Monday, February 12, 2024

EV Drivers

One thing that reactionary yahoos have long said about EV drivers is that they are smug. Well, I've been driving an EV for a while now, and, strangely, I AM smug about it. I DO feel superior to the drivers of the noisy, smelly dinosaur-burners all around me, as I dart nearly silently among them. Intellectually superior, morally superior, and definitely sexier! Superior every which way. I am the dog's biscuits. 

I can't open the rear doors yet, but I've googled it, and it's just a matter of settings and interior buttons. It'll come. I'll figure it out. I don't know why that overhead light comes on all the time, even in the brightest parts of the sunniest days, but I'll figure that out too! Just the same that I figured out where the radio's volume knob was! My brother helped with the volume knob. He's literally a rocket scientist and is wicked smart. With his help I'll get the charging situation sorted out. 

And you would not BELIEVE how smug I feel about it all. And I'm a person who's rarely felt smug about anything. Apparently I occasionally appear to be smug. People have sometimes accused me of smugness, but they've been wrong. Now they're right.

As the old saying goes: even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The yahoos were bound to be right about something eventually.  

I'm not saying that these feelings of superiority are accurate, just that I'm feeling them. For several months before the EV, I was without any sort of  personal-transportation vehicle. I walked or I took the bus. and I definitely THINK that those who do so are better than all of us who drive, no matter what we drive. 

But I didn't have this smirking, smug FEELING when I was on foot.

Can anyone else out there relate? Are we right to feel this way? Are we being manipulated by Big Something? Are are we the Vanguard of the Future? Are we silly? Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B?

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Continuing Education on YouTube

Stefan Milo is a British archaeologist who lives with his family in Murrka and has a great YouTube channel called, wittily enough, Stefan Milo: 

Well. There was supposed to be a link to Stefan's YouTube channel here. But we seem to be having even more technical difficulties. I repeat: it's on YouTube, it's called Stefan Milo and it's great.

I don't know what sort of archaeologist Milo is. He's very self-deprecating about his intellect and his academic accomplishments -- too much so, I would guess. He regularly talks to world-leading archaeologists on his channel, and he seems to keep up them pretty well. He has a degree in Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, but I don't know whether it's a Doctorate or some lesser degree.

I don't know whether he's published a lot of peer-reviewed papers. He's published a children's book about archaeology; he talks about that book a lot on his channel. 

I do feel that I've learned a lot about archaeology from Milo's channel after a few weeks of binge-watching his videos. That is in large part because I find his videos pleasant to watch: he has an engaging personality and his videos have good production values. 

For just a little while I said to myself: since Milo didn't make a career in academia, now he has to be an academic and a performer as well. And then suddenly it struck me: all teachers are performers. Some are good performers, some aren't. Milo is one of the ones who are more effective because they're more engaging and likeable.

I don't know why it took me until I was 62 years old to grasp this, but it's been grasped. Of course teachers who fascinate their students are more effective than those who repel them. And some teachers started showing slides decades ago, if not centuries, and some of them have been very good with the visual aids, and that doesn't hurt a bit when it comes to actual task of education.

Milo makes a great contrast here to Bart Ehrman, probably the world's most famous living academic authority on the subject of Jesus and early Christianity. Ehrman can be seen as having at least three separate careers: as an author of academic books, which contain footnotes and multilingual bibliographies and are peer-reviewed; an author of popular books, which eschew the footnotes and bibliographies, are aimed at the "general public," and sell several times as much as the academic books, routinely making bestseller lists; and also as a teacher who stands in front of students and talks.

Nowadays, of course, teaching is done not only in classrooms, but also in front of cameras, in the making of various kinds of videos. I've watched quite a few of Ehrman's videos lately, and... and I like his academic books very much.  So do many academics. And his popular books must have hundreds of thousands of ardent fans among the "general public" by now. If not actually millions.

Ehrman also appears on many YouTube channels, some seem to be run in part by him, and he's a guest on many others, and the videos get millions and millions and millions of views.

Would they get so many views without the books? I really have to wonder. There are probably some people who find Ehrman to be the epitome of charisma, because when there are millions and millions and millions of views, there will be every conceivable opinion. 

I watch the videos for Ehrman's knowledge. I have to put up with a lot of teeth-grittingly annoying behavior in order to get to that knowledge. One channel which Ehrman seems to at least partly control, is actually hosted by a British woman, and every video starts with her asking "Bart" about the latest in his private life, and why?! "Bart" never says anything edifying or remotely interesting and these intros, and I've taken to skipping ahead to where they're actually talking about Jeebus.

What a huge contrast to Stefan Milo's video, where the occasional glimpses of his wife and baby girl are actually charming, and sometimes even tied in relevantly to to the archaeological content.

