It’s why I’m writing in this excessively combative tone that doesn’t totally reflect how I feel. It’s why I, too, write articles about how we can cultivate more creativity in science. I want motherfucking Jeff Bezos to follow me. Jealousy is the ugliest emotion and it’s coursing through my veins. I feel it corrupting my mind like a zombie virus. 

Analysis of Nobel Prize winners supports the notion that it is getting harder and harder to innovate in your 20s. 

Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics

rebranding important body parts with gender neutral language (“front hole” for vagina), not to mention poisoning innocent children with cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Laura Kipnis

We’re happy to take cholesterol blockers, mood elevators, and erection enhancers as needed without worrying whether it’s what nature intended.

But if we’re getting empirical, let’s acknowledge that childbirth has killed far more women than murderous trans women ever did, though I suppose the sentimental premise is that all those dead mothers died fulfilling their gender destiny, not defying it.

Obviously women are subject to violence by men, frequently their husbands, boyfriends, and exes, but men are vulnerable to violence by men, too. (As are trans women, especially sex workers, assaulted by straight men who can’t own up to attractions that might make them, in their minds, “gay.”) Somehow we prefer telling stories about endangered cis women.

Nothing is less stable (or empirical) than social stereotypes about gender, as anyone who reads a work of history or anthropology knows. The traits associated with one or another gender bounce around and reverse over the centuries and between cultures: sometimes men are the more sentimental ones, elsewhere women; men are the lustier ones, no actually it’s women (amoral and multi-orgasmic); and so on.

Gilder obviously wasn’t wrong that paychecks and the sexual revolution gave women more access to what had traditionally been male prerogatives. (As to whether these were or are “freedoms” is a more complicated discussion.)

In other words: if endocrinology makes bodies malleable, and families instill (slightly) less repression this century than in previous ones, why not explore those possibilities instead of bemoaning the situation?

Maybe the rising reports of gender dysphoria and plummeting birth rates aren’t separate stories either. There have always been people who did not fit easily into normative categories but were herded in by threat and force, and who are increasingly breaking loose.

The majority of those recently surveyed in the United States cite childcare costs as the foremost reason not to procreate, along with climate change, another of free market capitalism’s great accomplishments. (France, the EU country with the highest birthrate, also funds eighty percent of childcare.) Obviously blaming women, homosexuals, and pornographers for macroeconomic shifts is a better yarn.

if both envision nature-defying creatures (feminists, hermaphrodites) snapping at them from the abyss, then we’re in the realm of what the fairy tale expert Marina Warner calls the monstrous imagination. Aroused by scenes of chaos and emergence, it mirrors our lack of understanding back to us in the form of menacing hybrids, typically depicted as scary inhabitants of dark underworlds. Among the chaotic emergent things no one much understands (especially these days) is gender, despite everyone supposedly having one. Yet what is it, where does it come from?

How vulnerable the “primacy of the biological realm” would turn out to be, how tenuous its hold on the species if each of us had to pledge fealty to the gender binary to keep civilization afloat. How confident can nature’s defenders really be in the selling power of this story?

This allows Puck to operate independently as they do today, but also build out the greater collective, that creates some economies of scale, building their own little media collective/conglomerate where the writers are the owners a la Defector.

when I mention that I am reporting on “cryptocurrencies,” his demeanor changes. “Don’t say that word,” he says. Knowing I will regret it, I ask him why, and find myself in yet another half-hour-long conversation about how Bitcoin is superior and how all other tokens aren’t really cryptocurrencies at all.

At one point, the DJ tries to hype up the crowd by yelling, “Ladies of crypto, make some noise!” The resulting cheer is barely audible. “Well, there are like five of you,” the DJ concedes, then adds: “Be careful.”

What’s happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game. So in brief, there are some things you can actually do on the internet: you can observe galaxies, you can presumably get married, you can submit a prayer to God, any number of things are just as real on the internet as doing them in flesh and blood. But the great exception to that, I would argue, is social media, where it’s more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.

The language of heterosexuality more and more emotionally cauterizes masculine desire in the way that all emotions are meant to be reduced into the key of anger.

Neoliberalism does not make room for the concept of human dignity. And that is an enormous problem especially among centrists and traditional American liberals. One of the reasons that they found it so hard to understand Trump is that what Trump offered a certain kind of person who voted for him was pride and a reason to feel that their dignity mattered.

But within heterosexuality, we’ve mistaken sexual license for sexual liberation, in exactly the same way that we’ve mistaken the free market for actual freedom. Actual sexual liberation is not something that most people can afford, even if it’s allowed.

I am not at all convinced that Twitter is a “public town square.” For starters, I don’t know that it’s “public” in the way an ideal “town square” should be; relatively few people use Twitter at all and even fewer of them actually tweet. If my back-of-the-envelope math is right, about five percent of Americans produce 97 percent of (American) tweets, and I don’t think it’d be going out on a limb if I said that that five percent is probably not broadly representative of Americans. Indeed, what makes Twitter influential, important, and powerful isn’t that it’s a “public” space but that it’s an incredibly elite space: nowhere else are you going to find quite so heavy a concentration of people working in tech, media, entertainment, and politics. And that’s all setting aside the question of whether or not “town square” is actually the right kind of metaphor for a technology whose main political quality is not that it provides an open forum for political debate or discussion but its usefulness as a tool for mobilization. None of which is to say that “free speech” is not an “issue” on the platform, I just think we want to start thinking pretty hard about “public sphere”-type arguments about social media.

Musk, like Donald Trump and Logan Paul and a handful of other black holes of energy and attention, grasps in an instinctive way the logic of social media: power and money are a product of attention, attention is accumulated by being annoying, being annoying is enabled by speech protections. In the hands of a particularly cynical poster, “free speech” is nothing more than the right to shitpost, which itself is merely a species of self-promotion. To protect free speech is to protect shitposting is to protect self-promotion.

A source who was at Berghain on Saturday night tells Read Max that “word had spread” inside that Musk had been bounced, and that, consequently, “the party had a very good energy.”

Olaf couldn't have been spending more than an hour a month on his hand count of conversion transitions. So the cost-benefit break-even point was at least several months out, possibility many years depending on how much Olaf's time was worth. But the moral calculus was in everyone's favor. What is money, after all, compared with good and evil? If ZipRecruiter could stop trampling on Olaf's soul every month, and the only cost was a few hours of my time, that was time and money well-spent making the world a better place.

There’s this hackneyed question: “to be or not to be.” I always tried to ask myself that from time to time. I feel like if a person doesn’t ask themselves that question on a regular basis, then the continuation of their life cannot be a conscious choice.

Technology babies us all the time. “Never talk to a wage worker again!” the embarrassing Seamless ads promise in so many words. “Everything you could dream of without leaving your apartment! Community without communing with a single soul!” Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for comfort at all costs. When we stretch that ethic to its limits, we make simple things like taking a phone call or being honest with a friend into something much scarier than they actually are.

I’ve spent years in therapy trying to rewire my brain to remember that the hard choice doesn’t necessarily equal the good choice, and sometimes I’m still not sure that’s true (sorry Lina). A lot of popular wisdom favors tidy aphorisms about giving yourself a break or giving yourself a push, when people moreso need a framework for when both sound kind of right. I’m starting to think avoidance is the key. As a litmus test, “Am I being avoidant?” tends to cut through a lot of ambiguity, leading me to an answer that sometimes is and sometimes isn’t what I want to hear.

