this is supposedly the age of mammals but those little shifty dinosaurs snuck right out of their mass extinction and taught themselves to fly. i don’t trust any of this.
Farnham: So, I’ve decided to work on a side project
Farnham: And I’ve got it, like, deeply conceptualized
Farnham: Which I usually don’t
Farnham: So I figured I’d run it by you
Farnham: See what you think of the premise
Benedict: ?
Farnham: Okay, so we open on this alternative medical company.
Farnham: Scarborough Fair Pharmaceuticals — specializing in herbal medicine a step removed from homeopathy
Farnham: And they release a drug that, they claim, allows one to instinctively understand cryptic speech, mysticism, etc.
Farnham: Like, not just in the sense some people use, where you’re in the right mindframe and get suggestible and your brain comes up with whatever it wants
Farnham: As in, you actually gain the ability to instinctively parse gurus, and come out with what they /meant/ instead of whatever they /said/
Farnham: Of course, no one believes them; that’d be a ridiculous claim from almost any corporation, let alone a little alternative outlet
Farnham: So they decide to publicly perform a study
Farnham: They dose up an experimental group and a control and send them, independently, to the lectures of Dr. Lee Kendricks
Farnham: And this guy is basically my Dr. Gene Ray, btw
Benedict: uh oh
Farnham: Dr. Lee’s been giving lectures for years, and everyone on the internet is basically convinced that he’s spouting the same old Christian conspiracy material, Templars Freemasons the Devil etc. etc.
Farnham: They send in these groups, and the control submits reports on what they think he said — fractured, without consensus, etc. etc.
Farnham: The experimental group all produce, independently, nearly identical reports on his claims
Farnham: They all report his claims thus: pink appears on the color wheel as between red and purple, but the spectrum of light doesn’t seem to support that, right?
Farnham: Dr. Lee Kendricks says that this is because pink — especially certain shades of pink — are intrusions into reality
Farnham: That is, they are the color of time itself, showing through otherwise mundane light
Farnham: (Taking inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s VALIS there)
Farnham: And he claims that great works of art, ones that seem timeless, are /actually/ timeless — that they’re inspired via the light by the presence of pink images of that art in the future
Farnham: So all timeless great art is acausal
Farnham: and the first instance, he says — not that that’s super consistent with the timeless thing, but you know, guru — the first instance of this phenomenon was the Pieta
Farnham: And as a result, time has essentially been transmuted into copies of the Pieta
Benedict: i’m getting suspicious
Farnham: The medium through which time works uses endless images of the Virgin Mary as a medium
Farnham: I’m sort of trying for an EVA feel
Farnham: Although I know I do that all too often
Farnham: Y’know, religious concepts slightly misapplied
Farnham: For ridiculous Gnostic coolness
Farnham: And so, Dr. Lee Kendricks comes out and verifies the whole thing — yes, these are his exact claims
Farnham: And zero people expected this — like, this drug Scarborough Fair Pharma has released is essentialy telepathy
Farnham: *essentially
Farnham: induced psychic powers via alternative medicine
Farnham: of course, no one quite considers Dr. Kendricks’s claims as viable in any way, but they’re shocked that they could parse Time Cube-equivalent so perfectly
Farnham: So Scarborough Fair Pharmaceuticals gets caught up in this marketing blitz
Farnham: And they’re still slightly stunned about being proven right (or close enough) in a scientific way
Farnham: So they rewrite the slogan to be about the success of the test:
Farnham: “Parse Lee, sage, ’bout rose Marian time!”
Benedict: i fuckin’
Benedict: god damn it
Benedict: i got suspicious too late
Farnham: Scarborough Fair Pharmaceuticals
Farnham: sounds just legitimate enough
Farnham: only to factor into the pun!
Farnham: !!!
Benedict: wait wh
Benedict: oh god damn it, i forgot that was in the
Benedict: if i’d remembered the lyrics i would have worried a lot earlier
Farnham: get dunked on
Benedict: oh fUCK ME AND THEY’RE HERBAL ALTERNATIVE-
Benedict: FRIGGIN
Farnham: LAYERS, NERD
Farnham: LAYERS
Benedict: it’s all ogre for me
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #oh my god #puns
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”
*waits, with sense of impending doom, for the parts of my dash reblogging this quote to agree with it and the parts reblogging it to oppose it to find each other*
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#…and I may have just sped up the process or even made it more likely by posting this #at least there’s the possibility it will be a productive argument? #*sighs* #*curls into ball* #effective altruism
I have never once been able to read your URL as “Ozymandias Two Seven One.” It’s always “Ozymandias 27182818…”, “Ozymandias e”, or in extreme cases “ozymandiase”, and I don’t speak enough biochemistry to know what that enzyme even does.
On the other hand, it took me MONTHS to realize that was e. Embarrassing.
It helps to have known their previous username :D
I did! I still didn’t figure it out!
