8 responses to “Boston Anarchist Thinking Brigade, Part 3”

  1. MBH
    1. Brandon

      Chromium 10.0.622.0 Ubuntu/10.10

      Speaking of pings, why isn’t your site sending out pingbacks? You linked to another post here and we should have gotten the pingback, but it wasn’t sent.

      1. MBH

        Firefox 3.6.13 Ubuntu/10.10

        I assumed that was automatic. Apparently blogger doesn’t do pingback. WTF? Trying to set up Haloscan, unless you have any other recommendations…

        1. Brandon

          Chromium 10.0.622.0 Ubuntu/10.10

          I’d like to know what possible justification there could be for not pinging other blogs, since that’s a core blogging function. In fact pinging was one of the foundational principles of blogging. Or does blogger only ping other blogger sites?

        2. MBH

          Firefox 3.6.13 Ubuntu/10.10

          Maybe it’s to make bloggers buy the pingback function — which it looks like is the only option. Maybe it’s to keep collaboration to a minimum — which doesn’t jive with google’s “don’t be evil” mission. Fuck if I know, but it’s pathetic. No pingbacks to other blogger users or non-blogger-users. Weird huh?

          Another thought is to prevent spam pingbacks, but you can filter which pingbacks appear in the comments, right?

        3. Brandon

          Chromium 10.0.622.0 Ubuntu/10.10

          Spam trackbacks never get through the filters here.

        4. MBH

          Firefox 3.6.13 Ubuntu/10.10

          Yeah, so if you have that option, then the only reason google could have is not a good reason — as far as I can see…

  2. Anon73

    Firefox 3.6.13 Windows XP

    Sorry to interrupt your charming discussion about blogger’s adherence to pingback rules. :)

    Roderick, do you remember how you resolved the Newcomb problem in your lectures? It seemed like the lesson was that determinism is equivalent to predestination-paradoxes in time travel. Since predestination paradoxes are clearly nonsensical (e.g. Kirk’s watch in Star Trek IV was never actually created), determinism must be as well. But it seems like you could still imagine a perfect predictor who used a complete simulation of your brain to determine what you would choose?