[…] there were historical groups called the rationalists and empiricists, where the empiricists were all about doing experiements and looking at the world, and the rationalists were all about figuring things out just by thinking.

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(your definitions for rationalist vs. empiricist are off. Per SEP, the usual definition is some variant of ‘rationalists think we have some innate knowledge, while empiricists think we get all our knowledge from experience’.)

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This distinction was always fake. The Wikipedia page on Rationalism begins with portraits of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Spinoza was a lens grinder who worked closely with astronomer-physicist Christiaan Huygens and wrote in his magnum opus, Ethics, that we only know about things in the world through our bodies interacting with them. It is unclear to me how it is possible for someone to be more committed to looking at the world. The Wikipedia page on Empiricism begins with portraits of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume. Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding includes the following, which implies that abstract mathematical reasoning is one of the two valid sources of knowledge, and refers to experimental reasoning:

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

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Alberto Vanzo argues that the modern philosophical ‘rationalist vs. empiricist’ dichotomy comes from Kant and early Kant-influenced thinkers. Though the dichotomies ‘rational vs. irrational’ and ‘reason vs. experience’ are both much older than the term ‘rationalist’; e.g., Francis Bacon in ~1600 was contrasting ‘rationalis’ with ‘empiricus’, though this was talking about dogmatists vs. experimentalists, not talking about the modern (Kant-inspired) rationalist v. empiricist dichotomy.

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Thanks, Rob! I agree with this summary. It is unfortunate that “rationalism” has this standard usage in philosophy (“rationalist vs empiricist”). This usage is not completely unrelated to the “rational vs superstitious/​irrational” distinction, which makes it more likely to confuse. That said, outside of the fields of philosophy and intellectual history, not many people are aware of the rationalist/​empiricist distinction, and so I don’t see it as a major problem.

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If I try to steelman the Rationalist-Empiricist divide:

Empiricists think that arguments justifying organized violence are nonsense so we ought to ignore them, do what we like instead, and argue about math and science.

Rationalists think that arguments justifying organized violence are sketchy so we should investigate them carefully as hypotheses for how mind organizes itself in the world. [because rationalists think the mind has to do with everything?]

– www.greaterwrong.com/posts/DtcbfwSrcewFubjxp/the-rationalists-of-the-1950s-and-before-also-called

A simple solution is to get an extra phone just for #emacs. An aged Android will do fine. Pop an updated LineageOS on there. Then run Emacs one of two ways:

• get UserLAnd (not a typo) and run emacs
• use Emacs for F-Droid as a native Android app

Use a Bluetooth keyboard, obviously. Keep the initfiles in sync with Syncthing. Done.

The screen is small, so you have to pick between cholera and the plague: either hurt your vision using this for long, or upscale the text far past practical limits.

It doesn't sound super useful, but an example legit use case is flashcards, if you prefer fully in-Emacs solutions like org-fc/org-drill/pamparam.

You can get more legit use cases if you depend on an elisp solution for something, e.g. RSS reading or a home-rolled incremental reading system. By ignoring the whole concept of a phone-specific operating system, you save effort on figuring out your infrastructure.

Ingredients:

• Old Android phone
• Phone-mount or holder of some kind
• Bluetooth keyboard (maybe learn to use a one-handed keeb like the FrogPad)
• LineageOS or postmarketOS

#slipbox

Looking on my old files, I always had tendencies to systematize my writings and work towards the ideal of something like a personal wiki, but there was always a QWAN missing. I would have been grateful to receive #org-roam many years ago.

Back then, I knew of wiki-style solutions for Org-mode, such as that automatic radio links thing with CamelCase, but they felt unnatural to me and many didn't extend outside of one file without some elbow grease. I was always forced to wonder if a new heading should be top-level or nested under some other or what – this is a waste of psychic activation energy. I continued to depend on filesystem hierarchy to some extent. It was difficult to find long-forgotten things among my writings – you can't ripgrep for what you don't remember.

The difference between back then and now is technologically a small thing, but it unlocked an explosion of productivity. It is the following, sorted by importance:

1. org-roam gives me a single hotkey for letting me pick from headlines known to the org-id database, to insert a preformatted link in one step (or to visit it)! Wow! This turns out to be crucial, and I no longer understand why anyone would bother to write anything without such a mechanism at their fingertips. If I could send just this component (org-roam-node-insert) to my past self…
   • It could be upstreamed into Org itself, it's not actually a Zettelkasten-specific thing.
2. org-roam doesn't mandate a hierarchy. I still use hierarchy many places by nesting notes, but I'm not obligated to make one up when there's no natural hierarchy to the topic. I don't have to think at all about where to put a new note, which turns out to be important.
3. org-roam has backlinks. I don't check them often, but the ability to check is reassuring.
4. the occasional visualization thru org-roam-ui – IMO a psychological big deal in the beginning

I was held back from adopting org-roam for a couple of years because it seemed to be a Big Thing to learn. In reality it's just two commands in day-to-day use: org-roam-node-insert and org-roam-node-find.

The moment I was sold on org-roam was seeing org-roam-ui visualize my own notes. That experience carried me over the threshold and lit the fire.

Noa: Well, simulacrum level 3 is worse! If they’re successful in defending the lie, they’re also confusing other people about what reasoning looks like. If people’s idea of argument is based on the kind of point-scoring that happens in a competitive debate or a courtroom, and they model their thinking and discourse after this, then they’re learning simulacrum level 3 thought patterns, trying to make a thing true by arguing for it, instead of using arguments to try to find out what’s true.

– www.greaterwrong.com/posts/KzAG4yWQJosmEjHe2/blatant-lies-are-the-best-kind

(This person's point touches the ancient discussion on Dialectics and The domain of rhetoric.)