I can’t believe I never realized “come on and slam and welcome to the jam” is in iambic pentameter
also please remember that the flip side to this is that you can recite any other line of iambic pentameter as if it were the lyrics to the space jam theme
HOLD UP because basically what this means is you can read Chaucer’s Canterbury Talesto the space jam tune what a time to be a l i v e
…Except I’m a godless extrovert with too many friends, and even I can’t date a hundred people.
wait does this mean once I become poly I have to transition
damn you trans-philic SJ and your brilliant marketing tactics
it true tho
@sinesalvatorem once said that one should not be surprised that wanting to kiss girls correlates with other good decisions, and I say that transitioning would also be expected to correlate with other good decisions (at least it correlates with being a diaspora-type rationalist and with wanting to kiss girls, see the pattern?) and thus nobody should be surprised if trans lesbians, with our exceedingly high prior for making Objectively Good Decisions, would make the decision of dating all the friends or as close as possible or convenient
everything fits as beautifully together as a theory ever could, and empirical observation that trans lesbians and trans-lesbian-adjacents tend to be awesome people further supports it!
this blog is first and foremost a shitpost curation station, BUT if I had to pretend it had some sort of greater mission I think increasing intellectual exchange between rationalists and leftists would be up there
if you are a rationalist, has this blog corrupted you at all with leftism? if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
if you are a leftist, has this blog corrupted you at all with rationalism?
if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
(where leftism/t arbitrarily and somewhat sloppily means “discourse community descended from marx’s writings” and rationalism/t means “discourse community descended from yudkowsky’s writings” and corruption means “getting more positively disposed to the idea that the associated people (at least here, On Tumblr) and ideas are worth engaging with,” but if you have a more interesting answer for different values of these go ahead - these definitions are sloppy and I really just mean “no, not bernie sanders” and “no, not descartes and spinoza” and “no, not selling all your possessions and joining the other cult”)
((credit for inspiring this come from @sinesalvatorem, who reminds me that i haven’t done that “reducing inferential distance from rationalism to communism” thing I said I would do, and also inadvertently that it would be a good idea to get a lay of what the inferential distances (in either direction) actually are))
Okay, so as someone who not only knows but cares about the Marx/Bakunin distinction (and thus felt really compelled to pick the nits of “descended from Marx’s writings” because as far as taking sides on the topic of two pre-all-the-empiricism-of-the-last-150-years dudes makes sense I’m on side Bakunin; for example when marxists.org tries to argue that Marx was right their arguments simply make Bakunin appear as the more sympathetic one even though they have been able to pick and choose them with the obvious itent of being favorable to Marx) I’m pretty much leftiness georg already by those standards, but then there’s the other distinction that is more political than cultural and which I am confused by.
The “communism as a vague description of the goal of post-scarcity and the end of poverty and material lack and rentseeker bullshit forcing people to toil for the benefit of powerful non-value-creator parasites; 3d-printers for everyone; beeline for future society: eudaimonic” thing makes sense; C4SS and David Friedman alike make sense (and I think the idea of “substantial basic income + actually laissez-faire” is effectively more socialist in the meaning of “alleviates the plight of the working class” than the entire state of Sweden), and “get maximum cash, invest in 3d-printers, share them, prevent the state from taking them away” is an actionable strategy, but what is the actionable strategy of “communism as politics, switch to economy: planned”, and what are its contents actually?
All I’ve managed to pick up from elsewhere is roughly “we have a lot of valid complaints about how a lot of things are really sucky for non-rich people but no proposed solution other than some kind of nebulous ~global revolution~ that is unlikely to ever actually happen and any attempts to do anything else than carry on the decades-old tradition of discussing the imminent revolution is liberal reformist bullshit, and we will control the economy democratically and it will ~automagically~ make it work better than markets despite not containing any actual replacement for the very important mechanisms markets have, and we will not expropriate your toothbrush even though we totally could expropriate your toothbrush and you’re supposed to trust us because this time subjecting everything to democracy would not work as disastrously as your previous experiences with democracy and de facto mob rule have led you to expect because this time democracy will ~automagically~ not vote on your body even though it totally could vote on your body and you would be a class enemy if you object” (this may sound a bit uncharitable but my interactions with statist marxists haven’t exactly been that fruitful because the inferential distance is too large)
So basically I’d like to know what steel marxism is _actually_ about, and especially wtf is up with the labor theory of value and democratic economy/economic democracy.
