If every topic of discussion is subjective then communication is impossible.
Communication is not impossible. Ergo, it is not the case that every topic of discussion is subjective.
Er, no, you've just restated the paradox. This is sort of like answering the koan, "what is the sound of one hand clapping" by clapping the fingers of one hand against the palm. It's an answer, but it's an answer that asserts that no meaningful question has been asked. Which is perfectly valid, but not true.
The purely objective world of which you speak is a world which is inherently unperceivable. The only world we can actually perceive is a subjective world. We theorize the existance of this subjective world based on the fact that we can communicate about it, yet our communications about it are themselves subjective, and often show disagreement.
The basic element of proof that something is objectively true is that it can be confirmed by independent experimentation based on a writeup of the experiment that showed it to be true in the first place - i.e., it's that the thing is subjectively true for more than one observer.
I'm sorry that you find this boring - I have to admit that I find it endlessly fascinating. I don't think realizing that my understanding of the world is completely subjective renders the world meaningless noise - indeed, I think the opposite is true - without the ability to subjectively experience the world, all it is is meaningless noise - we would all agree about the world, and there would be nothing to talk about, and no possibility of any kind of meaning.
If you make a statement about locally compact abelian topological groups, you had better damned well have a proof to back it up. And a proof *is* confirmation.. thats the whole point.
And yet, the entire foundation of the system in which you prove the mathematical statement is itself axiomatic - i.e., taken as a postulate, not something that can be proven. Even number theory, which purports to reinvent mathematics from first principles (sorry, that's a gross oversimplification by a complete outsider, but I think you know what I mean) is ultimately based on axioms which cannot be proven.
A paradox is something with no answer. It's interesting to think about because of the understanding that thinking about it brings, not because you expect to get an answer.
What you are doing in this reply is thinking about the paradox, in a completely reasonable way. The rest of your argument is just semantics - interestingly, a lovely illustration of the very paradox I was describing.:')
This article is really quite hilarious, although it's long. If you stick with it to the conclusion you will get a good laugh. By which I do not mean that the article lacks anything but the quality of producing a good laugh - it's interesting in its own right as well, if a bit turgid.
That's why I like mathematics. Theorem, (optionally, lemmas), proof. End of story. The only way you can disagree is if you throw out the entire concept of logic or the axioms upon which it is based -- and if you do that, we'll usually throw *you* out.:)
Right, and this is more intellectually honest than literary deconstructionism why?:')
Logic itself is merely an axiom (or collection of axioms). And yet without it, you can't reason at all. The reason we keep it is that it seems to work, not that it's provably correct.
the primary thing the author was pointing out is the postmodern logic trap: when everything is subjective, there can be no objective, logical measure for correctness or quality -- which is unique in all academia, and distinctly foreign to engineers.
Truly this is not even a critique as much as a giant warning sign that conventional logic isn't helpful in this territory. He may be implying a value judgement on this aspect, but if the reader isn't feeling defensive, there's no reason to consider it as vicious, superior, or confrontational.
It's a legitimate warning, but in the real world every experience is subjective. So there is in fact no objective determination of right and wrong for the bulk of what we do. In hard science, you can refute a theory through experimental results, but you can never confirm a theory other than by saying that it matches all known facts and has yet to be refuted. In this sense, you can say that hard science is objective.
However, most of what is interesting in the world is subjective. Is this a nice GUI? Subjective. Is this art good? Subjective. Is this food yummy? Subjective. Is this food good for me? Most likely subjective, unless it contains things that are poisonous to all humans, or contains no nutrients. I thrive on a vegetarian diet, and my wife is allergic to tofu (well, soy). Ultimately, food will kill you.
So while we can poke fun at academics who live in a subjective world, with some justification, there really isn't a solution to the problem. The bulk of what matters in the world really is subjective. It's fun and invigorating to work in the part of the world that seems not to be subjective (e.g., engineering), but thinking that things that are subjective aren't is actually a major trap into which we can fall. E.g., management theories that are supposed to always work. Programming techniques that are supposed to always work. Civil Liberties paradigms that are definitely correct. More and bloodier wars have been fought, etc.:'}
One of the keys to living a happy life is learning to differentiate between things that are subjective and things that are objective, and not treat things that are subjective as if they are objective. And, by the way, logic is an extremely important tool in this domain. It's just that you have to apply the logic - it's not objective. Not objective doesn't mean not logical.
