Sunday, August 9, 2015

Study Notes: Aug 2-8, 2015: "What's a Bodhisattva?"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 
Homework for the future:
  • Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
  • Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
  • Finish the reading for "Notes to: Anarchy: Never Been Tried?"
  • Finish the reading for "Notes to 16 Articles on Writing"
  • Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
  • Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
  • Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"A Neocon Bible"
  • "The new neocon Bible also says words like 'laborer' and 'comrade' and 'fellow' (as in 'fellow worker') are used in 'liberal' translations like the English Standard Version, and that this 'socialistic' terminology 'improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians." 
  • "Another 'liberal falsehood,' it claims, is the famous plea by Christ on the cross, when he looks at those crucifying him and says, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.' Conservapedia argues that the phrase appears only in Luke, and is a later interpolation. It says 'the simple fact is that some of the prosecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.'"
  • "...the Jesus Seminar, and its highly unorthodox method of voting, using colored beads, about what scholars thought Jesus would really have said."
  • "The Italians have a saying about the perils of translating faithfully from one language to another: 'Traduttore, traditore,' In other words, 'the translator is a traitor' to the original text and meaning." 

 "What are Jinns exactly made up of?"
  • "Some people concluded that it could be plasma. But these days, I am beginning to think that it is the same element we see in the sky during thunderstorm. The light we see looks like fire, but does not give off smoke." 
  • "The female Jinni, after their age of puberty, can bear children after every three month [sic]. They can give birth [to] 40 jinns at a time... More interestingly the Jinn's child can walk after one hour of his/her birth." 
  • "They can travel around the world in a flip of an eye." 
  • "They will do what they are told to do, nothing more or less. They also don't have patience's [sic] like Humans. They are always in hastiness and hurry." 

 "What are Jinns or Spirits"
  • "When Allah set up the four basic elements and smoke rose to the bottom of the Sphere of Fixed Stars, the seven heavens unwound themselves in that smoke, separate from each other." 
  • "The mixture of air and fire has the name 'smokeless fire'."
  • "The burning of that fire is the flame which is the burning of the air and this is smokeless (marj, jumbled) because it is mixed with the air and is the burning air." 
  • "Because of the air which is in the jinn, they can assume whatever form they wish. Because of the fire which is in them, they are insubstanital [sic] and very subtle, and they seek dominance, pride and might since fire has the highest position of the elements and it has great power to change things as nature demands." 
  • "The jinn did not know that the power of water from which Adam was created was stronger than fire for it extinguishes it and earth is firmer than fire by cold and dryness. Adam has strength and constancy by the dominance of the two elements from which Allah derived him. Even though he also possesses the rest of the elements- air and fire, they do not have the authority in him. The jinn also have the rest of the elements." 
  • "Adam was given humility on account of the clayness of his nature. When he is proud, that is incidental (and not intrinsic to his nature)... The jinn are given pride by the nature of fire in them. If they are humble, that is something incidental which they accept because of the element of earth in them."
  • "The angels are spirits breathed into lights. The jinn are spirits breathed into winds. Men are spirits breathed into shapes. It is said that a female was not separated from the first existing jinn as Eve was separated from Adam... So the jinn's nature was hermaphrodite. For that reason the jinn are part of the world of the interspace; they resemble men and resemble angels as the hermaphrodite resembles both the male and female." 
  • "As their union with each other in marriage, it is in the form of twisting - like what you see of smoke issuing from a kiln or a pottery oven. The smoke intermingles and each of the two individuals enjoys that mutual entry. Their ejaculation resembles like the seed of the palm and is in the form of pure scent, just as is the case with their food [jinn feed from smelling bones, flesh, and fat]."
  • "It is said that they are contained in twelve tribes and then they branch into subtribes. There are great wars between them, and some whirlwinds are, in fact, the centre of their battles." 
  • "When this spiritual world takes on shape and appears in a sensory form, the eyes confine it since it cannot abandon that form as long as the eye continues to look at it although it is the human being which is looking."
  • "Any jinn who rebels is shaytan."

