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the whole "driving around Christmas day is much more dangerous" thing is statistically interesting because yeah it is worse because there's a bunch more people driving drunk, however the risk isn't evenly distributed because if you're not drunk your odds are, while still worse, way better.

It's like living somewhere with a high murder rate that's largely inter-gang violence. Not ideal! But you know if you're in a gang or not!

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when learning to be rhetorically effective, we often settle into typical patterns. one common pattern is 'finding the happy medium.' in this pattern, the speaker outlines two opposing positions and identifies them as two extremes. then they introduce their own position, which they explain is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, which we are supposed to consider a more measured and reasonable place to be.

some people can only think in these terms, and strongly identify as centrists, looking for the space between both sides on every issue. other people find such an approach frustrating, and might use the cliche: 'the middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be.' for myself, personally, i'm in the middle; i don't disdain ever using this device, but i don't use it so much that it becomes a dogma...

ah, but there's another device: the 'finding the dialectic.' in the dialectic, there is one tendency, bringing about a certain state of affairs. but at the same time, there is a counter-tendency, called the 'negation', which will limit the first tendency's ability to express itself, such that the anticipated state of affairs never comes into being in just that way, but always in an altered form.

this way of thinking is so powerful that we have a tendency to want to explain everything as part of a dialectical system, everything moving in some direction yet being altered, everything consuming a reflection of its own limits. yet for most of us, we will find that we cannot use this paradigm comfortably to explain everything, and decide that sometimes we're overfitting the evidence, or we're ignoring other tendencies or states of being to focus only on ones that are easy to dialecticize. thus, in effect, none of us ever become fully dialecticians, but use it more or less, according to its actual power to explain the particular situation to hand.

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You can almost do Curry's paradox—"if this sentence is true then Santa Claus is real", which does seem true when you think about what it would imply—in provability logic. The Curry sentence:

C≡(☐C⊃S)

(S is "Santa Claus is real")

You can only get as far as proving

☐C⊃☐S

which is not C itself. No paradox.

If only ☐S⊃S...

This makes the paradoxical reasoning go all the way through, you get S, and that's Löb's theorem!

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the transgender urge to rip apart your body, to claw away all the flesh you never asked for, to free your soul from the prison you were born into and insert yourself into a vessel that you choose for yourself. sometimes it is not enough to voice train and take HRT and get surgery- sometimes you feel as if the only thing that could fix you is a time machine and DNA editor

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As someone who sorta neurologically doesn't do that great with video games but once watched a ton of game analysis videos - isn't putting all the plot in VN-like cutscenes considered bad craftsmanship for exactly this reason? Like, they're not integrated semantically with the rest of the game?

missing out tumblr / twitter

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The sun is very unlike the other objects that I interact with in my daily life. Larger, for example

Are you ever taking a picture, and you’re like, let’s try a different angle, ‘cause that ancient nuclear explosion a million times the size of the earth is in the background. And it is, naturally, pretty bright

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I'm Dumbledore in water

I'm stroking my ego? Boi I've LSed that shit

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Going at it fucklessly like it's a therapy animal

I'm stroking my ego? Boi I've LSed that shit

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Hawk tuah on that thang

I'm stroking my ego? Boi I've LSed that shit

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Smelling fucking burnt toast

I'm stroking my ego? Boi I've LSed that shit

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I'm stroking my ego? Boi I've LSed that shit

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All corner stores are fucking magical, New Yorkers are just the only people to understand it. I love all corner stores and I love New York!!

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It's because you ignore problems. They will probably still be there later. You might as well stick it to your dad or your middle school librarian or whoever and address them now.

they call me the problem ignorer for reasons that i know but dont feel like addressing right now

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like the most politically neutered movie of all time unironically

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Yeah, I'm gonna completely derail this post.

We don't actually understand entropy or thermodynamics at all.

It's true that, in a classical+statistical model of molecular physics, counting each individual particle in the system as its own N degrees of freedom, holding total energy constant and allowing other parameters to vary "randomly" over time, there's something like a clear reason why that system might regress toward a disordered-looking state. The system is traversing its state space randomly; of course it will end up in more populated regions of its state space.

But classical state space, with each individual particle providing its own N degrees of freedom, is not actually how reality works. We seem to be able to get arbitrarily large objects in quantum superpositions; if reality can get away with treating degrees of freedom spatially located on two different spatially separated particles as one degree of freedom for the purposes of evolving the system, it will. And I don't think we actually have sufficient reason to believe, right now, that reality is effectively forbidden somehow from doing this on the molecular level, "most of the time". If some local state space is not arbitrarily large, it once again becomes unclear why it should only very rarely spontaneously produce what looks to us like "order".

In quantum field theory, we come up very directly against the question of how reality decides what happens under "randomness". There are cases where we can say, it looks like a clean 50-50 probability on whether we'll get this binary result, vs that binary result. We can describe the situation in exactly that anount of detail, but no more - at least, not internally to the "probability". But we can effectively manipulate how reality deals with this "uncertainty"; two of what, by themselves, would just come out looking like 50/50 "probabilities", can enter reality at different "angles", having different visible effects when they logically combine. If true randomness, in the colloquial sense, is not actually an atomic feature of reality either [besides classical-mechanical state space], it becomes even less clear how the state space model of thermodynamics could explain this effect of "regression to entropy" that we see in the world.

So I'm taking this class called molecular driving forces and it's something like stat mech for chemistry and it blows my mind like every week. Today the professor asked us why heat flows from warm objects to cold objects and everyone was like entropy! Temperature! Equilibrium! and he was like yeah yeah but what's it really about when you get to the bottom of it? And the answer was statistics - because the number of states in which these two bodies are in a thermal equilibrium is much (like, much) greater than the number of states in which they aren't, and so thermal equilibrium is the most probable outcome. And the thing that decks me every time is that it's always statistics, it's all statistics.

So anyway, every week I'm like WHOA THIS IS WHY I CHOSE A SCIENCE DEGREE and if you're also a science student (or used to be one) please reblog and add your moments of awe at the beautiful complexity of our universe pretty please!! I want to read your stories! Science appreciation chain!!

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Absolute worst political compass yet