tanadrin

[tanadrin]

Consensus on tumblr seems to be that Trump's actions on Iran are the fault of the Dems because they allowed him to run as a peace candidate/failed to run someone more electable.

well, there's no pleasing some people. murc's law, innit? somehow only the democrats have agency, only the democrats can be held to standards, the republicans are a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with or expected to govern responsibly, etc, etc.

[tanadrin]

the thing that kinda befuddles me, as a non-new yorker who does not follow new york city or state politics, is why cuomo of all people is the one centrist dems chose to throw all their weight behind. like. genuinely, what was the thinking there?? and the guy even has shooters, people who seem genuinely upset he lost instead of just shrugging and going "yeah, he was a bad candidate for a lot of reasons." i genuinely do not understand these people's politics. is it because they just hate mamdani that much? but even if you did, why is cuomo your guy??

[tanadrin]

If Berliners really wanted to soak Deutsche Wohnen, they don’t need to expropriate apartment buildings—there are a ton of gains that could be had encouraging greater density in many parts of the city, including by enacting a 100% LVT to make all those one storey buildings on city lots wildly unprofitable to operate. And to encourage the redevelopment of those 70s-style apartment buildings that have huge setbacks from the street.

[tanadrin]

when people talk about biological systems that evolved through selection, they fall into this trap of assuming, like. if not design intent, at least like a basic telicity? like they talk about what an adaptation is "for." wings are "for" flight. the breasts are "for" nursing. but evolution isn't telic, evolution is blind, and traits and structures and genes that survive selection don't have to be "for" any one thing. penguins use their wings for swimming, for example. and lots of adaptations as far as we can tell serve no evolutionary purpose at all, they emerge as the result of sexual selection for essentially arbitrary reasons, especially in human beings. we can talk about what benefits certain adaptations/structures/genes confer in certain contexts, and we can use the language of telicity as a shorthand for that, but to take the telicity as a fundamental property of the thing (as people might do when they say sex is for reproduction [and so you shouldn't have non-reproductive sex] or breasts are for nursing [and so you shouldn't sexualize them] and so on and so forth) is to make a fundamental error, because not only do some adaptations serve apparently arbitrary, silly purposes (like the prominent breast tissue in humans, which is unusual among mammals and seems to exist only because humans have been sexualizing them for literally hundreds of thousands of years) adaptations can be repurposed to new functional ends all the time--as penguins adapting their wings to swim with, or humans adapting their vocal tracts for speech, or dinosaurs adapting their feathers to aid in flight.

which is all just a long-winded way of saying i think about social systems the same way. we can speak of the adaptational nature of social systems, discuss how they emerge (e.g., the division of labor in certain kinds of hunter-gatherer or agricultural societies, the realities of how childcare works where all infants who are not being actively nursed will die, the malthusian trap and the way that very slow growths in agricultural productivity and a lack of functional contraception incentivized infanticide as birth control and the effect that had on the development of premodern sexual ethics in many communities, and on and on) and why they can outlast the immediate conditions that formed them, and we can use the shorthand language of telicity, of "for"-ness to describe such social systems, but it must be borne in mind that if you make the mistake of assuming that telicity is real, that the "for"ness isn't just linguistic shorthand, you will make some very silly assertions about how society works and how people come to hold the social views they possess.

but i don't think it helps that a lot of what has been written about culture and society in this domain sort of intentionally equivocates as convenient between "this telicity is just a linguistic shorthand for what we acknowledge is a complex set of incentives and processes and outcomes" and "this is literally on purpose and malicious and people who say it isn't are lying." (i think that it doesn't help that that latter stance can be highly motivating if you want to politically organize to actively change the social system you live in, but that doesn't make it factually correct!)

Human culture isn't designed intentionally by anyone. Human culture is emergent, and is built continuously by everyone through the constant feedback loop of interaction with other people, individual experience, and social learning. No one is designing it from the top down.

It is a mistake to assume that any aspect of human culture is "for" anything in the narrow sense. Certainly culture emerges out of a historical process which can often be traced, and certainly there is the broad sense of "purpose" in which an aspect of culture might be perpetuated because it benefits certain people in certain ways, etc., but this is all an unplanned, decentralized, non-directed process. There have been efforts in human history by powerful institutions—like states—to shape culture in particular ways, and sometimes they see some amount of success, but the vast, vast majority culture is not produced in this way.

