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Man or God in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, September 13 2007 23:54 Profile #92
When in Rome ...

quote:
Originally written by Stillness:

Context context context!
Yes; but. What is context, after all, but a way of assigning to a statement a meaning which is not apparent in the statement alone?

Of course this is just how meaning works, and the very language that makes certain sounds or shapes carry meanings is itself a kind of context. But language is a context that is effectively fixed, as far as any individual is concerned. Other uses of context are inevitably more subjective.

If two statements seem to refer to the same thing and seem to imply different things about it, one can often resolve the apparent contradiction by interpreting one in the contextual light of the other. But which one gets to shed the contextual light, and which one gets to be contextually interpreted? It can in principle go either way.

I believe that there must be criteria, of some kind of overall cohesiveness, that can determine how good a contextual scheme is. I don't believe that anyone has ever elucidated this theory, but I think that in principle it must be possible. Some interpretations are just worse than others. They apply context in ways that seem more far-fetched, they make unimpressively expressed statements more important than striking ones, and so on.

But I think it is empirically clear, from the fact that a wide range of interpretations can survive, that the optimization of contextual weighting suffers badly from the annealing problem. For a large text there are usually lots of different contextual schemes that can provide a locally optimal understanding of the text. This means that departing from these locally optimal schemes a little bit, in any way, always makes your interpretation a bit less reasonable. So if one has threshed out such a locally optimal contextual interpretation of a text, then one is strongly tempted to consider it the objectively right interpretation. As long as you don't venture too far from the home ground of your own interpretation, you can rebut any challenge convincingly.

But make a big enough change, turn enough things around and take enough different perspectives, and you can have another locally optimal scheme, different from the first, but possibly even better as far as those elusive objective criteria are concerned. From the point of view of one locally optimal contextual scheme, another one looks like a weird parallel universe, where all the familiar things are still there, but all their relationships are wrong; and yet somehow it all hangs together uncannily well, on its own terms.

How to choose between different locally optimal interpretations of the same text? That's a hard problem, which usually can't be resolved by just examining the text itself more closely.

So the role of context is not exactly Biblical authority's ace in the hole. In one sense it is its Achilles' heel, because it effectively means that there are many Bibles, even if we agree on the same text.

For me, this does not mean that the Bible is unimportant. It is rather the sense in which the Bible is, as the preachers say, a 'living word'. Though its letter has been fixed for many centuries, its spirit still moves and shifts today.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
noob info in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, September 13 2007 03:45 Profile #124
Alorael was not criticizing Gauldoth's post. He was pointing out Azuma's incorrect use of 'FYT'. If you write 'Fixed Your Typo', you're supposed to edit what you quote into something you consider more accurate. In practice this is usually taken as an excuse for putting words into other people's mouths for sarcastic effect. Alorael thus corrected Azuma's inept FYT post by making it mutilate Gauldoth's quote more gratuitously.

Alorael is a professional driver on a closed referential loop. Do not try this at home.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Man or God in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, September 12 2007 20:23 Profile #76
It's as hard to get someone to understand you with a long post as it is to hit someone with a telephone pole.

"A telephone pole is a long post, and vice versa."

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
noob info in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, September 12 2007 20:09 Profile #118
quote:
Originally written by Dikiyoba:

But if you're not a transvestite Korean businessman, then how is Dikiyoba supposed to tell you apart from all the other 50-odd pedestrian-sniping Alaskan pedophiles?
Of course you can't. Camouflage is one of the sniper's basic skills.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Man or God in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, September 12 2007 06:16 Profile #71
God is clearly not evil enough to make human life all hell all the time, or even evil enough to ensure that it is never good. But the sort of negligent evil that leaves rat poison lying around in the nursery, that is still on the table. So are occasional fits of outright malice, against the unfortunate few.

The universe is a product that is dangerous even when used as directed. There's a liability there that isn't easy to dodge.

About Genesis: my comments had nothing to do with Cain or Eve. My point was that punishing murder is clearly enforcing justice, but punishing the disobedience of an arbitrary command is more like tyranny. My inference from this was that acquiring the knowledge of good and evil must not have been disastrous just because God had arbitrarily forbidden it, but that God had rather forbidden it because it was in some way inherently disastrous.

Parent tells child not to touch the hot stove; child disobeys; child gets burned. It is not that the parent burns the child to punish the crime of disobedience!

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Man or God in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, September 11 2007 23:49 Profile #65
This is still a telephone pole, but I think I agree with most of it. I'm more skeptical about miraculous healings, but then nothing funny ever happened to my legs.

Inasmuch as the original topic was the Bible, I would say that I find Synergy's picture in the Bible. And not by arbitrary squinting that is bound to project my views into the Bible, but just by not assuming that the Bible is a children's book. That doesn't mean it's a cryptic maze that James Joyce might have made. But God did make Joyce, so it's not like God is a simple soul with simple thoughts. The universe is a subtle place, and a revelation from the creator of the universe can only be so simple, without being false.

