosophical Therapy as unraveling the way that our questions and issues have put us on the wrong path and need to walk it back.
- The emergent understanding from awareness of intellectual history, changes, and "becoming" of Humans - History of Ideas - understanding as understanding how something came to be/got here and is currently in-motion all the time.
- Thomas Kuhn's Paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Cultural origins in Microcosm–macrocosm Analogy, Ptolemaic cosmos, Flammarion engraving, Great Chain of Being, Firmament
- Transition to Isaac Newtonian physics to Albert Einsteinian physics and then Quantum Mechanics
- The Universe, Astronomy
- Universe is very big - eg scale #to/expand more galaxies in our universe than stars in our galaxy
- Universe is very small #to/expand atoms, quarks, etc.
- Universe isn't that old and won't live that long, and not eternal. Big Crunch, heat death, red shift. Big bang origin of universe. #to/expand
- Chronology of the Universe
- Math, Quantification (science), Physics, and Metaphysics
- Quantification (science) vs Quality (philosophy), McNamara fallacy
- Understand numbers as a supervenience on numeral systems like Roman numeral system, Chinese numerals, etc. and how the concepts of Zero the Positional notation system, and Radixes allowed for the scalability and power of the modern Hindu–Arabic numeral system and Decimal notation.
- Exponentiation & Recursion
- Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, Chaos Theory
- The power of directed, recursive aggregation - thousand monkeys with enough time would write William Shakespeare - technically, with enough time, yes. But with even simple feedback or selection, it happens really fast. #to/expand
- Recursion
- Statistics & Probability
- Law of Averages
- Regression to the Mean
- Bayesian Probability #to/expand
- Initial expectation
- Clarifying and not modifying initial expectation...
- Initial expectation
- Randomness
- Uncertainty
- Gambler's Fallacy
- that thing where if you choose one door, you should choose the other door regardless
- "Lies, Damned lies, and statistics"
- Issues in range compression, intentional or otherwise
- permutation, combination
- Bell curve
- Discrete Mathematics
- Law of large numbers, Law of truly large numbers, Infinity
- Asymptote
- Cartesian point system, fundamental linear algebra
- fundamental geometry
- Metaphysics
- Time (concept)
- perdurance, endurance, sp? #to/expand
- Quantum Mechanics
- non-locality
- relativity
- wave-particle
- superposition
- Properties
- Identity
- PII & PII
- Theseus
- Time (concept)
- Anthropology, Life Science, Evolution, Archaeology, and history of life and humans
- Pre-civilization
- Clovis
- modern humans, genetically, existed for around 200,000 years
- Origin of life. Epochs. Ice ages.
- Humans once, maybe twice were down to only a few hundred humans on earth
- Evolution, pre humans, genetics
- Cultural evolution as in Not by genes alone - how culture transformed human evolution
- Pre-civilization
- Ethics, Values, Value Theory
- Fundamentals of Normative Ethics
- Consequentialism
- Deontology
- Virtue Ethics
- Care ethics
- The critique of justice/rational basis of normative theories by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings
- Metaethics
- Applied Ethics
- Abortion
- Euthanasia, Physician-assisted suicide
- Just war theory
- Death penalty
- Fundamental concepts, virtues, and considered beliefs
- Challenges in establishing morality
- Incommensurate values, Value pluralism, Cosmopolitanism, other cultures, other religions, change in values overtime within cultures, etc.
- Moral luck and its role in motivating the establishing of basic ethical principles contra imperiousness and fickleness of our fates.
- Meritocracy contra circumstances and Moral luck
- Expanding moral circle, Kant's claim of importance of feeling in moral universe
- Moral Psychology
- Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory
- George Lakoff - Political paradigms of strict father vs nurturant mother
- Hegel's Master-slave Dialectic
- Rank ordering of values - Nietzsche
- Iris Murdoch's notion of being understanding and giving others space to be something unjustified and non-rational and not needing to justify it or be understood
- John Hodgman's people like what they like - as that being enough, not needing to justify it.
- The significance and effect of ordinary people doing ordinary things, a la Sources/Web/Readwise Mirror/Books/The Plague
- Contra Great man theory
- Importance of Sentience and Suffering, Discomfort
- Egalitarianism, equity, Egalitarianism
- Fundamentals of Normative Ethics
- Philosophy, Science
- Maxims, razors, etc.
- Is-ought Problem (Naturalistic fallacy), aka Hume's Guillotine.
- Emergence
- Codex/Academia/Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences/Philosophy/Consilience and its role in epistemic aggregation/strengthening/confidence via disparate/independent domains
- Allegory of the Cave
- Euthyphro dilemma
- Stoicism
- Issues in Essentialism
- Subjectivity vs objectivity
- Becoming (philosophy)
- Quine's indispensability argument
- The big failures of 20th century intellectual projects
- systematize natural language
- Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
- Godel's Incompleteness Theorems
- Thomas Kuhn
- Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, Relativism, Moral Nihilism
- Perspectivism, Rashomon, etc. and how it can either motivate toward a nothing matters, is real, etc. or paradoxically via the understanding of the fragility of truth, etc. toward an increased valuation of Truth, science and all their necessary virtues.
