Moral moralizing Dec 22, 2020

Most people get their ethics from a combination of trusting what is normally done in their society and doing what they feel is right.

It seems to me that this has been utterly discredited as a reliable source of ethical advice, because it is the same one that recommended to the average person slavery as labor, and genocide as standard geopolitical strategy, and rape as prize, and torture as entertainment.

What is food like? Dec 22, 2020

I have an Anki¹ deck of things I feel like a failure regarding. Instead of each card having a question that I see if I can remember the answer to, it has a potentially shameful thing that I see if I still feel bad about. Each time I look at one, as well as marking it correct to the extent that I no longer feel bad about it, I briefly do a little bit to make it better. (Learn about the thing I’m embarrassed to not know about, practice the skill that I don’t have, think about whether it’s a real problem, etc). My sense is that one can often feel bad about something for a long time which one could alternatively make marked progress on in a very short time.

Elephant seal Dec 21, 2020

Opposite attractions Dec 19, 2020

Is the opposite of what you love also what you love?

I think there’s a general pattern where if you value A you tend to increase the amount of it in your life, and you end feeling very positively about various opposites of A—things that are very unlike A, or partially prevent A, or undo some of A’s consequences—as well. At least some of the time, or for some parts of you, or in some aspects, or when your situation changes a bit. Especially if you contain multitudes.

Examples:

Thesauring Dec 19, 2020

Sometimes I really enjoy opening a thesaurus. I don’t know why. It’s just a moment of opening it, anticipating feeling around amongst the meanings of different words, weighing their rightnesses, which seems like a kind of heavenliness, sometimes. I think it was better in 2018, and now I’m mostly remembering that.

Genetic magic Dec 18, 2020

23andMe are now willing to guess where one’s ancestors are from at the level of counties. For instance, as well as thinking I have 19% Swedish ancestry, they now guess that it is primarily from Västra Götaland County. Which is in fact where my current Swedish relatives cluster. Their guesses in Ireland center on Cork, with Limerick and Tipperary next door 4th and 8th most likely (of 26 counties), and those two are where the few 17th-19th Century relatives I know about seem to have come from in Ireland, so that also seems pretty good.

Much as I believe all that stuff about one’s body being full of cells that contain genetic code that is shared by one’s relatives, and about historic movement and mixing of populations being low, it’s awesome to actually see someone take a fairly good guess at what part of what country your obscure relatives lived hundreds of years ago by examining your spit.

Some things I'm looking forward to in 2021: probable post-pandemic edition Dec 17, 2020

1. Fewer deaths all around
2. A giant party at my house
3. A portion of the research I feel bad about not doing just becoming irrelevant (e.g. what’s the evidence about surfaces now? Are we badly underestimating the harms of long covid?)
4. Leaving my house in an unprepared fashion and seeing where it takes me
5. Whatever it was that I used to do in places other than my house, that I actually can’t seem to remember or explicitly pinpoint and plan from a distance, but which I vaguely miss (possibly this is basically just 4)
6. Seeing friends who live in faraway places such as Berkeley
7. Going on a cross-country train and embracing the general lack of hygiene and space
8. Seeing non-household friends without inadvertently spending a fraction of my attention on air dynamics and mask stability
9. The stakes of everyday personal choices being lowered enough that people being thoughtless or foolish isn’t a critical threat to friendliness, harmony or anyone’s life
10. Helping the economy of restaurants and cafes recover

What is it good for? But actually? Dec 16, 2020

I didn’t learn about history very well prior to my thirties somehow, but lately I’ve been variously trying to rectify this. Lately I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, listening to Steven Pinker’s the Better Angels of Our Nature, watching Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary about the Vietnam War and watching Oversimplified history videos on YouTube (which I find too lighthearted for the subject matter, but if you want to squeeze extra history learning in your leisure and dessert time, compromises can be worth it.)

There is a basic feature of all this that I’m perpetually confused about: how has there been so much energy for going to war?

The wild Dec 15, 2020

The idea of art about nature doesn’t sound exciting to me in the abstract. Perhaps I remember that I am evolutionarily supposed to see it and go, ‘oh fantastic, it’s green and blue near each other, maybe I’m in for some reproductive success’, and that doesn’t sound very inspiring. (Yes, I know that simple evolutionary situations can feel inspiring from the inside.)

Blog plant Dec 14, 2020

I like to have plants in honor of things I’ve done. I’m not consistent or proportionate about it, and admittedly I also have quite a few plants that I intend to be in honor of things I haven’t yet done. But now that this blog has apparently functional comments and images and analytics, as well as words on pages on the internet, I declare it fully bloggy, and my effort to make a blog complete. Here’s my blog plant:

I welcome perspectives on good marginal improvements toward WSSP being a pleasing blog to interact with. (I’m aware that the subscription possibilities are not as salient as they could be.) It is a static site made using Jekyll and kept on Github, with its comments looked after by Disqus and its analytics by Google and its pictures by Photobucket.