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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3450 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Watts' The Way of Zen. So far his discussion of relativity has been clarifying.

Reading more about the 1916 Rising (got distracted from reading The Seven and I've just picked it back up). Seems relevant to discussions on LARPing and aiming for real change, what if you self-consciously LARP so hard it works?

Hobson had 'hot arguments' about [the planned insurrection] with Pearse, arguing that guerilla tactics had a better chance of success than gambling everything on one throw, but Pearse said what mattered was to have a sacrifice, and it had to be a sacrifice of high theatrical impact. As Conor Cruise O'Brien put it, 'What he was aiming at essentially was the staging in Dublin of a national Passion Play, but incorporating a real life-and-death blood sacrifice'.

Pearse is one of the best Irish nationalist writers, but he is also absolutely crazy. As Yeats said to Ezra Pound, "Pearse was half-cracked and wanting to be hanged. He has Emmet delusions same as other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God."

Becoming Trader Joe - after learning it existed in this viral tweet

This probably seems weird to Americans, but up in Canada, we have a certain reverance for those uniquely American food chains. We have burger joints, but they're no In-N-Out. Donut shops, but they're no Krispy Kreme. Grocery stores, but no Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's occupies a special place in this pantheon because its products can be brought back. "Oh my god, Sasha went down to Seattle on the weekend and brought back cookie butter from Trader Joes! Cookie Butter! eeeee!". For a while, we even had a guy running a grey market Pirate Joe's.

Oh it's the guys before Aldi, now that does sound interesting.

Which is funny, because Trader Joe's is just the American emanation of German grocery company Aldi Nord.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. It's well-written, but making me depressed.

I’m ready Neal Asher’s Polity series from a rec on here. It’s alright, enough to keep me reading, but not as good as other AI driven sci fi I’ve read like The Culture or The Commonwealth Saga.

I'm currently reading Jonathan Losos' Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. It's a book that I've been aware of for a bit but only got around to now; it explores the convergence vs. contingency debate in evolutionary biology and attempts to tackle questions like "how deterministic is evolution?".

Losos in the book focuses quite heavily on the perspectives of two scholars, one who exemplifies the "convergence" perspective and the other espousing "contingence": the former being Simon Conway Morris, and the latter being the late Stephen Jay Gould. I have a decent working knowledge of both of their positions, and I have very little regard for either of them. Conway Morris is a devout Christian who seems to be using evolutionary convergence to import his own personal brand of theism back into science, whereas Gould was an incredibly politically motivated scientist who let his profoundly leftist ideological bias inform not only his evolutionary theory but also his criticism of cognitive measures like IQ and g, and whose reputation was nothing short of mud in his own field.

The book is pretty even-handed, though. Losos starts out by detailing pretty standard examples of evolutionary convergence (e.g. the placental mole vs the Australian marsupial mole), and evolutionary idiosyncrasy (e.g. the entirety of New Zealand, which provides a pretty interesting alternative vision of a bird-dominated biosphere with adaptions radically different from their mammalian counterparts despite filling similar niches). He then delves into the field of experimental evolution to further answer this question. One of the experiments he covers are the famous ones on guppies, where guppies were moved from high-predation to low-predation environments. In the low-predation areas, male guppies in a period of only a few years became colourful due to the lack of predation pressure allowing sexual selection to run amok. This would seem to provide strong evidence in favour of convergence, but the form the colourfulness took was not predictable: some populations became more vibrant by increasing the amount of all colours, whereas others became more iridescent. Whether this data point skews in favour of Conway Morris or Gould is left up to the reader.

I'd say it's pretty entertaining - I was already previously quite acquainted with the subject material and the way it's written is fairly easy to parse so it's not a particularly strenuous read.

I finished Homicide by David Simon, am breezing through On Writing by Stephen King, and plan to start The Corner next. Really obsessed with Baltimore crime statistics at the moment. Not sure why.

Funny, I'm just starting Homicide myself.

Let me know how you like it. I thought it was a terrific piece of writing.

You wanting to write a book?

Just today finished Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson. Unfortunately it was probably my least favorite work of his so far. I could tell right from the get-go that it would be extremely gentle towards the main character, a wheelchair-bound woman named Rysn. She was a fine character but it was fairly clear from the start that she would never fail or struggle much, a suspicion which unfortunately proved correct. The closest thing to character growth in the book was one character realizing that their (very, very mild) teasing occasionally hurt others' feelings. With emotional stakes so shallow, no wonder I didn't get invested.

I don't regret reading it though; I found it only a bit worse than the litRPG trash I usually occupy myself with.

Gave the longer book I was reading on the philosophy of personal identity (Daniel Kolak's I Am You) a break to read David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative. 1995 Manifesto on how and why we should use bioengineering to totally eliminate suffering. Not just specific kinds of emotional suffering in the Buddhist sense, but literally all negative-valence qualia. He does a good job anticipating and responding to most objections too. Was a huge influence on Nick Bostrom and it's publicly available online if anyone is interested: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm

Is this like most interesting topics on earth, something where humanity has pathologically, systematically stopped the depth of the discourse at the introductory level, or has this author or any human on earth cared enough to specify a semblance of a roadmap towards the stated hedonistic goal via bioengineering?

Where can I find a e.g. an exhaustive list of pharmacological pathways that promote positive valence qualias and of pharmacological pathways that downregulate or dampen negative-valence qualias?

Thanks, that's fascinating. I'll check it out

Lmk what you think

The Future of Conflict in the 1980s, from 1982. A collection of essays from a think tank/working group. I saw it in a bookstore and thought it would either be hilarious or informative.

So far, it’s been about as dry as might be expected. But wow, the 70s were a rough time for America.

The Weirdest People in the World about the effects of the hajnal line on European culture.

Could you share a gist of what it says?

I've read the intro of the wiki page on the hajnal line and it just seems from a quick glance to be a refuted ? theory on a fertility divide.

It is well known that fertility is inverselly correlated with wealth so that divide might have been partially true.

I’m only about 2/3 of the way through, and this is my first time reading a treatment of the hajnal line which doesn’t focus on HBD. But the thesis is that the marriage laws of the medieval Catholic Church led to individualism, capitalism, urbanism, widespread literacy, democracy, and innovation in Western Europe and not other parts of the world specifically because of their effects on family formation(that is, marriage of unrelated adults by free consent), and most of the book is taken up by comparisons to other parts of the world with bits and pieces of the same process going on. I will likely write a fuller review when I finish it, but for now it makes a strong case for the cultural effects of the hajnal line, hampered by a few historical view errors and the book’s unwillingness to think about HBD.

What does he say about the seeming counter-example of Ireland, which was both extremely Catholic and outside the Hajnal line?

He points to Ireland as a strange place that was halfway in the hajnal line but subjected to the same pressures much faster than say, the Ile de Paris.

Sorry what does HBD mean?

Human BioDiversity- group differences are at least partially influenced by genetic differentiation.

Thanks

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