One of my (recently met) good friends is a rationalist, on LW, etc. She had made some offhand comment about "Tell Culture", so I looked it up, found Thing of Things and started reading about it; it sounded like a good idea. Linked at the bottom was "Cis-By-Default", which described my feelings on my gender better than anything else. I started reading SSC after reading a lot of Thing of Things, then decided to make an account here!

I started reading Ozy and SSC's blogs about a month ago, thought they were quite good, so I figured I may as well see what LW is like.

I'll be starting school quite soon, taking some classes from what used to be Shimer College (now the Shimer Great Books Program at North Central College, if I remember correctly). Are there any Shimerians on here?

Also, has anyone here read Robert Pirsig's Lila: An Inquiry into Morals? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was good, so I figured I may as well read the sequel, and Lila has a lot of neat tricks in it that help me in trying to figure out what certain concepts/institutions might have in common with other ones, what they are opposed to, etc.

There's a good division in it between static and Dynamic (I normally don't like arbitrary capitalizations, but I figure I may as well follow Pirsig's style guide, it has a good feel to it) divisions of Quality, where static is the easily recognizable forms in the manner of "This feels bad, I think the hot stove is hurting me" or "It feels good to belong to a community", whereas Dynamic quality is mostly unanalyzable due to it's nature (it's a rational kind of irrationality--we see Dynamic Quality, so we go for it. Only when backed up by static patterns of Quality does it succeed).

Pirsig hypothesizes that the universe is trying to move towards greater and greater Dynamic Quality, but can only do so with the help of static patterns of Quality, otherwise the mystical euphoria of Dynamic Quality will come upon us and we will die, unable to bring about more Dynamic Quality. There's a long history lesson to go along with this, but I'm getting quite tired and would like to just post this so that I don't forget to later.