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aequalsa

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Everything posted by aequalsa

  1. I think we are on the same page, though, I don't think you meant this, but for clarity's sake, I don't think intuition is isolated to dealing with people. A similiar example could be imagined with charactaristics of objects where you have observed some similiar trait. Curvedness(?) of a ball for example, allowing it to roll. Then when seeing an object that was not a ball but had curvedness you might notice the trait before making the concious realization that it was similiar in that specific way. The point is that induction requires some examples to establish a connection or pattern. So, in the example you provide, the missing piece is not limited to your remembering having met someone or something similiar. The thing I am lthinking of is that first step. It is that level of discomfort that is causally related to some information that you have sensed but not percieved maybe? You feel something is wrong or important in some way, then later you might think about it to sort it out. At that point it becomes a concious thought and provides you with the new integratable information. That first feeling you get that something requires thought or investigation which later leads to induction which I think might be an essential beggining to being able to induct in the first place. My subjective experience of it is that it happens fairly automatically. I observe something, feel that something is off, then think about it and hopefully resolve the issue in my mind.
  2. I am too I am thinking about that initial step of recognizing a cause and effect or pattern that leads you to the more concious thought. On occasions when I have gained some new knowledge through induction, I seem to be aware of the circumstance for some time before I finally make the concious evaluation. Not sure if that is more clear. Obviously it is an issue I am struggling with.
  3. This sounds to me like she holds two intertwined double standards(does that make a quadruple standard?) One, that it is ok for boys but not for girls 'cuz boys have needs' and two, that it is ok for others but not ok for her in particular but that is just because of her personal distaste for it. In other words she does not seem to believe that morality is objective. She is unwilling to pronounce moral judgement on someone else even though she knows from personal experience that it lacks meaning. Whether or not this is serious enough to break up over depends on a number of things which no one but you is probably qualified to decide. A couple questions I would ask myself are, does her relativism bleed over into other aspects of life? Is she is trying to defend her own past behavior, known by you or unknown? Is she just trying to maintain a positive view of her father? Is she speaking from a position of maturity, or is it just a youthful notion she is likely to outgrow? Is she open to reason in general but not with this one issue? Does she have a great many other values which outweigh this negative for you? Do her actions rather then her words toward you and toward sex correspond to her belief that it is highly meaningful or does she treat it trivially? Those sorts of things.
  4. I think a sense of life is a more broad concept then intuition. It is your overall sense of the world. I forget the exact wording, but I think Rand described it as the sum of all of your emotional evaluations of the world. Intuition probably plays a part in the development of your sense of life, but I do not believe that they are synonomous. Intuition as I understand it, is as close as you can properly get to using emotions as a form of cognition. As you describe, you can be aware of a number of different things which you do not conciously consider. You can act on it immediately if no better knowledge is available or use it as a starting point to think about it conciously. What I am not sure about is if intuition is the starting point of induction. Do you always have that emotional sense of integration prior to any new inductively grasped fact?
  5. Being deliberate is also slow in this context. Fighting is almost wholly subconciously done. If someone were to punch me and I thought "right-hook-moving-toward-my..." !THUMP! "...-head...." it would be totally ineffective. You conciously consider things when learning, but at the point of execution it should be fairly automated. There are too many facts to consider simultaneously to be effective while deliberate. By having your movement automated you are able to be concious and deliberate with the more strategic aspects of fighting, but the actual movement has to be responsive without concious thought or it will be far too slow.
  6. Those little bastards. I have been trying to kill them to avoid this catastrophe, but every time I cut one in half, two more take it's place. It seems we are doomed.
  7. 'A Modest Proposal'-Jonathan Swift a la Gullivers Travels It was a satirical proposal about what England should do regarding the "Irish Problem" He actually goes into some detail on that account, if I remember correctly.