- Hoax, Old Wives' Tales, Conspiracy Theory, etc
- Chomsky on 9/11 conspiracy theories
- the exception proves the rule
- Systems Thinking and its limits, a la Nietzschean critique
- Thomas Kuhn's Paradigm shift
- Justified True Belief
- Analytic-synthetic distinction, and a priori and a posteriori
- Transcendental aesthetic and its answer to the Tabula rasa vs Universal grammar debate
- also how I see ontology of numbers and indispensability argument.
- Existence Precedes Essence as radical freedom, freigeist/free spirit, etc. yet we are not a blank slate.
- What is color?
- What is sound? Music? Why are there such a thing as chords that sound consonant vs dissonant
- Age of Enlightenment, Humanism Renaissance Secularism Civil rights values ideals and way of life
- Sweetness and light - Arnold
- Christopher Hitchens
- Science and Empiricism
- Explanatory power
- Intentional stance, design stance, explanatory stance
- Thorngate's Postulate of Commensurate Complexity
- Woozle Effect
- Scientific Method
- Chomsky's video on 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Correlation does not imply causation
- Empiricism entails causation as David Hume > Necessary Connection, causation only via an indispensability argument.
- The idea of objectivity, unbiased, etc. is flawed
- The View from Nowhere and Journalistic objectivity and Noam Chomsky's You can't be neutral?
- Perspectivism, etc.
- Thomas Kuhn
- Explanatory power
- Politics, Civics, & America
- Civic and government fundamentals
- Constitution - US is constitutional republic - literally no higher authority
- Democracy
- Voting System
- Government
- Branches of government
- Bicameral Legislature
- Separation of powers
- State vs federal government bodies, Federalism
- History, People's History, etc.
- Historical fictions, like Columbus, etc.
- Secularism, Separation of church and state, and the importance of these things for the practice of religion in particular. Essentially motivated and created by religious people?
- Ideologies, -isms, & -ocracies
- Economic Inequality
- Tax rates during most economically prosperous times - ie 90% tax rates on ultra rich
- Thomas Piketty, the inherent tendency in capitalism toward wealth concentration via the difference between labor value and capital.
- Share of total productivity has increased at a rate much higher than wage increases
- Robert Reich
- Occupy Wall Street
- The sheer numbers of billionaires
- The myth of the feasibility of a wide-scale, universal Meritocracy
- High-frequency trading, Flashboys
- Corporations write our legislation
- ALEC
- Midwestern Nice
- The modern issue of Globalization, and Multi-national corporations and large, impersonal, Stochastic Processes, etc. that make even national control, let alone local or community control of one's well-being increasingly severed and action as neutered. A cause of both Conservatism, Progressivism, yes, but in particular extremism such as Fascism white nationalism, etc.
- This in combination with the most-pressing issues of the day being Climate Change, Pandemics and global health, Existential risk, Technology, etc. occurring as our social-cultural appetite to advocate for the virtues of broad, collective organization.
- the decline of journalism and the erosion of trust in institutions and authority
- The messenger
- spotlight
- Universal healthcare and the incompatibility of health decisions in markets
- the question of what things should be decided by markets
- Annotation - Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale
- America
- Citizens United
- Us tortures people
- The report movie, etc
- Us operates in violation of the constitution
- Us spies on people - patriot act
- Civil rights reversals
- voting rights act - gutted, multiple times recently
- voter suppression and voter fraud
- Trump is who he appears to be - a childish narcissist.
- There was an attempted coup, it is still going, and Trumpism is now about participation in this coup. We are whistling past the graveyard.
- zeitgeist
- anti-democratic
- crisis of truth
- the cruelty is the point
- Corporatism is the bigger problem, not the government
- Far right populism
- White power, nationalism, Christian nationalism
- nationalism and wars
- Conspiracy theory and Hoaxes
- Mistrust of authority
- Mistrust of media
- Anti elitism, anti intellectualism
- Crisis of conversation
- Partisanship
- Living in a bubble
- Love it or leave it
- racism
- homophobia, LGBTQ, etc.
- sexism
- in-group outgroup tribalism
- Cultism of politics
- Attack on Age of Enlightenment, Humanism Renaissance Secularism Civil rights values ideals and way of life
- Terrorism
- domestic terrorism
- Stochastic terrorism
- American History
- The scale and legit modern genocide of native americans by the US
- Chatel slavery of the sort the US participated in and couldn't stop doing without fighting a civil war over it was fundamentally different than just about all other forms of historical slavery. Utter horror and in the modern world, with eyes wide open.
- slave boats - people in coffin sized boxes
- Colonialism
- Critical Race Theory (CRT)
- Identity politics
- Cancel culture, Political correctness
- Social Justice
- Racism
- Systemic vs individual
- Civic duty, participation, activism, protest, etc.
- The Indispensable Opposition and the value of Free Speech and the 1st amendment.
- Yes, the 1st amendment is about what the government can impinge, but the value of free speech precedes it and requires active championing beyond simply following the 1st amendment. Free speech can be fatally attacked not just by the government. E.g. corporations, technology, erosion of commons, etc.
