User:Dan Polansky

Dan Polansky is described in more detail at Meta:User:Dan Polansky. He is trained in computer science, earned money as a programmer and software engineer, and loves real philosophy and stubborn independent attempt to think clearly. He spent an inordinate time documenting mainly Czech vocabulary in the English Wiktionary, a job truly for a harmless drudge rather than a philosopher proper, but maybe it is like painting a hedge in The Karate Kid, an activity preparatory for philosophy in some sense.

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Why Wikiversity
Wikiversity has fewer rules than Wikipedia, so one can do what makes sense rather than what meets some unnecessarily narrow rules: In general, all the narrow-minded people that edit other wiki projects are conspicuously lacking in Wikiversity, so far. (They may yet arrive.)
 * If one wants to trace every single sentence to a source, one can.
 * If one prefers itemized bullet points (discouraged on Wikipedia, which favors paragraphs), one can.
 * If one has a paragraph of original deliberation not tracing to sources, one can have it.
 * If one wants to include more material than would be encyclopedic, one can, including various interesting lists, nested lists, tables, etc.
 * If one dislikes having one's text mercilessly modified by anyone who comes along, whether anonymous IP editors and qualitatively unidentified editors (no education, job experience, age or other similar identification), one has the option of writing and editing one's own article.

Originality
The contributions of Dan Polansky are original in the sense of author law: they are original formulations, original sequences of words that form phrases, clauses and sentences. By contrast, the ideas expressed in the formulations are often unoriginal, stemming from one of the books that Dan Polansky has read and that are identified below, or from a YouTube video such as a debate. Some ideas stem from face-to-face interactions with people, including relatives, friends, colleagues and teachers. The original contribution of Dan Polansky as for ideas is for the historians to identify.

Created pages
Selected created pages, whether articles or debates (see also xtools report):
 * COVID-19
 * COVID-19/All-cause deaths -- amazing highly instructive graphs generated with the use of Python that hardly anyone views, given the page views
 * COVID-19/Dan Polansky
 * COVID-19 related censorship
 * Technology, its ethics, threat, and limits
 * Technology as a threat or promise for life and its forms
 * The limits of technological potential
 * The limits of progress
 * History of cornucopian thought
 * Technosphere
 * Saving the Earth
 * Philosophy, psychology, miscellaneous
 * Hedonism (Polansky)
 * A human as multiple persons
 * The burden of history in the design of functional entities
 * Mind Children and Hans Moravec
 * Concept and Concept clarification
 * Donald Cameron's The Purpose of Life
 * Transgenderism (Polansky)
 * Qualitative consensus
 * Defamation law in Czechia
 * One man's look at the debate format in Wikiversity
 * All Life is Problem Solving
 * An analysis of identity
 * An analysis of truth
 * A pictorial guide to asset price history
 * Discrete-time dynamical system orbit diagram
 * Mandelbrot set along the real axis and the orbits
 * Mandelbrot set as a model for the concept of approximation
 * Variations of the Mandelbrot set
 * Original research on Wikimedia projects
 * One man's look at copyright law
 * One man's look at The Hacker's Diet
 * An application of computability theory to epistemology in Popperian spirit
 * A purpose of life: The power of living things
 * Crafting Your Life Program
 * Czech national identity
 * One man's manual calculation exercises
 * Software
 * FreeMind
 * Comparison of Python and Perl
 * AMOS programming language
 * One man's look at C and C++
 * Atari BASIC programming
 * Learning 6502 assembly
 * Linguistics, with possible philosophical component or aspect:
 * Proper name
 * Explication of modalities
 * Elimination of dead metaphor from writing
 * English as a hybrid Romance-Germanic language (Polansky)
 * Compound (linguistics)
 * Thesaurus (information retrieval)
 * Thesaurus (lexicography)
 * Slovak-Czech dissimilar terms
 * Czech Wiktionary
 * Czech diminutive
 * Czech verb morphological productivity
 * Czech dictionaries
 * Word coinage during Czech National Revival
 * Many Wikidebates
 * Are wikidebates a good thing?
 * Should Mill's harm principle be accepted?
 * Should cryptocurrencies be banned?
 * Should we aim to reduce the Earth population?
 * Is Wikipedia consensus process good?
 * Is collapse of the global civilization before year 2100 likely?
 * Can electric cars significantly help humanity get off fossil fuels?
 * Etc.; see Category:Wikidebates
 * Also about Wikidebates: One man's look at the debate format in Wikiversity

