The craigslist rando is definitely the option with larger downside risk. Not least of which, unless you're very careful/lucky with the lease agreement, is that they disappear and you're on the hook for the whole rent anyway.

New Things to Beware on the Internet

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.

Be cautious out there.

I really want to reiterate how this can go wrong frequently and fast, folks.

A malicious actor sets up a page with an auto-downloader squatting on a domain name that matches a common zip file name like photos DOT zip. This website is set up to start an auto downloader upon being visited, downloading a zip file with the same name as the URL which contains malicious software (virus, worm, keylogger, etc).

Scenario.

Someone you know well sends you an email or text with promised photos attached. The email even reads something like this.

Because .zip is now a TLD, that plain text is automatically formatted into a link to malicious actor's website without them having to send you anything.

Folk with family with iPhones or iPads that are sent multiple photos in one go might be familiar with iCloud's tendency to automatically compile them into zip file for the sender and less savvy tech users have trouble NOT doing that.

These same less savvy users, or even just someone just not thinking in the moment, will click that .zip link, not realizing it isn't the the same as clicking on the promised attachment.

They download a file that matches the name they expected. They open it because they were expecting that file and it's from a trusted source. Except the file they downloaded isn't the one that was sent by their trusted source and now they have malware.

Another Scenario.

An IT person tries to send you an email with instructions on how to resolve a problem with a commonly used filename like install-repair DOT zip or to install new software like microsoft-office DOT zip.

The email may start with instructions of where to go get the legitimate file to do the install or repair, but now a line later in the instructions is also has a link to a .zip URL. A user, already frazzled by IT problems, may click it to ensure they have the right file. Again, they download malicious code from a squatting website or it prompts them with a fake login and now the squatting website has stolen their login credentials for a legitimate site. All due to an expected email from a trusted source.

Above you can see microsoft-office DOT zip is already out there with a fake Microsoft login screen waiting to steal your credentials.

These risks are already out there now because the TLD has been activated.

Plain text on old post are already being resolved into links to the new websites.

Here you can see a tweet from 2021, long before .zip was a domain name, now resolves that plan text into a clickable link. You'll start seeing this everywhere, and malicious actors do not have to lift a finger to send it to you.

Yes, a lot of users aren't going to click that, but a lot of folk will. Whomever is squatting on photos DOT zip domain name has made a one time payment to have access to anyone that ever sees that file name typed out.

In an example of an existing squatter site, clientdocs DOT zip is exactly one such pre-setup .zip domain name that initiates an automatic download. This one may be harmless, but the set ups are already out there and waiting to catch folk.

It's an unnecessary and risky can of worms that's been opened up.

Holy Unforced Errors, Batman.

I'd also strongly urge email/messaging providers (etc) to not automatically convert xyz.zip strings into urls (unless the string includes a http(s):// prefix).

Fall of Rome to the Goths. Before that, you could honestly say the Eastern Roman Empire was the Eastern *Roman Empire*, the eastern half of a greater whole. Afterwards, the "Eastern Roman Empire" is all there is, it makes sense to identify it differently.

I would, however, date that to 455 rather than 476. The "Western Roman Empire" soldiered on after that point, but it wasn't effectively part of the same polity as the East. Yes, even under Anthemius, who despite being appointed in the East still ruled on Ricimer's sufferage, as proven by the fact that when they went head-to-head Anthemius lost.

As an additional point, the next Eastern emperor to be crowned after 455, Leo I in 457, was the first emperor to be crowned by Patriarch of Constantinople. Obviously, any cultural transition is going to be gradual, but I think that's a pretty significant threshold.

Supreme court on a bipartisan basis believes nothing a public official does can be fraud.

Ugarles's anger is not about how the Supreme Court is ruling "we don't think this is fraud according to the law" as much as "we think these laws against fraud are unconstitutional," from what I understand their arguments are around "this is shady but this precedent would make any lobbying illegal and is this really the court's responsibility to judge political officials?"

I mean, you can *sort of* see their point but meanwhile poor people get convicted for "possession of burglary tools" for having a screwdriver and that's apparently fine, so, you know.

dumb question about how hard content moderation is at scale: who the fuck is uploading the child porn and beheading videos traumatizing the underpaid moderation teams in all of these exposés? If I were in possession of those things I would simply keep it to myself out of self preservation. Why and how are a small fraction of people doing it in such volume that it creates a huge problem for moderation teams? And don't say "some people are insane", that's a curiosity-stopper

Sometimes shock value, as people have said, but sometimes I do think there's a genuine desire to share the content with like-minded people (or, more selfishly, trade content with like-minded people).

