Cerebralicious

So, um, I’m closing down this Tumblr, and indeed my personal blogging in general, and moving on.

It’s not that I haven’t had a jolly old time here, because I have, or that I have any kind of beef with most of you guys. (Which actually is the problem: y’all’re, if anything, too damn interesting; and I’m going to miss a few of y’all quite a lot in my daily argument-stream. You know who you are.) It’s just that between making a living at my day job(s) and spending all this time arguing matters political and matters ethical and generally setting the world to rights, I’m both spending a great deal of time, and consuming most of that ineffable quantizable willpower I need in order to get stuff done, and that’s impinging badly on the thing I really want to do, which is my writing.

And since I can’t stop earning a living, alas, and a chap’s got to pursue his dreams, the blogging’s got to go.

For those of you who have enjoyed my writing/worldbuilding/conlang posts and would like to keep following them, they’re moving to a new blog here (RSS feed here), with a Google+ page here. Please do feel free to follow me there; your comments will continue to be welcomed, as ever.

I’m also over there personally here, where I’ll no doubt continue to post some random stuff of vague interest to some, although I don’t plan on returning to habits argumentative; must focus on the writing, dammit.

So, with that, farewell, and to all the chaps and chapesses with whom I’ve had heated arguments - or heated agreements - over the last year, keep it up! You guys are awesome.

Just misclicked, and answered privately an ask I meant to post publically.

And, of course, there’s absolutely no way to recall that, or even to get a copy of the text to be posted publically.

Stab stab stabbity stab.

These are, note, not the rules for valid and sound arguments, nor are they the rules of fair or reasonable debates. These are simply the rules, unfair, unbalanced, and arguably unmedicated as they may be, which the author of this blog chooses to apply in order to cull the discussions which he might have on it down to those in which he can sustain a degree of interest adequate to justify the time spent on having them. This blog and the mind behind it are, after all, not public utilities.

1. I will cite anything I reference that is obscure enough, or novel enough, in my opinion, not to constitute common knowledge.

2. However, no, I will not cite common knowledge, especially on matters of fact, for you. Yes, I have high standards, given the state of education these days, for what constitutes common knowledge, but I am (a) assuming my audience constitutes the rational, the sane, and the philosophic, and (b) an elitist ass. Thus, I feel no need to provide citations for things including but not limited to formal logic, objective reality, pancritical empiric rationalism, the scientific method, relativity, quantum physics, evolution, free market microeconomics, game theory, thermodynamics, the basic status quo in any field of science, or anything else that can be presumed to be within the knowledge base of the competently educated individual, or at the very least something that they ought to be able to - and ought to wish to - find out for their damn selves.

(Nor am I terribly interested in debating most of those at length, because your argument is with reality, not with me, and it’s not my job to fix your broken epistemics. Go put your ideas into practice and then come back and discuss the experience with me, m’kay?)

((Nor, doubly, am I interested in proving my honesty to you. If you think I’m mistaken, and I freely admit that I may very well be, raise that point. If you think I’m lying, bugger off. Leaving aside all questions of my personal ethics, I’m not stupid enough to lie to people capable of calling me out on it, and I wouldn’t condescend to lie to the rest of you.))

3. In addition, anything which is found in popular science books, on the science pages of the New York Times or other major newspapers, has its own non-stub Wikipedia article, or appears on the first couple of pages of Google/Bing results is deemed to fall into the category of trivially autodidactible things the reader should not expect to be educated on.

4. If you really, really want an exception to rule #2 and/or rule #3, bear in mind that you have to compete with all the other things I do for money, because I’m not invested in counting coup in Internet arguments for its own sake. I argue because I find it interesting, and assembling common-knowledge bases for people disinclined to do their own research is neither interesting nor fun.

Which is to say, that kind of education is something that I bill at office rates; and my research services for this purpose bill out at $65/hour, 10 hour minimum, payable in advance.

5. Taikong suoyou de xingqiu saijin wo de pigu was I ever not asking what the Authorities thought.

I share my life with 5,000 physical books, an untold number of e-books, a perfectly functional Internet connection, and another exceptionally well-read and highly intelligent human being. This being the case, I’ve got my arguing with the philosophers of the ages over and done with long ago, and I’m appallingly uninterested in recapitulating it. This being the case, I’m only really interested in engaging with original ideas, here - maybe not entirely de novo, but at least with the writer’s own intellectual spin on them.

Any argument that comes in the form of an unadorned quotation definitely doesn’t count, especially since it doesn’t give any hint as to whether the argument has passed through the brain of the quoter at any point. But more to the point, if I wanted to argue with a book, I’d buy the book, and hell, there’s a good chance that I have the book. What do you think?

6. Extra specifically on this point, I am militantly uninterested in playing the citing-papers-taken-out-of-context game in which we throw examples of the ad auctoritatem fallacy at each other until one of us gets tired and or bored enough to give up and the other one does the victory dance. If I was interested in doing that, I’d go join a “believer” or “skeptic” faction on a climate-change site with the rest of the nutjobs.

7. The apparent end of a discussion may well mean any of “I’m busy, and leaving this until later”, “I’m busy, and may well have forgotten about this discussion”, “In my opinion, either consensus or a point of irreconcilable disagreement has been achieved”, “You’re insane”, or “Bored now”. It does not, therefore, unambiguously or even necessarily probably mean “You’ve won”.

If you really care that much, ask.

Worked even aller through the night than usual. Nothing but sleep ensues.

How time flies when you’re having fun!

…is very nice, very nice indeed. Especially the new way it handles notifications, although for my money the new storyboard feature for developers is the real killer “app” - for me, anyway.

A cautionary note, though, to my fellow iOS developers on Tumblr; it would appear that something in the upgrade breaks the ability to view the Tumblr dashboard in the Tumblr iPhone app, or indeed in plain old Safari. Individual tumblrs still work just fine, of course, but no dashboard, nohow.

(If you’re reading this, Tumblr staff, you might want to get on to Apple about that? Or not do whatever wacky web thing causes it?)

It still posts fine from the app, though, so unless you do your reading on your iDevice too, it shouldn’t slow you down all that much.

Quick one for those waiting for posts from me: sorry, folks, but I’m going to need to ask y’all to wait until Monday or so for replies. Looks like I’m not going to be available all weekend.

I’d just like to give a quick shout-out and thanks to my many awesome, thoughtful, erudite responders, questioners, and commenters, even - no, especially - the ones I disagree with on various points, because while I may argue with y’all vigorously on occasion, I really appreciate a good argument and something to think about. Thanks, y’all!

(This being rather pointed up with recent reblogging demonstrating the rather more common form of response one gets on the internet; namely, vomiting on your keyboard and pretending it’s an answer. Especial thanks for not doing that.)