Furthermore, Douthat elides over the fact that preventing gays and lesbians from marrying causes them great harm by preventing them from taking advantage of the many benefits society confers upon married couples. So one really has to justify pretty strongly a compelling state interest and I can’t see any state interest whatsoever that makes any sense, beyond “I just happen to think heterosexual relationships are better and I want the state to officially say so even if it makes no difference whatsoever to me personally or to my life, other than validating me and my love life as better, richer, more valuable than the love life of homosexuals.”

Whatever the case, I really wish a law will be passed to grant them rights for marriage, I couldn’t care less who other people marry.

Plus it’ll be very fun to also see the effects on immigration (and immigration law) once the stats on gay marriage start looking a little too inflated,

1. because of all the LGBT international community coming here LEGALLY to get married and living a life with full rights (which in a way is already happening, literally all but one of my gay friends come from latin america and eastern europe.)

2. because of all the LGBT international community looking to get married with Americans legitimately and staying and…

3. because of all the LGBT international community and the non-LGBT looking for an easy green card to escape their countries.

Thank you.

If you just come to visit a NY Tech Meetup you’d see what I mean. The energy is vibrant, electric; the last one I went to in July was huge, packed. Not a sclerotic suit anywhere to be seen. It’s still not the size of the Bay Area tech scene and probably never will be, but it is real and larger than you’d think.

I actually miss New York as well. My post is actually a love letter to New York, in a tough love sort of way.

At heart though, California has this Brave New World property to it (i.e. filled with ambitious arrivistes with big ideas) that New York maybe lost three generations of immigrants ago.

I secretly hope I lose my bet so I can move back….

“Thanks I agree with a lot of this —
Galen”

m.

You might want to know the technical reason it is necessary. and why it is impossible to avoid. every single thing we experience sensorily is just blind faith, and whatever conclusions we draw from the raw impulses (not yet images, etc) are based on those dubious premises. furthermore, metaphorical concepts, like a number “line”, is a made-up abstraction, but one nearly all of us have faith in.

Belief is like oil to a brain; it works much much better with it, and sometimes not much at all without it. Ayn may be sloppy with her logic, but most folks come off that way, when they don’t have all the info or know what info is relevant.

social software is pretty much just a magnet for sloppy thinking. but sloppy thinking is so common, that it’s not worth bothering over. just stay cool and do your thing.

you won’t find much relevant info on twitter. it’s sloppy folk logic, as is rand’s, albeit another variation, and nothing to take seriously. a good book on this subject (whether we agree or not with his thesis) is “computation and cognition” by pylyshyn.

have fun

That said, there’s still a huge amount of technical work to be done in the gaming world which will mitigate the various suspension of disbelief problems. We’re seeing only bits of what we need now, and these bits tend to be divided across different games. A few examples:

* Convincing graphics. I think we’re getting there now, with the PS 3, XBox 360, and modern computer graphics systems, but there’s still a lot more that can be done here.

* Good acting. The Uncharted series, using simultaneous voice acting and motion capturehis is otherwise currently quite rare, is making great strides here, but this is otherwise currently quite rare.

* Stronger interactions with other characters with more nuanced choices. As you point out, this is hard, and may need to wait for much better voice recognition technology before it becomes significantly more convincing.

* Real moral choice that makes a difference to how the game turns out. Fallout 3 is the classic example here; Bioshock also has it to some degree.

Then there’s the idea of open world gameplay. This is not always necessary or even desirable, and, interestingly enough, seems very nearly unique to video games.

All that said, I found the two Uncharted games to be quite as enjoyable, probably moreso, than any of the Indiana Jones films, so we’re capable of reaching at least that level today.

Where Ebert perhaps went wrong is calling what he’s looking for “Art” rather than “Great Art.” It seems to me by his definitions, most popular films and books are not art, either.

Doubt of one’s own thoughts and feelings. Doubt of one’s worldview, of things that seem true of the world as if directly perceived.

And how clear it is, once you’re there, how safe and right a place it is, home.

First of all, please don’t misunderstand my position. I have made no attempt in this post to detail in depth my own epistemology, which is extremely intricate and bears little resemblance to anything you’ve considered in the past (based on your remarks above). For example, I did not argue that “propositions can not have truth value”, nor have I been arguing that truth can only be found in my “personal constructs” and so on. I don’t want to get into what my actual views are on these subjects, but suffice it to say they’re far more subtle than what you’re assuming here.

