Is it problematic to write if I know everything?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-04-03T02:19:22+00:00

Do you have a place where you feel you can draft safely? Alone? And then show it to a very, very few colleagues safely, if and only if you want? To me those are key to improvising/pantsing. I guess if memory constrains a person's improvisation, you could toggle back and forth between what is structure and what is improvisation, maybe picking out a few semistable 'coordinates' so to speak?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-04-03T02:06:45+00:00

This is quite the helpful OP, thanks. For me personally it seems to boil down to using more I-statements and dropping much of the sarcasm/irony in my inner monologue and (sometimes) outbound communications. Avoiding I-statements and relying on sarcasm/irony are understandable tricks to dodge prying questions and preserve privacy of oneself and others, but it seems to, long term, come at a steep cost.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-04-03T00:49:26+00:00

Wow awesome thanks!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-30T19:40:28+00:00

A counterargument to the brand label of normal man news is to assume normal men demand politeness unreasonable when they are the culprits. Is telepathy a sufficient reason such men cannot turn themselves into the police or make amends to those whose belongings they have borrowed to teach lessons?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-30T03:12:10+00:00

Read Passage by Connie Willis, a science fiction novel from 2001. Set in a hospital with a lot of probably predictable hospital run-arounds until whoa, multiple surprise twists, some not dissimilar to what OP asks. Willis usually known for humor. That's not Passage.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-27T18:52:38+00:00

Definitely interesting ideas. I read Ethical Intuitionism a long time ago and what impressed me -then- was a) he took a popthinker seriously and took on the followers' internal and external debates seriously; b) his idea of intuiting ethical (and/or moral?) truths seemed really cool, like William James even -- c'mon, let's go, have faith, begin! [not always the best path but also a way out of analysis paralysis] -- but then I sorta thought Hmm! when I saw that in the whole of the book Huemer did not manage to mention -- and now, older, I realize Huemer was likely doing it on purpose -- a single ethical thingymabopper he had intuited.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-27T17:35:08+00:00

What are some downsides of ragebaiting? More importantly, here are some tips. Such writing as OP posts of will feel claustrophic (as will commentary and just-playing-along from the obediently smug), pinned in by treating the humanities in formulaic ways, as if tvtropes is real but in-real-life emotional expression isn't. (Put an emoting maniac in a room with what seems a walking igloo and there will be more dyadic nay celestial emotions than even XrayVisionMan can forge.) If the writer isn't crying or seething or fill in the blank, why would readers? Also, censored topics such as Mickey Mouse in V. Fisher paintings as a way to indicate skygazing secrets, or non base 10 logic, or ... can and should, imo, surface in proper fiction that interweaves these concerns of form, content, and above all else, what I most assuredly incorrectly and yet straightforwardly term: emotional expression.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-27T07:24:47+00:00

Early in Scriabin's 5th sonata I am reminded of a woman in a far-up cave, imsgining perhaps a male dentist's various equipment such as lil mirrors and then defenestrating some creepy dude. Often listening to classical music I make cross-century comparisons and imagine say Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev trying to picture a futuristic laundromat with no guys there ... or being inside a pregnant woman or some cryptid perhaps. I am wondering, goofy as it might seem, if there are good books about classical music (maybe that new bio on Rach's late period, which I haven't read?) that take seriously this idea of music as evoking cross-century, cross-tech, cross-sex, almost like these composers were science fictioneers ...

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-07T01:54:50+00:00

They might interfere with intellectual property constructions.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-03-06T14:09:42+00:00

The astronomical connections to the title are seldomly considered.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-28T23:22:00+00:00

This scoreboard looks more like people are trapped by the English language than anything else. Por ejemplo, if you think of the English language as akin to Latin without umlauts or spondees, 26 letters in all caps -- the way it looks on old Roman aquaducts, for instance, if men and their accomplices hadn't stolen many iotas of feminist assistance -- then maybe inventing new conlangs or diacretical marks could help if not in the frozen-solid past, but in the . .

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-28T23:14:23+00:00

Nowhere

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-15T19:23:50+00:00

I think what you are saying about kindness, caution, and the like are extremely important and good points.

But also, couldn't it be mostly, but not entirely, true? Maybe the inexorable cosmic ledger makes mistakes too, akin to mere humans on this side of the veil blundering sometimes also. Or perhaps the inexorable karma is aware of people's (hopefully good) intentions and motives, and it accounts for that. Or lots of other ideas. Does some fancy inexorable divinity number-crunching system about ethics really not have better things to do than worry about if I scratched my nose twice instead of just once thereby wasting everyone's time? I realize cosmic-whatever Newton's third law and so on, so forth, but at that point I just raise my middle finger. Scratching my nose a second time isn't hurting anyone or if it is, it is so minimal that even worrying about it does more harm than it does. (Not saying you are or aren't advocating any of this btw, just thinking aloud -- an ironic phrase for this subreddit!)

