As a philosophy major, I would advise you to pay attention to the order in which you expose yourself to materials. The earlier stronger impressions in your journey will naturally have a weight on your opinions of later materials. In addition, academic departments usually have an -ism bias so that will also influence their content recommendations.
A neutral starter would be:
Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking
Once you have some formal thinking tools, I would approach philosophy building organically by writing down your beliefs and identifying questions and gaps, and then researching those ad-hoc. You may also discover that your current existing informal / intuitive model is mostly sufficient for a 21st century life.
"A neutral starter would be: Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking. Once you have some formal thinking tools, I would approach philosophy building organically by writing down your beliefs and identifying questions and gaps, and then researching those ad-hoc"
There are probably many HN readers who would find this a congenial approach, since there are so many programmers here, and logic is so close to math and programming.
I also can't deny that studying it does make one's thinking more rigorous, and it's useful for working with other philosophy (and with math and programming).
However, I am concerned that someone who starts off with logic might get the impression that that's what all philosophy is about, or that's what it builds on, and just stop there. While that's true for some types of philosophy, it's not true for the majority of philosophy.
Also, for those people who aren't in to math, logic, puzzles, or programming, I'm not sure this approach would be particularly engaging for them.
When starting from the Socratic dialogues, I think pretty much everyone gets engaged, since they deal with questions which are of universal concern. They are also questions and themes that run throughout the whole course of Western philosophy (and many in Eastern philosophy too, though from a different direction).
People who start with Socrates instead of logic might not have the tools to analyze his arguments rigorously (though if that's even possible is debatable), but they'd get a much better feel for what philosophy was about.
I would agree that Plato/Aristotle are good foundations for understanding European intellectual history but a lot of chronological study is required to see their influence / relevance today. Here's a cool dependency graph that shows the centrality of Ancient thought: http://www.designandanalytics.com/philosophers-gephi/
However, I worry that a student without some grasp of valid inference would be at the mercy of aesthetic attraction/repulsion factors for deciding what to accept as valid.
I specifically recommended "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking" because I found it to be the most practical and skill-based class in a Philosophy curriculum. While they usually cover some proofs, most of the content has to do with identifying arguments. In addition, having knowledge of formal/informal fallacies helps in everyday inference. It is also relatively free of heavy "Greco-roman" western bias, which may appeal to a wider audience.
There are many great recommendations of philosophy works to read, but logic itself is how philosophy works. I would even go as far as to say logic is the class that has had the single largest impact on my life.
More of your type is needed in the industry because specialists get outdated You need to market your openness to jump in and solve problems. https://link.medium.com/5ucrrV7nNbb
Thank you for suggesting this tool man I have been looking for one for a long time now, I will try the free version first to see how it works I hope it will cover the countries I need, I have visitors from all around the world at lest that is what my geolocation service tells me, I use https://www.abstractapi.com/ I hope the accuracy is good.
At least 3 reasons: stereotype threat (related to race), financial aid and socio-economic pragmatics.
Stereotype threat makes people less likely to engage in psychologically risky feedback loops (bad grades, seeking feedback,...), and many higher STEM courses are riskier in this regard.
Many students are forced to engage in work-study programs or work part-time to get through college. STEM curricula (especially engineering) require dedication and ample time.
Pragmatics, higher education is the most expedient path to escaping poverty for the underserved. So pursuing more vocational fields like nursing, professional stuff over a risky long career in academia seems more fruitful.
If my anecdote adds any value: I went to a somewhat rigorous college where most of my STEM classes were mostly Asian or White and I was the usually the only black student. I experienced the stressors mentioned above, the financial one was especially painful.
12 years later, I wish I had chosen a less time consuming field like liberal arts instead of CS/Eng and had a somewhat enjoyable experience.
One of my close Asian friends (with comparable ability) is now a Math professor. His upper middle class background enabled him to pay for his college, and living expenses in grad school. It’s inconceivable that I could have taken a similar track given the reality constraints of my particular situation.
1. Could you please explain the connection between economic growth and the population problem a little more?
I would expect economic development to gradually cause a decline in birth rates? Is there a GDP marker where delta GDP > delta population?
As far as overpopulation, the entire continent of Africa has roughly the same population (1.3b) as India with ~9x the land area so the absolute population density is not dire.
2. If you look at carbon emissions per capita, African countries are relatively carbon neutral. Ethiopia relies mostly on renewable energy and they are also building the largest hydroelectric power plant on the continent. I would expect younger economies to “leap frog” to cleaner and greener tech, having polluted less in total (than countries before them) by the time they attain middle income status.
Sounds like a surviving version of Victorian "blame the victim" thinking. It was a popular and heavily flawed idea that the people the British invaded and robbed (of food in many cases), if faced with food shortages, should have just "had less kids".
When a parasite finds a good host, the logic can get really warped.
GeoIP is pretty accurate at the state/country level for most users, but you will run into precision issues at the city level.
A bigger problem seems to be that many forget to continuously sync their IP DB with their provider. Your targeting is only as good as your IP -> Geo map.
My team built a tool for testing GeoIP implementations here: https://www.geoscreenshot.com to get around the issue of testing if it works.
That depends on your use case. Huge numbers of people (e.g. people at work) use VPNs, and their 'geolocation' could be wildly different than their actual location. If you're an IBM employee (what...quarter of a million people) on the VPN, you look like you're in New York someplace. At my current employer (80k), most of us look like we're in Minneapolis, even though I'm half a continent away. If you're, say, targeting ads based on city/state level GeoIP, that's a lot of misdirected ads.
VPN users are an exception. I would think it would be best to use a proximate node to reduce latency.
For corporation, there is another form of targeting (account based targeting) that relies on IP ranges. I believe DemandBase covers this specific use case.
Interested to hear about professional use cases for this kind of tool. I am working on a cloud-based sandbox browser very similar to the OP here: https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/
My target audience is software developers, QA engineers, and Ops people who want a predictable isolated browser environment for doing various forms of testing / hacking.
A neutral starter would be: Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking
Once you have some formal thinking tools, I would approach philosophy building organically by writing down your beliefs and identifying questions and gaps, and then researching those ad-hoc. You may also discover that your current existing informal / intuitive model is mostly sufficient for a 21st century life.