Episoder
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[Original post here.]
Aeon writes:
The main complaint about this expression is that itâs ânot a real apology,â and thatâs true, it isnât. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isnât, because âIâm sorryâ is not a statement of contrition, itâs a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words.
This is the comment that best expresses what I wished Iâd said at the beginning.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sorry
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You look up from your massive mahogany desk.
âTom, right? Thank you for comingâŠhmmâŠI see youâre applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didnât even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.â
âThatâs what we want you to think,â says Tom.
âOf course. Then just one question for you. Whatâs something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?â
âI think weâre in a simulation.â
âHm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital weâre looking for something - â
âLet me finish. I think weâre in a simulation, and itâs a porno.â
âWhat?â
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/interview-day-at-thiel-capital
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Manglende episoder?
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Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
1. The Supernatural is DeadApril, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell.
The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing:
âTo conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession.â
Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported,
âArriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils.â
Dr. Constansâ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: âŠan examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-history-of-the
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And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended"
People hate this phrase. They say itâs a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss othersâ concerns. Well, Iâm sorry they feel that way.
People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions:
Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (âPlease lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addictionâ), you say no, and they say they feel like you donât love them.
Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relativeâs sacrifice and calling them a bad person.
Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized.
I see three classes of potential response:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that
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Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I.
Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called âpoetryâ, wondered what it was all about and where it came from. You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you canât easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as John Skeltonâs âSpeke, Parottâ [sic]:
My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse,
By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde,
Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce,
Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde;
Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde,
And send me to greate ladyes of estate;
Then Parot must have an almon or a date. -
Now that weâve gone over the pharmacology of the GLP-1 agonists, letâs get back to the economics.
Last time, we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants?
Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole
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In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge. His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind, is:
Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is â or would be â protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.
When I talk about wanting to ârigorously define itâ, I donât just mean the kind of definition you would put in a dictionary. Consider the debate around the definition of âwomanâ. Itâs perfectly fine for a dictionary to say âyou know, female person, opposite of maleâ. But the debaters want something you can use to adjudicate edge cases.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture
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Finalist #9 in the Book Review Contest
You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading an 11,000 word review of superhero comic books?
That is the first question I aim to answer in this review. If I am successful, maybe you will invest a little more time to discover the answer to the next four questions.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel
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Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds theyâre also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinsonâs, Alzheimerâs, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
Thereâs a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know itâs a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for âhave low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skinâ? Why would all the herbâs side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If youâre lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. Thatâs how real medicine works.
But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter âHtWWWâ) by Phillips Payson OâBrien?
It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einsteinâs penmanship.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was
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[original post here]
Table Of Contents
I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality
II. Comments By People Named In The Post
III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post
IV. Other Commentshttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche
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Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism.
We hate altruism, they said, not because weâre âbad and cruelâ, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength.
In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments.
My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia.
The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic PhilosopherFor me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else.
In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.
He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.
The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.
On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.
In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head
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I. Benthamâs Bulldog
Blogger âBenthamâs Bulldogâ recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality.
Nietzscheâs concept of âslave moralityâ (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where youâre not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use ârejection of slave moralityâ as a justification for badness and cruelty:
When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesnât materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesnât make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.
The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But itâs not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news
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[I havenât independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I canât guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024
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The âLibsOfTikTokâ Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadnât missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired.
Moral of the story: despite everything, thereâs apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before
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Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-language-began
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
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[Original post here]
Table Of Contents
1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections
2: Responses To Specific Comments
3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences
4: Closing Thoughtshttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally
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A guest post by Daniel Böttger
[Editorâs note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last yearâs review of On The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I donât necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and Iâm still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]
Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called âthe most important problem in the biological sciences", âthe last frontier of brain scienceâ, and âas important as anything that can possibly existâ as well as âcore toâ all value and ethics.
So, letâs solve that in a blog post.
- Vis mere
