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Category: Post
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My Obsidian inbox had 40 fleeting notes (fragments from books, podcasts, conversations, and half-formed ideas). In the past I would set aside time to make them into proper Zettelkasten notes for my vault with 1000+ notes. I know that this is an important part of the Zettelkasten, but in the spirit of experimentation I wanted…
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When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious. — Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape
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I’ve never played the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, but I’ve read the book, and it’s a fascinating read into a system of magic (essentially) based on the works of Carl Jung. It’s paranoid and interesting, with magic built on obsessions made real. I stumbled across the ruleset in a Reddit discussion of the movie Under…
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These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage. — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais
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The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling. — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there
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Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely…
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Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who…
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…think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back. As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become…
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One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).…
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The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about that one thing pushing Dungeons & Dragons, which comes from the same lineage as wargames, in the direction of the medieval and fantasy setting is that there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment because of Vietnam…
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When the economist Tyler Cowen was in Chicago last month, I asked him why he keeps talking about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). He said it’s because it’s abundantly clear, after his conversations with government officials over the years, that they have files on things they don’t understand (he basically says the same thing here). So…
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Their fate [secretaries] is the subject of this essay, and a lens to think through the implications of AI for work with a bit more nuance than “LLMs are a scam” or “white collar work is doomed.” Perhaps those all-or-nothing predictions will turn out to be right! But honestly I doubt it. Instead I think…
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The patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the drive for Italian unification, described the Italian family as the “country of the heart.” In his typically prophetic voice, Mazzini wrote, “There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less…
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…I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were…
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Benedict Anderson claims that newspapers created national identity. Specifically, the development of print capitalism meant that suddenly people across the country were reading the same words over their tea and coffee in the morning, and (per Anderson) this massive shared ritual created a sense of kinship across millions of people who would never actually meet…
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…there’s a strong affinity between the pulp fantasy story and the picaresque, which is probably no accident. The picaresque is a clear antecedent of “adventure stories” of all sorts and many pulp writers latched on to the Picaro archetype as an ideal vehicle for telling lurid, sensationalistic tales set in far-away lands. I contend that…
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“Robbie and I were sittin’ on a plane an’ like it’s first class, so you get a couple o’drinks, an’ I said to Robbie, ‘Y’know, there are these Apollonian people…like, very formal, rational dreamers. An’ then there’s the Dionysian thing…the insanity trip…way inside.’ An’ I said. ‘Youre an Apollonian…up there with your guitar…all neat an…
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sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels. Like in Slovenian, some vowels prefer particular tones. Like in human language, there’s a lot of coarticulation (a process when you say “tense” but the word sounds…
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About a political group underrepresented in the Trope Land of garbage that passes as major media discourse these days: For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight…
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More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith offered a simple way to think about economic growth. He argued that prosperity depended less on grand strategy, and more on a small set of conditions that allowed ordinary economic activity to proceed with confidence. He summarized them as peace, light taxation, and a tolerable administration of justice.…
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