thejdizzler
1d ago
Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
thejdizzler
2d ago
This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.
thejdizzler
2d ago
We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.
thejdizzler
2d ago
I think I came off too harsh against St. John's in my post. I haven't attended the college and so I don't know what the experience is like on the ground, and from what you and other's have said, it seems like I'm missing quite a bit of what they do there. What I'm more frustrated with is people using this list on substack to peddle a way to become a well-read, well-rounded humanistic individual. It's part of the path to be sure, and if you don't read any of these books I think that's not a good sign. But merely checking the box isn't enough. You need to move beyond the curated list. Which hopefully these kinds of things actually spur people to do. So maybe there's not a real problem after all...
thejdizzler
2d ago
This is an aspect of these lists that I hadn't considered, because my own high-school education looked quite a bit like the St. Johns list. I graduated public (although rich, white, and suburban) high school in 2016, and we had at least one Shakespeare every year, various English classics (Austen), Robert Penn Warren, Kafka, Camus, etc. There was some woke stuff too, but nothing that actually really challenged the Liberal, Modern worldview. But I suppose that things have likely become significantly worse since then.
thejdizzler
2d ago
I think this is probably what St. John's as an institution that you actually attend does this well, re:creating a shared knowledge-base that can be expanded on individually. I think what I am frustrated with, which maybe didn't come across here, is how this is presented by secondary sources (i.e. substack). Read these 100 books and become based, you HAVE to read these books in order to be a learned individual, etc. etc.
Re:histories vs. historical accounts. I think there is a place for both, but a good history book will a). introduce you to many other primary sources about the period and b). take a step back from some of the bias that is inherent in a primary source account (although you can't really get rid of bias completely). Of course pop history often fails to this, which is why I think trying to read more academic history (Battle Cry of Freedom is my favorite axe to grind here) is the way to go.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Yup fair. This was me talking out of my ass about something I haven't read very much of. Thanks for the correction.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Ayn Rand is the sore thumb that sticks out to me, but the anglo-centrism is the real problem. There should be far more Latin American and continental authors on there.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Lilliana Bodoc's Saga of the Borderlands. Vague retelling of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, but the Spanish are Sauron. I've only read the first one and am making my way through the other two but it's good. Ecological twist on Lord of the Rings with some pretty unique races of people that I don't think I've seen anywhere else in fantasy.
Also have to recommend Wizard of Earthsea. Best character development I've seen in fantasy by far.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I don't think this analogy works for literature/art. It's already extremely convenient to find a piece of art/music/literature to consume. It takes a couple seconds to download something from the kindle store, you can listen to anything on Spotify within a few seconds, and every painting ever made is on google somewhere. How exactly can you get more convenient than this? I suppose there's an untapped market for specific fan fiction/ slashfics for niche fandoms, but archive of our own and fan fiction.net are chock full of almost anything you would want to read in this regard. There's so much slop out there we don't need AI to make any more of it.
In terms of search and customer service, there is certainly room for convenience, but the AI that I have seen implemented in these fields is simply worse than previous algorithmic (or human) implementations. I'll change my mind when I see something better.
thejdizzler
13d ago
We know for a fact that the electron transport chain of mitochondria relies on quantum tunneling to move electrons between complexes and MRI doesn't seem to effect that very much, so I wouldn't be surprised if an MRI had no effect on conscious experience (although I couldn't tell you, I've never had one).
I don't buy the claim that we can simulate biological neurons perfectly with their ML counterparts. We can barely simulate the function of an entire bacterial cell, which for context, is about as big as a mitochondria. Can we approximate neuronal function? Sure. But something is clearly lost: what else would explain the great efficiency of biological versus human systems in terms of power consumption.
thejdizzler
13d ago
Relevant paper: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.110.024402
Relevant other links: https://jacquesmattheij.com/another-way-of-looking-at-lee-sedol-vs-alphago/, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.full, https://www.rintrah.nl/a-universe-fine-tuned-for-biological-intelligence/
thejdizzler
14d ago
I don't think it's unlikely that humans are far more optimized for real-world relevant computation than computers will ever be. Our neurons make use of quantum tunneling for computation in a way that classical computers can't replicate. Of course quantum computers could be a solution to this, but the engineering problems seem to be incredibly challenging. There's also evolution. Our brain has been honed by 4 billion years of natural selection. Maybe this natural selection hasn't selected for the exact kinds of processes we want AI to do, but there certainly has been selection for some combination of efficient communication and accurate pattern recognition. I'm not convinced we can engineer better than that.