While it's not not dangerous, I don't think it's necessarily as dangerous as you're assuming. The tools required for ban evasion probably provide protection against low effort law enforcement responses, and more sophisticated responses are limited by resources. Plus, the content may not even be illegal: actual CSA content is illegal almost everywhere, but simulated material and gore/shock stuff is often legal.

Annual cigarette consumption per person aged 15 or older.

by lingue.maps

You can tell this is map is based on a faulty analysis of data because of Andorra. Andorra is a haven for tourists when it comes to low taxes. French people (but not exclusively) are known to cross the border to buy alcohol and cigarettes, hence the whopping 6.000+ cigarettes per year per person

Basically, this map equates the number of cigarettes bought with the number of cigarettes smoked within the same country and totally overlooks the trans-border purchases that often take place.

This leads to blown figures for Andorra and possibly underestimated ones for France where French people go to Luxembourg, Belgium or Andorra to buy cigarettes

Yeah, that.

Annual cigarette consumption per person aged 15 or older.

by lingue.maps

Meanwhile in Andorra

Andorra and Luxembourg both at >2x the next highest. It's gotta be a statistical artifact, right? Like, it's based on sales but most of the sales in those countries are actually foreign visitors, something like that.

Not to be anti-union on main but the ai related demands of the writers strike are dumb. Automation will come for us all and this is good actually, like, for society. Obv they're allowed to want to keep their jobs but you can't expect stop progress forever.

The AI demands are dumb but only a small part of WGA's demands. If you see a lot of coverage of them in the media, it's because the AI stuff is new and interesting, whereas the yet another dispute over rates for online streaming is not.

I encourage you, or anyone interested, to check out the general statement of the demands:

Or the detailed proposal:

genealogically speaking christianity gets all of the fun stuff (cosmic battles of good and evil, eschatons to immanetize, all that jazz) from judaism, which in turn picked it up during the exilic years in persia. so culturally zoroastrian, surely

Happy Thursday (Thor's day) to all my culturally Norse pagan followers.

literally luddism isn't it

Important to keep in mind that the media writes about the AI part of the dispute because AI is the sexy new thing, but AI is a single item out of 14 distinct line items in the WGA demands.

I need to make a walrus pog image. I feel like their faces were made to pog. AI art maybe?

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott's blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren't going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it's written extremely well, but if you can't get most of the value of the philosopher's work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it's something else, something that's artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers' contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can't circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it's just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it's hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can't be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It's astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work's value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field's own capacity to understand and express itself.

Endorsed all of this, and I will also add that, anecdotally, as I have gotten older, I have moved in precisely the opposite direction as the OP wants: I used to be a real snob about trying to always read philosophical primary sources; once I gave up on that and read contemporary textbooks instead, I understood things much more clearly. Which is obvious, if you think about it: the original authors were writing for (and to persuade) an audience with a background and context we don't have, and in many cases to refute or at least elaborate then-popular viewpoints we don't believe in anymore.

Like, in other sciences, you wouldn't read primary texts except as a historical curiosity. I actually have read (parts of) Newton's Principia Mathematica, and... it's totally impenetrable! This book more-or-less invented calculus, but it would be crazy to use it to learn calculus, because subsequent centuries of authors and educators have figured out better ways to convey the same concepts. If philosophy is supposed to be taken seriously as a discipline for revealing truth, it needs to pass the basic test of "other authors can convey the same points using gentler pedagogy."

The problem is that, even if philosophy is a truth-seeking discipline, it’s still one dominated by fundamental and wide-ranging disagreements, meaning that everyone has an axe to grind, very much including interpreters and professional digesters. How to make sense of a given philosopher will depend more generally on what kinds of views make sense in the first place, and obviously philosophers differ widely in what kinds of views they think make sense

The risk isn’t principally that latter day scholarship on Hume (or whoever) is going to be an overly lossy compression function (tho that’s not a non-problem), it’s that it’s going to be a highly noisy channel. Allan Bloom gives a good set of examples in the preface (which is excellent and everyone should read, especially anyone interested in translation) to his version of Plato’s republic: here are a bunch of translators whom we can see, in retrospect, managed to seriously bungle the meaning of the text, mistaking their alignment with academic/cultural trends at the time for having pierced to the intellectual kernel of the work. (Bloom does indulge in some philosophy-as-literature reasoning, but tbh that’s much more plausible of Plato than of many other major historical philosophers, and I think it’s detachable from his bigger main point) This is a rampant hazard in philosophy that looks back on the Greats. Just one example: a major debate in contemporary ethics is the question of “particularism:” is morality a matter of applying general principles to particular cases? Aristotle very clearly seems to talk about this issue in the nicomachean ethics, but there is huge disagreement about how to interpret his conclusions… disagreement that unsurprisingly largely cuts along the same lines as disagreement about the object level. Any summary of the relevant passages is inevitably going to be coloured by the authors own views. This problem generalises

