thejdizzler
21hr ago
What I'm actually reading.
Finishing up the last book in The Warlord Chronicles, Excalibur, which I'm really enjoying. It's a gritty (although maybe not that historically accurate) Arthur retelling that I think thematically captures a lot of what the Arthur mythos is going for. Also reading After Virtue, which I am starting to enjoy more.
thejdizzler
21hr ago
I hated that book. Review below
First the plot. I think I could live with an unbelievable speculative world, and even with arrogant writing, if interesting stuff happens to interesting people. Very little happens in this book, and very little of what happens is due to the agency of the main character. I get that that's part of the point: women in this literary universe (and in the world in general) are so often oppressed and powerless, and its difficult to them to feel like they have any agency. But it doesn't make the main character very interesting, or even very feminist. Offered is kind of sniveling coward who goes along with pretty much every thing that's done to her, only taking matters into her own hands when she wants to have sex with the chauffeur (which I suppose could be read as empowering, but did not come off to me that way).
Secondly, the world building. Margaret Atwood markets herself as an author of "Speculative Fiction" rather than "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy" because she prefers to think of herself as someone who writes about things that could happen. The thing is, The Handmaid's Tale could never happen in this country, especially not on the timescale suggested. Polyamory is not something acceptable for the Christian right (although not so on the left), and the reduction of Women to sex objects is not something that Christianity preaches (the most revered women in the faith is A VIRGIN). Even if some kind of twisted version of the faith was to appear, there's no way it would be able to seize power in the country, and have such widespread support on the timescale suggested. And that's not to mention the whole issue of political conflict in a society with a declining birth rate. Atwood does this kind of okay in some aspects: most everyone in the Handmaid's tale just seems tired: no one actually believes in all the crap that the regime puts on, which I think fits with the general narrative of declining population. That, however, does not fit with the brainwashing or the force of belief required for Gilead to overthrow the US government. Again, I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of Atwood's about fundamentalists. A lot of fundamentalists actually really deeply believe what they say they do. What Atwood presents here is yet another caricature of religious extremism: hypocrites who don't actually practice what they preach.
Given some historical context in which this was written (aftermath of Reagan's election and Iranian Revolution), the world of this book makes a little more sense. However, Atwood's concerns about the rights of women have, at least in my opinion, aged badly. Although the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, many states, including Massachusetts, still have the right to abortion enshrined by their constitutions. The religious right is increasingly irrelevant: their champion is a hedonistic old man who fails to even make lip service to any kind of religious morals. Threats to women rights rather have come from capital, and the insidious reduction of everything, from bodies, to free time, to meaningful relationships, to the grasping hand of the market. Atwood so poignantly critiqued this system in her MaddAddam trilogy, and it was frustrating to not see that same level of analysis here.
Finally, I found the writing to be unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. Frequent, un-signalled flashbacks, and lack of quotation marks were the worst offenders. I get that this was supposed to be due to the framing device of these being audio transcripts, but it still grinds my gears. Atwood is not unique in this regard (looking at you Cormac Mccarthy). I also found that the framing device didn't really do it for me: somehow this being a university lecture ~100 years after the fall of Gilead made the whole speculative world even more unbelievable for me.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Agreed. The section on the problems with Buddhism is extremely undeveloped compared to the rest of the essay and basically amounts to complaining that the author didn't experience any spiritual progress with Buddhism without actually seriously trying to make spiritual progress with Buddhism. No shit dawg.
thejdizzler
4d ago
You're 100% right and I will. Time to add it to the new years check in.
thejdizzler
4d ago
I really should meditate, but I constantly avoid it for some reason.
Those things help relax the body but they rarely seem to relax the mind, which is the real problem. Lots of racing thoughts.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Stretching, warm shower, reading.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Explain
thejdizzler
5d ago
Thanks! I'm trying not to be too disappointed, as this is the best marathon since my PR in 2023 (2:35:34). I know what I need to do better next training cycle, which is getting me quite excited!
thejdizzler
5d ago
Any tips on relaxation/decompression activities that I can do in the evening to help me prepare for bed/do during the work day to help manage stress? Thinking my marathon training wasn't as effective as it could have been because of poor stress management, but not sure how to do a better job.
thejdizzler
5d ago
- Work. Nothing new to report
- Fitness: Boston marathon went not how I was hoping but not exactly badly. Went out conservative (1:19 first half) and was hoping to pick it up the second half but ended up fading to 6:30s and running a 2:41 high. A few weeks off/extremely easy then I'm planning on starting up the build again. This time I think I need to be more running-focused, serious about recovery and sleep, and hit the gym at least once a week.
- Intellectual Stuff: Plugging away at After Virtue and The Warlord Chronicles. Trying to find an Italian speaking group in baltimore to keep up with.
- Finances: Found a third roommate starting in June, and spending is on track to be below $3k this month.
- Dating. No news to report
- Tarot. No session this week
- Socializing: Saw all my college friends at the marathon.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours phone.
