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.

Moral relativism holds that there is no universal conception of moral right and wrong, and that right and wrong is relative only to the predominant culture in which an action is being considered.

Therefore what is considered murder in one culture may not be so considered in another, and moreover the act may not be judged outside of the cultural context in which it occurs.

I refute moral relativism with the argument that it is a self-contradictory, and thus invalid concept, since it requires and yet cannot sustain the concept of tolerance.

As an illustration, consider that in order for the notion of moral relativism to hold, a universal moral good is required, that being tolerance. This however, is a contradiction of moral relativism which requires that there be no universals.

[WIP]

Von Mises was a praxeologist, who reasoned about economics from principles of human behavior, rather than from studies.

He seems mainly to be known for his critique of socialism that being that it is not possible in a centrally planned economy to make all necessary economic calculations. This is an idea I’ve known about for a while, but didn’t know where it originated.

Popescu’s “differential” of Von Mises’ Liberalism and Socialism

First off, much evidence points to democracy being an immoral and ultimately destructive form of government, and I do not advocate it in any way. That said, this is the system most of us with computers hooked up to the internet live in, and so we must cope.

When debating with friends or online about political candidates and comparing them, (Trump and Hillary, for example), the debate often turns into a game of ‘who has the worst scandal, and which of those are actually scandals.’ This is a pointless game to play usually because no standard for scandal is ever defined. Not only that, but let’s say there’s a standard being used – it seems likeley that any actual adult politician would come out less favorably compared to the standard than your average 13 year old girl, who is likely completely scandal free.

A better standard for for election to public office is accomplishment. Having been elected is an accomplishment of sorts, however the better part of election is having a name, and a name can be earned without much accomplishment, simply by being born to a family with a name, or marying into a family with a name.

Without yet defining a standard for accomplishment, I’ll list a few men and women who have accomplished great things: Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Douglas MacAurthur, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charles Babbage, and Ada Lovelace.

Some of the accomplishments of these people involve leading large numbers of men, while others are of a more intellectual nature. Of the two types of accomplishment, those related to leading seem most closely related to the role of a public official, especially to an executive role.

So a standard for accomplishment could be: success in leading complex organizations in achieving concrete, substantial goals that leave the organization, the country, or the world better off, preferably in a voluntary (i.e. non-democratic) context.

This is the standard I use when considering political candidates outside of their ideological leanings.

I have an ongoing pointless debate with a friend who thinks he’s “conservative” yet voted for Hillary Clinton. In any case he is unsurprisingly anti-bitcoin. Can’t be bothered to own 20 bux worth of it and I’m a bad “evangelist” because it’s too inconvenient to use and so on.

Anyway we had the following exchange (one of many at various but monotonically increasing btc price points over the last several years):

Κασσάνδρα: you can buy 20 bux of btc you know. it’s an educational experience. process for moving it around is the same no matter the amount. and unless australia is more insane than the us, no tax enters into it until you sell it in X country.

Trojan: it’s the time involved not the hassle.

Κασσάνδρα: it’s the same time involved in putting your cc # into amazon.

Trojan: so whats the advatage? I have money to lose by learning something?

Κασσάνδρα: you don’t have 20 bux?

Trojan: how about I invest 0 and lern something?

Κασσάνδρα: you sound like an economist

For the past month or so, I’ve been having some success reading a particular Ancient Greek text called "The Anabasis", and written by Xenophon. This is an account of the adventures of 10,000 Greeks who joined forces with a Persian prince in an attempt to sieze power in Persia.

This is a great text for beginners because Xenophon’s style is straight forward, and the narrative is exciting as well as being easy to follow. It is essentially a sequence of battles interspersed with colorful anecdotes about grand practical jokes, persuasive oratory, local flora, fauna, and peoples.

I use three books to read this text. One is the Loeb’s edition, which I use as the primary source. The two other books I use are Clark’s interlinear translation and John White’s “Illustrated dictionary to Xenophon’s Anabasis,” which has an invaluable etymological breakdown of many of the words it defines.

I generally read about one page per day using the follwing technique. I first scan Clark, noting down words I will have to look up. When I’ve reached about 15 words, I stop scanning and mark my place in the book with a pencil. Next I look up each word in White, making sure to understand its grammar and etymology (which helps a lot in commiting the word to memory). I underline with a pen words that I’ve looked up in White, so that I can test myself when I encounter them again later when thumbing through the dictionary. Finally, I attempt a reading of the text in Loeb, occasionally referencing the English translation on the opposite page, or Clark, when I run into some difficult grammar.

With the preparatory vocabulary work, I find I can read a fragment from Loeb’s quite enjoyably, and this technique has kept me engaged and learning for a good while now. I look forward to being able to tackle more than one page at a time, and ultimately to a second reading, which should go much much faster.