Eight of Cups
Sunday 7 July 2019, 11:44Summer 2019 marks eleven years since I completed my PhD, and three since I decided to stop looking for an academic job. I want to write about that but it's hard to do so. I've written and thrown away many drafts of comments on my own experience, what was promised, what I found instead, and where I stand now.
When they bring in the idols
Wednesday 1 May 2019, 16:51I once saw the leaders of a student group insert a paragraph at the start of a pagan ritual, pointedly giving it top billing over the other introductory material, to pledge allegiance to one side of a then-current highly controversial issue in international politics. "We believe..." was the statement they read out in circle, speaking without permission on behalf of me and the rest of the group, ahead of something I certainly did not believe, something that was not closely connected to the personal experience of anybody present, that had nothing to do with the subject of the main ritual, and indeed was worded in such a way as to invoke a pantheon completely alien from the one I'd come to practice that day; incidentally breaking the rules of our own practice regarding what and who gets invoked first. It was not "We believe that China should end its occupation of Tibet" supported by some quotes from Buddhist scripture and inserted at the start of a Wiccan rite, but that's the kind of thing you should imagine.
Horse girls considered
Thursday 11 April 2019, 13:27Uma Musume Pretty Derby (ウマ娘プリティーダービー, hereinafter UMPD; the first couple words translate as "horse girl") was a hit anime series in 2018. It quickly became a favourite topic of fan artists on Twitter and the federated network, largely because of the cute character designs. It's basically a sports anime, which is not exactly my favourite style, and it took me some time to get around to watching it, but I finally did in December and I became interested in a number of questions about the world-building.
I'm sure UMPD was never meant to be "hard SF" and the writers, throughout the series, just did what they thought would be cute without regard to whether it made any sense; but let's see how far we can go on the assumption that this show actually does depict a consistent world that makes some sort of sense. What kind of world is it?
The imagination gap, part 3
Monday 17 December 2018, 03:00This is the final part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit in hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about a difference between what is real and what is imagined.
TeXLiveからMediaWikiのために最小のインストールは何ですか？
Wednesday 12 December 2018, 21:02MediaWikiは有名とポピュラーなソフトです。 もちろんWikipediaがMediaWikiを使っています。 その上、多数のサイトはMediaWikiを使っています。 たとえば、僕のタロットサイト「edifyingfellowship.org」でMediaWikiが使われます。 MediaWikiはLaTeXのプラグインあります。 プラグインとLaTeXのインストール時Wikiで数学の植字が出来ます。 でもTeXLiveの全部インストールなら5.7Gが使われます。 小さいウェブサーバのでTeXLiveが大き過ぎるのようです。 このブログでMediaWikiのためにTeXLiveの最小のインストールを考えましょう。
これは「TeX and LaTeX Advent Calendar 2018」の13日目の記事です。 12日目はkn1chtさんです。 14日目はMizukiSonokoさんです。 外の年も記事を書きました。 2014 2015 2016 2017
The imagination gap, part 2
Wednesday 12 December 2018, 21:01This is the second part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit in hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about a difference between what is real and what is imagined. In the first part, I discussed this deficit as an abstraction. In this second part, I'll look at some legal and political examples.
The imagination gap, part 1
Monday 10 December 2018, 03:00A deficit in hypothetical cognition
In The World As If, Sarah Perry gives "an account of how magical thinking made us modern." She discusses how to define "magical thinking" and suggests that the diverse things to which people apply that label form "a collection of stigmatized examples of a more general, and generally useful, cognitive capacity." Namely, the capacity to entertain false, "not expected to be proven," or otherwise not exactly true propositions as if they were true.
Although magical thinking may often be called a behaviour of children or of those in primitive cultures, what Perry calls the "as if" mode of thought (I want to also include "what if") is in no way primitive. The view that magical thinking is for children and the uneducated can and should be inverted: mastery of hypothetical "as if" cognition is necessary for functioning as an adult in a literate technological society, and characteristic of the most sophisticated thinking human beings ever do.
Syntax differences hide splits in meaning
Friday 7 September 2018, 17:33One way people divide themselves into tribes is over word usage. If one tribe claims a certain sequence of letters has a certain meaning, and another claims it has a different meaning, then there are plenty of opportunities for them to misunderstand each other or each declare the other Wrong. There may not be a lot we can do about it when there's a direct disagreement on the one true meaning of exactly one word.
However, human language is more complicated than that. One sequence of letters may not have just one meaning and in particular, it may be used in more than one syntactic role such that the different ways of using it have different meanings. At that point it may not even be right to call it one "word"; it is two words, with different meanings and also different grammar, that only happen to share a spelling. And if two tribes use words that differ in this way, maybe there is some hope of building a bridge between them by making clear that their uses of the same sequence of letters really refer to different things and do not need to have identical meaning. That is what I'd like to talk about here: how different syntax can be a clue to different meaning.
On human needs
Saturday 1 September 2018, 06:25What if our response to homelessness was to have activist marches against the toxic idea that housing is a right; to lecture homeless persons on how evil they are for feeling entitled to housing; campaign for their exclusion from job opportunities, education, and any other path that might allow them to gain access to housing under their own power; and (for the most compassionate of us) try to help them understand that not having shelter, is okay and doesn't make them bad people?
Motto
Wednesday 29 August 2018, 10:01Today I changed the motto on this Web site, and in my email signature, to read "People before tribes"; it formerly referred to "principles." Where it appears in Japanese translation, I've similarly changed 理 to 族. The intended meaning has not changed, but in the years since I started using it, the former wording has become too easily misunderstood, often as the direct opposite of what I intended for it to mean.
As human beings we naturally divide ourselves up into groups that purport to be about beliefs and ideologies, and we tend to hate those of other groups irrationally and on the basis of entire groups; we are inclined to lose sight of the fact that everybody is human and everybody's a unique individual not well described by their group membership. It's important to pay attention to individuals (people) and to actively ignore membership in identity groups (tribes). That is what my motto is about. But it's possible to misread the words if you think that "people" actually means tribes and that "principles" refers to important ideas - like the important idea of being blind to identity group membership, itself.
At the time I first started using this motto, it was obscure and uncontroversial. Nobody else was writing much about these things. Unfortunately, there's been a great rise in the popularity of the opposite of my position in the last few years, and it has become a topic of general discussion, to the extent that relentless one-sided chanting can be called any kind of "discussion." I've also become more acutely aware of the practical irrelevance of the literal content of belief in principles to groups that claim to define themselves by principles, and I want to talk about group membership directly when literal belief is not the real issue. As a result, it has become more important to make sure that I'm not misunderstood, and although it's a shame to lose the snappy alliteration of the old wording, this change seems important.
