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Doctrine of the Mean trutherism
Cool picture
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Camino Day 10 & 11
Yesterday I woke up to the smell of smoke. There are several wildfires now I'm Northern the and the smoke has been blowing into Galicia for the past two days, creating a haze in the atmosphere. It feels awful to know that the beautiful country I just walked through is being damaged.
I continued traveling with the woman I met at the monastery. We walked from the monastery at Armenteira down along a gorgeous wild-looking river and through vineyards to Villanova de Arousa (23km). We had hoped to catch the boat that afternoon but instead we watched it pull away from the dock just as we came into view of the harbor so we checked into the municipal albergue in the local albergue.
Today we caught the boat at 1:30 and traveled up the Arousa river to Pontecesures. I left my companion at the monastery in Hebron and continued another 15km to O Faramello so that I would have less to walk tomorrow.
Everything feels more intense now that's I'm so close to finishing. Tomorrow I will walk the remaining 15km to Santiago de Compostela.
(Pictures aren't uploading, will try adding tomorrow)
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Hello world!
Obligatory "I'm new here" post. I'll post some other things soon; posting on Facebook has been feeling aversive and it's the only social media I ever use.
Meanwhile, in what may be news to those of you who know me: I have a child now! Interested in talking to other child-havers. She's two months old. This part is honestly kind of boring - babies start out _extremely_ limited in their abilities. Her most recent milestone is that she can now somewhat consistently move her hand to her mouth. I expect it to get more interesting later. She's cute though!
I'm also interested in programming languages (I'm one of three editors of the JavaScript specification), math, language, and reasoning about the world in general. I have a draft of a long essay about reading the news I need to get around to finishing someday and if that sounds interesting to you feel free to poke me about it. I might end up using this instance for that kind of somewhat-less-polished-but-therefore-actually-existing writing.
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Translate things
Sometimes people are like "noooooooo I can't just translate Tian as Heaven or Dao as Way or junzi as gentleman, the terms have slightly different connotations and are used by this writer in a sort of distinct way". Nah. Writers in English use common terms idiosyncratically all the time. If you're worried we'll misunderstand, put an asterisk the first place the terms are used and refer us to a glossary. In the meantime, the reader will have a better understanding of what the terms mean.
In general I think we should translate more things so that you can understand what people are saying. E.g. "Hamas" is just short for "the Islamic Resistance Movement", call them that or the IRM if you want to save space. Most English speakers don't speak foreign languages, and it's important to be comprehensible!
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i dont know words like junzi or Tian. With Dao I think we should use Dao. But shrug.
If this were about Buddhist terms I'd have more specific things to say.
But my sense of English is that it just doesn't even act like these other languages in very relevant ways. Pali/Sanskrit is super different as a language, for instance, and so you just can't translate the words into English without losing ~70% of the background meaning and connotation.
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oh i see.
yes i agree that context is important.
if you're just a casual audience, then i should use an English phrase in the conversation so you know what i'm saying at all.
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So you're saying people should write more like official subs and not fan subs youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIl…
(I have never watched a fan sub but I have observed the urge of people who are really into a hobby using obscure language because they care too much about capturing nuances)
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- https://x.com/marysia_cc
- https://x.com/0zmnds
- https://x.com/opancaro
- https://x.com/PaulWelsh89
- https://x.com/JaimeV3ra
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Something really wild to me is the extent to which archaeology seems to believe that artifacts were used for some kind of religious / worshipful purpose.
Like, in the modern world, relatively very very few objects are used for worship. If a future civilization finds a figurine, it's probably a Barbie doll or a Funko Pop or something.
Future civilizations might find our most treasured artifacts and presume that we worship glass rectangles or something.
Seems kinda weird if this is the default assumption for unexplained historical artifacts, as it naively appears (to a non-archaeologist). Like, why do we think that these figurines are fertility goddesses rather than toys or instructional tools or even pornography?
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I contend that we do worship glass rectangles.
Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.
Our current 'secularism' is also a 'religion' in this same way. We don't see it as religious activity to go to a supermarket or post on Facebook. But ... it is?
> Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.
FWIW I don't think this is true. If you want to talk about the New Testament authors, the last bit of James 1 seems to talk about Christianity as a religion, James and Paul talk a lot about "the faith", Hebrews 11 talks about faith as belief in things unseen and seems to indicate it's a good thing. The proceedings of the Council of Trent talk about "the Christian Religion" (e.g. history.hanover.edu/texts/tren…).
[I mean TBC they also thought it was "the way things really are"]
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Hmm lemme clarify.
RE: 'Religion' as 'worldview you can select into or out of' -- at the time of Christianity's dominance (which wasn't until much after New Testament being written anyway), no one thought of Christianity as a worldview. They thought of Christianity as the way things really are.
"Religion" was more like those pagan traditions that you could opt into or out of but were clearly wrongheaded, outdated, nonsensical, and everyone knows are made up. That's what I mean.
Now we use 'religion' in the same way, without recognizing that our dominant worldview is also a religion in fact.
FWIW this wasn't clear from the way I wrote things up but the Council of Trent was held in the 16th century as a reaction to Protestantism. People at the time really did use words like "faith" and "religion" to describe Christianity, altho I'm not sure they would have said you could opt out of it or that it was made up.
At any rate, zooming out, I feel like we can drop the word "religion" and there's still an important thing here. My understanding is that most religious practitioners think that there's something importantly different about the rituals I'd be tempted to call "religious" (e.g. going to mass / church service, sacred artwork, etc) and stuff I'd be tempted to call "secular" (e.g. drinking a can of soda, going on my phone), even when they think mass / sacred art is super important and real. So there's still a live question of "was this pot related to by people back then more like the way believers relate to sacred artwork, or more like the way believers relate to cans of soda".
