So, judging from Hypothesis sending me a quote from an alchemy book a few days ago, we might want to try interpreting this in a somewhat similar manner to this quote:
The king's crown should be pure gold. and a chaste bride should be married to him. Take the ravenous grey wolf that on account of his nature is subjected to bellicose Mars, but by birth is a child of old Saturn, and that lives in the valleys and mountains of the world and is possessed of great hunger. Throw the king's body before him that he may have his nourishment from it. And when he has devoured the king, then make a great fire and throw the wolf into it so that he burns up entirely; thus will the king be redeemed. If this is done thrice, then the lion has conquered the wolf, and nothing more to eat will be found in him; thus is our body completed at the start of our work. - Valentine’s first “key” to the stone, Of the Great Stone
For which Hypothesis sent me the following interpretation:
So in a similar vein, my first steps at the interpretation:
Given that we are on LW, and the natural subject is rationality, I would expect the metaphors of the text to refer to rationality techniques, or at least deeper principles of rationality. Candidates of things in this class include:
System 1/ System 2
Any of the 12 virtues of rationality
Any of the great scientists discussed in the sequences
“Slack”, “Fungibility”, “Comparative Advantage” and all the other specialized terms we have come up with
General ideas from cognitive science
Let’s start with the first line:
Paths are walked one foot after the other, by careful repetition.
This feels like its strongly referring to habit formation/TAPs, with some principles about plans for habit formation ideally consisting of many small steps, instead of large habits such as “exercise more”.
Crossbow is closer to Mars than pen.
This is maybe the most confusing sentence to me in the whole paragraph. Crossbow has some connotations of aiming something, but I have no good grasp on what “Mars” could refer to. General connotations of Mars are “Iron” , “War”, “Red”, but I can’t find any obvious parallel term in rationality parlance, except maybe “dedication” or “something to protect”.
“pen” probably has something to do with writing and system-2 based thinking, but I don’t feel like I can easily understand it without getting at the “Mars” bit.
Zeno’s wisdom of measurement must be considered carefully to achieve Erasmus’s glory.
Zeno’s wisdom probably refers to Zeno’s paradox, though I would guess he refers to some deeper insight about how the universe works as a result of Zeno’s paradox. The only thing that I ever really learned from Zeno’s paradox was “the greeks should really have invented infinitesimal calculus”, so maybe it refers to that, but who knows.
I don’t know a lot about Erasmus, except that he was a Renaissance Humanist and wrote some things about free will.
Ok, this is taking a bit longer than I had expected, so I will take a break and maybe come back later. Other people are happy to pick up where I left.
If you treat war and conflict as directed intentionality along the lines of the Book of Five Rings, then this is something akin to a call to taking actions in the world rather than spilling lots of words on the internet.
That’s how I interpreted this sentence. A little more like “you can’t get to Mars by thinking, but by doing,” but the war reference makes sense with Mars and the crossbow.
The quote that comes to mind is from Miyamoto Musashi, and appears in several places in R:A-Z:
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.”
So, judging from Hypothesis sending me a quote from an alchemy book a few days ago, we might want to try interpreting this in a somewhat similar manner to this quote:
For which Hypothesis sent me the following interpretation:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/364899268215046157/401491954392629270/DOC-20180112-134346.jpg
So in a similar vein, my first steps at the interpretation:
Given that we are on LW, and the natural subject is rationality, I would expect the metaphors of the text to refer to rationality techniques, or at least deeper principles of rationality. Candidates of things in this class include:
System 1/ System 2
Any of the 12 virtues of rationality
Any of the great scientists discussed in the sequences
“Slack”, “Fungibility”, “Comparative Advantage” and all the other specialized terms we have come up with
General ideas from cognitive science
Let’s start with the first line:
This feels like its strongly referring to habit formation/TAPs, with some principles about plans for habit formation ideally consisting of many small steps, instead of large habits such as “exercise more”.
This is maybe the most confusing sentence to me in the whole paragraph. Crossbow has some connotations of aiming something, but I have no good grasp on what “Mars” could refer to. General connotations of Mars are “Iron” , “War”, “Red”, but I can’t find any obvious parallel term in rationality parlance, except maybe “dedication” or “something to protect”.
“pen” probably has something to do with writing and system-2 based thinking, but I don’t feel like I can easily understand it without getting at the “Mars” bit.
Zeno’s wisdom probably refers to Zeno’s paradox, though I would guess he refers to some deeper insight about how the universe works as a result of Zeno’s paradox. The only thing that I ever really learned from Zeno’s paradox was “the greeks should really have invented infinitesimal calculus”, so maybe it refers to that, but who knows.
I don’t know a lot about Erasmus, except that he was a Renaissance Humanist and wrote some things about free will.
Ok, this is taking a bit longer than I had expected, so I will take a break and maybe come back later. Other people are happy to pick up where I left.
If you treat war and conflict as directed intentionality along the lines of the Book of Five Rings, then this is something akin to a call to taking actions in the world rather than spilling lots of words on the internet.
That’s how I interpreted this sentence. A little more like “you can’t get to Mars by thinking, but by doing,” but the war reference makes sense with Mars and the crossbow.
The quote that comes to mind is from Miyamoto Musashi, and appears in several places in R:A-Z:
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.”