mathionalist

[mathionalist]

- https://www.xkcd.com/610/ The thing this comic is criticizing gets made fun of a lot, but… I still feel like it’s relatable to a degree. I don’t think that “the masses” are dumb necessarily, or that they’re less important, or have less to contribute to society or whatever. But at the same time, I know that I (and other people like me) are waaaaaayyyy more ruminative than the average person, which I don’t think that anyone would really dispute. Many of them would probably even say that the amount of rumination I do is maladaptive, and in many cases they’d be right.

And, like, that still means that it’s really hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be any other way. Rumination, overanalysis, and endless levels of meta are such a core part of my existence that imagining not having them feels like it would be only a fraction of a person. Which, obviously, isn’t true and is a really unfair judgment in many ways, but I still feel a profound disconnect from the average person. ”””Normies””” don’t do any specific thing or set of things that I don’t, and there’s no one specific thing or set of things that I do that they don’t, so there’s no experience or set of experiences that I feel like either of us could seek out to try to understand each other.

So I feel like it’s just always gonna be like this and I wish I had a way of talking about it that didn’t make me sound like a dick.

[mathionalist]

Endorsed

is it possible to be jewish but alone? i was abused by my hebrew school and so i can't go to synagogue anymore ever without feeling awful but i want to stay connected to my religion i just can't un-associate judaica with the violence that i survived and all the religious trauma resources out there seem aimed at christians and idk i feel like i'd be giving up my heritage if i just don't observe but i can't be involved in community the way jews are supposed to

I’m so sorry that happened. I hope you’re doing okay. You can totally be observant in a way that’s meaningful to you and lets you stay connected to your heritage without setting foot in a synagogue. 

Some things you could do:

- light candles for Shabbat. You can Google the candlelighting time. Say the blessing, if you want to. 

- listen to recordings of songs or psalms you particularly like. Or socialist klezmer bands, that’s also totally an important part of our Jewish heritage.

- https://www.sefaria.org is a great source of Jewish texts and it’s super visually pretty, which makes it fun to read for a while at a time. 

- keep Shabbat in a way that is sustainable and healthy for you; for example, maybe it’s a good idea to keep it Friday nights but not Saturdays, or to avoid spending money or doing chores but not to avoid going on the internet. Shabbat is supposed to be joyous. 

- talk to G-d on your own, about whatever comes to mind, without doing any kind of structured prayer. 

- read the weekly parsha and have an opinion about something in it, even if your opinion is ‘well that’s terrible and I’m glad the world is a nicer place today’. 

- find a snack you have that’s kosher (most packaged food is; you can look for the little icon). Look up the blessing for that snack. Say a blessing over that snack in particular whenever you eat it, and literally no other foods. 

- put up a mezuzah. Often, you can email the nearest Chabad and ask them for help with this and they’ll help you.

If these things are helpful, most of them can be expanded into more observance, but it’s really important to start with something that you actually like and actively feel is making your life better.

[mathionalist]

[mathionalist]

"From 1972 to 1984, Best Products collaborated with the design firm SITE to transform many of its stores into stunning and bizarre works of art."

https://t.co/g8MMf0O4zX

#architecture

[mathionalist]

“you think religion is based on bad philosophy, when it’s actually based on really complicated bad theology, you fucking bassoon, you walnut, you pineapple,”

#I feel attacked for my love of theology

[mathionalist]

I’ve seen a lot of men post with it and no one has gotten any pushback that I’ve seen. I’ve also seen women post about sexual harassment and assault at the hands of women, and both women and men admitting to their own mistakes with regard to consent and similar, all with support.

Please don’t jump the cut if you’re not willing to see unfiltered, probably unendorsed emotional reactions to things that I’m likely not qualified to have a real opinion on that aren’t really about me at all

Keep reading

[mathionalist]

Forcefully reminding myself to stop internally screaming “aaaaugh I didn’t know something,” and start saying “I learned something.”

[mathionalist]

I was going to ask you to steelman fascism, but I'll try for something more interesting. Perhaps *because* of this cultural reread of history, perhaps because of other things, the fact is that at this moment (or at least this is how my bubbles make it seem) there are many more good faith communists and communist-sympathetic people caring about people and improved general welfare and thinking through potential problems and etc, whereas fascists are generally terrible people. Now, I'm sure that's in large part because if you make fascist=unending evil, then only people interested in flirting with evil will align themselves that way (though I'd also argue that fascism selects for people interested in holding power and exerting dominance, which I'm sure is useful in getting some things fine but is also selecting for terrifying-ness), but that's the reality to deal with now.

So, what do you mean by "too hard on"? Too hard on the believers, on the " fairness " axis? Or niceness aspect? Too hard on the ideas, because by labeling a whole category of thought evil we're possibly losing out on valuable approaches?

American cultural forces have done an amazing job simultaneously demonizing fascists* and sanitizing communists**. Almost everyone decent, even among those who will be the first to point out that communism killed far more people than Nazis and that left vs right is a pernicious false dichotomy, will concede that the underlying motivation leading to communism is decent or at least understandable, even if the decision to force it is not, while the underlying motivation leading to fascism is fundamentally twisted. Hell, I’m writing this post and even I alieve that.

The truth is, genuine human values paired with normal human vices and cultural backgrounds primed to amplify the latter and distort the former underlie fascism, just as they do communism (both, of course, glorifying the state). I’m not going to claim they are exactly equal, because there are too many asymmetric random forces affecting the history of these movements to suggest they in average end up in the same place, but if you see the forces driving a fascist with nothing but contempt but are able to summon up sympathy for a communist, you are being too hard on the former and/or too soft on the latter.