When we read the Steven Hotdog tweet, we see the two points defining a line between the writer’s experience (hot dog memories) and factual research (hot dog history). But we also, consciously or not, see the infinity of possible planes including that line, and the way that a third point would collapse all those possibilities into one relationship, one interdependent structure. In that moment before the third nail goes in, we know that these two strands relate, but we don’t know what they mean. Meaning is defined by at least three points: the personal, the factual, and the resonance between them.

I dont mean to exonerate tech journalism for its many crimes against taste, judgment, good writing, the people, etc. But I'm also increasingly less convinced that a "better" tech journalism, by any definition of the word, would have made a particular difference in how the internet of the 21st century has unfolded so far. What strikes me looking back at tech journalism of the 2000s is how fast Facebook (to take the most prominent example) was growing: zero to 500 million users in just five years. I'm not sure any analysis or criticism, no matter how damning, could have slowed that kind of planetary momentum — and there was plenty of good analysis and criticism of Facebook at the time. What was missing was a coherent, organized, well-resourced political movement that could have matched Facebook's size, speed, and capital. I agree with Roose that we should take crypto "seriously from the start" so that we might steer it "in a better direction" in the event it takes off. But looking at the kind of people and money invested in crypto it seems to me the real question is: us and what army? 

split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test.

There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking: First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease—imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection—that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective. Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of ‘vitamin’. Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong. Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentally replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh. This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems. But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all. By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

A lot of people use the chat platform Discord to organize with their friends, and they jump from one platform to another if there’s a specific event or party or something worth doing.

One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting. No game company would ever come up with that. And that was early on in the game.

Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.  If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to. 

Curios will go on holiday for a week, as my girlfriend is (barring mishaps) coming to visit for a few days tomorrow and as such I will hopefully have marginally better things to do with my time than stare unblinkingly at a screen while tears course down my cheeks.

How differently the Church’s acknowledged mystics approached the theme of heaven and hell. According to Denys Turner and Bernard McGinn, ­Julian of Norwich has been often, but wrongly, read as a universalist. Interpreted in the context of her other statements, Julian’s famous phrase that “all shall be well” did not mean that “all shall be saved,” but instead it was her affirmation of the ultimate rightness of God’s ways. It was a statement made in faith, shot through with epistemic and eschatological tension, since she did not presume to be able to state exactly how it is that finally “all shall be well.”

Often, you’ll have a choice between spending time on optimizing one sample or drawing a second sample—for instance, editing a blog post you’ve already written vs. writing a second post, or polishing a message on a dating app vs. messaging a second person. Some amount of optimization is worth it, but in my experience, most people are way over-indexed on optimization and under-indexed on drawing more samples.

Light-tailed distributions most often occur because the outcome is the result of many independent contributions, while heavy-tailed distributions often arise from the result of processes that are multiplicative or self-reinforcing.§§ More formally: the central limit theorem means that the sum of independent contributions will be approximately normally distributed, and normal distributions are extremely light-tailed. An easy extension of the theorem says that the product of independent variables will be log-normally distributed, which is much more heavy-tailed. The type of self-reinforcing process I’m referring to is a preferential attachment process which usually generates a power law distribution, which is even heavier-tailed than the log-normal. For example, the richer you are, the easier it is to earn more money.

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was ­Origen who taught the Church how to read Scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative ­spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought.

everything else in Orthodox tradition, be it ever so venerable, beautiful, or spiritually nourishing, can possess at most the authority of accepted custom, licit conjecture, or fruitful practice

While most branches of Western Christianity hold to some conception of original sin as formulated by Augustine, Calvinists emphasize to an extreme degree how humanity is marked indelibly by Total depravity, the Unconditional election of a small segment of people who will be saved, the Limited atonement whereby Christ’s sacrifice was only for some people (and a small group at that), the Irresistible grace whereby God’s saving power can’t be denied by those who are elect, and the Perseverance of the saints, so that once someone is elect nothing they do can challenge that salvation.

Leftists on the internet often claim this is false and America only looks rich because of inequality or billionaires

If activists sincerely can’t get themselves excited about a broad political push against poverty per se and see the moral force in that, then I think that just reflects poorly on them.

White Americans experience poverty at a much lower rate than Black Americans, a legacy of racism over the course of American history. It’s also true that white Americans of all income levels enjoy certain racial privileges. But if you are yourself white and poor, it doesn’t really do you, personally, any good to know that a different set of white people has a lot of money or that white people on average are unlikely to be poor.

It’s an admittedly different approach from my generation’s inclination toward full-frontal accountability. Daily diary apps and self-improvement podcasts and confessional Instagram stories evince a belief that to grow as a person you have to be entirely, unflinchingly forthcoming. But I couldn’t catalog my flaws without flinching. And I don’t think I need to. That’s part of the point of reading, I think: When I find myself too earnest, too impatient, too much, I can be in conversation with other minds instead. Keeping a commonplace book feels like a kinder way to grow, by wrestling with the articulations of others in the open as I hopefully adjust myself within.

But in 2020 the Russian government made it absolutely illegal to report on Russian security services. And because I wanted to keep going, because I think it’s an important topic, I thought I needed to leave the country. Then the Russian government sent me some signals that it would be better for me to leave the country. I have a Web site, which my partner and I established back in 2000. It’s a Web site that monitors the activity of the Russian security services. And it used to have a media license, because in Russia you need to have a license to be in media. So, in the beginning of 2020, our Web site was stripped of its license. But the reason provided by the Russian censorship agency, which is in charge of these media licenses, was the death of [Agentura.ru’s] editor. And, because I’m the editor, I took it as a kind of perverse humor by the Russian censors. I got several signals of the same sort, enough that, in September of 2020, we decided to leave the country.

Despite the limited achievements of feminist struggles, the structure of straight coupledom still represents an appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of women to benefit men. And insofar as gay people recreate the straight couple, this structure of violence, domination and emotional paucity is what they are recreating.

Overall, the couple seems to endure mainly negatively: break-ups are painful, being alone means you’ve failed, good sex is hard to come by, the world is a scary place, etc. Those couples whose love survives on the gentle basis of shared affection and interests might be inspiring examples of emotional health, but on the other hand their advantages over people with, say, a close circle of friends, are mainly legislative.

As Germaine Greer famously notes in The Female Eunuch, “Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.”

Monogamous romantic commitment, like infallible lifelong attraction to only men or only women, is surely a minority tendency expediently elevated to a general social principle.

Aesthetic analysis is about nothing deeper than consumption habits; but consumer habits reveal public appetites and the interests of capital and the state and that..can run deep. 

“Geriatric” millennials misidentifying any of this as something that has to do with them are so desperate and arrogant. It’s like…millennials, , stop flattering yourselves. No one wants to recreate your college era looks. You looked bad. We don’t need to look to Gen Z to represent nostalgia for our youth; we already embody it.

The e-girl and the Christian girl autumn aesthetics aren’t in competition with each other. People know each has its lane. For Millennials, aesthetic categories felt fraught and were strictly pursued and guarded because we were embattled. And we were the last generation for whom that was true.

In short, I dislike mumblecore, because it mistakes self-centeredness with self-reflection, and it’s wrong to recommend (through romanticizing) the former in lieu of the latter. 

These were people who came of age during the Obama years, and genuinely felt like things were fine, even as everything about the Bush era accelerated.