Just what was it with the Bible's first moral rule? I hope that God does not simply overlook crimes like murder, but eating a particular fruit hardly seems criminal. Even if some sort of psychoactive vegetable really did have an impact on early humans, as is perhaps just conceivable, the literal story about fruit is clearly unimportant.

What the story is saying is that the 'knowledge of good and evil', whatever that is, somehow necessarily entails mortality, and is incompatible with the idyllic existence represented by Eden. I understand that uncertainty about ancient Hebrew idiom makes it unclear whether the 'good and evil' phrase implies moral awareness, or simply heightened awareness ('good and evil' meaning 'everything'). Some threshold level of consciousness clearly is a prerequisite for mortality in the sense we really care about: the death of an ant is not the death of a someone. On the other hand it's hard to believe that God would forbid consciousness in general. In any case, the story suggests some basic derailment in the development of human consciousness. It's not like that's implausible on the evidence, or that even today we have much more to go on about the evolution of consciousness.

Opinion has long been divided over whether we are supposed to think that this derailment was God the quarterback getting sacked, or just God dropping back for a Hail Mary. So to say.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Man or God in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, September 11 2007 11:20 Profile #57
Arguing at great length is like attacking with a telephone pole.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
noob info in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, September 11 2007 04:02 Profile #96
Imban noticed something funny one day.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
noob info in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, September 10 2007 20:25 Profile #88
Alorael is actually a collective account used by quite a number of older members. That's why the PDN changes so frequently. And the signatures are generated automatically by a sophisticated bot program. Obviously, no single normal person could possibly generate so many distinct signature lines, let alone the posts that preceded them.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
What have you been reading lately? in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, September 10 2007 13:34 Profile #491
I actually got some reading done this month. The two middle volumes of Greg Keyes's current tetralogy. It's wandering and wobbling a bit, but not nosediving like his last series, and I think there's a good chance that he'll finish it well.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. It's true that the protagonist is the least memorable character, but it's a good story.

One I really liked: The Lies of Locke Lamora by one Scott Lynch. It is apparently the first book of a planned series of seven, and there are movie plans in the works, but there is no Hogwarts. We'll see how it goes, but it's a promising start. What I liked was how consistently the author explains something by telling an interesting little story, instead of just telling us that things stand thus and so. Odd customs of the city get explained with anecdotes from its history, and fights with edged weapons become micro-stories of their own, with plots and practically with characters. This makes everything more credible and immersive.

The story is a tad gruesome; any movies that do get made will not be rated G.

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Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
What have you been reading lately? in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Sunday, September 9 2007 22:59 Profile #486
Funny book, Dune. I was tremendously impressed when I first read it at age 14 or so, but by ten years later I was disgusted by the consistent and obtrusive misogyny. Authors can have hang-ups like anyone else and still produce fine books, but once I noticed how warped Dune is in this way, it was impossible to overlook. And interstellar feudalism whose only rationale is hoary space opera convention doesn't age well, either.

There are a few cool and genuinely original elements in the book, and it must be some sort of archetype because I think of it as the progenitor of a prolific genre, yet I can't actually name many books that follow its pattern. So it somehow still seems like an important book, for anyone interested in sci-fi as a genre. Just seriously flawed.

I might be able to enjoy it happily now as camp, a sort of sci-fi Hadrian VII. But it's probably not quite consistently outrageous enough, and it's a bit long.

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Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but... in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Sunday, September 9 2007 20:15 Profile #15
How shiny is A5? Can you see your own reflection?

Well, would you believe that it replaces the old character graphics with pictures of the player taken by the iSight camera?

What's amazing is the algorithm it uses to make slith and nephil faces out of them.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Monarch's Notes in Geneforge 4: Rebellion
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Sunday, September 9 2007 11:16 Profile #1
Keep looking around. There's a cupboard not too far away.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 4 Internet Patch in Geneforge 4: Rebellion
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, September 8 2007 04:00 Profile #4
A mantain is a really tall guy.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 3 - Problems and Lankan in Geneforge Series
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, September 8 2007 00:35 Profile #15
And if Jeff would put that into a pop-up, I'd be happy.

Edit: Not ecstatic, mind.

[ Saturday, September 08, 2007 00:36: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 4 Internet Patch in Geneforge 4: Rebellion
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, September 8 2007 00:29 Profile #1
A softwere is a person who, every full moon, turns into a teddy bear.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Heads will roll in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, September 8 2007 00:12 Profile #20
quote:
Originally written by Nioca:

... all the spots where he starts ranting that everyone is evil and will be destroyed by Cubic what-cha-call-it, or the points where he's swearing himself into incoherence and calling himself 'most cubic and wisest human'.