I am making, above, two very straightforward arguments. The first argument I made is a direct consequence of the following two assertions about Rand’s thought (again I hate to even use the word “thought” to describe Rand’s fuzzy-headed ideas, but anyway):

1. All propositions are either true or false (law of the excluded middle)

2. A statement such as “the apple is red” is a proposition.

My argument I believe quite conclusively demonstrates that holding those two views together is irrational. Either one has to give up 1) or give up 2) in the light of the very obvious and simple argument I put forward. Note that my classmate, whom I mentioned above, understood Rand to be asserting these two things, and my argument, obvious though it is, apparently eventually convinced him that Rand must be wrong about this.

It is this and only this I argued in the first part of my post, above. I made no additional assertions about how it is impossible to assign any truth value to any propositions whatsoever, nor have I made any assertions that truth value is entirely relative or subjective. For example, in Zadeh’s fuzzy logic, propositions can take on truth values ranging from 0 to 1 (false to true), which obviously includes the values 0 and 1 in the spectrum. I think Zadeh’s model is still too simplistic but it is a proof of concept that the argument I am making does not involve giving up all notions of any sort of truth — it simply involves giving up the notion that propositions can only have one of two truth values. My own use of language is far more sophisticated than either a notion of pure relativism or even Zadeh’s approach; if you want to understand my views on certainty, I would say they’re somewhat along the lines of Wittgenstein’s argument in On Certainty as well as his views in Philosophical Investigations — one of the things he says is that even though one can never be absolutely certain of any proposition, it is nevertheless correct to speak of being certain because that is how the language game is played (that is to say to be “almost completely certain” is functionally what we really mean when we say we are “certain” about something). However, there’s far more I could say on that subject, particularly regarding relativity of truth; my position is quite complex, and I don’t have the time or space to say it here in these comments (I will however detail it in future posts, and I’ve alluded to it in some prior posts).

Regarding your comments about the financial system, again you’re arguing about a completely separate point from the one I was making. Of course I am aware that libertarians frequently make the argument that market instability is due not to some failing in libertarian ideas but due to the fact that the market does not reach the libertarian ideal of one which completely lacks government involvement. But that is a mostly unrelated point to the one I was making. My argument was that, whether or not one can argue that in the case of our own financial system government interference contributes to market instability, one can easily come up with highly simplified thought experiments which DO involve absolutely no government interference and yet clearly suffer from serious long-term instability (as is the case with my “fish in the lake” example, quite obviously). Another example more apropos to the financial crash: there have been numerous experiments in economic psychology (a new and quite fascinating field) which show conclusively that market bubbles occur even in idealized market conditions with absolutely no “government” intervention whatsoever. These experiments have been ongoing for many years now and are quite incontrovertible. For example, consider this survey paper:

http://bit.ly/asHMO8

Whether or not one can argue that government interference was a contributing factor in the recent market crash, it’s simply beyond question that even purely free markets do not, in fact, always reach equilibrium and stay there, in practice. The simple reason for this is that while a market is rising, it is in fact reasonable for market participants to try to cash in on this rising market even when asset prices exceed their underlying value. This phenomenon does not depend on government interference, whatsoever.

Also a bit amusing — you argue Rand (or her philosophy) is not only wrong but, actually, evil. If you believe your own proposition about the knowability of things, then you already are aware such a claim can not be made. As you know, the only claim you can make is that the wrongness and evilness can not be known to exist in Rand or in her ideas but only in your personal construct of them– ie., your knowledge of the wrongness and evilness lies in your personal dialectic with Rand’s thinking, not within her thinking itself. Actually, if you were to claim that, I would in this case agree with you. I also wonder, where is the fuzzy logic in such a proposition.

On happiness, there is more baked into my short comment to be considered for I think it struck the main point. But to take a new tack completely Our financial system is possibly as close to the direct opposite of the Randian ideal as can be had. Here, in fact you have her favorite bugbears — a powerful, organized, non-value creating interest group (the financial industry) symbiotically feeding off of and feeding a corrupt government, at the expense of the individual, who is victimized by both. I’m sure many libertarians have no true or deep understanding of Rand but it is precisely the thing she’d want Atlas shrugging off, with its destructive derivatives industry built upon the back of enabling government financial institutions (even prior to the bailout). The conservative argues the meltdown was caused by the government via Fannie and Freddie. The liberal argues it was caused by greedy corporations and traders. The libertarian argues it was caused by the corrupt dialectic between the two. And that’s really Rand.