Of course, ultimately this can only be fixed with a moral culture capable of truly denouncing the moral underpinnings of both “sides”, and until then we’re pretty much stuck with oscillating back and forth.

* Here, fascism should be thought of as an umbrella over “right wing” authoritarianism, including especially white supremacy. This may not be the best term. ** Ditto, for communism and “left wing” authoritarianism.

[mathionalist]

Think of a social issue you were debating recently. Think of the opinion and argument you were putting forward so vigorously. Can you remember a time when you felt differently? Can you remember why you felt differently? Can you remember the events or thought process that brought you along the path to the understanding you have today?

https://theestablishment.co/you-must-understand-why-you-believe-what-you-believe-fff0bf829cc8

#this is such a nice reframe of the rationalist questions #making it even more about process and evolution

[mathionalist]

one of my favourite linguistic phenomena/in-jokes is spanish potato chips being “ham-flavored, probably”

#amazing

[mathionalist]

This is very good.

Because “diversity” doesn’t mean what it’s usually made to mean.

#diversity #essays

[mathionalist]

A discourse request, mostly directed at @slatestarscratchpad –

Can we not casually equate “fuzzy / empathy-oriented / non-systematic thinking” with “the humanities?” 

“The humanities” is a field of intellectual inquiry.  Practiced properly, it involves rigor and clear logic – not experiment, not quantification (usually), not empirical data (usually), but definable principles and arguments that proceed cogently from those principles.  The people who are good at it are not that different, in ability or in temperament, from the people who are good at science. 

[…you know that philosophy counts, right?  That High Holy Utilitarianism itself is a product of the humanities?]

If you want to point out that we live in a world in which humanities scholars and humanities departments often seem to prefer feelings to reason, well, I can’t really argue with that.  But making a bad-thinking totem out of “the humanities” in the abstract…cedes a lot of ground, unnecessarily, to people who don’t deserve it.  And insults a lot of people who  do good work.

#I like this game

[mathionalist]

When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.

Tribes are, basically, big families.  You know how families work, probably.  You were probably raised in one.

And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families.  It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction.  It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships.  It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever. 

Nonetheless.  Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back. 

Because there are costs, and they are crushing.  Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries.  The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.”  Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone.  Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values.  Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics. 

Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case.  But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling. 

Squaring this circle is super hard.  It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects.  Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet.  But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism. 

#this is an excellent point

[mathionalist]

It's because women do well in groups.

why do you think the male-female things/people interest dichotomy doesn't extend to mathematics?

I don’t know and find it really confusing.

The best I can do is say that for some reason, computers count as literal things, but since math is abstract it doesn’t? I realize that totally torpedoes my attempt to link it to systematizing/empathizing, though.

#math jokes are best jokes #sorry

[mathionalist]

#I like this a lot

[mathionalist]

Follow up (spoilers for season 13, episode 24):

Minnick gets fired because she couldn’t see the time when protocol needed to be overwritten to do the right thing. Protocol was not to tell the police about a resident who was missing, so that resident wasn’t found in an emergency for a long time, and that resident was saving a child, so the argument is that the resident did the right thing and without her the child wouldn’t have been saved. 

But the resident and child was only in danger in the first place because the resident broke a different protocol earlier! Of course there’s time to break protocol, but everyone thinks this is the one time when you should break protocol. There’s even a fallacy which I can’t find a link for right now, but when there’s a predictive model which says that someone will be at the movies, but you know that person has a broken leg, you have good reason to override the model, but people *always* think there’s a broken leg, and doctors *with* diagnostic programs do worse than just the diagnostic program (I can’t find a link or cite for this, but I’m >85% sure there’s a paper about this).

When we killed Osama bin Ladin, people got polio, because no one trusted vaccinators anymore. Maybe that tradeoff is worth it, but it is a tradeoff. Norms and protocols matter, both when they’re good and even sometimes when they’re not because predictability and structure help us make decisions under uncertain conditions.

Come ON, Shonda Rhimes.

Teaching and Grey’s Anatomy

In Season 13, the hospital brings in someone with a different teaching philosophy to adapt the teaching program. Experts in and outside the hospital agree that her approach is good, and in fact better than what they currently have.

So of course the attendings hate it. The residents love it and feel like they’re learning a lot.

I identify with this. I don’t enjoy feeling like I’ve been doing something wrong all along. I am not (yet) the kind of person who always gets excited about the prospect of doing even better now that I know what I can do next time. And I’m a teacher. Your teaching style doesn’t feel like an impersonal external widget you’ve created; it feels like you. Criticisms of it sting deep. On top of that, feeling like you’ve failed your students really sucks.

But that can’t be how it is. And (though I don’t have any examples handy) I think it is how it is. I think often teachers and anyone who’s been through the education system (everyone) get really defensive when we get new data or models for how to teach. We get defensive about teacher training and tenure and MOOCs. Kudos to those who don’t. 

Teachers aren’t saints, and teaching isn’t sacrosanct. It is a craft and a process, and when there’s something better out there, we have to use it. Even if it’s hard. Even if that better idea came from economists instead of educators. Teachers are not necessarily experts on teaching, even if we’ve been doing it a long time. Data incorporates more than we can see in a lifetime. 

Perhaps more than in other professions, we have a responsibility to not let our personal feelings stop us from improving. We’re in the learning business, after all.

#greys anatomy #rationality

[mathionalist]

I *still* want the power to see the page and link I opened a long-abandoned, newly-read tab from

#zeroth world problems #civilizational inadequacy