playdead

Aristotle, well-known for thinking about things for only 10 minutes.

Interesting. Yeah, I grew up in the 90s, so in addition to tamagotchi and pokemon, I became aware at some point about the Japanese mob.

I didn't know all the male-leaning words tbh, but it's not hard to have an educated guess that "neodymium" is probably a chemical element, thermister is probably something in physics related to thermodynamics, that a teraflop is computer-related (at first I thought, terabyte + floppy disk?), etc.

Didn't know azimuth, aileron, or strafe but they're all cool, and I'm glad I learned.

I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.

I only learned about servos a couple years back in a maker-space YouTube channel.

I think you need to read more carefully. For example, he explicitly anticipates and puts aside some questions you ask:

"In this paper, we will not be concerned with postmodernist critiques of the idea of objective truth nor with skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge. I shall assume some broad commonsensical understanding according to which there are truths and we humans sometimes manage to know some of these truths."

> If you multiply two numbers together, shouldn’t the result be greater than each part?

I appreciate the metaphor, but... multiplication is not repeated addition.

What tools did you use to build it?

> don't really make us use math differently

Even is we suppose what you're saying is correct — the goal isn't really to change how we use mathematics, but to understand what math is in a deeper explanatory sense. If that's not a project that interests you, that's totally fine.

Happy to see analytic philosophy trending on HN

> I still think Plato invented Socrates.

No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations.

> If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way?

You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.

I'm unsure if you've read this novel, but the translation "was to remember" actually works well here, and was probably a deliberate choice. The cycles of time are a major theme in the story.

Skip this one. An article written by someone who doesn't understand math, logic, or philosophy, and thinks stamping his foot and saying "general relativity" is the height of explanatory sophistication.

Software people with philosophy backgrounds (there are a lot of us!) will be quick to note that Grice did not intend these to be understood as rules of thumb for regular people. But if it gets ordinary citizens interested in philosophy of language, theories of rationality, or game theoretic ideas about convention (cf. David Lewis), then I don't mind some innocent misappropriation.

As philosophers keep saying, over and over, the trolley "problem" is just a thought experiment in normative ethics about different types of moral judgment — it's not an actual problem demanding solutions or recommended behaviors, and it's not designed to make claims in cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, etc.

The way people actually behave is of course interesting and important, but it's not the issue at stake.

Go Big Green

It's only really a Quine if it has a taste for desert landscapes