But one critique people make of Rooney’s books is that they’re main character lit, which speaks to the kind of glamorization you pointed to. Vs analyzing it as a structural force that affects everyone. But maybe that’s also just because this is a novel and like historically that’s a bourgeois individualist genre. Thank you CIA lol.

The last decade of fiction starring single late 20s-early 30s white women recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around. The self-sabotaging white woman is to the 20teens what the flailing dad was to 90s family comedies, an era defining trope. These women are always unhappy in the same ways, always vying for love in places they are guaranteed not to receive it. The list includes: Hannah Horvath, Fleabag, the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist of The Worst Person In the World, and a litany of less-acclaimed versions of the same. They’re about as relatable to me as aliens, but it makes me sad how many white women seem to feel seen by them. Which is strange, because these protagonists are all relatively privileged people who could easily avoid the choices that are making their lives miserable, and usually hurting many others in the process. These aren’t stories of women burdened by circumstance. 

I think there was a moment where certain people felt threatened, because she’s like them (she herself insists) but they’re not celebrated young authors, even though they were in the gifted and talented program too. That’s the vibe I get from her detractors, who engage primarily with their idea of her than the books themselves. She’s an introverted bookish intellectual, and introverted bookish intellectuals are struggling with the concept of her being massively popular. She didn’t have to write Twilight to be a phenomenon that led to screenrights. It must be hard for them to process. Maybe it makes them feel they have fewer excuses for themselves. 

Though these messages primarily target women, appeals to men’s confidence are also evident across dating websites and advertising campaigns for products such as Viagra. But, for men, the “wins” of confidence are typically framed as ways of achieving greater status and top performance. For example, one popular male life coach claimed that he’d teach men to “operate on the highest, most optimized level of performance,” “become a remarkable leader,” and “reach social mastery.” By contrast, those who promote self-confidence in women tend to focus on overcoming internal problems—even in realms where this wouldn’t seem to make sense, such as financial advice. An accountant and writer who aims to financially empower women, for example, promised “five ways to make managing your money an act of self-love.”

Inside the rooms, many of which go around the clock for weeks at a time and use paid accounts, it’s common for at least 50 to 150 people to be on video using meth at the same time. For Paul, the Zoom rooms are a way “of staying connected without having to face the reality of the fact that it's Sunday at 4 a.m.”

There is no such thing as “western culture”. To pretend that, say, German culture has any less in common with Russia than it does Spain is silly and ultimately politically motivated — not to mention the profound influences that India and the Islamic world have had on “western” arts and sciences.

It’s not just in your head: buildings really have gotten uglier. Can we have ornament back, please? I’m not asking for the Sage to be covered in gargoyles or anything. Just a little decoration? Please?

Capitalism is like the steam engine. Left without maintenance, it’ll grind to a halt, overheat, and do more harm than good — but anyone who thinks we’d be better off without it is deluded as to what life was like before its invention.

SystemSix display showing weather, calendar and moon. To be clear, this is not an interactive application. It looks like a computer display you could click on or touch the screen of, but it is quite static — only displaying your calendar events and the weather forecast in a retro, computer-like interface.

Today, huesos de santo are mostly associated with the Catholic holidays, including Holy Week in Andalucía, where they are sometimes served along huesos de San Expedito, another saintly, bone-shaped sweet. But they are also tied to some harvest traditions. In Ceuta, for example, huesos are linked to Día de la Mochila, a celebration in which families fill backpacks with nuts from the fall harvest, and head to the woods for a feast that features huesos as a dessert.

According to Sura Ascaso—the business development manager of Pastelería Ascaso, a pastry shop in Zaragoza famous for its huesos—a popular legend contends that a Benedictine monk created huesos de santos as part of this effort to blend pagan and Christian traditions. While unproven, the legend would link huesos to other monastery-made sweets that resemble body parts and saintly relics.

Visit Spain in late October or early November, and you’ll find bakeries and sweets shops stocked with these little figures, known as huesos de santo (saint’s bones). In their most classic form, these marzipan-based sweets come stuffed with a candied egg yolk paste, similar to the traditional Spanish yemas.

In bakeries and sweets shops across Spain, huesos now come in diverse flavors and varieties, such as covered with chocolate, stuffed with praliné, or even colored pink by a raspberry marzipan base. Yet both Juan Manuel Albelda and Sura Ascaso agree that the most popular variety is the original version.

He concludes that the age of kitsch has eliminated the original function of the ‘court artist’ who in a certain sense was a ‘servant’ of the court; consumers now occupy the same social stratum as the artists themselves. As a result, around the artists there forms a group of specialists, collectors, connoisseurs, snobs, etc, who make the existence of art possible; behind them stand the masses, who hear various things about art, but do not experience anything personally in it. Elias then concludes: ‘The term “kitsch” is nothing other than an expression of this tension between the highly formed taste of the specialists and the undeveloped, unsure taste of mass society.’ The word kitsch originated, according to Elias, in the artistic circles in Munich, where it was derived from the American word ‘sketch’; to verkitsch something was thus selling something to an American who had no taste but paid well. But although the word expresses the scorn of a small social group, the concept is also applicable to the group using the word disparagingly; because the lack of certainty about form among the masses, who remain the primary consumer, obliges artists in the age of kitsch to create products which they themselves consider inferior and only produce in order to support themselves. It is the great merit of Elias’s essay that he does not allow himself to be misled by the initial tone of the word; and it would not surprise me, if in a hundred years distinguished art historians speak as easily about the kitsch style as they do today about rococo or Louis XIV.

Elias begins by showing that the distinction between, for example, ‘baroque’ and ‘rococo’ or between Louis XIV and the Régence style, is wholly insignificant compared to the distinction between the styles of the eighteenth century on the one hand and the nineteenth century on the other. This is because, according to Elias, the former differences in style were only differences within the same social milieu, while the differences between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were determined by the rise of a new social order, the capitalist-industrial order, the decline of the old, still more or less feudal, order. ‘Court style and taste were replaced by those of the capitalist bourgeoisie’. Court style is for some the last style there ever was, because the nineteenth century heralded a period of formative chaos. Elias concedes this; and precisely because of this he suggests calling the style of the ‘capitalist’ or ‘liberal’ period the kitsch style. Not (and one must understand this properly!) because he wants to lump all the expressions of that period together, but because the rise and development of the bourgeoisie took culture into a completely different arena than before, when the court and the surrounding aristocracy were the ‘cultural consumers’. ‘Kitsch’ sounds very negative, but Elias says quite correctly that the words ‘baroque’ and ‘gothic’, which have since become generally accepted, did not have a much more positive ring to them than ‘kitsch’. In the first place, the word ‘kitsch’, as a characterisation of the style of the age, expresses the great uncertainty of artistic production which accompanies industrial, mechanised society. The descent into formlessness in this period is a constant threat even for the greatest minds, because the eighteenth century aristocratic formal tradition had disappeared.

