Kevin Beal

My response applies equally well for any deliberate agent you can think up.

Interesting question: Why should anyone care how something that was said made you feel? If you don't already have a relationship with someone, then I don't think you can appeal to a shared value called "we should RTR". If someone I just met put the expectation on me that I should be RTRing with them, then that would make me far less willing to do it. But at the same time, RTRing with someone you're meeting is a good idea to see how interested people are in your live experience of the interaction. If someone is not interested in that, then that's probably not someone you're going to want to be friends and develop an intimate relationship with. I wasn't there, so if I only take the facts as presented and ignore the conjecture/assertions (e.x. "tacit expectation", "excellent argument"), then all I know is that you presented an argument, someone was bothered by something you said and told you so, you continued to make that argument and then they got increasingly frustrated. I'm sure that if I got their side of it, it would tell a story different than the one you presented. The people at the meetup are probably more interested in making lasting connections than in debating philosophical issues. <- cognitive empathy right there. Maybe you explained this further in the posts you said didn't make it through the grinding machine, in which case, I hope they weren't taken out by the guys upstairs (I apologize for the vague language, I'm trying to avoid the suffocating keyword filter).

All you need to do to debunk an argument for intelligent design is to grant every single one of it's premises. The idea that an omnipotent guy is coming up with what the size of celestial objects should be is so ridiculously unnecessary that to take it seriously is to reveal a complete nutcase of a creator. I mean, why the hell does he care that the earth and the moon are a particular size?! Just for the fuck of it?

God is really lucky that we measure miles and degrees that way God thinks to himself "wouldn't it be like totally trippy if, when all these humans develop units of measurement, that these celestial objects all conveniently fit mathematically, given those units of measurement? They are totally going to flip their lids! LOL" He's a real trickster. The idea that anyone would do that on purpose is just funny. Why?!

jQuery would be good for using XHR(ajax) to grab the JSON responses and working with the DOM (elements on your page). You could use a templating library like hogan.js, or an actual framework like Backbone.js to display the results of that ajax request. Personally, I'm an Angular.js fanboy all the way, as a framework. (Technically, jQuery is a library and not a framework, despite them saying so on their website). Angular's learning curve is small at first, and then when you want to get into advanced things, the learning curve gets steep quickly, but it's easily my favorite of the javascript frameworks. Code School has several free courses on Angular if you are interested. (FDRPodcasts is built using Angular).

I haven't, but here's a thread on it: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38228-the-philosophers-toolkit/

What kind of web developer do you want to be? Do you want to be a freelancer, lone wolf type who helps out small businesses expand their brands? Do you want to work on a small team? Large team? Do you want to focus on website branding and design? Like working with data? In any case, I think a good first project is building a personal site of your own. And making it something that you'll be able to use, for real. Like have it be a place where you show off your work as you are figuring it out, or a blog where you talk about what you are learning. That way, you learn the important skills involved in getting hosting, attaching a domain name, working with files remotely, etc. Here's an intermediate to advanced project: If you become comfortable enough with javascript and ajax (which is an important skill to develop, I think) then you can use your web inspector in your browser to find out where the HTTP requests are going in FDRPodcasts, so you can grab all the data you want from the podcast stream and develop a podcast browser yourself, maybe one built for mobile sized devices, or do something clever with the data that I haven't thought of. You can keep that in the back of your mind as you progress. I use Chrome's web inspector constantly as I'm working, since I focus so much on building and presenting templates. If you aren't already familiar with it, it's by far the best way to debug things and make quick tweaks to projects you are working on. It's also a great way of seeing just how other people do things with their HTML, CSS and javascript. Becoming familiar with that will definitely give you an advantage over people who don't know how to use it. Once you become pretty good at HTML and CSS, and that's something you can see yourself continuing to do, rather than focus on the backend, then I think that understanding page layout is important. You'll want to start thinking about your pages in terms of features, how to best layout those features for your intended audience, drawing up a wireframe and then, for extra points getting familiar with photoshop, and taking that wireframe and making it into exactly the design you want most. With all of that preparation laid out, executing the building of that page becomes much much easier and simpler to reason about. I'm curious as to why you chose to take courses on Python. Seems like an interesting, unique choice of programming language

Haha. Well, that's a good point. On the one hand, I want to honor myself and my life, but a lot of people are alive and are not worth celebrating, imo. The simple fact of staying alive another year is not really a challenge to people in most of the modern world. If I'm honoring my life, I want that to be because of my achievements or because of especially good fortune, or something like that. Having the celebration on the anniversary of my birth, rather than tied specifically to some achievement,... or good fortune, as I mentioned, does seem to make less sense, given what the celebration is for. That is, I'm less so celebrating me, and more celebrating what I've done. Is it too late to switch sides of this debate?

