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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3283 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 3, 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 picking up the I-Ching, or the Book of Changes, Wilhelm-Baynes translation. I recently learned that it had a lot of philosophizing in it- not just the divination system.

Paper I'm reading: Simon's The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial.

The latest book in Charles Stross's Laundry Files universe, Season of Skulls.

For the uninitiated, in this setting, when mathematicians develop headaches from thinking about extremely tough theoretical maths, it's because their neural circuitry is inadvertently emulating a summoning circle and drawing flocks of microdemons that eat your brains and give you dementia.

Cocks gun Turing Machine's haunted.

In the initial novels, we have a every man computer programmer protagonist who is shanghaid into a reclusive and underfunded British department that handles the occult, the eponymous Laundry, based beneath an actual laundry in Soho. Then he gets thrown into the deep end, cults take over the United States, and everyone is fighting for their lives against a Techno-Lovecraftian Singularity.

It's really really good, and I diligently await every new release.

I grabbed the first couple from a used bookstore last month. Pretty excited to try them out.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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