…well shit.
Um.
*awkward*
(I never noticed and it’s been maybe a year and I’ve been working with natural exponentials and logarithms in math class)
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#(although to be fair I’ve been using the e button on my calculator) #(so the actual *value* of e doesn’t come up that much) #(maybe if we were using approximations I’d have figured it out) #reply via reblog #math
Wow. This is a truly excellent work of Rationalist Social Justice. Status 451 may have just redeemed itself in my eyes.
(Also, I had no idea just how deeply I’d internalized the “nerd model” of communication. Not even just with other people; my internal monologue consists largely of me Taymonsplaining things to myself. Including while reading this article.)
This makes a ton of sense to me. The whole concept that “privileged people” are not supposed to correct “marginalized people” makes me instinctively feel like people are trying to avoid intellectual discussion and trying to evade defending their perspective or ideas. Which bothers me in part because I don’t want to be taken less seriously BECAUSE I’m marginalized – I’m concerned I’ll be dismissed as a politikid if I talk about it at all.
Where to them it might be more like “we don’t have the advantage of a whole long field of study with far-reaching traditions, but that doesn’t make my perspective invalid. Please take seriously the idea that a different way of thinking about that might make sense.”
The opening section about New York listening is a great explanation of competing access needs.
And, yeah, I feel like different communication norms is a part of what’s going on in peoples’ reactions to learning ‘don’t correct marginalized people’. To people like me who feel infinitely more comfortable with the information model of communication, “don’t correct marginalized people” almost comes across as “exclude marginalized people: cut them off from the flow of ideas and corrections and debates and redefinitions”. When a conversation is almost entirely about corrections and counter-corrections and reframings, “don’t argue with people” means “don’t take their ideas seriously”.
Just like if you told the New Yorker “don’t interrupt me while talking”, they might think you mean “don’t behave in a way distinguishable from a flowerpot” and decide you don’t actually care about them as a listener.
For people coming from a different communicative context, though, “don’t correct marginalized people” means “when people correct me, it’s almost always to assert the worthlessness of my ideas, not to engage with them. I don’t expect, when I’m corrected, that we’ve embarked on a back-and-forth of refining ideas; I expect that you’re corralling excuses to dismiss me. I can’t override this expectation (and it’s usually warranted, anyway) so if you want to actually hear my ideas communicated and fully realized, don’t offer your objections and disagreements and thought experiments. Doing that doesn’t include me, even if it is how you always communicate.”
…huh. I’m having a lot of trouble trying to map this article’s descriptions to my own life, because to me, the defining experience of navigating social-justice culture is constantly perceiving status games that nobody else would admit to seeing and that may not even have existed. (Seeing everything in terms of hierarchies and commands is what They do, after all. We are better than that. (Not that anyone would phrase it in quite that way, of course.)) I have had conversations that I perceived as an exchange of carefully veiled insults and insinuations that the other person should be outcast, and that I suspect (but am not certain) the other person perceived as friendly conversation about, say, the downsides of cleverness-based power fantasies. I have had so many conversations that I suspect the other person perceived as commiserating and that I perceived as them presenting their credentials and demanding to inspect mine.
I feel better around rationalists not because they lack hierarchical thinking but precisely because they acknowledge it. In general, they tend to recognise when things they say might be interpreted as orders and are careful to make it clear when things are not orders. And if it’s not clear, *it is permitted to ask for clarification on whether something was an order*. I use such extreme emphasis because it’s very, very important. Thinking in terms of “mandatory” and “permitted” and “forbidden” (rather than “right” and “okay” and “wrong”) isn’t itself forbidden here! I actually feel reasonably confident that you won’t jump all over me for writing this post! (Slightly less confident than I was before you reblogged this, but still enough that I’m willing to post it.) I don’t know whether you understand how huge a relief that is.
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#not only am I reasonably confident people from the rationalist-sphere won’t jump on me for writing this #I am even cautiously optimistic some of them might stand up for me if somebody *else* jumps on me #which in the end is the deciding factor in pressing ‘reblog’ rather than ‘close’ #reply via reblog #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
NASA Boeing 747 with Space Shuttle Endeavour on her back
The mid-air mating of a space shuttle with a 747.
Though their offspring will be sterile like a mule, Space Shuttles and 747s are close enough genetically to reproduce together, leading some scientists to believe they have a very recent common ancestor, possibly the Bell X-1.
Rudimentary social characteristics in both Shuttle and 747 groupings however make the mating a sort of taboo. If caught, the shuttle will face ostracization from its herd. The 747 my actually be dismantled by others of its kind. And the offspring not only faces social isolation, but runs a high risk of deformity:
Of course these risks are nothing compared to the recorded instance of a biplane mating with a tank:
That’s an Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka btw and it’s real.
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#pretty things #proud citizen of The Future #(and for the addition:) #storytime
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 