Contemplations

* Nock thinks that because there is a greater amount of literature (or content in our modern consumer parlance), the quality of all of it is hurt. I've always just imagined a normal distribution that gets larger -- meaning that the more stuff that exists, the more good stuff exists. Is blogging in the short-thought format actually a bad thing from the perspective of developing quality ideas and writing about them?

* A lot of people I know find Vegas crass, shallow, and vulgar and want nothing to do with it. I find that sort of thing fascinating and entertaining. Our experience is the same but with completely different reactions. Not that they're wrong, but it's a part of humanity that I embrace rather than turn away from.

* What is the foundation of ethics without Deity or natural rights? Most modern philosophy focuses on some kind of utilitarian model, but that leads to all sorts of lame-assedness and degradation. A more interesting foundation might be in Aristotelian virtue ethics, which no one has really dealt with since some monk hung Divine Will around its neck a few centuries back. (If someone has, please let me know!)

* Truth, Virtue, and all other sorts of Big Words are best understood as statistical realities. This is the main reason why Fortuna is so damn influential. The Law of Large Numbers is profoundly important, and failure to respect it leads to all sorts of errors, like the gambler's fallacy and belief in luck. The higher the number of trials, the closer the percentage holds to the mean, but the absolute amount of deviation from the mean increases. This is something Gladwell is on to in his latest book.

I'm in the middle of all sorts of life events right now, including moving to a new apartment in Henderson. I plan to come back to the bloggy thing in another week, but if I decide not to I'll let you know.

More layout changes

Been working on this instead of writing posts. I like the color spectrum because it illustrates the distributional nature of things, which is one of the core truths I'm trying to understand better.

I'm thinking of using tags, but that means going through the drudgery of tagging my old posts. Poor me.

Also, I decided to stop worrying about posting something all the time just for the sake of posting. It turns blogging into a real drag instead of a joy. But I do have a lot of free-floating junk banging around in my skull so I still plan on posting almost daily. But more is worse, not better as Nock informs me. Feed back is always appreciated, of course.

Anyways, more anon.

Blog rules

One of the great things about writing a blog is that, at its best, it's a way to develop ideas through writing in short snippets with feedback from intelligent readers. It's a lot more communicative precisely because it's less comprehensive and open to constant revision. Over the last couple of days I wrote a pretty lengthy and sourced piece for the blog, but I've decided to chuck most of it out of the window because it was turning into an academic essay. Blogging is not useful when you try to write too much in a single post. The way I'd rather approach this is to paint the broad strokes for your perusal and fill in the details as the ideas develop.

Comments are heavily encouraged. I am a big believer in the benefits of open source thinking, but let me also make it clear that I'm not interested in being a referee. Votes are boring and thoughts are gold. This is a House of snark and iconoclasm and crimethink, so there are no ideas that are out of bounds. If you're easily offended or even just normally offended, then please move along -- nothing to see here. I may delete comments just because I think they're stupid.

I also may go back and edit a post, which is often considered a no-no in the blogosphere but I have my own goals for this project that may not be the same as other bloggers. When I do edit, I'll note that it's updated but I may not necessarily leave in the redacted part if it's not addressed in the comments as part of the discussion.

So please participate, and have fun dammit! Also, be sure to use the Google reader link. I don't often link the cool stuff as a blog post because I share it with you there. You can use it even if you don't have a Google account.

First Post

Since I've been bugging youse with links and commentary via email for so long, I figured that it was time to ditch the '90s distribution model and let it all hang out here on teh IntarW3bs. Now, rather than having my fascinating, erudite ideas delivered to your email box in random, unbidden spurts, I'll just post them here and leave it up to y'all to read or not.

The plan is to start blogging on April 19th, but I set the damn thing up early for administrative purposes -- so g'way and come back later!