nico λ

Strauss therefore argued that political philosophy must re-open the “theological-political problem” rather than declare it settled. That does not mean re-imposing dogma; it means rediscovering, through thinkers such as Plato, Maimonides, and even Hobbes and Spinoza at their best, the ways in which reason and revelation, liberty and moral limits,... See more

By putting the database changes inside of a transaction, we can ensure that we either get all of the records or none of the records. We call that an atomic transaction: it happens completely or not at all.

The problem is that when you make productivity personal, you put the pressure on individuals to figure out the tension between different roles in their life. You’re telling them: You figure out how you organize the work, how you execute it. The more you do, the better. Now you have this tension of: If I spend less time with my family, I could do

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Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, said that the universe as it truly is must be unknowable, and all we ever know is the world through our senses: he made a clear distinction between phenomena , our perceptions of objects, and noumena , the things in themselves.5 More than that, he foreshadowed the Bayesian model of the brain: he argued that

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For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment”... See more

But Feynman’s brilliance was not solely due to his natural cognitive abilities. He relied on a method : a simple technique for seeing the world through the lens of open-ended questions, which he called his “favorite problems.”

But I think perhaps the main element in Musk’s radicalization is simply the feedback loop of the internet - Musk has millions of fan-boys cheering on his every lurch to the right, every tweet about immigration or Anthony Fauci or the ‘woke mind virus’. He’s a transhumanist enslaved by his own machine, a wizard deceived by the demon algorithm which... See more

The term “dependence” has traditionally been used to describe “physical dependence,” which refers to the adaptations that result in withdrawal symptoms when drugs, such as alcohol and heroin, are discontinued. Physical dependence is also observed with certain psychoactive medications, such as antidepressants and beta-blockers. However, the

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We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks  (a thread on why) https://t.co/ZNg3FHiGUD