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Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.

counterargument:

1) let x be a thing

2) I name x "Jeff"

3) all things are nameable (from 1 and 2)

another way to put this is that it's natural to take the paradox as a reductio.

Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!

It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.

Frasier, at a free sample station: I do thank you, but I'm afraid I'm rather particular about the provenance of my shellfish. To subject a scampi to the radiation of a microwave is not cooking, madam, it's an execution! My god, Niles, is that a '98 Chateau Latour in your cart?

Niles: I've already secured six cases! They're over there, just between the Kirkland Signature Leaf Blowers and the 5 pound bags of "Kickin' Queso Jalapeño Poppers"!

Martin: Oh I LOVE those, where?

It's probably very store specific. If you know the Market Basket in Somerville, MA, it's got a legendary produce section. I've been to locations in NH with crap.

IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)

I've become a Costco person in recent years. At least in my perception, inflation has affected grocery stores unevenly:

Whole Foods: eye-bogglingly expensive (and no, I don't think it always was)

Wegmans: substantially more expensive than a few years ago, and a noticeable decline in produce quality

Trader Joes: incredible value on many prepared foods, but not the best source for staples like rice or paper products.

Costco is not inflation-proof by any means but they have pretty much 0 margins and they're reliably the best value on just about whatever they sell. The selection can be limited in some ways compared to a supermarket, and they can be a bad place to be health conscious (as it can be hard to resist massive containers of ultra cheap and delicious treats of various kinds) or to try to try to be an ethical consumer (and please spare me the HN cynical line on this, I get it, I have no real agency and I'm pathetically guilt-ridden): I've read bad things about their meat sourcing, they rarely have coffee with bona fides like fair trade or shade grown, I see controversial products like bird's nest soup, etc.

We play with a base point being a dime or a quarter. Note also that the function from fan to points is subject to house rules, it's not always p(f) = 2^f (I've seen rules for example that start to "level off" the payout at higher fan values).

I'd add the note that the whole strategy of mahjong really only gets interesting when you play repeated hands (a full game has at least 16 hands, with each player acting as the dealer once per prevailing wind) and when you're gambling (or otherwise tracking points). Most house rules also enforce a minimum fan value for a winning hand, banning the "chicken hand" which wins but scores no points. We play with a 2 fan minimum. If you just play for mahjong (i.e. a a hand that "wins" the round regardless of score), the game is a pretty uninteresting game of luck, and you're not incentivized to gun for the higher scoring hands.

This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands

There is a section of the article covering precisely this, headed "The external actors: arms to both sides"

Note that node-fetch will silently ignore any overrides to "forbidden" request headers like Host, since it's designed for parity with fetch behavior in the browser. This caused a minor debugging headache for me once.

Stop grinding for a second.

You don't need to be perfect to win. You don't need to spend 100 miles "hustling" in the desert to prove your worth.

The real secret to sustainable growth? Authenticity. Let your natural strengths lead the way.

Let’s get vulnerable—share your biggest professional setbacks in the comments, and I’ll share mine.

The market keeps moving. The sun is rising on new opportunities, and the landscape is shifting for those ready to see it.

The "wild geese" of innovation are heading home. No matter where you are in your career journey, the world is calling for your unique vision.

It’s time to claim your seat at the table. You belong in this ecosystem.

#Mindset #Authenticity #Leadership #Growth #CareerAdvice #FamilyOfThings

This kind of view tends to logically conclude in the idea of a noumenal, unknowable reality. I think it's more reasonable to say that truth itself is gold star we award to descriptions that suit our purposes. After all, descriptions are necessarily approximations (or reductive or "compressions"), since the only model of a thing with 100% fidelity is... the thing itself.

Reminds me of the blog post about Waymo's "World Model". Training on real-world data results in a sufficiently rich model to start simulating novel scenarios that aren't in the training data (like the elephant wandering into the street), which in turn can feed back into training. One could imagine scientific inquiry working the same way.

It strikes me that many of these complex systems have indeterminate boundaries, and a fair amount of distortion might be baked into the choice of training data. Poverty (to take an example from this post) probably has causes at economic, psychological, ecological, physiological, historical, and political levels of description (commenters please note I didn't think too hard about this list). What data we feed into our models, and how those data are understood as operationalizations of the qualitative phenomena we care about, might matter.

Might sound like a rube here, but: is agentic development really this good at novel UIs? The video shows a sort of cassette tape music player, and a fancy looking audio visualizer/equalizer thing. I'm well aware agents are very good at boilerplate UIs, but I wouldn't expect them to be able to one-shot novel, dynamic UI elements like this. I've had Claude attempt some SVG animations and the results were very crude. That was a year or so ago though. Are there established ways of letting agents iterate on UIs, i.e. having them visually verify the visual design and interactions?

I really don't know anything about it, but I'd speculate that the fantasy is plain old 'misattribution of arousal'. The heart gets pounding at the idea of violating the taboo against incest, and that bodily state is interpreted as sexual arousal. Not that I'm suggesting that there is just one explanation of something as complicated as this.