I’ve sometimes talked about how the level of distance I feel from my past self varies as a pretty consistent function of relative time.   That is, at any given time, things I remember thinking/saying/doing X years ago tend to feel familiar or alien in a way that depends predictably on X.

It’s weird to watch past selves recede along this trajectory.  Looking back was more comfortable back when this “alienness function” made my high school self (pre-2006) much more alien than my college-era self (2006-2010), since I actually changed relatively quickly between those two periods, and since that’s a socially ordinary place to place a chapter break in one’s life.  But these days, my college self has mostly receded back into the same mists that I’ve grown accustomed to placing my high school self in.  2010 was a long time ago.

And because the high-school-to-college transition happened so rapidly, and seemed so ripe for interpretation even at the time, it feels relatively easy to think of it as a well-defined thing that might be boiled down into a set of specific, articulable lessons and changes.  Indeed, interpretations like this came pre-made for me, handed down to me by the same self they described.  The distance I face now as I look back is more continuous, less tied to any identifiable start or end points, and it comes with fewer helpful annotations.

Nonetheless, I notice some patterns when I look back at it.  The really big one is that my self from 10-12 years ago was much more “apriorist.”

He was inclined to believe as a matter of course in things like a priori knowledge and universal human nature.  He thought that there was just a way life was, that everyone’s life was basically that way with some minor person-specific modifications added on top, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was lying or (more likely) not expressing themselves clearly.  He believed, in various ways, in a natural match between the human mind and the environment, which rendered “important” things ultimately comprehensible and tractable (although it might sometimes be very hard) and, likewise, implied that anything sufficiently bizarre and un-parseable must be “irrelevant,” a distraction from the single correct way of life for human beings.  He reacted warmly to things like the Poverty of the Stimulus argument, not so much (or only) for any empirical merits he saw in them, but because they felt like the sort of thing that just is deeply true.

In retrospect it seems jarring that he had this same reaction to, say, evolutionary psychology and mathematical Platonism.  If our mathematical faculties can ultimately be traced back to material trends in our ancestral environment, one might ask, how can we know that we grasp eternal trends in some kind of eternal Forms, rather than trends that merely obtained approximately in that environment?  As far as I can remember, my old self was less focused on the possible limits of our understanding than the apparent extent of it: to him, it was a miracle that he or anyone else could understanding anything with any reliability, and (I guess) this miracle could only be explained via some deep patterned correspondence between mind, material world, fundamental reality, all of it.

We could only get anywhere in life because we came with a detailed facsimile of Universal Truth printed on the inside of our skulls, and the most our parents or society could do was add a few footnotes or maybe cross out a passage or two.  All we could do was follow the inevitable logic written in there, which said to live “the good life” as described in the in-the-end consistent if sometimes distorted stories told by great literature, religion (all of ‘em, probably), cutting-edge science, my parents, my knee-jerk emotional reactions to stuff, etc., etc., etc., or … one could do anything else, which was to do something dumb, wrong, and ultimately empty.

I’m describing this kind of parodically, of course, and it’s a better description of my high school worldview (which has long been comfortably in the past) than of my college-and-soon-after worldview.  But the latter was still … like this, just very gradually less and less so over time, with no clear turning point, which is harder to accept and to get my head around.  I also wonder how many people are out there now, in similar positions to mine with knee-jerk attitudes similar to the ones I held.  (I can’t imagine this outlook thriving in mainstream online discourse these days.  In the period I’m talking about there wasn’t really such a thing as “mainstream online discourse,” and it was much more common to have strictly on-topic conversations about video games or whatever in which these philosophical gulfs might never have a chance to come up.)

His mental blocks were dissolving like salt in water. His mind was incredible. Beautiful. Sensual. I wanted him, just as an Earth salmon ready to spawn felt driven to swim upstream, against all obstacles, to reach home and reproduce.

For example, Chinese screenings of Mission: Impossible 3 omitted a scene showing clothes drying on a clothesline in Shanghai because it was not a positive portrayal of Shanghai, despite the fact that the film was partially shot in Shanghai, where many people do not own dryers.

Something I’d love to see, though I have no idea if it’s even possible, is a piece of interactive computer software able to represent the sorts of world models that physicists have in their heads.

That is, a model that has a bunch of “scale-specific compartments,” each consisting of some equations of motion or equilibrium or whatever, and each linked to one or more of the others by taking or relaxing a limit in one or more dimensionless parameters.  These limits could be added in either direction, and perhaps even searched for over some space of equations.

One might have the ability, for instance, to have a single thing in the software’s ontology which has the property “obeys the ideal gas law in the appropriate limits,” and the property “behaves like a collection of many randomly moving corpuscles under the appropriate limits (not the same as the other ones),” and which knows how to derive the former from the latter, but can still use the simplified encoding of the former when doing other calculations that share the same limit.

Each part of a physical system would look either classical or quantum depending on which limit the user was using at the time, and they would do so together.  Statistical mechanics would be (automatically) applied when, and only when, the relevant large-N limit was compatible with the rest of the calculation.  That sort of thing.