“I didn’t start publishing Pennsylvania’s Orange Street News so that people would think I’m cute. I want to get the truth to people, even if it makes grownups mad,” says 9-year-old Hilde Kate Lysiak, publisher of and reporter for the Orange Street News.
After reporting on a suspected homicide in Selinsgrove, Pa., Hilde was harassed by “disgusted” adults commenting on her site, saying her time would be better spent at tea parties and playing with dolls.
this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student.
I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.
thanks!
- [name]
k
-professor
I have a stock format and structure I use.
Dear Person I am Writing To:
This is an optional sentence introducing who I am and work for, included if the addressee has never corresponded with me before. The second optional sentence reminds the person where we met, if relevant. This sentence states the purpose of the email.
This optional paragraph describes in more detail what’s needed. This sentence discusses relevant information like how soon an answer is needed, what kind of an answer is needed, and any information that the other person might find useful. If there’s a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate this paragraph into two or three paragraphs to avoid having a Wall of Text.
If a description paragraph was used, close with a restatement of the initial request, in case the addressee ignored the opening paragraph.
This sentence is just a platitude (usually thanking them for their time) because people think I’m standoffish, unreasonably demanding, or cold if it’s not included.
Closing salutation,
Signature.
People always ask me how I can fire off work emails so quickly. Nobody has figured out yet that it’s the same email with the details changed as needed.
Do you know that feeling in an RPG when your character is all twinked-out and you’re just utterly destroying all the low-level content with your optimized build and great gear?
Because that’s what doing Project Euler with Julia feels like.
It’s amazing. The language knows what I want to do, it already has a tool to do it efficiently and easily and move on to the next problem, and pretty much everything in the syntax is easy to understand and bugs and mistakes are never counter-intuitive. Figuring out that the variable i needs to be typed to i::Int64 to deal with big numbers on my 32-bit ARM is exactly as obvious and quick to backtrack as it should be and makes perfect sense once noticed.
5/5 highly recommended.
omfg lol number 10 (sum of all primes under 2 million)
In a certain way I think (steel) postmodernism is the natural match for the archetypical Formidable X-rationalist neo-renaissance-person who appreciates the “hard” and “soft” arts alike.
There’s the thing where one hones their craft for their entire life and learns to build very intricate and detailed and high-quality worksmanship.
Then there’s the thing where one designs a 3d-printer that can do the same, and way more, as long as the blueprints are supplied. Or uses a high-level programming language, with the grunt work abstracted away, to write in a few lines the kinds of code that require weeks of work in a less sophisticated language.
Similarly there’s the thing where one spends countless hours learning the classics, history, Latin, cultivating the tastes and refinement, etc.
And then there’s the thing where one learns to question and evaluate the very base assumptions that underlie such things.
These things seem to very comfortably sort themselves into two pairs of somewhat fundamental similarity.
And one of the pairs fits together with dutifully thinking about the lofty ideas of important philosophers, and the other with recognizing that many of the things the philosophers so dutifully ponder are actually kind of embarrassing category errors, or results of biases that we’ve discovered with empirical research in the last few decades, or…
Do you know that feeling in an RPG when your character is all twinked-out and you’re just utterly destroying all the low-level content with your optimized build and great gear?
Because that’s what doing Project Euler with Julia feels like.
It’s amazing. The language knows what I want to do, it already has a tool to do it efficiently and easily and move on to the next problem, and pretty much everything in the syntax is easy to understand and bugs and mistakes are never counter-intuitive. Figuring out that the variable i needs to be typed to i::Int64 to deal with big numbers on my 32-bit ARM is exactly as obvious and quick to backtrack as it should be and makes perfect sense once noticed.
Steel Feminism as you described some months back seems amazing, but I would not exactly call it typical.
That’s why I’m working on making it typical. It’s only a matter of taking over the world, after all, and since I took over a somewhat impressive fraction of it while still being a total NEET, the prospects are quite promising now that I’ve stopped being a total NEET.
