Great analogy. Its the same reason why I grab stuff off of supermarkets and walk out. If they really cared about it, they'll invest in better technology to stop me. Suckers.
This is one more data point for my theory that New Yorkers have, oddly, become the most insular population in the U.S.
There is a wide world outside of New York and class-signaling. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere on Earth where loud, ambient noise is preferred over quiet. In the early 20th century, New Yorkers themselves had similar complaints about automobiles, regardless of class.
For those of us who grew up in rural areas, we find it odd that quiet is a “rich people” thing. No, it’s a universal thing. No one wants to sleep or work next to endless motorcycle revs, honks, and sirens. On a personal level, I don’t like hearing it in the background of New York podcasts either.
Finally, and this should be obvious, New York is a city for the rich. It is an enormous privilege to be from or to live there, and those of us who could never afford it can only dream of hearing such daily noise.
It doesn’t adjust correctly much of the time. For example, full screen video controls will effectively disappear, rendering them unususable, in many circumstances (particularly against white backgrounds).
2040 feels far too soon for this thought experiment, at least in the U.S. ICEs will remain the primary vehicle for most families until charging networks are built out. 40-50 years is more realistic.
The charging network could be built out in 5 years... if there was money in it.
(No, don't ask me how that would work. I don't know. I just think that private enterprise could do it quite quickly, if they saw a way to turn a profit doing so.)
And the median car is 13 years old and getting older. If the market share is only 23% today, then in 2040 the fleet will still be overwhelmingly ICE-powered, unless the government starts pulling levers that accelerate the transition, like quadrupling the fuel taxes.
I think most people understand this, but in reality many homeless do have a choice in their living situation. This idea that they can’t possibly have chosen their life reduces the homeless to human-like primates with no agency. Often they have a sense of personal dignity and are capable of making their own decisions, despite how destitute we see their situation.
My experience is from São Paulo and Seattle but entertaining this notion that it's a thought-out choice full of intention is wild. Most homeless people just want some shade of stability and would leave that situation any day any time if given resources.
They are not primates with 0 agency but most societies don't really give them a lot of options.
This is an odd take. Rorty is one of the major philosophers of the 20th century. MacIntyre is more obscure, probably unknown to plenty of academic philosophers.
My sense is that they're pretty comparably famous. I think MacIntyre gets a bit of extra press from people who like him for basically religious reasons (e.g., the OP's author bio begins by saying he's "the Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life at the Word on Fire Institute"). But I'd guess that most academic philosophers have heard of MacIntyre and could name at least one of his books.
I do agree that it seems very weird to call Rorty "largely forgotten".
(One pair of data points, from the person whose knowledge of such things I know best, namely myself. I am not a philosopher in any sense beyond that of having a bunch of books on philosophy. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by MacIntyre, I would definitely remember "After Virtue", might remember "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?", and would not be able to think of any more. I could give you a crappy one-or-two-sentence summary of what AV is about (which would e.g. largely fail to distinguish his ideas about ethics from Anscombe's) but couldn't tell you much more about his work. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by Rorty, I probably wouldn't be able to but would probably recognize a couple of his. I could tell you I thought he did important work in the general area of epistemology but not more than that. So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty. But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.)
> So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty.
What you mean is that you know MacIntyre better than Rorty. To be famous is literally to be known about by many people, so there's no such thing as "famous to me".
I don't judge fame by my own familiarity, otherwise many obscure people would be "famous" and many famous people "unknown".
> But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.
Yes, obviously strictly speaking "famous to me" makes no sense. On the other hand, you correctly understood what I meant, and I made it clear at the outset ("One pair of data points") and at the end ("my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative") that I understand that my own state of familiarity isn't anything like definitive and am not attempting to "judge fame by my own familiarity". So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.
I mean, if you want to complain about people making judgements of relative fame on insufficient evidence, fair enough. But I'm having trouble figuring out why my comment is the one that requires that complaint, when the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.
(I actually don't think I quite do mean "that [I] know MacIntyre better than Rorty", though I agree that that's the specific thing I gave a bit of kinda-quantitative evidence about. I think what I actually meant is more like "I have heard more about MacIntyre than about Rorty". That correlates well with who I know more about, for obvious reasons, and in this case it matches up OK, but there are philosophers I know more about than either but who I would consider less famous even with the yes-I-know-strictly-incorrect "to me" qualifier; for instance, I have read zero books by M. or R. but one by Peter van Inwagen, but I have hardly ever heard other people talking about him and I think I encountered his work while browsing bookshop shelves. I know Inwagen better than MacIntyre but I hear about MacIntyre much more often. Again, I admit that you couldn't reasonably have got that distinction from what I actually wrote; to whatever extent I'm offering a correction it's a correction of my previous unclarity, not of any perceived misunderstanding on your part.)
> So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.
My point is that the anecdotal data of one person is completely worthless. And for what it's worth (nothing), my own personal anecdotal data is the opposite of yours, so we cancel each other out. I would also note that the commenters on a MacIntyre obituary are an extremely biased sample.
> the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.
It's true that I've offered no empirical evidence for my claim. My objection to you is that you offered your own personal experience as a data point, whereas I did not, and indeed deny that my experience is data: "I don't judge fame by my own familiarity". I actually have no wish to get into a long argument about the relative fame of two persons and was mainly just reacting to the ridiculous, "20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten", which by the way was not supported with evidence either (and was not even numerically accurate, because Rorty died 18 years ago). In any case, another commenter did mention how Rorty has entered into the wider culture in at least one respect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074114
The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small. That's why I festooned what I said with caveats about how my own experience need not be representative, etc., etc. But it's not zero, which is why I thought it worth saying anything.
(Zero plus zero plus zero plus ... plus zero equals zero. But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.)
Anyway, I think this argument is taking up something like 10x more space than it actually deserves and don't propose to continue it further.
> The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small.
It's less than zero. It's negative. Taking a very biased, unrepresentive anecedote and presenting it as positive evidence for some conclusion is fallacious and misleading. It's worse than presenting no data at all. You should have no confidence in a broad conclusion based on an anecdote.
> But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.
I couldn't disagree more. If you ask 1000 randomly selected people, that's pretty good evidence, but it's not good evidence if the sample is highly biased.
I'm not sure why, but uBO Lite randomly stops working at times. I've had to fire up the test page (https://ublockorigin.github.io/uBOL-home/tests/test-filters....) many times after enabling experimental filters, but it just doesn't seem to "stick."
reply