Descent into Knowledge

so I’m in the second day of being sick which is the worst and last night I woke up halfway through feeling like death and hell given flesh and set on fire (dry nose)

and I stopped at the store for some generic nyquil now I know this stuff doesn’t make you less sick but a dose of it CAN make you feel better just long enough to go to sleep, which is easier than what I had to do last night which was a 30 minute scalding shower at 4 AM (which worked!)

see it turns out being able to sleep instead of lying awake, ALL NIGHT, like I used to do as a kid is super helpful for getting better!

so there’s this woman next to the medicines and I keep walking because I have an attack of the scotts and randomly feel like everyone female is perceiving me like a super predator also I’m tired and sick and feel terrible

after all, hopefully the thing I want is somewhere else on the shelf because my klondike bars are melting

SPOILER IT WASN’T

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I woke this morning to mixed opportunity and failure baked into to a fine souffle of melancholy and self-hatred.  

This is my state.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alaska/@65.3690818,-157.403093,5z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x5400df9cc0aec01b:0xbcdb5e27a98adb35

Click, zoom, scroll around.  If one were interested in seeing the whole thing in person, from the scale and capacity of human mobility, it might as well have an infinitely large area.  

Canada, the Yukon, the Northwest passages, the icy islands even further north occupied only by the Inuit, surviving before any of our modern technology.  Siberia.  The United States itself and all those states, the countries of Europe and Asia.  

The world is a big place and I have seen very little of it.  I could spend my whole life exploring and seeing, and not see very much more relative to the extent of which exists.  Looking up at the stars has never made me feel small; it gives me a sense of power, of supremacy over the whole universe, as if it were my domain and mine alone to dominate.

Google maps makes me feel very small.  

I had a dream last night where I was eighty.  I remember being quite sad and confused, arguing with myself over how I could possibly be so old already when I had seen and done so little.  It felt unfair, as if something was twisted and moved from another domain in the multiverse and left terribly wrong.  

In Alaska, I am often surrounded by the very practical: the sorts of people who have physical strength, immediately useful knowledge, and the ability to feed and clothe themselves and survive in the cold wilds thousands of miles away from civilization - circumstances where they willingly place themselves.  In those locations, life is quite simple: if you do not do the work necessary to provide yourself food and shelter, you will die.  If you made a mistake in good faith or were a bit unlucky, you can die anyway.  There is no-one in authority to petition to provide you what you consider the supplies and amenities every human deserves to live.  If there are things you want, you work harder or learn more until you have the capability to get them yourself.  

I do not think we should all be relegated to that kind of life, but it is an interesting contrast to the Tumblr debates and perspectives of societal welfare.

I cannot help but compare and judge myself to people with the knowledge and ability in a hundred different domains to venture willingly into such an environment and flourish.

I go online, and I see the intellectual brilliance on display, and the decades spent learning advanced subjects which in some cases need genetic intelligence I may not even have; in the very least, they required dedication of a sort I have never shown.  

I know that the skills and abilities I do have are good for the people around me.  I know that I am probably not, in sum, a burden to humanity, and I know that I am taking immediate practical steps to advance those capabilities in multiple domains.  

But I wake up in the morning and take a look at that map before my shower and I feel too overwhelmed to step out of my room.  

cuddle4shton:

-weight

-appearance

-intelligence (or lack of) 

-skills (or lack of) 

-weird hobbies

-friends (or lack of) 

-body

-personality

-family

Who ever reblogs this will get a message in their inbox.

I AM INSECURE ABOUT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE THINGS.

(via funereal-disease)

nostalgebraist:

uncrediblehallq:

nostalgebraist:

uncrediblehallq:

nostalgebraist:

Pet peeve: people saying “high IQ” when they appear to mean nothing more than “smart” in the colloquial sense of that word

It sounds more science-y and more (pointlessly) contentious, but otherwise has no purpose that “smart” wouldn’t serve just as well, and in some ways is less useful as a descriptor.  (Whatever merits IQ tests may have, it’s widely agreed that they lose much discriminating power in sufficiently high IQ ranges; Christopher Langan, who has a 195 IQ and a crackpot theory of everything, is an exemplary case of a “high IQ person” but not of a “smart person.”  If you don’t want to bring Langan and similar people to mind, don’t say “high IQ.”)

