Quick Takes

Rereading this post, I'm a bit struck by how much effort I put into explaining my history with the underlying ideas, and motivating that this specifically is cool. I think this made sense as a rhetorical move--I'm hoping that a skeptical audience will follow me into territory labeled 'woo' so that they can see the parts of it that are real--and also as a pedagogical move (proofs may be easy to verify, but all of the interesting content of how they actually discovered that line of thought in concept space has been cleaned away; in this post, rather than hiding the sprues they were part of the content, and perhaps even the main content. [Some part of me wants to signpost that a bit more clearly, tho perhaps it is obvious?] There's something that itches about this post, where it feels like I never turn 'the idea' into a sentence. "If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune." Sure, but that leaves much of the work to the reader; this post is more like a log of me as a reader doing some more of the work, and leaving yet more work to my reader. It's not a clear condensation of the point, it doesn't address previous scholarship, it doesn't even clearly identify the relevant points that I had identified, and it doesn't transmit many of the tips and tricks I picked up. A sentence that feels like it would have fit (at least some of what I wanted to convey?) is this description of Tarot readings: "they are not about fortelling your inevitable future, but taking control of it through self knowledge and awareness." [But in reading that, there's something pleasing about the holistic vagueness of "proper form"; the point of having proper form is not just 'taking control'!] For example, an important point that came up when reading AllAmericanBreakfast's exploration of using divination was the 'skill of discernment', and that looking at random perspectives and lenses helps train this as well. Once I got a Tarot reading that I'll paraphrase as "this person you're

Rereading this post, I'm a bit struck by how much effort I put into explaining my history with the underlying ideas, and motivating that this specifically is cool. I think this made sense as a rhetorical move--I'm hoping that a skeptical audience will follow me into territory labeled 'woo' so that they can see the parts of it that are real--and also as a pedagogical move (proofs may be easy to verify, but all of the interesting content of how they actually discovered that line of thought in concept space has been cleaned away; in this post, rather than hiding the sprues they were part of the content, and perhaps even the main content. [Some part of me wants to signpost that a bit more clearly, tho perhaps it is obvious?] There's something that itches about this post, where it feels like I never turn 'the idea' into a sentence. "If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune." Sure, but that leaves much of the work to the reader; this post is more like a log of me as a reader doing some more of the work, and leaving yet more work to my reader. It's not a clear condensation of the point, it doesn't address previous scholarship, it doesn't even clearly identify the relevant points that I had identified, and it doesn't transmit many of the tips and tricks I picked up. A sentence that feels like it would have fit (at least some of what I wanted to convey?) is this description of Tarot readings: "they are not about fortelling your inevitable future, but taking control of it through self knowledge and awareness." [But in reading that, there's something pleasing about the holistic vagueness of "proper form"; the point of having proper form is not just 'taking control'!] For example, an important point that came up when reading AllAmericanBreakfast's exploration of using divination was the 'skill of discernment', and that looking at random perspectives and lenses helps train this as well. Once I got a Tarot reading that I'll paraphrase as "this person you're