The real paradox of postmodern deconstructionism (really, of all discourse - the Indian pandits talk about this, as did the Buddha) is that at the same time that it presents the world as inherently subjective, the very act of deconstruction implies that the product of the deconstruction is objectively valid - otherwise, why bother? Yet if every topic of discussion is subjective, this implies that communication is impossible, and clearly it's not. It's a very interesting paradox to try to understand.
I guess I'm not expressing myself well. Sorry about that. I belong to a Dharma group, and a lot of us are heavy meditators, and a lot of us have sleep schedule issues, and I'm also a geek, and am very familiar with geek sleep schedule issues, both from personal experience and that of friends.
A lot of sleep problems are physiological. E.g., sleep apnea and narcolepsy. A lot are mental. There's a stigma attached to things that are mental - they're "all in the head," or "a psychological problem." In the geek community, I think we would rather ascribe any sleep problem we have to a physiological problem. In the Dharma world, we have thousands of years of experience in these problems to draw on, and we know that mental sleep problems are just as serious as physiological. And we know ways to deal with them.
My advice was based on this combined experience. I hear people telling me all the time about sleep issues that they have that are obviously mental in origin, or sound like they're probably scheduling issues, but they frequently insist that they're physiological because that's okay, and mental issues aren't.
But if you know that the problem is a bad mental habit, and you attack it knowledgably, you can beat it over time. And if it's mental and you try to address it on a physiological level, you won't get a lot of traction, although what you do may make a difference, and can be useful in the short term.
The difference is that in the Dharma group, problems in the mind are just things to debug, with no stigma attached, because Dharma is all about debugging the mind.
You are right that I did express myself unequivocally in a situation where my answer wasn't really unequivocal. This is a communication style that most geeks understand - you say what you think is the problem, and you expect the person listening to you to say "no, that's not it because of this" if they think you're wrong, or to try your hypothesis if they don't think you're wrong.
This style works less well with non-geeks, who may think that you are claiming that what you say is inarguably true. Our discussion of this tubed because I was reading your reaction to what I'd said as if I'd literally said "I think your problem is X" when in fact I did say "your problem is X, definitely not Y."
So your criticism was not inaccurate, although I think you're being far too literal. But it's worth considering that the style of communication that I used doesn't work well for all readers, and clearly didn't work for you, so I should probably avoid using this style in the future if possible.
Right. I didn't tell them they didn't have the disorder. I suggested some things to consider before assuming they had a disorder. Why are we still talking about this?
Er, so your point is what, that I'm an insensitive clod who assumed the most likely scenario and responded on that basis rather than erring on the side of extreme sensitivity and assuming not only that the poster has a rare disorder, but that he would be offended by my assuming, based on the lack of him saying anything at all to suggest that he had been diagnosed with such a disorder, that in fact he did not have any such disorder?
It looks like the only person I offended is you. Get over it.
I'm not a professional, I'm an amateur. The data was all recorded on analog media - that's why I had to re-digitize it. I didn't make the decision to digitize it to RA format in the first place. Otherwise, your comments are incisive and to the point....:'}
He said in the post that his clock runs more than 24hrs! You disputed that, and you were wrong!
No, I was neither wrong nor right. I was hypothesizing based on my own personal experience and that of people I know. It is much more common to *think* your clock is running longer than 24 hours than it is that it actually *is* running longer than that. Usually when we *think* this is what's happening, what's actually happening is that we are not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep then leads to wrapping around, as our body tries to compensate by sleeping later. This leads to a perception of having a >24 hour clock.
I am not saying that there is nobody who has a >24 hour clock. What I am saying is that it isn't the first thing I'd assume when someone tells me they keep sleeping later and later.
I manage audio production for a Dharma group in Arizona that produces a lot of spoken audio. We adopted RA early on, because of the free sound editor software (this wasn't my decision). So we had a lot of audio in that format. I needed to get the audio into MP3 format so that it would play on platforms that weren't supported by Real. There was a company that sold a converter. Real sued them and forced them to stop selling it. So I had to redigitize all of that audio.