The suggestion of ignoring the books Scott reviews for his blog post summaries is surely a case in point: Scott is one of the most highly opinionated and persuasive ppl ik, and that is obviously going to affect his summarising. You should only trust his summaries to the extent you think he is himself reliably right on the topic he’s writing about, and I think he’d be the first to tell you not to treat him like a prophet. For ultra contentious foundational texts, the same reasoning applies in even greater force

Ofc this in a sense reflects philosophy’s failures as an intellectual enterprise in that it has failed to conclusively settle lots of questions to the satisfaction of all reasonable parties. But it’s not like a lot of these questions aren’t themselves very interesting and important, or like there’s some clear other means of addressing them

This is sort-of the same issue as @jadagul's interpretation, albeit more circumscribed. Doesn't Plato, too, have his own axe to grind?

If we're seeking truths (at least truths about, eg, ethics, rather than truths about Plato as a historical person), shouldn't we be as worried about Plato's biases as anyone else's?

This does, to be sure, cut against trusting any single person's interpretation. But that really means not trusting *any* single interpretation, including the original.

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott's blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren't going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it's written extremely well, but if you can't get most of the value of the philosopher's work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it's something else, something that's artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers' contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can't circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it's just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it's hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can't be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It's astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work's value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field's own capacity to understand and express itself.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let's try again.

There's a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until "that might not be efficiently extractable." I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously "procedural knowledge", it's clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it's not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it's much harder to "distill" procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I'm arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we've definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from "grappling with a long and weird text". Like, we've streamlined math education, but we can't streamline "doing exercises" out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you're inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about "doing the exercises" that you can't steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of "doing the exercises" is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that "grappling with a long and weird text" is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).

The practical skill I'm talking about isn't, like, "doing philosophy". Or even "grappling with a long and weird text".

The practical skill is thinking like Immanuel Kant. You spend a bunch of time embedded in Kant-thought, and that helps you learn how to create Kant-thought on your own. If you go read Christine Korsgaard, you're not marinating in Kant-thought; you're marinating in Korsgaard-thought.

Now Korsgaard-thought has a lot in common with Kant-thought, because Korsgaard has spent a lot of time marinating in Kant-thought. But it's still different.

And this is why, like, if you take a test in a philosophy class, the questions aren't "What do you think about X?" so much as "What would Kant/Hume/Bentham/whoever think about X?"

And then from this perspective, the point of a philosophy text is to guide you to think like the author. In much the same way that poetry wants to make you feel a certain way, philosophy wants to make you Or think a certain way. (And those two things aren't that different.) If you read a summary of a poem, you may get the "content" but you won't get the feeling it's trying to engender; philosophy I think works much the same way.

Now this is not how a lot of people doing philosophy think about what they're doing. But people can be wrong about what they're doing!

I’ve heard this claim before, and it seems reasonably plausible that it is true. It doesn’t, however, explain why I’d want to do that.

Kant had some ideas. They were novel and influential. But they’re not novel anymore. Applying the algorithm “think like Kant” to the modern world is unlikely to come up with novel ideas; it will come up with ideas which look like Kant’s ideas applied to new situations, which I could just do by learning Kant’s ideas and applying them to new situations when it seemed appropriate. (Not to particularly pick on Kant.)

The only purpose that seems definitely useful for is inculcating an appreciation for philosophy(/philosophers). That would be a pretty good explanation for why philosophy departments do it, but not at all an explanation for why it is valuable.

I think this is exactly backwards. If you think the ideas are important, you should learn the content of the ideas. And that will let you come up with things that look like Kant's ideas applied to new situations.

The goal is to figure out the ways that Kant thought. To inhabit his worldview, to develop his cognitive tools. And then you can interact with the world in a Kantlike way. (Much like Christians want to interact with the world in a Christlike way.) It's not enough to be able to recite the Beatitutdes or the Categorical Imperative; you have to internalize Kant's attitudes, his approach to the world, so that those ways of acting and being come naturally to you.

When you engage with Kant at length you learn how to inhabit a Kantlike mien, a Kantlike attitude, a Kantlike inner life. You engage with Mill and learn how to be Mill-like, and react to things in the way Mill would. And then you engage with Hume and learn how to be Humean.