Religion practiced without a proper historical background becomes the sort of synthetic mysticism that is vaguely directed into the future. It is the mysticism that sects are often making use of. Myths are probably, as has stated Gillo Dorfles, the vastest containers of kitsch that humanity has ever produced as they relish in sentimentality, coarseness, and vulgarity. Any separation of mythology from history (easily effectuated by turning the myth into a utopian tale) produces almost automatically the most kitsch-like gibberish possible. Mori plays with this sort of spiritual kitsch that embraces the irrational, pre-conscious, “cosmic,” or fantastic, by reediting the spirituality of romanticism with the help of high-tech, occasionally integrating manga characters. Her Dream Temple is clearly an example of utopian architecture, but in spite of the enthusiasm for the future that Mori’s work vibrate in general, this work is different from the eighteenth century utopian architecture of Boullée and Ledoux. On all levels Mori refuses to represent the utopia in the form of an articulated wish (a Freudian Wunschtraum) but prefers to let the utopian concept empty itself into ethereality and undefined dreamscapes.

The decision marks an end to a long debate within the field of mental health, steering researchers and clinicians to view intense grief as a target for medical treatment, at a moment when many Americans are overwhelmed by loss.The new diagnosis, prolonged grief disorder, was designed to apply to a narrow slice of the population who are incapacitated, pining and ruminating a year after a loss, and unable to return to previous activities.Its inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders means that clinicians can now bill insurance companies for treating people for the condition.It will most likely open a stream of funding for research into treatments — naltrexone, a drug used to help treat addiction, is currently in clinical trials as a form of grief therapy — and set off a competition for approval of medicines by the Food and Drug Administration.

The web runs on newness, but the massive quantity and disagreeable structure we place on that newness (*cough* streams) means it’s very easy to have your stance online become, as my friend Jason likes to say, “Fuck you, impress me.” Your coping mechanism for the glut becomes passing judgment, a weird and public version of sour grapes to deal with missing out, thanks to limited time and attention. You form an opinion about something in five seconds, because maybe if you kick it like a puppy, it’ll go away. We’ve all done this, but good god: asshole move. Good people don’t want to be like that. Especially if that grumpiness and ill-will seeps into the stuff you truly love, because you can’t pull it out from the bullshit.

There is a particular hazard that comes with being a genuine dissident or whistleblower or an otherwise deeply committed critic of things: to really do it involves demolishing your standard frame of reference. The things that other people go around believing, the assumptions that are supposed to constitute your shared reality—some fundamental part of that structure, you come to understand, is just purely false. The government will lie to you about something as plain as how many people died in an earthquake, and where; what seemed to be your available zone of free expression and disputation was secretly a box that could close on you at any time. And so you have to fall back on your own judgment about everything. You can't trust what you're told. Every condition in the world is up for debate; every apparent fact could be the front for another conspiracy. If Seymour Hersh could catch the government lying about a thing as terrible as My Lai, in front of the whole world, why should he trust the official story about Seth Rich, or about Syria's use of chemical weapons? 

The 5th century in Ireland was a time of great change, where the traditional Celtic religion, language, and culture was being swept out and replaced by Christianity from the mounting pressure coming from England and Scotland. Brigid played a unique role in this change, because her father was Celtic and her mother was Christian. Brigid was born the daughter of an enslaved person in 453 AD. Her father wanted her to marry a wealthy man, and he had promised her hand in marriage to someone she had no interest in. Brigid refused and left home, building one of the first convents in Ireland for the sole purpose of educating young girls. There continues to be debate over whether or not Brigid identified as Catholic or Pagan. Some even say she was baptized by Saint Patrick himself. She has since become one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with St. Patrick and St. Columcille. Her feast day, occurring on the same day as Imbolc, suggests that she was likely a Celtic fertility goddess before being canonized a saint.It’s an excellent idea to honor Brigid on Saint Patrick’s Day, a day reserved for recognizing the Irish diaspora around the world. 

I am an ecosystem, serving through the interplay of water, air, sun, earth, and AWS.

So if you’re at a meeting of conservatives, virtue-signaling might mean aligning yourself with the Founders, the original meaning of the Constitution, and time-honored views of the meaning of marriage; as well as dismissing newfangled ideas about transgender rights. If you’re at a meeting of progressives, virtue-signaling might mean the embrace of bold new views toward transgender rights, put-downs of those who oppose same-sex marriage, and maybe even mockery of those who would lionize the Founders, many of whom were slaveholders.

Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure. 

Rivers become contaminated by human and industrial waste. Fog is different. It's caused by the water cycle and mostly purified by the Sun's UV radiation.

John’s sermon on the rich man and Lazarus is in the first place an attempt to get the rich to recognize ourselves as enemies of the poor. The rich and the poor are always already enemies; the luxurious life of the rich man depends implicitly and inextricably on the denial of the humanity of Lazarus. But it is ultimately the rich man who has become less than human, stripped by his own oblivious merrymaking of his ability to recognize the suffering of another. John’s meditation on the suffering of the poor is not just a rhetorical tactic meant to guilt the rich into giving a few more alms. The sermon is an attack on the segregation of rich and poor, a segregation already etched in their souls, and an attempt to create an environment, right there in his church, in which the rich might learn to see the poor afresh.

The Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, for example, puts the point sharply: the early Christians advocated earnestly for the rich to share their wealth with the poor, she says, but “the Christian communists took good care not to enquire into the origin of these riches.” The early Christians cared about sharing their goods, but not about the structural mechanisms by which those goods were produced; theirs was a communism of consumption and not production. For that reason, their communism “proved incapable of reforming society, of putting an end to the inequality between men and throwing down the barrier between rich and poor.”

John would have been happy, no doubt, for all his listeners to immediately renounce their luxuries. He had lived his life as a hermit before being ordained, and continued to champion the ascetic life in his preaching. But at this moment, in this sermon, he does not make that appeal. He prefers to work on the core problem: the failure of empathy, and the disappearance of the poor that follows on from that failure. He wants to transform the moral relationship between the rich and the poor.

Plato is not suggesting, note, that private property would introduce “adverse incentives” that might be too strong for the guardians to resist. He does not cast the citizens of his city as utility maximizers and then set out to align the guardians’ personal and social utility. He says, rather, that owning private property would make the guardian a different sort of person, a manager instead of a caretaker. That sort of person stands in a different moral relationship with the city and its citizens. Plato’s intuition, though he does not argue for it, is that a manager of private wealth will always have an antagonistic relationship with others. Private property breeds violence.

Mobilizing the stock of fossil energy layered under the ground was the weapon with which British capitalists fought back against the upsurge in unionism and Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s. Water was cheap and abundant, but unlike the power unleashed from coal, it could not be controlled. As Malm remarks, "If the autonomy of the working class is to be fought by a regiment of machinery, the prime mover – the field commander – had better be reliable."

The fascists in Germany were in a better position than the War Communists. They had coal. But they also had to find a way to break the grip of oil, the commodity basis of Anglo-American power. In the event, the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben devised a way of making oil and rubber out of Central European coal. Not by accident, a huge synthetic chemical factory was at the heart of the Auschwitz camp complex.

Despite the fact that many publications refer to the dining establishments at Pompeii as thermopolia, the Loeb Classical Library records only two instances of the term being used. Experts such as Tonnes Kleberg, Mary Beard, Steven Ellis, and Claire Holleran have all noted that the more frequently found term in the Latin literary record, popina, is a more suitable name for these types of spaces. Typically translated as “tavern,” it’s sometimes translated as “public-house,” or, in the more modern vernacular, pub. To imagine the atmosphere of ancient Roman taverns, one can simply look to the frescoes that still adorn the walls of such spaces in Pompeii, depicting scenes of drinking, canoodling, gambling, and horseplay.