Redigitizing was probably the right thing to do anyway, because converting between different lossy compression formats is hell on audio quality, but the fact that this happened really soured me on Real.
So, here we are in 2004. What's Real's position on people selling software that converts from RealMedia formats to other formats? Are you still going to sue if someone does something like that?
I'm sorry to see anybody take the degree of bashing you folks are taking in this forum, and I applaud your fortitude in reading it anyway. I know you have to make a buck somehow, but I think there's a reason why you're getting so much flak. I don't know if you can simultaneously execute your business model and genuinely make nice with the Open Source community. Formal answers to questions like this (i.e., an open source patent licensing program) might help us to understand whether or not you can.
No, we're not talking about sleep disorders! We're talking about someone who claims to be a heavy sleeper. My theory is that he's not getting enough sleep. That seems like a good place to start in debugging the problem. Possibly the end result will be that he turns out to have a sleep disorder, but there are things to try first.
The reason I keep arguing with you is that you keep making categorical statements like "most teenagers this" and "getting to bed earlier that", without qualifying them by saying in what cases they are applicable.
Getting to bed earlier *does* help if your problem is simply that you're not going to bed early enough to get enough sleep by the time you have to get up the next morning. It doesn't help if you have a sleep disorder and you're not going to get to sleep anyway. It also doesn't help if you've got a caffeine buzz when you go to sleep, or if you just did a major breath-oriented physical workout - e.g., a yoga class.
However, it is still the first thing to try if you find yourself comatose when the alarm goes off. If it doesn't work, you should definitely try something else. The key to solving any problem like this is figuring out what works *for you*, because the same things don't work for everybody.
If you have a sleep disorder, then knowing what it is is helpful. However, if you just aren't getting enough sleep, getting more sleep helps. And if you have to get up at a certain time, then going to bed earlier helps. Getting a louder alarm clock when you don't even know what's wrong isn't the right thing to do.
I'm very skeptical about the idea that the average teenager lives on a 26-hour sleep cycle, as you've claimed. I don't remember that being the case for me or any of my friends when I was a teenager. It just doesn't make sense - it's an extraordinary claim. So it sounds more like an excuse for oversleeping after staying up too late than it sounds like an actual syndrome.
It's smaller. That's all. If you're docking it a lot anyway, you won't care as much about the disk space as about the smallness. Different strokes for different folks.
Yup, it's sure handy when you have a syndrome that you can blame for your problems. That way you don't have to solve them.
I will admit that my advice isn't as good as some of the people who've responded who actually *have* sleep disorders, but the bottom line is that if you are having trouble waking up every morning, there's something wrong - it's not just a natural thing that you should accept, and the solution isn't an alarm clock that will damage your hearing. It's to address the problem in your sleep cycle.
If you are having real trouble waking up, it probably really does mean that you are not getting enough sleep, and if you have to be up at a certain time, you need to arrange to go to sleep early enough that you do in fact get enough sleep. Trust me, your body does not have a >24hour natural sleep cycle.
One thing that can help is to sleep in a location where the rising sun will wake you up - that is, don't close the curtains, and don't sleep in the darkest room in the house.
With respect to alarms that are painful but not injurious, you have it backwards. If the sound is loud enough to be painful, it _is_ injurious. Even sounds that are not painful can be injurious, depending on how long they last.
Indeed in Tibetan verse it seems that the authors frequently go out of their way to do repeats. For example, the famous statement from the Abhidharmakosha: le le jikten natsok kye. In this case, the first le is action. The second le is "comes from". Both words are spelled the same way, but have two different meanings. This sort of thing happens quite frequently in Tibetan scripture.
(BTW, that's: "The multitude of worlds come from actions.")
You're in samsara. The Matrix has you. Things go wrong. You have to fix them.
I've found personally that I spend a lot less time screwing around with broken things now that I'm running MacOS X, but YMMV - for example, my father has a dual-cpu G4, and he's getting frequent UI freezes right now (possibly system crashes - we don't know yet, because he hasn't done the latest diagnostic I asked him to do yet).
