Wrote1 a minor Anki add-on so I can search for cards based on their review time.
(I was surprised to find that I only have 61 cards with a total review time of over 3min, and most of those are caused by a review timing out at 1min (aka I got distracted). Assuming decent card design, a more realistic threshold of Anki-worthiness is probably at most 1min, not 3min.)
Deleted a few hundred language cards with a review time below 1.8s at their last review, on the assumption that those are too easy anyway.
I’ve also finished the Manifeste du Futurisme. When I made the first French cards, I couldn’t read it. (Disclaimer: French was still my third-best language. I just hadn’t used it in a long time and had limited vocab.) After I did the last card, tried again. Now I can read it, fluently.
So my cards work, at least for intermediate level languages and building vocab. Even if that’s all they do, I’m happy ‘cause that was the only important (and tedious) problem left.
Also got bored with Le Petit Prince (mostly because my mom uses it like every 2 years or so in her classes and we constantly talk about it), so I tried to find some French movies, but there are literally none I like.2 I went through a Top 100 French Movies list and not a single one of them looked interesting. (Except Enter The Void, which isn’t even in French.)
I think I can find more Latin movies than French ones. I have no idea who to blame, but French cinema is completely worthless. Le sigh.
So instead, I’m reading Leibniz’ La Monadologie (which is surprisingly short) and some random French thinkers. I guess I’ll just throw chapters from random Great Books I can find into the card grinder until I’m reasonably fluent and then I’ll work through my actual French reading list. (Which consists of actual paper books. Look, it’s like 5 years old, it was a different time back then!)
Started Feser’s Aquinas. (Skipping his Last Superstition, mostly because I can’t find an ebook version, and because I’m already annoyed with those Gnu Atheists and their weak-ass metaphysics, so whatever man, gimme the good stuff.)
(I also feel that there’s a very promising economical / decision-theoretical way to disentangle the metaphysics of agency, but I don’t feel smart enough to do it or even develop good intuitions for it. Sometimes I feel inadequate for thinking in a theological / scholastic / pragmatic way, and not a solid math-y / algorithmic / functional way, but then I remember what tended to happened to those people (*cough*GödelBoltzmannCantor*cough*), and I feel slightly better.)
Also started When God Talks Back, which is fun. I find it amusing (and inspiring) that there are so many people trying to become more schizotypal. They know where all the action is.
(I’m adding a mental +1 to my long-standing almost-certainly-way-oversimplified-but-maybe-not-quite idea that there’s a special schizotypal / dissociative / meta / gods-as-directly-experienced-agents / sacredness / eldritch cluster of people, clearly distinct from the insight porn nerd. When God Talks Back is pretty much what you get when an insight nerd tries their best to understand the schizotypal nerd.
I like the idea that what separates a post-rationalist from a rationalist is whether they get Jesus or not, but that’s not quite strong enough. Even some rationalists get trolling without getting sacredness. I could postulate some better criteria, but those are likely to be only meaningful to people in the schizotypal cluster, and then I realized that this is the feature that separates them. It’s no coincidence that Malkavians form a hivemind, and that post-rationalists care about acausal interactions and weird ontologies, and that the Catholic Church sees itself as part of the Timeless Church, coordinating through the spiritual realm and not just the material one.
So instead I propose, once you have identified the general nerdiness, ask how they feel about ambiguity. If they answer “ugh, I hate it, I want clarity and resolved conflicts!”, they are an insight porn nerd (and likely an NPC). But if they answer, “gimme more, muddle my signals, multiply the mysterion and add more layers, syncretize the unsyncretizable and other the consubstantial”, you’re dealing with a schizotypal nerd (and likely a PC or alt of a PC).)
Fine, people. Did some calculations, noticed that I need to reset my sleep cycle almost on a weekly basis by now, checked the legal situation3, checked drug interactions4, gave up. Bought some modafinil.
(Yeah, no new drugs, I know, but on the other hand, the less I sleep, the less I dream, and so the less I’m in danger of ending the world. I think that’s a net benefit. You’re welcome.)
I expect it to arrive in a few weeks, and to use it at most 1-2 times a week, mostly to reset my sleep. Also, I guess that ends my nootropic experimentation because there’s nothing interesting left. (Except maybe testosteron. I remember it being hard to dose and/or being expensive, but maybe I’ll look into it again soon-ish.)
I officially hate time zones and all time zone implementations in all programming languages.
