January Miscellany
Cambridge commas, links, and life updates
Winter has finally come to the upper midwest!
This is my favorite part about living here: snow falls, and it sticks.
I took a walk yesterday in a park in Ypsilanti by the river: kids are sledding and throwing snowballs, and it’s a real happy sight. When I slipped on some ice and fell on my ass, I didn’t even have the capacity to be ashamed. ‘Tis the season!
Cambridge Commas
I’ve been thinking a lot about grammar and language recently. My support for the Oxford comma is by now well-documented, but I want to take it further.
To clarify: I love punctuation. My essays are full of em-dashes, and my text messages full of ellipses, because punctuation is a great way of writing down non-verbal cues. So much of how we communicate with each other is hidden in the pauses and gestures and looks that we give, not in the words that we say—punctuation is the only way to get that meaning across in writing.
When you learn to write, you’re told that the period is for the end of a thought, and the comma is for a pause—for when the reader should take a breath. And only later on, maybe in high school, once your English teacher gets tired of reading massive run-on sentences, do you get more specific rules. Hell, it took until 11th grade for me to have even heard of a comma splice—and I’m a massive punctuation nerd.
There are also much more complicated formations that no one outside of highly-literary circles cares about—I learned of syllepsis just the other day, reading Scott Alexander’s rundown of old psychiatric ads in my bed and a state of amazement.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: right now, I only want to talk about commas.
Scott’s most recent post is about bureaucracy. It’s good and makes sense, but I read it while tired and it wasn’t interesting enough to stop one passage from grammatically distracting me. Scott quotes an executive from Coinbase:
“All of us are begging for sensible standards that would allow us to get back to building great products and services and spend less time and frankly, less money, arguing over legal definitions and statutes.”
Can you spot the missing commas?
I really strongly feel that the sentence should read “…building great products and services[,] and spend less time and[,] frankly, less money, arguing over…”
The “and[,] frankly, less money,” bit just makes perfect sense to me. “Frankly” is a simple aside, and should be set off from the rest of the sentence, even though it leads to this sort of awkward nesting-asides structure with “less money.” The exec just got this wrong.
The other insertion, though, between “…building great products and services” and the rest of the sentence, is sort of a comma splice. But it still absolutely feels right, enough that I think this should be considered as ambiguous a case as the Oxford comma—I call it the Cambridge comma.
(Have you noticed all the Cambridge commas I’ve used to this point—how many times I’ve split “and”-able clauses with “, and” instead? I do it a lot…)
The exec’s sentence has an obsession with the word “and.” Its second half has the structure: “[verb 1] [obj. 1] and [obj. 2] and [verb 2] [obj. 3] and {aside {aside}} [verb 3] [obj. 4] and [obj. 5].”
There are three different verbs, and two of them act on multiple objects!
The last [verb] [obj.] and [obj] triplet is set off from the rest of the sentence by the nested {aside {aside}} we discussed before—it’s just fine.
The problem is that the first and second verbs sort of run into each other. “And” is first being used to pair objects that the first verb acts on, and then immediately afterward it’s used to add another verb to the sentence. These are two totally different functions, and the incongruence was more than enough to confuse me in my somewhat-diminished state. The Cambridge comma does what a comma should do—inserts a little pause. It’s nice, it’s clarifying, and it hurts no one. Just like its older cousin.
What I’m Reading
I’ve never done a links post before, but, frankly, I feel like I’ve been having some trouble expressing my beliefs recently, and it might be helpful to share some of my intellectual world with the people I’m expressing to. I’ve also just been reading lots and lots of things, and I think most are pretty fun and interesting.
There’s another, selfish benefit: I want this post to serve as a sort of time capsule or repository for future me, who will undoubtedly have forgotten much or most of the wisdom contained here.
Old SlateStarCodex. Scott Alexander is truly an incredible writer, and between 2014 and 2018 or so, he was really in his prime. His work is incredibly erudite, and his style is almost addictively readable. Some highlights:
Different Worlds. Maybe the most important idea to how I try to interact with other people these days. It makes a compelling case for being empathetic and charitable, and for being humble and cautious in applying one’s own worldview broadly—I’m trying to update in that direction.
…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes. Primary conclusion: jocks rule, nerds drool. Scott replies to an complimentary comment: “I sort of debated whether to post this because it was really silly, so it’s nice to get positive feedback.” Considering how clever and valuable I think this essay is, that response has me worried about the impact of Impostor Syndrome on the world. Probably not as much of a drag on human knowledge as poverty or malaria, but certainly not a small one. I think I’ll be taking the jump with more borderline-weird posts as a mechanism to fight this tendency in myself.
Answer to Job. Christians are silly, modern theodicies are wacky (cf. Bentham’s Bulldog), and Scott is a hell of a writer. Also of note:
The Sequences. I’ve put off reading Eliezer Yudkowsky’s introduction to the Art of Rationality long enough. It’s probably one of the most important things I or anyone else can get good at; each post is stuffed full of wisdom and insight. Some highlights so far (I’m through Map and Territory, plus a little more):
Semantic Stopsigns. Ideology inculcates “semantic stopsigns:” phrases and concepts which, when invoked, shut down our ability to investigate and think critically.
