Dale Udall's Shortform
Mar 22, 20212
Dale Udall
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This is a beautifully articulated taxonomy. My first application is to addictions. At the top level, addiction "makes things okay" in a way that makes things very not okay.
Uppers can make someone feel like things are okay. This reduces stress until they wear off and the "not okay" can be seen more clearly, assuming the time spent "up" wasn't used to actually make things okay.
Downers can make someone feel like being "not okay" is okay. This reduces stress by taking away the onus of responsibility for a time.
Psychedelics can induce states of A or B.
Codependency is an addiction to trying to make things okay, in any sense of the word. Individually, it's a pathology. En masse, it's a driving force behind politics.
Shakespeare was the Joss Whedon of his day: high concepts and raunchy humor executed with total dedication to the world being created, with witticisms and new phrasings that hit the zeitgeist just right.
We now have a Philippines strain to worry about, there will be more until we solve this globally, yet there is no sense of urgency whatsoever.
The urgency went away with the restaurants, the jobs, the summer protests and the winter elections. "Two weeks to slow the curve" became "Let's make sure the poorest people with the most vulnerable relatives still have to ride the NYC subway to work because a city survives on its underclass, and hey let's stick COVID patients in nursing homes." The pandemic became the one thing that's poison to a news cycle: boring.
Not the existence of a God, but the actions of specific Gods.
The book of the Christian God promises eternal existence to all instead of oblivion, and a really good eternal existence to those who follow the Way of love and choose to accept that God's offer of redemption.
The book of the Muslim God promises a similar pair of eternal destinations.
Those are just the two most famous promises of infinite lifetime tied to interpretations of the holy books of religions which focus on specific Gods. They're extraordinary claims, and so they require extraordinary evidence, but any decently plausible promise of an infinite lifetime is worth enough investigation to falsify it.
You could simplify Machi Koro:
It actually (didn't) show up in one of the final (and best) novels of the old Star Wars canon, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover.
It also (doesn't) show up in the Elder Scrolls series as Sithis, the Void.
Much of contemporary spirituality, I think, aims at a certain type of unification or “non-duality.” It aims, that is, to erase or transcend distinctions rather than draw them; to reach the whole, rather than the part. Indeed, to the extent that an “existential” attitude aims, ultimately, to encompass as much of the “whole picture” as possible, some aspiration towards unity seems almost inevitable.
... (read more)But as we raise the level of abstraction, but wish to persist in some kind of existential affirmation, we will include, and affirm, more and more of the world’s horror, too (until, indeed, we move past what the world is actually like, to what it could be like, and to
If one or more exist, then our time is not 100 years but infinite, and our reach not limited to our arms. Worth as much ink as the heat-death of the universe or the eventual extinction of Man, which both rely on the false vacuum not popping before then.
This is the frustrating thing about the culture war. People seem to assume that the sides are clearly delineated in black and white. Just because some activist shouts that you have to call hispanics "latinx" now doesn't mean it's true, and trans issues are no different. The actual people who are supposedly being represented are much more diverse than you might think.
Much of the activism I hear about on the news falls into both the legibility trap and the movement trap. While allies are trying to simplify the issues to build steam for building an institution to work on creating an expert class who can manage the organizations that will obtain the workers who will provide integrated solutions to the impacted people, the impacted people are living the problem and finding their own grassroots solutions.
For Italians in early New York City, the grassroots solution to racism was the Mafia and political machines, and now Italian-Americans are now considered white by pretty much everyone in America.
Philosophizing from the beginning: what makes something real? What even is reality?
Something is real to something else if it can affect it. My desk is real to my fist because it absorbs the energy and brings my hand to a stop, also causing a noise from the air particles disturbed en masse. El-ahrairah is real to Fiver and Bigwig as a mythopoeic hero / rabbit celebrity, and Fiver and Bigwig are real to my imagination as well as to my list of well-written fictional characters.
A reality is an arena within which some things are mutually real. Our physical reality is a shared nonfictional physical reality. Our logical realities and emotional realities are often treated as if they're consistent with a universal underlying logical reality or emotional reality too, when in fact they're just inside our own minds.
But hearts and minds affect other hearts and minds through communication, and so they are real to each other (in large measure).
Some outliers are hypernumerate. I'm hyperlexic, so attuned to words that I was able to teach myself to read before my childhood amnesia kicked in, so I never had to learn phonics. This doesn't mean the vast majority of humans aren't congenitally literate or numerate. OP's statement may be nominally false, but the exception proves the rule.
As for teaching the aesthetic beauty of math, I would give each student their own blank copy of the 10x10 multiplication table (with a zeros row and column, making it 11x11) at the start of grade 2,... (read more)