I don't think we are going to see eye to eye on this at all because I don't think current AI models are good at writing. There is no flow, there is no linking together of ideas, and the understanding of the topics covered is superficial at best. Maybe this is the standard for writing now, but I don't think you can say this is good.
I challenge you to post two examples of writing you find good in a reply below, one from AI, and one from a human. I bet you I will be able to tell which is which, and I also guess that I will find neither good nor compelling.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Sure, might be true for stuff like books/art/music. I might argue that this has been happening for a long time, without AI, due to the centralizing effects of globalization and the internet. Why pay to listen to Joe Shmoe and his band play at a local bar when you can listen to the best of the best on your phone at any time?
In terms of customer service though, the slop is not good enough. It's not 80th percentile, it's 10th percentile. Maybe it can get better, but I don't really think so based on how these models are built. AI is just pattern recognition on a massive scale, it can't actually think. The best it's ever going to be in customer service is the equivalent of an Indian in a call center reading off a script. That's not good enough.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I have to wonder when people like you post stuff like this about AI (and my past self-included) have actually used these models to do anything other than write code or analyze large datasets. AI cannot convincingly do anything that can be described as "humanities": the art, writing, and music that it produces can best be described as slop. The AI assistants they have on phone calls and websites instead of real customer service are terrible, and AI for fact-checking/research is just seems to be a worse version of Google (despite Google's best efforts to destroy itself). Maybe I'm blind, but I just don't see this incoming collapse that you seem to be worried about (although I do believe we are going to have a collapse for different reasons).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Just wanted to agree with the second part. Monogamy allows us to focus our energies on cultural outputs on things other than being a coomer. Which is straight good. This obviously way more difficult in harem/polygamy situation (because of time constraints), and in a situation where you never mate (not having a partner is bad for mental and physical health).
Yes! I'm in the middle of the SST progression. Just did 3 x 20 min last week, planning on doing 2 x 30 min tomorrow.
In complete agreement!
I'm not saying that grit isn't real. Heck I'm reminded of this cycling study where they had people do some max power efforts, a longer VO2 max effort, and then the same max power efforts. Most people had around the same max power the second time around, meaning they weren't able to push themselves effectively on the VO2 max stuff. Rather, I'm saying that the way that you sustainably develop grit looks a lot like the kind of training that you should be doing anyway, and much less like just being yelled at by a guy that you're not trying hard enough. There is nothing that has made me want to quit a sport more than my coach telling me I wasn't trying in the middle of a race where subjectively I was burning all cylinders.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I played a lot of sports when I was younger. From about the age of 11 on, I was doing about nine to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week. Initially this was swimming, but I transitioned to running in high school, and then later took up cycling to complete the triathlon trifecta. I still do all three of these sports, am very glad that they were such a large part of my formative years, and frankly, I would like to get back to the kind of hours that I was putting in a few years ago: dedicating yourself to sport is one of the most meaningful things you can do in today’s society. These sports have taught me many things: patience, discipline, fortitude, and even kindness. They continue to cultivate these virtues even today, and will probably always be part of my life.
However not everything that sport inoculated in me was positive. Every coach I had, from middle school swim club onward, was drawn to a conception of mental toughness, or “grit” that made it difficult to understand where improvements came from, or to have a healthy relationship with competition in general. When races went poorly, poor training, physical conditions, or distractions were never at fault. Rather, I was made to feel that there was something defective in my brain or character. That I was, to quote Severus Snape, a weak person. Not only is this position a philosophically bankrupt form of the worst kind of Cartesian mind-body dualism, it also fails to offer any actual avenue to improvement. Willing yourself not to slow down doesn’t actually work when you’ve completely overshot your sustainable threshold pace ten minutes into a thirty minute race.
