What do you like?
First, happy birthday. Keep shining.
Second: I'm 2 years older than you, but reading your blog feels like learning from a teacher who has advanced in the path of wisdom an unfathomable lot more than me. In my own circles I meet dull and thick PhDs all the time, so my perception of your wisdom cannot entirely be due to your having done three times the education I have.
Your writing is the most careful I know. You know when you're right, but you never come off as overconfident. Time after time, you go out of your way to try to prove yourself wrong. And you care whether you're wrong, which is a rare virtue these days.
A predictable retort is that I'm not much wise myself, so what do I know. Maybe. You'll decide how much to weigh the admiration coming from people less wise than you vs. the admiration from people wiser than you. But the fact that you get admiration from both groups must count for something.
Upon first viewing, my brain wanted to think that the empty space in the middle was the "solid thing" and that the area corresponding to the leaves was "empty."
Last night I had a similar experience while organizing my new apartment. I kept walking past this open door, and my brain kept misinterpreting the space within the frame as the "door" even though it was already open and what I was seeing was actually the wall beyond.
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker. A crazy neurosurgeon dissects people's selfhood while the good guys discuss evolutionary psychology and why the whole concept of crime may be misguided. The author keeps a blog on the same ideas (https://rsbakker.wordpress.com).
At the barest minimum, your birth certificate (and associated papers that prove your relatedness to people you hope to inherit from), your high school diploma (unless you already have a university degree AND don't intend to pursue another one), and any vitally important medical records.
"Revival" is the text I wrote.
I missed the reason why LW no longer has bragging threads, so allow me to brag here about my first published story in English at Antimatter Magazine.
Unfortunately I don't travel much (although there's a 50/50 chance I'll move to Boston later this year), but you can find me on Facebook as carturo222.
ARARRRARGGGGHHH why do I only see this now.
Do you have any plans to come visit again?
What I wanted to tell the teacher was, "If arguments + evidence are compelling enough, you have no choice but to believe. In general, belief is not a choice." But then she'd have thrown Sartre and radical freedom at me, which would have completely missed my point.