The Marginalian

I have so many.

JSTOR: It has a good selection of open access books[https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/] (supplement with individual publishers[you can find many from DOABOOKS, https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/covid19-information-and-resources-from-obp/#open-books, https://www.oapen.org/researchers/13516596-funder-compliant-publishers, or https://www.oaspa.org/] & doabooks[https://www.doabooks.org/]). I like reading that sort of thing. I've been enjoying Stand Out of Our Light[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/3F8D7BA2C0FE3A7126A4D9B73A89415D] by Cambridge University Press, which is legitimately engaging and not written very academically.

Wikipedia: Duh. Favorite page is the Unusual Articles[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles] one.

Internet Archive: Amazing. Especially the books. Supplement with the Online Books Page list of archives.[https://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/, click on 'Archives and Indexes']

Find Your News[https://findyournews.org/]: Directory-ish of nonprofit news outlets. Missing, last I checked, many of the ones in Hung-Su's list of slow news outlets[https://hung.su/slow-news-movement/], so I tend to use them together when I'm in a bingeing-on-nonprofit-news mood.

NEH Humanities Magazine: The US National Endowment for the Humanities has a magazine[https://www.neh.gov/humanities] that covers a lot of historical subjects, and it's free (online at least). Similar ones are available from the Library of…

As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.

The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.

Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.

Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away…

> The mind is not part of nature?

Nope. It's a theoretical construct with no empirically measurable properties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem : "The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body."

This is a problem because there's no obvious connection between the mind and everyday reality.

> As to Popper, there is no singular definition of science ...

This is not true. Falsifiability and empirical evidence are part of the universally accepted definition of science. This is why mathematics, as important as it is to science, is not itself accepted as a science -- like psychology, it doesn't address empirical reality.

Carl Sagan, quoted from "The baloney detection kit" (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/): "Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable, are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result."

> It is really difficult for me to comprehend your point…

To focus on something I don't think gets a lot of play:

> To me, the local minima looked "good"

AI's entire business [0] is generating high quality digital content for free, but we've never ever ever needed help "generating content". For millennia we've sung songs and told stories, and we were happy with the media the entire time. If we'd never invented Tivo we'd be completely happy with linear TV. If we'd never invented TV we'd be completely happy with the radio. If we'd never invented the the CD we'd be completely happy with tapes. At every local minima of media, humanity has been super satisfied. Even if it were a problem, it's nowhere near the top of the list. We don't need more AI-generated news articles, music, movies, photos, illustrations, websites, instant summaries of research papers, (very very bad) singing. No one's looking around saying, "God there's just not enough pictures of fake waves crashing against a fake cliff". We need help with stuff like diseases and climate change. We need to figure out fusion, and it would be pretty cool if we could build the replicator (I am absolutely serious about the replicator). I remember a quote from long ago, someone saying something like, "it's lamentable that the greatest minds of my generation are focused 100% on getting more eyeballs on more ads". Well, here we are again (still?).

So why do we get wave after wave of companies doing this? Advances in this area are insanely popular and create instant dissatisfaction…

If you have not read this piece, I recommend it:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/17/diseases-of-the-will-cajal-advice-for-a-young-investigator/

> The situation is far more serious: question everything.

Someone who thrived at life or work to a satisfying enough point will always tell you something

- nihilistic like "it does not matter",

- or reaffirming like "that's a lot of stuff to write about, no matter how many people write about it"

- or "that's a lot of stuff to deal with, are you in a state to work any of these inquiries problems?".

- or they tell you all the above combined in the form of "that's where we are and there's reasons why and how we got here. Where do you wanna go?".

In either case you are left with sticking to the prescribed reality or you say fuck it and go down any of the spiritual and or occultist rabbit holes. There's enough narratives for billions of lifetimes.

When it comes to our online experience, the main questions are: how big or small is your network and how deep or shallow are the connections.

Whether something is real is easier assessed in cooperation; as is whether and how something useless can be turned into something useful. But it all works solo just as much, except in cases where doubt is warranted, which is when more heads traverse more data, connections and patterns in less time.

We found our inquiries entirely on our backgrounds and the motivations of our psychosocial (low base death growl in the back of my head…

Some of those tweet criticisms gets the side eye from me:

> People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form and structure, and of course some amount of talent

It's very much just a thing that you can do. Doing it well may be an art, but simply doing it is a humanity.

"Knowledge of form and structure" is a pretty circular standard, like many aesthetic standards. Form and structure become established by becoming established forms and structures -- matters of meter and certain symmetries may have something of a longer standing but the sonnet isn't a cosmic constant. Form is arguably one of the cheaper ways of making poetry.

Brilliance among post-structural poets is uncontroversial at this point. Authors like Wendell Berry might make a case for the use of old forms (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poetry-marriage/ ) and that's certainly worth understanding for practitioners of the arts of words or living, but that doesn't mean everything else isn't poetry (as Berry himself implicitly acknowledges in his own poetry).

Talent helps but sometimes you build up talent. Most people aren't Keats or Cummings from the get go.

> they fail to appreciate that the sentiments it expresses are also hackneyed and trite

So are sunsets and love.

I appreciate novelty and sophistication as much as the next guy, maybe more. I can even see not thinking these poems are particularly "good" by some set of aesthetic…