This is a special post for quick takes by Pedro Freire. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I posted this here because I had posted it elsewhere and I personally thought it to be funny and interesting. On a deeper level, one of my autistic obssessions lately has been the Hellenistic Intellectual Traditions. I feel like Ancient Greece was an unusually flourishing context for a plurality and originality of original truth seeking, and that many later authors who think Ancient Greeks to be antiquated have failed to contextualize and interpret correctly these older texts. In particular, the Ancient Greeks were fascinated by language and by words, and many of the words they used do not have a direct translation outside of that intellectual context.
Furthermore, I remember being introduced in a philosophy class at École Polytechnique many years ago to the concept of History of Ideas, how one of the philosophical pursuits is to trace and connect different versions of similar ideas through time. There is something interesting about thinking of ELK in the lenses of different intellectual traditions over time that were also investigating similar concepts. I do think exploring how the Ancient Greeks might have approached this problem to be a potential avenue of ideas for those interested in making progress on ELK.
Creative actions often lead to out-of-distribution states, for better or worse.
Many of my mistakes in life involved either doing something creative while being unprepared to handle negative surprises or limitations in my imagination that prevented me from figuring out better outcomes.
Many of my successes in life involved either repeatedly executing something that reliably works or pursuing a creative direction and unlocking new states beyond my initial imagination of what was possible.
(My Facebook and Instagram accounts have been suspended without explanation. Hopefully they will be restored soon. If anyone reading this wants to reach me in the meantime, please use other means.)
(I will elaborate more what I mean by this and why I think this is relevant once I have the capacity.)
(I am not implying that existing interactions are not constructivist. I mostly have a positive vision of ways of making more of the dialogues here more productive. This is not a super well formulated claim yet, so hold it with grace please.)