... by that reasoning, it'd be more accurate to say that the Earth has 24 days every 24 hour period, or 1 day per hour. ... Or you could divide it into 86,400 sections ... ad nauseam.
Well, yes, but apart from all that, he's right. Finding a crackpot who's right even a tiny bit is like watching a baby roll over. For them, it's impressive.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
You Choice, Your Music.. in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, September 7 2007 22:19 Profile #17
Hey, I really like the BNL' latest album. I also really like an acronym with a single apostrophe at the end.

Moxy Fruvous was great, but I guess by now they've dwindled for me too, into just the King of Spain on my playlist. Oh, and Green Eggs and Ham.

While we're collecting Canadian bands with odd lyrics, what about the Crash Test Dummies?

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Heads will roll in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, September 7 2007 22:10 Profile #16
Buried under more silly invective than is entirely reasonable, Dr Ray's point seems to be that in the course of one rotation of the earth each quadrant of the earth sees an entire day. So each rotation brings four days in one. If the earth did not rotate, each quadrant of the earth would forever see the same period of the day (midnight, noon, morning, evening), which together would make up only one full day. So rotation produces four days from one.

So by cracky he's right.

'By cracky'?

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Spiderweb Archives? in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, September 7 2007 08:26 Profile #19
quote:
Originally written by Gauldoth Half-Dead:

quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

EDIT: You see nothing here.
It's a holy sign! The return of TM!
This understanding of holiness needs work.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
What are you learning right now? in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, September 6 2007 21:17 Profile #42
I think there's a lot to be said for taking summer jobs that are as different as possible from what you plan to do as a career. They may be your only chance to connect with ideas, experiences and people from outside your future rut — which not only make you a more rounded person, but can be surprisingly useful later on. Also, of course, broadening your horizons reduces the chance of finding yourself wondering wistfully, in your retirement, whether maybe you should have chosen a completely different life. Or at least it may make for a healthier kind of wistfulness.

In the short run it can certainly hurt you, to throw away a third of your youth on things that don't help kickstart your career. But it's the unsquandered youth that is truly wasted.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
What are you learning right now? in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, September 6 2007 07:10 Profile #25
Yes, factor analysis is where statistics makes its bid to rule the world. Disraeli had no idea.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
New Spiderweb product idea in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, September 6 2007 07:04 Profile #39
This is where casual Fridays could contribute so much.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 3 - Problems and Lankan in Geneforge Series
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, September 5 2007 20:54 Profile #13
The fact that Lankan never even considers that you might be able to deal with the rogues is indeed a weakness in the game. It's an example of the single biggest weakness I find in all Spiderweb games so far, except perhaps G4 — and of course in most other RPGs. The player's levelling up has no in-game rationale, and thus the plot cannot deal in any reasonable way with the single biggest phenomenon that transpires over the course of the game, namely the PC's advancement from peon to demigod.

Why does the PC gain so much power so quickly? Why can't everyone else just go out and bash some monsters, level up a couple dozen times, and then come back and solve all their problems themselves?

In G1 it's actually not so bad, in that the PC is at least respected, although prematurely, as a Shaper. In G2 and G3, everyone treats you as a helpless apprentice, except when they're giving you missions too big for a Shaper army. When you accomplish these, they still treat you as a helpless apprentice. It's as if you're Clark Kent. Lankan seems to assume that the most you can do is talk to people and carry canisters, when in fact, of course, you're the reason he doesn't need no stinking Shapers. There could definitely have been an option to tell Lankan, Relax, go home, I'll handle this. Then after succeeding you should be able to dictate peace to Lankan and Diwaniya.

One thing that most of the Geneforge games seem to imply, without ever being really clear about it, is that there are actually a lot more rogues or rebels or whatever than the ones that you encounter as a player. It's as though 90% of the bad critters are holed up between the zones somewhere, and can only be cleared out by huge Shaper armies, in the ending texts. So in this sense the player's power is still limited. But this explanation only goes so far, since you can definitely eliminate the spawners or creators or whatever that are the source of the monsters. And it's only rather weakly implied, at best.

In G4 people seem to assume consistently that as Lifecrafter you are a force to be reckoned with, and that you are quite abnormal. But given the Geneforge theme of gaining power, G4 could have been still more explicit about just why you gain power so much more rapidly than anyone else, and how other people deal with that evident fact. Even G4 never takes any notice of the fact that you are not just abnormally effective, but are actually gaining power at an enormous rate, such that you'll be able to toast named Drakons within a few months of having to run from rogue worms.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
To whom it may concern. in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, September 5 2007 11:03 Profile #2
Dikiyoba's episodes are pretty much eyewitness accounts of actual events. Written shortly after the events happened by a participant and immediate observer, they are invaluable records of some of the most remarkable recent times in the history of this community.

The only really important inaccuracy in the episodes has been the subject of fierce debate. Dikiyoba omitted all mention of how bad the Ur-Noob smelled. Some people object to this suppression of a fact that no-one who was there can ever forget. Dikiyoba's supporters insist that they be allowed to try.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00

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