I bought a book called 'Thus Space Zarathustra', full of turgid language, making it a challenge to read. Nietzsche wrote the book in the 19th century, so he's old, and the book is old, but why translate it in faux-archaic English? People of the past didn't say 'here we are, living in the olden-days'; Nietzsche …

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I know two ways to be wrong very well, but people have more ways to be wrong, and I don't know the rest very well at all. But I'd like to. The first way to be wrong - and the most wrong someone can be - is to make a contradiction. People do this when they get their sums wrong, miscounting how much money to give to a …

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If we accept the premises of the Newcomb Problem, then it's not possible to receive $1,001,000 from playing this game. But you have the choice to take both boxes, and therefore the mystery-box is empty. Once you approach the boxes to make your decision, the boxes have been determined. From this point, we know that: (A) …

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Something stinks about 'social contract theory'. They way we live - the philosophers say - has the form of some contract where we relinquish the complete freedom to do just anything our bodies might do, and in return we acquire peace. This thing, where it's all chilled, and we have an understanding, is very much like a …

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I used to think of programming as something natively binary. 0's and 1's, [ True, False], just like the Propositional Logic in first year Philosophy. And file-systems do work that way on the disk - every picture is made of 0's and 1's. However, Philosophy, or Logic in general, has other systems. Some of them use 'True' …

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In recent years I've slowly changed my thinking on the concept of 'faith'. Or perhaps I've been thinking about attitudes, and just made very narrow use of a very broad word. Here's the thought: Someone with a cool mind, an impartial attitude, and some very basic arithmetic can optimize. It's fashionable to make fun of …

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I feel an unstated agreement among disparate civil society that one shouldn't preach. Breaching the preaching rule quickly looks like hypocrisy, because everyone has more work to do on themselves. Easier Said than Done Someone - usually young - preaching about veganism, trans-rights, the effects of aeroplanes on …

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Fallacies and critical thinking are all the rage in some circles, but I hear a lot about (and occasionally experience) people making 'logic-noises' who clearly haven't studied the subject. In fact, they seem unaware one can take a University course in the subject, as they've missed the first lesson every student of …

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Once in a while I hear of someone who's decided to not have children because of bad ideas. I don't want to argue that anyone should or should not have children, but I do want to remove those bad ideas. The bad ideas usually go something like this: "I have this condition, and I don't think I should inflict that on …

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Reading Plato's various Dialogues, I've come across a few very strange choices from the translators. Firstly, a pig could be dedicated as a 'sacrifice' to a god. I've read that people would then eat the 'sacrifice', and initially thought this was a cop-out - if you eat the meal, then you're not really sacrificing …

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