User:AP295

Live free or die.

My Essays. Each is a work in progress, but all feedback is welcome. I had labeled two or three of them "complete", but I would not consider any of them to be truly "finished". Instead, I've just moved the very rough ones to userspace.

An RfC I started on metawiki [1]. As you can plainly see, all of my replies are relevant and appropriate, yet I was indefinitely blocked for replying to others.

The subjects these essays address are important and frequently misrepresented or distorted by mass media. Most of them concern mass media and government. They may seem polemical, but the general argument I'm making here is a morally serious one. I invite you to consider which principles a free nation must prioritize and defend when necessary, to consider what sort of society we want for ourselves. Do we value liberty, self-respect and common decency, or are we content to tolerate an unaccountable "leadership" and debauched culture? Eventually I intend most of the above to be part of a single page in mainspace, perhaps entitled doylist essays or something to that effect. I'd also like to make a college-level course on linear algebra, mathematical logic, or functional programming after I'm done writing these critical essays and polemics. I invite you to read them and also to offer any comments, questions, concerns and critique you may have on the discussion pages.

Below are some notes and ideas for essays and other work. If and when they become sufficiently developed, I will move them out of userspace and into a resource. I've always thought it would be good to have a co-author, so have a look and let me know on my talk page if you're interested.

Notes, ideas, and very rough drafts

w:E Prime looks very interesting. I may translate some of my essays, though not fully. With E-prime one would think more about verbs and probably use the passive voice less, but it seems silly not to use "is" in some instances, such as when one defines something. Making an effort to use the active voice and choose more specific verbs seems to improve my writing and thinking. I've started to make a serious effort toward breaking these habits and I'm certain that it will begin to feel more natural if I persist. I'll probably at some point write an article on the language problem itself, which I have wanted to do for a long time but felt I didn't have a sufficiently firm understanding of the problem. Many of my essays touch upon different aspects of this and it would be better to have one single essay that covers this properly, which I can then reference. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 23:26, 25 May 2024 (UTC) Some notes: Rather than avoiding "to be" and its various forms altogether, I try to reserve them. (I had to consciously stop myself from writing "to be reserved in using them"). For instance (and I mentioned this earlier on some or other talk page, I think during a conversation with DP) in the example on Wikipedia's page comparing "The cat is Garfield":"I call my cat Garfield", neither really seem appropriate. Here I would say "The cat's name is Garfield", because one has the prerogative to name their own cat. By and large, however, ~~"to be" and its variants are grossly overused in the media~~ the media grossly overuse "to be" and its variants and thus impress this habit upon the public. It takes some effort to break the habit, I find. I only know English, and I often wonder whether this issue appears in other languages. I suspect that someone my age or younger would not easily avoid this habit unless they were conscious of it, yet anyone could do so if they made an effort. At least some of the bad habits Orwell points out in his excellent essay "Politics and the English Language" depend upon this overuse of "to be" (and variants). He does advise the reader to prefer the active voice (all of his recommendations are good), and he also notices the concerning reduction in the range of verbs, but seems to miss that much of this depends upon the abuse or overuse of "to be" forms. At some point I shall try to refactor the above essays and eliminate "to be" forms where appropriate. It has greater significance than I realized. Most of my essays use "to be" forms rather extensively and it will require work to fix them. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm generally rather critical of political media that does not put some emphasis on actionable goals. I have not formally studied propaganda or rhetoric so take this paragraph for what it's worth and well salted. I believe one feature of "propaganda" is the degree to which it motivates the subject to socially organize or at least take some action. In other words, you could divide propaganda into "agitprop" and "filler". The former is propaganda as most people think of it. It could be entirely honest or it could be dishonest, but the point is that encourages people to take direct action. On the other hand, the latter exists to do just the opposite; to discourage any sense of necessity or obligation on the subject's part or to limit that perception. The latter probably accounts for most political propaganda in the USA today. By nature and necessity, such propaganda must be somewhat abstract (if not irrelevant). I think most people could recognize that it's nonsense if they were in the habit of reasoning abstractly and applying those abstractions, rather than following instructions and taking bogus abstractions at face value. I've always thought formal logic should be part of secondary education curricula. The prussian education system teaches people to be good workers and soldiers, to accept instructions and carry them out. Public secondary and primary education gives one a very procedural way of thinking and expressing oneself; formulaic, mechanical, pavlovian, rote, whatever you want to call it. Useful abstractions are not impressed upon the student in general. Likewise, political filler is presented in the abstract. Concrete, actionable objectives are always either absent or futile. If two politicians run against each other but both are obliged to the same benefactor, then it really doesn't matter which one is elected. Each one might run on quite a different "platform" yet neither actually threaten the status quo. Of course a media network can propagandize and fearmonger against one while a second media organization favors the other. A great fuss can be made about each one's scandalous affairs or the policies they differ on, giving all the appearance of democracy and a free press. In the end, one gets elected and to some extent fulfills their promises, but obviously the purpose of this is to reduce political activism to nothing more than a futile exercise. You can see how easily filler is disguised as agitprop; the subject may be actually be encouraged or motivated to vote participate in rallies, protests, etc. It would look exactly like agitprop, but the propagandist (by which I mean the organization they act on behalf on, not just an individual) has no preference either way. To them it's all the same if you vote for candidate A, candidate B, or simply stay home. However inclined or disinclined toward activism the subject is, the propagandist intends that they get their fill but ultimately do not accomplish much. The propagandist's goal is to undermine the public interest. This is obvious when you consider that, were propagandist simply looking out for the public, they could simply appeal to the public truthfully on that basis. Rather, this is a method of deception. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 04:10, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

