(-Death)rant.net

This time I will tell you about an alternative use of my blog: I use it to collect interesting bookmarks. Right, there’s always the possibility to create bookmarks inside your browser, but honestly I very rarely get back to them. Somehow it’s like collecting goodies in a box you have locked away at a place, which looks safe. There are a couple of problems with browser based bookmarks:

• You can lose them, if you change or reinstall your system.
• They are not comfortably transferable to other browsers or more independent places, although there are exceptions to that rule.
• Browser based bookmarks are pretty minimalistic. You can’t add elaborate reviews about the sites they are pointing to, and add them to the bookmark itself.
• Usually, you collect too many of them, even the less interesting onces, making your list of bookmarks uncomfortably long.

So, just collecting links in a blog post avoids these problems in a more or less convenient way. And those bookmarks are public, too. In theory, I could also create private blog posts to collect bookmarks, but I think that would be relatively boring. Well, you also could collect bookmarks on Twitter, or Facebook, or any other web 2.0 site, but I think the blog format is one of the best possibilities for collecting and sharing them. I can write short or long or no reviews and despritions, collect them into lists, point out possible connections and share all that stuff with people who might be interested in what I think is interesting.

Usually I have in between 10 and 30 differnt open browser tabs at the same time. Writing monthly reviews is a pretty convenient and fun way of saving interesting collections of tabs, so I can close them all again. Every time I upgrade Firefox I have to save all the open browser tabs anyway, because after restarting the browser, they are gone. (Update: Ok, this time my open tabs were saved through the whole updating and restarting process. Firefox rocks! ) Essentially, I write this blog post, because I have upgraded Firefox again and am constantly bothered with that information panel, which hangs on top of my main browser window like the sword of Damocles, and tells me that I have to restart the browser. In restart-needing mode Firefox also doesn’t work well.

Let’s come to the collection of links of great value:

• With great cartoons comes great fun: El Goonish Shive, featuring: Transformation beams, furries, goo, magic, aliens, parallel universes, good stories and great humor.
• Need a long German composite-word? What about Valenz-Instrumentalitäts-Erwartungs-Theorie? In English it’s just called Expectancy Theory. It’s a theory about what determines people’s motivation and decisions. I think the most interesting aspect of that theory is just a single word:
  

  Valence – Strength of an individual’s preference for a particular outcome. For the valence to be positive, the person must prefer attaining the outcome to not attaining it.

  (Wikipedia)
  It would be pretty interesting to create an utilitarianism theory based on the concept of valence. Basically, I see four different levels at which one could speak of valence:

  1. Subconscious valence: You have some preference, but that preference doesn’t get to your consciousness. In my opinion, the existence of moods and moody behaviour indicates that this concept is more than just fiction.
  2. Conscious valence: Your prefrerence is conscious. At that level valence is a component of what I would consider a feeling (the other component being general qualia).
  3. Meta-conscious valence: You have a conscious preference and you are conscious about having that conscious preference. So, you feel you want something and you know that you feel you want something.
  4. Reflected valence: This is the same as meta-conscious valence with the difference that your conscious control mechanisms are in agreement with your preference, so you have consciously affirmed valence. The difference between 3 and 4 is that 3 is just a conscious desire, while 4 is also the conscious will to seek the satisfaction of that desire.

  Actually, Peter Singer‘s version of utilitarianism seems to use valence of type 3 or 4 as basis, while I think that utilitarianism should be based on valence of types 1 or 2, because those are closer to the core of what we might call “value”.

• Patterns are everywhere! That’s why it’s good to know that there is a mathematical subject called pattern theory.
• Somehow it feels like there might be connections with random matrix theory, which is also about more or less random patterns.
• Oh, and btw: The universe is maths anyway, which is the central statement of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which is described in great detail in a paper of Max Tegmark: The Mathematical Universe, discussed at Less Wrong as the map that is the territory, and is, more or less, a variant of modal realism, which I call mathematical modal realism. The implications of that theory are incredible. And just because they are incredible, I don’t bother mentioning them explicitly at this time. Maybe later.
• Magic and rationality? Surprisingly, that’s a combination that works, which is demonstrated in Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s fanfic: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
• Virtual magic is demonstrated pretty impressively in a short movie called World Builder.
• An almost magical trick is to use crowdsourcing for changing the world: Armchair Revolutionary makes it possible.
• If you just want to defeat breast cancer, then the Pink Army might be the right thing for you. Personalized medicine FTW!
• Attention! The Singularity has entered the Science! David Chalmers has written a philosophical analysis about the Singularity!

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We are the philosophically ascending life!