All too right. I think I preferred the old-fashioned notion of the media when they were trying to find out what the message actually is, when it's been hidden by powerful vested interests.

Or thoughtful ruminations on the world. Actually, the Guardian, a liberal-left British paper runs an occasional piece called The Long Read which hearts back to this older model. It's a relief for me to come across it - It's like an oasis in a desert!

I suppose to be fair, newspapers have had a hard time of it recently, and that's driven the writing down to the most basic feel-good or feel-bad news.

I like this idea that Big-Tech isn't so much about technology (and with my scientist hat on I agree - there is much more to technology than IT) but a new form of Big Media, in fact, Massive rather than Mass Media.

Heraclitus: Lightning steers the universe and all things are full of gods.

re that, what is the difference between 'mereology' and 'set theory'?

It really makes me thin that mathematics is what philosophy wants to be, but the people with the language facility to be attracted to philosophy generally lack the ease of symbolic manipulation that attracts one to mathematics.

Which is a fancy way to say that philosophy is bullshitting, devoid of content musings, where mathematics actually addresses and solves philosophical problems successfully

@Mitch: Mathematics addresses mathematical problems and sometimes, not always, solves those problems successfully. If you look at mathematics historically you'll also see a lot of mathematics, which whilst true, have become irrelevant. So so much for the permenant truths that mathematicians pride themselves on. I've also come across lots of mathematical papers which were better thrown in the trash-can for similar reasons.

@Mitch: human beings are generally all adept at symbolic manipulation. It comes with the territory of being human. The first such facility being language. Language is articulated in symbols. Mathematics is more than symbol manipulation, it's also a matter of grasping mathematical concepts and very often the symbolic representations we have for them hide the simplicity of the concepts that require grasping.

@Mitch: Bullshitting too is common to humans. You don't get it in just in philosophy, but also in politics, in law, in art; in fact, in every endeavour of human life and yes, that includes the scientific disciplines such as mathematics and physics despite the paeans of eulogies that these subjects get for the very real successes that they have achieved.

@Mitch: Here's a well-known set theorist, Joel Hamkins, attempting an axiomatisation of mereology. If he thought it was just bullshit, then why bother?

This suggests that he feels it is a worth while enterprise. Mereology, Set Theory, Category Theory are three different theories that try to articulate and conceptualise a theory of parts to wholes; Mereology through the part good relationship, Set Theory through the membership relation and Category Theory through morphisms. They have different strengths, and yes, weaknesses.

@Mitch: By the way, can I ask you why are you so keen on mathematics? Have you trained as a mathematician by any chance?

This is the ancestral thought behind the notion of the hermeneutical circle...