This represents a nasty trend, actually - as soon as your own geek foo is good enough that you run out of your own problems to fix, people start to notice that you have supreme geek foo, and then you have to fix *their* problems. So there is no hope. Give it up. Get used to fixing computers. It is your karma.:')
They claim that they do, but I tried one (a two-month demo cert), and immediately ran into users that couldn't use the cert. I have a lot of users with really old computers. Sigh.
...which cost me >$100, in order to have some password security on the bulletin board I run. phpbb would mail the password out in the clear, and didn't allow you to log in over SSL. It wasn't a big deal to hack it, but I was surprised that it wasn't an option. It may be that more people would use decent security if the software they ran supported it.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, no, you've just restated the paradox. This is sort of like answering the koan, "what is the sound of one hand clapping" by clapping the fingers of one hand against the palm. It's an answer, but it's an answer that asserts that no meaningful question has been asked. Which is perfectly valid, but not true.
The purely objective world of which you speak is a world which is inherently unperceivable. The only world we can actually perceive is a subjective world. We theorize the existance of this subjective world based on the fact that we can communicate about it, yet our communications about it are themselves subjective, and often show disagreement.
The basic element of proof that something is objectively true is that it can be confirmed by independent experimentation based on a writeup of the experiment that showed it to be true in the first place - i.e., it's that the thing is subjectively true for more than one observer.
I'm sorry that you find this boring - I have to admit that I find it endlessly fascinating. I don't think realizing that my understanding of the world is completely subjective renders the world meaningless noise - indeed, I think the opposite is true - without the ability to subjectively experience the world, all it is is meaningless noise - we would all agree about the world, and there would be nothing to talk about, and no possibility of any kind of meaning.
A paradox is something with no answer. It's interesting to think about because of the understanding that thinking about it brings, not because you expect to get an answer.
:')
What you are doing in this reply is thinking about the paradox, in a completely reasonable way. The rest of your argument is just semantics - interestingly, a lovely illustration of the very paradox I was describing.
This article is really quite hilarious, although it's long. If you stick with it to the conclusion you will get a good laugh. By which I do not mean that the article lacks anything but the quality of producing a good laugh - it's interesting in its own right as well, if a bit turgid.
Right, and this is more intellectually honest than literary deconstructionism why?
Logic itself is merely an axiom (or collection of axioms). And yet without it, you can't reason at all. The reason we keep it is that it seems to work, not that it's provably correct.
It's a legitimate warning, but in the real world every experience is subjective. So there is in fact no objective determination of right and wrong for the bulk of what we do. In hard science, you can refute a theory through experimental results, but you can never confirm a theory other than by saying that it matches all known facts and has yet to be refuted. In this sense, you can say that hard science is objective.
However, most of what is interesting in the world is subjective. Is this a nice GUI? Subjective. Is this art good? Subjective. Is this food yummy? Subjective. Is this food good for me? Most likely subjective, unless it contains things that are poisonous to all humans, or contains no nutrients. I thrive on a vegetarian diet, and my wife is allergic to tofu (well, soy). Ultimately, food will kill you.
So while we can poke fun at academics who live in a subjective world, with some justification, there really isn't a solution to the problem. The bulk of what matters in the world really is subjective. It's fun and invigorating to work in the part of the world that seems not to be subjective (e.g., engineering), but thinking that things that are subjective aren't is actually a major trap into which we can fall. E.g., management theories that are supposed to always work. Programming techniques that are supposed to always work. Civil Liberties paradigms that are definitely correct. More and bloodier wars have been fought, etc.
One of the keys to living a happy life is learning to differentiate between things that are subjective and things that are objective, and not treat things that are subjective as if they are objective. And, by the way, logic is an extremely important tool in this domain. It's just that you have to apply the logic - it's not objective. Not objective doesn't mean not logical.
The real paradox of postmodern deconstructionism (really, of all discourse - the Indian pandits talk about this, as did the Buddha) is that at the same time that it presents the world as inherently subjective, the very act of deconstruction implies that the product of the deconstruction is objectively valid - otherwise, why bother? Yet if every topic of discussion is subjective, this implies that communication is impossible, and clearly it's not. It's a very interesting paradox to try to understand.