 "What's a Bodhisattva?"
  • "The word bodhisattva means 'enlightenment being.' Very simply, bodhisattvas are beings who work for the enlightenment of all beings, not just themselves. They vow not to enter Nirvana until all beings enter Nirvana together." 
  • "For example, one might meditate on the image of the Bodhisattva of Compassion in order to become a vehicle for compassion in the world." 
  • "From a Buddhist perspective, most people confuse 'identity' with 'reality.' But in Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism in particular, nothing has intrinsic identity. We 'exist' as distinct beings only in relation to other beings. This is not to say that we don't exist, but that our existence as individuals is conditional and relative."
  • "Bodhisatvas [sic] manifest where they are needed in many forms. They might be bums or babies, friends or strangers, teachers, firemen or used car salesmen. They might be you. Whenever needed help is given without selfish attachment, there is the hand of the bodhisattva. When we see and hear the suffering of others and respond to the suffering, we are the hands of the bodhisattva." So, "type" rather than "personage" if we're going to try for a response that isn't "No, bodhisattvas are not 'real'."
  • "In Buddhism, all beliefs and conceptualizations are provisional. That is, they are understood to be flawed and imperfect. People understand the dharma as best they can, and as understanding grows, conceptualizations are discarded." 

The Four Vows of the Zen School:
Beings are numberless; 
I vow to free them. 
Delusions are inexhaustible;
I vow to end them. 
Dharma gates are boundless;
I vow to enter them.
The Awakened Way is unsurpassable;
I vow to embody it.


 "The radical 'Jurassic Park' we didn't get to see"
  • "What's particularly fascinating about this alternate 'Jurassic World,' though, is not only that it might have had a Chinese woman as its protagonist, but that her two sons would have been lead characters as well. Meaning, there might have been many crucial scenes, playing on cinema screens across the United States today, where the three most important speaking parts were all played by Chinese people. That doesn't happen very often in Hollywood, let alone in a blockbuster film." 
  • "A recent study out of Zheijiang Normal University in China offers further evidence that just one black woman in the foreground, or an army of various people of color in the background, may not be enough when it comes to challenging the way we are all socialized to think about race." 
  • "In other words, when the youth were forced to study more than one black face as an individual, at least briefly, it pushed aside a tendency (formed as early as 4 years old) to see those faces as being less than their own."
  • "If encouraging people to study many faces from an othered group helps reduce implicit bias, imagine how powerful a 'Jurassic World' centering [on] a Chinese woman and her two Chinese sons might have been in the U.S. today. Or, given this Chinese study, what about one with a leading cast of all black and indigenous women? What cultural impact could just one blockbuster like that have worldwide?"
  • "Rather than films that sprinkle people of color in at the margins, or even place a single woman of color in the center, what we really need more of are widely seen films that feature many lead characters from one marginalized background." 

"Desert Utopia"
  • "For Soleri, architecture and ecology were twin components of man's relationship with nature -- by treating cities as living, breathing, organisms, humans could live in harmony with nature and with each other. He dubbed his defining philosophy arcology, a portmanteau of 'architecture' and 'ecology'."
  • Paolo Soleri, Arcology, City in the Image of Man: "Architecture is the physical form of the ecology of the human, the configuration of matter which allows for the best energetic and willful flux." 
  • "Soleri wanted to answer a simple question: is it possible to design a utopia? Can the perfect human habitat be engineered by human hands, or does it have to emerge, organically, from the ecological and economic forces far beyond the grasp of a master builder?"
  • Cosanti, meaning "before things" (Italian)
  • "To the average visitor, Arcosanti looks like a college campus sprouting in the middle of the desert, molded from the red silt of the surrounding mesa. The complex is marked by a cluster of soaring stone apses, crafted in Soleri's distinct, casting-inspired architectural style, designed to absorb sunlight and power the town's energy grid. The majority of buildings are oriented to the south to capture the sun's light and heat, while an open roof design yields maximum sunlight in the winter and shade in the summer. Artisans live and work in a densely packed compound, designed for maximum energy efficiency and sustainability. The community's permanent residents keep greenhouses and agricultural fields, and income from bell-casting goes to maintaining the town's infrastructure." 
  • "The buildings and walkways are built in a more dynamic formation than a conventional city grid, not just to conserve resources but also to encourage increased social interaction between residents, forcing them to bump into each other in various open-air atriums, gardens, and greenhouses. Living quarters are clustered in a honeycomb of sparse, minimalist apartments, all virtually identical." 
  • *Paolo, Earth's Answer: "Arcology recognises the necessity of the radical reorganisation of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture." 
  • "This is the fundamental problem with planned communities, from company towns to modern arcologies: they often forget about the people who inhabit them." 

