- Nov 2021
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www.thefreelibrary.com www.thefreelibrary.com
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it's not a specialized "organ" as Pinker and Chomsky claim.
versus chomsky
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www.thefreelibrary.com www.thefreelibrary.com
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novel and innovative applications of general semantics
process and practice of surfing waves. Practicing eprime.
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- Aug 2021
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www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
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Normally, thousands of rabbits and guinea pigs are used andkilled, in scientific laboratories, for experiments which yieldgreat and tangible benefits to humanity. This war butcheredmillions of people and ruined the health and lives of tens ofmillions. Is this climax of the pre-war civilization to be passedunnoticed, except for the poetry and the manuring of the battlefields, that the“poppies blow”stronger and better fed? Or is thedeath of ten men on the battle field to be of as much worth inknowledge gained as is the life of one rabbit killed for experi-ment? Is the great sacrifice worth analysing? There can be onlyone answer—yes. But, if truth be desired, the analysis must bescientific.
Idea: Neural net parameter analysis but with society as the 'neural net' and the 'training examples' things like industrial accidents, etc. How many 'training examples' does it take to 'learn' a lesson, and what can we infer about the rate of learning from these statistics?
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What we call progressconsists in coordinating ideas with realities
"The map is not the territory" is there as a basic sentiment long before General Semantics
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What is the defining or characteristic mark of humanity?To this question two answers and only two have been given in thecourse of the ages, and they are both of them current to-day. Oneof the answers is biological—man is an animal, a certain kind ofanimal; the other answer is a mixture partly biological and partlymythological or partly biological and partly philosophical—manis a combination orunionof animal with something supernatural.An important part of my task will be to show that both of theseanswers are radically wrong and that, beyond all things else, theyare primarily responsible for what is dismal in the life and historyof humankind. This done, the question remains: What is Man? Ihope to show clearly and convincingly that the answer is to befound in the patent fact that human beings possess in varyingdegrees a certain natural faculty or power or capacity whichserves at once to give them their appropriate dignity as humanbeings and to discriminate them, not only from the minerals andthe plants but also from the world of animals, this peculiar orcharacteristic human faculty or power or capacity I shall call[004]
Here Korzybski defines how he thinks his thinking diverges from previous work, what in his thought is novel. It is very specifically the idea that the spirit-animal and the animal conception of man are inadequate and that the time-binding posterity man is his nature(?).
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It is useless to argue if electricity be“natural”or“supernatu-ral,”of“material”or of“spiritual”origin. As a matter of fact wedo not ask these questions in studying electricity; we endeavorto find out the natural laws governing it and in handling livewires we do not argue or speculate about them—we use rubber[xi]gloves, etc. It will be the same with Man and the great affairs ofMan—we have, first of all, to know what Man is.
This basically materialist approach, believing that Man has a specific nature which can be described and planned around accords with the zeitgeist of the 1920's, and it's of course correct. Its declining popularity in the ensuing decades points more to a declining society than to any essential incorrectness.
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- Jan 2021
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www.researchgate.net www.researchgate.net
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O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and the human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!
Interesting precursor to Korzybski's ideas about social progress lagging the rate of gain for technical capability.
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- Oct 2020
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One of the primary tasks of engineers is to minimize complexity. JSX changes such a fundamental part (syntax and semantics of the language) that the complexity bubbles up to everything it touches. Pretty much every pipeline tool I've had to work with has become far more complex than necessary because of JSX. It affects AST parsers, it affects linters, it affects code coverage, it affects build systems. That tons and tons of additional code that I now need to wade through and mentally parse and ignore whenever I need to debug or want to contribute to a library that adds JSX support.
Tags
- for-reaching consequences
- implementation complexity
- mentally filter/ignore
- fundamental
- avoid complexity
- syntax
- can't keep entire system in your mind at once (software development) (scope too large)
- mental bandwidth
- semantics (of programming language)
- the cost of changing something
- primary task/job/responsibility
- engineers
- too complicated
- high-cost changes
- infectious problem
- unintended consequence
- engineering (general)
- complexity
Annotators
URL
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