“Come on! Did you see God and angels and the tunnel of light and all that shit? Did you go to heaven?”
…
“Yeah, I saw all that fucking shit,” he said.
Clipping
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web > Anti-majestic cosmic horseshit
[https://extelligence.substack.com/p/anti-majestic-cosmic-horseshit]
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web > Pagrams are sentences that use all the phonemes of English
[https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/6o2rka/phonetic_pangrams/]
Pangrams which use all the phonemes, or phones, of English (rather than alphabetic characters):
“With tenure, Suzie’d have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.” (for certain US accents and phonological analyses)
“Shaw, those twelve beige hooks are joined if I patch a young, gooey mouth.” (perfect for certain accents with the cot-caught merger)
“Are those shy Eurasian footwear, cowboy chaps, or jolly earthmoving headgear?” (perfect for certain Received Pronunciation accents)
“The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.” (a phonetic, not merely phonemic, pangram. It contains both nasals [m] and [ɱ] (as in ‘symphony’), the fricatives [x] (as in ‘loch’) and [ç] (as in ‘hue’), and the ‘dark L’ [É«] (as in ‘all’) – in other words, it contains different allophones.)
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web > Heroic sacrifice of working at soul-killing institutions
[https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-pale-king]
In Wallace’s conception, boredom isn’t only personally enlightening—it can also be a heroic sacrifice for the collective good. At one point Chris Fogel wanders into the wrong classroom and ends up in the exam review for Advanced Tax, taught by a capable and dignified Jesuit (possibly the eponymous “pale king”). The Jesuit makes a speech which sparks an epiphany in Chris, where he declares the profession of accounting a heroic one: “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.’”
There it is: the vision, the cure, the path forward. We accept the burden of adult responsibility, go to work every day and engage in the important but unglamorous work that keeps society running. We orient our institutions not towards money but principle. We refuse to treat people like numbers or cogs or some great undifferentiated mass—we treat them as fully human, always, even and especially when they’ve chosen to subsume some part of their individuality to a soul-killing institution, because we recognize this as a heroic sacrifice they’re making for the good of the collective. And we withstand our negative emotions, embrace them fully, travel through their every texture until we transform and open to a deeper and richer experience.
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books > Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells (Lena Dunham)
If you have a bad feeling about someone, don’t worry about offending them. Just run. Being polite is how you get your purse stolen or your “purse stolen.”
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web > Do what you love is a trap
The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon - and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.
~Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
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web > Writing is a spanning tree of a thought graph
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432477]
Now you’re making me curious why people with ADHD (me included) tend to have a weird tendency for writing longer run-on sentences with commas, that on top of that use more parenthesis than average. Often nesting them, even. Because according to research our working memory is a little lower on average than neurotypicals, which seems to contradict this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432848
Perhaps the text itself is functioning as working memory.
Both ADHD people and neurotypicals have deeply structured thoughts. “Serializing” those thoughts without planning ahead leads to the “stream of consciousness” writing style, which includes things like run-on sentences and deeply nested parentheses. This style is considered poor form, because it is hard to follow. To serialize and communicate thoughts in a way that avoids this style, it is necessary to plan ahead and rely on working memory to hold several sub-goals simultaneously, instead of simply scanning back through the text to see which parentheses have not been closed yet.
It could also be simply that ADHD people have “branchier” thoughts, hopping around a constellation of related concepts that they feel compelled to communicate despite being tangential to the main point; parentheses are the main lexical construct used to convey such asides.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41433367
It’s not just “branchier” thought that make it hard to communicate, it’s graphier thoughts, when you mean (it’s important) to communicate that it’s not just a tree, but that connections may also go both ways, and sometimes they even have cycles. That to see the full picture in more nuance you’ve got to consider those feedback loops, and that they don’t necessarily have precedence one over the other but that they must be all taken account simultaneously.
When you explain it serially you are forced to choose a spanning tree, and people usually stop listening when the spanning tree has touched all the relevant concepts, then they persuade themselves they got the full picture but miss some connections, that make the problem more complex and nuanced.
When graphs have more than one loop, loopy belief propagation doesn’t work anymore and you need an another algorithm to update your belief without introducing bias.
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web > Social anxiety is a physical feeling that can and should be overcome
[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-was-not-acting-like-me-are-you]
About two years ago, I experienced a novel social betrayal that deeply affected me… making me realize my naivety about how people can behave… Although it caused no material damage, it led to a year and a half of uncharacteristic introversion… where I avoided socializing and felt less happy… I only recently recognized that my reduced social engagement was driven by an unconscious shift in my feelings of social safety… This background unease subtly influenced my behavior until I became aware of it, allowing me to act in line with my values again… Now, I reflect regularly on whether my actions align with my true intentions, avoiding being led by unfounded gut feelings…
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web > Hopefulness is the warrior emotion
[https://kottke.org/tags/word.php?word=Nick%20Cave]
The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from his Red Hand Files, an AMA project where fans write in with questions and he answers them. The question was:
Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
In a lovely letter in response (which he reads in the video above), Cave writes that “much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt” and that “it took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope”. That devastation was the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, which he talks more about in this interview and in this book. Cave’s response concludes:
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
I promise, your day will be better if you take a few minutes to watch or read this letter. And the entire interview is worth watching as well — there is no better interviewer on the topic of loss and grief than Stephen Colbert.
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web > People want interesting choices
[https://ranprieur.com/archives/046.html]
Google Is Not What It Seems. Julian Assange writes about being interviewed by some people from Google who appeared to be politically neutral, but they turned out to be representing the American foreign policy establishment, and he argues that Google has been allied with these people and their world view for a long time:
By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower”… This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they’re the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; and that anything you can call “economic development” is good.
But the story I find most interesting, is that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff. I’m thinking what people really want is interesting choices — partly inspired by Sid Meier’s famous definition of a game as a series of interesting decisions, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that’s not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn’t result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn’t matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I’ll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn’t effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it’s not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it’s not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn’t make any sense, and it’s why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
Now sleep. Karma is karma. Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou art thyself the Tao. Be thou, now, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain…