Also sprach ryan93

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I may have made my walker go in circles as a toddler, or maybe my tricycle when a little older, but I do remember riding my first bicycle in tight circles on the concrete back patio of my parents' house for hours at at time when I was a little boy. I would ride first one way, and switch to go the other way. If I was really slow and careful I think there was room to do figure eights on the patio. As a teenager I frequently rode a ten-speed bicycle (without a guitar) on long day trips (thirty to fifty miles) throughout the county where I grew up. In my late teens I started playing guitar. Then somehow in my early twenties I found I could do both at the same time. It is the closest thing to Nirvana I have achieved in this lifetime, a meditation in motion that temporarily relieves some of the physiological and psychological stress of my life (the sensory overload issues and the hyperactive mind).

I have ridden at least twenty-five thousand miles this way, the past thirty years all on the same bicycle, the past twenty years with the same guitar, writing hundreds of original songs a few dozen of which (the older ones) are available for free on my official web site. I am fifty years old now and currently am playing guitar and singing better than ever before in my life, better than anything yet recorded or posted of me anywhere. I badly need to be recorded (as opposed to being recorded badly, which is all that's happened so far). Most of my best songs have not yet been recorded, and my earlier stuff badly needs to be re-recorded (not re-recorded badly, lol).

As much as I want my sounds to be recorded, it is even more important that I be filmed doing what I do. The novelty is that I sing and play guitar (and write original songs) while riding a bicycle at the same time. ALEX! I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP! I may not be the world's greatest guitar player, singer (but I'm not called The Bicycling Singer anyway), or song writer, but I'm not bad. Some of my music and lyrics are as good or better than many well-known popular songs.

On the subject of linguistics, in 1989 I wrote a song about some of the limitations of language called What Can I Say?. In 1991 I wrote a song about the evolution "controversy" called Evolution. Those are some of my better older songs that are relevant to this discussion, although in both cases they need to be re-recorded professionally to sound decent.

Took a look at "what can I say" lyrics.

Interesting I have assembled a fairly large body of lyrics aimed at eventual use for Number 1 Son. A fair percentage focussed on the futility of communication.. Not incompatible. I may fire you off a few - they are on the other machine.

Um.... everything I see in terms of the theoretical structures put forward has always shown me lines of debate. If an idea is accepted, there is no debate, but there is also no real interest as nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. On contested areas though, where we still grow, theoretic structures and their use is always open to interpretation and exploring this interpretation is probably more important than all the data-mining one would want.


Well.... the decision isn't arbitrary. It isn't ill-considered. Even further, an a priori decision isn't necessarily bad. (Note: Terminological issue possibly involved, as a priori is major in philosophy and philosophy is important)


I am not against independence, but I am against free-wheeling madness, and to me that is exactly what is being promoted. I can understand using accepted methods to find an unaccepted conclusion. Even trying to improve methods using other accepted ideas. So on and so forth, but I am not an epistemological anarchist. To put visions on the same level as peer-reviewed study though, that seems to me to be a push towards anarchy. We have rejected a lot of the methods we reject for valid reasons. They may act as inspiration, but they cannot do the heavy lifting.


Except I don't think that this is what's going on though. What you propose isn't just "let's be empirical", it is more like a rejection of the strict standards that need to be promoted. The empirics on why we can't accept voodoo practices as scientific inquiry are pretty well-settled. The problems of the epistemology of religions are not things where we have an open empirical question. We have an obvious empirical failure as noted by the nigh-infinite divergence in religious beliefs and practices, and the failure of any method to show itself superior except in the minds of those who are already predisposed to believe it.(and even then, they often can't get more than a handful to agree with them, or give much logical coherence to their framework)

It could only be this debate if unsettled issues were involved in the matter, or if the consensus view had more flaws than it did.


That's actually probably the best response to give to any layperson. Unless you are a astronomical expert, you probably do not have the proper epistemic authority to begin a criticism of a mainstream consensus, and that's that. I mean, for all of the Gallileo's we have a few dozen(possibly hundred or thousand) more Ray Comforts, and frankly we need these idiots to shut up and stop lying to folks. The few Gallileos, being that they are scientific experts, won't be impacted if we get rid of the obvious fools.

Yes. GIGO.

GIGO is very true. But I may point out that rarely before running the program do we know a priori which data will be garbage.

I have complained elsewhere about computational linguists who count this and that and either come up with absurdities OR with truisms - proving that Hemingway's sentences are shorter than Faulkner's - an actual study.

When the garbage comes out, we toss the data. But if we KNOW the outcome, there is little point running the experiment except to train new recruits.

Well, right... and that's why we have the standards we do on knowledge. It isn't as if science were born out of the muck yesterday, but rather our processes in gaining knowledge are very old processes, and our knowledge is in many ways time-tested. We discard inputs with good reasons, this includes shamanistic bird-signs, as it isn't as if we've never tried or used bird-signs before, we've just found the idea to be nonsense.

And so the drug companies go to the Amazon and New Guinea to find out what the curanderos are treating their patients with these days.

Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Almost everything Science knows was arrant nonsense a while ago. I say we keep rummaging through the attic to see if great grandpapa threw out anything interesting.

I am extremely impressed!

If I could do that, I would have posted that exhibition eons ago.