"Contra Hallquist on Scientific Rationality"
  • "Yudkowsky's support for his preferred Many Worlds interpretation is remarkably strong for a subject where some of the world's top geniuses disagree. On one hand, it is no stronger than that of many experts in the field--for example, Oxford quantum pioneer David Deutsch describes the theory's lukewarm reception as 'the first time in history that physicists have refused to believe what their reigning theory says about the world...like Galileo refusing to believe that Earth orbits the sun' and calls arguments against it 'complex rationalizations for avoiding the most straightforward implications of quantum theory'. On the other, perhaps one could argue that a level of confidence appropriate in an Oxford professor is inappropriate in a self-taught amateur." [ellipsis original]
  • "There is a general conversational norm that to assert something is to say that you believe it and will provide evidence for your belief, not to say 'You must believe me on this and may never go find any other sources to get any other side of the story.'
  • "Presumably, if Aquinas' arguments are really stupid, but everyone believed them for five hundred years, this would imply there is something wrong with everyone. It might be worth saying 'When someone makes a stupid argument, is there anything we can do to dismiss it in less than five hundred years?'"
  • "Philosophy is hard... It's hard in the same way politics is hard, where it seems like astounding hubris to call yourself a liberal when some of the brightest minds in history have been conservative, and insane overconfidence to call yourself a conservative when some of civilization's greatest geniuses were liberals." 
  • "If we are wise people, we don't try to use force to push our beliefs on others. If we are very wise, we don't even insult and dehumanize those whom we disagree with." 
  • "One of my favorite results from the Less Wrong Survey, which I've written about again and again, shows that people who sign up for cryonics are less likely to believe it will work than demographically similar people who don't sign up (yes, you read that right)--and the average person signed up for cryonics only estimated a 12% chance it would work. The active ingredient in cryonics support is not unusual certainty it will work, but unusual methods for dealing with moral and epistemological questions--an attitude of 'This has like a 10% chance of working, but a 10% chance of immortality for a couple of dollars a month is an amazing deal and you would be an idiot to turn it down' instead of 'this sounds weird, screw it'." 
  • "I am usually in favor of being nice to people who get things wrong, because things are hard and goodness knows I am wrong often enough. But I am not in favor of being nice to people who get things wrong and are smug and mean to everyone else about them, because punishing defectors is the only way things ever get done in this world." 
  • "Eliezer Yudkowsky has had some pretty silly ideas about diet. I know this because he [sic extra word] when he has them, he comes to me and asks me if they are correct, and I tell him. At one point, he bought and sent me a book he was interested in so that I could review it and tell him if it made sense. I told him it was wrong, and he listened." 
  • "If thinking clearly is a learnable skill, where are the grad schools for it? Where are the textbooks? Not in philosophy programs--Hallquist and I both agree about that. What all of this 'only domain-specific knowledge stuff matters' effectively implies is that 'thinking clearly' is so easy you can pick it up by coincidence while working on pretty much anything else--something we believe about practically no other skill. If you trusted a rocket scientist who had never read a single rocket science textbook to be any good at rocket science, you'd be insane, but we routinely trust the subjects we most need to think clearly about to people who have never read a How To Think Clearly textbook--and I can't blame us, because such textbooks, or at least good evidence-based textbooks of the same quality as the rocket science ones, simply don't exist." 
  • "If we want to get all hypothetical, we can imagine some kind of theorizing contest between a totally irrational person with an encyclopaedic knowledge of cell biology, versus a very rational person who knows nothing at all about the subject. Who would win? Well, who cares? Whoever wins, we lose. We lose because I want the people working on curing cancer to be good at both cell biology and thinking clearly, to know both the parts of science specific to their own field and the parts of science that are as broad as Thought itself." 
  • "'Don't worry too much about learning rationality, just listen to the experts' is all nice and well up until the point where someone hands you a lab coat and says 'Congratulations, you're an expert!' And then you say: 'Well, frick.' And when that day comes you had better already have learned something about the Art Of Thinking Clearly or else you have a heck of a steep learning curve ahead of you." 
  • "I have immense respect for Topher Hallquist. His blog has enlightened me about various philosophy-of-religion issues and he is my go-to person if I ever need to hear an excruciatingly complete roundup of the evidence about whether there was a historical Jesus or not." 
  • "These things I like and respect about Topher are cases where he's willing to go his own way. He views open borders as a pressing moral imperative even though you'll have a hard time finding more than a handful of voters, sociologists, or economists who support it. He's signed up for cryonics even though 99% of the population think that makes him crazy. He donated to fight AI risk way back when it was hard to find any AI experts willing to endorse the case, and so gains extra credibility and moral authority now that many of them have." 