Glad you like it And I actually had a decent grasp of HTML & CSS. I used to do that stuff for fun when I got home from school, and I was easily the best in the 3 semesters of website design I took in high school, so I probably had more experience than you'd imagine, but definitely I was under qualified. I think it was more desperation than anything else. I wanted any job I could get, but I wanted a job in web development a good deal more. And to that end I developed a wordpress site with my own design, worked on graphics, flash and anything else I had a basic proficiency in to give a good representation of what my skills were, like a hastily thrown together portfolio. And I was still under qualified when I finally got the job, but I was a lot closer having practiced every single day in the time in between. Code Academy was pretty puny at the time so I just tried to work on any projects I thought I might actually publish so that I could stay motivated to finish them and do the more tedious things that were required. I think that one thing that is not said enough when learning web development is most people's thinking is completely backwards. They start with what they want to learn and find tasks/projects which facilitate that learning. That's not how web development jobs actually work, and you could very well be learning skills you'll never use and end up wasting a ton of time. Rather, I think that you need to start with the kind of projects that you want to work on, and then as you work on it, discover what skills are required and then learn those skills in order to complete the project. That is, having the end result in mind, always, and don't change that scope of the project simply because you don't have the skill required, but actually learn them, even when they aren't fun. Working in web development means you have to be a jack of all trades, in a lot of ways. If you are working on large teams where you never do wireframes/mockups, and you are not doing anything with the databases, you can get away with only knowing a few skills at a high level, but more often, you'll want to gain a lot of different skills that you wouldn't think you would ever be doing. I work on a two man team. I'm the front end guy and he's the back end guy, but really I do back end work sometimes and he does front end work sometimes. We both do project management, but he does it a lot more. We both do templating, but I do that a lot more. We mix together responsibilities a lot, and the variety of the projects we take on kinda require that since they vary so much. But also, web devs themselves vary wildly. Some only know simple design skills and know how to run a wordpress site and they can do a lot with only those skills and take on a lot of different kinds of basic sites. So, my advice applies more if you want to make large scale sites, do start ups, or make fancy things that someone else hasn't already done or can't be plugged right into your project. Hope that helps!

It's a gorgeous mockup Is it going to be a responsive design?

Hi Filip! I'm a self taught web developer with mad skills in HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. (I built the interface for the FDRPodcasts browser). I currently work at an online insurance company where I'm the Senior UI Engineer (although I keep changing that title for convenience). I'm not as successful as a lot of people with that title, but I'd be happy to give you my perspective from my experience. I mentioned a bit about it in the recent video Stef did on finding a job. Here's what I wrote:

I talk about my experience of that in a video I published to youtube yesterday. I think it takes courage what you are doing, and I admire that

I'm totally fine with people celebrating their life any / every day of the year, I just think that there is a reason it would be one of those particular days, and that reason is not trivial. Same goes for marriages or anything else. Celebrate it whenever you want, but it's not this completely arbitrary decision to celebrate a marriage on the same day of the year as the wedding. It is ritualistic, and rituals can be totally awesome! Have you had yourself a good ritual lately?

Number 3!

The reason you would celebrate your life on your birthday as opposed to any other day is because it is the day that you were born. The day you came into the world. If you accept that celebrating your life is a good thing, it's hard to imagine a better event for that celebration to be tied to. And I think it is important to celebrate your own life, to honor who you are and are becoming. You've made it this far, and that's worth celebrating. Stef also said that he doesn't think birthdays are a big deal, and all of you are crazy. Yes, birthdays are a big deal!