- Mental health: feeling pretty relaxed post-marathon.
thejdizzler
9d ago
One of my earliest podcast memories from high school is of Sam Harris discussing the paradoxical path towards becoming a successful meditator. For those of you haven’t tried Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation, the end goal is basically to quiet the mind: to be present in the purest sense of being present without latching onto thoughts or judgements. However, I usually find it is quite difficult to actually do this: even when I do manage to successfully clear the mind of thoughts about dinner or my crush in dance class, there’s still a part of me that’s judging how empty my mind is, preventing me from actually being fully in the present. In order to actually successfully meditate you have to cease being this reflective self. That self, as Sam Harris puts it, can’t get there from here.
While I still don’t fully understand how this works in terms of meditation, I think this serves as a pretty apt metaphor for many other areas of life. We simply don’t understand how development, whether as an athlete, artist, or businessman is going to change our relationship to that craft, and who we are in that domain of life in general. In all these fields, the novice can never obtain mastery because it doing so he becomes a master and no longer thinks or behaves like a novice. He couldn’t get there from here.
There are three areas in my life, probably quite familiar to readers of this blog, where I very clearly see this process at work: running/triathlon, language learning, and science. I don’t pretend to be a master at any of these categories, but I do claim to have experienced a profound transformation in how I relate to my own process of improvement in each of them. There is no path from 12-year-old swimmer who pushed as hard as he could every practice, the grammar-drilling high-school student, and the flailing first-year graduate student to who I am today, but rather and abrupt disconnect– which paradoxically cannot be placed at a single point in time. I’ll unpack what I mean more for each specific example below.
Endurance Sports
I started competitive swimming when I was in 4th grade around 9-10 years old. Before that, my parents had made me try a variety of different ball sports (soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis), as well as fencing. I was not particularly good at any of these: I was supremely uncoordinated (still am), not very fit, and because of the first two not very interested in improvement. Swimming changed all that: I quickly became more coordinated, more fit, and much more interested in improvement, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Perhaps this first season of swim club represents the first “you can’t get there from here” moment: before I had no interest in sport despite parental pressure, and afterwards it became one of the pillars of my life. The Joshua that deliberately ran away from the ball in soccer games, couldn’t hit a single baseball, and walked during the elementary school run-a-thon would never have been able to understand the person I became within a few months.
The next phase of my endurance sports career was characterized by what I like to call a try-hard, or a no-pain-no gain attitude. I thought that if I just worked harder I would improve. I would constantly sprint the warm-up, race during dry-land circuits, and, once I switched my primary focus to running, treat every easy day as a tempo or light threshold. The model of how I saw myself improving was the ability to continually handle more and more pain and more and more work until I was some kind of athletic übermensch.
This phase lasted from when I was about 10 to my senior year cross country season when I was 18. Ending it required another shift in perspective. I wasn’t going to keep improving, and in fact, I was getting worse by continuing to bash my head into a wall of always high-intensity all the time. In my junior year, along with my friend Zack, I began to become interested in how to actually train and improve based on the science. It wasn’t so much a question of grit and mental toughness and grinding really hard every day, but of intelligently putting together a mix of training that would support the physical and psychological adaptions necessary for improvements. The try-hard, whose favorite poem was Invictus5, and prided himself on how tired he was after practice, never could have gotten here from there.
I have changed my attitude towards training and endurance sports quite a bit since I was 18, but I don’t think I’ve had another discrete transformation. My realizations that lifestyle can have a larger impact than the training itself, the importance of adapting training to my individual genetics and physiology, and the importance of truly easy days all fit within this framework of training as recipe rather than a wall to be knocked down with a sledgehammer. I could get here from there.
Language Learning
One of the big problems with most language learning instruction in schools and on apps like Duolingo, is the disconnect between how the language is taught and what kinds of activities you want to actually use the language to do. In my other blog posts I like to break up the later into four different domains: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Traditional classroom instruction, as well as the apps, heavily favor the output domains, probably due to the need to evaluate a student’s progress, which is much more difficult to do from the standpoint of pure input. This approach also heavily relies on translation from one’s native language. It’s a little absurd to expect that constant grammar drills, and speaking exercises that involve heavy amounts of translation from one’s native language to lead to fluency, which involves seamless and intuitive understanding of written and spoken language. You simply can’t get there from here.
I tried really hard to get there from here using traditional methods in various languages. 10 years of Spanish in elementary→ high school. Not fluent. 3 years of an hour of Duolingo a day in Dutch. Not fluent. I made similar attempts, although with much less effort for Japanese, Hebrew, and French.
It was only with the discovery of Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, and a fundamental change in my approach to language learning away from book learning and towards acquisition that I was able to make real progress. Sixth grade Josh who thought drilling his conjugations harder would lead to fluency never would have made it here from there.
Science
In the career of every single scientist there is almost guaranteed to be a sharp “you can’t get there from here” moment. For me this happened during the second year of my PhD, where classes and controlled experiments gave way to the vast wilderness of the unknown that I would have to hack and slash through to arrive at my thesis. The skills that served me so well in class, memorization and logic, could only take me so far in this brave new world. The intimate details of your specific experiments and systems, how complex pathways interact with each other, and if your hypothesis is total bullshit or not are not facts that you can derive with a pencil and paper sitting with your advisor in July of 2021, but can only be won through the cauldron of trying things out and seeing what shit sticks. You can’t get there from here.
thejdizzler
11d ago
- Work. Working on only three things at a time which seems to be helping with the overwhelm. Still thinking about this job opportunity: if I take it I need to wrap up the PhD in the next few months.
