i would recommend this one. it is pretty woke but in like a cool 70s marxist anthropologist sort of way. he brags about how quickly he can estimate the caloric yield of an ox

i hate it when people are "directionally correct." one of the most damaging things you can do is offer up a bad, overstated argument for a good idea. you negatively polarize everyone around you and inoculate them against the good version of the argument

maybe we should all start our tweets like drug disclosure: 🍺🍺🍺🍃🍃❄️💎🚬🚬🚬

some magic systems have a power fantasy that's something like "what if the engineer had to be physically present for the machine to work?" like if you needed a software developer to be in the room every time you wanted to use a computer

one of my takes is that as the democratic party has become the de facto party of the educated class, a lot of obsession with structural advantage is sublimated class anxiety. educated people want it to be true that education in itself is the thing that matters because they have a lot of control over that.

imagine being an old guy who's been cranking out solid church latin his whole life and then these young humanist upstarts start talking about cicero and copying his weird archaic style

okay i have a definition of consciousness i would define consciousness as the ur-realization: "i exist." the "i" here is less important than the "exist" part though. really consciousness is just the realization that anything exists at all. what exactly counts as "i" is stretchy. this is the ur-realization because it necessarily precedes any other realization. you can't know about anything in particular without first knowing that something exists and you can interact with it somehow. unfortunately, "know" and "realize" are slippery concepts. especially for something so abstract as knowing of one's own existence. so it's tough to say who has the thing and who doesn't. probably not rocks. probably other humans. maybe cats. i think this squarely roots us though for the hard problem of consciousness. it bottoms out in the question: "why is there anything at all?" which to me seems unknowable. unfortunately this isn't helpful at all for understanding AI but that's how it goes

i think a tension inside liberalism is whether we're doing multicultural liberalism or monocultural liberalism. if we don't let parents control media exposure, we're going to end up with monocultural liberalism by default

thesis: if magic exists in a fantasy world, it makes sense that people would figure out how it works antithesis: magic should remain mysterious and mystical in order to feel properly magical synthesis: common uses of magic should feel mundane and ordinary, but the underlying mechanism can still be mysterious and mystical. extraordinary appearances of magic should feel foreshadowed by ordinary appearances of magic

people like to talk shit about sanderson but he's very good at writing religion

my canon is: all three prequels star wars (1977) - calling it ANH is anachronistic. NOT ESB - too woke RotJ - flawed but a worthy conclusion to the OT Andor - great show NOT The Force Awakens - derivative The Last Jedi - Rian Johnson is a master NOT Rise of Skywalker - i'm a trevorrow script legitimist the one EU novel my mom bought me for my birthday when i was 13 that i don't remember the name of but it was pretty good absolutely nothing else

i had an idea i never followed up on for a cryptocurrency called equalitybux. the way it would work is that everyone starts with 365 equalitybux. you accumulate 1 per day. there would probably be some cap on how many you could have at once. transferring it would burn it, but in a provable way. the person on the other end could confirm you paid but they wouldn't actually get the money. the idea would be to use it for when we want to ration access to stuff but are squicked out doing it based on how much you can pay. there could be leaderboards for equalitybux collected as a sort of secondary prestige competition

crack theory time. a key feature of the roman empire (but not the republic) was the militarization of the frontier. the way this worked is that rome taxed the whole empire to pay people to go hang out at the frontier with nothing to do most of the time. that was, in practice, a gigantic stimulus package for the rhine and danube frontiers. it promoted economic development on both sides. eventually, the whole system inverted. the roman tax system collapsed as the frontier zone underwent a phase shift and took charge of things, becoming a new political center.

the final mogging of rome by the visigoths

the way i think of US politics is you have a two axis system where one axis is cultural alignment (educated blue america vs uneducated red america), and then a secondary dispositional axis for revisionist vs status quo. moderates are dispositionally oriented towards protecting the status quo and making incremental changes, while activists on both sides are dispositionally oriented towards making big changes. horseshoe theory emerges organically because similar dispositions cause left and right to converge on similar strategies, even though their goals are different.

my view is that personhood is socially constructed. personhood is a club and you join the club by invitation. for this reason i think it's reasonable for parents to think of embryo selection as choosing the traits their baby will have. the person under discussion is an opening in the human relationship graph that hasn't been filled yet, not a specific genetic sequence.

if you zoom all the way out i do think part of what's happening is a sort of horseshoe collusion where the right and left consistently undermine the moderates on their side in order to juice their own chances of winning primaries. it wouldn't work if just one side did it, but both sides doing it is stable so long as they remain semi-coordinated. that doesn't mean like conspiracies in smoke-filled rooms though, it's the type of collusion you can do at a distance.

in fairness platner is what salty waffle house guys are like. there's just a reason we don't usually have those guys run for office

people are dunking on this and i haven't read any of the books or anything but isn't it pretty obvious this is doing a faerie dream logic sort of vibe? there are like hard lines between regions named after seasons and it calls them all "courts."