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The Way We Look at Poverty

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(source:  https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023 ) I agree with Steven Pinker's claim that poverty being a default state, not wealth. But because of societal norms and prejudices, we put so much blame on people in poverty. Of course there are people who are in that situation for the reasons they created (i.e. it is their fault). Despite that, I believe that there are far more people who are poor because they were not able to create wealth. Their circumstances might have not let them. The amount of energy they need to spend to pull themselves out of poverty is much larger than for a wealthy person to further aggregate their wealth. If you think really hard about it, how does one create something from nothing? And why is the society so unforgiving towards the poor and generous to the wealthy? People including myself are primed to think that way and now I see how powerful propaganda is. The reason the oligarchs try so hard to hold onto the mass media is that it is extreme...

A Little Bit of Fun

Our favorite Laugh-Out-Loud's on Internet: Existential Comics A Philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living in a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes.

Interesting Articles

We populate here a list of interesting articles (most of my source is from Arts & Letters Daily ) Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans by Henry Farrell We Are Multitudes by Katherine Rowland

Aletheia

Philosophers guided me through hopelessly quixotic questions with honesty and precision. Thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard shared passionate writings on how to live with shortcomings one did not choose. I was moved by their painstaking efforts to inspire the discouraged. Then amidst my voracious but haphazard readings, I came across an ancient Greek word, the philosophical concept of "aletheia," which encapsulates my affinity for Philosophy. "Lethe," meaning oblivion is transformed with a negative prefix "a" into a poetic expression of truth or unconcealment. "Lethe" is also a river of the Greek underworld and its water erases the earthly memories of a drinker. I see the word as an embodiment of the effort required to strip double-negatives to perceive an elusive kernel: the refusal to exist in oblivion like the dead. Philosophy prompts me to practice "aletheia." It brushes the dust off of axiomatic and familiar worlds and words. ...

About Blunders

I would not know how things were back in the days, but I would only assume that people were more generous about other people's mistakes. Perhaps it is me who have changed, not the world, but I feel that this thought is worth investigating. Machines and computers make us treat mistakes as something unforgivable (or unacceptable), because it is unacceptable for machines to be making mistakes. And over time, such standard for machines has slowly spread and influenced our standard of whether certain degree of error is acceptable. At first, machines were introduced to do things that we were not capable of doing in a given amount of time. And perhaps, to complement our ability to overcome blunders we commit. Now it seems like even things we can do are left for machines to do. Sure they can do it faster and possibly more perfectly; and it probably is a good thing. But the problem is not their taking over what we can do. The problem is that their perfectness (error-free performance) has ...