According to Dr. Anna Maria Sodo, director and archaeology officer of the Antiquarium of Boscoreale, in the Vesuvian area alone, only 40 percent of the urban dwellings of the working poor and 66 percent of the middle-class homes had fixed hearths for cooking. To meet this high demand, there were at least 80 food and beverage outlets at Pompeii (the site has yet to be fully excavated).

especially in the days prior to the enormous slow React apps and the browser per application Electron apps of today.

How might we create easier ways for small groups to publish / maintain knowledge in public?

Should I build an MVP of a new solution here? Will it rely on someone like Twitter to build the core infrastructure?

Pingbacks 2.0 - pingbacks got ruined by SEO spammers but there’s a real need for better tools for networked authors.

I maintain my own publicly accessible feed reader at tomcritchlow.com/feeds and if more people did the same I think we might be able to make RSS have a come-back moment.

I’m curious to see Nathan’s approach to “discuss on twitter” see here for example - the new twitter threading UI feels pretty good at this though definitely still not “solved”.

Think about blogging for a second: the fact that a list of posts is ordered chronologically by publication date, by default, is a bug in our incrementally-correct worldview. Blogging tools don't create any incentive to go back and edit previous ideas or posts. Or, at the very least, the default ordering has a de facto side effect of fewer people being aware of revisions or reversals to previously-published ideas. RSS feeds are organized linearly by publication date, putting pressure on writers make sure that each post is "final" – there's no going back to improve or clarify your thoughts for a feed reader where everything is static and cached for eternity. At the very least, any subsequent edits will only reach a fraction of the initial audience.

A classic theme within the Iranian artistic tradition is that of the rose and the nightingale; set apart from the other innumerable depic- tions of birds and flowers typical to the region, to the extent that it has become an inescapable symbol of Persian culture. Known as Gul-i-bulbul, or Gol-o-bolbol, the ‘rose and nightingale’ motif, which found its earliest expression in Persian poetry, has spanned eras and art forms. The use of the motif by Persian artists in fact dates back to the pre-Islamic era and reached its zenith during the Savafid and Qajar dynasties. Taking their inspiration from literary imagery, these artists saw it as above all a romantic concept: the rose representing the desired woman, proud and unattainable amid its thorns, whilst the nightingale is the male lover who, each day, returns to serenade her in the hope that she lowers her defences. In most representations of the scene, the roses tower over the birds and are so imposing that the animals appear almost overwhelmed, dominated by the flowers. A different interpretation, this time religious, associates the rose with the Prophet Muhammad – whom it is said created the first rose from a drop of his sweat – whilst the nightingale, which is devoted to the flower, symbolises the faithful Muslim.

Children will always play, when allowed to, and people will always sing. But will they play or sing anything that can’t be bought and sold? Will playing and singing, in the Western world anyway, ever again be anything other than a set of commercial transactions? I’m glad that I can listen to almost any music in the world that I want to listen to; but I can’t help wondering sometimes whether music would mean something more to me, and certainly something different, if most of the songs I knew were the ones that, in that imagined life, I’d be entitled to sing. 

He believed that at one time human beings had been much better able to perceive certain dimensions of reality that, with our modern mechanistic view of nature, we no longer can. Perhaps, he once opined to me, it all has something to do with the relative preponderance of the right and left hemispheres of the brains—though, as an enemy of all materialism, he was convinced that, if this was so, a change in our shared metaphysics had slowly altered the balance of the cerebral cortex, and not the reverse.

entelechy

Of course, one is free to regard formal and final causality as fictions (though they will always tend to reassert themselves, even if only subtly), and one may dismiss the question of being as meaningless or imponderable (though it is neither). But one should also then relinquish ambitions for empirical method it cannot fulfill.

For one thing, it does not logically follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented toward a transcendent reality. To imagine that it does so follow is to fall prey to a version of the genetic fallacy, the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value.

Well, if Dennett is going to resort to italics (that most devastatingly persuasive weapon in the dialectician’s arsenal), I can do little more than shamelessly lift a page from his rhetorical portfolio and reply: No, they cannot. This is not a matter of territoriality or of resistance to the most recent research but of simple logic. There can be no science of any hard empirical variety when the very act of identifying one’s object of study is already an act of interpretation, contingent on a collection of purely arbitrary reductions, dubious categorizations, and biased observations.

There are also the embarrassing moments of self-delusion, as when Dennett, the merry “Darwinian fundamentalist,” claims that atheists—unlike persons of faith—welcome the ceaseless objective examination of their convictions, or that philosophers are as a rule open to all ideas (which accords with no sane person’s experience of either class of individuals).

And what makes these particular verses so delightful is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity.

we fail to remember (and to fashion our lives according to the knowledge) that we exist only because there is One who has called us from nothingness to be what He desires us to be, not simply what we would like to make ourselves

It is generally wise to seek to be separate, to be in the world but not of it, to be no more engaged with modernity than were the ancient Christians with the culture of pagan antiquity; and wise also to cultivate in our hearts a generous hatred toward the secular order, and a charitable contempt. Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish, in no more than a generation or two, a demographic revolution.

This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plenitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end—even if it be our own power of choice within us—is a form of bondage.

Pars destruens / pars construens (Latin) is in common parlance about different parts of an argumentation. The negative part of criticizing views is the pars destruens. And the positive part of stating one's own position and arguments is the pars construens. The distinction goes back to Francis Bacon and his work Novum Organum (1620). There he puts forth his inductive method that has two parts. A negative part, pars destruens, that removes all prejudices and errors. And the positive part, pars construens, that is about gaining knowledge and truth.

At some point during the council's proceedings, a Monothelite priest claimed he could raise the dead, thereby proving his faith supreme. He had a corpse brought forth, but after whispering prayers into its ears, could not revive the body

Laudato Si positively trembles from all the echoes it contains of G. K. Chesterton, Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc, Elizabeth Anscombe, Dorothy Day, E. F. Schumacher, Leo XIII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and (above all) Romano Guardini; its native social and political atmosphere is that rich combination of Christian socialism, social democratism, subsidiarism, distributism, and anti-materialism that constitutes the best of the modern Catholic intellectual tradition’s humane alternative to all the technologisms, libertarianisms, corporatisms, and totalitarianisms that in their different ways reduce humanity to nothing more than appetent machines and creation to nothing more than industrial resources.

For instance, it has not gone unnoticed in the East that he refers to himself in public almost never as “the pope,” but only as “the bishop of Rome”: a habit that most Western Christians are scarcely likely to notice, or to regard as anything more than a curious eccentricity or precious affectation, but that many Eastern Christians take as a historically astute and generous gesture.

Journals for the last 31 days with entries

There’s a kind of elitism that says it’s important to pretend that hard things come easy, and a disdain for people whose professional arcs carry the stench of effort. That’s the underlying sentiment of “the work speaks for itself”, because in this media landscape, it never does. And even the elites, the tenured people, promote themselves; they just affect the appearance of having not done so, and often rely on others to perform promotional functions they think are beneath them.

The New Queer Conscience may tell you to stay on the bus with Jenner and continue hammering away at a fraught notion of solidarity because you’re on the “same team.” But there’s nothing wrong with pulling over and finding your own way home.

Yet, Eli neglects to engage with the fact that, a few months prior to instituting those travel restrictions, Trump gleefully displayed a rainbow flag given to him by his queer supporters at a campaign rally.