Nobody mods old news. :')
I guess I'm not expressing myself well. Sorry about that. I belong to a Dharma group, and a lot of us are heavy meditators, and a lot of us have sleep schedule issues, and I'm also a geek, and am very familiar with geek sleep schedule issues, both from personal experience and that of friends.
A lot of sleep problems are physiological. E.g., sleep apnea and narcolepsy. A lot are mental. There's a stigma attached to things that are mental - they're "all in the head," or "a psychological problem." In the geek community, I think we would rather ascribe any sleep problem we have to a physiological problem. In the Dharma world, we have thousands of years of experience in these problems to draw on, and we know that mental sleep problems are just as serious as physiological. And we know ways to deal with them.
My advice was based on this combined experience. I hear people telling me all the time about sleep issues that they have that are obviously mental in origin, or sound like they're probably scheduling issues, but they frequently insist that they're physiological because that's okay, and mental issues aren't.
But if you know that the problem is a bad mental habit, and you attack it knowledgably, you can beat it over time. And if it's mental and you try to address it on a physiological level, you won't get a lot of traction, although what you do may make a difference, and can be useful in the short term.
The difference is that in the Dharma group, problems in the mind are just things to debug, with no stigma attached, because Dharma is all about debugging the mind.
You are right that I did express myself unequivocally in a situation where my answer wasn't really unequivocal. This is a communication style that most geeks understand - you say what you think is the problem, and you expect the person listening to you to say "no, that's not it because of this" if they think you're wrong, or to try your hypothesis if they don't think you're wrong.
This style works less well with non-geeks, who may think that you are claiming that what you say is inarguably true. Our discussion of this tubed because I was reading your reaction to what I'd said as if I'd literally said "I think your problem is X" when in fact I did say "your problem is X, definitely not Y."
So your criticism was not inaccurate, although I think you're being far too literal. But it's worth considering that the style of communication that I used doesn't work well for all readers, and clearly didn't work for you, so I should probably avoid using this style in the future if possible.
Right. I didn't tell them they didn't have the disorder. I suggested some things to consider before assuming they had a disorder. Why are we still talking about this?
Er, so your point is what, that I'm an insensitive clod who assumed the most likely scenario and responded on that basis rather than erring on the side of extreme sensitivity and assuming not only that the poster has a rare disorder, but that he would be offended by my assuming, based on the lack of him saying anything at all to suggest that he had been diagnosed with such a disorder, that in fact he did not have any such disorder?
It looks like the only person I offended is you. Get over it.
I'm not a professional, I'm an amateur. The data was all recorded on analog media - that's why I had to re-digitize it. I didn't make the decision to digitize it to RA format in the first place. Otherwise, your comments are incisive and to the point.... :'}
No, I was neither wrong nor right. I was hypothesizing based on my own personal experience and that of people I know. It is much more common to *think* your clock is running longer than 24 hours than it is that it actually *is* running longer than that. Usually when we *think* this is what's happening, what's actually happening is that we are not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep then leads to wrapping around, as our body tries to compensate by sleeping later. This leads to a perception of having a >24 hour clock.
I am not saying that there is nobody who has a >24 hour clock. What I am saying is that it isn't the first thing I'd assume when someone tells me they keep sleeping later and later.
I manage audio production for a Dharma group in Arizona that produces a lot of spoken audio. We adopted RA early on, because of the free sound editor software (this wasn't my decision). So we had a lot of audio in that format. I needed to get the audio into MP3 format so that it would play on platforms that weren't supported by Real. There was a company that sold a converter. Real sued them and forced them to stop selling it. So I had to redigitize all of that audio.
Redigitizing was probably the right thing to do anyway, because converting between different lossy compression formats is hell on audio quality, but the fact that this happened really soured me on Real.
So, here we are in 2004. What's Real's position on people selling software that converts from RealMedia formats to other formats? Are you still going to sue if someone does something like that?
I'm sorry to see anybody take the degree of bashing you folks are taking in this forum, and I applaud your fortitude in reading it anyway. I know you have to make a buck somehow, but I think there's a reason why you're getting so much flak. I don't know if you can simultaneously execute your business model and genuinely make nice with the Open Source community. Formal answers to questions like this (i.e., an open source patent licensing program) might help us to understand whether or not you can.
