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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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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Note: You can invite people to this instance if you'd like! Please only invite people you trust to be kind, friendly, and reasonable. Especially only invite people you're sure are human.
To invite someone, go to your "contacts" page and click on "invite friends" in the left sidebar. You'll need their email address.
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Do y'all remember that princeton election guy who forecast a win for Clinton with 99% in 2016? I just found a post-mortem interview with him where he says:
Probabilities are not a good way to convey uncertainty. The first reason being that it’s hard to estimate the true amount of uncertainty, and I discovered that.
I... have never before felt such a strong urge to say "skill issue". But people weren't saying "skill issue" yet in 2016, so nobody got the chance. Time is cruel.
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Sam Wang and Nate Silver had an interesting back-and-forth, if I remember correctly. A friend of mine was convinced that Sam was right and that Nate was “putting his thumb on the scale to cover himself.”
In hindsight, it seems to me that Sam’s approach was more of a straightforward averaging of polls, while Nate’s method is more like a gambler’s—integrating his own beliefs into the model.
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Okay, so if these complex systems like weather and biology are theoretically best described by some ideal set of policies, then would these complex systems, even the stable self-replicating ones be considered non-agentic?
I struggling to see the fundamental difference between a fire that is hungrily eats all the wood in the pile, and me, a person that a hungrily eats all the snacks in the pantry. Unless we're considering some ineffable free well, I mostly see the difference that my systems are much more complex and illegible, making it hard to map out the full causal chain from the biochemistry in my psychology to my hands reaching for a bag of chips.
Combustion is much simpler, but from some all-knowing perspective, they're both self-sustaining chain reactions of chemistry.
How do tools differ from trading partners?
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I'm guessing it's only because I have only 1 friend so far, but I have an empty feed, so I am discovering posts using the circular button in the navbar. It's a confusing interface!
> "The top left icon, with the rectangular grid, is the thing to click in order to see the "Facebook timeline" analogue
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Post for collecting bugs reported on this friendica instance
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network
page? on your global community
page?
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Reminds me of of the "you are bugs" scene in the three body problem.
> And as we go about changing the world to suit our preferences, the rats will remain unconsulted. It seems clear to me that rats will only get what they want, when what they want happens to be nearly-costless to humans.
This seems like it's making progress towards a formalization, though I think it still struggles.
If you imagine that covid virons were agents, then it seems to me that although there's a sense in which we're much more powerful than them, and you know, humanity could, if "it" wanted, defeat them, they can kinda get what they want without enormous costs to humans. And yet humans are still much more powerful than covid virons.
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Hosting providers
Right now superstimul.us is hosted on a Vultr VPS instance. I use Vultr because it's a decently reliable VPS host that offers OpenBSD (though this instance is running in Docker on a Debian system). Much cheaper than AWS; comparable pricing and features with many other VPS providers.
But I just went looking at the prices of competitors, and Hetzner is cheap. How is it so cheap? For roughly the same price I'm paying for this host, I could get ~8x the vCPUs and RAM, and 4x the storage.
It would be a hassle to migrate at this point, but I'm definitely tempted.
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Notes on the outcome of groups experiment
I think groups are a pretty half-baked feature, and I don't expect people to use them much. A "group" (previously called a "forum", and most of the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this change) is basically an account that auto-reshares things it's tagged in. You can give it a few different settings for how it responds to follow requests, and another setting for the visibility of its reshares. To administer a group, you have to create a second account for it (which friendica does make relatively easy but not trivial), and then switch to being logged-in "as" the group.
So, yeah I guess it might be useful for coordinating things somehow, and the setting with private reshares is maybe promising (though also marked "experimental"). But it seems much less natural to me than the corresponding concept on Facebook.
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Huh, so this is a test group. What does the result of this look like? Who can see it?
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Some praise for the behind-the-scenes tech I'm using to run this site
- Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
- Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
- Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.
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The plan for the beta
Thanks to everyone who's joined to help beta test! I'm very grateful y'all are here! ❤️
My basic plan is to use superstimul.us for the next week, posting here instead of Facebook, getting a sense of the platform so that I can help other people later, and trying to iron out basic issues if they crop up.
After that, I'm going to do a push to invite clusters of people who I'm especially excited about being here. I'll probably reach out to y'all for names of people who are cruxy for your active enjoyment/participation here (feel free to preemptively message me about this!).
Anybody can invite their friends, btw, though I would slightly prefer you held off for now, because I want to be strategic about the launch.
I might do some kind of incentive / costly-signaling scheme where I give $20 or so to the first 30 people who share a substantive post here, and not on other social media? Or something; Not sure about that yet.
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I'm considering going to the southern hemisphere for December and January, to miss the shortest days in California.
New Zealand and Chile both seem like good options: Tons of sun that time of year, good climate, safe cities, relatively cheap. Chile is a lot cheaper, and after having a lot of fun visiting Mexico, I kind of want to try living in a country where I don't know the language.
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I'm really excited for this experiment! Friendica exceeds my expectations in some ways (looks nice, has imo an especially good privacy model, seems easy to update and administer) and falls short in others (ease of finding people, occasional UI weirdness).
Please let me know if you run into any issues and I'll try to fix them or at least help resolve them
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
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in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Sam FM
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niplav
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •My best guess is that they know a lot about how similar contemporary societies (e.g. hunter-gatherers) behave, and that religion is very infused into many activities we consider secular. Those societies are doing worshipful-X instead of just-X.
I'd guess the fandom-forming instinct also exists in many other societies, but there it's channeled into religion. So Funko-pops might be descirbed as semi-religious objects?
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niplav
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Guive
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in reply to Guive • •Raemon
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renshin
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •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?
Daniel Filan
in reply to renshin • • •> 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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renshin
in reply to Daniel Filan • • •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.
Daniel Filan
in reply to renshin • • •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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Jen Blight
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •This blog series seems to make a distinction between ancient polytheistic traditions (eg. the way people felt about the Olympians) and "religions" (eg. the way people feel about the Abrahamic God). So, ancient people do rituals and make offerings to gods more because they think it's the "way things are" and out of a sort of precautionary principle (maybe the harvest ritual does nothing but you don't want to risk a year's crop on the experiment) but they don't believe that Zeus is personally invested in their struggles or virtues or mental states nor is Zeus asking them to have "faith" in him.
That said, I also don't think we "worship" glass rectangles. Medieval women used to carry a spindle and distaff with them everywhere so the they could do their spinning during any available moment. This was so much a part of life that the distaff became a symbol of femininity but we don't say that these people "worshipped" the distaff; it was a tool.
... show moreThis blog series seems to make a distinction between ancient polytheistic traditions (eg. the way people felt about the Olympians) and "religions" (eg. the way people feel about the Abrahamic God). So, ancient people do rituals and make offerings to gods more because they think it's the "way things are" and out of a sort of precautionary principle (maybe the harvest ritual does nothing but you don't want to risk a year's crop on the experiment) but they don't believe that Zeus is personally invested in their struggles or virtues or mental states nor is Zeus asking them to have "faith" in him.
That said, I also don't think we "worship" glass rectangles. Medieval women used to carry a spindle and distaff with them everywhere so the they could do their spinning during any available moment. This was so much a part of life that the distaff became a symbol of femininity but we don't say that these people "worshipped" the distaff; it was a tool.
I think maybe we do worship Funko Pops though. In the sense that people who buy Funko Pops have the same relationship with the depicted character as an ancient person might have had with Achilles or Cu Cullain.
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