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sonicrocketman

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sonicrocketman

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I write and think about history, science, public policy, and tech. These days, I focus a lot on the history and process of science.

My blog:
https://brianschrader.com

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sonicrocketman

I write and think about history, science, public policy, and tech. These days, I focus a lot on the history and process of science.

My blog:
https://brianschrader.com

sonicrocketman — LessWrong

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On The Lies Depression Tells

I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme in my conversations lately about depression, and something I hope you, the reader, might find useful when combatting this Great and Terrible Beast yourself. To begin, I'd like to draw a distinction between depression and melancholy. There's a beauty to melancholy[1] that there simply isn't with depression. One begets yearning, the other smothers everything in its path. I love melancholy, I really do, enough that sometimes I work to keep it going a little longer. Melancholy is a mourning wistfulness, the loss of something dearly loved, a cousin of grief and dour predilections. Depression is a plastic bag, thrown over your head to choke off every breath of air until you succumb to its will. It's insidious, and it lies to you. The Venomous Snake Depression, however brief or fleeting, is the bedfellow of despair. They don't always arrive together, but they are never long apart. Both weave a web of thought that strangles fragile hope and sets to bury will and want beneath the mountain of excuse. Despair works slowly, convincing—no, proving—to you that this is how the world is: that it's terrible, that it has always been terrible, and that it will always be terrible. Then Depression swoops in like a hero to stifle that pain with dullness. Depression and Despair have all the rhetorical skill of Cicero: ethos, pathos, and lagos enough to destroy whatever justification you can weakly muster to your own defense. That's what makes Depression and Despair the monsters that they are. They pull the ultimate trick: not only to convince you of their lies, but to convince you that they—not hope—hold the truth about the world, that theirs is the only word you can trust, and that n

Blogging, Writing, Musing, And Thinking

The Long View Of History

Empirical Partial Derivatives

A Field Guide To Learning

Let's say you're someone who wants to learn about an academic discipline. Perhaps advanced Physics, Sociology, Early-Modern History, or Cognition Science. Of course, there's YouTube pop-sci videos (which I love) and no shortage of products and services that purport to teach you the basics. But what do you do when...

Load-Bearing Walls

This post is the long result of several years of musing on my part combined with a topical discussion from last week's Ezra Klein show. It touches on everything from AI to D&D, from Life to Physics and really tries to give a wide view of a topic I've only...

An Age Of Promethean Ambitions

In a recent post, I wrote the following: > [Without] the context of history, we're blind to the reality that we live in a world… deeply connected and familiar to the worlds of the past. Perhaps it is just my brain seeing patterns where they don't exist, but this sentence...

Words Are A Leaky Abstraction

Something about hearing the phrase "Claude's Soul Document" got me thinking again about a problem I've long pondered. Software folks, like myself, have a long and proud history of taking words that exist and coopting them, manipulating the meaning of those words into feeble shadows of their former selfs. Tech...

On The Lies Depression Tells

I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme...

The Long View Of History

History as a subject is often viewed by students and the public at large as a domain without a use, a pedantic study of dates and names with some vague mission to remember the past—a memorial to ages past but neither a forward-looking or useful endeavor. The study of history...

Blogging, Writing, Musing, And Thinking

Yesterday I stumbled on this quote from a blog post by JA Westenberg: > Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are...

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