To make things work out without needing too much pedantic formalism (or to extend it to areas that no one has rigorously grounded), one might need the ability to stipulate an asymptotic relation without proving it.  But, in the cases where the relation came together with a proof, the program would be able to automatically compute and propagate some information about the leading order error terms in the various asymptotic approximations, which could be useful and interesting in a few ways – as a automatic check for common mistakes when making many approximations, as an automatic way to quantify the relative sizes of different effects on deviations from various equilibria, etc.

This would be nothing like a numerical simulation (which is what I usually think of when I think of software that represents physical laws interactively), and although much of the underlying backend would be something like a computer algebra system, the focus and design would be very different from existing computer algebra systems I’m aware of.

More events of defenestration have occurred in Prague during its history, but they are not usually called defenestrations of Prague.

Whenever the red button is pressed in some universe within the multiverse, that universe is deleted, and N successor universes are then created.

I suppose I must have been aware of it for a long time, but the Democratic debates are making me realize explicitly that most politicians, even successful ones, are not very good public speakers by the standards that prevail outside of politics.

Even though they give lots of speeches as part of their jobs, I really dislike listening to most of these people just on the level of elocution and vocal tone and so forth.  I think this explains much of why Marianne Williamson has come off so well: she’s the only one up there who’s just really good at public speaking by normal standards, and you get used to not expecting that in a political context.

(I’d also put Obama in that category.  Of course it’s not unusual to say Obama is a good orator, everyone says that, but the specific distinction I’m drawing is that he’s not just a good political orator, he’s someone you’d want to listen to if he were just a local radio host or something.)

onion-souls:

The idea that Pokémon is a contraction of the English “Pocket Monsters” is blatantly untrue when put under any kind of scrutiny; the poke element is a Japanese rendering of Pokkim (”Undermountain”), a term originating from the Ainu dialect of Sinnoh, who believed that the creatures spawned from the depths of Tengansan (Mt. Coronet). It is due to this primordial connection that the Ainu held rock and ground pokémon in particularly high esteem, specifically Rhyhorn, who they honored as the “first” pokemon. It is only with the later settlement by the Yamato people that we see the cultural ascendance of “heavenly” pokemon - Dragon, Flying, Fire, Electric, and Water.

In the Kofun period, as the early Japanese courts adopted Chinese culture, plant-type pokemon rose to social prominence, as Chinese philosophers glorified plant-type pokémon for their value in cultivating land, sustaining civilization, and promoting social harmony with their aesthetics (and, as would be later understood, chemical manipulation of the human brain). For this reason, the bulbasaur, a ubiquitous pokemon in China, was adopted as the chief pokemon of the Japanese imperial courts, despite the creature being alien to Japan. Later Japanese emperors would enshrine the mountain-carving Korean Blastoise and, much later, the European Charizard as equal symbols of Japanese cultural reach, but Bulbasaur always held the position as the primal pokemon of Kanto.

This “plantmania” did have a literally toxic knock-on effect, as the Kanto population of plant-type pokémon are entirely poisonous, unlike those found in other regions (including the imported Sinnohan Tangela; note that Tangela only dwells in a patch of grass near the aging port of Pallet Town, and in the Safari Zone). This led to a disproportionate amount of power concentrating in the hands of the psychic-training mediums in Kanto society, including the notorious “shadow regime” of the Itako of Mt. Osore.

Due to the psychic stranglehold on Kantese politics, the people were unusually ignorant of Ghost-types (with their existence only confirmed with the Sylph Co.’s work at the end of the 20th century), and Dark-types had been completely exterminated from the region despite their presence in neighboring Johto (with the dark variants of Kantese pokémon establishing roots in Pacific Island chains such as Alola).

Oda Nobunaga introduced Steel and Dark-type pokémon into the region in his attempt to unify Honshu and wrestle power from regional psychic priesthoods; While these types remained in Johto, their population never stabilized in Kanto and faded quickly after Nobunaga’s death in Honnō-ji at the hands of Akechi Mitsuhide‘s Portuguese Charizard Kapadokya.

At the end of the Kofun period, the Emperor established a rule to curb similar excesses; the peasantry could only own normal and bug Pokemon, while those of the merchant class could use water and flying, and no more than three. The other types, especially the “heavenly,” were the domain of the nobility; a noble could train up to six pokemon, but they must be of the type of their house. The Dragon-class was the sole domain of the Emperor and his household, who alone could raise pokémon of any type, without restriction. The Dragon-class privilege was later extended to the shogun in the Tokugawa period, leading to the eradication of the Fairy-type from Japan, with most local varieties of those species bred into normal-types.

This legally enforced connection of the poke to the symbolism of the noble and imperial houses lead to their conceptual merger with the Japanese system of heraldry, the mon.

In the Kamakura period, Johto became a major cultural and commercial center, as its rich soil allowed the production of Apricorns, which could be ritually altered with carving and mercury inlaying to seal away pokemon in a small, weightless space. These sealing spheres allowed the development of a far more efficient and mobile pokémon warrior class, leading to the ascension of the pokésamurai and a strong ronin underbelly, with Minamoto no Yoritomo generally acknowledged as the first pokemon master.

In the Meiji period, these noble houses’ type-monopolies were disposed of, and pokémon training was reorganized into the Gymnasium system of continental European origin.

(via balioc)