next »

[Paul Eres]

It isn't really terrible news to accept, and I totally agree with you about common sense, but I reject the dividing line you draw between what counts as abstract and concrete. I think it's weirdly positivistic to think that we ever have concrete thoughts.

no, i don't believe we have concrete thoughts. our senses are concrete, our perception is mostly concrete, but our thoughts and words are never concrete. they can be more or less connected to reality, but never concrete. even the word 'cat' for instance, referring to a specific type of animal, is abstract, it's just more connected to the concrete world than, say, the word 'curious' is, or the phrase 'dialectical materialism' is

[Bennett]

I don't see how our senses are all that concrete either. There's still a lot of fuzzy pattern-matching going on even with sight, much more so with smell and sound, even at the basic level of the visual cortex. I don't think you gain much in the way of reality or concreteness by allowing words like 'cat' and denying words like 'curious'.

[Alec S.]

Schizophrenia and Hallucinogens are a testament to the non-concrete nature of perception.  And we don't have any direct understanding of our senses, only our perceptions. 

[Paul Eres]

@bennett

i don't think people can gain much in the way of concreteness, people operate at the level of concreteness their brain operates at, and can't really do much to change it. there's meditation and using thought against thought and such, but those are short-term band-aides. so i'm not denying curious and accepting cat, or saying that people shouldn't use those terms, just denying that either cat or curious exist (c.f. nominalism)

we wouldn't want our senses to be too directly accurate. for example, with the eyes, the light that we actually collect is upside-down, and it appears right-side-up in our heads. we wouldn't want our eyes to accurately show the world as upside down just because that's how they collect light. so i see most of those things not as distorting reality, but as clarifying it

in any case the senses certainly are far closer to reality than spiral dynamics or original sin are, and also far closer than scientific theories like gravity, evolution, relativity, etc. -- not to downplay the importance of that latter group, but they're still closer to spiral dynamics and original sin than they are to reality, even if they can make accurate predictions and are useful as tools

@malec2b

i don't actually see what you mean. schizophrenia and hallucinogens work by physically distorting an instrument of sensation (the brain). of course when you mess up the brain it's not going to sense reality as well as it is when it's correctly working. but i don't really see how if a machine, when broken or distorted, doesn't work, that it somehow follows that it doesn't work when it's not broken or distorted

[Alec S.]

I'm just saying that perception can lie.  There could very well be someone in a mental institution somewhere living in a fantasy world arguing with figments of his imagination about the validity of his perceptions.

[Paul Eres]

yes, though i wouldn't consider it a "lie" in the same way that people lie, but rather a malfunction or distortion. not different in kind from, say, cataracts blurring one's vision

[Dacke]

Derail much?

Awesome, I hope it takes wildcards, I would like to start using it with "TIGSTWG *"

I have put up a new version of the script, that supports regular expressions.
Script 3: Ignore updated threads 2.0

To remove any thread that begins with "TIGSTWG" you should add (or rather replace the existing examples with) /^TIGSTWG/, like so:

var threadsToIgnoreRegexes = [/^TIGSTWG/];

The ^ represents the beginning of the thread title, so it won't match any threads that have "TIGSTWG" in the middle of their names. If you want it to be case-insensitive you can write /^TIGSTWG/i

Regular expressions are extremely powerful and handle all sorts of matching goodness. For more details you can look at this reference: http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html

[deadeye]

I altered the code to to the "Capitalize Paul Eres" script and created a new one that some may find useful.  It's the "Paul Eres Disagrees" script.  It changes all of Paul's posts to simply state "I disagree."

With proper capitalization, of course.

Here's a snapshot:



And here's the script:

Code:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Paul Eres Disagrees
// @namespace      http://forums.tigsource.com
// @description    Paul Eres Disagrees with you on every subject.
// @include        http://forums.tigsource.com/*
// ==/UserScript==


var titleSnap = document.evaluate("//head/title", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);

if(titleSnap.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML.match("Latest posts of:  Paul Eres")){
var snapElements = document.evaluate("//div[@class='post']", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
}else{
var snapElements = document.evaluate("//a[@title='View the profile of Paul Eres']/../../..//div[@class='post']", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
}
for (var i = snapElements.snapshotLength - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
var currentElement = snapElements.snapshotItem(i);
var editInnerHTML = currentElement.innerHTML;

editInnerHTML = "I disagree."

currentElement.innerHTML = editInnerHTML;
}

I don't know much about .js so there might be stuff in there that isn't necessary, but it seems to work just fine so I'll just post it and call it a day

I'm a horrible person lol.

[r.kachowski]

can you change that even more so that it's pink capital comic sans?

[Paul Eres]

I'm a horrible person lol.

I disagree.

[agj]

I think that's the first post you've made that I've read, Paul, that I'd call cute. <3

[moi]

Change it to
"I disagree lol"

[r.kachowski]

Change it to
"I DISAGREE LOL"

[deadeye]

Change it to
"I DISAGREE LOL"

I don't know how!  I barely know enough .js to hack Dacke's script even that much

[Dacke]

Not to encourage any bad behaviour, but learning more programming is always a nice thing.

The editInnerHTML variable holds all the html that is inside the post's "text-area" (where what you write end up). You can put any text/html you want there. It will replace the original content of the post, in the html source of the page.

If you want to format it like another post, you can look at the source for that post. For example, we can see that what Kachowski wrote generated this html:

<span style="color: pink;">"I DISAGREE LOL"</span>

Using this you can simply write:

editInnerHTML = "<span style=\"color: pink;\">\"I DISAGREE LOL\"</span>";

The backslashes in front of the quote marks are escape characters, to let you put quote marks inside quotes.

However, I'm not really sure if I approve of these turns of events. But I guess it's cool if Paul's cool with it