Ehrman has said many times that his students in North Carolina are from North Carolina, and therefore are often fundamentalists, and therefore are often quite astonished by what he has to teach them. He's said this many times just that I've seen. How many times has he insulted his students in pretty much the identical way in his entire life?! It boggles the boggles. Why not try some new material for a change, and tell the world about the most surprisingly clever things he's heard from his students lately? 

And his laugh. Ehrman's laugh just sets my teeth on edge. it literally sounds like "Hyuck hyuck hyuck!"

Anyhow. Stefan Milo's videos on YouTube, and Bart Ehrman's academic books, the ones with the footnotes and bibliographies, are what I recommend. 

Also, since I'm sure some of you are wondering now that I've mentioned Ehrman: no, I am still not convinced that Jesus existed. I agree with Ehrman that most of the most prominent living mythicists, Price and Carrier and Freke and Gandy and Fitzgerald et al, are bozos as well as unpleasant people, I agree with him that Atlantis was not real and that the Egyptians and Mayas built all of those amazing buildings all by themselves, with no extra-terrestrial help whatsoever. I will almost always side with the academic consensus in the sciences and humanities. "Academic cover-up" strikes me as an oxymoron. I agree with Ehrman that there is no reason to doubt that Socrates and Caesar and Alexander the Great and Pilate and Herod Antipater and John the Baptist and Saul/Paul of Taurus were real people, and I trust Ehrman's opinion about which of the Pauline epistles were written by Paul and which of the Platonic dialogues were written by Plato, and about many, many other things. 

But I still haven't had that  "AHA!"-moment where it suddenly makes sense what Ehrman and almost all other academics say about Jesus: that he certainly existed. I'm also not certain that he never existed, the way I am with, for example, King Arthur. When it comes to Jesus' existence, I'm on the fence, where I've been for at least 30 years.

Friday, December 29, 2023

Generalizations

If someone said, "All engineers are the same. They're just working to further enrich themselves and to screw over the rest of us," you would respond that this is entirely incorrect, and that the speaker seems to know very little about engineers. And, of course, you'd be right.

The thing is, the statement is just as wrong if you substitute any other group for engineers. "All billionaires are the same," "all Jews are the same," "all Belgians are the same," "all Republicans are the same" -- all of those statements are making the same mistake: they are assigning characteristics to people based on their perceived membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals.

It's an over-generalization, an over-simplification, and it's mistaken, about 100% of the time.

Now, maybe you would respond, "What about Nazis? Weren't they all the same in some very important ways?"

I'm glad you asked! No, they weren't. You know Oskar Schindler, the guy played by Liam Neeson in that movie, the guy who saved all of those people's lives and sabotaged the German war effort in WWII?

He was a Nazi. A member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party for business reasons, and he started to work against it when he could no longer ignore the death camps and stuff.

Individual human beings will constantly surprise you, if you go to the trouble of paying attention to them. 

 

Monday, December 11, 2023

HEGEL!!

After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough.

I'm not bragging. On the contrary: I'm saying that I'm starting to grasp certain ideas which have occupied a great number of people over the past 200 years. Probably millions of people. And almost all of them began to grasp these same ideas decades quicker than I did. Well, better very, very late than never, and who knows what you might achieve if you simply don't give up, etc. 

I am not now going to explain Hegel to you. Of course not. Many others can do that far better, and there's always the drastic step of actually reading a philosopher's work, itself. It's still only been about 2 days since I moved from Schopenhauer's position on Hegel: that he was a simpleton, a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher passing off the most awful nonsense as genius. I'm not now convinced that Hegel is a genius. I'm being cautious here. For a while I thought Sloterdijk was a genius. What has changed is that I think that now I've gotten a glimpse of why so many others think Hegel is a genius. I'm a take it from there.

If almost everyone thinks that you and Schopenhauer are wrong -- you and Schopenhauer may be wrong. Don't worry, Schopenhauer was still right about many things. 

It's so wonderful to suddenly see that you were wrong about something, and that it actually is as good as all those people have been saying, whether it's someone's music or someone' paintings or someone's philosophy. Suddenly, there's this wonderful thing. Well, it was there all along, right under your nose. But suddenly, you understand that it really is wonderful. 

Perhaps a great deal of the difficulty, for me and and also for Schopenhauer, was very simply that we are solitary natures, and Hegel's emphasis is on interaction, from the interaction of the smallest insect with its environment, to the interaction of entire civilizations, and the interaction of individual humans with each other in between. You and I interact, and we change each other. Previously, philosophers had investigated the way that people and things are. Hegel asks what people and things are becoming, and how this happens. That is the beginning, or one of the beginning premises of Hegel's philosophy, or one of its significant points of departure from Kant's. You and I change each other, and it goes on endlessly from there, and the mind races at the immensity of the possibilities.

