The ultimate question is "what is to be done". It's a question that every philosopher must ask him or herself. In answering that question we create reality. Any tradition which does not ask itself this is not philosophy, but one of the lesser sciences.
What's the difference between a priest and Coca Cola?
It seems to me that other than things of necessity, or needs -- namely those things described by Maslow in the proportions described by Maslow, everything else is religious consumption. That is to ask the question of the difference between a priest and Coca Cola. Both promise you happiness and both sell you virtually worthless products for profit. Yet, both neither make you happy. Read on...
TED's exclusiveness
There seems to be a number of different issues:
- Echo chamber, preaching to the choir, preaching to the preacher.
- Political context
- Viral nature
- Inclusiveness vs exclusiveness
- Class warfare
- False legitimacy
- Source of ideas
- Political slant of the ideas
- Propaganda
- Opinion leaders
- Mixing legitimate discourse with illegitimate discourse
Ideas to the contrary
- Doers vs thinkers
- Private organization's right to preach what they want.
- Freedom of speech
- Openness of free information - Because its free it is open.
Search engine semantics
Previous keywords used in the session
What's going on in the world and online
Popularity of the document itself
The chances of a given linked to be clicked in response to presenting it as a result of a search.
Whether the user returns and clicks another link within a short period of time.
The length of the query, the longer the query the more information it contains.
The length of the session, what exactly can we ascertain from the words without the context and with the context? Read on...
How to use invasive, illegitmate power effectively
It seems that the world today is filled with people who like to use invasive power. By this I mean all sort of spying on people that if people knew what the people in power know about them would harshly decry. However, this continues on unchecked. There is little public outcry or outrage. Why is this? I hope to convince you that this is because the power is used randomly as more of a coercive measure than anything else. That the discourse makes it so that when anyone is singled out using such methods, that they are in fact recognized to be evil, wrongdoers. Read on...
Citation as a method of control
It seems to me that a significant amount of effort in education is spent on control. One method of control is the process of citation. If one has an original idea, one can't simply write the idea down and make a case for something that they intuitively feel, but instead must validate that. I claim that this to some extent constitutes control and limits the discourse to what has already been said. Read on...
Gag on evidence of murder
70-year gag on Kelly death evidence
A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported. Read on...
Digital intelligence
Ideas or more properly creativity, in arranging and reinterpreting ideas and creating whole new schemas of reality based on those ideas is an activity of human beings. I seriously doubt computers will ever be able to do that, they can't even reinterpret idea systems that we currently have without tons of programming. Their job is actually getting easier because our lives and what we do has been reduced to simplistic models which all of us follow, and hence in that circumstance the pattern recognizers seem more intelligent than they really are. Read on...