And since that's learning, not just a collection of facts and positions, but a disposition, it's hard to shortcut.

Now modern analytic philosophy isn't doing this. Modern analytic philosophy is a weird hybrid of linguistics and math that tries to make narrowly circumscribed declarative claims; and I think modern analytic philosophy does lend itself well to being summarized.

But when we're looking at the classical thinkers---remember that "philosophy" mostly wasn't a distinct identifiable field for most of human history. Aristotle talked about a lot of things. We don't study his biology, because that's been supplanted by modern biology textbooks. And we don't study his physics. And we don't study his political science.

What we still study directly is his philosophy. That's exactly the stuff that can't effectively be summarized and repackaged.

But why is it so valuable to learn to think like Kant specifically rather than Korsgaard or any number of other people. If the ideas are valuable, why are they so bound up in the idiosyncrasies of one specific person?

Like, the comparison to Christians trying to be Christlike is apt but not exactly flattering. Christians believe that Christ is metaphysically special and unique; that's a fundamentally religious position.

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott's blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren't going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it's written extremely well, but if you can't get most of the value of the philosopher's work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it's something else, something that's artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers' contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can't circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it's just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it's hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can't be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It's astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work's value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field's own capacity to understand and express itself.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let's try again.

There's a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until "that might not be efficiently extractable." I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously "procedural knowledge", it's clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it's not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it's much harder to "distill" procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I'm arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we've definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from "grappling with a long and weird text". Like, we've streamlined math education, but we can't streamline "doing exercises" out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you're inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about "doing the exercises" that you can't steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of "doing the exercises" is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that "grappling with a long and weird text" is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).

The practical skill I'm talking about isn't, like, "doing philosophy". Or even "grappling with a long and weird text".

The practical skill is thinking like Immanuel Kant. You spend a bunch of time embedded in Kant-thought, and that helps you learn how to create Kant-thought on your own. If you go read Christine Korsgaard, you're not marinating in Kant-thought; you're marinating in Korsgaard-thought.

Now Korsgaard-thought has a lot in common with Kant-thought, because Korsgaard has spent a lot of time marinating in Kant-thought. But it's still different.

And this is why, like, if you take a test in a philosophy class, the questions aren't "What do you think about X?" so much as "What would Kant/Hume/Bentham/whoever think about X?"

And then from this perspective, the point of a philosophy text is to guide you to think like the author. In much the same way that poetry wants to make you feel a certain way, philosophy wants to make you Or think a certain way. (And those two things aren't that different.) If you read a summary of a poem, you may get the "content" but you won't get the feeling it's trying to engender; philosophy I think works much the same way.

Now this is not how a lot of people doing philosophy think about what they're doing. But people can be wrong about what they're doing!

OK, I'd buy that.

But the implications of saying that's what philosophy is are pretty significant! Probably even more so than the philosophy as literature/poetry/art argument.

i feel like theres gotta be some sense in which the US has the largest population of people who are very far from its border. there are other bigger countries but theyre all mostly along the edge i think? if i wanted to rig this in the US' favor id pick maybe... 200 miles? like, "largest population more than 200 miles from its border". like 80% of countries cant even fit a 200 mile radius circle in them

@st-just said:

KIND OF but canada, china, and russia are all very big without a lot of inner people. i think

(In)famously, 2/3s of the US population live in the "border control zone", and that's only 100 miles. That does include a few place one might dispute are actually close to the border (notably Chicago, because it's reasonable to say Lake Michigan is not really a US border). But bumping to 200 miles presumably adds a bunch more, too. The US is in the same general position as China with most of its population living on the coast and a relatively empty interior.

But China is overall much larger, so I'm pretty sure the relatively empty interior ends up with more total. Like, just Chongqing and Hubei are 90 million, which almost gets you to 1/3 of the US population before you starting counting the parts of other provinces that qualify.

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott's blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren't going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it's written extremely well, but if you can't get most of the value of the philosopher's work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it's something else, something that's artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers' contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can't circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it's just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it's hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can't be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It's astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work's value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field's own capacity to understand and express itself.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let's try again.

There's a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until "that might not be efficiently extractable." I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously "procedural knowledge", it's clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it's not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it's much harder to "distill" procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I'm arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we've definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from "grappling with a long and weird text". Like, we've streamlined math education, but we can't streamline "doing exercises" out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you're inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about "doing the exercises" that you can't steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of "doing the exercises" is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that "grappling with a long and weird text" is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).