• Clock – Why can’t the time zone for my clock be set automatically to which time zone I’m in.
• Weather – I want the default display to be the weather of my current location.

I’m too ADD to listen to audio lectures on my desktop but I’ve found it works when I have it running in the background on my iPhone while I’m playing games. One major annoyance was that I wasn’t able to listen to video lectures (such as TED talks) and do anything else at the same time on the iPhone.

It turns out there is a way to do it although it’s pretty obscure. First upload a 10 second silent audio clip onto your iPhone. Then, go into playlists and create an on-the-go playlist. Add the 10 second audio clip first and then any video clips you would like to watch. Start the playlist and then exit the iPod application before the audio ends. When the video starts up, it’ll be running in the background.

There are two types of ideas which appear very similar yet behave very differently and the ability to distingush can be very useful. Legitimate ideas are not neccesarily ideas that are right but their distinguishing factor is that they have an adequate response to all developed criticism. That means one of the hallmark properties of a legitimate idea is that if you’ve heard a criticism against it, that criticism is probably flawed. What’s more, the mere attempt at trying to demolish it looks foolish and woefully ignorant. If a legitimate idea is demolished, it’ll be demolished from the top, by the people who are most intimately familiar with it. Evolution, I believe is a legitimate idea. All attempts to debunk evolution merely reveal the debunker’s lack of understanding of evolution.

Cargo cult ideas are those which have all the outward trappings of a legitimate idea but without the social process that causes those trappings. It survives not because it can survive criticism, but because it carefully prevents legitimate criticism from affecting it. Cargo cult ideas can survive for a surprisingly long time despite the presence of arguments against it because their very survival involves aping legitimate ideas so closely that it can use the same refrain: “if you’ve heard a criticism against it, that criticism is probably flawed”. Cargo cult ideas are undermined from the bottom up rather that from the top down as it involves a loss of faith in the system.

The structure of argument is so different between legitimate and cargo cult ideas that it becomes impossible to argue unless both people are on the same side. You can see this tension play out with the atheist vs Christian arguments where atheists take the side that Religion is a cargo cult idea masquarading as a legitimate one. Christians on the other hand feel safe dismissing atheist arguments because well, even though they personally don’t know the rebuttal to the argument, they’re sure some learned Christian scholar surely does. Why, this athiest simply doesn’t understand the full subtlety and intricacy of the Christian position and all they are doing is revealing their ignorance of it.

How do you distinguish between the two? There are some useful zero knowledge proofs but they’re tricky because ultimately, the goal of a cargo cult idea is to become indistinguishable. I think in order to do so, you need to learn enough about a subject to reach the cliff. The cliff is the point where a simple question, well stated will be rebuffed rather than answered. No good answer will be forthcoming. The problem with this is twofold: It’s impossible to assert that no answer can be found unless you’ve read all of the literature on the problem and it’s impossible to ever assert the cliff does not exist unless you reach the end of the field. Neither of these are practical goals so only probabilistic measures are possible.

Every media type has a natural “grain”, a gentle structure that tugs and shapes the work within it. You can write a novel about your heroine that has piercing blue eyes and the audience with believe you. In a movie, to convince the audience that your heroine has piercing blue eyes requires that you go out and find an actress with piercing blue eyes and this is significantly more difficult.

The natural “grain” of movies is hucksterism. It’s easier to portray an artist who is a talentless, pretentious hack who exploits a gullible audience than it is to portray an artist with genuine talent who receives the accolades they deserve. It’s easier to show a motivational speaker who only speaks in pseudowisdom than one who says genuinely wise things.

Literature is the medium of heroes, of people who are admired by others because they do great things. Movies are the medium of dupes and cons, of the people who are admired by others despite having no discernable talent. Is it then a coincidence that the rise of the long form novel coincided with the spread of modernism with it’s exultation of progress and cinema coincided with the move towards post modernism and the admiration of aloof cynicism?

I just ran across an article by the now departed Michael Crichton on an excellent example of a skill you didn’t know you needed.

Here’s what I don’t understand. If you were going to spend your life in physical battles—bar fights, or boxing matches, or whatever—you would almost certainly get some instruction. You might hire a coach, do a little training. At the very least you would learn the fundamentals: how to punch, and so on. Such instruction would make sense to you.
But the same people who feel the need for instruction in boxing will instantly join in a verbal domestic argument without a moment’s thought about what they are doing, let alone any real training.
Yet verbal fighting, like physical fighting, is a skill. Domestic fighting can be learned. One can become very good at it—although almost nobody is, because almost nobody thinks it’s necessary to learn this skill. Many men don’t bother because they erroneously believe that women are more verbally skilled and emotionally nimble than they are. But whatever the reason, most men just jump into a domestic fight, adopting the fighting style of their fathers, or various people they’ve seen on television.

How to fight