There's a particular post I'm vaguing here, whose political orientation I don't even particularly disagree with, but it significantly rubbed me the wrong way because it was worded as if culture was basically something engineered from the top down, in which everything has a discernible, coherent "purpose" that can be logically deduced. No! I don't think that's actually true!

[tanadrin]

A first draft of an uncial-style ujan, the 29-letter alphabet that replaced the oscun among the eastern Kuthra languages. The ujan keeps three characters which are obsolete for writing Kuthra (<e>, <o>, and <v/w>), which are nonetheless used for loanwords and learned borrowings from Middle Lende. Like the oscun, the ujan is written right-to-left, uses only simple punctuation, and does not distinguish upper and lower case.

[tanadrin]

Favorite vowel cluster and/or consonant?

fan of the uvular trill. BIG fan of the lateral fricatives. i think the non-pulmonic consonants are neat but i'm lousy at pronouncing them.

[tanadrin]

my conlangs do in fact encode fundamental features of my worldview, like the fact that i think vowel clusters are neat and i don't like the consonant /p/

[tanadrin]

1) llms have shown us that languages apparently contain a representation of the world, bc if you train a model on a large linguistic corpus it can build a useful world-model to do some kinds of reasoning; 2) every human has their own internalized model of the world, and their own internal implicit understanding of the structure of the language(s) they speak; 3) therefore we may posit that in fact it is the cognitive model of the language(s) you speak that constitutes your soul, and the metaphysical locus of your capacity for reason and understanding, and further that 4) one may sharpen and exalt one's soul, becoming more ultimately oneself, if one creates and learns to fluency a constructed language which encodes implicitly fundamental features of their experience of the world; and 5) one could preserve one's soul, or at least an echo of it, by training an LLM on a corpus of that constructed language and preserving the set of weights that result from that training run to be instantiated again out of the ether when one's descendants wished to commune with the raw spirit of their deceased ancestor

^ something that isn't true but you could believe it if you wanted

[tanadrin]

Lulu waiting patiently next to the bed while I perform my nighttime routine, anticipating that at any minute the Great Human Mattress will be ready for her to lounge upon

[tanadrin]

side character on this svu ep shoots up a police precinct, gets shot by a cop, and then looks directly in the camera while dying and says "This never would have happened if not for DC v Heller in 2008."

[tanadrin]

Proto-Indo-Europeans be like “*g̑n̥néh₃mi stéh₂tim” and then they take you into the middle of the steppe

[tanadrin]

this page is a battlefield

[tanadrin]

i think if you don't have a big room with gurgling tubes of fluid and machines that go beep you shouldn't be allowed to call your research department a "lab." a room where people fill out self-report surveys is not a "psychology lab." you gotta be shocking people with an Apparatus like it's the 1950s for that.

[tanadrin]

one kind of conceptual weakness that crops up in places in There Is No Antimimetics Division and the related stories is that even in a narrative where the threat is explicitly immaterial, the result of alien ideas intersecting with and infiltrating the human cognitive realm and spreading within human minds, some of the horror elements falls back on the tropes of monster fiction, with the big spider-monster and the black slugs that erupt from people's eyeballs and whatnot. and i think this is a weakness because the premise of, like, extradimensional ideas that can be understood by a human mind (or we'd be immune to them) but not from the outside (you only really "get" 3125 once you completely fall under its control and are doing its horrific bidding) is an interesting and unique one, and can be--and in places is!--presented in a way quite different from straight-up monster fiction, which the scp universe already has plenty of.

and we have plenty of real world examples of memeplexes that drive people to do horrific shit that is somewhat incomprehensible from the outside, like the catholic church burning heretics to death or the aztecs cutting out the hearts of war captives, and there are some glimpses of that here as well--the immense concrete structures in the middle of cities in which it is implied incomprehensible horrors take place. but it feels a little bit like the author doesn't completely trust in the premise as stated at the outset, and so we also get elements reminiscent of monster fiction or demonic possession, which isn't quite as interesting to me.

[tanadrin]

I feel absurdly lucky not just to have siblings who are good people, but siblings I have always actively enjoyed spending time with. This seems really rare among siblings in other families I have known.

[tanadrin]

There is a special powerful kind of sleepiness that comes from spending a hot afternoon in the park drinking beer and eating cake.

[tanadrin]

Saw shoops on the Feld today and one had giant balls