So how does one actually improve mental toughness in racing? There are a couple strategies. The first is to simply not put yourself in a situation where you need to be mentally tough. This means starting out a more intelligent pace that will lead to a slower accumulation of exhaustion and allow you to finish the race without having to rely on mental toughness. This was the real issue for myself and many of my teammates in college: we overestimated our fitness, went out too fast and had to rely on “grit” and “toughness” which couldn’t make up for the extra accumulated muscle fatigue from overshooting our capacity.
The second solution is to recognize that mental toughness is trained in much the same way as physical toughness: by doing training sessions that are physiologically, and psychologically challenging, and progressing these over time. By targeted exposure to the kind of pain that you would be likely to experience in a race, that pain becomes both physically, and mentally easier to deal with. You can push yourself more because it “feels” easier to do so because you’ve practiced it. And that practice looks a lot like the kind of training you are already doing to prepare for the race physically.
However, the two things aren’t exactly identical, or there wouldn’t be such an “epidemic” of mental weakness on high school and college cross country teams. The key distinction, I think comes from how we would break up intense training sessions, or workouts, as they are colloquially referred to.
In college, we ran an 8k (5 miles) on grass about every other weekend. Our weekly Tuesday night workout was about this same distance, but split up into intervals anywhere from 400m to 2 miles. The longer repeats tended to be much faster, but with more rest proportionally. We sometimes did even longer and slower intervals on non-race Saturdays, but these were never close to the 8k distance. Physically, these intervals made a lot of sense: they allowed us to get in the kind of stimulus (neuromuscular and metabolic) that was essential for improvement in the 8k but without the toll on the body that running a full 8k all-out every Tuesday would have required. Psychologically, it was a different story. My best 8k time was around 25 minutes, but the longest of these intervals was only around 10, providing very little opportunity to learn how to cope with the mentally taxing final 5 minutes of the race. There was also little opportunity for progression week to week: the total length of the workout didn’t get any longer from week to week, and neither did the average interval length.
Contrast this to how my current Tuesday workouts are structured. I would start the season with just a simple 10 minutes and my target half-marathon pace. The next week I would progress in total volume to 3 x 5 minutes, but compensate for the increased intensity by making the workout psychologically easier by splitting up the 15 minutes into intervals. But the next week I would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally. And so on and so forth until I got to about an hour of work at half-marathon pace, which would be sufficient mental preparation for that kind of race.
The real problem with our team at MIT (where I went to school) was not lack of character, confidence, or belief in oneself, but poor training. Mental strength in racing does not come from some inner reservoir of “will” but from treating the brain as a muscle that needs to be developed in the same was as one’s body through the principles of overload and progression.
I think this has some implications for other areas of my life as well. If I'm giving a presentation at work about my research, I’m going to be much more confident in my work if I’ve spent the time to carefully collect data it and think through the details of the experimental design. If I doubt my own work, bullshitting can only conceal so much of that from the audience. With Spanish, conversations with natives and my reading ability get better when I spend time in the language. If I haven’t read all week, of course my speaking ability is going to suffer. There is no substitute for putting in the time, bro: this idea of willing things to be so through sheer “grit” and “determination” cannot die fast enough. Confidence comes from competence, there are no shortcuts.
(Mods not sure if this is better suited to Wellness Wednesday, but thought it was relevant to culture war because of mind-body dualism, grit talk).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Good advice. I think I'm honestly too open to giving people chances whereas the dates I've been on where it worked out (at least short term) things just clicked fast.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Careful you don't feel too inferior or I'll eat you too!
How I can I be less bothered ad hominem attacks by randos online? I recently was pushing back against some seed-oil sophistry on substack (not even advocating for no-meat/veganism like you might assume, there isn't actually good evidence that vegan/vegetarian is better than the mediterranean diet), and some dude told me my profile picture looked like that of a prematurely aged teenager (for reference, here is the picture). I know this is bait because most of the time seed-oil sophists don't have any real arguments, but I couldn't prevent it from really bothering me. I've had similar experiences with non-appearance comments about intelligence, personal character, etc. and they all bother me to some extent. In real life this isn't really an issue because it's faux pas to make these kinds of comments (or at least has been since I graduated high school). Maybe a sign of some underlying insecurities I need to work through, or that I need to get a bit more sleep. Thoughts the motte?
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