I don't like this. Facade?

http://www.slate.com/id/2214447/



Here, Farhad Manjoo argues that just because you say you don't like it doesn't mean that you are not going to like it, or that this layout isn't going to, well, have people get used to it.


For our purposes, consider how modern philosophy's response to skepticism lead to greater and greater idealism. That is, Kant believes that appearances are reality, but that we should understand these appearances using logic.

Okay, here it is a different way. 1) Remember in kindergarten when they said you could trust everything and you believed them?

2) Remember in middle school when they told you that you can't trust only perception when you make a scientific judgment? For example, many students found out that we use rulers and measuring utensils to verify our findings. In order to figure out a Newtonian equation, you use mathematics, but less and less you were using outside information in the way that you think. It was the math applied to nature and not the other way around.

3) Well it turns out that all of this is subject to doubt if you do it without the math. Yes, even those rulers and measuring cups. You have to remove yourself 1 more time in order to really grasp Kant's final argument, which is basically using reason only in order to understand science. This is because nothing exists outside of your perception of existence, what translations of Kant call appearances, what I might call facades for the sake of this blog. Knowledge very much depends on reason and how we know that reason exists outside of nature.

How does all of this relate back to Farhad Manjoo and his argument? Facebook recently redesigned itself. By doing so it made a number of people, Manjoo quotes 1 million or 94% of those surveyed, very annoyed. Zuckerberg has an unpolitic office memo that says users don't know what they're talking about. Zuckerberg thinks that people do not know what they want. In this way, theory is separate from nature. Theory is reasoned and then applied to what happens.

This is not to say that the facade, that people really are annoyed is not happening. Indeed, I think in some way it is unrefutable that they are. Rather, the nature of the connection between being annoyed and stopping the use of the program was not as it appears.