feotakahari

I’m reading The Dragons of Dorcastle, and I gotta say, the Mage isn’t very good at the solipsism he professes to. For instance, he tells the Mechanic she’s foolish for believing other people exist, but a solipsist would believe that the shadow he perceives as the Mechanic is neither wise nor foolish, just a shadow.

Society: “You should kill yourself unless you’re useful.”

1000 IQ poster: “It’s innate and natural that people are unhappy unless they can find a way to be useful.”

About those “humanities classes” arguments: I took a philosophy class that explained the difference between sense and reference. I often see arguments on Tumblr that depend on the idea that sense and reference are the same thing. Some people build entire worldviews around this confusion.

But on the other hand, I’ve seen people grasp the difference between sense and reference just by reading the statement “the map is not the territory.” So I don’t think you need an entire college class in that.

In college, I studied Business Management Economics. The name’s a bit misleading, because it’s not really for business managers. It’s for folks who have to talk to business managers. Given the assumption that your audience has no economic knowledge, how do you explain economics to them in a way they’ll understand?

I get why philosophers are so tetchy about the value of philosophy degrees. But if you want philosophy to be relevant to how people in general live their lives, not just how philosophers live their lives, you need to teach yourself a sort of Business Management Philosophy.

Hot take inspired by a post by sigmaleph: the Infinite Loops crossover fanfic setting is fiction’s best portrayal of what a “utility monster” would look like, and the reason so much Infinite Loops fic is fucked-up beyond belief is because folks don’t really want to address or discuss that concept even while they portray it.

(Basically, every world requires a particular individual to remain alive and sane across untold eons, and if that person does horrible shit, at least the world continues to exist.)

Me, thinking: People post about Slavoj Žižek all the time, but what does he actually believe in?

Wikipedia: Žižek's philosophical and political positions are not always clearly understandable, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance … Noam Chomsky deems Žižek guilty of "using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever", adding that his views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.

I’ve posted about this multiple times already, but I keep coming back to that one mutual who says there’s no difference between magic and science you don’t understand. I think this is the worst take a person is capable of having, and whether or not a take is capable of being “good” or “bad” depends on whether or not it’s downstream of this take.

The real question, the one this take is a distraction from, isn’t “do you know the truth?” It’s “if I tell you the truth, will you kill me for it?”

Stephen Law argues that “you can’t jump in the same river twice” conflates two different definitions of “same.” If two bowling balls are identical, they’re qualitatively the same. If a black bowling ball is painted white, it’s quantitatively the same as when it was black. It’s arbitrary that our language uses the word ”same” for both of these definitions, and if we used a different word for one of those definitions, the fallacy would be obvious.

In a lot of ways, my vision of utopia is a world of absolute banality. I want a world where you argue with your girlfriend, or your workmate isn’t doing her share of the work, or your parents don’t understand your artistic endeavors, and that’s the biggest thing you have to worry about. I want a world where politics is meaningless, because there aren’t any remaining issues a politician could fix. Where any religion that sustains itself by justifying suffering no longer has enough sufferers to market to. Where heroism is no bigger than fighting a fire or preventing a bar fight, because there are no great injustices left to oppose. I want a world of little joys and little hurts.

Many people would call this horrifying. I think the same of your utopias.

I’ve been thinking about thathopeyetlives. I think we’re equally strident about the same things, just in opposite directions.

I’m not going to get into too much detail about Hope, because I think he can do that more accurately himself. But my impression is that he thinks the purpose of humanity is to serve ideals. There’s a repeated pattern where someone tells him his ideals are hurting people, and he’s disgusted that they would think that’s a valid reason to abandon ideals.

I think the purpose of ideals is to serve humanity. On our own, it’s easy for us to help ourselves and our friends, but harder for us to help people we don’t know. There are many ways to help people, but there are recurring patterns to be aware of, and we can codify these patterns as ideals, like the Golden Rule or the cardinal virtues.

There’s a Terry Pratchett quote about how lives are more valuable than causes, because you can find a new cause, but you only get one life. I don’t know if he actually meant anyone to agree with the character who says it, but I do believe that life should buy life. Take suicide bombing—are your people really going to live longer or better because you’re killing yourself? Or are you just benefiting some old man in a cave who likes having power over you?

It’s not as simple as “never die for anything.” If other people are suffering or dying, there’s value in standing up. But I think it’s about the people themselves, not about something as vague as an ideal.

(Note that there’s a degree of asymmetry here. I support Hope’s desire to follow his own principles, so long as that doesn’t trample on other people. Hope opposes any values other than his own.)