Michael Bench-Capon

if there's one thing the ninja were known for, it's a rigorous obedience to the letter of the law

Alex on twitter writes: "Someone on Twitter writes: "You’re a menswear writer. You don’t know anything about manufacturing in America, or steel mills, or metallurgy, or CNC machining, or how anything is produced from raw material into a finished product in this country or anywhere. Stick to writing about “men’s fashion."" I reply: "i actually had a career in knifemaking before this. the reason why you can't avoid tariffs in knifemaking is because everyone relies on Gobelin machinery. are you aware of this?" Alex replies: "Gobelin machinery? What exactly are you referring to?" I reply: "you Gobelin DEEZ NUTS!"

"stick to menswear"

I've discovered that Captain James T. Kirk has not only read Spinoza but taught him in class at Star Fleet.

It feels wrong somehow.

Ending all my blogposts in future with "OK quick confession I don't actually know anything about any of this"

Image from Labour Party Facebook page wherein they brag that they've now banned ninja swords

Bad enough Labour are attacking higher education in this country but now they have to wreck my plan B career too!?

Here in the UK the idea that you can come to know when the train is leaving merely by checking the schedule would be considered preposterous

Do we want to say that looking again at the departure board when you already know what it says is good or bad? It sounds like our datum is that it's good but iirc JL Austin has a passage where he says rechecking stuff like this is bad

Of course it's a long shot; of all the cognitively impressive species on Earth there's only one that's any good at deciphering documents and (perhaps pace Derrida) even they haven't been doing it for their whole history

I think they just wanted to give them the best chance they could of figuring it out

"How do you know?"
"I don't; I just like to live dangerously"

Kripke has a bit where he points out that we know that *other* people know a lot of everyday stuff, and since that's easy knowing that we know stuff should also be easy

I guess that there's a "KK is easy" camp and a "KK is hard" camp; when I have my "knowledge is possible" hat on I find myself in the "KK is easy, at least for me" camp, where the hard part is knowing stuff and once I do I'll usually be in a position to know that I know it

Well normally if you're on K^3 you'll already be on K^4; all the relevant contrasting pairs here will be weird

When I'm wondering whether or not I know that p, the natural thing to do would be to go down my list of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that p and see if they all obtain. But if any of them don't, then should I really be answering "yes" to "p?"? Seems kind of risky

I don't think my niche is basically the same as an octopus's just because we both live on the same planet

And yes it should be "position to know that you know that p"

I suppose someone who was more wedded than I am to the "usually" might say that reflecting on your processes for arriving at the conclusion that p can sometimes make the difference between knowing that p and not knowing that p so that's still more from the same bucket

Do you think evidence we already have from cephalopods and birds points to the evolution of cognition being convergent in the right way or not being convergent in the right way

It's not a counterexample to the claim itself but it is a counterexample to your ground for the claim since he's not a good writer

Another potential counterexample is Socrates

But I don't think it's *odd* not to find it appealing; p and your knowing that p are prima facie quite different states of affairs and you would expect knowledge about the latter to involve possessing some extra evidence to cover you-aspect and the knowing-aspect

A more hardcore version which I think has a more mysterious appeal takes ⌜p⌝, ⌜I believe that p⌝ and ⌜I know that p⌝, in the first personal case, to be different flavours of the same thought, and then builds the concepts of knowledge and belief in general out from the mysterious first-personal case

I think it is kind of appealing in a mysterious sort of way, although you could probably also explain it away via safety considerations: if you know that p but aren't in a position to know that p it's usually because you only just know that p and so to make it knowable you need more evidence that p

Events in the distant past seem closer together because we know less about what happened in between but are actually further apart because there were fewer old people and worse recordkeeping; nobody except me seems to care about this and even I don't care much about it

you know I really do believe that being a global best-selling novelist would solve a lot of my problems

"somewhere" over the rainbow? could you be a LITTLE more specific please?? I'm trying to find these fuckin bluebirds

Guess that'll be Storm Floris outside

BBC Sport getting dangerously close to swearing on the live commentary

Well I've read the article on the website now www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... and it didn't come over as irresponsible journalism to me but I don't expect I'll watch the show; I don't watch a lot of documentaries

No; I've barely even followed the story in the first place let alone the supplementary background reporting. Are they well done