Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

For Memorial Day, I leave the floor to Omar.

this dirty old &}$#*(% jay tagged me, so now I have to admit that I don't read much.

At the end of the post And Life Goes On... in your blog Baghdad Burning you write:

It's about needing someone who wants peace, prosperity, independence and above and beyond all, unity.

Can't you see the contradiction between unity and all the former things? Unity means that everyone is to do the same. This directly contradicts independence. Unity and hence no independence means that everyone will be fighting to know whose opinion will prevail upon all others. This directly contradicts peace. Unity, hence no independence and no peace means that everyone will have to fight or submit to fighters, and won't be able to do the things they know could improve the lives of those they care for. This directly contradicts prosperity.

As long as you put unity before all the former, you're actually supporting the oppression you're suffering from, be it from dictators like Saddam and Khomeini, or from demagogues like those you have in Iraq currently.

Many of the blogs I read have a RSS feed of sorts, so I read them through an aggregator. Thus, here is my Blogroll, available through bloglines.com.

Dear Roderick,

in your blog entry Are We All Consequentialists Now?, you argue against consequentialism. What a joke! Your opposition between consequences and principles is a false dichotomy. The objective world is one and does not depend on the point of view taken. When you consider things up to isomorphism, you realize that consequentialism is but the requirement that theories be logically coherent. Denying consequentialism is denying that logic applies in philosophical matters. Deontics and utilism (to reuse the term by Hazlitt instead of the over-ended "utilitarianism" -- but then why not usism?) are but different points of view, and can but coincide in their conclusions. As Bastiat would put it, there are Harmonies in Nature. These harmonies are but the correspondances between various points of view due to the fact that they all valid points of view but describe the very same underlying structure from various different angles. Any possible contradiction is but a mistake in whoever reaches an absurd conclusion, and not an indictment of the coherence of the universe. There is no contradiction in the universe. Let's leave philosophical dilemmas to absurdists.

Roderick replied:

Last wednesday, I met Mr. Libertarianism @ Japan, one of the happy few japanese libertarians. Quite a nice fellow.

Some time ago, I found on a blog this quotation that quite fits my writing activities (or lack thereof, much too often, for some important document of mine):

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

-- E. L. Doctorow

Checking who was linking to my site, I discovered bloglines.com, one of many news feed aggregators with which you can read all your favorite blogs and news sources in real time from anywhere.

SEXP is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is T.

All the lispers who don't know about it yet may be interested in Planet Lisp, an aggregator of news from various Lisp blogs and related sources.

Au sujet de la Psychologie évolutionniste, Eric ABC nous a récemment fait découvrir Philippe Gouillou, son site, son blog, cependant que Martin Masse a attiré notre attention sur ses recensions de The Moral Animal de Robert Wright et The Stone Age Present de William F. Allman. Sur ce sujet a aussi été publié récemment cette interview de Steven Pinker par Robert Wright.

Malheureusement, le sujet de la psychologie évolutionniste est tabou, et ce qui peut se dire sur des mailing-lists privées des spécialistes est impubliable sur les mass-médias, y compris les maisons d'éditions. Rien n'est publiable sur papier qui ne fasse allégeance à l'idéologie égalitariste semi-officielle. La pensée unique social-étatiste règne en maître. Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir.

Question à mille balles: À quel point la magie noire est-elle ancrée dans la nature humaine?

Mise-à-jour 2003-11-28: trouvé sur l'excellent site de John McCarthy, dans sa section sur les effets de l'idéologie sur les débats sur l'écologie, une section sur la sociobiologie, avec cet article de Edward O. Wilson et celui-ci de Paul R. Gross. Enfin, voir le blog Gene Expression.

I first heard of Clay Shirky through Slashdot, with his article The Case Against Micropayments. But actually, I like all his articles. This guy has a lot of insight, and his approach of problems is definitely of the same kind as for austrian economists: taking information costs into account.

mood: calm

Mon ami David Madore m'écrit une lettre fort pertinente au sujet de mon blog, avec comme à son habitude cette pénétration exceptionnelle qui est la sienne. Il met le doigt sur certains points essentiels qui ne vous ont je l'espère pas échappé, en tout cas qui méritaient d'être discutés. Voici le texte complet de sa lettre, et ma réponse incise. Merci donc à David.

There are many interesting Lisp Weblogs, among which the one by Rainer Joswig to whom I owe a lot (the opportunity to purchase my LispM, among other things).

If I were more of a programmer, there would be more Lispy stuff here. However, I don't program enough to be called a programmer, and I don't unprogram enough to be called a non-programmer. So I'm a non-non-programmer, which, in intuitionistic logic, is weaker than a programmer.

Je ne crois pas avoir encore dit sur mon blog comme j'appréciais celui du Zek. Côté psychologie des étatistes, je crois qu'il a bien résumé la situation dans son dernier article:

I realize that I have little time to write to this blog: during workdays, I don't have much time to spend blogging, whereas during other days, I don't have any internet access. Doh! So I'm writing while offline, and posting whenever I can.

Consequently, the publishing date of an entry will usually be posterior by quite a few days to the date that I wrote it.