Disqus - Latest Comments for mills

Re: Meta is Murder - Mills Baker's Internet Haus of Cards

Mills Baker — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:35:09 -0000

I agree, but I didn't want to aggravate the various sympathies any real-world examples would necessarily entail.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/17039173878

Mills Baker — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:14:55 -0000

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words a lot!

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Dani Lierow was so severely neglected for the....

Mills Baker — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:51:42 -0000

That's great news; I hope she's at peace!

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Disclaimer / Claimer.

Mills Baker — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 14:06:47 -0000

Thanks Hilker! You know, I don't really feel that way, but I've always liked you a lot and will take your word for it for the time being. I'm really glad to sort-of-Internet-know you (and your family); I feel like we're some old-school Tumblr people now!

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Landscapes by Frank Walter (1926-2009), shared....

Mills Baker — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 19:10:51 -0000

Yeah, it's pretty good.

Re: Dave Parker: If You Hear Any Noise

Mills Baker — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 16:24:02 -0000

I'm sure you're already aware of this item, but if not I feel like it's important to let you know: http://www.homage.com/store...

Re: heaven spent

Mills Baker — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:51:18 -0000

I always love commenting here because then it doesn't say "0 readers gave a shit" afterward.

Re: heaven spent

Mills Baker — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:50:53 -0000

I missed it in theaters too, but the nice upside is: it's on Netflix Instant Watch right now! If you see it, please let me know what you think!

Re: In The People's Republic of San Francisco: Dog Walkers Must Now Be Licensed

Mills Baker — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 19:53:16 -0000

There are lots of things about the name "Mills" that are no good, starting with the fact that the word is merely the plural form of a noun describing a particular type of agricultural / industrial structure. But man: if "abortion mills" is going to be a phrase like "puppy mills," I'm changing my name to "Bro" and calling it a day.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. This photo was taken in 2003, when she was just a....

Mills Baker — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:49:12 -0000

Hey! Thanks for the sentiments; I appreciate them a lot. I know you've seen a lot of her through the years!

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. This photo was taken in 2003, when she was just a....

Mills Baker — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:18:53 -0000

Thank you, Lacey.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. This photo was taken in 2003, when she was just a....

Mills Baker — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:18:32 -0000

Hey John; thanks for the kind words. I know you know what it's like, and I appreciate them very much.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Free Will and the Fallibility of Science.

Mills Baker — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:55:58 -0000

I am not a dualist; I believe that mind is matter or energy, or some other scientifically-approachable element of the physical multiverse as we can understand it. I don't understand emergence well enough —or really anything well enough— to have any sense of what the mind really is, and I accept that it is therefore at the moment a mystery. But I doubt that there is any quality which in principle will keep it a mystery indefinitely.

That is: there will come a day when mind is understood as we understand other physical / information systems. As such, mind, like nearly all things, is subject to scientific inquiry.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Free Will and the Fallibility of Science.

Mills Baker — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:47:41 -0000

Straight roads don't seem perfectly straight to us, then turn out to have been Mobius strips all along (in the manner that, say, solid objects turn out to be nearly empty); I see what you mean about abstraction, rounding, and even qualia; but scientific theories typically don't proffer explanations that are knowing approximations. Perhaps among some scientists —and observers like you— it is commonly known that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity are deep misconceptions, false while being so true that we can make spaceflight calculations based on them. It seems interesting and surprising to me that Newtown's laws could enable the construction of the most technologically-advanced structures humanity could imagine, but nevertheless be utterly wrong, particularly in what they describe and imply. An approximately straight road is pretty straight; the universe described by Newton doesn't exist.

I am surprised by your other argument. It is true that something is only moral or not according to morality, moral philosophy, metaphysics; at the moment, science has little (not nothing!) to say about these matters, although we can't predict whether that will always be so. It is not true that free will is a comparable concern.

