lynn / clarissa

Unintentionally, one of the big lessons about that piece on sports betting in the Atlantic is that it shows how an environment that tells stories of the inevitable seduction of the good by addiction---in the author's case, Mormonism---creates self-fulfilling prophecies

I regret to inform you that if you understand stupidity as a chosen willful ignorance, and not an innate failing, you are more angry all the time, not less

I really need to write that 'zine about how everyone argues like a flat-earther and they don't even know it

I saw a post recently that was arguing that you should stop using alcohol wipes when giving yourself hrt injections because it's too wasteful, literally saying that the possibility of sepsis is worth not using a square inch of cotton per week.

They weren't arguing for more efficient solutions, ways of recycling the material, or anything like that. It was just "you should facetank risk of infection in order to not create waste"

And goddamn isn't that everything I've been noticing lately about how people talk about technology and progress and waste these days; a kind of reactionary tech-pessimism.

I recently had a student argue that we should never have invested in NASA or the space program because rocketry can also be used for weapons, damn all the other things that came out of it like weather satellites.

Westerners literally make up stories about the Fukushima Daiichi plant, talking about people who are walking-dead cleaning up the site since they'd already had a lethal level of radiation exposure. Sorry, what's that? No one died from radiation exposure when Fukushima Daiichi failed? That doesn't feel right.

The power grid! My god, the power grid. Everyone is so hung up on "what if we ban datacenters" but, guys, the US power grid has been decaying from austerity and intentional conservative sabotage for decades. Remember when rotted infrastructure caused wildfires a few years ago in California? The primer driver of your power bills is that, not facilities still under construction. We have to fight and build solar and improve transmission between states so we can actually send that electricity places!

Like we can't embrace our own "reject modernity". We just can't. The answer can't be "stop using air conditioning", "stop using electricity", "stop using satellites", "stop using alcohol wipes".

"high functioning"/"low functioning" is such a pointless designation

With preparation I'm a smooth-talking persuasive speaker who can be charming, tell jokes, and command an audience.

I am also at all times a sufficiently loud sound or a misplaced object away from being non-verbal and rocking for an hour.

Isabelle/HOL is an amazing theorem proving system wrapped in just truly atrocious syntax and I think that's why it never got as popular as it could have.

Protesting is cringe and pointless. Striking is cringe and pointless. Resistance in any way is cringe and pointless. Dying to protect others is cringe and pointless.

Complaining about people who do things while living in a little bubble far from the people being hurt?

Fuck, man, that's the shit that makes revolutions. I'm basically a hero.

Number of days I've been hungover from actually drinking: 2
Number of days I've been hungover because my body just doesn't know how to manage its salts and fluid reserves: hundreds

Husserl was an interesting philosopher for a lot of reasons but one is that he was perpetually trying to get a rigorous grasp on the problem he wanted to solve and writing new introductions setting up the work ahead in more refined ways so that his students and their students in turn could make real progress

This didn't happen, mind you, but it's interesting to see volumes spent on just trying to get the right setup to begin

When you see people arguing with each other on the internet and it's clear they're both using LLMs to generate the replies we should call that a Poketrainer fight

A very spicy take I have is that the "wow suddenly there are fake citations in papers" phenomenon is less about AI and more like the way that trans women have lower breast cancer risk but a younger age of first discovery: once circumstances force you to check regularly you find things more often

Like, you get it, right? A culture of not checking what the fuck you were citing can't have arisen overnight. Maybe the phenomenon of incorrect names and titles showing up in bibliographies is new, but it definitely means that there were A Lot of "fake citations"-qua-"unread papers unrelated to the claim they supposedly support" already.

The emotionally double-edged sword of realizing that your "novel" idea is, in fact, already being explored by others

God it makes so much sense learning that Colin Wright, a really big anti-trans/anti-woke grifter type who uses his biology PhD to argue that he's an authority, hasn't been able to get an academic job because his advisor has been disgraced for falsifying data and papers he himself co-authored are part of that now retracted body of work