Ignorance
current intake:
tea w/milk - 40
hot chocolate - 37
toast - 100
strawberries - 3
Stork butter - 25
current total: 200
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I met up with ubermammal yesterday in Chinatown for lunch; taro bubble tea (and I had Beijing dumplings) at Jen Cafe. Then we walked around Covent Garden a bit, and wound up in a Starbucks near Charing Cross. We had a good conversation, about AI, objective morality, natural rights and the power and uniqueness of the human mind. A lot of interesting problems were solved for me, mostly regarding the existence-or rather, nonexistence-of "natural" rights and the derivation of objective morality which is something I keep forgetting, but the biggest one was this: I know hardly anything about a lot of important topics. I can derive a lot with logic and by thinking very hard (the Feynman method!), but in terms of actually knowing things I need to learn a lot more.
I have started a thing recently whereby I think of something that I've heard of but know nothing about-recent examples are computational linguistics and the Dewey Decimal System-and look it up on wikipedia, and learn about it. This is a lot of fun and is a good way to easily broaden one's knowledge base. I do not take sufficient advantage of the internet's resources.
tea w/milk - 40
hot chocolate - 37
toast - 100
strawberries - 3
Stork butter - 25
current total: 200
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I met up with ubermammal yesterday in Chinatown for lunch; taro bubble tea (and I had Beijing dumplings) at Jen Cafe. Then we walked around Covent Garden a bit, and wound up in a Starbucks near Charing Cross. We had a good conversation, about AI, objective morality, natural rights and the power and uniqueness of the human mind. A lot of interesting problems were solved for me, mostly regarding the existence-or rather, nonexistence-of "natural" rights and the derivation of objective morality which is something I keep forgetting, but the biggest one was this: I know hardly anything about a lot of important topics. I can derive a lot with logic and by thinking very hard (the Feynman method!), but in terms of actually knowing things I need to learn a lot more.
I have started a thing recently whereby I think of something that I've heard of but know nothing about-recent examples are computational linguistics and the Dewey Decimal System-and look it up on wikipedia, and learn about it. This is a lot of fun and is a good way to easily broaden one's knowledge base. I do not take sufficient advantage of the internet's resources.