Before I lie down in bed, I pull back the covers and sit down on the area where my feet would go for 15-20 seconds, pulling the inside of the duvet up around my back. I find that this short period of time is enough to make the sheets and duvet comfortably warm. Then, if I lie down and put my feet into that warmed space, they never get cold again for the rest of the night.

I am going to continue my live journaling of the Beyond Self-Discipline Zero (BSDv0) experience. I finished yesterday’s entry with some throbbing thumos…The time is here for virtue to make a fucking come back.I am fired up. My energy feels like it has shifted since Saturday, the thumos is sharper, the energy more penetrating, and the desire is deeper to get the fuck after it. Camille is noticing it as well. She said she feels the fire. I asked her how that makes her feel and she said “protected.” That turns me on.My full body is turned on. The thumos is wild, overwhelming at times, and the daemon usually attempts a full spectrum takeover when I feel like this. I learned my lesson before though, when I almost fused completely with the daemon, on the knife’s edge of losing my mind. I was live journaling when this last happened back in April 2020. In a foreshadowing entry titled Stoicism Reborn I wrote...This crazy wisdom that I thought I possessed is just feeling crazy, and fully listening to the daemon is like being ill prepared to hold on to a fire hose, and I have never done either before. I feel the need to back off. I am becoming unpredictable, dangerous, feral. I am ready to turn my life upside down.

Invite three or four others onto a call and play a new game I like to think of ‘Where Do We Disagree’. I often wonder if under the surface of the relatively high alignment of values I appear to share with my Liminal pals there may be huge hidden areas of disagreement that don’t often come to light. I recently hosted a call like this with a few others and it was filled with laughter and ‘Aha’ moments. Pro tip - Aliens, transgender rights and notions of reincarnation are all fun and potentially spicy topics to explore.

In the Celtic tradition this kind of bond is known as anam ara. As the poet John Donahue writes in his book Anam Cara ‘Anam is the Gaelic word for soul; ara is the word for friend. So anam ara means soul friend. The anam ara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam ara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul...a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.’ (excerpted from the Book Anam Cara by John O’Donohue).

a unique kind of relationship I’ve playfully come to think of as the Neotribal Kin Buddy (or just Kin Buddy for short).

After moving to South East Asia and connecting in with the community there

Shadow Work (ie. Encounter Groups, Podding)This involves helping each other to actively seek out and become more aware of our blindspots and shadow sides.

Sharing (ie. P2P Counselling, Origins Stories)

Accountability (ie. Discipline Groups, Goal Setting) This is the practice of inviting one another to hold us accountable to new habits we are attempting to form and goals that we are committed to moving towards.

This involves the group combining its energies and skills to create something together.

It might involve feasting together, going to festivals or embarking on adventures to new places or events.

Being (ie. Circling, Altered States) This is a quality of interaction that is often experienced without words although certain kinds of practices like Circling and various Authentic Relating exercises can help to guide a group into this state through the use of specific forms of highly conscious dialogue.

‘[Friendships of Virtue] is Aristotle’s term I like to use to describe friendships in which you truly want your friend to be better and wiser. In these kinds of relationships you do not instrumentalize your friend towards some benefit, nor do you use each other for some mutual pleasure. No. These friendships are about virtue.’

‘[Crews are a] long-term set of relationships with singular purpose, like a co-op, shared house, or affinity group. The size is important, because it is small enough to stay highly coordinated with minimal explicit rules & roles, and large enough that your enhanced impact is worth the cost of collaborating.’

‘Whether housemates or friends sharing a Discord group, squads allow social currency and financial capital to inter-convert, creating opportunities and group resiliency that would have been impossible to achieve alone.’

Forging friendships in the communal fire of directed focus as we leverage our shared camaraderie towards personal growth.

therapy and coaching that is outside the confines and structures of a paid professional setting

Going psychologically deeper than the bounds and informalities of modern friendship tend to allow for.

That many of us are now at least one or two generations away from having experienced a deeply communal religious context. And whether we realise it or not I’d suggest we’re often looking to fill a congregation or sangha shaped hole in our collective hearts.

I believe that much of the effort of this lineage has been an (often unconscious) attempt to rekindle the kind of deep tribal cohesion we experienced for time immemorial as nomadic hunter gatherers.

They are geared towards helping each person in the group grow, kick ass and have as much fun as possible along the way.

there’s a new kind of social unit emerging

He knows the things that are yours, so that you may rest yourselves in them. For by the fruits one knows the things that are yours,  that they are the children of the father

Translated by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer This original translation of The Gospel of Truth (Nag Hammadi Codex I and XII)

one knows his aroma, that you originate from the grace of his countenance. For this reason, the father loves his aroma; and it manifests itself in every place; and when it is mixed with matter, he gives his aroma to the light; and into his rest he causes it to ascend in every form and in every sound. For it is not ears that smell the aroma, but it is the spirit that possesses the sense of smell and draws it for itself to itself and sinks into the aroma of the father. Thus the spirit cares for it and takes it to the place from which it has come, the first aroma, which has grown cold. It is in a psychical form, resembling cold water  that has sunk into soil that is not hard, of which those who see it think, “It is earth.” Afterward, it evaporates if a breath of wind draws it, and it becomes warm. The cold aromas, then, are from division. For this reason, faith came and destroyed division and brought the warm fullness of love, so that the cold may not return, but the unity of perfect thought may prevail.

PUTTING KNOWLEDGE INTO PRACTICE Speak concerning the truth to those who seek it and of knowledge to those who, in their error, have committed sins.  Make sure-footed those who stumble, and stretch forth your hands to the sick. Nourish the hungry, and set at ease those who are troubled. Raise up and awaken those who sleep. You are this understanding that seizes you.  If the strong follow this course, they are even stronger. Turn your attention to yourselves. Do not be concerned with other things, namely, that which you have cast forth from yourselves, that which you have dismissed. Do not return to them to eat them. Do not be moth-eaten. Do not be worm-eaten, for you have already shaken it off. Do not be a place of the devil, for you have already destroyed him. Do not strengthen your last obstacles, because that is reprehensible. For the lawless one is nothing. He harms himself more than the law. For that one does his works because he is a lawless person. But this one, because he is a righteous person, does his works among others. Do the will of the father, then, for you are from him.

As much as we are willing to question the idea of the canon and be suspicious of the motivations for its construction, we are far less motivated to question the idea of the lone genius. The myth of the genius positions the artist against society, against tradition, against community. The myth works backwards: the genius does not actually impose his will on the world; the world creates the conditions that allow for the art and artist to emerge. But it’s easier to control your own work rather than the entirety of the world, so focusing our attention on the individual instead of the condition of the environment in which they operate gives a much more satisfyingly egocentric story about artistic production.

our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.

exploring a number-associative [[mind palace

I agree with the authors of “Stochastic Parrots” that neural language models are dangerous. But I am not sure that critical discourse has alerted us to the most important dangers yet. Critics often prefer to say that these models are dangerous only because they don’t work and are devoid of meaning. That may seem to be the strongest rhetorical position (since it concedes nothing to the models), but I suspect this hard line also prevents critics from envisioning what the models might be good for and how they’re likely to be (mis)used.