  8. An couple exceptions to this which may justify it's use are when time is of the essence, or no means of attaining hard facts is available. Without time to think, say wehn being attacked, the circumstance almost requires intuitive though. Concious thought is far to slow to block a punch. Another circumstance would be if you suspect someone is lying to you about something, say, something in their tone of voice, but have no way of affirming it. In that circumstance, you should not act as though they are lying but should take precautions to minimize the damage if it turns out that they are.
  9. As I understand it, he promised Miss Rand before she died that he would let the movie be made if he believed someone had a reasonable chance of doing so, regardless of whether or not it would be done well. It was her oppinion that you could not make a good movie of AS but that even a bad one would draw attention and readers to the book.
  10. This reminds me of that question..."at what point do stones you are stacking become a pile?" I think it has to do with the crow epistomology. Once their are too many stones to individually identify, you integrate them into a 'pile'. The relation to the dividing line between colors would be this: You differentiate them to the extent it is necessary. In a box that has 10 crayons, it is enough to call each one 'blue', 'green' etc. because the particular type it is, does not affect your understanding of the names reference. In a box with 10 slightly different green crayons, it becomes necessary to differentiate them further into 'moss green', 'pea green', etc. When it becomes necessary to differentiate between 540nm and 545nm, say with mixing paint, then the use of words at all becomes too difficult to manage mentally. The numbers give you the necessary relationship as well as the differentiation and degree of differentiation.
  11. That's interesting. I wonder if there will be a rise in job related injuries as a result of this chanmge. Unless they can find people more in that golden mean. There's a lot to be said for being able to raise your voice and speak in a commanding tone when necessary. Also in fighting, when it comes to that, you have to have that 'forward' mindset to some extent to make most techniques effective. It surprises me that grappling isn't emphasized more. I would think you would spend a good deal more time doing that(drunks, domestic violence,etc) then say shooting at the more violent criminals.
  12. It looked to me like the officer was both trying to use very little force and was not very proficient in grappling. Rationalcop, how much training in grappling fighting do police usually recieve? I would think it would be a fairly integral part of the job.
  13. I had a similiar experience except there was a goat involved.
  14. In this circumstance you describe, your rights are not violated in any way. You do not have a right to have people associate with you. Everyone is(or should be) free to associate with whomever they wish and not associate with people they don't care for. Rights can only be violated by action. Their lack of action with respect to you is only the withholding of a benefit. If they make this choice irrationally, then you are lucky to not have them associate with you.
  15. Well...no. You have to seperate your personal values from values qua values. A value is anything that anyone acts to gain or keep. As I pointed out with the jesus example, they can be bad values as well as good values. This is a definition you are asking about, not a commentary. Take capitalism. You can call it "the only moral economic system" and that would be a correct assessment in my oppinion but a poor definition. A proper definition for it should be something like -an economic system where the means of production are owned privately. It is, what it is, regardless of anyones estimation of it. Even a communist would agree with the definition. Same goes for values. They are anything that anyone acts to gain or keep.
  16. Aids would be a value IF you act to gain or keep it. If it is something you attempt to get for yourself and not get rid of, then it is a value to you. It would be a poor, poor, poor choice of values, but a value none the less. The same could be said of pursuing a relationship with jesus. Whether it is a good one or not does not alter the fact that it is a value. Life as the standard of value does not mean that anyone who does not act to better their life has no values, just that they have bad values, and if bad enough, soon they will have none due to their death. The fundemental choice between life and death has to exist for values to be possible at all. A rock has no values because it lacks the ability to act in anyway to change it's condition as well the self awareness necessary to consider it. Those are particulars within the genus of morality.