I assert that LISP is by far and away the most powerful, versatile, sensibly designed, simplest and most edifying type of programming language that exists or ever will exist. It has existed since the fifties. The grammar is dead simple. Processing lisp code with lisp is trivial. It has a more powerful macro system than any other language, allowing the user to extend the language however they please. LISP can represent various structures and recursive definitions in an extremely natural way. It encourages a functional approach, which is the right way to think about programming even if you go on to use some other model. It has arbitrary precision arithmetic. There's much more that I'm forgetting. Sadly I have not used it in some time. I learned scheme in a class on classical AI with an excellent professor, god rest his soul. In working on each assignment, I gradually began to realize just how natural and powerful the language was. Problems practically solved themselves. Since then I use it whenever I have the choice, which sadly isn't very often. I probably have more experience with coding python. While python's not terrible the first time I used it I thought to myself, this is just a bastardized lisp with gross, needlessly complex syntax/grammar. My initial impression remains unchanged. I will say that python has a larger collection of third-party libraries, many of which are very good. If I'm entirely honest though, the only language I really enjoy writing is lisp. Occasionally one hears or reads comments like "python doesn't get in the way" or "it just gets out of your way". I think these are fair statements, but it does say something about one's expectations when they're intended as complements. One should expect a bit more from their tools than merely not being an active nuisance or obstruction. Anyway, maybe I'll expand on this at some point, but if you want to take my word for it, give it a try. Why don't more people use lisp if it's so great? You got me, I haven't any idea. It's been around since the fifties and it's not as though people don't know about it. Apparently scheme was common in academia and computer science curricula but I doubt that anyone at my university teaches it anymore. The professor I learned it with was a genuine intellectual. Such people seem less common than perhaps they were in the past. At any rate be warned, if you learn it and end up using it for a project or two, you will be spoiled for life. Going back to something else is like owning a Ferrari yet never being allowed to drive it. I was going to include specific recommendations but I don't want it to seem too promotional, even though it's all FOSS. Just search around and you will probably find something that suits you. I ping me from your talk page if you really want a recommendation.

A perfect example of abstract sophistry can be found in this Jones' video, ostensibly a critique of "neoliberalism". [2]. Even if much of it is true, so what? What is one supposed to do about it? Which specific institutions are to be held accountable? They even talk about some of Milton Friedman's work but fail entirely to identify monetary policy as a practical target for reform, i.e. something the public can potentially change and in doing so solve several of the problems they're bemoaning. Instead it's the usual story about -isms and -ists. That video checks every box; the words 'liberalism', 'neoliberalism', 'communism', 'capitalism', 'facism', 'totalitarianism', 'calvinism', 'feudalism', each being mentioned at least once according to the transcript. The problem here is that it does not identify any actionable objective or solution. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:43, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikimedia syntax examples so I can remember them: Permalink: [[Special:Permalink/X#Title of article]] where X is the oldid. Inter-wiki link: [[wikipedia:Title of article]]