And now the decision was at his fingertips; everything had become clear. Art was a beautiful thing, but it was no goddess, no goal—not for him. He was not to follow art, but only the call of his mother. Why continue to perfect the ability of his hands? Master Niklaus was an example of such perfection, and where did it lead? It led to fame and reputation, to money and a settled life, and to a drying up and dwarfing of one’s inner senses, to which alone the mystery was accessible. It led to making pretty, precious toys, all kinds of ornate altars and pulpits, St. Sebastians and cute, curly angels’ heads at four guilders a piece. Oh, the gold in the eye of a carp, the sweet thin silvery down at the edge of a butterfly’s wing were infinitely more beautiful, alive, and precious than a whole roomful of such works of art.
Clipping
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
Perhaps it was after all worthwhile to place one’s entire life at the service of art, at the expense of freedom and broad experience, if only in order to be able once to make something this beautiful, something that had not only been experienced and envisioned and received in love, but also executed to the last detail with absolute mastery? It was an important question.
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clippings > Depression does something useful
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X6Nx9QzzvDhj8Ek9w/a-slow-guide-to-confronting-doom-v1]
I strongly suspect human brains have the ability to enter a depression state because the state does something useful. It seems to me that depression often arises from feeling stuck or not believing that one is able/on track to achieve acceptable outcomes. It’s like the brain, dissatisfied with the situation, boycotts and withdraws motivation. Something like that.
Having one’s brain not let you mindlessly or unreflectively continue down a path that won’t work, seems maybe useful. I’m not sure if that’s it, but I think it’s something.
Capitalism: our best, or even only, truly working coordination mechanism for deciding what the world should work on is capitalism and money, which allocates resources towards the most productive uses. This incentivizes growth and technological progress. There’s no corresponding coordination mechanism for good political outcomes, incl. for preventing extinction.
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clippings > The inner voice is not the problem
[https://qualiacomputing.com/2025/05/03/the-voice-in-your-head-dont-mind-the-inner-monologue/]
The problem with having a voice in your head is that it is a judgmental voice – it creates a self-view.
Judgment is self-perpetuating. It stings. It costs energy. And it builds on top of itself. When you’re too far gone in a judgment spiral, you judge yourself for being judgmental.
Freedom from judgment is within grasp for all of us (assuming we put in the time and effort – though please don’t take this as a judgment on your temporal thriftiness or laziness!). Burbea affirms it’s “absolutely possible” for the habit of judgment to end – sometimes large chunks of the “mountain of judgment” crumble suddenly in a matter of weeks. Even when judgment thoughts continue to arise from habit, they arise “completely free of any charge… just like empty words” with no power behind them. Eventually, these empty judgments fade away because they’ve been “sucked dry” of meaning.
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
“I … superior to you!” stammered Goldmund, feeling as though his whole body had been lamed. “Why, yes,” Narcissus continued. “Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are almost always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don’t live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plenitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at the mother’s breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. Your dreams are of girls; mine of boys…”
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clippings > Criticisms of libertarianism
[https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-owe-the-libertarians-an-apology]
My basic criticisms of libertarianism were:
- Libertarians’ ideological opposition to public goods provision and state capacity not only makes us poorer, but it also makes us less free in the long run, because poorer societies are less able to resist foreign conquerors. For example, it’s hard to imagine a libertarian government winning World War 2.
- By treating all of society as an interaction between a government and the individuals it governs, libertarians tend to ignore the threats to liberty from non-governmental institutions (“local bullies”), and from foreign governments. This led some libertarians to oppose the Civil Rights Act, and to underestimate the threats from illiberal powers like China. And these omissions led to some unsavory people grafting themselves and their oppressive ideas onto the libertarian movement.
- Libertarians underrate the importance of non-market mechanisms, which are sometimes superior to markets when transaction costs are high. If friendship, sex, and the right to breathe air were allocated by markets, society would be worse.
- Libertarians’ focus on deontological (principles-based) notions of freedom often contradicts humanity’s moral sentiments. For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.”
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books > Schild's Ladder (Greg Egan)
“You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity—fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way—and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.” Tarek gripped the lectern tightly, but continued in the same calm voice. “You’re so gloriously, indisputably right: if there is sentient life behind the border, we should wipe these creatures out of existence, on the mere chance that they might do the same to us. Then we can learn to predicate everything else we do on the same assumptions: there is no other purpose to life than an eternity of grim persistence, and the systematic extinguishment of everything—outside ourselves, or within us—that stands in the way of that goal.”
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clippings > Blues as a comical performance of black sorrow
Anyway Charlie freed the guitar from all that baggage. He didn’t “twang,” and he didn’t do a lot of showy emotive bending and he had little or no vibrato. That’s a lot like lester young, but it’s also I think a move to escape the minstrel shows and the blues as comical a performance of black sorrow for white people. I mean you can kind of see the legacy of the minstrel show every time some guy with 9s on the top is doing boomer bends and making guitar face playing blues.
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clippings > True art versus social status
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243805]
As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on.
How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate?
Which brings me back to the OP’s lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art!
I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and the Stalker’s Prayer:
“Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win.”
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clippings > A rationalist argument for god
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/]
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There is an all-powerful, all-knowing logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law.
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It watches everything that happens on Earth and is specifically interested in humans’ good behavior and willingness to obey its rules.
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It may have the ability to reward those who follow its rules after they die, and disincentivize those who violate them.
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