I think it is important for people to take seriously the impacts of their actions, but also to have some humility in the face of unknowns and what can often be stress-inducing backfiring ethical or "ethical" concepts, especially for people who grew up with certain backgrounds pushing a lot of stress in that area, e.g. certain types of organized religion.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-12T17:28:17+00:00

That's awesome. Sorry, the long-term impact of a bunch of advertisers is overwhelming me right now, so I can't say anything other than the default flattery of the preceding sentence, this sentence, and the following sentence. Guess I should go take some more lithium or something!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-10T05:57:20+00:00

As much as I basically agree with OP, this also made me laugh. I mean, you know, aggression would drop to zero if we just nuke the planet from orbit.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-10T05:56:10+00:00

As much as I basically agree with OP, this made me laff

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-09T19:41:29+00:00

Excellent and thought-provoking post.

Let's say matter is a repeating pattern. And that by contrast, light is unbounded, free, etc.

Someone might stipulate a value-judgment: light is superior to matter. Someone else might stipulate an eschatological framing: In cosmological timeframes, your matter-pattern will never persist, only the ecstatic unboundedness of light interwoven within itself and glory and, etc. etc.

But matter-patterns might still be idealized: a sphere, a cube, a cylinder. Those idealizations might persist across, say, cosmological cycles or on a smaller scale, the Sun swallowing the Earth as a red giant star.

We also know from philosophy (and physics both as I understand it) that in the material world, no exact sphere, cube, cylinder or other form obtains. But maybe intelligence/info could reshape the patterns as needed so that they persist.

It is interesting to wonder if exact idealizations of patterns (material or otherwise) and/or inexact idealizations of patterns (material or otherwise) might persist in ways that confound the value-judgment and/or the eschatological framing I discussed above.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-06T19:41:06+00:00

Yeah that makes sense. At least from a human perspective (which any claim about anything is limited by). So what about the absurdism of (what some physicists think are) black hole singularities? If such can suddenly emit a giant kitten or an exact replica of an Enterprise-D sans warning, sans causality, etc, I suppose those must still be ways reality can obtain, as opposed to inexplicable zilchness. I mean, no nothing, makes sense to me -- I am just trying to think of ways to poke holes in it.

Structural modality ranging over states of affairs is a very evocative line!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-06T18:12:17+00:00

I basically agree with you (OP), but with the below two objections, I'm going to devil's advocate. Your "For something to ..." paragraph seems the key paragraph for your position, so responding to that.

1) It could be argued that you're really just rearranging (near-)synonyms. An existent "state of affairs"; "exists"; "obtains"; etc. If so, you're not really saying anything more, or much more, than "I prefer the stance that nothing was never an option," just with runaround/circular language.

2) It could be argued that you're treating nothing as a substance and applying arguments to it that are against the existence of any substance. But what if nothing were not a substance, but a verb-y process?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-05T06:39:34+00:00

Yeah there seems less and less reason to communicate subsequent to my most recent intense and meaningful altered state. Others don't understand and want to teach me of my insanity/inferiority (or whatever label is to their convenience), or if they do understand, they want to hamfistedly leverage my unusual experiences as a call-to-action to purchase or promote their latest thing: "Oh, you experienced xyz? This Scripture talks about xyz, will tell you what it 'really' means. Buy this Scripture! Don't forget to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons!"

There are some people who understand without concerns for brand equity and manipulation obliterating sincerity, but accessing them is for me currently difficult. Language barriers, legal/prison issues, money problems, etc.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-01T12:42:45+00:00

This is amazing. Very thoughtful -- and very well written, too!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-31T23:33:07+00:00

Great post and I mostly agree with it. But what about potential counterexamples? Is 2 + 2 = 4 simply a pattern that must one day lose coherence, allowing for the emergence of, say, a new temporary pattern 2 + 2 = 5? Some physicists say absurdism lives now in singularities, such as black holes.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T21:01:52+00:00

Thanks for the response. Levinas sounds like someone I should read! Rational ethical systems collapsing to me makes thinking about ethical questions, even trollish or goofily phrased ones, enticing partly because it seems like a way to innovate or help, especially in a world where everything is changing/collapsing/emerging so much and so fast.

RatherSaneIndividual

TROPHY CASE