Free will and determinism are issues that relate closely to the nature of time, a real scientific concern. Should there be no free will, should determinism be the order of the universe, time would be "symmetrical," as it is in Newtonian systems, and the future would be fixed by the past and present. Human intentionality would be an illusion, decisions would not need to be made, the development of science itself would seem immaterial or disconnected from any effort or reflection on the part of an individual. Free will is the human experience of the openness of the future, the multiplicity of probabilities and possibilities an entity moving through time —with the "arrow of time"— encounters and can pursue, participate in, ignore, etc. Many other scientific issues are involved, too: can knowledge act upon the universe? Is there a teleology of scientific progress, and according to what does it vary?

Last: science does endeavor to explain how human experience and life work, so that even if time were itself somehow unrelated to this question, and even if Prigogine, Deutsch, Einstein, Penrose, Hawking, Poincare, et alia didn't find the issue of free will to be worthy of scientific attention, we might still convince a few psychologists to take a look at it. It affects jurisprudence, morality, everything!

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Free Will and the Fallibility of Science.

Mills Baker — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:01:55 -0000

I'm not sure I follow your objections. While I am fond of the idea of "non-overlapping magisteria," I can't see why "free will isn't a scientific question." One must be a dualist, I believe, to claim that some operant aspect of human psychology is not a subject to scientific analysis; if one isn't a dualist, free will must be part of the material, detectable, rationally-analyzable world or an illusion of phenomenology, scientifically accessible only as part of the study of human psychology. In this latter view, since free will is an illusion, one must regard the future as more or less "fixed."

You are correct that I don't emphasize the progress of science, its improvement, its weird teleology. I have done so before, and Deutsch touches on it in his quoted remarks: "Einstein's Misconception of Gravity is an improvement on Newton's Misconception," etc. But the real reason is that I think people take that for granted to the detriment of understanding how provisional science is; it's the simple old fallacy of favoring the present. People are aware of the succession of scientific paradigms, in some sense; they are aware that they improve; but they think that the present consensus views of the world are permanently true.

Also, I was particularly interested in —and maybe failed to emphasize!— how strange this ability a scientific theory has to be both true and false is, how unpredictable the recontextualization of a theory is. What deeper truth will make relativity look partial, incomplete, an ill-fitting metaphorical abstraction? That seems neat to think about.

This is the big question:

And it seems not unreasonable to think that we might be close to reaching, in at least some areas of knowledge, the kinds of approximations so close to the truth that no practical counterexample could ever occur, even if metaphysically there might be room for error still.

You know my philosophy is not as sound as it needs to be for precise reasoning, but: I believe Deutsch claims that this is not in fact so, that the succession of explanatory theories asymptotically approaching "truth" will both get ever-closer and remain far away and improving. I can't clearly remember that part, though, so I'm not at all sure! Obviously we can understand some domain nearly to completion; what we can't say is how deeper theories will someday revise that understanding (think of the mastery of chemistry that eventually necessitated the mastery of physics, and which physics theories therefore revise periodically*).

*Dad joke.

Re: Millsin' About - San Francisco: Creep City

Mills Baker — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:21:36 -0000

Well, like, obviously.

Re: Millsin' About - San Francisco: Creep City

Mills Baker — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:07:07 -0000

What? The problem is the gaffling, not the wealth of the gaffler; you and lots of commenters just short-circuit to your most reliable form of criticism: this guy must be complaining about the poor.

Do you think poor people like getting gaffled? I see plenty of working-class folks waylaid on buses by lecturing strangers; they don't want to move to Marin, they want to not be used as an audience by self-involved jerks. I don't like being used as a prop or an audience either. I don't know who does. I don't care if it's Jack Dorsey talking about reforming currency or a wino talking about women. I don't care if he's intoxicated by money, liquor, utopianism, religiosity, success, heroin, the lean startup movement, or anything else: the gaffler's artifice and disrespect to his fellow-persons is the obnoxious problem here.