I repeat, I'm not the one to explain any of this to you, as it's been just a couple of days since anything Hegel said began to make the slightest bit of sense to me. But don't worry, as one of the handful of most popular philosophers of all time, he's had plenty of people write entire books just about him. And, I repeat, you could, actually. Read. One. Of. His. Books.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

A Reply to Someone Who's Fascinated by Mathematical Questions

Another question about math is whether it is something intrinsic to nature which people have discovered, or a very useful tool which we have invented, and which we impose upon nature. I've always seen it as the latter, which diminishes, at least for me, the intrinsic interest of those other questions you mention.

Of course, I may have been entirely wrong this entire time. I have the impression that most contemporary mathematicians and physicians and zoologists and botanists would say that I'm wrong.

Nietzsche believed we invented math. See Menschliches Allzumenschliches, vol 1, section 1, "Von den ersten und letzten Dingen," paragraph 19, "Die Zahl." Mathematicians and physicists might find this passage interesting, among other reasons for the grasp of atomic theory which Nietzsche demonstrates in something he published in the late 1870's.

But many years after I first read that, it suddenly struck me, like a hammer striking a gong, that everyone knows exactly what a circle is, although none of us has ever seen a perfect circle. This very simple fact, available to anyone who thinks about it for as long as a moment, seems to me to be a very strong argument in favor of Plato's forms, and in favor in math being something we discover as opposed to something we invent.

Nietzsche despised Plato more intensely than he did any other single human being. I went through a period of very intense admiration for Nietzsche (except for his sexism and enthusiasm for war, which I always rejected), and I adopted his contempt of Plato. But my gong-moment, my insight about circles, has forced me to reconsider Plato. And when you reconsider something as influential as Platonic philosophy, you necessarily re-consider many other things.

Monday, November 20, 2023

EV Sales are Booming, Worldwide. So Why Do Many People Believe That They're Dropping?

Worldwide, 2.1 million electric vehicles were sold in 2019, 3 million in 2020, 6.76 million in 2021, 10 million in 2022, and sales in 2023 are expected to top 14 million, which will be well over 20 percent of total motor vehicles sales. Overall sales of motorized vehicles  have actually declined over the past several years.

So why are there so many stories about an alleged decline in the sales of EV's? I can only think of bad reasons, such as: people really are that bad at math. So bad that they would look at numbers as simple and clears as those I just gave you, and think it means that "the EV craze" is over. It's hard for me to believe that there are people smart enough to be able to read, but still that bad at math. But not as hard as it would have been before the 2016 Democratic US Presidential primaries.

Could it be because people think only of Teslas when they think of EV's? It seems a lot of people do. And Tesla's share of the EV market is shrinking in the US. And a lot of people, especially in the US, think only of the US when they think about how things are going in the world. 

Could it be because some bad people are flat-out lying to broad segments of the public who trust them and look to them for vital information about the world? It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that some influential bad people are doing exactly that, and trying their utmost to convince the public that "the EV craze" is over. 

I would guess that a combination of all of the above -- people's inability to do math, their tendency to do math, their tendency equate Tesla in the US with EV's globally, and lying big shots -- have led to the perception that the EV sector is doing poorly. 

This would be an example of the importance of investing in education, for instance, education in math and in critical thinking. Investments staunchly opposed by a lot of of those very same bad liars.

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Logistics Again

I have discussed Amazon logistics with people who have some insights into how businesses actually function, with me suspecting that Amazon, and/or some other shipping company, had messed something up, and them arguing that there are things involved which I didn't grasp, things which meant that the quickest route was NOT a straight line.

 
And I've been listening, and I've learned some things. That's how it often works if you talk with smart people, and listen: you learn things. It's great. I recommend it.

I've got another case for the intelligent insiders: USPS says that a package I ordered from Amazon was in a small town in Michigan, about 50 miles away from me, two days. 

According to Google Maps, from that small town to my place is about a 4-hour trip. By bicycle. Somewhat quicker by car.

USPS says that the package is now in Irvine, Texas.

Oh btw, I ordered the item 12 days ago.

Your witness, smart guys. Explain to me how Amazon and USPS have been handling this as well as anyone has a right to reasonably expect.

Or admit the possibility that something has gone wrong.

Oh, I just thought of an explanation: Amazon expected to get the item in that small Michigan town. But they didn't. Eventually they gave up on getting it there -- or maybe they had it there for a while, and then lost it --  and they said, lessee, where else is there one of these things? Aha: Irving.
 
If that's what happened, somehow, it would be much more reassuring to me than if they actually are shipping the package Michigan-to-Texas-to-Michigan. Although I'll be receiving the package the same time either way.