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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
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14d ago
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
You should certainly make an effort to study philosophy then! It's right up your alley. (The tradition of philosophers tearing down Platonic ideals goes back to at least Plato.)
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14d ago
It does not feel outside the panopticon, it doesn't feel like a place where one can take off their 'mask'.
I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
For this feeling to go away, every layer of the structure will have to be unrelated to something that I consider hostile to myself
But this is just a phantasm that can never be realized, in particular because people are actually much more hostile to themselves than they realize.
Do you forgive yourself for being an imperfect human? Probably not, to be honest. But then, why would you expect anyone else to do it?
All you can really do at the end of the day is pick your poison.
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14d ago
Nah. It's not a format I'm interested in. I like the community dynamic here, and I like the spontaneous back-and-forth arguments that emerge.
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14d ago
this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong
I am pretentious.
I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds
I only ever post with the intention of blowing everyone’s minds.
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14d ago
Be the change you want to see. Share some hot takes.
Talking about the same thing (the CW) for 10+ years gets old eventually.
I enjoyed the discussion we just had about Mormon theology. That was interesting and informative.
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16d ago
...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.
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16d ago
I was looking for examples of specific theological beliefs or other aspects of Mormonism that might render Mormonism incompatible with Christianity as it's traditionally conceived. Looks like Quantumfreakonomics has it covered though.
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16d ago
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
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16d ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
...how come?
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16d ago
Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?
I live in America and I like anime.
This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.
Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)
What other lens would they use at that point?
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16d ago
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
Off the top of my head: attitudes and practices surrounding religion, childbearing (are you encouraged to even have kids at all, or at you an antinatalist?), cohabitation with immediate family and/or extended family, career choice (are you encouraged to stick with the family business, or do you have an individualist culture where "doing your own thing" is an aspiration?), different types of long-term planning (are you a square if you refuse to blow your paycheck right away, or are you an idiot if you do blow it?), respect towards elders and superiors (how unthinkable would it be to challenge your boss's ideas during a meeting?), freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, sexual ethics, etc.
To be clear, there is no "lived experience of a culture" for a tourist on a one week vacation, that's an absurdity. The "lived experience of a culture" can only unfold over a lifetime. A culture is a concrete mode of life, as distinguished from other possible concrete modes of life.
Food is not culture. Foot binding, widow burning, jus primae noctis -- that's culture. To the extent that we increasingly find genuine cultural difference to be unimaginable, this is only a statement about the shrinking horizon of our imagination, and not a statement about the nature of culture.
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16d ago
Why does it always come back to food?
No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.
Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)
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16d ago
I told someone ages ago I was going to write an effortpost on horror and then I never did, but if there are multiple interested parties then that might motivate me to finally get around to it...
Long story short is that the sublime is intrinsically horrific.
Most "contemporary horror films" are pretty bad (for many of the same reasons that formulaic genreslop in general is bad). But there are many works that have horror "elements" (David Lynch films are my go-to example) that are brilliant.
Even the most hardcore fans of mainstream horror movies tend to look down on jumpscares. They're fun every once in a while, but ultimately a jumpscare is just a pure physiological response, like pinching someone on the arm; it's the lowest form of horror, there's nothing conceptually interesting about it.
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16d ago
…bot post? (Sorry to be suspicious!)
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17d ago
I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.
There are plenty of other types of academics (in both STEM and the humanities) who are also doing work that has roughly the same level of impact on you and your life (~zero). Philosophers don't seem to be much different from those guys. Why single philosophy out for such ire?
Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle?
Several (both online and irl).
It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof.
I don't believe I've ever seen anyone actually do this. I can imagine what it would look like, but I've never actually encountered it. The greatest and most common danger is that you run into people who are just kind of dumb and don't have anything interesting to say. But that happens in everything, not just philosophy.
There are a number of papers in the analytic philosophy literature that try to present themselves as having achieved a "mathematical" level of rigor. Maybe this is what you're talking about. But you're incorrect to say that those papers are "unintelligible". Usually it's just a matter of understanding how the key terms are defined; hopefully the author will define terms that they're using in an unusual or idiosyncratic way, and if they don't, it's probably because they assume that you already know the definition of the term based on prior experience with other relevant literature (physicists do not use the word "work" in the way that people do in ordinary conversation, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to define it for you every time they use "work" in the physics-sense).
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17d ago
The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies. The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).
So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.
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19d ago
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19d ago
I share Nietzsche's opinion that the OT makes for better reading overall.
Do you have a favorite Gospel of the New Testament? It has been suggested that the four Gospels correspond to the four Keirsey MBTI temperaments (SP artisans, SJ guardians, NT rationalists, NF idealists) and were written to be persuasive to different audiences:
"The reason there are four Gospels in the Bible has, since antiquity, been argued by Christians to be be because there are four different kinds of people. The Gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as an action-oriented doer, or as we would say, an SP type. The Gospel of Matthew recounts Jesus's heritage and lineage within the Jewish community and shows us why he is the rightful heir to the messianic throne, just as it focuses intensely on the proclamation of laws in the Sermon on the Mount; that's to say, the Gospel of Matthew shows Jesus as an SJ type. Then there is the Gospel of Luke, which recounts the story in a more critical and detached way, emphasizing abstraction and intellectualism, or as we would say, Jesus as an NT type. Finally there is the Gospel of John, which emphasizes the spiritual qualities of Jesus. It is much more ideal-oriented, concerned with identity, and contains more theological deliberations than the other three. This Gospel shows Jesus as an NF type."
Conveniently, you can also draw a parallel here with the four Hippocratic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic).
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20d ago
don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.
I’m usually skeptical of the “porn made me do it” explanations.
I was having AGP fantasies before I had ever even been on the internet. And when I first discovered the porn, there was no “rabbit hole”, there was just an immediate reaction of “damn this shit is lit”.
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21d ago
Only boring people have nothing to hide.
We're all monkeys, cops are the dominant monkeys (in at least a certain restricted sense), and yes, they do in fact have the right to make you eat a certain amount of shit. Civilization could not function otherwise. (Arguably, ceding that the state has a legitimate monopoly on violence already constitutes cuckoldry in a certain sense; but it's a necessary cuckoldry.)
(I made this comment because I’m interested in how notions of pride and honor are “centered” differently in different individuals, and I’m hoping that further responses will provide illumination in this direction…)
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24d ago
If he is Turok then we should be thankful that he has been gracious enough to return, as Turok never should have been banned in the first place.
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24d ago
The best things in life are pointless.
Masturbation is pointless too, but damn if it doesn't feel good.
Yes. ^.^
I want to stay focused on the central issue here rather than turning this into a huge quote reply that nitpicks a bunch of little points. What do you want to be able to say or do here that you're not being allowed to say or do? What "mask" do you feel like you're being forced to wear on TheMotte?
The rules here are relatively lax, all things considered. Outside of maintaining a standard of cordiality, restrictions are minimal. I have fond memories of getting banned from multiple forums in the 00s, so I can assure you that the concept of the moderation of internet discussion forums is not a particularly recent invention.
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