@johnwehrle It's on my radar, though that radar is rather crowded ....
As for fringe / cultish things: there is a long history of such schemes existing Largely To Separate Rich Idiots From Their Money, and it turns out that you can also find a through line through much cultish-thinking generally that it's a #MakeMOneyFast scheme.
All the more so if there is #InsanelyComplexReasoning behind the core notions, in which we find again that #SmartPeopleAreMoreEasilyFooled. I've been meaning to mention #Kant and his #CritiqueOfPureReason in this thread before, so let's do it now. If what Kant showed is that #reason is very often inferior to #epmiricism, that is direct #evidence and #experience, then the field of #GlobalCatastrophicRisk, for all the reasons (ahem, go with me here, please) given above is absolute fucking catnip because there can be no definitive evidence.
That's the fundamental problem of forecasting, prediction, and/or prophecy: it's inherently non-empirical. At best you can point to a track record of past successes, though that has some obvious issues:
Sufficiently vague / subjective predictions that judging is a crapshoot. A/K/A the Nostradamus and/or Cold Reading problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading (I suspect that much the success of current LLM Generative AI models has foundations here.)
The Stock Picker's Scam: Find 1,024 marks, send each a stock pick prediction, half saying it goes up, half down. Whichever proves correct, repeat the mailing to the remaining 512, then 256, then 128, then 64. Finally offer your next set of predictions for some fee to the final 32. Each of those 32 has just seen a record of five perfect predictions. What they don't see are the 992 others who received incorrect predictions. So a full prediction history is required.
Beyond that, as noted above, similarities, mechanisms, mathematical foundations (e.g., thermodynamics), etc., are the best guides we have.
Kant defines intuition at the start of the first chapter (after using it undefined throughout the introduction)
"In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition."
#Kant uses “intuition” in some unexpected ways. It’s a key concept in the #CritiqueOfPureReason and I’ve been trying to suss out his definition from context. I got curious about the original German term and if it might shed some light on the meaning. I think it does, though it also complicates it:
Now, from the introduction, after making the outrageous claim that "there cannot be a single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here," #Kant follows it up with
"While I am saying this I believe I perceive in the face of the reader an indignation mixed with contempt at claims that are apparently so pretentious and immodest..."
He never stops being like that! I love it.
While working on #CritiqueOfPureReason Kant kept sending letters to his friends that he was almost done with it. It would be ready in a few months. Definitely by Easter. Definitely by Easter *this year*
"Kant was confident that he would be ready to publish the work, which he now for the first time entitled a Critique of Pure Reason, in only three months! In fact, it would be almost nine years before the work with that title appeared."
🧵 Welcome to my Kant thread. In this interstitial week, I'm reading the Critique of Pure Reason, the Cambridge edition https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel-ebook/dp/B00D2WQ4TO
I'm going to stick my thoughts, questions, reflections, exclamations, and Kant-related shitposting in this thread. I will attempt not to shit up your feeds by posting things unlisted if I am on a tear. If you want to read all my Kant thoughts as they flow, use this post as the starting point.
The nice PDF of the Guyer/Wood translation is how I know I'd prefer that one.
I want an ebook because a PDF doesn't have the affordances I need, like text to speech, highliting, and notes.
I am unlikely to read a ponderous paper book. If it's an ebook, I'll actually read it, eventually. I am also a weirdo and like listening to the robot voice read books to me in text to speech.
Is it possible to get an ebook edtion of the Critique of Pure Reason translated by Guyer and Wood?
So far I have found:
Cambridge website -- only seeing paper
Amazon -- will happily sell you a 2.99 ebook groupled together with the Guyer/Wood hardback but is actually a dodgy repackage of a Internet Archive scan of another translation
Reddit -- Shares links to a high-quality PDF
The Philosophy Of Immanuel Kant