I understand why researchers in a field named “artificial intelligence” would associate meaning with mental activity and see writing as a dubious proxy for it. But historical disciplines rarely have access to minds, or even living subjects. We work mostly with texts and other traces. For this reason, I’m not troubled by the part of “Stochastic Parrots” that warns about “the human tendency to attribute meaning to text” even when the text “is not grounded in communicative intent” (618, 616). Historians are already in the habit of finding meaning in genres, nursery rhymes, folktale motifs, ruins, political trends, and other patterns that never had a single author with a clear purpose.[5] If we could only find meaning in intentional communication, we wouldn’t find much meaning in the past at all. So not all historical researchers will be scandalized when we hear that a model is merely “stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data” (617). That’s often what we do too, and we could use help.

Afghans developed this method of food preservation, which uses mud-straw containers and is known as kangina, centuries ago in Afghanistan’s rural north. Thanks to the technique, people in remote communities who can’t afford imported produce are able to enjoy fresh fruit in winter months. But even in villages like Ahmadi’s, near the capital, the tradition is kept alive for good reason. “Have you ever seen another method that can keep grapes fresh for nearly half a year?” Ahmadi asks with a laugh.

In Man Walks Into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, beer journalist Pete Brown writes that “Society revolved around popular celebrations known as ‘ales’: bride-ales, church-ales … were gatherings where plenty of alcohol was drunk, and they frequently degenerated into mayhem.” Anyone could brew up a batch of ale in their home, and standards and strengths varied wildly. Homebrewed ale was advertised with “an ale stake,” Brown adds, which consisted of “a pole covered with some kind of foliage above the door.”

Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Although it looks like a woodland of individual trees with striking white bark and small leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, Pando (Latin for “I spread”) is actually 47,000 genetically identical stems that arise from an interconnected root network. This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 metric tons. By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth.

Accordingly, Gramsci approached the subject of taste with the same vigor that other Marxists reserved for political economy. He reserved special rancor for Eugène Sue’s popular novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843). In the novel, a Prince Rodolphe metes out vigilante justice in Paris’s seedy underbelly. Gramsci said the French serial provided “the romantic setting in which the fascist mentality is formed,” since it presented social problems as something to be solved by a superhero figure rather than through class struggle. 

Implementing this interconnection well enough to be useful imposes costs, though: it can make it feel more difficult to write about topics that aren’t connected to the superstructure of ideas I already have, and which don’t slot neatly into existing taxonomies.

If I change my opinion on something, it’s much clearer to simply write what my new opinion is, than to try to edit and untangle everything I’ve written in the past.

The problem, though, is that a large part of why I find this mode of thinking useful is that you can create useful insights by connecting nearly anything to anything else: the world is fundamentally so highly interconnected that trying to explicitly capture connections between ideas is bound to fall short. Everything is connected to everything else.

It’s tempting to think that breaking this externally enforced temporal linearity will make one’s ideas more legible, but I’m not convinced: I find it easier to understand writing where the influences are clearly and simply laid out.

I find it’s often better to summarize a few ideas, rather than link to the place I first explored those ideas.

If reading links is required to understand the post, and there is heavy interlinking, that means that reading the entire site is required to understand any of the ideas.

structuring your thought around links between existing ideas means that there’s a pull to categorize every new thought as related to some grouping of existing thoughts.

It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it.At the same time, I wonder if this obsession with permanence is misplaced.

For instance, a safe withdrawal rate of 3% and a cost of $12 for domain renewal would mean that a one-time payment of $400 should be enough to keep a website up ~forever.

Arena fails to support associative thinking — its connections are no more than categories and lack semantic meaning.

Arena encourages the collection of resources as fetish objects, and performance over knowledge building and sharing.

Or you could comment on other people's blocks to try to force a debate.

Arena's passive collector is insulated from critique.

A *tool* for collaborative research might seek to help collaborators move from collecting resources to producing an original work. A *platform*, on the other hand, seeks to maximize user engagement. It optimizes for an endless flow of new content, rather than slow digestion of what has already accumulated. A tool would focus on helping you *create*. A platform focuses on helping you *share* and *connect*. A tool might support collaboration, but it would not distract you with social-media-style notifications about people engaging with your content. Arena's followers, connection notifications, etc. are all design patterns lifted directly from the world of addictive platforms, not tools for thought.

It seems like there are a variety of simple acts that can throw a wrench into the legibility of one’s digital life in a meaningful way.

Publishing on your own website, especially if you use a protocol like Gemini (a simplified HTTP alternative).

Google had a surprisingly high number of True Believers, so I mostly stayed quiet about my thoughts on the tech industry while I was at work. I had some friends who shared my disillusionment, but techlash hadn’t made its way into the tech industry yet: people seemed to really believe that they were changing the world for the better. Sure, there are a lot of bad startups out there, but the startup I work for is good. Pay no attention to the VCs behind the curtain.Over the past few years, the disillusionment of the public has slowly been seeping into the tech industry.

Significantly, the burden of these accounts was on the effects of blast, burn and destruction. Hersey’s descriptions of radiation sickness in Hiroshima were not mirrored in the United States, where the government consistently minimized its dangers. For the benefit of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in February 1953 the Atomic Energy Commission superimposed the blast radius from the first hydrogen bomb detonated in the Marshall Islands the previous November (‘Ivy Mike’) over a map of Washington DC, and the conceit provoked laugher from members of Congress because the ‘zero point’ was centred on the White House not the Capitol.  The high-yield thermonuclear blast of Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954 was of a different order, and its fallout contaminated thousands of square miles. To illustrate its extent the AEC superimposed the plume over the eastern seaboard of the United States. Had this bomb been detonated over Washington, then Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York would have become uninhabitable. President Eisenhower insisted on the map remaining classified, and when the New York Times splashed across its front page ‘The H-Bomb can wipe out any city’ its map was centred on New York and emphasised physical damage and destruction: I rehearse all this because in her reflections on ‘the age of the world target’ Rey Chow writes of ‘the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the … target fields.’  Yet, as I have shown, a common – perhaps even the most common – American response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years immediately after the war was precisely the opposite.

For another, this particular epistemological problem is oh-so-familiar to me from my home turf: psychiatry. Y'all: this why the DSM-III happened. The neo-Kraepelineans were like, "Right, this is bullshit. There's no standardized definitions of any psychiatric disorder, so we have no idea if one researcher's paper on 'schizophrenia' has anything to do with the subject population of another researcher's paper on 'schizophrenia'. Scientific research into psychiatric disorders is absolutely hamstrung by this. So step one: we infiltrate and take over the DSM committee. Step two: we give every single disorder in the DSM a formal set of diagnostic criteria. That will solve it!" (Morgan Freeman voice-over: "That did not solve it.")Welcome to nosology, the branch of medical science – and philosophy – concerned with the classification and definition of diseases and other medical conditions.Is it wrong to eat popcorn at a two-hundred car pile up? Nosology, and the history of philosophy and medicine attendent it, is my favorite blood sport. I am so deep into raptly amoral, "Please continue your petty bickering, I find it fascinating" land here, I don't even know how to find my way back.I mean, I would find it utterly fascinating, even if it didn't come served with a big ol' side of schadenfreude pie. Psychiatry has long been the black sheep of medicine for its difficult relationship to nosology, and I've long been of the opinion that psychiatry has been the Identified Patient of the family that is medicine, where all(?) the rest of medicine has been doing that Jungian "shadow" thing and projecting their faults – here, around nosology – on a scapegoat to disown those faults. You motherfuckers have been busted.