No, we're not talking about sleep disorders! We're talking about someone who claims to be a heavy sleeper. My theory is that he's not getting enough sleep. That seems like a good place to start in debugging the problem. Possibly the end result will be that he turns out to have a sleep disorder, but there are things to try first.
The reason I keep arguing with you is that you keep making categorical statements like "most teenagers this" and "getting to bed earlier that", without qualifying them by saying in what cases they are applicable.
Getting to bed earlier *does* help if your problem is simply that you're not going to bed early enough to get enough sleep by the time you have to get up the next morning. It doesn't help if you have a sleep disorder and you're not going to get to sleep anyway. It also doesn't help if you've got a caffeine buzz when you go to sleep, or if you just did a major breath-oriented physical workout - e.g., a yoga class.
However, it is still the first thing to try if you find yourself comatose when the alarm goes off. If it doesn't work, you should definitely try something else. The key to solving any problem like this is figuring out what works *for you*, because the same things don't work for everybody.
If you have a sleep disorder, then knowing what it is is helpful. However, if you just aren't getting enough sleep, getting more sleep helps. And if you have to get up at a certain time, then going to bed earlier helps. Getting a louder alarm clock when you don't even know what's wrong isn't the right thing to do.
I'm very skeptical about the idea that the average teenager lives on a 26-hour sleep cycle, as you've claimed. I don't remember that being the case for me or any of my friends when I was a teenager. It just doesn't make sense - it's an extraordinary claim. So it sounds more like an excuse for oversleeping after staying up too late than it sounds like an actual syndrome.
It's smaller. That's all. If you're docking it a lot anyway, you won't care as much about the disk space as about the smallness. Different strokes for different folks.
Yup, it's sure handy when you have a syndrome that you can blame for your problems. That way you don't have to solve them.
I will admit that my advice isn't as good as some of the people who've responded who actually *have* sleep disorders, but the bottom line is that if you are having trouble waking up every morning, there's something wrong - it's not just a natural thing that you should accept, and the solution isn't an alarm clock that will damage your hearing. It's to address the problem in your sleep cycle.
If you are having real trouble waking up, it probably really does mean that you are not getting enough sleep, and if you have to be up at a certain time, you need to arrange to go to sleep early enough that you do in fact get enough sleep. Trust me, your body does not have a >24hour natural sleep cycle.
One thing that can help is to sleep in a location where the rising sun will wake you up - that is, don't close the curtains, and don't sleep in the darkest room in the house.
With respect to alarms that are painful but not injurious, you have it backwards. If the sound is loud enough to be painful, it _is_ injurious. Even sounds that are not painful can be injurious, depending on how long they last.
Indeed in Tibetan verse it seems that the authors frequently go out of their way to do repeats. For example, the famous statement from the Abhidharmakosha: le le jikten natsok kye. In this case, the first le is action. The second le is "comes from". Both words are spelled the same way, but have two different meanings. This sort of thing happens quite frequently in Tibetan scripture.
(BTW, that's: "The multitude of worlds come from actions.")
You're in samsara. The Matrix has you. Things go wrong. You have to fix them.
:')
I've found personally that I spend a lot less time screwing around with broken things now that I'm running MacOS X, but YMMV - for example, my father has a dual-cpu G4, and he's getting frequent UI freezes right now (possibly system crashes - we don't know yet, because he hasn't done the latest diagnostic I asked him to do yet).
This represents a nasty trend, actually - as soon as your own geek foo is good enough that you run out of your own problems to fix, people start to notice that you have supreme geek foo, and then you have to fix *their* problems. So there is no hope. Give it up. Get used to fixing computers. It is your karma.
Cool. Maybe I'll try that next time - thanks!
They don't work with enough browsers. :'(
They claim that they do, but I tried one (a two-month demo cert), and immediately ran into users that couldn't use the cert. I have a lot of users with really old computers. Sigh.
...which cost me >$100, in order to have some password security on the bulletin board I run. phpbb would mail the password out in the clear, and didn't allow you to log in over SSL. It wasn't a big deal to hack it, but I was surprised that it wasn't an option. It may be that more people would use decent security if the software they ran supported it.