  17. You don't have to kill'em. That's why god gave criminals kneecaps.
  18. The socratic method has been helpful to me in not alienating people. I have always thought of it as more selfish approach. When someone else is speaking, you have the oppurtunity to learn from them. Even if the individual is a total hippy-communist mystic whackjob you can at least come to understand what causes them and people like them to believe what they believe. Phrases like "what do you mean by that?", "why do you feel that way?", "why do you feel so strongly about this?" are very helpful in that regard. I'll make an exception to socrates and give them both barrels if they are proselytizing and I lack the time to massage them into their own contradictions little by little. If someone is talking to a group and possibly having any kind of influence, then, I will resort to rhetoric. If it is another reason oriented person, I'll be honest and direct, too, but in a slightly different way. If I have a disagreement with someone who advocates reason, I try to keep in mind that the communication of complex issues is difficult in general, but even more so when two people are dealing with different sets of information(definitions, personal experiences, and so forth). Patience is key in those circumstances.
  19. There might be something to the idea. I have a very good friend who immigrated here from Russia when he was a teenager. He's a programmer and says that when he needs to think about something difficult,(related to programming or anything else) it is much easier to think in english. Russian requires too much of his concentration to arrange the proper grammer whereas english allows more of your mental capacities to be focused on integration. This is second hand of course, but it seems to make sense to me. It is possible that some languages lend themselves more to certain types of mental activities but I'd be surprised if english was undisputably better in all respects. In fact, I'd be a little surprised if they did not have some effect on the thought processes of the user.
  20. Thanks Lathanar, That's the first time I have heard that put in a way that I understand and agree with. Good integrating!
  21. oh...i didn't catch that part of her comments. I can understand not carrying a gun if it's illegal or you are worried about it being turned on you, but mace? Can't really defend that for her except maybe on the "not wanting it used on you" grounds. But even then, with great technological advances, like rings that carry a charge of pepper spray, that is no longer a good reason.
  22. I agree with your initial comments regarding the lack of effectiveness without the sparring element. It is was what I was getting at in my last post. But I disagree with your assessment regarding miseleigh's comments. Attacks are going to be context dependent. Any particular situation is going to possess a number of different details likely to alter the outcome significantly. If for example, miseleigh bent down to tie her shoe right as you were lunging for her, you would likely trip and give her plenty of time to get out the mace and after macing you she could unwrap the spork in her purse and pluck out an eye. Any scenario you can dream up is going to be like this. Martial arts to the extent it does these thought experiments, looks(or should look) at particular nonsituational concretes. How do you move if someone grabs your left wrist with there right hand? How do you move if someone puts you in a collar choke? It's just not useful for her or anybody to look at an attack from the perspective that you suggest where the situation is that someone they don't see rushs at them from behind, grabs them and chokes them out without them realizing what happened. While that very well could happen, it is irrelevent since the scenario itself puts their fate outside of their control from the start. It would be the equivelant of someone asking me, "what if someone put you between the crosshairs of their sniper rifle and pulled the trigger, then what would you do? How would martial arts help?"To which my answers would be, "my head would explode and it wouldn't" Learning to defend yourself is learning how to increase your chances using what you have the power to change. Her willingness to struggle, flail, and claw her way into an escape gives her a far better chance of success then someone who just accepted that there was nothing they could do. How good or bad your chances are in that circumstance are not pertinent. All you are trying to do from a self defense aspect is up your odds a bit. If she were thinking of competeing in UFC or pride fighting against men, or even walking down dark alleys in bad neighborhoods looking for fights, I would be right there with you trying to talk her out of it. In fact I would go a step further and tell her she's out of her mind. But she's only talking about how hard she would try to escape when put into a circumstance she can't avoid, and helping to make the point that with effort, resolve, and training, she(and ostensibly, any woman) would at least have some chance of being able to stun the attacker and get away. From the sounds of her, she might even bring an ear out of it as a trophy.
  23. I think you have the proper attitude regarding this. The guy you mentioned who would rather pass out then tap out would be a good role model in that regard. Lot's of training is ideal, but in the absence of that willpower is 90% of everything. Just making that decision to not give up makes a huge difference. Even with more limited competition fighting (wrestling/sparring), the main difference in difficulty when fighting a person with no previous training is thier mindset.
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