future future future
One of my friends just sent me a voice note making a couple of points:
my 17 “Essay” posts
empty brain
No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
treasure island
There's a good version on Standard Ebooks. Greg Wagland's rendition is also great.👂
For thirty years, I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—amen, so be it.
why i'm vegan
A friend just asked me this. Might as well write it down.
I stopped eating meat when I was 17 because my girlfriend at the time was vegetarian, and I knew that it was one of the remaining ways I could significantly lower my carbon footprint.
pretentiousness
this isn't merriam-webster, but i reckon it's when you're motivated by something other than what you should be.
say you come out of the cinema with your friends and you start raving about how many of the shots were inspired by some french new wave guy.
maybe you're authentically stoked about the cinematography (the pretense), but maybe you mostly just want to sound smart about movies because of how it affects your status in the group.
automation
More Perfect Union released a video on automated truck drivers (which are now on the roads in Texas.)
They argue:
- The "driver shortage" framing is industry spin on the fact that employers are deliberately underpaying workers to increase churn and keep the average pay grade low.
- Automation will lead to further degradation of the trucking career that has allowed many men to earn a decent wage and quality of life. The consequences of this will be dire.
Is automation necessarily anti-labour? Is it possible to automate jobs while protecting the people who do them?
what happens to us
When people say "the problem is education" they tend to mean "I want everyone to have the same beliefs as me, but persuading adults is too hard."
I think it's naive to assume that agreeing on a national curriculum is any easier, but assuming that you could, it's even more naive to assume that students would internalize the lessons you want them to.
For example: in high school, I didn't understand our English curriculum's emphasis on literary analysis essays. They seemed mysteriously tautological: fill in the essay template to demonstrate to the person marking you that you can fill in an essay template.😱
downbeat illusion
Laura C by Big Supermarket is a song about Tomb Raider. I love it.
Part of the reason why, is that I cannot reliably hear the downbeat in the right place. There is a clear "right" way to hear it that my mind can snap into if I try, but most of the time I hear it spasmodic style.
memory
In 2019, a large chandelier was installed underneath Granville Street Bridge, to aesthetically enhance the area. It was controversial at the time - a symbol of what's wrong with luxury condo development.1
I used to work near Granville Island, so when I visited Vancouver in early 2025, I wanted to walk around my old stomping grounds and pay the chandelier a visit.
I walked to where I remembered it being installed, and discovered it had been removed, presumably for maintenance reasons. Disappointed, I went home and lamented to my sister.
let me level with ya
Tul, the fearsome barbarian, pursues the duke down one of the castle’s corridors. Elsie, his gnomish wizard companion trails behind, holding her velvet hat in place with one hand and a crumpled scrollbook with the other. Slam! The duke locks the door behind him, and his footsteps disappear up the tower. Roaring, Tul crashes his shoulder into the door, but he rolled a 2, so the door doesn’t budge. When Elsie catches up, she rolls a 20, and the door bursts open. The duke can’t have gotten far!
simulation fibrosis
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.
on "spiritual damage"
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.
tradcath surprise
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.
(modern) five-colour pirates
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.
sounding smart
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?
food
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.
the blank page the empty chairs
What is a crystalisation of the mind?
The gaseous, evanescent process that is thinking, is entirely internal. I don't have to worry about the incoherence of my thoughts if I don't have to communicate them with anyone. But the moment I write, I create the first molecular bond: a dynamic of relations. Me and you.