So...why, then? My working theory is that I was cursed by an ancient totem I touched as a child, but I’m open to suggestions.
Your active search and your writing are both selecting for smart non-conformists. Sanity and integrity might even be correlated with those, but not strongly enough.
I have a blog, sure, but is it really that weird to like learning about some science stuff and sometimes tell people about what you learned?
It is, in fact, deeply weird. If you know a bunch of bloggers who write good posts like yourself, I would love to know your recommendations, though. I already knew 3 out of 4 of the YouTube channels you mentioned, which made me more pessimistic about how much high-quality, easy-to-digest material I might be missing. Your posts on chemistry and engineering revived some curiosity that had been withering. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more basic chemistry, biochemistry and geology, sometimes just because I was curious what things are made of and why, so thank you!
Your active search and your writing are both selecting for
(Me not realizing that is the 1st part of the joke, with the 2nd part being that maybe [quote] is the reason I’m like that.)
Your posts on chemistry and engineering revived some curiosity
Thanks!
I already knew 3 out of 4 of the YouTube channels you mentioned, which made me more pessimistic about how much high-quality, easy-to-digest material I might be missing.
I was deliberately choosing popular channels that uploaded a lot. You might also like https://www.construction-physics.com/archive?sort=new but you probably already saw that. As for obscure things you probably haven’t seen, well, here are some random bookmarks of mine:
You can also use something like https://hn-buddy.com/ or look at weekly top posts for mid-size subreddits if you want; a pretty high % of high-quality posts are on blogs that only have 2 or 3 posts.
There’s a trend, I think, towards people making a youtube video instead of a blog post for interesting things, and that has a lot of obvious advantages, but also means that indexing by search engines is worse, they’re buried in a larger amount of junk content, and there’s less cross-linking between people and posts.
These days, if somebody’s house has candles burning in it, I’m turning around and leaving. People dumb enough to do that just aren’t worth putting up with their air pollution.
I found this post broadly entertaining (and occasionally enlightening) but unless you mean “has candles burning it regularly, outside of annual rituals like Petrov Day”, this is a pretty weird take. Do you also refuse to enter houses with inhabitants that use their kitchens, unless you confidently know that they keep the windows open during & after cooking? Burning a candle indoor once or twice a year is just not that many micromorts, and deciding that people who do it are obviously so dumb as to be trivially screened off is a straightforwardly wrong heuristic.
has candles burning it regularly, outside of annual rituals like Petrov Day
That is what I meant, yes.
unless you confidently know that they keep the windows open during & after cooking
It’s pretty obvious when particulate levels are as high as what indoor candles produce. Anyway, normal people don’t “keep the windows open” when they cook, they use a range hood fan.
Burning a candle indoor once or twice a year is just not that many micromorts
OK, but are the candles actually providing value at all? If you want to develop social ties or whatever you could just, say, have a LAN party instead of something highly-scripted with cult-y vibes? Petrov day...yes, there are things that could go wrong with the world, and some people don’t consider that enough, but on the other hand some people already consider it too much. Sure, the guy himself deserves some amount of honor, but I don’t think he’d have been impressed by that.
A lot of them liked burning candles indoors. Now, this isn’t uncommon in America, it’s just that spending money to make smoke in your house with no real benefit isn’t very...rational, is it now?
That kind of falls in the whole “rationalist doesn’t mean be Spock” thing, though, no?
I mean, I personally wouldn’t put up candles as a display of celebration of anything in my house because they’re a fire hazard and in no way particularly superior, as far as I’m concerned, to less burn-y means of celebration such as decorations, leaflets to the windows, or even just electric lights (still technically potentially a fire hazard, but a much much lesser one if your electric system is half decent).
