Knowledge is simply weaponised belief

You might have heard, or read, that philosophers like to define knowledge as “justified true belief”. This idea seems to go back at least to the ancient Greeks, though according to Plato, Socrates rejected the idea. I reject it too – I think it is nonsense.

Certainly knowledge is a form of belief, but as we cannot in general determine if something is “true” in the “absolutely accurate” sense, and as “justified” is a value judgement that reasonable people might disagree on, it seems impossible to say when any given belief becomes knowledge, so it seems to not be a useful distinction. More importantly, I don’t think it reflects the way the people use the terms “know” or “knowledge”.

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Cataract Creek – functions and references

I’ve been active on my “Ocean” programming language design project again and have created another point release which I am calling “Cataract Creek”. It contains a number of changes but the most significant are functions and references (aka pointers) so that is what I’ll discuss here.

I found as I was working on some of the design that these two really need to come together, or at least I needed some understanding of references before I could do anything useful with functions. This is because functions need some form of “by-reference” parameter to be really useful, and that means there must be some concept of references.

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Selections and clipping in The X11 Window System

One of the many tasks when writing an editor for Linux – which I am with my “edlib” project – is to support sending and received content from other applications for copy/paste operations. The X11 protocol provides support this is with “Selections” and a “clipboard” which are documented in the ICCCM – the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual. Unfortunately the big-picture of how this should work is poor described, and consequently different applications can behave quite differently and many, in my opinion, get it wrong.

While the selection mechanism can seem confusing and needlessly complex, it actually makes lot of sense and is easy to work with, providing you look at the right way. The important observation is that the “PRIMARY” selection and the “CLIPBOARD” should NOT provide different content. They are really just different interfaces to essentially the same content. Let me explain ….

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LR Parsing with line breaks – 2021 edition

Yes, here it is over a year and a half since the last time I wrote about this, and I’m still working on it. Or maybe working on it again. But I really think I’ve got a much better solution this time. It certainly seems to be easier to work with.

I don’t clearly remember the problems that I had with the previous design, but I do know that it seemed fragile and there was particularly some issue with not having a token that clearly closed a list of statements – like a ‘}’ in C or “end” in Pascal. In any case I now have a new approach which is much simpler

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Funding government – tax, borrowing, or printing.

If you’ve been following along you’ll know that I’ve justified (for myself) the intervention by the government into the affairs of the economy. Any such intervention will have a cost. The question for today is: how will these costs be funded? The options seem to be a tax levied on actors or actions in the economy, borrowing from actors within the economy, or simply creating money (e.g. printing new notes, though that is an archaic way of thinking about money in the modern age).

I believe that all three of these may have their place, and the goal is to explain in what circumstances and in what manner each should be used.

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edlib ideas from elsewhere

There have been a couple of articles on lwn.net (https://lwn.net/Articles/819452/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/832311/) about emacs and how it could be better, which have generated lots of discussion (a really valuable aspect of lwn.net). For some reason this encouraged me to explore more of vim – I’ve never really got passed the basics that I learned in in the late 80’s) and I also stumbled across https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-brief-glance-at-how-5-text-editors.html (largely because edlib was mentioned in the hacker-news discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11244103). All of this has encouraged me to take a step back and look for a different perspective on some editor issues.

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Managing an economy

I wrote in a previous post that any functioning democracy must run the economy with a blend of the two extremes of socialism and capitalism – that ownership of property must, in some way, be shared between the individual citizen and the whole society. The social part-ownership would manifest as some form of intervention by the government, with a combination of exercising partial control, and collection of partial profits. Even with the stated goal of maximizing productivity, minimizing hardship, and providing long-term stability, this provides little guidance on what a government in actually expected to do. In this post I hope to being to map out how government intervention could be structured, by presenting it as Facilitating Markets.

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Socialism or Capitalism

Once you assume a nation with a democratic form of government, the broadest brush used for describing the style of economic management seems to be a choice between Socialism and Capitalism. This is a false choice. Socialism and Capitalism are not alternates, they are extremes. Any functioning democracy will have an economic system which is both socialistic and capitalistic, in different circumstances or to different degrees. The question is which of these to choose, but how much of each to include into the mix.

The issue which these two “isms” address is the ownership of the means of production. Socialism suggests that society as a whole should own it, while Capitalism suggests that individuals, or individual corporations, may own it. In a working democracy, ownership is shared, and the degree of sharing has a substantial effect on economic outcomes. To being to think about the sharing, we need to be sure that we understand two things: What the “mean of production” are, and what it means to “own” something.

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Designing plugins for edlib

As edlib (my Emacs-replacement editor) matures I’m being more adventurous in the functionality I’m adding: spell checker, calculator, difference highlighter. This often involves importing functionality from an external source and making it available within edlib. This has raised the question of how to map an ad hoc interface from some library into the more constrained interfaces supported within edlib. Experience so far suggests that it is always possible, but there are sometimes multiple options and it is worth making the effort to choose carefully.

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The goals for the economy

If I’m to explore ideas concerning macro economics, I need to have a clear understanding of the goal – what is the economic system trying to achieve? Any such goal must be subjective – it can only be “my” goal. I might hope that others will agree with it, but I cannot see any basis for arguing that a particular goal must be the goal. The best I can really hope for is a goal, or set of goals, that is simple, achievable – at least in principle – and that seems consistent with what most people seem to want. To that end I nominate, and will go on to embellish, three goals: maximum productivity, minimum hardship, and long term stability.

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