I thought Ruby was stupid for having multiple incompatible classes, inconsistent time zone implementations unless you pull in Rails libraries, and no way to change a Time object’s time zone. Then I had to implement the same thing in Python and it’s even more retarded. datetime.now() doesn’t set a time zone. strftime is platform-dependent, so on Windows you don’t have “%s”. That’s right: you have to generate Unix timestamps by hand. I have no words.
Time libraries have been written specifically to torment me. I have no other explanation.
muflax out.
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That moment when you realize you maintain several projects people actually use and you have to write announcements now. Feels so weird.↩
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Ok, there’s Amélie and the Asterix movies, but I’ve watched those way too much. I meant movies I haven’t been watching regularly since I was a child.↩
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It’s reasonably legal, provided you get it shipped from within the EU to bypass customs.↩
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It may fuck with every hallucinogen / dissociative I’m on, but everything does, so that’s not a surprise. I’ll just schedule around it, like I always do.↩
It would be nice if Aquinas were made, ahem, more accessible.
The Tibetans actually bred for this. I realized that a couple years ago, when reflecting on the fact that tertons run in families. A "terton" is someone who talks to gods and writes down their stuff as religious revelations, and people take them seriously. If you read about these people, it's obvious that they would be diagnosed with dissociative disorder in the West. So I looked up the heritability of dissociative disorder, and it's way high.
The really great thing about being a terton is that everyone knows that if you have sex with one you'll have good luck for the rest of your life. So even your run-of-the-mill low-grade terton would typically have sex with hundreds of women. (I dunno about gay/bi tertons. Probably the same.)
This has been going on for about a thousand years. Besides some genetic clusters of people who combine high IQ with high dissociation (the terton families), you've got dissociation genes significantly amplified throughout the population.
Tibetans will believe anything, pretty much. Analytical thinking, not so much.
*Damn* I'm in the wrong business. Learning Tibetan nao!
More seriously, I think Todd Murphy (who's the good kind of crackpot) said that those with broken/hyper-active temporal lobes tend to be either hypersexual or asexual, with most of them on the asexual side.
I'm not sure if that separates the cluster into two different flavors (maybe depending on which lobe is more dominant?), or if there are other, more substantial differences, and there are a tantric and ascetic sub-cluster.
Because I (and most of my influences) are on the Kant / Tesla side of sexuality, the idea of breeding more schizotypals didn't even occur to me. I'm already surprised enough we haven't died out yet!
I'm also reading Feser's Aquinas right now. Happy to discuss it with you and interested in your thoughts on it.
(although slightly worried - I got into Feser because I wanted to figure out where you and your ilk were coming from, and assumed you already knew this stuff. If you haven't read Feser (and I assume you haven't read Aquinas directly and understood him, because I've tried that and it doesn't really seem possible) where *have* you been getting your Catholic metaphysics trip from?
Right, I haven't read Aquinas yet, or basically any important Catholic authors past the 5th century or so.
I *haven't* been making arguments specifically for Catholic metaphysics, that's Will. I've stayed away from several of your discussions of Catholicism explicitly because I *don't* understand them well enough to be useful. (I think I sometimes understand the actual position, but I'm not sure if that's what *Catholics* believe, or if they have the same reasons as I do.) In particular, I never endorsed or even talked about Aristotelianism, except on a meta (historical) level.
I've been impressed by Catholic positions on theology with regards to Jesus and the Church, which I take from early authors (like Polycarp or Tertullian) and the Catechism. I also think their historical track record is excellent, which suggests awesomeness of belief.
Their positions on Jesus (and implicitly the Holy Spirit), saints (and the Timeless Church), and angels/demons suggest a specific framework in thinking about transhuman intelligences influencing humans (on a historical and individual level), which I think is promising and potentially correct. I don't know the actual Catholic framework, but as much of their conclusions agree with certain of my intuitions from computation theory / decision theory / algorithmic information theory, I expect their metaphysics to be in some ways isomorphic.
There are some additional things I could say about specific beliefs, particularly metaethics and God, which I'll mention in the next log(s).
Leibniz' "Discourse on Metaphysics" is dense with compellingness. "The Monadology" is _too_ short, IMO.
If you want to get into decision theory at some point I can send you an invite to the decision theory mailing list.
FWIW, in my experience, it's a bad idea to take modafinil and go to sleep right after. Fucked me up for a few days.
