Tag: Peter Thiel

Narcissism, Nonsense and Pseudo-Science

Mark Davis5 Comments

I recently began posting pictures of our home base in Sedona to Instagram (check it out in column to right). It’s been a strange trip. If you are not familiar with how Instagram works, it’s fairly simple: you post pictures and other Instagram members can “follow” you and you can follow them, meaning that you see their pictures and can tap a little heart icon to show you like their pictures. My goal, if I have one, is just that I like the Northern Arizona mountains and deserts and like thinking about the composition of photographs. I’m also interested in the gear and techniques involved in taking and processing pictures. I did, however, market my own books on the platform—briefly, and with apologies.

But Instagram, like Facebook, is a world unto itself.

Shortly after starting on the platform, I received follows from blond Russian beauties who appear to be marketing online sex services. I have received odd follows from variations on the same name who have no content on their pages and who disappear after a day or two if I don’t follow them back. Though I don’t have any definitive evidence, I suspect these might be bots. I have received follows from people who seemed to be marketing themselves as, well, people—including one who bait-and-switched with good landscape photography. They are typically attractive young people, often showing off their six-pack abs, and trying to build a following with the goal of making money off of Instagram. Maybe they plan to show off products or reference them, thus becoming “influencers” in the lingo of social media. Maybe they are trying to fund their travel experiences by reaping revenue from advertisers that co-exist with their popularity in their image feed.… Read the rest

Desire and Other Matters

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“What matters?” is a surprisingly interesting question. I think about it constantly since it weighs-in whenever plotting future choices, though often I seem to be more autopilot than consequentialist in these conceptions. It is an essential first consideration when trying to value one option versus another. I can narrow the question a bit to “what ideas matter?” This immediately externalizes the broad reality of actions that meaningfully improve lives, like helping others, but still leaves a solid core of concepts that are valued more abstractly. Does the traditional Western liberal tradition really matter? Do social theories? Are less intellectually-embellished virtues like consistency and trust more relevant and applicable than notions like, well, consequentialism?

Maybe it amounts to how to value certain intellectual systems against others?

Some are obviously more true than others. So “dowsing belief systems” are less effective in a certain sense than “planetary science belief systems.” Yet there are a broader range of issues at work.

But there are some areas of the liberal arts that have a vexing relationship with the modern mind. Take linguistics. The field ranges from catalogers of disappearing languages to theorists concerned with how to structure syntactic trees. Among the latter are the linguists who have followed Noam Chomsky’s paradigm that explains language using a hierarchy of formal syntactic systems, all of which feature recursion as a central feature. What is interesting is that there have been very few impacts of this theory. It is very simple at its surface: languages are all alike and involve phrasal groups that embed in deep hierarchies. The specific ways in which the phrases and their relative embeddings take place may differ among languages, but they are alike in this abstract way.… Read the rest