I honestly have no issue calling Christopher Langan “smart”; to the extent he doesn’t fit the popular notion of “smart person,” I think that just shows this notion isn’t a useful concept. A lot of people seem to think that if a smart person said something, you’re not allowed to just dismiss it as crazy, but this is hard to square with e.g. Isaac Newton’s obsession with alchemy and numerology.

My point is more that the further up you go, the further “high IQ” and “smart” diverge.  “Extremely high IQ” and “extremely smart” are very, very different sets of people.  As far as I know most famous scientists (say) don’t have exceptionally high IQs, nor are most people with exceptionally high IQs (Langan, high IQ society members, et. al.) especially accomplished.

Granted, the correspondence is better at lower levels of ability, but the exemplars of “high IQ-ness” are very different from the exemplars of “smartness,” and to the extent that we judge intelligence in a prototype-based fashion, this is a problem.  Langan may be smart, but it would be a severe error to use “similarity to Langan” as a proxy for intelligence.

OK, I agree IQ tests aren’t very accurate at extreme levels. Though AFAICT they’re still pretty accurate at the, say, 130+ or 140+ level, which is what I’d tend to assume people mean when they say “high IQ.”

Also, you seem to be conflating “smarts” with “success” (at intellectual pursuits?) Which… obviously they are different things? Very obviously. Being smart helps with being successful but there are other factors.

I’m using “intellectually successful” as a proxy for “smart” which I think is more reliable in some ways than “high IQ.”

If all I know about someone is their IQ, then I guess I’ll assess how smart they are on the basis of their IQ, but if I know their IQ and their intellectual output, the latter will tend to outweigh the former.  Langan has an IQ of 195 and writes incoherent pseudo-philosophy; for the definition of “smart” I personally use, he doesn’t seem all that smart.  On the other side, Richard Feynman reportedly had an IQ of 125, which is surprisingly low, but given his accomplishments I am pretty confident he’s very smart.  In both cases, the intellectual output takes precedence; learning Feynman’s IQ didn’t make me say “okay, I guess he wasn’t really smart,” and learning about Langan’s pseudo-philosophy did make me say “huh, turns out he’s not that smart.”

(I guess this is because I see “smartness” as involving the ability to produce good intellectual output; roughly, a smart person is someone I would want to delegate an intellectual problem to, because I would be confident they’d do good work on it.  I’ve been reading Keith Stanovich’s “What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought” which says that IQ tests don’t measure rationality – either instrumental or epistemic – which could explain why they don’t fully capture my notion of “smartness.”  Although Stanovich claims that colloquial ideas about intelligence vacillate between “IQ” and “IQ + rationality” and this leads to a lot of confusion, so maybe I shouldn’t expect the colloquial idea of intelligence to do the work I want it to do.)

Afaik the 125 number is anecdotal and there is no actual reliable evidence for Feynman’s score. Would be happy to see source if one exists

argumate:

argumate:

It’s been too long since I spammed some basic income all over your dash.

davidsevera said: Alaska pays all residents a yearly dividend out of oil revenue, but it’s only between $1000 and $2000.

I’m able to resist the temptation to make sarcastic comments about Alaska, and say that sounds like a great idea! And a demonstration that it’s possible to have a policy like that without the world ending. And it could be scaled up slowly.

LEAVE ALASKA ALONE

invertedgender:

• be muscular
• be fathers
• financially support you
• have short hair
• fix cars
• have sex with you
• be masculine
• be stoic
• shave
• work out
• be fashionable
• avoid wearing pink
• love women
• be the media’s idea of perfection
• listen to your bullshit
• have a penis

(via somervta)

I feel really fantastic
Am I the only person who really loves traveling? It’s suck but also awesome

And music
Really music

I love ya all

by all rights i should be asleep

but it’s only now that my silly body finally had the energy to get things done 

I mean I should know this is how it goes I finished studying for all my college exams at 5 AM so I could take them at 7,  tbh, I’m surprised the Getting Things Done happened This Night already when I’m flying out tomorrow - except for the amount of non-avoidable non-prep work necessary

BUT THE THINGS ARE DONE AND I FLEE CLOUDY WEATHER.  FINE

IF ANYONE IN SF HAS ANY RECOMMENDATION FOR A THING I HAVE TO SEE/DO WHILE THERE PLEASE NOTIFY.