Thimbron

Scott Adams speaks often of his idea of Systems vs. Goals. While I don’t have any particular reason to believe Scott Adams about anything, especially given his nihilistic streak, the idea strikes a chord with me, and also makes me think of Taleb’s concept of optionality. Taleb’s optionality is the idea that it is better to have bounded loss and unbounded gains. Scott Adams’ gives the example of having improved his writing skills without any particular goal in mind resulting in him getting lucrative speaking gigs.

I have maybe one system going right now, which is to study the classics, both the languages and the texts.

One other idea from Adams’ post that corroborates with other things I’ve read is the idea of consciously training your mind in order to save willpower. It relates to some things I’ve read about Stefan Molyneux’s idea of free will, in that just becuase you might have some automatic responses that require no delibration, it doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for those actions, since you may have consciously trained yourself to react in a certain way. This is how playing music works.

Note that the name of this piece is intentionally mispelled.

More and more I’m annoyed by those claiming not to be on the right or left, but to have discovered their own political philosophy and set of opinions that is somehow above it all. Show me the fuckin’ blog mother fucker! If you’ve had such great thoughts that you found the correct balance of left/right/up/down viewpoints that Aristotle, Plato, Locke and Marx somehow missed show me the post where you laid it out.

Because I agree with someone else’s thoughts you see since I’m such an ideologue, and my opinions aren’t based on reason and evidence like yours are, and you spent years developing your own unique and independent line of thinking, and so on. It couldn’t possibly be that you never even researched the obvious refutations of your own personal theories that you came up with all on your own.

Symptomatic is that anything outside of (Harvard|Yale|NPR|BBC|CBS|TheHill)'s Overton window is dogmatic and ideology and conspiracy.

The definition of white privilege:

“White privilege (or white skin privilege) is a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. Academic perspectives such as critical race theory and whiteness studies use the concept of “white privilege” to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people.”

If there were such a thing as white privilege, non-whites would not be able to publicly discuss it.