"The easy morality of Cecil the Lion"
  • "You'd think that something as extreme as a 12-year-old boy being shot to death by an incompetent cop would be a slam-dunk for universal outrage, but every attempt to rally people behind the #BlackLivesMatter banner because of Rice's death-or anyone's death-has been met with a mixture of concern trolling and outright racist attacks."
  • "Publicly condemning the hunter who killed Cecil is an act requiring no moral courage at all. It's no more meaningful than going onto Facebook to proclaim how much you hate the latest mass shooter, or how much you hate rapists and sex offenders, or how much you hate people who set kittens on fire." 
  • "I think it's the pettiness of killing a dog, or killing a lion, or 'killing' a robot, compared to killing a woman or man. There's no way you can possibly spin it as necessary to break hitchBOT or to lure Cecil out of his park and shoot him." 
  • "HitchBOT wasn't capable of being a nuisance or a threat to anybody; it wasn't even capable of moving under its own power. Anyone who didn't want to play along with the conceit of hitch BOT's 'personhood' could just keep walking. There was nothing to gain by smashing it beyond repair. Nothing except the brief, cheap thrill of being powerful enough to destroy something." 
  • "That's the nice thing about being a lion. People care when you die, because no one tries to make it your own fault that you died. Because killing lions is rare, and the people who kill lions therefore don't have a socially sanctioned explanation for why killing lions is necessary in the course of daily living." 
  • "But standing up for victims of sexual assault? For victims of police violence? For anything that gets classified as a 'social issue'? That requires acknowledging that it's not just random villainous criminals who are evil. That something can be 'normal'--the normal way policing works, the normal way capitalism works, the normal way hookup culture works--and still be unconscionably, unforgivably evil. That evil is something we're complicit in every day." 

"Scholars are way more skeptical of war than the American public"

  • "Probably the most important foreign policy challenge that a country can face is deciding when to go to war. And, based on a new study, the American public is much more hawkish on this issue than are the country's international relations experts." 
  • "The data is pretty clear: There is, in the United States, a systematic gap between public willingness to wage war and whether experts think it's a good idea." 
  • "And yet IR scholars really have learned some things about the world--the finding that democracies never or almost never go to war with one another is a genuine breakthrough (even if the reasons why it's true are still disputed). And there's a lot of good research on smaller questions, such as whether arming rebel groups is a good way to make a civil war less bloody." 

"It's never too early to start thinking about your own death"

  • "This view of death as an 'art' or 'practice,' rather than an emotionless biological process, can be tremendously empowering." 
  • Carl Jung: "It won't help to hear what I think about death." 
  • "Your relationship to mortality is your own." 
  • "The decubitus ulcer presents a unique psychological horror... As a rule, bedridden patients have to be moved every few hours, flipped like pancakes to ensure that the weight of their own bodies doesn't press their bones into the tissue and skin, cutting off bone circulation. Without blood flow, tissue begins decay. The ulcers occur when a patient is left lying in bed for an extended period, as often happens in understaffed nursing homes. Without some movement, patients will literally begin to decompose while they are still living, eaten alive by their own necrotic tissue." 
  • "We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system."
  • "Some day, I would like to open my own crematory. Not an industrial warehouse, but a space both intimate and open, with floor-to-ceiling windows to let the sunshine in and keep the weirdo death stigma out. I was able to work with two Italian architects to design such a place, where a family can witness the body loading into the cremation machine with light streaming through the glass, giving the illusion they are outdoors in a place of serenity and nature, not of industry." 
  • "Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed. I believe the animals I've consumed my whole life should someday have their turn with me. The ancient Ethiopians would place their dead in the lake where they fished, so the fish would have the opportunity to receive back the nutrients. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation." 