- Fitness: 9 hours. Tapering a little this week for the Boston marathon which is Monday! Goal is a PR (sub 2:35:30)
- Intellectual Stuff: Italian class is ending, which I am happy about. Adopting the only three books at a time, and only one YouTube/Podcast and one substack/blog article a day is also helping.
- Finances: Talked to a financial advisor at my brokerage and he suggested that I should put money into individual bond funds rather than CDs (better liquidity and slightly better rates). Spending is low for this month, and we are working on finding a third roommate, which should ease my financial worries for the next year (if we don't find a third roommate, my rent will go up 50% at the beginning of June.
- Dating. Had a fun time hanging out with my friend Bella last night, but didn't and am not planning on making any romantic moves.
- Tarot. Great session with my ex-roommate when I asked about job stuff. The cards basically said to stop trying to please other people and do what I want to do
- Socializing: went to a board game bar with my lab. Will be hanging out with friends all weekend at the marathon.
- Screen time: 1.15 hours phone.
- Mental health: anxiety is 100% hunger-related. Haven't been the best about eating enough this week, so was quite anxious Friday-> Monday.
thejdizzler
13d ago
You might be interested in checking out MacIntyre's After Virtue. He makes the same argument, although I think his solution is kind of ass.
thejdizzler
13d ago
There's a difference between the regime and the Iranian people, which I'm sure you know. The Iranian people give probably nearly zero shits about Israel as a country. The regime is a bunch of theocrats who are very interested in exporting fundamentalist Islam and destroying Israel.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I talked to some of my colleagues more about this (not my professors as they are completely unwilling to talk about not academia) and they said that I should definitely aim higher with my skillset, but that it could be a good temp job while I wait for the startup to get more funding/look for other positions. I'll get to do a lot more chromatography/protein work on stuff that hasn't been my specialty in the PhD which looks good on my resume. So not a don't take, but more of a don't sell yourself short and play hardball if necessary.
thejdizzler
14d ago
This is an absurd position. Israel has had nukes for ~30 years. Tehran still exists and Israeli nukes have never been used.
There was also no conflict between Israel and Iran under the shah. The entire reason this conflict exists is because the Iranian regime wants to kill all the Jews.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Think it's time to buy USO tomorrow AM...
thejdizzler
16d ago
The idea is that I would get paid more after a year or two when the company grows. Postdoc salaries around 65-75k.
thejdizzler
16d ago
I just got an informal job offer from my friend's startup company here in Baltimore. It's almost exactly what I want to do (engineer soil microbes) and although it would only pay 60k, I have significant financial assistance from my parents to buy a house, and would come with significant equity in the company, which could have huge upside.
On one hand staying in Baltimore is hugely appealing. I have a ton of friends and community here, the crime problem in the city has gotten significantly better since I started my PhD, and I could actually afford a house, even without my parents' help. On the other hand, dating here has been total ass, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up the dream of academia just yet (although I think American universities are sinking ship for a variety of reasons), and while crime has gotten significantly more under control than when I moved here in 2020, there's still an anti-white racial animus here that I don't like. I'd also have to speed run the end of my PhD, but that again shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I guess I'd like your guys' thoughts: should I stay or should I go?
thejdizzler
18d ago
For the swing dancers on the forum. How can you dance/do swing outs for a long time without getting exhausted? Cardio shouldn't be an issue: I'm a fit runner/triathlete, I'm thinking it's a skill issue.
thejdizzler
19d ago
- Work: Lab meeting today. Working on only three things at a time which seems to be helping with the overwhelm.
- Fitness: 10.5 hours with a 23 mile run. Amazing repeat of the 40 min tempo (5:36 pace this time). Cooler temps and fueling helped loads.
- Intellectual Stuff: Knocked out a lot of books last week, but need to get back to substack writing!
- Finances: Put most of my parents money into 4% CDs. Maybe a conservative move, but I just don't know with all the geopolitical uncertainty. Spending is on track for this month so far.
- Dating. Porn free all week. Think my friend Bella may be interested in me, but I'm not sure about her because she's a Sanderson fan and that gives me the ick.
- Tarot no session.
- Socializing: Swing dancing and two brewery hangouts.
- Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
- Mental health: anxiety is 100% hunger related as eating more fixed it.
thejdizzler
20d ago
Where is an example of this?
thejdizzler
22d ago
Please no!
thejdizzler
23d ago
This is amazing thanks man!
Makes me want to learn Welsh, especially since my ancestry is almost 100% British and Irish (with some Scandinavian blood). Would be practically useless but is very beautiful.
Do you know about the Winter King mod for CK2? You can just directly play as the book characters in the 480 start (edit: I see that you talked about this, guess the mod isn't that good)
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