Increasingly, ordinary people encrypt their internet communications. Some want to share files. Some are worried about the increasing surveillance and threats of surveillance of Internet data that is taking place in many corners of the world. ACTA, Hadopi, data retention would be a few examples. People may simply wish to keep their data private, even [...]
Monomorphic
Conceptual meandering
complexity
Utilitarianism and computability
I’ve started watching Michael Sandel’s Harvard lecture series on political philosophy, “justice”. In this series, Sandel introduces the ideas of major political and moral philosophers, such as Bentham, Locke, and Kant, as well as some libertarian thinkers I hadn’t heard of. I’m only halfway through the series, so I’m sure there’s other big names coming [...]
Partitioning idea spaces into containers
Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an [...]
Provocation and adaptation
My last post, on the topic of resisting the circumstances in life, ended with a question. What choices should I make to resist maximally, given that choices make me stronger, i.e. choices have long term side effects on me? So I would like to, probabilistically, maximise my set of skills in order to best be [...]
Resisting circumstances
Friedrich Nietzsche famously said that “what does not kill me, makes me stronger.” While true in some ways, this statement appears to be a generalisation masking a more complex truth. For instance, cutting off one’s hand does not kill one, but hardly makes one stronger, unless one specifically desired greatly improved dexterity of the other [...]
