im ari im dumb and idk what to call this
My mind is blanker than one of those things, you know, the blank ones
1.
I’ve run out of ideas for quotes. Thought I had more, but it seems like I never wrote them down and so now they’re gone.
I lead my school’s Jewish Student Union and my secretary the club’s secretary, Nadav Dueber (also writes here as
“I wet the bed until I was 26”
“No hah-blow ess-span-yole”
“I can rationally acknowledge that yes, there are countries outside of the US, but I just can't, no matter how hard I try, bring myself to care about them!”1
“If there’s 330 million people in the US but only 144 million homes, does that mean half of us are homeless? That can’t be right…”
There are so so many more of these. I mean, obviously they’re a good writer or something. But I worry my legacy at school will be characterized more by these than by anything I put in the yearbook on my own account. Maybe I should just admit defeat and submit one of theirs. This one’s a classic:
Now listen to this: I drink a glass of warm, not hot, it’s very important that it’s not hot. I drink milk every night before I go to bed. To make my dreams sweeter. And more lactatious.
And if I’m open to stealing my secretary’s the club secretary’s writing, I guess I should also be open to the infinitely-lame thing of stealing some famous person’s writing. It’s crazy to me how popular that is—how many seniors opt against their own voice each year. But I do have some ideas. This one also happens to be my little bio message on WhatsApp:
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction and frankly the fact that you haven’t given me $20 is SO evil.
- JS Mill
The last bit is usually edited out, but I’m pretty sure he did say it.
Alternatively, I could get a little spiritual with it. For example, my favorite passage from the Talmud:
As Rabbi Yitzḥak says: Since the day the Temple was destroyed, sexual pleasure was taken away from those who engage in permitted intercourse and given to transgressors, as it is stated: “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”
What a beautiful religion!
Right, the point of this preamble was to say: I’m done with the quotes and the recaps of old blog posts! Back to your regularly-scheduled sophomoric rambling.
2.
Moonclouds are prismatic.
The moon itself is a sort of bright blue, and immediately around it is a softer and bluer haze. The farther out you go, though, the redder and warmer the haze gets. Just before disappearing into the darkness, it becomes a fiery orange ring.
I found this beautifully strange when first noticing it last night. My dog took me on a longer walk than I’d intended. He just refused to turn around, and we looped all the way around to the main road by my house. A hilly road, with low visibility even during the day, and a reputation for being sped on often. It was also freezing cold.
We ran for the last block or so. He’s faster than me, and has been for a while, despite being about a foot and a half tall.
Thoroughly emasculated by my ten-pound poodle and out of breath, I thought back to the moonclouds. I don’t think it’s so strange after all. It’s light through water vapor—of course it’d be rainbowish.
I was in the Bay Area about a month ago. My grandmother took me out to Coyote Point and looking out at the Bay I saw a rainbow, and so I got excited and started taking a picture and pointed it out to her. She shrugged and asked me if it was a double, and I said no, and she waved me off and kept walking along the trail. They get them all the time out there. I see maybe two or three a year.
The proper conclusion is diminishing marginal utility, not value arising out of scarcity.
3.
A particular friend of mine wouldn’t have gotten that right, though.
Actually, the brother of the sibling of the false quotes.
He and I had an argument about wireheading recently, I think. At least it was something isomorphic. Maybe immortality or transhumanism.
The usual line is that death makes life worth living or suffering makes pleasure worth experience or work makes play fun… it’s stupid, whatever the construction. I mean, ask any kid if working makes playing more fun or if they’d rather just play! Brian Caplan says kids are more honest than adults, and they’re also more likely to say that work is stupid and dumb and it’d be better if they didn’t have to do it.
I’m remembering now that I already wrote this essay. Go read that, Ziv.
Agh, but it doesn’t quite go so far as defending wireheading. Only handing production over to an aligned AGI so humans can “pursue the higher pleasures which give our lives true meaning.” Shit.
What is true meaning, though? Why is it important? And why couldn’t a properly constructed experience machine give it to us? Does realness actually count for anything in morality? Why should it? As
argued recently, improving dream experiences seems morally valuable. Is there a substantial difference between an experience machine and a dream? How confident can we even really be that our waking experience is the real one, and our dream one fake (Cf. SMBC)? Ooh, I’ve still gotta watch the new season of Severance. Been on a bit of a Futurama kick lately, though.Boy, what a shitty version of the future that show is. Faster-than-light travel and spaceships and seemingly-limitless energy and perfect cryogenics and conscious superintelligent machines… And they’re not even wireheading! Why the fuck aren’t they wireheading?
God, I can’t do this right now. Just read Scott’s defense:
Imagine instead our posthuman descendants taking the form of Buddhas sitting on vast lotus thrones in a state of blissful tranquility. Their minds contain perfect awareness of everything that goes on in the Universe and the reasons why it happens, yet to each happening, from the fall of a sparrow to the self-immolation of a galaxy, they react only with acceptance and equanimity. Suffering and death long since having been optimized away, they have no moral obligation beyond sitting and reflecting on their own perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience – at which they feel boundless joy.
WHY ISN’T FRY A WIREHEAD GOD ON A LOTUS THRONE?? It’s been ONE THOUSAND YEARS, and there’s so much energy, how can they not make this happen?? How come the professor aged so normally?? Jesus.
4.
“jesus is counterfactually impotent”
I was looking through my Notes app, trying to see if I’d written more quote ideas anywhere. I hadn’t, but I had written the sentence “jesus is counterfactually impotent.”
This was in the course of brainstorming ideas for the Jewish Lives Prize, it looks like. An essay contest answering “Who do you think is the most influential Jew of all time? And why?” I suppose I needed some reason for it not to be Jesus, because pretty obviously it oughta be Jesus.
I mean, Christianity is huge. It took over Rome and pretty much all of Western civilization snowballed from there. And that’s all down to Jesus! I mean, it’s in the name, for Christ’s sake.2
How was I going to defend the idea that Jesus wasn’t so important in the end?
judaism/monotheism could’ve taken over rome on its own
jesus made it a bit more viral
but not that much above replacement
cf. mohammed eventually came along and made it all even more viral
There’s good evidence to back some of this up. Judaism definitely had a real shot at taking Rome, and maybe eventually could’ve succeeded. And Islam was definitely a religion much better at propagating itself. It’s now nearly caught up to Christianity despite the latter having about a 600 year head start.
Anyway, this all was supposed to lead to the conclusion that John von Neumann was actually the more influential Jew. Because his brain was so powerful and special that really no one else could’ve done all the great and awesome math things he did.
Really, the whole idea was very silly. Strictly speaking, the most influential Jew would have to be the first Jew. The one who gave birth to all the other Jews in the world.3 It’s Abraham!
But that answer is infinitely lamer even than Jesus. So probably it’s a good thing I never got around to writing the essay.
Well, this one’s true, but I’ve never said it!
Heh.
Converts notwithstanding, I guess. But they never would’ve converted if not for Abraham getting the whole thing rolling.