We called that "Home Ec" (as in "Home Economics") when I was a kid. (I'm an elder millennial.) To be honest, I didn't find it particularly useful, and I think many of the calls for "practical" classes in primary or secondary education miss the mark.
We had something similar, our home ec classes had some household management, but the focus was largely on cooking and making/repairing clothing. This further split into seperate elective classes in the last few years of high school. That said some aspects of homekeeping were absorbed by other classes (math module on balancing a budget, social studies modules on how you'd start a business, etc.).
> It was basically "home ec" is for girls, shop is for guys.
We didn't have too many girls in the shop classes, but we had a surprisingly large numbers of guys taking the clothing and textiles classes. It was regarded as one of the most relaxed and enjoyable electives, and there was an unofficial exemption to the uniform policy that you could wear things you'd produced in class, so it was nice to see the schoolyard brightened by students wearing strange and colorful clothing.
Did you by chance receive supplementary lessons at home? I didn't take a home ec class, but my mother made it a priority to teach me budgeting and such.
I don't really have an answer, but I've thought about this problem too. It can be uncomfortable to fire people for things that aren't transgressions (such as laziness, irresponsibility, rudeness). Some people don't do anything flagrantly wrong, they just don't have the level of ability required for their job despite otherwise exhibiting qualities of a good employee. I'm sure many HackerNews readers work at companies that are serious enough about performance that it seems obvious to simply fire under-performers as such. But in my experience, the average company is much more forgiving than this.
Yeah, I think it's a form of self-flattery or gatekeeping for programmers to say that you need passion or drive to have a career in tech--outside of the upper echelons, you clearly don't. In this respect it's a mundane occupation like most others, and I wouldn't expect coders to be any more passionate about their work than nurses or plumbers or accountants.
The US generates ~18% of its electricity from nuclear, ~13% from wind and solar and ~60% from fossil fuels. France generates ~68% of its electricity from nuclear, ~10% from wind and solar and ~8% from fossil fuels.
We're trying to reduce the number for fossil fuels, one of these is actually working.
What you describe reminds me of arguments about whether "TERF" is a slur (and therefore objectionable) or just a straightforward description a specific political stance.
Ironically, the "Radical" in "TERF" was never intended to be disparaging, but rather as a descriptive label within Radical Feminism. In fact, it could almost be read as begrudging respect from the perspective of non-TE radical feminists. Of course, the term "TERF" has now become so generic that the "R" is almost always a misnomer (and to a certain extent at arguable degrees so is the "F").
Wittgenstein tries to explain how language works, how it represents the world. One consequence of his theory is that language cannot represent that relationship itself. (At one point, he compares this limitation to the way that an eye necessarily can't see itself.) Well, if you believe that, what's the point of writing the Tractatus? So the ladder metaphor is supposed to suggest that contemplating the Tractatus might lead the reader to grasp the nature of language, even as they ultimately realize that a book can't really depict that straightforwardly.
Exactly this, but even more so. Wittgenstein believed the purpose of philosophy is to "prevent the bewitchment of our senses by means of language". Throwing the ladder away is important, else the reader might mistakenly interpret the tractatus as being the ultimate systemization of reality, rather than a critique of all such projects.
Fantastically, our modern obsession with truth-tables when studying logic comes from exactly this misreading! (Which also lead to Wittgenstein quitting philosophy for years.)
Wittgenstein was initially received by Bertrand Russell, and by the various positivists of the time as a possible intellectual giant who could champion their various projects. But he sews the seeds in the end of the Tractatus of the criticisms that would be developed more fully in his Philosophical Investigations, which is sometimes read as a repudiation of his own earlier work.
I don't think he intended with his ladder metaphor to fully repudiate the Tractatus, I think the purpose of the Tractatus evolved over the course of him writing it. Otherwise the second half of his philosophical career would have just been an endorsement of the Tractatus rather than retrospective criticisms of it.
The tractatus isn't like the blue and brown notebooks, where we just grabbed random notes of his after he died and published them for future generations to study. It's an intentional published work. He means everything he says in it the moment it is published.
He _definitely_ evolves the view presented throughout the course of the tractatus, but this is intentional, walking the reader up the ladder, the last step of which is throwing the ladder (the tractatus) away.
The relation between early and late Wittgenstein more complex than outright repudiation. Immediately after the tractatus he thought he solved the problems of philosophy, and later came to realize simply destroying the positivist project was not ask there was the problem of philosophy.
On Russell, hilariously, he would organize readings of the tractatus with the Vienna circle. Wittgenstein would be so furious with their interpretation he would sit the room with his back to them and talk Indian poetry aloud.
