Yes. And the parents who sneak out to smoke aren't just teaching their kids to smoke: they're teaching them to be sneaky. It would be better to smoke openly and say, 'Please don't follow my example. I regret having started.'
Admitting to have faults as well, is very important, but especially hard for many, as they think their authority will suffer.
Humans are not perfect. Also not parents. Children can handle that.
Yet authority figures set a standard, whether one is able to meet it or not. If they had been sneaky, then I might sneak around sociopathically for the rest of my life, without a twinge of guilt. This could easily mar both my life and others.
>I get a sort of "movie in my head" when I'm reading
I think this means you're doing it right! In Polanyian terms, your subsidiary awareness is on the particulars of the typography and the words allowing your focal awareness to be on the fun bit, i.e. on the meaning.
This ability, I think, depends just as much on how interesting and enjoyable the content is as it depends on your reading skill.
For more Michael Polanyi I recommend this superb (audio, non-fictional) lecture:
>I don't read non-fiction like that, though. It just doesn't happen, and I don't know how to make it happen.
This may be because the books are boring. For instance, textbooks. Here the reading is mainly about searching for the relevant material, so the focal awareness is on the text itself. However, Feynman's Hairy Green Ball Method seems applicable:
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two halls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, “False!”
We don't know what Socrates said because it wasn't written down.
He relied on his followers to improve on his ideas and transmit those improved versions, and perhaps they did. However knowledge does get lost (e.g. how to read Cretan Hieroglyphics). It's good to insure against that.
There are advantages to live discussion but it doesn't preclude making occasional records in the form of books. Why not do both?
Contra the article, books do contain knowledge. It's knowledge in the form of 'know that' rather than 'know how to'. Yet if we could somehow obtain science textbooks from the future, we could use those books to recreate advances in knowledge in a much shorter space of time, i.e. we could bridge the gap to know-how. So books do have value beyond entertainment and recording historical facts.
This misses that it might be a rarified form of egotism to privately reject great prizes such as Nobels, knighthoods, and Oscars in the knowledge that this voluntary refusal will probably become public knowledge, sooner or later.
Yes. To me it seems that great players find something new and relatively simple in the music and then find a way to communicate it in performance.
Likewise, the best music is simple in its core. Starting with melody. If I can't remember the tune, perhaps it was too complex. Apparently it's hard to compose simple melodies. They're like mathematical theories: much easier to appreciate than to discover.
And there is a darker side to complexity. Many in the audience will entertain fantasies about becoming great players themselves and occupying the place of the soloist now on stage. To them, complex technical feats are glamorous and worthy of slavish emulation.
To some extent, I think that 'simple' depends on your own listening history. Jazz that sounds like noise to one listener might sound logical to the next once the second guy has internalized all of the cliches that are built into the music. If tension-release mechanisms simply result in tension, you gotta problem.
I've largely retooled my thinking on a lot of these things. I can see more genius in a pop tune that is highly addictive than in something with complex changes going 100 miles an hour. Rather than wondering why people prefered (being an old guy) The Eagles to Joe Henderson, I've made an effort to appreciate popular music more.
Dunno much about classical music, and you can argue about whether it's anything but a museum piece (and interesting more for live sound in an era of perfectly good recordings), but I've always been surprised how jazz has largely avoided taking on useful rock cliches in building arrangements. I would think that instrumental music would be more popular as a result.
A lot of music appreciation involves an arc of progression. In Jazz, for example, complex solos sound like random wankery to the person beginning their journey.
But after you acquire a grounding in the basic forms like blues and rhythm changes, then suddenly, more complex music stops sounding random. It makes sense when played with the simpler music as a backdrop.
Then after you’ve listened to that for a while, even more complex music suddenly makes sense. And so it goes for a while.
Then you listen to a simple piece again, but you hear something in the simple piece that you literally didn’t notice at first. The complex music has trained you to notice a certain note or phrasing, and you realize that what you heard wasn’t simple, it too was complex, but it was complex in a subtle way.
Music is not absolute. It is a conversation between performer and audience that changes both.
I dislike many of those statements, because optimality is neither simple nor complex. And that's why I totally agree that it is difficult for a tune to appear simple, but recognizable.
Corrolar: software should be just as complex as the problem that it is trying to solve, and if the problem is difficult, the code will be difficult. Finding an optimal code might be more difficult than the problem that is supposed to be solve.
Yes, however, do you think that music should be beautiful? And is beauty easy, or hard, to apprehend? If your answers are 'yes' and 'easy' then I think you'll naturally appreciate simplicity or the emergence of simplicity from a complex background.
The reason these scams seem so crude and obvious, as I learnt from Daniel Dennett, is that they're designed that way. They filter out the vast majority of the population. The scammers can then focus on trying to reel in potential victims, in a series of verbal/written exchanges, from the tiny pool that remains.
I've read this for years, and I'm still not sure I buy it. It smells to me like the same sort of thing as when pundits say Some High Ranking Executive in Govt(tm) does something nonsensical it's because of some cleverness or cunning that we just can't see, when my suspicion is that he is just nonsensical.
But it isn't nonsensical: filtering your client base into qualified leads is sales 101.
You wouldn't advertise tax law services to 100% of the population. Nor would you want to high touch sales on 100% of the population for a sex scam.
I'm sure some amount of it is explained by incompetence, poor english skills, etc. But if that was a real detriment to sex scamming, it would have been worked out of the market.
Interestingly enough if a large amount of people replied to fishing emails they would become unprofitable as most of those people would not be tricked into sending them money. If anyone felt like a charity project a chatbot that contacted spam senders could put a lot of these scam operations out of business...
Holy crap that could be a public charity. You donate $10 to help keep a service running that honeypots the scammers. Like an automated / machine-learning version of kitboga, the guy on twitch who scams people and thousands of people watch him do it.
For people to learn to cook poisonous plants safely, a lot of other people must have died from food poisoning. So why did they eat bad stuff? Well, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. And people frequently got very hungry in history. The clever part is where somebody remembers who died or got ill and passes on the information.
Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work. It's easier if the person gets sick and doesn't die, and then they themselves can tell the story.
>Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work.
Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being able to explain why).
An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally imitate other people. Rather, they guess the meaning of other people's behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.
