trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:

I keep running into conceptual situations where it looks to me like there’s some attempt to totally circumvent the fact that one is the ultimate arbiter of one’s actions, and it always feels to me like you can’t really do this.

The most recent example was last night, when I heard someone (Barack Obama on TV) talk about people “wanting to become part of something larger than themselves.”  Which is a cliche, of course.  But last night something struck me as wrong about it.  Because … sure, there are lots of projects larger than me in the world, and I might devote myself to one or another of them.  But which one I choose, and which role I take in it, is my decision.  “Becoming part of something larger” is framed as humble, but in a way it seems the opposite – it would involve me cogitating about these great imponderable things and saying yes, this is the one I should do.  If these things are really “larger,” who I am to judge them?

(I realize there’s an equivocation there, but I don’t think it ruins the point.)

A similar problem comes up in talk of privilege based on standpoint theory.  In the most limited form, this is fine – stuff like “if you want to understand an issue involve black people in America you should talk to black people in America.”  That seems perfectly true to me.  But sometimes I hear attitudes that go further than this – that a privileged person is supposed to talk to marginalized people, learn things from them, internalize those things, and then go around being a more enlightened ally (or whatever).  Which runs into the big problem that there’s disagreement in all marginalized communities and which viewpoint the privileged person “takes home” with them is up to the privileged person.  The “active ally” who’s internalized a bunch of social justice ideas has selected those ideas, from among a larger group.  Maybe they were the “right” ideas.  But they made the choice.  Ultimately, their free will was what had the power to adopt one side of a dispute among the marginalized; once the decision has been made, the disputers themselves are powerless to change it.

That is, again, you can’t avoid the fact that your own free will is a routing station that all these kinds of decisions go through, even if that makes you uncomfortable.  You can’t just directly channel “people who would know better” or “things that are bigger or more important”; you’re still making a choice as to which of these things you’re endorsing, out of several options.  Pretending you can get around this is pointless.

Regarding listening to minorities, yeah in the end you have to choose who to listen to, but you don’t have to listen to one person. You can listen to a few different voices and begin to understand the contours of the debate. And sure, Joe-Right-Wing-Guy will find that small number of minorities who say the things he wants to hear, just as those who hate trans woman can always find that one doctor guy who makes money saying shitty things about us.

But most people are not as bad as Joe-Right-Wing-Guy, and it’s not a choice between him and Utterly-Perfect-Social-Justice-Person. Certainly hearing more minority voices, and branching out and listening to what they discuss among themselves will give you much insight.

This is not about find simple answers. This is about understanding complexity. We call it “perspective” not “final truth.”

Sure, and I think I try to do something like this in practice.

I think my complaint is more about … the fact that privileged people really do often have sets of “standards” that they apply to determine which voices they’re going to listen to.  They might not be Joe-Right-Wing-Guy’s standards, but they’re still internally generated.

I guess I’m reacting to stuff like … I dunno, for some reason it makes me cringe whenever some white guy writes about a feminist author in approving terms like “she’s a great kick in the ass” or w/e (cf. #5 here).  There’s an element of approving a performance there.  “I am looking for the Authentic Voice of the Other and gee you sure sound Authentic and Other!”  I worry that this has under-examined effects on the whole social network and that basically privileged people end up finding what they’re looking for, even if that’s “people like you are terrible” (”great!  I was wondering why I feel free-floating inexplicable guilt all the time!”).  I just have doubts that this system is actually doing what it says on the tin.

not-even-even asked: I second that calling liking-people-for-just-existing "cuteness" is an unlucky word choice. In the name of older siblings neglected in favor of younger and thus cuter newcomers (who were better at instinct manipulation) - we grew up hoping it won't matter, at one point! Meritocracy is dangerous, but physical cuteness is also an arbitrary hierarchy, and it's too tied to gut reactions to theorize a morality around it. (as personal preference, on the other hand, it's perfectly legit, of course.)

This is informative, thanks.  I am an only child and haven’t had this experience – of course I’m aware it happens, but not in such a way that it’d naturally occur to me in a case like this.

Maybe I should say something like “affection” rather than “cuteness,” with the addition that the two are highly connected in my mind?  Although “I like affection” sounds like a platitude, almost meaningless.  But I don’t think it’s meaningless to talk about … the thing I’m trying to talk about, whatever the word for it is.

nostalgebraist:

Going into work void for the afternoon, if I am on tumblr in the next 6 hours yell at me or something

Okay, going to do more stuff later, but got enough stuff done that I feel okay tumbling a bit

Going into work void for the afternoon, if I am on tumblr in the next 6 hours yell at me or something

tbh I liked Anathem and it helped lift me out of my critical theory morass.

