Philosophy has spent 2,500 years asking "What is true?" when the urgent question was always "What kind of constraint is this, and does someone profit from my belief that it's unchangeable?" Deferential Realism doesn't care whether your epistemology is justified—it asks whether your constraint claim serves extraction or description. The innovation here isn't the four-category … Continue reading The Tyranny of Necessity: How Deferential Realism Weaponizes Skepticism
Tag: systems theory
Nothing’s More Practical Theory
"If we want to learn to use a system, part of that is speeding up this process of operant conditioning - learning what's safe, and what to avoid. Having an adequate mental model of the system seems to be a key part of that, because it lets you figure out this mapping of action to … Continue reading Nothing’s More Practical Theory
Swallowing the Elephant (Part 1)
"Years ago while interning in the rendering group at Pixar, I learned an important lesson: “interesting” things almost always come to light when a software system is given input with significantly different characteristics than it’s seen before. Even for well-written and mature software systems, new types of input almost always expose heretofore unknown shortcomings in … Continue reading Swallowing the Elephant (Part 1)
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