Category Archives: blog

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Arithmetic of missing out

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This article is riffing on some ideas in found in this 2011 article that is very much worth the read.

There are 8 billion or so people going about their business. Suppose 1 hour of consumable content is produced per 1000 people per day (whether it be books, shows, poetry, video, etc.). Then, suppose that 0.1% of that is truly good content (whatever “good” means to you).

Under these assumptions, 8000 hours of good content is produced per day, and there’s 8 million hours of content that you need to sift through in order to find that good content.

With far less than 24 hours per day to spend on content consumption, that’s a lot of stuff that is simply impossible for you to consume.

We can tweak the numbers and assumptions and things don’t improve much. We can reduce 8 billion to 400 million if we’re only interested in English works by native English speakers (I doubt this is particularly accurate of anyone). That’s still 400 hours of good content per day.

0.1% might be generous when it comes to how much is good. But there’s still 4 hours per day for 0.001%, or 1 in 10,000 hours of content being good. And no matter how strict you make this percentage, the amount of media you have to sift through to find the good stuff doesn’t change. Reducing this percentage doesn’t reduce your chances of missing out on something good, it just means you waste far more energy trying to find the good stuff in the first place.

In any case, there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Which we won’t experience. And this doesn’t even factor how much good has already been created. Jules Verne, Dostoyevsky, Confucius–an endless list.

And that’s a good thing. I’m glad humanity is more complex, more creative, than I or any single person can comprehend. If all of humanity, all of its creations, could fit in a single mortal mind, that’d be an infinite shame.

But there’s no such infinite shame. Instead we have an infinite, human text. There is always much, much more to discover. To hear, feel, think.

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antipostmodern

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the funny thing about anti-postmodernism is we’re all postmoderns until we move on from/stop obsessing over the problems posed by (post)modernism

which we very very much have not

some of the big ones are

– acknowledging the flaws in science

– failure of language and interpretation

– perfectionism

– structuralism

– social construction (esp. treating social constructs as playthings)

– most existentialism, absurdism, etc.

– self-loathing zeitgeist

perfectionism’s an interesting one, but you see it in how people’ll identify problems in an idea and then abandon it entirely (science, religion, governance, etc).

i’d argue existentialism’s only a big deal because all the natural sources of meaning are flawed/require work, which means they can be rejected/ignored, whereas a lot of existentialists seem to want a sort of meaning they cannot resist no matter how hard they try (which isn’t going to happen).

So it’s an interesting claim that meaning doesn’t exist naturally when, imo, there’s plenty. lots of things are naturally and brilliantly meaningful if you don’t demand that they unilaterally solve all your emotional problems. the natural meanings all tend to naturally reinforce each other and are most meaningful in tandem, rather than as a lonely “meaning of life.”

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wanting family

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thinking about how many ppl have never seen happy parenting or been able to visualize themselves as happy parents (when this is literally one of the only things literally every human can do and do well)

it’s really sad

so much of life is locked behind being educated or wealthy or knowing the right people or whatever

but 0 education subsistence farmers in 5000 BC without leaving a 20 mi radius their whole lives could be a happy family. happy families weren’t ever invented. we can do it too

to say nothing of how much the act itself of starting a family and having kids makes you a better person and improves your soul if you genuinely care about your family and dont just treat them like a hobby or a chore after you finish your very important job

(and responding to a comment about people who complain about parenthood and especially parents who do so)

like we live in a dystopia of many flavors but dog, it aint your family’s fault. your kids are the closest youre gonna get to someone who isnt corrupted by this blasted planet for pete’s sake. So if you hate your own kids, sounds like youve fallen in love with your dang cage.

this was a tweet thread. nothing particularly eloquent, but i really felt the ideas matter here and i hit a lot of things that i want to remind myself of

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Homunculus

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A human-derivative species first created by foul arts.

They are mainly distinguished from humans by their small stature. They may also exhibit traits more diverse than the humans they live with. Some branches of the species cohere more to the idea or symbol of a human than an actual human body (resulting in odd appearances such as “chibi” homunculi or homunculi resembled a child’s drawings).

The process of creating homunculi is forbidden and severely punished by the homunculi themselves. The necessary knowledge, as much as possible, is destroyed. Homunculi are able to reproduce normally, but the artificial creation of a homunculi involves acts only tolerable to the perverse and sadistic. This fact leaves little hope for homunculi who arise under the process.

Homunculi who are created, rather than born, are not even orphans, for they have no parents to lose. They have no relations, no heritage, no genetics, no kin.

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What is culture?

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two quick blurbs on culture. I wrote the 2d first but the 1st is punchier. 2d is sort of the background for the first.

culture is medicine, it’s engineering, law, social visions and longterm development projects, logistics, agriculture, dialect. it’s family and caring for the next generation. communal joy and shared hope, mourning and celebration. all attuned to specific, nontheoretical people.

None of us have that. To quote a friend, “we are all forced to live as a cheap imitation of the old English gentry.” Even fully English peasants and descendants are denied culture (and have been for centuries). Consider the Welsh-English relationship too.

it’s wild how culture has gone from a full set of practices, traditions, and knowledges used to navigate your people’s specific environment, ecosystem, and circumstances to just foods and dances

almost no one lives in a way terribly adapted to their ecosystem any more. half the people who live in places with winters dont even know how to handle snowy roads (i barely do). we have festivals, but few are tied to any common experience or speak to more than a subcommunity

the food and dance stuff are vestiges of this. but if knowledge were better distributed, i think things wouldnt be quite so ridiculous (eg, more engineers would build for their ecosystem instead of working from models developed in the mildest American/European climates)

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xenoblade and what lies beyond the morally grey

