I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist.
—John Wesley
Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason.
Why is it considered rude to reschedule an event after you've already sent out the invitations? Why do people stubbornly rejecting a compromise tend to do so in a polite and kindly manner? Why did you name your car Rainbow Dash? Speculative answers to these and other questions might be found in the following list of observations.
You can't spell alliteratively without literati.
You can't spell announcement without cement.
You can't spell apprenticeship without entice.
You can't spell chemotherapy without mother.
You can't spell eponymous without pony.
You can't spell compassion without compass.
You can't spell literate without iterate.
You can't spell disappointingly without tingly.
You can't spell disapproving without roving.
You can't spell disconcerting without sconce.
You can't spell discontinuance without nuance.
You can't spell ill-naturedness without redness.
You can't spell illustrative without strati.
You can't spell intransigently without gently.
You can't spell resolute without solute.
You can't spell oversuspicious without versus.
You can't spell precedent without recede.
You can't spell vindictive without indict.
"We need some sort of slogan to go on our advertisements. Any ideas?"
"How about 'World's Best Widgets'?"
"Ha—no."
"Too cliché?"
"Not ambitious enough."
"Not ambitious enough?! How so?"
"Think about it! What use is it to have the best widget in today's world, if someone might just invent a better widget tomorrow? And who would be content to have the best widget in our universe, past, present, and future, when still better widgets might have existed if things had gone differently? No! I want all our potential customers to know that we make the best widgets in all possible worlds!"
Specific is terrific,
But meta is betta.
You hear people accusing their enemies of being morally or intellectually bankrupt, and they mean it in the sense of "destitute of, or wholly lacking (something)", rather than the sense of financial insolvency. But I actually would like to see the insolvency metaphor: people should speak of declaring intellectual bankruptcy to mean "I was wrong before; I won't try to defend my previous claims because I can't" (in analogy to "I won't try to pay my debts, because I can't").
kind of disappointed that cog and cognition don't actually share a root
"I shall seek the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
"I shall seek? What's wrong with the original God grant me?"
"What God sees fit to grant me is one of the things I can't change."
"Avinu Malkeinu, we have sinned against you! Avinu Malkeinu, forgive us, bless us, grant us atonement!"
"Why do you bother? You're not a child. You've studied the history of our world. You should know that there's no one to grant you atonement."
"You don't know that! Science doesn't know everything. You can't prove that there's no Higher Power."
"As you say. But if there is a Higher Power, It clearly hasn't concerned Itself with the operation of the moral law."
"In this world."
"Yes, in this world. But surely it is this world that we must concerned with, for if there is a next world, we are too ignorant to speak of it."
"That is why it is also a teaching of my people that this is also a time for us to forgive each other for the wrongs we have committed in the past year, as well as seeking reconciliation with haShem."
"And you anticipate the same thing being necessary next year?"
"I don't understand. How could it not be necessary?"
So, did John Donne actually take a reductionist view of personal identity, or was that "No man is an island [...] therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls" business just ordinary empathy and stuff?
"Even after racism, sexism, and speciesism have been eradicated, the work of social justice won't be done. We still live in a viciously existence-biased Society, which cruelly disregards the interests of possible creatures just because they happen to not have been created yet!"
"'Creatures'?—I see you're still mired in the insidious grip of of organism privilege! What about all the possible qualia-bearing processes like orgasmium or paperclip-manufacturing nanoware, which don't factorize into distinct entities? My friend, I say there will be no justice until Society's sphere of moral concern extends to all possible computations in inverse proportion to their complexity!"
"I've heard of dei ex machinis, but this is ridiculous!"
"Oh, I'm so nervous! What if I ... ? What if they ... ? Oh, what ever shall I do?"
"I keep telling you, man, you're making things way too complicated. Just think about what outcome you want, predict which behaviors will lead to which outcomes, and then perform the corresponding behavior."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
Just keep telling yourself: if they haven't started questioning what society tells them yet, then maybe they are not the one for you.