> achieving mystical realizations along the lines of zen koans
Except that there's really nothing mystical about zen koans, if mystical is meant in a derogatory way as vague mumbo-jumbo. Zen koans are trying to do the same thing as Wittgenstein is (according to the parent - I haven't read him): lead the thinker to recognise the limitations of language, and in particular its inability to fully express ideas about its own limitations. The response "mu" unasks the question, indicates that the concept has been understood but the question itself seen as nonsensical.
That's my understanding anyway. I haven't practised Rinzai Zen, the one that emphasises koans, but only Soto Zen, which mostly eschews philosophising in favour of just sitting quietly.
>lead the thinker to recognise the limitations of language, and in particular its inability to fully express ideas about its own limitations
Right, I think that's a good way of putting it. He even writes in the Tractatus about how we can see with our eye, but we can't "see" the limits of our visual field. (Edit: I see now that GP mentioned this, which I missed while skimming.)
I think Wittgenstein would have credited those higher meanings with significance and not divided them as mumbo jumbo. In a way you're supposed to apprehend that those things that mean the most are not the things that language is capable of representing.
The eye can't see inside of itself. The metaphor breaks down though, because the inside of an eye are in principle _seeable_ (mirrors and microscopes etc), while the "nature of language" or whatever, is in principle _unspeakable_ , no so much as a coherent thing to ask after.
Even better, you absolutely see things in your eye. They're called "floaters". Your brain learns to mostly ignore them.
And if you develop cataracts, your vision tends to "yellow", and you'll be seeing more and more of the lens of your eye, as it becomes less transparent. Cataract surgery (= replacing natural lens with plastic lens) can lead to the operated eye seeing "bright" and un-operated one "yellow".
Well, you are not really seeing an eye in a mirror, you are just seeing a representation of it. The medium cannot depict all the dimensions and details of the object, so again you are able to see depictions, representations, and simplifications of it, but never truly be able to grasp the object itself.
Sure you can say that everything I see is technically a representation in my head. But there is very much a shared reality, a domain of objects and state of affairs for which we both agree about the presence or absence of the same representations. There's a difference between a value and our measurement of a value. If every multimeter we touch to a battery reads 5.9v, its possible the battery is actually 6v and every single multimeter was coincidentally wrong. However from the inside the situation is indistinguishable from a 5.9v battery. We may as well accept the reality of our perception and its representations as the real thing per se, because even if it is delusion we are still stuck playing by its rules as if it were real.
I am "really" seeing an eye in the mirror in the sense that I'm seeing the same thing other people would call an eye, and thus it exists in the shared domain. To have a shared domain of objects and facts is to have a common ground. There is no "object itself" for us to reach out and grasp outside of our mutual perception of objects. We might all be in a computer simulation. Doesn't matter. The conversational/perceptual reality is reality.
Right, it's a three dimensional object projected onto a two dimensional surface and your knowledge about it, from looking into the mirror, is merely superficial. What's to say our world isn't a five dimensional space projected onto four dimensions? What can language say about anything, everything, and the universe when great amounts of it is hidden from us?
> he compares this limitation to the way that an eye necessarily can't see itself
On the contrary, language is both perception and action. And it is also a self replicator: language -> model or brain -> language. I think that's why LLMs are so great - they rely on this medium that is both receptive and emissive, unlike other modalities.
Insofar as one can "apologize" on behalf of someone else, anyway. Elon is deprecating about Twitter's performance because he attributes it to the prior regime.
I'm a little surprised at people here who claim to be classical music aficionados and yet haven't heard of him. I would have guessed it's hard to know enough to be able to name more than two or three classical violinists and not know who Bell is.
But I think that's beside the point, because I don't think the premise is that people "should" have recognized Bell as a celebrity. The naive hope is rather that people can recognize great art when they encounter it.
The whole framing is weird to me. I enjoy classical music among other things, but I'm in no way an "aficionado" (whatever that means), and I can recognize around 0 classical musicians by appearance.
Concert soloists have their own characteristics. They often play the same piece with subtle differences and confer different feelings. Some may sound more convincing/touching than others. When I hear a version I like, I may check who is the soloist and may buy his/her album. Then I will naturally remember the name.
Cool, but I asked for a Big Mac, and so did 99.99% of the world.
You're just in the 0.01% that would have stopped and listened, just like you're in the 0.01% that would buy his album or go to his concert.
My point is that classical music soloist is a niche hobby, just like my playing cards collection is a niche hobby, and that to expect that more than 0.01% of the world would stop on their way to work to look at my playing cards collection is simply laughable. This whole article is a joke.
You quoted "classical music aficionados". I was mainly reacting to that part and explaining what an aficionado would do. A random person buying a Big Mac is not an aficionado. Also from the article, 2.5% paid, 0.6% listened and 0.1% recognized him. This is more or less in line with my expectation. I certainly know classical music is a niche hobby. When I go to some chamber music concert, I often see a room of elders, very few young audience.