If you think that, then you might like part 2! (Once it finishes processing, anyway)

Cured of what? I think there is a danger in the sort of attitude which says that we are never healed and must always see ourselves as grown wounded children, a danger and a falsity (because there's no "compared to what", no standard). But in terms of my own healing, I've had too many experiences of seeing where I have been blind, have acted out because of patterns I've picked up during dysfunctional periods in my life to ever be so confident as to simply tell people that I'm cured. (Of course, assuming that by "cured" you mean, resolved all your past traumas). And it could be because you have done a lot more work than me, or had less to heal or whatever. But I've heard so many people claim to have been healed only to demonstrate later that they are totally dysfunctional, mystical and in denial, that I never take it at face value anymore. I don't know the NYC group you're met up with, and maybe they were being false, or pretentious or whatever. Maybe all of that is true with regard to your experience there, but you've made comments about talk therapy, the principles that inform the RTR that happens on the show and lumped it in with the type of unbearable pretentiousness of the self esteem movement, who care only about feelings. And you are saying now that it's very easy to heal and the reason people find it difficult is because they are doing it wrong. These are very big claims that you need to make the case for if you are going to ask me to believe it. I'm assuming you've never done therapy, but as someone who has done almost 4 years of twice weekly talk therapy, talked to a ton of people who've also done therapy and being someone who studies psychology as an amatuer, I know immediately that your portrayal of talk therapy as being all about feelings and never resolving anything, and being at the expense of cognitive empathy is just plain false. You are telling me that you know better than me with my direct and considerable experience with talk therapy, and you without any experience with it. If you can present a logical case, then awesome! I can do something with that, but if you simply assert that all of my direct knowledge is wrong without offering up a series of logical steps which I can use to determine that for myself, then I'm just simply not going to take it seriously. You said that all of this is at the expense of cognitive empathy, and I said how it's not the case at all that it's at the expense of cognitive empathy. You say therapy is X, and I say that it's not X. You say that the RTR approach is antithetical to resolution of problems, and I say that is exactly formulated the way it is to resolve problems. Just putting out conclusions and not logical arguments makes it so you don't have to stand behind anything. Arguments you have to stand behind. Conclusions you can maintain by simply changing your own reasoning in your head about, I guess, until your opponent has exhausted every single counterposition you could think up and guessing what the logic is because you won't say what it is. It's so so so easy to simply assert things.

Haha. Yea, it seems to be the consensus (including myself) that the unscripted videos are better. They are less preparation too, which I like. I'm glad you are found it interesting. Thanks for the feedback!

There are other languages that don't require you to write subroutines to handle simple functions.

When emotional empathy is at the expense of cognitive empathy, that would imply that you are losing sight of the problem itself. If the emotional empathy acknowledges the current problem, but perhaps, is looking for origins earlier in life, then that is not just emotional empathy, but cognitive empathy as well, since it is addressing a current problem by looking at it's origins, not simply addressing symptoms. If there is cause to believe childhood origins, or something to that effect, then it's actually lacking in cognitive empathy to only address the present, local manifestation of that psychological constellation. And there is a cognitive empathetic reason for this. Alice Miller did say something like: "It doesn't matter whether you intellectually understand the problem; you have to emotionally connect with your childhood trauma?" But this is for the reason I mentioned above. How many times have you been trying to gain moral clarity about past abuse / neglect and get it on an intellectual level, but have this sense that your analysis is lacking? The intellectual component is easy, at least for me. It's really occupying those circumstances emotionally that is difficult, and when I finally do, the intellectual part goes from being abstract and distant to being visceral and real. I'm sure there are therapists who are not good and are enablers, or are really shallow, or do the "everyone's a winner" kind of thing but that's not what it means to be a therapist in the responsible sense. It's not what the psychology of talk therapy is about. And if you see it that way, you are doing the equivalent of saying that all economics is bullshit because Keynesians are so full of shit. (To the degree that is happening).

There is a question I sometimes ask myself: am I growing? How do I know if I'm growing? What does growing look like? This video is me attempting to answer that question and coming up with some helpful principles in thinking about it. Here's the original script that I barely used: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zPJeUtWluIzVaHGrtGv5V4Ha5ZunHUcEk_WIbZAqP1U/ (might still be processing)

Hey thanks! And that's an interesting thought about the downplaying. I have to give that some more thought.

Hi Edgard! Welcome to the boards I'd love to hear more about the offense and defense against toxicity. Is it more in terms of protecting your own mind from the propaganda all around us, or is it more about dealing with other people, or something else?

Oh yea. When I'm intensely focused on something, I forget to breathe. That includes breathing out, so every once in a while I have all this CO2 to exhale that was stored up. People have commented on it before mistaking this for me sighing. It's just me being a laser, I don't have any respiratory diseases or anything.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Could you rephrase it?