But it’s also not like things such as “here, I do this little thing that has no goal other than make this day feel special and make me feel part of a community” is such an insane thing to do, as long as you’re aware of it. Straddling the line between “bah humbug, it’s all irrational nonsense” and “this is the most important thing ever and if you don’t do it too you’re a filthy out-grouper” is probably where the happiest state lies (and I say this as someone who probably lies personally more on the bah humbug side; you can’t really unlearn that attitude easily if you have it). It’s like adding spice to your dishes. If you think cinnamon is a magic cure-all drug, you’re wrong. But if you think there’s no point adding any cinnamon because it has no nutritional value anyway, you’re sort of being more of a robot than a human.
the outcome of the discussion actually matters, and I don’t mean reddit karma
Which applies also to this. Sometimes discussing is just… fun. I think people should be aware of that, if that’s what they’re doing, and give it the appropriate weight (I tend to drop out of disproportionately heated online arguments for this reason—there is no point in arguing like the world depends on the outcome when you’re literally just a few guys on a private Discord server). In fact perhaps one of the biggest drivers of polarization of the last decade has been this “it’s important to take every internet argument as if it was the most important thing ever” attitude, which has been rationalized in various way to make keyboard warriors feel like they’re doing important activism. So, be self aware! But as long as you are, you can in fact just think that debating is fun.
But if you think there’s no point adding any cinnamon because it has no nutritional value anyway, you’re sort of being more of a robot than a human.
It’s my rant and I’ll complain about what I want! But it’s funny you bring up cinnamon, because I also wrote this:
While I’m an American myself, I’ve come to agree with some of the complaints Europeans often have about American food culture, such as “Americans use too much cinnamon”.
The flavor of cinnamon comes largely from cinnamaldehyde and cinnamic acid, which were so named because...cinnamon contains them. Are those antioxidants? No. They’re anti-microbials. Cinnamon inhibits bacterial growth. That’s what it does for you. But what do Americans do? They make cinnamon rolls where cinnamon-sugar paste is put inside the food. It’s not accomplishing anything, it’s just flavor.
So, why do Americans like that flavor, more than Europeans? That’s because American kids grew up eating sugary stuff with cinnamon. There’s an unconscious reasoning that happens:
This has sugar, so it’s probably a fruit.
This compound is in things that are probably fruits, and fruits tend to be good for you for evolutionary reasons.
Therefore, these compounds are probably good for you, at least if they’re combined with sugar.
But that’s wrong! A cinnamon roll is not a fruit! You’ve been fooled!
Do you like cinnamon when it’s not combined with sugar? If not, is it really cinnamon per se that you like?
there is no point in arguing like the world depends on the outcome when you’re literally just a few guys on a private Discord server
What you said came more across to me as “don’t waste your time at all with discussions that have no real world impact”, I wanted to say more that I think it’s fine to enjoy them (or cinnamon, which I don’t think anyone thinks make rolls a fruit, it just tastes good), just as long as you’re aware it’s mostly just an intellectual sport, and you’re not at a UN summit on the future of the world.
Oh, maybe you were referring to my Alice/Bob bit, instead of the bit about not using debates as a point-scoring competition. Can you clarify the part you’re talking about by quoting?
If you’re saying you like debates with retrospective point-scoring as a sort of sport, I disagree about adding that scoring being a positive thing, because of the effect it has on the debates.
If you’re saying the Alice/Bob bit has Alice being too serious because debating Substack posts is fun, the point was that:
Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob because “having Substack subscriptions” doesn’t make you interesting—but Bob thinks it does, which means there’s probably nothing interesting about him.
Bob is saying “we’re discussing the stuff I read” instead of finding something of mutual interest, and without understanding how you’d even go about finding something of mutual interest in an efficient way.
Your active search and your writing are both selecting for smart non-conformists. Sanity and integrity might even be correlated with those, but not strongly enough.
It is, in fact, deeply weird. If you know a bunch of bloggers who write good posts like yourself, I would love to know your recommendations, though. I already knew 3 out of 4 of the YouTube channels you mentioned, which made me more pessimistic about how much high-quality, easy-to-digest material I might be missing. Your posts on chemistry and engineering revived some curiosity that had been withering. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more basic chemistry, biochemistry and geology, sometimes just because I was curious what things are made of and why, so thank you!
(Me not realizing that is the 1st part of the joke, with the 2nd part being that maybe [quote] is the reason I’m like that.)
Thanks!
I was deliberately choosing popular channels that uploaded a lot. You might also like https://www.construction-physics.com/archive?sort=new but you probably already saw that. As for obscure things you probably haven’t seen, well, here are some random bookmarks of mine:
typical examples of personal projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
frequent uploads on China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9i1vKkDA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neOjEHJDjJU
examples of blogs with a lot of posts:
https://eighteenthelephant.com/
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
https://macwright.com/writing
You can also use something like https://hn-buddy.com/ or look at weekly top posts for mid-size subreddits if you want; a pretty high % of high-quality posts are on blogs that only have 2 or 3 posts.