… okay you have no right to complain about bad didactic nerd fiction ever again

(I kid, I kid.  I just didn’t understand the appeal of that book at all.  I know a lot of people who like it though)

I’m reading this Diderot biography and the author (who is generally pro-Diderot) is talking about one of Diderot’s books he considers so gross and bad and worthless that he doesn’t even name it, referring to it only as “the story of 1748″

I looked it up and it turns out it’s

The Indiscreet Jewels (French: Les bijoux indiscrets) is the first novel by Denis Diderot, published anonymously in 1748. It is an allegory that portrays Louis XV as the sultan Mangogul of the Congo who owns a magic ring that makes women’s genitals (“jewels”) talk.

Speaking of “history of philosophy 101 in novel format”: say what you will about Sophie’s World, at least it’s not … Anathem

light-rook:

ogingat:

light-rook-offtopic:

ogingat:

light-rook-offtopic:

ogingat:

light-rook-offtopic:

If someone took his book and added a bunch of endnotes with actually good references, how much do you think it would improve it?

That would make it like the Stanford Encyclopedia without the encyclopedia.

Yeah, like I think the role EY’s writing forms is like the equivalent of popular science for philosophy (I don’t want to say popular philosophy, because I think that’s something different?) In particular, it seems kind a really good idea to have a book that entices laymen to read SEP.

Yeah, it’s a cool idea. Hence Sophie’s World.

Man. I remember HATING SW

Okay, I’ve never read it. But it can’t be worse.

I thought it was boring, overly historical, and insufficiently precise. It certainly has the advantage over EY of standard terminology, not being a part of a phyg of personality, and having reasonable error bars and default positions.

But I actually enjoy reading EY. It’s fun. It’s entertaining and it’s low-engagement so it gives my brain a break from papers and textbooks without completely shutting it off like Netflix. He actually _seeks answers_ which is refreshing after hearing a million arguments and interpretations of Plato (See my blog title lol). But I think the fact of the matter is that not only is it the case, IMO, that SW is way worse than you think it could be, but it’s also the case that I think more highly of EY than you do (though not as much as he does :)).

I didn’t much like Sophie’s World as a book but it was a fun enough way of learning “history of philosophy 101″ type stuff.  Who Democritus and Parmenides were, what the Cogito was, “consign it to the flames,” all that stuff.

What it doesn’t do is give a good sense of why philosophy might be interesting or important to those who aren’t already convinced.  IIRC it has the usual sort of “philosophy is the amazing journey of thinking deep thoughts, wow!” sort of presentation which IMO doesn’t fit that well with a historical survey where you learn about the guy who thought everything was change and the guy who thought nothing changed and the guy who acted like a dog and the guy who said that material stuff wasn’t real and … 

The inherent problem is that it’s kind of hard to make a subject seem interesting and important while maintaining neutrality.  In principle you could write something like “there is this controversy, and we don’t know which side is right, but it’s really important that we figure that out.” though for some reason that doesn’t seem to be a common route in popularizations?  Anyway, this is why I like reading controversial books (recent examples are Better Angels and Doniger’s Hinduism: An Alternative History), because they tend to make me care, and then I’ll go and read other stuff (hopefully!).

(Source: su3su2u1)

Attn: Physicists

su3su2u1:

su3su2u1:

perversesheaf:

The qual review list I’m working off of asks for a “physicist’s justification” for the Riemann-Lesbegue lemma. Presumably there is some heuristic/physical plausibility argument here.

Physicists: any ideas?

So… what I would do is draw a really wiggly plot symmetric about the axis and then write “I mean, look at it.”  What my advisor used to call “proof by ‘duh’ ”

This is also the best way to prove the Jordan curve theorem. 

This is probably not the desired answer, but: “if it weren’t true then stationary phase wouldn’t work, and then the path integral formulation wouldn’t approximate classical mechanics in the low h-bar limit, but we observe classical mechanics in real life, so”

(ETA: technically it might still work out for some reason other than stationary phase, so this is not really a successful proof-by-contradiction)

(via perversesheaf)

ketzerei-heuchelei:

nostalgebraist:

momothefiddler:

a man now known as Yud the Lesser

DID U REALLY

After I learned that he was (apparently?) reading the story, my sense of mischief gave me no other choice

did you know yud is (one name for) a hebrew letter

that’s what i think of when people say “big yud”

Yes.  (A fun coincidence: it comes up a number of times in The Instructions, a book with a somewhat Yudkowsky-esque protagonist [messianic child prodigy who writes a giant rambling treatise celebrated by his followers].  In that case it’s because two yuds in a row is an abbreviation for the name of Adonai)