Fixpoint

2020-01-11

What's on my mind

Filed under: Ego, Politikos — Jacob Welsh @ 20:46

As I continue shaking off the grogginess of a deep holiday blogging slumber,(i) it's time for a tack away from the recent technical series, fascinating as it is, to make room for some other thoughts that have been occupying my head the past couple days.

There were the occurrences of Mr. Ragavan dropping out of our academy and Mr. Datskovskiy reversing his previous confidence in its Master, based on an alleged lack of capacity for independent judgement. The matter was explored quite nicely I thought by Will Haack and commenters; all I really have to add is my own perspective, a narrow selection from the many available facts that I found most relevant, that I may shed light on myself as well as the subject.

I agree with Diana Coman's comment, as I understand it. MP asked her to stop advertising for the #asciilifeform channel; Datskovskiy took this as a demand to tune him out altogether, seemingly so he could consider his prediction fulfilled and sustain his view of MP as an unreasonable and overreaching madman. I'm not presently sure how I should interpret the invitation to leave, though I wasn't especially tuned in to begin with based on time constraints; I'm not inclined to contribute to building a Berlin Wall, as he puts it, if I don't have to, but at minimum it would give me pause about signing up for his ISP service knowing that I could be kicked out on such grounds.

The specimen of deductive reasoning that Datskovskiy took for finding a spine: it's not because it's not; I don't see the need; I'm not convinced; I don't think it conforms to idea. I'm not too surprised by Ragavan's attitude after how he spoke in our own main interaction. I will note that I don't hold it against anyone for having doubts. I know my own grasp of philosophy and what TMSR is really about remains limited; I've been wrong about plenty of ideological things; and we're all limited beings striving to navigate a complex world. As far as I can see, if he had wanted to avoid getting quite so tied up in knots, his best bet would have been to communicate more, or more clearly. This is a point that I still quite need to keep in mind myself.(ii)

What's been more on my mind though are some different relationships altogether. To be continued...

  1. I see myself as having been something of a compressed spring; once released, I overshot the neutral state, doing no writing at all, and am now having to pick back up the habits of time-sensitive existence. [^]
  2. As for instance about my getting stuck on drafting this article. [^]

4 Comments »

  1. I did not know that you were interested in my ISP service.

    Must nitpick: specified IMHO very clearly in the prospectus that paying subscribers will only be banished for hooliganism. (This has not happened to date.)

    Comment by Stanislav Datskovskiy — 2020-01-12 @ 17:27

  2. @Stanislav Datskovskiy - thank you for the clarification. I'm still not seeing that "only" in the linked text though; I had thought the "exclusively to my L1 and L2 WoT" was the higher consideration. To put it as plainly as possible: if Diana Coman had not earlier moved out herself, you would not kick her out or decline to renew the contract despite evaluating her as "-1 chained biorobot" ? Not that it would make for the happiest of business relationships anyway but there's quite the difference between "uncertain future" and "house on fire, need to evacuate".

    Comment by Jacob Welsh — 2020-01-13 @ 19:38

  3. @Jacob Welsh # 2: This is rather like posing an arithmetical problem where "what if you encountered a 5 that is also a 4 ?" I can't picture why I would rate "-1 : biorobot" someone with whom I have an active commercial relationship.

    It is true however that I would not likely *begin* such a relationship with someone whom I had previously negrated. The same, however, holds true for any other reasonable WoT user.

    Comment by Stanislav Datskovskiy — 2020-01-13 @ 19:49

  4. > MP asked her to stop advertising for the #asciilifeform channel

    This wasn't actually a consideration. MP simply decrufted his desktop ; the situation is rather similar to one who, upon realising his kitchen countertops do indeed offer limited surface space, decides to discard a well defunct Rowenta mixer. This isn't a decision to "stop advertising Rowenta", notwithstanding that such could be indeed counted as one of the outcomes.

    Yet the reason Rowenta needn't write lachrymose denunciations of the offensive example of undemocratic madness or whatever is that indeed Rowenta, while quite the obscure brand, nevertheless expends a little more effort towards acquiring some customers, building some market share and so forth than simply none at all. Consequently, it can afford the apparent luxury of not giving a shit whether you keep about old appliances you no longer use nor will ever again use.

    As I use her log displayer multiple times a day, a 100% ham item is better for me than a more crufty version. Fortunately she was amenable to what for me personally is an improvement, possibly even because she actually came to the same conclusion independently -- I don't know, because I didn't ask ; and I didn't ask because I didn't care. I don't care still, what the fuck difference does it conceivably make ?

    In any case you might notice that Trilema also doesn't have a sidebar full of dead links, forinstance. This isn't because of some concern about advertising -- notwithstanding that my blog does perhaps carry more commercial power in this sense than her log reader, I routinely link all sorts and manner of deranged fucks. But I also tend to maintain my workplace, at least to some sort of hygiene standard which, while I don't deem either obligatory for anyone else nor even necessarily recommendable, yet perhaps shouldn't be confused with random other things. I also don't breed rats or ants in the basement or raccoons in the back yard, and this also out of other concerns besides not advertising the respective animals -- though conceivably they might tell you differently.

    In summa : I really don't care nearly that much what other people do.

    Comment by Mircea Popescu — 2020-01-29 @ 02:56

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