Tom Moertel's Weblog: Tag life

That looks about right

Tom Moertel — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:58:00 -0400

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    196 git
    110 l
    102 cd
     70 make
     34 darcs
     30 pushd
     23 ssh
     23 m
     23 ls
     20 rm

The l and m commands are aliases:

l = ls –CF
m = less

Debate to learn. Learn to debate.

Tom Moertel — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:23:00 -0400

Recently, Reg Braithwaite wrote about the ad hominem fallacy. His article reminded me that debating – the art and science of constructing sound arguments in the face of opposition – is a valuable skill.

Though many online debates devolve into name calling and other foolishness, most are rich opportunities to learn – if learning is your goal. So make learning your goal.

Look at each debate you enter as a chance to discover something new. When you participate, assume the other participants are good people, who deserve an honest argument from you. If you learn the fundamentals of logic and clear thinking, it’s easy to stay in the debate, contribute, and increase your (and their) chances to learn.

Many people, however, overlook the opportunity to learn in order to pursue the opportunity to win. What a mistake. If the price of winning is ignorance, can you afford the purchase?

Therefore, when I debate, I make considerable efforts to be rational and reasonable. Even so, it’s hard not to say the wrong thing when a debate gets heated. To help keep me in the right frame of mind, I use a simple, idealized debating model.

I wrote about this model six years ago on Kuro5hin, but it’s worth revisiting. The model is not magic, and I doubt it’s novel, but it has helped me. Maybe it can help you, too.

Here it is:

The motivation for debating is to arrive at a better understanding of reality (i.e., the truth).
All participants share this motivation.
All participants are intelligent, rational human beings, each fully capable of drawing logical conclusions from facts.
The reason for disagreements is not because participants want to disagree but rather because their understandings of the facts differ.
Therefore, the objective of debating is to share information until the participants can bring their understandings of the facts into alignment, which will allow for agreement or at least consensus.

I know that the model and reality part ways at the outset. When I debate, however, I pretend the model is reality. I do this is because it allows me to participate earnestly. Forcing myself to make meaningful contributions increases the chance that debates will end in somebody learning something useful.

Nevertheless, debates often go wrong. That’s the second reason I use the model. It gives me something to compare real debates with so that problems are easy to spot and classify. If a key participant in a debate makes personal attacks or refuses to accept demonstrated facts, for example, the problem is easy to see and classify: It is a debate killer. Time to move on.

Another tool that has helped me stay on track is D. Q. McInerny’s wonderful introduction to logic, Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking. This short book, inspired by Strunk and White’s classic, tiny text on writing, The Elements of Style, introduces the foundations of logic, explains how to construct sound arguments, and prepares you to recognize and avoid illogical thinking (fallacies). The book is a pleasure to read and makes a handy reference (I keep mine within arm’s reach). If you need a quick refresher on clear thinking, add this delightful book to your toolbox.

Don’t forget: Every debate is an opportunity to learn. So when debating, make learning your goal. And if you learn to debate, you will have an easier time debating and learning.

Debate to learn. Learn to debate.

A bad way to start the evening

Tom Moertel — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:08:00 -0500

I just checked my inbox and noticed the following urgent message from the SMART daemon on my laptop:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW!

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

Crap.

Luckily, I recently ordered a new laptop, and it should be arriving tomorrow. Good timing.

Once it arrives, I should be able to transfer my dying laptop’s personality to the new laptop from the back-up copy on my development RAID system. Still, getting things set up just right will probably eat half a day.

I blame the pie

Tom Moertel — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 01:45:00 -0500

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. But I have a good excuse.

This weekend I baked myself an apple pie. I have the proof right here:

(Yeah, that’s an all-butter crust. Thank you, Sherry Yard.)

So you can see the problem. Whenever I have an amazing idea that simply must be shared on the blog and I start typing it up, it’s only a few minutes before I realize that instead of typing, I could be eating pie. And then, of course, the typing stops.

Then, when I’m eating the pie, I think to myself, Eating pie really is better than typing stuff up. No comparison, really. I mean, none at all. So, if I’m being perfectly honest with you, until the pie is gone the blog will suffer.

But I’m down to the final slice, so posting should resume shortly.

Thank you for your understanding.