"Secrets of the extreme religious right"
  • "Reconstructionists basically reject the entire framework of secular political thought in which individual rights have meaning, so 'freedom' as most Americans understand the term is not the issue at all. Indeed, they argue that such 'freedom' is actually slavery--slavery to sin, that is." 
  • Julie Ingersoll: "According to Rushdoony, biblical authority is God's authority delegated to humans, who exercise dominion under God's law in three distinct God-ordained institutions: the family, the church, and the civil government. Each of those institutions has carefully delineated and limited responsibilities. When humans decide that those institutions should serve any functions beyond the ones ordained by God, they presume the autonomy and supremacy of human reason and thus violate biblical law." 
  • *Julie: "Part of the problem with the fundamentalist/modernism division is [that] it denies that fundamentalism is essentially modern. I mean, it's really, really modern. When you look at how they're fighting the battle between creationism and evolution, they turned creationism into science. It's really, really modern." 
  • *Julie: "For Lincoln, that is minimalist. Religion has its own sphere, but its influence is limited, it's minimal with regard to all of the others. We, in the modern world, don't necessary think of work, for example, as religious. And this is part of what's underneath the debate over where to draw the line in the wake of the Supreme Court's marriage decision... A minimalist will say those [institutions] are going to be secular, but a maximalist says no; everything is essentially religious for a maximalist." 
  • "If you read Rushdoony carefully, there's an argument there that dates right back to Dabney and the pre-Civil War stuff, that equality itself is not a virtue. That people aren't equal. That people are different; that God ordained some of that difference. That's Calvinism; that's predestination. So people exist in the place in society where God has put them." 

"This Wasp Mind-Controls Spiders Into Building It Cozy Webs"

  • "There's one variety [of wasp], for instance, that injects up to 80 eggs into living caterpillars. The resulting larvae devour the caterpillar's insides, yet leave it alive, then erupt out of its body and mind-control the poor thing to protect them as they spin their cocoons." 
  • "Reclinervellus nielseni, which somehow mind-controls spiders into building a special web to protect it. That's before the wasp kills the spider by sucking out its insides, of course." 
  • "Instead of injecting the spider with an egg, like the caterpillar wasps do, she simply lays it on the host. The egg hatches into a larva, which feeds on the host's hemolymph--the arthropod version of blood--and begins mind-controlling the spider to build a web similar to the resting variety."
  • "As an added bonus, that silk actually reflects a whole lot of ultraviolet light, making the larva, now spun into a cocoon, that much brighter and therefore more conspicuous to passing birds, which can see UV. That might seem counterintuitive to the whole survival thing, but think of it as a traffic cone that helps birds steer cleer of the web instead of running into the structure and destroying the pupa. A really, really disturbing traffic cone." 


"The Deep Influence of the A-Bomb on Anime and Manga"
  • "The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--along with the firebombings of Tokyo--were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It's no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music and in art." 
  • "The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka's. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man's desire to conquer it." 
  • "The message [in Akira] seems to be that adults can be reckless when man's desire for power and ambition outweigh what is important on Earth. And the children, still untainted by the vices that overtake humanity in adulthood and innocent enough to the point of thinking rationally, are the ones who end up making the most practical decisions overall." 
  • "Nakazawa watched a sister die several weeks after birth from radiation sickness, and witnessed his mother's health quickly deteriorate in the years after the war." Cf. Cecil quotes for story. 
  • "In essence, what we have seen is that the atomic bomb indeed affected Japan to the point that the works of Tezuka and later artists inspired by him reflect on the bomb's effects on families, society, and the national psyche. Much like the cycle of life, or the immortal Phoenix in Tezuka's case, Japan was able to reinvent itself and come back strong as a powerful world player capable of starting anew, but with the idea that mankind must learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating history." 
"Assumptions"
  • "One important caveat is that all of these assumptions are framing, much more than empirical differences. I tend to adopt the 'people are basically good and doing the best they can' framing, while Topher tends to adopt the 'people are selfish bastards' framing. But we've discovered that we don't actually predict different things." 
  • "Some framings are more useful than other framings, and I think these happen to be fairly useful ones." 
  • "DBT works from the assumption that people are doing the best they can... Furthermore, everything you do, everything you feel, everything you think, has a reason. You might not know what the reason is; in fact, most people aren't always aware of the reasons for their thoughts. And even when they are aware, a lot of times they don't want to admit it to themselves, because it seems petty, or stupid, or not in line with their own self-image. Nevertheless, you do not do things for literally no reason; your behaviors have a cause and it's probably a sensible cause, all things considered." 
  • "The problem is that your best isn't good enough. I mean, if mine were, I wouldn't have to be in How Not To Kill Yourself Class, and you wouldn't be reading this essay. But I think this is pretty much the human condition, actually: pretty much everyone has some dumbass thing that they constantly keep doing even though their life would be 100% better if they stopped--whether it's skipping workouts, self-sabotaging relationships, or spending too much money." 
  • "In my two decades of yelling at myself about what a terrible person I am, I have never not once found that yelling at myself about what a terrible person I am fixed anything. In fact, it usually makes the problem worse. Instead, you need to figure out why you're behaving that way." 
  • "Fun fact: when I was in college, every two months I would have an epiphany about being able to buy [insert food here] whenever I want to, because 'I can buy gummies whenever I want to' never generalized into 'I can buy any food whenever I want to.'"
  • "You can't make other people do shit they should do. You can make you do shit you should do." 

