You say that the three listed things are your “findings”, which are the result of you “investigating” “the idea of ‘ownership’”. Could you say more about this? What was the nature of this “investigation”? By what means did you proceed, what sort method or approach did you use? What questions did you start with? In other words, could you tell us more about how you got here?
Like I said in the post, I’ve been at this particular point for over a decade, as I see from looking back on my notes. My research MO, aside from the obvious, is to educate myself, write up my thinking, expose it for criticism to the most intelligent people I can find, (blogs, social media, the occasional “expert” who’ll take the time), endless hours of discussion, and see what comes up in the process. This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I’ve made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections—whether to correct them or take correction myself—until we’re agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating.
So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it’s after having spent the time and done the work that most people don’t even attempt.
The question I started with was, “Why are things so fucked up and almost nothing makes sense?” That was in my teen age, when I stopped asking my parents for answers because what they insisted on made no fucking sense. I worked my way up through the educational route until I finally got so frustrated and repulsed by the attitudes in academia, I dropped out just credits short of my BA in Philosophy. Since then, I’ve been self-educated.
So, I got “here”—a career in construction as a business owner, a career in IT at major corporations, currently a writing career, and six grown sons later—covering a helluvalot more ground than just the nature of ownership, by listening to every non-absurd theory I could, and even some that were absurd, too, trying to make them work (something almost no one these days seems to have the balls to do,) accepting and incorporating what did work and discarding the rest, rinse, repeat. What I have now is what I’m left with, and none of it is sacrosanct. It’s all provisional, open to question, discussable, criticizable, correctable, debatable (although I’d much rather discuss than debate), and rejectable whenever good reason for doing so appears.
This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I’ve made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections—whether to correct them or take correction myself—until we’re agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating. So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it’s after having spent the time and done the work that most people don’t even attempt.
Or, to put it less flatteringly, “I harangue the most sycophantic and new-agey LLMs I can find until they finally agree with me, in the absence of any objective feedback or empirical evidence, about something I’m already certain of, and I think this is intellectually valid work which deserves the name of ‘findings’ and is an ‘investigation’ far superior to whatever it is ‘most people’ do, rather than deserving the name ‘intellectual masturbation’.”
I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary.
You say that the three listed things are your “findings”, which are the result of you “investigating” “the idea of ‘ownership’”. Could you say more about this? What was the nature of this “investigation”? By what means did you proceed, what sort method or approach did you use? What questions did you start with? In other words, could you tell us more about how you got here?
Excellent question!
Like I said in the post, I’ve been at this particular point for over a decade, as I see from looking back on my notes. My research MO, aside from the obvious, is to educate myself, write up my thinking, expose it for criticism to the most intelligent people I can find, (blogs, social media, the occasional “expert” who’ll take the time), endless hours of discussion, and see what comes up in the process. This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I’ve made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections—whether to correct them or take correction myself—until we’re agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating.
So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it’s after having spent the time and done the work that most people don’t even attempt.
The question I started with was, “Why are things so fucked up and almost nothing makes sense?” That was in my teen age, when I stopped asking my parents for answers because what they insisted on made no fucking sense. I worked my way up through the educational route until I finally got so frustrated and repulsed by the attitudes in academia, I dropped out just credits short of my BA in Philosophy. Since then, I’ve been self-educated.
So, I got “here”—a career in construction as a business owner, a career in IT at major corporations, currently a writing career, and six grown sons later—covering a helluvalot more ground than just the nature of ownership, by listening to every non-absurd theory I could, and even some that were absurd, too, trying to make them work (something almost no one these days seems to have the balls to do,) accepting and incorporating what did work and discarding the rest, rinse, repeat. What I have now is what I’m left with, and none of it is sacrosanct. It’s all provisional, open to question, discussable, criticizable, correctable, debatable (although I’d much rather discuss than debate), and rejectable whenever good reason for doing so appears.
Thanks for asking.
Or, to put it less flatteringly, “I harangue the most sycophantic and new-agey LLMs I can find until they finally agree with me, in the absence of any objective feedback or empirical evidence, about something I’m already certain of, and I think this is intellectually valid work which deserves the name of ‘findings’ and is an ‘investigation’ far superior to whatever it is ‘most people’ do, rather than deserving the name ‘intellectual masturbation’.”
You don’t say.
Wow, do you habitually make shit up off the top of your head and pretend it’s real? Seems pathological.