When Camus said "Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes," he should have added that anyone can be a tyrant: tyrannizing someone's attention is its own little act of abuse, the consequence of self-centeredness (which isn't a vice "just because" but due to its likelihood of prompting just this sort of rudeness).

And Odelan —who prefaced his comment by saying "I am French" to announce his authority on the matter— is mistaken. I've lived in lots of cities, large and small, and I've traveled plenty. And even if it "isn't uncommon for a city," it's more common here: that's the whole point! And If you truly think there are as many pontificating bloviators assailing passerby with their monologues and demands in other cities, well: we disagree. I think there are fewer in New Orleans, New York, etc.

Disagreeing about whether there are more creeps here or elsewhere is one thing; telling me to move to Marin because the jerks will "tend to be more affluent" is just such typical garbage, though: an easy rhetorical tack to take which you yourself must have known was irrelevant. No one cares about how affluent a jerk is; most of us resent rich jerks more than poor jerks anyway.

AND WHO DOESN'T STOP TO THINK THAT THEY'RE THE ISSUE? I consider it beneath mentioning; this is my argument; of course I could be the issue.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. It Doesn't Matter if They Say They Like You.

Mills Baker — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:46:07 -0000

Oh, just saw this! I didn't even mention these points in part because I'm quite sure they are beyond the ken of my critic. No one writes with such furious, puffy stupidity while capable of understanding history, politics, or literature.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. It Doesn't Matter if They Say They Like You.

Mills Baker — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:43:17 -0000

Good lord, you unthinking line-parroting fool, that's the entire point. If you weren't so dazzled by your proud moral disdain, you'd have a better shot at understanding writing (and the world).

You didn't understand this at its most basic level because you prefer to judge. That's fine with me: although you purport to know my "other work," you obviously don't know how deeply uninterested I am in the opinions of hectoring, superior non-readers, non-seers. And although you claim to know my writing, I don't know you or yours.

Well, I know one thing: you call this piece "derivative" but do not say what it derives from, what it mimics. That's because like most judgmental and indignant and proud people, you use words without thinking about them. You liked how "derivative" sounded as an insult, but didn't think: "What is this derivative of?" If you had, you'd have included that: "Totally derivative of so-and-so, such-and-such."

So I know that you throw words around without understanding them, attack fiction you don't grasp, and judge people you don't know according to categories. At white male is privileged in the US, but real privilege for all humans would be freedom from ignorant, a priori judgments that serve to confirm the moral pride of the judge and have nothing to do with facts, reality, or the accused. In other words: it's a pleasure not knowing you.

Re: Millsin' About

Mills Baker — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:03:15 -0000

This is outstanding!

Re: Millsin' About - Judgement and Understanding

Mills Baker — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:51:36 -0000

Thank you!

Re: Millsin' About

Mills Baker — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:05:44 -0000

Here's my plan: I am going to try this for thirty years and then I'll report back on how it goes. First stop: Abby made this pasta salad, holy mackerel. BRB.

Re: Millsin' About

Mills Baker — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:59:38 -0000

It does seem like he's particularly lame. I just reel at Gruber's diligence in finding negative things to say about MS, Google, etc. I mean: I agree with his analysis about this move: a pollster? Proof that MS still doesn't get it, etc.

I AM BLINDED BY MY JEREMIAD!

Re: Millsin' About

Mills Baker — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:06:28 -0000

That's outstanding!

You may be right; I certainly don't have any real idea, and I don't think anecdotes of this sort are dispositive or evidentiary. I just find them interesting, I suspect because I like the idea of realizing that one hasn't understood. Most of think we understand everything we've judged; that's how we judge, after all! But the counterclaim is sometimes made: a judgement is evidence of a lack of understanding.

That's not logically defensible, but I like it anyway, and I'm Bill Mills the sprinter, so what are you going to do about it?! Chase me down?! I think not!

Re: Millsin' About

Mills Baker — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:27:39 -0000

I want / intend to do this, but don't. That's probably going to my epitaph.