—"Pick-up Lines for Feminists" by Lesley Kartali
So, so what
I'm still a rock star
I got my rock moves
And I don't need you
And guess what
I'm having more fun
And now that we’re done
I'm gonna show you tonight
I'm alright
I'm just fine
—"So What" by Pink
The cheaper people are to model, the larger the groups that can be modeled well enough to cooperate with them.
I'm going to do it the dark way
I'm going to do it in my way
I'm going to quietly sulk
And write things on the wall
And always be lonely
I will try to do my share
Sorting papers in my lair
But don't ask me to come play
'Cause I'll ask you to go away
I'm going to go on with living
Observing, loving, and giving
And I will never know joy
Nor being annoyed
Knowing that I've sinned
Knowing that I've sinned
25 / M / Straight / Single
Walnut Creek, California
My self-summary
It hardly seems fair to ask for a self-summary—how could the rich tapestry of a human mind (with all its hopes, fears, memories, anticipations, and quirks) possibly be summarized in a mere paragraph? Or maybe that's a cop-out, a facile rationalization offered not because it has any chance of being believed, but because the real truth is too terrible to face: maybe the real reason one finds oneself reluctant to write a self-summary is not that there's too much to say (and therefore, that to say anything in particular would leave out too much and be a contemptible misrepresentation), but precisely that one fears there is too little: if we actually knew how much of our behavior could be predicted by simple programs informed by broad demographic data, a few personality parameters, and a small correction term for subcultural memetic noise, would our self-esteem survive the blow? What does it mean to be human in an inhuman universe, to hold true to one's ideals even after formulating the now-dominant hypothesis that those ideals were just folderol evolved to cover up the unavoidable responsibility of action in a world of crazy talking monkeys?
I don't know the answers. But I want to work to find them out. To face them, together, with you.
What I'm doing with my life
(Written 30 August 2013.) This autumn, I shall be attending App Academy's web development course, after which I shall seek employment as a programmer.
I'm really good at
starry-eyed idealism, reasoning under uncertainty
The first things people usually notice about me
My ... hair? My desperate and ineffectual attempts to signal how "smart" and "creative" I am? But probably my hair.
Favorite books, movies, shows, music and food
Text: collected works of Greg Egan and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Atlas Shrugged (it's not what it looks like, I swear)
Television: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Star Trek (TNG, DS9, VOY)
The six things I could never do without
internet access, mechanical pencils, the knowledge that it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission, em dashes, the magic of friendship, the global economy, being forgiven for listing seven things when I was only given permission for six
I spend a lot of time thinking about
Consider reading my blog to get an idea of the sorts of thing I think about.
On a typical Friday night I am
doing something wholesome and virtuous
The most private thing I'm willing to admit
... pass?
I'm looking for
You should message me if
and only if it turns out that messaging me is the right thing to do
It's always tempting to make excuses for our past selves, to tell a story about how, despite the appearance of continual failure and waste, we were actually in the right all along.
It's not true. If we were really in the right, we wouldn't need to strain to tell a complicated story explaining why; it would just be obvious from appearances.
When I find myself tempted to tell stories, it takes a deliberate effort to remind myself to be honest, but it's important. I was a fool; I was worse than a fool, and maybe I happened to get away with it, sort of, so far, but there's so much that I should have known, should have guessed, should have realized, should have considered. Of course there's no use dwelling on it overmuch, for we cannot make decisions about the past. But that's not the same as it being okay that it happened that way. It's not.
Books arrived in the post! Including the book about counterfactuals and causal inference in the social sciences, which is really important because everyone and her dog has political opinions, but it's rather less common to have a theory about how to reason about which interventions will lead to which outcomes!
We speak of the outcome of a coinflip being heads or tails, which are surely singular nouns in this context, despite being derived from the plural forms of head and tail. So when we flip a coin twice and get heads (respectively tails) twice, should we describe the outcome as two heads (respectively tails), or two headses (respectively tailses)? I feel like you could make a logical case for the latter, but I guess the former does sound more natural?