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I agree about being unprepared. I didn't expect so much attention - if any. I write endless articles on Medium in a variety of styles, including poetry, and answer questions on Quora, and mostly just get ignored. At one time a few years ago, when blogging was popular, I had about eight blogs which I posted on regularly, and got a total of about one one-sentence response comment per month - and quite often that was from someone wanting to sell me viagra. (I don't know who they'd been talking to.)
Although I have been editors choice on Poetbay 3 times - which I am proud of. Being down-voted about Heidegger is a new high for me.
I'll go read Luke's sequence. :-)
Hey, I'm right up to minus 19 - that's put a smile on my face. Thank you for bringing some balance to the force.
I do sort of understand the antagonism - people in the community want to protect the quality of the content which the community is generating. They value the comradeship of shared values, etiquette, assumptions, agreed-upon starting points for conversations, and so on. Noobs just don't get it. Noobs are a threat to that. In the first instance, given the reputation, I was surprised that I was allowed to post on here at all without having some established credentials. I mean, I do have a few credentials, but nobody made me provide them.
If I had thought more before just jumping in, I could have been more careful. Perhaps I should have started by commenting rather than posting. Dunno. They could actually enforce that as a way of smoothing the path, maybe. On the other hand, perhaps it's a fun sport letting noobs stumble around and watching them get burned. Smirk.
I do think it is a very interesting investigation how to design and manage public thinking so that the best possible outcomes are delivered - partly why I wanted to explore playing on here, so as to get some insight into that.
Quite apart from my own adequacies or inadequacies I think there is an interesting debate to be had been LW-style rationality and the thinking that swirls around Heidegger. (Heidegger as like a whirl wind that sucked in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the whole tradition and sprayed out a whole legacy of subsequent thinkers and tryers.) I wonder if later Wittgenstein could help provide a bridge.
I think so. I'm not sure. I would need to think about it some more.
I can certainly see some value in some of the thinking around e-prime. And I made a point out of the linguistics at the beginning of the talk, but mostly I did that just as a way of starting my talk with something familiar.
In distinguishing being the way he does, I don't think Heidegger is really so interested in the meaning variations of the linguistic form. He is more interested in what our behaviour and experience silently indicate ie. what is in the background that makes different forms of inteligibility viable.
One way of thinking about that is as a set of standards for what counts as being - one of the points Heidegger is making in B&T is that there are at least three different kinds of sets of standards which are embedded in our behaviour and experience, which are 1. self-sufficient substances, 2. equipment and 3. ourselves.
So, for example with equipment, I behave as though a tea-mug is, and in particular I behave as though it is a tea-mug - I don't behave as though it is a piece of fired clay - I might be careful not to drop, but that is subsumed into it being for what it is for - and I don't experience it as a piece of fired clay. I experience it as a tea-mug... But not even that really... I just pick it up and pour boiling water in it. And more interestingly, the more competent I am with tea-making, the more transparent the tea-mug becomes in my experience.
One thing I certainly don't need to do, unless I am doing philosophy, or something is not working, is think about the tea-mug. Rather we live in a condition of skilful absorbed coping, dealing transparently with the equipment with which we are familiar. We always find ourselves already in this world, engaged in some activity or another.
As my first post on LessWrong I was not aware of the particular piece of etiquette w.r.t. not finishing posts with a biographical sentence. I have gotten used to doing this because on Medium.com, where I have been writing articles for about a year now, it is a standard practice to put a biographical note at the end of your articles. I only started doing it cos I saw other people doing it, and I thought it looked smart.
Also because the "Save Draft" button on this post did not work (I kept trying to get it to work - lost the post three times and had to start again), I opted in the end to simply publish the post before I had properly finished editing it.
In any case, in my talk I have summarised some commentaries by notable authorities, in particular the late Prof. Hubert Dreyfus and Prof. William Blatner. I have moved the source links from the end of the document to the beginning, in case anyone doesn't get that far. Although even in the very first published version of this text, I stated that that was what I was doing right at the top of the text.
If this is "nonsense" then essentially so is the entire lecture course Dreyfus delivered about this subject for fourty years at Berkeley, which I have linked to in the list of sources, which was also included even in the first draft.
Hubert Dreyfus was able to predict the failure of Minsky's A.I. program at M.I.T. thirty or so years before the people working on it finally gave up on it, and able to tell them why what they were doing was never going to work. And he was able to do that precisely because he understood Heidegger. The M.I.T. A.I. lab spent millions of dollars of defence budget on a futile project precisely because they didn't.