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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27546 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Don't text her bro.

Joking aside, great post. I think you would enjoy Ted Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", a much better exploration of the multiverse concept than the vastly overrated Everything Everywhere all at Once.

I didn't text her, but it was close. Maybe if I'd opted to have more than two drinks.

We just wouldn't have worked out. In some ways we were picture perfect, in others, we found ourselves at each other's throats. The picture I'd used was one of the last few of us together, and happy. LLMs might be very good at modeling the world, but alas, even they can't decide that the next step function would likely be a divorce and the two of us arguing over custody of the kids.

Thank you, and I'll take a look at Chiang's work.

Maybe (I saw you posted this after my last comment), but we sometimes know ourselves less well than we think, are good at talking ourselves out of happiness.

If you've seen Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, it was adapted from one of his other novellas.

I've read quite a bit of his work, though I didn't like Arrival or the story it was adapted from I'm afraid. I have a dim opinion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and even its most ardent believers probably don't think it makes you into a mentat.

I've seen the film twice and I am not sure characterizing it as selling Sapir-Whorf (soft or hard) is entirely accurate--is at least not what I'd get out of it, or did get out of it. Admittedly I did not read the novella, so maybe there's something more obvious there that was removed or de-emphasized by Villaneuve. I dislike at least the hard version of Sapir-Whorf as well (to say I dislike it means I simply don't buy it--the hard version of course the suggestion that language determines thought, that some thoughts simply cannot be held in the mind in certain languages--one of the common weapons in the arsenal against the supposed linguistic imperialism of, say, English) but the soft version (e.g. that a language one speaks/reads/thinks in at least influences their thoughts or their thought patterns) is to me self-evident. You, as a multilingual, must have some thoughts on this as well?

From AntiDem's Ask.FM:

I fell in love with the first of these - let’s call her L - when I was 22 and she was 16 (spare me your comments). It started out online (yes, that was possible even in the mid-90s) and progressed to a real, in-person, face-to-face relationship through means of all the impossible romantic daring that was at my disposal back then. When I went to Japan for my year living there, I engineered a way to bring her along with me. For that one year, we lived a peaceful, idyllic life in a small village in the mountains, in a tiny (but it was all we needed) place with a rice field stretching up to our wall one way and a corn field the other. I’d never lived in the country before (and haven’t since), but the pace of life grew on me. We had no internet service (the only year in the last two decades I’ve lived without it). We’d get woken up in the morning by the neighbor’s rooster. In the evenings, she’d make dinner, then we’d sit on the couch and watch whatever anime was playing on TV that night, struggling to understand as much as we could. On weekends we’d go into Tokyo for the day, or visit friends, or just walk around the lake hand in hand. We only stayed a year, though we could have stayed longer. I had other plans, none of which seem real important now. That was emblematic of what went wrong. I was young and smart (though nowhere near as smart as I thought I was) and overbearing and bossy and most of all arrogant - so terribly arrogant. I wanted to do the right thing; I wanted to treat her the way that I now know I should have. But my own parents had divorced, and my family had shattered… I had no guide to doing it right, so I did it all wrong. Not that that’s any excuse. When we came back, we ended up in New England, a time I liked almost as much as Japan. I don’t think she liked it that much - she loved Japan, and had wanted to stay - though she put on a brave face for a while. Things started getting bad a little bit at a time. A lot of stuff had built up - a lot of it my fault, and a lot of it hers. Things came to a head in the spring, and just like that she was gone.

Somewhere there’s a parallel universe where there’s a version of me who made better decisions, and he’s married to L, still living in that tiny place in the mountains of Japan between a rice field and a corn field. I know this because I know that’s the way things should have gone. It’s just that in this universe, they didn’t.

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