There’s a trend, I think, towards people making a youtube video instead of a blog post for interesting things, and that has a lot of obvious advantages, but also means that indexing by search engines is worse, they’re buried in a larger amount of junk content, and there’s less cross-linking between people and posts.
I found this post broadly entertaining (and occasionally enlightening) but unless you mean “has candles burning it regularly, outside of annual rituals like Petrov Day”, this is a pretty weird take. Do you also refuse to enter houses with inhabitants that use their kitchens, unless you confidently know that they keep the windows open during & after cooking? Burning a candle indoor once or twice a year is just not that many micromorts, and deciding that people who do it are obviously so dumb as to be trivially screened off is a straightforwardly wrong heuristic.
That is what I meant, yes.
It’s pretty obvious when particulate levels are as high as what indoor candles produce. Anyway, normal people don’t “keep the windows open” when they cook, they use a range hood fan.
OK, but are the candles actually providing value at all? If you want to develop social ties or whatever you could just, say, have a LAN party instead of something highly-scripted with cult-y vibes? Petrov day...yes, there are things that could go wrong with the world, and some people don’t consider that enough, but on the other hand some people already consider it too much. Sure, the guy himself deserves some amount of honor, but I don’t think he’d have been impressed by that.
That kind of falls in the whole “rationalist doesn’t mean be Spock” thing, though, no?
I mean, I personally wouldn’t put up candles as a display of celebration of anything in my house because they’re a fire hazard and in no way particularly superior, as far as I’m concerned, to less burn-y means of celebration such as decorations, leaflets to the windows, or even just electric lights (still technically potentially a fire hazard, but a much much lesser one if your electric system is half decent).
But it’s also not like things such as “here, I do this little thing that has no goal other than make this day feel special and make me feel part of a community” is such an insane thing to do, as long as you’re aware of it. Straddling the line between “bah humbug, it’s all irrational nonsense” and “this is the most important thing ever and if you don’t do it too you’re a filthy out-grouper” is probably where the happiest state lies (and I say this as someone who probably lies personally more on the bah humbug side; you can’t really unlearn that attitude easily if you have it). It’s like adding spice to your dishes. If you think cinnamon is a magic cure-all drug, you’re wrong. But if you think there’s no point adding any cinnamon because it has no nutritional value anyway, you’re sort of being more of a robot than a human.
Which applies also to this. Sometimes discussing is just… fun. I think people should be aware of that, if that’s what they’re doing, and give it the appropriate weight (I tend to drop out of disproportionately heated online arguments for this reason—there is no point in arguing like the world depends on the outcome when you’re literally just a few guys on a private Discord server). In fact perhaps one of the biggest drivers of polarization of the last decade has been this “it’s important to take every internet argument as if it was the most important thing ever” attitude, which has been rationalized in various way to make keyboard warriors feel like they’re doing important activism. So, be self aware! But as long as you are, you can in fact just think that debating is fun.
It’s my rant and I’ll complain about what I want! But it’s funny you bring up cinnamon, because I also wrote this:
To be clear, that’s what I was saying, yes.
What you said came more across to me as “don’t waste your time at all with discussions that have no real world impact”, I wanted to say more that I think it’s fine to enjoy them (or cinnamon, which I don’t think anyone thinks make rolls a fruit, it just tastes good), just as long as you’re aware it’s mostly just an intellectual sport, and you’re not at a UN summit on the future of the world.
Oh, maybe you were referring to my Alice/Bob bit, instead of the bit about not using debates as a point-scoring competition. Can you clarify the part you’re talking about by quoting?
If you’re saying you like debates with retrospective point-scoring as a sort of sport, I disagree about adding that scoring being a positive thing, because of the effect it has on the debates.
If you’re saying the Alice/Bob bit has Alice being too serious because debating Substack posts is fun, the point was that:
Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob because “having Substack subscriptions” doesn’t make you interesting—but Bob thinks it does, which means there’s probably nothing interesting about him.
Bob is saying “we’re discussing the stuff I read” instead of finding something of mutual interest, and without understanding how you’d even go about finding something of mutual interest in an efficient way.
>Do you like cinnamon when it’s not combined with sugar? If not, is it really cinnamon per se that you like?
How do you feel about butter