Reality doesn’t grade on a curve: either you pass its inflexible criteria or you don’t (and risk getting eaten).
So, reality doesn’t care wether you are doing better than your peers or even if you are doing your very best. Each subsequent pig built a better house than the previous one, but none could withstand reality (a wolf with a serious lung-capacity and a bazooka in this case) and they all died regardless of their effort.
Oh, ok. I thought that was supposed to represent nihilism (no matter what you do, the wolf will always have a better weapon) but it was actually just “the wolf was keeping a bazooka in hammerspace”.
I can see how that story could be interpreted like that, but the whole concept of ‘reality doesn’t grade on a curve’ is explored in some of the sequences.
I guess the point of not mentioning the bazooka until it is used to blow up the third house, is that reality also doesn’t care wether you know its rules or not. The third pig had no idea or indication that the wolf had any capabilities above the huffing-and-puffing, but he got eaten all the same.
Maybe a fourth pig with a missile-proof house could’ve survived, or maybe the wolf has more tricks up it sleeves. But whatever the all-out capabilities of reality turn out to be, these are the only thing that matter on wether it’ll survive.
Also: its nice that there is still some activity on these old posts. I’ve recently started reading all the sequences and the codex, and it feels quite sad to have these hunderds of high-quality essays with hardly any community discussion underneath.
It seems to me that some reasons may be: a lot of interesting comments have been made, which may intimidate; the posts are often very concise; and since the posts are so old, one may expect the page to be dead.
Personally I don’t think I have read any “new” articles so far^^
Unfortunately, non rationalists do not seem to appreciate the humour.
Could you explain the first one? I’ve been re-reading this for years, and I don’t get it.
Reality doesn’t grade on a curve: either you pass its inflexible criteria or you don’t (and risk getting eaten).
So, reality doesn’t care wether you are doing better than your peers or even if you are doing your very best. Each subsequent pig built a better house than the previous one, but none could withstand reality (a wolf with a serious lung-capacity and a bazooka in this case) and they all died regardless of their effort.
Oh, ok. I thought that was supposed to represent nihilism (no matter what you do, the wolf will always have a better weapon) but it was actually just “the wolf was keeping a bazooka in hammerspace”.
I can see how that story could be interpreted like that, but the whole concept of ‘reality doesn’t grade on a curve’ is explored in some of the sequences.
I guess the point of not mentioning the bazooka until it is used to blow up the third house, is that reality also doesn’t care wether you know its rules or not. The third pig had no idea or indication that the wolf had any capabilities above the huffing-and-puffing, but he got eaten all the same.
Maybe a fourth pig with a missile-proof house could’ve survived, or maybe the wolf has more tricks up it sleeves. But whatever the all-out capabilities of reality turn out to be, these are the only thing that matter on wether it’ll survive.
Also: its nice that there is still some activity on these old posts. I’ve recently started reading all the sequences and the codex, and it feels quite sad to have these hunderds of high-quality essays with hardly any community discussion underneath.
It seems to me that some reasons may be: a lot of interesting comments have been made, which may intimidate; the posts are often very concise; and since the posts are so old, one may expect the page to be dead.
Personally I don’t think I have read any “new” articles so far^^