"Dialectics"
  • "Niels Bohr once allegedly said, 'The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.' This is the essence of dialectics in DBT."
  • "People have to accept themselves as they are; and simultaneously they have to change. This is not the same thing as a compromise between those two points... One must hold both truths in one's mind simultaneously."
  • "In my experience, one of the biggest signs that you're facing a dialectical dilemma is that the two things appear to be opposites, but if you think about them you can see the seeds of one side in the other. Fully and completely accepting yourself as you are is a pretty massive change."
  • "While normal people often tend to get fucked up by going to one side of a dialectical dilemma and ignoring the other one, this is particularly a problem for borderlines, because of a symptom of borderline personality disorder called 'splitting'. Borderlines tend to see things (concepts, ideologies, people, themselves...) as either all-good or all-bad, to either pedestalize something or to think of it as worse than dirt. Therefore, borderlines have an especial need to learn to navigate the dialectical dilemma 'this person has virtues' and 'this person has flaws'."

"Contrarians, Crackpots, and Consensus"

  • "Taubes' main theory--that low-carb diets could solve the obesity epidemic--hasn't fared the test of time very well. But some of his supporting points have... Given how hard it is to fight the scientific consensus and win, even those few minor victories would potentially be remarkable. The counterargument is that these are other people's ideas and he gets no credit for them." 
  • "If Icke's book spends just as much time arguing for the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha theory as for the lizard theory, all while inveighing against some supposed consensus of anti-Saxe-Coburg experts, we can imagine the far future finding him pretty impressive, since they might not have done the historical work necessary to realize everyone knew of the Queen's foreign origins all along... He's not prescient, he just sometimes reads Wikipedia in between his bizarre ravings." 
  • "I think a lot of things are getting obscured by the term 'scientific establishment' or 'scientific consensus'."
  • Scott Alexander proceeds to describe a pyramid, comprising (in descending order): specialist researchers in a field, non-specialist researchers in a broader field, the organs and administrators of a field who help set up guidelines, science journalism & fieldworkers, and the general public. As examples he gives "the people doing studies on the effect of dietary cholesterol", "nutrition scientists in general", "the head of the USDA who's in charge of looking over the Food Pyramid to make sure it's accurate", "everyone from the science reporters at the New York Times to the guys writing books with titles like The Antidepressant Wars to random bloggers" and "the professionals we charge with putting the research into practice", and, of course, the general public. 
  • "A lot of these issues make a lot more sense in terms of different theories going on at the same time on different levels of the pyramid. I get the impression that in the 1990s, the specialist researchers, the non-specialist researchers, and the organs and administrators were all pretty responsible about saying that the serotonin theory was just a theory and only represented one facet of the multifaceted disease of depression. Science journalists and prescribing psychiatrists were less responsible about this, and so the general public may well have ended up with an inaccurate picture." 
  • "In psychiatry, drug companies have established defensive chokeholds at various points on the pyramid, trying to promote pro-pharmaceutical results and sink anti-pharmaceutical ones. This isn't a far-out conspiracy theory--practically every psychiatrist agrees that it's true to some degree, which is why there are so many conflict-of-interest laws to try to minimize the damage." 
  • "There are two types of 'no evidence', and this was the entirely neutral one. It seemed like a very different situation than vaccines causing autism. There, too, experts in the field aren't worried--but they're not worried because every single one of them has an opinion and the opinion is 'NO'."
  • "It seems like a potentially important idea, which has small but nonzero evidence behind it, but which everyone nevertheless ignores, because this isn't anybody's business in particular. There are hundreds of things like this scattered across the literature in pretty much every field." 
  • "Then somebody looks a little closer and sees a pattern in the noise. The studies and ideas everyone else was ignoring actually tell a consistent story which is more plausible than the grand narrative of the field which everyone else is working off of. They propose a new paradigm. There is some fighting and eventually it is determined to be superior to the old one, which is jettisoned in its favor." 
  • "One way to be a contrarian without being a crackpot seems to be trying to start these sorts of paradigm shifts. Indeed, I notice that they are often people with enough expertise to understand a field who nevertheless acquired that expertise outside of the field itself." 
  • "If they're doing their job right, all they're doing is calling increased attention to certain results in the field. They're not the first people to mention that there's some evidence for recent human evolution. They might not even be the first people to publish a review paper collecting a bunch of different examples of recent human evolution in one place. They're the first people to be jerks about it, the first people to say 'HEY, YOU WITH THE PARADIGM, YOU SUCK' and force all the lower levels of the pyramid--the non-specialists, the administrators, the fieldworkers, the journalists, and the public--to confront the new possibilities head-on."
  • "The likely outcome is pretty much what we've got. Even when the contrarians win, they lose. Members of the field will be celebrated for being the ones who helped usher in the new paradigm. And the contrarians will be remembered as partisans of crazy false ideas, who happened to gain a thin veneer of credibility by also repeating some true stuff already known by domain experts." 


