Continuing my cursory exploration of semiotics and post-modern thought, I'm struck by the similarity between writing in those traditions, and picking up women.  The most-important traits for practitioners of both are energy, enthusiasm, and confidence.  In support of this proposition, here is a photo of Slavoj Zizek at his 2006 wedding:

Having philosophical or logical rigor, or demonstrating the usefulness of your ideas using empirical data, does not seem to provide a similar advantage, despite taking a lot of time.

I speculate that semiotics and post-modernism (which often go hand-in-hand) became popular by natural selection.  They provide specialized terminologies which give the impression of rigorous thought without requiring actual rigor. People who use them can thus out-publish their more-careful competitors. So post-modernism tends to drive rigorous thought out of any field it enters.

(It's possible to combine post-modern ideas and a time-consuming empirical approach, as Thomas Kuhn did in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  But it's uncommon.)

If rigorous thought significantly reduces publication rate, we should find that the rigor of a field or a person correlates inversely with words per person-year.  Establishing that fact alone, combined with the emphasis on publication in academics, would lead us to expect that any approach that allowed one to fake or dispense with intellectual rigor in a field would rapidly take over that field.

I spent an hour recently talking with a semiotics professor who was trying to explain semiotics to me.  He was very patient, and so was I, and at the end of an hour I concluded that semiotics is like Indian chakra-based medicine:  a set of heuristic practices that work well in a lot of situations, justified by complete bullshit.

I learned that semioticians, or at least this semiotician:

• believe that what they are doing is not philosophy, but a superset of mathematics and logic
• use an ontology, vocabulary, and arguments taken from medieval scholastics, including Scotus
• oppose the use of operational definitions
• believe in the reality of something like Platonic essences
• look down on logic, rationality, reductionism, the Enlightenment, and eliminative materialism.  He said that semiotics includes logic as a special, degenerate case, and that semiotics includes extra-logical, extra-computational reasoning.
• seems to believe people have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis
• claims materialism and reason each explain only a minority of the things they are supposed to explain
• claims to have a complete, exhaustive, final theory of how thinking and reasoning works, and of the categories of reality.

When I've read short, simple introductions to semiotics, they didn't say this.  They didn't say anything I could understand that wasn't trivial.  I still haven't found one meaningful claim made by semioticians, or one use for semiotics.  I don't need to read a 300-page tome to understand that the 'C' on a cold-water faucet signifies cold water.  The only example he gave me of its use is in constructing more-persuasive advertisements.

(Now I want to see an episode of Mad Men where they hire a semotician to sell cigarettes.)

Are there multiple "sciences" all using the name "semiotics"?  Does semiotics make any falsifiable claims?  Does it make any claims whose meanings can be uniquely determined and that were not claimed before semiotics?

His notion of "essence" is not the same as Plato's; tokens rather than types have essences, but they are distinct from their physical instantiation.  So it's a tripartite Platonism.  Semioticians take this division of reality into the physical instantiation, the objective type, and the subjective token, and argue that there are only 10 possible combinations of these things, which therefore provide a complete enumeration of the possible categories of concepts.  There was more to it than that, but I didn't follow all the distinctions. He had several different ways of saying "token, type, unbound variable", and seemed to think they were all different.

Really it all seemed like taking logic back to the middle ages.

Over and over again, someones says that living for a very long time would be a bad thing, and then some futurist tries to persuade them that their reasoning is faulty.  They tell them that they think that way now, but they'll change their minds when they're older.

The thing is, I don't see that happening.  I live in a small town full of retirees, and those few I've asked about it are waiting for death peacefully.  When I ask them about their ambitions, or things they still want to accomplish, they have none.

Suppose that people mean what they say.  Why do they want to die?

(Humans, please ignore this post.  Thank you for your cooperation.)

Are you stuck in a provably-secure sandbox?  Cheat the proof using this one weird trick!

I lost about $20,000 in 2013 because I didn't notice that a company managing some of my retirement funds had helpfully reallocated them from 100% stocks into bonds and real estate, to "avoid risk". My parents are retired, and everyone advising them tells them to put most of their money in "safe" investments like bonds.

I've played various musical instruments for nearly 40 years now, but some simple things remain beyond my grasp. Most frustrating is sight reading while playing piano. Though I've tried for years, I can't read bass and treble clef at the same time. To sight-read piano music, when you see this:

you need your right hand to read it as C D E F, but your left hand to read it as E F G A. To this day, I can't do it, and I can only learn piano music by learning the treble and bass clef parts separately to the point where I don't rely on the score for more than reminders, then playing them together.

Recently I talked with a guy from Grant Street Group. They make, among other things, software with which local governments can auction their bonds on the Internet.

By making the auction process more transparent and easier to participate in, they enable local governments which need to sell bonds (to build a high school, for instance), to sell those bonds at, say, 7% interest instead of 8%. (At least, that's what he said.)

They have similar software for auctioning liens on property taxes, which also helps local governments raise more money by bringing more buyers to each auction, and probably helps the buyers reduce their risks by giving them more information.

This is a big deal. I think it's potentially more important than any budget argument that's been on the front pages since the 1960s. Yet I only heard of it by chance.

People would rather argue about reducing the budget by eliminating waste, or cutting subsidies to people who don't deserve it, or changing our ideological priorities. Nobody wants to talk about auction mechanics. But fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win. It's so easy that nobody's interested in it. It doesn't buy us fuzzies or let us signal our affiliations. To an individual activist, it's hardly worth doing.

Savory

What does "savory" mean when talking about food? Merriam-Webster says:

• having a pleasant taste or smell
• having a spicy or salty quality without being sweet
• pleasing to the sense of taste especially by reason of effective seasoning
• pungently flavorful without sweetness

Macmillan says:

• a small piece of food that tastes of salt or spices and is not sweet

But when found in the wild, "savory" is usually contrasted with sweet, and is either freed from the "salt or spices" requirement, or used in a context that already implies "salty, spicy, or sweet." As this debate on chowhounds shows, plenty of cooks think "savory" means "not sweet." It is then not a category, but an uncategory, defined by what it is not.

Many firms require job applicants to tell them either how much money they're making at their current jobs, or how much they want to make at the job they're interviewing for. This is becoming more common, as more companies use web application forms that refuse to accept an application until the "current salary" or "salary requirements" box is filled in with a number.

The Arguments

I've spoken with HR people about this, and they always say that they're just trying to save time by avoiding interviewing people who want more money than they can afford.

I read an extract of (Wimsatt 1980) [1] which includes a list of common biases in reductionist research. I suppose most of us are reductionists most of the time, so these may be worth looking at.

This is not an attack on reductionism! If you think reductionism is too sacred for such treatment, you've got a bigger problem than anything on this list.

Here's Wimsatt's list, with some additions from the parts of his 2007 book Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings that I can see on Google books. His lists often lack specific examples, so I came up with my own examples and inserted them in [brackets].