Guessing the Teacher’s Password. On what it means to actually learn (and why school tends to be a bad place to do that).
Lawful Uncertainty. “Subjects were asked to predict whether the next card the experimenter turned over would be red or blue in a context in which 70% of the cards were blue, but in which the sequence of red and blue cards was totally random.” The results may shock you…
The Simple Truth. Yudkowsky writing allegory is Yudkowsky at hist best. If you only follow one link, let it be this one.
Erik Hoel on societal decline. We’re heading in a very weird, very dystopian direction, and it’s mostly just because we’re not paying enough attention. Wake up and fight.
Cosmopolis. In truth, I read this book a little while ago, but that Erik Hoel post references its author, Don DeLillo, and for good reason (though Hoel is a bit more critical than I would be). It freaked me out, that book. I’d really rather we didn’t end up there. Book review maybe forthcoming possibly.
Slaughterhouse Five. I thought I’d read it years ago, but apparently not. Got it off a bookshelf at my great-uncle’s house, and am around 80% done.
Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say. Based on Bryan Caplan’s recommendation. This is a self-help/relationship-help book which aims to help men and women communicate effectively. Its thesis is that men often swallow their feelings, and that while they need to take some responsibility for being more vocal, women also should do a better job of being understanding and open to men’s complaints. I’ve found it convincing so far.
Project Xanadu. Oh, what could have been. Xanadu was the first hypertext system—it predates Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. Bad luck and circumstance meant that the WWW won out, and how I wish it hadn’t. Reading through those old SSC articles, so so many links were broken—and most of them are less than a decade old! Xanadu would’ve fixed all that—connection upon connection upon connection, our computerized world could have held the vast network of human knowledge steady and complete. Xanadu’s creator, Ted Nelson, gives a beautiful interview to filmmaker Werner Herzog here:
“There are two contradictory slogans: one is that continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. On the other hand, you say, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ I prefer the latter. Because I don’t want to be remembered as the guy who didn’t.”
What Else I’m Up To
Blogs, in the early days, were so personal. I like writing essays here, but I also want to do more of that—more of the me-sharing.
I’ve got a few essay-type things I want to write soon. None of these are promises, but consider them strong signals of intent:
All arguments beg the question. In response to this annoying article, basically: (1) yeah, deductive arguments beg the question; (2) really, all arguments are deductive arguments; (3) so all arguments beg the question; (4) that’s ok. Arguments aren’t for convincing someone who disagrees on specific logical grounds—they’re for convincing you that certain premises are equivalent to certain conclusions. It’s an exercise in rephrasing, with the hope that someone will be convinced by the new phrasing to believe in the underlying statement.
Reviewing Cosmopolis. I mentioned this before—it’s a cool book, and I might try to do a write-up.
Xanadu. This might also take the form of a book review (it’s a format I want to get more comfortable with) if I can get my hands on a pdf copy of one of Ted Nelson’s manifestos. My usual methods have so far been unsuccessful, mostly because my computer’s been spazzing out since I started fucking with network config stuff.
Fiction? I’ve written short stories in the past to absolutely zero acclaim, but haven’t ever put a narrative up here. I think doing this fits into the Impostor Syndrome–fighting category… it’s a thing worth practicing for its own sake, and hopefully I’ll muster the courage.
On Model United Nations. I’ve had like a quarter of this post written for the past month and a half now, just need to find some time to sit down and finish it.
Speaking of Model UN… I have a conference coming up. Model UN at the University of Michigan starts this week, and I’ll be in the Manhattan Project committee representing Congressman Sam Rayburn. He’s a pretty minor character and, so far, I’ve done exactly zero preparation, so it’s possible I’ll really senior-out on this one and give it no effort. It’s about equally possible that my competitive instinct takes control and I end up giving way too much effort. We’ll see! I’m excited to learn more about non-proliferation; maybe I’ll get enough material for a post on that too.
On the topic of laziness and senioritis… I go to an IB school, which sucks, because I still have lots of work to do this year. I’m revising lab reports in Physics and Chemistry right now, and would like to quickly highlight how good I am at making graphs of things (also see my work on PSAT scores):
I’m also working on my Theory of Knowledge (TOK) senior essay. TOK is an IB-required class that teaches epistemology poorly to students who give zero shits about learning epistemology. I like it a lot (there are no other philosophy classes for me to take), but it’s also fairly soul-crushing to be in that classroom.
My essay is presently quite shoddy: the feedback I got reads, in part, “The essay sometimes prioritizes humor over depth, leading to underdeveloped arguments.” Sigh.
Another time-suck: over the last few months, I’ve written approximately eighteen million college application essays. Most of them are smarmy and annoying, but a couple are good, and I might share them here at some point.
The big update on that front is that I got into Yale during the Early Application round. How exciting! I’m very glad. I also am totally unsure of what to do, and will take any advice from anyone at this point.
And my dad got some new coffee cups… shtein.net/coffee.
Happy New Year!
Congratulations on Yale! You'll fit in so well.
I love nelson dearly