I was listening to a podcast the other night where one of the hosts complimented Tim Urban on his knack for defining conceptual structures that help clarify a confused subject. Unfortunately, the given example was Tim adding Up-Down to the Left-Right political spectrum, where "up" is being educated and rational, and "down" is being primitive and emotional.
As far as poltical compass memes go... pretty bad.1
Still. Love a good model.
in arguments, i sometimes say “this is bad because it damages our souls.”
i think i got it from david graeber.
but what does it actually mean?
it's probably easier to understand what it does, which is, i think, create a sort of rhetorically unassailable position. what are you going to say? nuh-uh! it doesn't damage our souls! are we both just going to assume we know exactly what the other person means by that? no.
i searched "nominalism" on youtube, hankering to listen to someone discuss it as i ate sultana bran.
i clicked on the first video and a man sitting in front of a shelf of leather bound books started talking to me.
i thought he seemed a bit like Philosophize This! in his manner, except his leading example was a joke about how it's impossible to answer simple questions like "what is a woman" without having a biology degree these days.
youtube i love you, but you're bringing me down
in a bastardized interpretation of fitness landscapes, i've recently been thinking about how every decision i make is a step in some direction in an infinite mountain range. in this space, my altitude isn't environmental fitness. it's something more like "personal value" or "amount self-actualized" where you can imagine standing at the peak of a hill in this endless mountain range as being highly satisfied with myself, highly engaged in my life.
the other day i had some fun with poetic justice's less serious cousin
an evil man from new york
once stole a shipment of chalk
he was eventually busted
one could say done and dusted
when the cops caught him on the sidewalk
or
a fraudulent author from wales
faked sales with no paper trail
she was eventually booked
when the law had a look
Say I have a CSV with two columns:
country, users China, 113 Nicaragua, 29 Jordan, 89
and I want to aggregate these by continent. What's an easy way to do that?
Well I found this country-by-continent dataset by samayo:
[
{
"Country": "Afghanistan",
"Continent": "Asia"
},
{
"Country": "Albania",
"Continent": "Europe"
}
So I have everything I need except for a workflow. Let's evaluate some options.
I attached the two files and submitted the following prompt to ChatGPT 4o:
yu-gi-oh was so smart. transformers had already proven you could forcibly extract money from parents by pretending your advertisements for children's toys comprised a television show, but hasbro still had to pay for injection moulding. what if they just printed the money instead?
in the yu-gi-oh tv show1, the main thing that all the characters do is play the card game yu-gi-oh2. all disagreements are resolved via dueling3, and even though this is shown to favour the rich, at the end of most episodes the child protagonists justly win and you feel an urge to go to the toy store and purchase yu-gi-oh cards.
a classic thing that happens is someone says "i think the reason is blah" and then another person says "i think it's something else" and then a third person says "it's a bit of both" or "it's somewhere in between" or something like that.
it's such a reliable thing to be able to say and it takes so little effort, yet you can sound quite wise saying it. oh shit! it's both things?
i realised recently that there are at least two ways in which we ask the question "is x a y?"
it was when i asked "is Terminator a monster?" which is the sort of question i like to ask, to get into all the necessary-but-not-sufficients of dumb shit conceptual analysis. does a monster need to be biological, or more fundamentally, not understood? are all monsters morally permissible to kill?
there is a tweet that responded to Chess Is Not A Game by Deborah P. Vossen that i can't find. it said something to extent of "What the author fails to consider is that chess is, in fact, a game." because the other way we ask these sorts of questions is the Family Feud way. if you surveyed one hundred people with "Name a monster" - zero of them would say Terminator. they would say Dracula or Zombie or Frankenstein. and so in that sense, Terminator is not a monster. it is important to be considerate of your friends and realise this, when asking these sorts of questions.
Suppose there were aliens who were sort of sentient plants, okay? And they're coming to visit Earth. Earth was in their tour guide- the tour catalog, because Earth, they know, had rainforests and a huge uh- plant biodiversity. And so they just want to see what's going on here. And these are aliens that live off of sunlight and on their ship they just have lamps that they lay in, and that that's where they get their energy.