I haven't read much Aquinas—maybe two hundred pages of the Summa. I _have_ read a lot of Catholic Encyclopedia articles, from newadvent.org. I don't think Catholic metaphysics are especially awesome, just fleshed out. (And don't forget e.g. Molinism—Catholic metaphysics are big enough that if your intuitions diverge from orthodox Thomist doctrine, there are explicitly recognized alternatives that are themselves fleshed out in great detail. Longstanding intellectual traditions FTW!) I actually prefer Leibniz' metaphysic, which was Leibniz' attempt to take into account intuitions from many traditions—including Scholasticism and Chinese philosophy—and go meta on their origins, to get them closer to something that could be programmed into a computer. But Catholic metaphysics provide a good Schelling point, and they're better than the kind of really vague implicit self-contradictory metaphysics that are the norm among otherwise promising thinkers these days.
FWIW KarmaKaiser seems to me to be the most competent local metaphysicist, but I'm not sure. He's who I'd go to with specific questions.
KarmaKaiser here.
Yvain, I read Aquinas by Feser as well as TLS and now I'm going through the Further Reading regarding of both (in the middle of Real Essientialism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science right now and I've read over some of Whitehead's Gifford lectures that Feser loves to cite). I'm largely in agreement with Feser's critique of the Mechanistic View of matter and his assertion that computational realism implies an Aristotelian metaphysics which at the very least implies an Aristotlian prime mover. Consider me among the post-rational theists with a Catholic fetish, Hi! I'd at least take his criticisms of modern philosophical metaphysics seriously, dude brings up some good points.
Will Newsome, I know of a few people who read Leibniz as a Hylomorphist, notably Justin EH Smith in Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. I've so far interpreted your position as Monistic and I'm just burned out on Monism for now whether idealistic or naturalistic. How much Leibniz do you know and is it possible to you that he intended to be read as a hylomorphist? I'm currently exploring the possibly that Leibniz's theory of forms can be married to Aquinas' theory of essences but still keep material reality sense *so far* hylomorphism allows for all of human common sense as well as it's mystical elements. I'm still excited to see what you come up with though and I'm more than willing to jump ship if I hear a good case for it. (Need to understand Mitchell Porter's Phenomenology position better too)
Also also: I can haz decision theory mailing list invite plz?
Muflax: What eastern philosophy have you been reading that you'd recommend (even if it's just on meditation)? I've been in a scholastic mode for the past few months and when I'm done with David Wong's "This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It" and the Metaphysics books I'm in right now I'd like to check out Eastern Philosophy beyond my limited survey via Great Courses.
"It is, in sum not so much that Leibniz shifts
from Aristotlian hylomorphism to idealistic monadology, but rather from a
"one body, one form" model to a model according to which bodies are
conceived as essientally consistenting of infinite suborinate forms. " - Justin E.H. Smith "Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life"
Will: Any suggestions on an explanation of Leibniz that is as clear and as sympathetic as Feser's explanation of Aquinas? I'm pretty sure Leibniz himself doesn't count.
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I'm a big fan of Wang Yangming (Instructions for Practical Living). He offers the best construction of Confucianism, I think, and lies down a framework for virtue, meta-policy and purification. It's not so much theoretical philosophy (like Aquinas) as practical philosophy, though.
The Visuddhimagga (source) is amazing, but maybe too dense to just jump right in. Mahasi's notes and of course MCTB are good introductions. I'm not sure how much use the Visuddhimagga is if you're not into (Theravada-style) meditation, although it's a good overview of the Theravada worldview, stripped of all niceness and ritual.
Other Theravada sutras are cool, but I don't have a list. Mahasi / MCTB cite all the useful ones though.
I love the Gateless Gate and the Tao Te Ching, for obvious reasons, but they're more like ancient but really clever tweets.
I also remember liking the Bhagavad Gita, although it's been a while since I read it.
I like Divine Machines, but as has been indicated earlier, I suspect Will and I read Leibniz differently, I'll look around for a more Traditional Idealist reading of Leibniz to recommend. In the meantime specifically look into Tegmark's multiverse theory (particualrly it's mathematical monism) and "Digital Physics" a movement that is *like* Leibniz and talks of the debt they owe to him, but they don't seem to get that Leibniz's cosmological arguement for a necessary being is baked into his metaphysics near as I can tell and I don't seem to see a wider recognition of this fact.