lady-inkyrius

[lady-inkyrius]

People who get sick from radiation exposure are faking it for attention, radiation is literally the divine light of creation and it nourishes those who are pure of spirit

[lady-inkyrius]

Moscow is a state of mind

[lady-inkyrius]

lightbulb bee brooch

[lady-inkyrius]

Geometric Shapes / 240429

#RGB colour interpolation :/

[lady-inkyrius]

its retrospection tuesday

#Wasn't 2012‚ I first read it in 2015 but yeah #V my beloved #V and Redcloak have always been my favourite

[lady-inkyrius]

#:(

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[lady-inkyrius]

I think in general people are too impressed by "paradoxes" and "unintuitive truths" and stuff from science and mathematics, e.g. Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the Banach-Tarski paradox, quantum mechanics...

This is part of my whole "people believe too much" thing. People commit themselves to too many strong general principles and too many implications between ideas. The average person should be more "passively skeptical". That is to say, they don't need to go out of their way to doubt or debunk things, they should just in general take a more "I dunno" stance towards the world; they should be more inclined by default to suspend judgement on things, including on the truth per se of ideas that they have decided to adopt as working best-guesses at the truth.

Coming at this the other way: in practice, life requires us to commit to all kinds of beliefs in order to figure out what to do in various circumstances. But I feel like a vastly underrated observation is that you don't have to really believe these commitments in any deep sense. You can be more casual, more willing to say "this seems like the most likely thing at the moment, so I'll go with it for now, but idk if it's really true". This is more of a posture towards ideas than a proposition in itself. Most people are willing to entertain the concept of doubt, but it's almost about... how fluidly you entertain it? Anyway, I think this posture of casual skepticism has many epistemic benefits.

The point I was making about "paradoxes" and so on, though, is like... ok, it was reasonable based on what was known about physics in the 19th century to adopt this view of the world as made up of little billiard balls with definite positions and momenta and all that, progressing according to clockwork rules. I think if I had been alive then, I too would have adopted that as my working best guess about how the world is. But I don't think I would've have been that committed to it. I mean it's purely an empirical thing, right—"huh, sure looks like the world is made up of little billiard balls progressing according to clockwork rules". And anyway, I don't really think any of the concrete claims of quantum mechanics are that unintuitive or philosophically troubling or whatever, unless you start out weirdly committed to this billiard ball idea. If you had a more casual stance towards it to begin with, I don't think QM would have been such a shock.

I mean, I guess I do think QM was (probably) justifiably surprising, but not for the reasons most people think that. Not because of its "deeper philosophical implications" or whatever, which again I think are not that big a deal. Just for the reason that the billiard ball idea worked really well for a long time and seemed to have a lot of success and (potential) explanatory power, so seeing it overturned, if you're a specialist familiar with the area, seems like very reasonable cause for a "whoa moment". But anyway, in light of this, I'm tempted to call it "surprising in a mundane way" rather than surprising in a deep way. And I guess my further feeling is that with a sufficiently causally skeptical outlook, there isn't very much that actually should be surprising in a deep way. Most surprising stuff should just be like "oh huh".

So anyway the fact that people keep getting deeply surprised at these scientific revelations suggests to me that maybe they have too many commitments.

#I think I endorse the general point about commitments #Unsure on some of the specifics

[lady-inkyrius]

ever since i learned about ghost buildings i haven't been able to stop thinking about them

[lady-inkyrius]

There are different tiers of how hard books are to find, and honestly the type that annoys me the most are books that have been out of print in the UK for a while (or just never published here in the first place), but that are still published in the US.

This invariably leads to a situation where most places don't stock it, but the ones that do (usually only Amazon and maybe Blackwells) all sell it for rather a lot. I don't particularly want to give Jeff Bezos £15 for a paperback.

#Specifically looking for Trouble on Triton this time #The uni library gives me access to a PDF but it's just low res images that aren't anti-aliased rather than actual vector text #There was an ebay auction for a copy yesterday starting at £12 but I forgot about it about and didn't bid

[lady-inkyrius]

tech by hiroto ikeuchi

[lady-inkyrius]

the fact remains that body horror is an expression of intimacy. a grotesque and perverse one, maybe, but intimate nonetheless.

#simulcast

[lady-inkyrius]

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[lady-inkyrius]

I can't believe some people like Asuka better than Rei

[lady-inkyrius]

I can't believe some people like Rei better than Asuka

[lady-inkyrius]