- John Rawls Veil of ignorance, Elizabeth S. Anderson what is equality?
- What is Feminism
- 1, 2, 3 wave
- Care ethics
- unpaid labor
- second shift
- second sex
- suffrage
- de Beauvoir
- legal obligation to maximize profit at expense of pro social things. Eg Craig Newmark Craigslist eBay case?
- Subsidies of gas, even when not counting externalization. But with externalization gas should be like $20/gallon (some study)
- Civic and government fundamentals
- Law
- Habeus Corpus
- Right of reply
- Innocent until proven guilty
- Economics
- Marginal Utility
- Externality
- Tragedy of the Commons
- Capitalism vs Markets
- Labor
- Money, Currency
- Cryptocurrency and what it's good/bad for
- store of value vs exchange of value (currency/payment system)
- Regulatory capture
- History
- Great man theory flawed vs History from Below
- Psychology
- Simulacrum, Simulacra and Simulation
- The extended mind
- Motivated Reasoning
- Bias
- Personality Psychology
- Narcissism
- Psycopathy
- that study where students went undercover in an insane asylum and couldn't get out
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Fixed vs Growth Mindset
- Cognitive dissonance
- Dunning–Kruger Effect
- Folie a deux
- Puer aeternus
- Sociology
- Community, local, cities, etc.
- That video Cayden sent me
- Technology
- Technology's zeitgeist is cognitive augmentation/enhancement via extended /external cognition within an experienced conceptual framework qualitatively experienced as a simulacrum in which knowledge, intelligence, ability does not inhere solely in an individual or localized aspect of a person, it extends both beyond semantic externalism but also to shifts from knowing what vs how (a la a simulacrum), and further from an individual as a supposed romantic/natural/unaided/pure state into an individual's relied on objects and technology like clothes, paper, books, computers, notes, references, internet, phone etc. - the how to, not memory, etc, and finally from the individual to the social, distributed, collective, systemic, structural, organizational, standardized, interfaced, and ultimately economic, political, and directed intentional teleological, including at least a weak form of determinism, technological determinism, and the intensification of systemic and structural circumstances and an element of momentum, arrow of time, and needing realistic, practical steps that recognize nothing can cause right turns, it will be iterative, cumulative, adjacent possible, etc. But not gradualism - we just underestimate what is possible. #to/expand
- semantic externalism not to social, collective but also the how vs what
- but also collective, distributed
- witt - nothing, something
- empirical nature of cognition resolves not to atomism or essentialism but to the extended relationality of neural networks
- contra essentialism
- contra atomism
- toward relationality, extendedness, networks
- also the fundamental and inescapable role of meaning via perception with Transcendental aesthetic and within some version of metaphysical idealism
- Technology fundamentals
- Electronics and circuits
- Binary numeral system
- Binary-to-text Encoding
- Networking
- Sources/Web/Web & The Internet
- Cloud
- Cryptography and the flaw in making backdoors
- Privacy and Identity, Authentication, & Authorization
- EFF
- Open Source
- CLIs
- Programming
- Portability, owning your data, local, standards, file formats
- Technology's zeitgeist is cognitive augmentation/enhancement via extended /external cognition within an experienced conceptual framework qualitatively experienced as a simulacrum in which knowledge, intelligence, ability does not inhere solely in an individual or localized aspect of a person, it extends both beyond semantic externalism but also to shifts from knowing what vs how (a la a simulacrum), and further from an individual as a supposed romantic/natural/unaided/pure state into an individual's relied on objects and technology like clothes, paper, books, computers, notes, references, internet, phone etc. - the how to, not memory, etc, and finally from the individual to the social, distributed, collective, systemic, structural, organizational, standardized, interfaced, and ultimately economic, political, and directed intentional teleological, including at least a weak form of determinism, technological determinism, and the intensification of systemic and structural circumstances and an element of momentum, arrow of time, and needing realistic, practical steps that recognize nothing can cause right turns, it will be iterative, cumulative, adjacent possible, etc. But not gradualism - we just underestimate what is possible. #to/expand
- Existential risk
- Banality of Evil, my lai massacre, responsibility to disobey direct orders if immoral, Nuremberg defense
- Laughing with Kafka, identity, finding value and exertion and relation to ethics of ambiguity
- Forms of life
- Conflict resolution, Truth and reconciliation
Miscellaneous terms, words, definitions
Sources
- books
- music
- movies
- tv
- Watchman
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Heartbreaking work as my catcher in the rye
Humor
- standup, comedians, jokes
- ability to use humor in life
- Hitchhiker's guide, Catch-22, hearbreaking work of staggering
Inbox
- sense reference
- Type token class
- Use, mention
- Parameter vs essence as ontology, related to empiricism, semantics, and Wittgenstein's beetle etc, nothing works just as good as something
- Non-linearity vs arrow of time - Interstellar, Paraprosdokian and similar larger scale backwards-directed reevaluations, Proust, identity, reflection, Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
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Good to Know™
Concepts
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