casens
2yr ago
the feminist by tony tulathimutte -- a short story, brutal analysis of a certain kind of incel mindset
story of your life and others by ted chiang -- great light sci-fi short story collection. "hell is the abscence of god" in particular is an amazing thought experiment on morality and religion
animorphs: the reckoning by duncan sabien -- addictive page turner, constantly chewing on questions on ethics and consciousness. gets at a lot of what HPMOR was saying without having one of the characters stop and recite the sequences to another character. fun to read even if you have no familiarity with the original animorphs series
this is probably an irrelevant tangent, but every time i see "we optimize for light, not heat" i think "isn't that the opposite of what that is supposed to mean?" i don't remember where i first heard the phrase "more light than heat", i thought it was poetry (emily dickenson?), google says it's from hamlet; my initial interpretation is that we're talking about a fire, and trying to keep ourselves warm or cook food, but the fire produces "more light than heat". ie, the "heat" is substantial and useful, the "light" is irrelevant, misleading, empty. but then you have communities like here where "light" means knowledge/insight, and "heat" means passion/emotion.
it's probably too baked into the community's culture at this point, but i'd recommend everyone abandons the metaphor completely.
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