It is obvious to the 3 people who read this blog that my enthusiasm for doing the research required for trying to honestly analyze something that caught my eye has waned. Back in 2021 I posted “When an honestly mistaken person is confronted with the truth, he is either no longer mistaken, or no longer honest.” I am confronted with the reality of a post-truth world, where onion peeling analysis is irrelevant.

This song was written about an episode in a cozy fantasy novella called Andras Hill, which can be found at Anthracyda.org.

I saw the following recently on reddit: When I worked in a book store, we had a guy come in once looking for waterproof books. I asked why, and he said he wanted something to read to chickens. He went on to say he already had one laminated book of poetry that he read to them every night, but he thought they might want something else. I’ll take that.

Neil Gaiman coined the term “information shaped sentences” for the results from ChatGPT. He is right. Much of what comes back from ChatGPT and other “AI” products looks like information, but isn’t. It is one thing for “AI” to look for patterns in actual physical data (e.g. medical research). It is quite another for “AI” to mine from datasets like the internet that is full of misinformation, disinformation, opinion, fiction and a trillion biases.

I was once told by a left wing activist that existential crises were a luxury for the rich. There was a recent discussion on social media (the askphilosophy subreddit) about whether philosophy is a borgeouise hobby. I thought the most interesting comments came from the “third world” perspective. They distinguished between western academic analytic philosophy and philosophizing done by persons outside that small circle. Some thought the first was becoming a bourgeois hobby, but the second happened every day, every where.

I was at a Christmas party a couple of weeks ago. A guy at the party was wearing a shirt clearly intended to trigger liberals. The wording on his shirt read, in part “I am a Christian but I am a born warrior. I will fight for ….xyz things.” The language was clearly written so that if you objected, you would be played as opposing motherhood, apple pie etc, while at the same time demonstrating that he had no intention of following the Sermon on the Mount.

How often do you read a story in the media in your area of expertise that is misleading or even completely wrong, then turn to the next story in a different subject and assume that its correct. This is called Gell-Mann Amnesia. Michael Crichton coined the term. In his words: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.

TRIGGER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU TAKE THE BIBLE LITERALLY.

Now that ChatGpt is claiming the ability to write stories and have conversations, I was talking with someone about whether published authors could have chat rooms where paid subscribers could “talk” to their favorite characters. Requiring a paid subscription would cut down on the internet troll problem and generate additional revenue for the author (and publishing company). On the other hand, just think about a simple user question like “[Protagonist], when you did [X], what were you thinking?

I’m trying to get back to songwriting. This was in response to a challenge on writing a song involving listening to the wind. I started playing around with the theme of “winds of change” and how everything is always changing. So often we don’t hear the first whispers and, when we do, we try to fight it instead of accepting it and going with the flow. The changes can be physical (I can’t stop getting older), they can be cultural, they can be economic or environment or scientific or lots of other things.

Someone once said “Things were simpler when we were younger” and the response was “No, we were simpler”. We can’t go back to the naïveté of our younger days, but we can reset how we engage with life, the universe and others.

For those of you who care, this was actually written in an open D minor tuning.

A peer-reviewed study found Christians hold more animosity towards atheists than atheists hold toward them. The going in assumption of the researchers was that both groups would be more favorable to their own in-group but it is actually asymmetric. The atheists do not really view Christians any worse than they view other atheists. On the other hand, Christians view atheists as worse than Muslims or convicted criminals. Unlike some other studies, this one took a cross section of the American population rather than just getting samples from atheist organizations and samples from Christian churches.

I’m really only posting this so I can find the word again. Sonder - from the urban dictionary: The realization that there aren’t any main characters in the world and everyone has a complex life, thoughts, crushes, relatives, dreams and mind just as your own. Essentially while you’re the main character in your life, you’re also a background character in someone else’s. Coined in 2012 by John Koenig, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that currently lack words.

I occasionally run into people who complain that I am tolerant of X, but I am not tolerant of them, so if I claim to be “tolerant”, I need to be tolerant of everything. NO I DON’T. I am tolerant of people whose actions do not adversely affect others. I do not pretend to be tolerant of people whose actions and beliefs do affect others. Two gay people getting married does not adversely impact anyone else.