As I have ventured to show elsewhere, there are numerous orthodox resources in the Catholic theological and philosophical tradition that can help us renew our theological anthropology such that it is in keeping with both the tradition and the best of human knowledge and experience. The first step forward involves moving from the abstract to the particular as our shared theological and pastoral starting point.

The prioritization of what constitutes human personhood rests in adhering to a vision of a common nature. According to this way of thinking, a singular pattern or form of what it means to be human exists, and everyone conforms to this ideal to a greater or lesser degree. Everyone who shares this common nature is ordered to a singular goal that shapes and informs what is considered appropriate in terms of behaviors or moral actions. This teleological vision of human personhood, which also frequently places the importance of actions over inherent dignity and value of persons, is what leads to the condemnation of LGBTQ folks as “objectively disordered”—it is “objective” because the divinely designed pattern is universal; it is “disordered” because it departs from the singularly envisioned path (in this case, reproduction) guiding ethical action.

“I wish we were,” she tells him. “It’s like waiting to be hung.”“Maybe it is,” he says. “Or maybe it’s a period of grace.” I suppose those are the two ways you can look at a normal life in general as well. We’re all born waiting to be hung and we can either despair over that fact or consider the interim a gift. Every day a last minute reprieve from the governor. I think we all know which one I’m going to personally do but you can do it differently it’s your life buddy.

Suddenly, they were not tiny little plates of food for big prices. They were experiences, knowledge and expertise, presented in such a way that I could have flown if I wasn't anchored to the restaurant floor by a crisp table topped with stacks of cutlery.

How many flowers had the chef tasted to know that the little pink one goes best on asparagus? How many tried and failed attempts had gone into deciding just how much reindeer moss goes well with artichoke? What countries had he visited to learn what goes best with the finger lime? Or, in forests filled with mushrooms of every conceivable type, how had the chef decided to choose hen of the woods for me to enjoy today, right here in Birmingham?

And discussing where our opinions differ is where the real opportunities to grow as a person reside.

As a result of that, the public online discourse is mostly made up of short takes that leave no room for those very important details. If you want to understand someone’s opinion on a topic you need time. Opinions are usually not binary and they can span across a wide spectrum. You need to invest time reading or listening to what they think about and then probably ask follow up questions. That’s not something that usually happens online.

“There are some American institutions that are relatively good at getting people integrated into a community,” he added. For example, “megachurches are one of these cultural responses to residential mobility — they’re big, they don’t take a lot of time, and they get you into a deep community quickly without having to incur a lot of costs.”

Looking at a survey of 16,000 Americans, the authors find that people who want to move but remain at the same address the following year are more likely to disagree that “hard work can help a person get ahead,” even when controlling for a bunch of factors like socioeconomic status, health, age, race, and more. “Wanting to move but being unable to leave leads people to wonder about whether their other efforts in life will be rewarded,” the researchers write.

The paper finds that as residential mobility has gone down, so have “levels of happiness, fairness, and trust among Americans.” How could declining mobility lead to these changes? Buttrick and Oishi explain that moving to a new place severs social bonds, and in a new town, far from home, newcomers are forced to define themselves with “context-free personality traits (i.e., ‘I am hardworking’ or ‘I am intelligent’)” rather than by their relationships to locals like they might in their hometown (i.e., “my sister owns the butcher shop downtown”).

Totems are kind of like spirit animals, but for grown-ups.

For starters, the Indigenous version of the Turing test turned out to be ineffective because we asked too many questions about complex relationships with people and place that would have ended up with Harrison Ford shooting a lot of innocent settlers.

International and industry-wide organisations currently pick and manage what the protocols are, but this governance could potentially be automated.

To be as nuanced as I can about this, I get the desire for everything on the internet to be verified and correct. I have, personally, been tricked by more than a few misleading or factually incorrect posts about Ukraine in the last few days. But I, also, think the further into this conflict we get, the more it’ll become apparent that there is no meaningful way to factcheck this stuff anymore. Platforms like TikTok run on autopilot and have reached a scale in which they cannot be moderated by human beings anymore. There has also been so much content published about the invasion of Ukraine in just the last few days that there’s really no fixing things. And it’ll only get worse and more complicated from here. I’ve known researchers who have talked about an “infopocalypse,” a future event in which there will simply be too much mis- or disinformation online to sort through. Well, I think it’s happening and I think TikTok is ground zero.

The core problem that causes all of this is that there's a leaky pipeline of knowledge from epistemic communities to the outside world. In order for you to discover a piece of knowledge: It has to be interesting enough for someone to think it is worth writing down. It has to be interesting enough that it gets accepted (though if not, it may end up on a random blog post if you're lucky). It has to be interesting or well organised enough that it gets surfaced in a way you can find. It has to be accessible enough for you to be able to find it (e.g. it can't use super technical terms that you'll have no way to ever discover without access to an expert). This pipeline is leaky enough that it would be very surprising if most knowledge produced by an epistemic community were accessible to you. This may not seem like a big deal when you think of communities like mathematics, where most consumers of its contents are also members of the community, but it's a big deal when you consider two things: Everything is like this, including subjects that everyone would benefit from. I read a lot of therapy books for example and I'll bet that there's at least two orders of magnitude more ghost knowledge about therapy than I have access to. Every community is an epistemic community. Many lessons are e.g. learned over and over again inside companies, and are never written down anywhere, or when they are are so defanged that nobody can benefit from them. The pipeline is different, but the problem is the same. Given this, we are surrounded by ghosts: The information that is written down and that we can access is so thin on the ground compared to what's actually out there, it's astonishing that we ever get anything done.

The difference between me and Teach is that Teach hates you and thinks you are contemptible, while I love you and think that you are hilarious.

“The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something; it’s more like rigidity across situations,” Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.“So it’s okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, as long as you can turn it off?” I asked her.“People who say they’re never bitchy in their heart are lying,” she said.

Surviving improv made me feel like I could survive anything, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of Leningrad.

I find expressing gratitude unnatural, because Russians believe doing so will provoke the evil eye; our God doesn’t like too much bragging.

One guy shared that he didn’t understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in China and Russia were learning to make weapons, which I deemed an interesting point, because you’re not allowed to criticize others in anger management.

My vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.”

Hudson’s findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of “no-self”—no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian Little writes that people can have “multiple authenticities”—that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. He proposes that people have the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting “free traits,” often in the service of an important personal or professional project. If a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the office holiday party, they can grab a canapé and make the rounds. The more you do this, Little says, the easier it gets.

If you cut open an apple a certain way, the core appears as a tiny star. For Api Etoile apples, however, the star is on the outside. These gleaming red-yellow fruits are curiously flattened, and often they grow out into five points, giving them the shape of rounded stars. These special apples originated in France in the 1600s, and over the centuries, growers commented on their otherworldly look.

There are variations of drop text (currently very rare) that would be useful. For example, clicking on the arrow could rotate it down to only 45 degrees, causing only the first line or two of the section to appear. This would give you a better idea of whether you want to see the whole section. If you do, you click (say) below the arrow to turn it down to 90 degrees. Otherwise you click above it to send it back and hide the section.

If you’re reading this post via email or on the Last Week in AWS website, I’m going to bet you’re not doing it via mutt or w3m respectively; you clicked something in a GUI, or tapped your mobile device’s screen to read these words. If I’m wrong on that and you are in fact reading this on a command line reader, it’s imperative that you not email me about it, Captain EdgeCase.