Miscellaneous: 
  • Robert Aitken Roshi, Taking the Path of Zen: "I have heard people say, 'I cannot recite these vows [the Four Vows of the Zen School] because I cannot hope to fulfill them.' Actually, Kanzeon, the incarnation of mercy and compassion, weeps because she cannot save all beings. Nobody fulfills these 'Great Vows for All,' but we vow to fulfill them as best we can. They are our practice." 
  • Taitaku Pat Phelan: "When we take these vows, an intention is created, the seed of an effort to follow through. Because these vows are so vast, they are, in a sense, undefinable. We continually define and redefine them as we renew our intention to fulfill them. If you have a well-defined task with a beginning, middle, and end, you can estimate or measure the effort needed. But the Bodhisattva Vows are immeasurable. The intention we arouse, the effort we cultivate when we call forth these vows, extends us beyond the limits of our personal identities." 
  • John Green: "The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing." 
  • Levi Gadye, "Here Are The Ways Smoking May Actually Be 'Good' For You": "Studies have observed that the more people smoke, the less likely they are to develop Parkinson's disease... In cases of Parkinson's disease, dopamine producing neurons in the midbrain degenerate and die. But nicotine appears to protect these neurons, at least in rodent models of the disease. Clinical trials using nicotine to treat Parkinson's disease in humans are currently underway, but doctors still do not recommend using nicotine (like nicotine patches) unless you're actually trying to quit cigarettes." 
  • Dylan Matthews, "A Facebook billionaire is handing tons of cash to poor people in East Africa": "Generally, you should only give something other than cash if you are confident you know the recipients' needs better than they do. With the exception of bednets, I'm not confident of that. So I, personally, give a considerable amount to GiveDirectly."
  • Sam Keeper, "Who Killed the World?": "The environment plays a huge role [in Mad Max: Fury Road] as a destructive force, but noot only in the sense of it being an antagonist. It is this omnipresent entity that all parties must work around because it is so unfathomably vast and protean that no group can really plan around it. We can see this in the place that was, formerly, the Green Place. We don't actually see much of anything literally--it's a Sea of Fog." 
  • Dara Lind, "Why historians are fighting about 'No Irish Need Apply' signs": "What's clear, through the controversy, is that Irish Americans chose to identify with the narrative the sign represents. And it's made them a continued ally for immigrants--both Irish and not--straight through to the 21st century." 
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