#foxoftindalos

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

the sex I have not had, am not having, and will continue not to have is astoundingly and essentially gay and there's nothing any of you can do about it.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

my darling catboy has a tumblr predating mine

my darling catboy has absolutely no idea that I have a tumblr

I had totally forgotten what my darling catboy's tumblr *is* as of when I finally decided "fuck it" and made a tumblr, and also decided it'd be funniest not to ask him what his is and not to go looking and to instead see how long it takes for him to figure it out

and I am going to link this post to him when he finally finds it and cackle like a madfox.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

just thinking about how utterly contingent my life has been, even apart from the "could have abruptly died for basically no reason at any point, more likely than pop mean" part

slides notes from a TED talk which should never at any point exist:

[no discussion of contingent lifepaths stemming from more ancient possible-world changes can be found here, owing to massive simulational divergence, but some of the ones worth looking at are very very weird tbf.]

I get better grades and find success early on undergrad at [Fancy School]? Then I probably disappear into mol bio and am in 2025 probably working at a miserable biotech firm.

I get better grades and find success later on at [Fancy School], and don't almost drop out? Then I likely end up getting accepted at a way fancier doctoral program like my peers, and when academia inevitably gets to be too much, I disappear into quant finance on the strength of those undergrad grades.

I get slightly worse grades and don't prove myself to [summer math research advisor]? Then I don't even get to be last-pick at an also-ran doctoral program and can't move forward in math at all and uhhhh cut the tape cut the tape cut to next counterfactual-

I take up [thesis advisor]'s implicit offer to set me up at [Deep-South Math Place]? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh man I don't even know. Probably I am still there doing irrelevant work in math.

I get slightly more/better research done at [Non-Fancy Doctoral Program]? Then I likely end up getting a remotely acceptable postdoc at all instead of [Crappy One-Year Bullshit] in Fox City, and I'm slowly going mad under the tenure-track grind nearing the end of a first postdoc and trying to get a second. Hoping I'll be permitted to tear up my life again.

I don't end up deciding, on what was basically a whim, to flirt with and briefly date one person, and then meet a second one through them, and end up dating that second person long-term? Oh my shitting radioactive Buddha who keeps putting the really awful counterfactuals in this slidedeck. This was not fit for broadcast. [muttering from offstage] I - because this is blatantly maybe the third worst delta you could have picked! No, just. Just cut to the next one.

[no further discussion of contingent lifepaths stemming from more recent possible-world changes can be found here. but wow, most of those are really not great.]

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

there is every reason to be an alignment monk if you can manage it

there is, on the other hand, absolutely no reason to be an alignment ascetic.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

waoooowww... it really knows but also: what an honor...

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

what would it feel like, from within, to be an iron age farmer groping about trying to figure out what a chloroplast is? would they have any hope, even in principle, of succeeding?

what would it be like, to have invented fire and then barely begun to deduce the existence of oxygen?

did Fleming ever dream of 4-member heterocycles, spring-loaded with ring-strain? could the Unsung Quechua, she of the Potato, ever have conceived of Lay's? surely Aristotle must have been able, however dimly and poorly, to glimpse Godel... right?

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Me-specific tags

#foxoftindalos is for pictures of foxes I find particularly representative, or for talking about topics that touch upon That Which Lies Outside Reality But Whose Shadows Loom Long Over It

#angelcat is for anything I want my partner to see but would be OK with anyone else also seeing (likewise #angelrat #angelcrow , though given what else is on angelrat I'm probably just going to group all of this under angelcat)

#due to my agonies is for mental health bads, especially if I refuse to give further context; #randomly selected mourner is where I take the whole WTNV thing totally seriously and do some light divination powered by demographic data to determine who it was.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

friends, I think that reading about the do-calculus is getting to me

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

not me doing some alignment applications brainstorming while blasting Unexpectancy Pts. 1-3

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

on a scale of 0 to yes

how bad of an idea is it to give the subtitle "#ω, XYZ sequence" to a post that is very much meant to be "however many he ever writes, this is meant to be after them all"

this is meant in a genuinely cooperative sense - I solve an open problem the original author of the sequence brought up

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

you are now thinking about the fact that the first counting number alphabetically is eight and the last is zero, but there is no meaningful middle.