Books in library
Selected philosophical books in Dan Polansky's library, in physical form:
 * Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig
 * Lila by Pirsig
 * Guidebook to Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by DiSanto and Steele
 * Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
 * Metamagical Themas by Hofstadter
 * Alles Leben ist Problemlösen by Popper (in German)
 * The Open Society and Its Enemies by Popper (volume 1: The Spell of Plato; volume 2: Hegel and Marx)
 * Conjectures and Refutations by Popper
 * Proofs and Refutations by Lakatos
 * The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn
 * Word and Object by Quine
 * Čtyři důvody pro zrušení televize by Mander, in Czech; original title: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
 * In the Absence of the Sacred by Mander
 * Meaning and Necessity by Kripke
 * Mind Children by Moravec (arguably a book with a strong philosophical component)
 * How the Mind Works by Pinker (although primarily a work of evolutionary psychology, there is a strong philosophical component)
 * Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett
 * Cultural Software by Balkin
 * Out of Control by Kelly
 * Cybernetics by Wiener
 * What is Life by Schrödinger
 * Zen in the Art of Archery by Herrigel
 * A New Introduction to Modal Logic by Hughes and Cresswell
 * Moral Calculations by Mérö
 * Against Method by Feyerabend (largely nonsense)
 * The Conquest of Happiness by Russell
 * What Do You Say After You Say Hello by Berne (officially a work of psychology, but seems philosophical enough)
 * Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Gould
 * Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems by Galilei
 * The Purpose of Life by Cameron
 * The Greeks by Kitto
 * The Value of Science by Poincaré
 * The Society of Mind by Minsky
 * A přesto říci životu ano by Frankl, in Czech (the English title: Man's Search for Meaning)
 * Sociology, 6th edition, by Calhoun et al.
 * Cybernetics by Wiener -- arguably philosophical
 * Introduction to Cybernetics by Ashby -- arguably philosophical
 * Saturnin by Jirotka -- a Czech comic novel that is arguably somewhat philosophical
 * Only the Paranoid Survive by Grove -- only read, but not in my personal library
 * Analytische Theorien der Metaphen by Mácha (Candidate English title: Analytical theories of metaphor.
 * Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Bateson
 * Selfish Gene by Dawkins
 * Snad ti nedělají starosti cizí názory by Feynmann, in Czech (the English title: "What Do You Care What Other People Think?")
 * To snad nemyslíte vážně, pane Feynmanne! by Feynmann, in Czech (the English title: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!)
 * O povaze fyzikálních zákonů by Feynmann, in Czech (the English title: The Character of Physical Law)
 * Programátorské poklesky by Kopeček and Kučera, in Czech -- has many philosophically interesting quotations

Philosophers who would appear to be properly classified as pseudo-philosophers: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Foucault, etc. Kant is perhaps somewhat unfairly on the list, but someone who claims that lying is strictly prohibited in all circumstances and that the knowledge of Newton's laws is a priori (pre-empirical) thereby creates an unfavorable impression. As for Foucault, I have read in Czech (Slova a věci) and I could not tell what in the world he was talking about, like what problems he was trying to address and what solutions he offered; it was "not even wrong", as they say.

Dictionaries: However, I use online dictionaries much more than those above.
 * Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, with a beautiful middle section showing a picture dictionary
 * Penguin Thesaurus, a synonym dictionary
 * Czech Etymological Dictionary by Rejzek

Self-help and other non-philosophical books:
 * The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey
 * Living the 7 Habits by Covey
 * How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Carnegie -- some bad ideas, but also many good ideas
 * How to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie -- some bad ideas, but also many good ideas
 * Your Erroneous Zones by Dyer

Tolkien, arguably somewhat philosophical:
 * The Hobbit, in Czech
 * The Lord of the Rings, in Czech (read in English long time ago when I was a teenager and at that point, it was a hard reading)
 * Silmarillion, in Czech

Books read
Selected books read that have philosophical, scientific or similar impact, other than those in Books in library section:
 * Economics by Samuelson and Nordhaus
 * The C++ Programming Language, 3rd edition, by Stroustrup, showing Stroustrup to be a great thinker
 * Usability Engineering by Nielsen

Online authoritative text resources
Online authoritative text resources that I used during my philosophical and other investigations:
 * Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), plato.stanford.edu
 * Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu -- seems less excellent than SEP but still often worth having a look
 * 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, especially 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Classified List of Articles, a section for which I created many articles in Wikisource

YouTube videos
Some ideas stem from YouTube debates viewed or other videos:
 * The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World featuring Hitchens, Fry, Onaiyekan and Widdecombe
 * Etc; TBD.

Debaters:
 * Christopher Hitchens, the ultimate debater
 * Richard Dawkins
 * Steven Pinker

Films/movies
Films/movies rich in intellectual ideas and fun, from which possibly some ideas are being drawn:
 * - shows the idea that a lone opposer stubbornly trying to think clearly and carefully examine the strength of the reasoning and evidence can turn the sides of supports and opposes around
 * The Boss of it All (Direktøren for det hele, Danish), including the ultimate Gambini, with whom the film starts and ends, staring the spectacular Jens Albinus, and in some frames also the amazing director Lars von Trier (although many of his films are a bit too drastic)
 * District 9, e.g. the funny name MNU: Multi-National United or the like, the ultimate evil über-corporate, and the incredibly funny main character Wikus van de Merwe, who is a cowardly and nasty little officer or something, an entity many of us have in our psyche
 * Adam's Apples (Adams Æbler, Danish), e.g. the funny quasi-corporate manager doing an analog of performance goal setting and über-positive thinker (Christopher, go to the father's office) Ivan; Ivan is also an ultimate provocateur in his "is this a good looking man; is it your father", when referring to a picture of Hitler in Adam's (the nazi's) room; Ivan is played by the great Mads Mikkelsen, and other actors are also excellent
 * Box of Moonlight, somewhat reminiscent of Pirsig's contrast between classic and romantic, featuring a very responsible engineer and family man Al Fountain and a hippie or worse Kid, featuring the great and

Frequently viewed pages
The following report shows most often viewed pages created by me:
 * Userviews Analysis for Dan Polansky, en.wikiversity.org, pageviews.wmcloud.org

Policies and guidelines
See User:Dan Polansky/Policies and guidelines

About Wikiversity
See User:Dan Polansky/About Wikiversity