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i like xenoblade 2 cuz it’s a world where ppl *are* fighting for each other but failing. and how our fragility and mortality kinda guarantee that. (we’re too small and ignorant for it to be otherwise.) and what you do after you realize that.

for the most part, you know who the good guys and bad guys are. not only is that refreshing, but it allows the narrative to deal with harder moral questions (questions that are actually complex, not the typical morally “grey” junk that hobbles so much literature).

the real world is full of wonderful people, miracles, divine intervention, beauty, nature, peace, healing, the gamut. and we’re *still* a mess. and that’d be true even if the intentionally cruel ppl weren’t with us (it’d be less severe tho).

and i think it’s precisely this space where the most healing, the most wise, the most creative, and the most valuable writing occurs.

the space im talking about: the discussions about goodness that can only come *after* we’ve fully committed to doing good, and only with ppl who trust us to *choose* good and whom we trust back.

and trust is so important because we need to handle stuff that hurts us and scares us and terrifies us and we need to be challenged in our beliefs, but for all that we really, really need someone we can trust.

[originally formatted for twitter, so please excuse the choppiness]

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Fire Emblem Fates: Trucker AU

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trucker au where nohr and hoshido are rival shipping companies

nohr specializes in difficult routes, rural deliveries, places like Alaska, while Hoshido has a bigger operation running agricultural supplies.

  • xander, ryoma: next-in-line for CEO. handle clients, logistics, finances, and planning.
  • camilla, hinoka: operate the biggest of rigs.
  • leo, takumi: special jobs with specialized gear. Leo does offroading but sometimes uses his mastery of gravity to lease out a helicopter or small plane for deliveries into the Alaskan countryside. Takumi does hazmat (e.g., fertilizers but sometimes other chemicals) as well as heavy machinery transport.
  • elise, sakura: operate the main truck fleet. they talk to each other on the radio and would start a podcast if not for the war.

corrin has been employed by both and noncompete agreements have just been abolished. which company will she choose to give her client list and special trucking knowhow? (also corrin can turn into a giant truck that propels itself with water jets)

retainers help with respective functions (so Beruka and Serena are also running big rigs). meetings at gas stations and truck stops get tense. coming soon on the Discovery Channel.

idk why i wrote this lol

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Some notes on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ finances

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Since there are some odd claims about the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints going around, I thought I’d just mention a few things:

1. I honestly like paying tithing and making other donations. It’s chill, I like not worshipping money, it’s lovely how it tempers materialism, and God watches over us better than money does anyway.

2. The monetary reserves the Church holds (about $100 billion), in the highest amounts I’ve seen alleged, are comparable to the combined endowments of Yale (~$40b) and Harvard (~$50b). The 3 BYUs (Church-owned universities) serve about the same number of students as those two universities, but the Church is a much, much bigger org than Yale and Harvard (and even just discussing the BYUs, they’re operated at a massive loss with the lowest nonmilitary tuition in the US, a far cry from Yale and Harvard). The Church’s worldwide operations include welfare programs active basically everywhere the Church is present, humanitarian operations, facilities, budgets for local congregations, even educational services etc. The numbers in modern finance are dazzling, but that’s because the world is crazy. $100b in the modern economy is ~not~ large at all for a global institution.

3. The Church is tax-exempt. Its investment arm (Ensign Peak), however, is a related but distinct entity and is ~not~ tax exempt. It receives extensive IRS oversight, as does any org handling large amounts of money.*

4. Church investments are largely consistent with the Church’s purpose. One of the biggest sectors of investment is agriculture, which is necessary to sustain the Church Welfare system’s food distribution. The oddball projects are usually offshoots or offspring of various community development projects that the Church has contributed to. (Consider how the Church in Utah was in charge of developing almost everything necessary to build a life in the beginning; it has taken on similar projects in other countries as well.)

5. The Church does report what it spends donations on. Building maintenance, humanitarian needs, welfare, missionary funds, temple funds, etc. It doesn’t specify what percentages go to which, but 1) i’m satisfied as to the legitimacy of each fund, 2) detailed reporting is v expensive, and 3) i don’t really care about the details, anyway.**

*I found this kind of funny, it’s an aside about tax law, but I saw a claim that the Church wasn’t following the spirit of the law in its tax operations in some unspecified way. I just wanted to take a brief moment to note that the Tax Code is the most byzantine, absurd, torturous area of law in the US. There is no “spirit of the law” when it comes to our tax system. (It isn’t even fully consistent with the spirit of raising revenue lol.)

**The trend to demand detailed budget reporting in the name of government transparency is a similar and sometimes vexatious issue. The more detail you demand, the more checks you add in, the more expensive it gets (and it gets expensive fast when you apply it across an institution as extensive and varied as the government). It’s really easy to spend so much on “improving” finance reporting that you burn any savings you’d gain from catching errors.

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xenoblade and les mis and clannad and ssss.gridman

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xenoblade 2 & 3, les miserables, clannad, and ssss.gridman are the stories that just made me genuinely and powerfully happier. there’s not a lot of fiction that does that. ive enjoyed a lot of stories. But this is something far deeper than being compelling, truthful, or profound.

and maybe to drive the point home, i have a minor and half a master’s in spanish literature, and i’ve read in a lot of different movements and traditions. i’ve been looking for these stories like my life depends on it lol.

i love truth (as i can distinguish it), i love thought-provoking stuff, i love to be moved. i’ve written trying to figure out the magic, but i hate to write about these texts themselves because i just want ppl to experience them; anything i say points towards that because i cant capture what’s so important myself.

“Truth, it seems to me, is known only to the person who is affected by it; and if he chooses to communicate it to others, he automatically becomes a liar. Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are communicated … What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.” (Thomas Bernhard) It’s stuff where i can tell they’re fighting to get the truth through with all they’ve got.