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Recently I've had some physical issues that have kept me from being physically active (not that I'm usually very active, but this has been even worse than normal):
- About a month ago I learned I have a hernia after doing some wood-chopping (which is really fun btw), and I've been having an upsettingly difficult time setting up an appointment for surgery to fix it
- A week after that, I broke my pinky toe by accidentally kicking a staircase in the dark
The hernia has kept me from feeling good about doing any kind of weightlifting, and the broken toe has made it hard to walk more than a few blocks. This kinda sucks and I'm not sure what to do about it.
Maybe I should be cycling more? Anyone have other ideas?
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Camino Day 7
Tui to Mos, 21km. Another beautiful stretch of forest. I stopped early today because I had a big day yesterday and the next stretch of road is supposed to be very hilly.
I had a nice moment in the early morning, running into some bagpipers playing in the middle of the forest. It was cool because you could hear them for a long time before you could see them so there was a stretch that felt very fairy-like and mysterious
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(1) There's some truth to this. Violent islamists are on average, worse than most people in various ways.
(2) But also, they may see it more as a direct insult to God as opposed to an insult to them personally or their human social group. Compare their stance towards practicing Christians and Muslim apostates. Both groups go to hell, on the conventional conservative Muslim understanding. But they are much more bothered by apostates.
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I agree that terrorists are in some sense not serious and tbh I think it's for the best
or rather, second best, behind "not being terrorists"
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I feel like the "introvert/extravert" axis bundles (at least) 3 things together in a kind of unhelpful way:
- low vs high need to socialize
- low vs high gregariousness
- low vs high desire to talk to people you don't know
These are sort of related, but I feel like usually when I hear people talk about extraversion or introversion they would usually be better served by appealing to a sub-factor rather than the bundle.
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Yeah, this seems true. How do you define 'gregarious' separately from the other things?
Other dimensions could be related to social anxiety, awkwardness, and/or masking. A lot of the time when I "don't want to talk to people" or it drains my energy to do so, it's because I feel uncomfortable in the situation, rather than because there's something I inherently dislike/find tiring about talking to people.
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I'm glad you've had a good time with nurses. There's a lot of variance, so I expect many people feel this way overall.
I think there are intermediate cases where the thing really sucks, but it's not quite in the "obviously extremely painful" category, where there can be a significant disconnect between patient experience and provider concern.
Yes -- I think in many of these situations, the provider does not believe that the patient is suffering as much as they claim. As a patient, it's very distressing. I've had a lot of good healthcare experiences as well, but bad experiences have the potential to be intensely bad.
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Free Manifold alpha
In this market about how many episodes of AXRP I'll publish in 2024, there's an 11% chance I'll publish less than 9, the number I have published so far. manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…
(The motivation of the market was to test whether I'd succeed in publishing a ton - in fact, I've been down an editor for a bit which slowed me down, as did having a real job, but I still think I'll beat my all-time record of 10 episodes in 2022)
- How many episodes I'll release in 2025: manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…
- How many YouTube views my peak episode will get in 2025: manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…
Camino Day 6
I'm in Spain now!
Today I turned off the Coastal route and walked inland along the Minho river, culminating in the medieval cities of Valença (on the Portuguese side) and Tui (on the Spanish side), for a total of 29km. I chose to take the cycling path along the river most of the way rather than the official route which runs through several towns. On the way, I came across a huge open air market and bought myself a Weird Little Guy (pretty sure it's Saint Anthony)
The cities were particularly cool. The route runs directly through the old Valença fortifications and as you approach the bridge you can see Tui cathedral on the hill above the river.
Tui is 118km from Santiago. Meaning that I have gone 142km already but also that tomorrow I start collecting my stamps to qualify for the Compostela rather than because it is fun.
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limited-audience posts
I'm planning to write misc techy blog posts here. I wish when I wrote stuff for a niche audience, I had some way of saying "if this post is not for you, you can filter out posts like these". When I write a post there's a "categories" input field, but I don't yet know what they're for, and I don't see an easy way to configure my ignored categories (maybe this is what channels are for? but I think people don't look at channels / know what they are by default). For the sake of experimentation, I added a "meta" category to this post.
For the time being I'm just going to post stuff and not worry about it, but I'd be interested to hear from people who have already solved this problem.
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Probably you don't want to do it this way, but in principle you could make a sub-user or even a group (i.e. a sub-user that auto-reshares things you tag it in) for this.
I do think you can use channels for this, by making a new channel that excludes the tags you don't want to see. I haven't tried it though.
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This makes me think of how in normal society there are a variety of expensive-to-verify tasks that have their quality/correctness guaranteed by the threat of reputational damage, or even malpractice/liability lawsuits.
Say a civil engineer submits a design for a bridge, and then it collapses on day #2 after the expensive construction is complete. Even if he can't get sued to cover the construction company's loss, he'll have trouble finding work afterwards.
But with internet bounties, generally people aren't laying their expertise and credibility on the line with their suggestions, so there isn't much of an incentive to hold back from offering dubious solutions.
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Camino Day 4 & 5
Castelo do Neiva to Carreço and Carreço to Seixas. Both 22km stages.
As I've gotten farther from Porto the towns have gotten smaller and more of the route had consisted of forest paths and walled alleys, typically routing into town whenever there's a Big Old Church to get a stamp at
The past two days I've been traveling with other solo women that I met on the road, one from the UK and the other from Lithuania, both friendly and enthusiastic. B, who I spent both days with, was excited to learn it was my birthday and told everyone we ran into at the hostel (something I wouldn't have done myself). A big group of us went out for dinner and everyone sang happy birthday in their native language.
I've enjoyed the sense of community among the pilgrims; the one thing everyone has in common is that we're all on a Big Adventure.
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Daniel Filan
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