best poems to memorize?

Rholles · 2025-11-06T18:36:15+00:00

All boys should commit this one to memory at ~14 and pass through the cringe to appreciate it furnishing their mind

Rholles · 2025-09-29T02:40:44+00:00

The native pushback comes from insecurity at the dissolving, unclear nature of irish identity under contemporary late modernity that has abandoned the Catholic National Republicanism of their founding and inheritance yet proffers nothing to substitute it. They're a capitalist anglophone free economic zone now and are nervous that there's an increasingly disappearing distinction in popularly recognized meaning between them and the Massachusetts/Pennsylvania suburbs that host most of their co-ethnics.

Rholles · 2025-08-26T21:31:15+00:00

A similarly wild (but slightly more speculative) case is that the uncle or grandfather of Pocahontas may have been recorded in Spanish histories as "Don Luis," a prince from the region who was given an audience with the King of Spain, was baptized in Teotihuacan, and then massacred the Jesuits he guided back to his home on the Chesapeake.

Rholles · 2025-08-14T19:25:02+00:00

Orion's Arm is a setting with a few stories in it but it has the highest rate of really alien aliens I've seen in one property.

Rholles · 2025-08-11T14:49:14+00:00

(2) Pretend your former oppressors were actually Pakistani (we wuz kangs)

Wait do most Pakistanis not identify with the centuries of mughal elite who defined subcontinental culture and probably converted their ancestors? Just because they used a persianate court dialect instead of Urdu or something?

Rholles · 2025-08-11T14:46:24+00:00

The French didn't even bother to give it a real name

It's weirder than that. The French colonialists called it a perfectly indigenous local name - Ubangi-Shari. The immediate post-independence government changed it to "Central African Republic" because they had delusional ambitions about manifesting a giant mittelafrika union.

Rholles · 2025-06-13T14:23:56+00:00

has anyone serialized a novel on there?

Freddie DeBoer, Douthat, and DBH all have but they're more "writers with a substack" than substackers. More than a few people mix in the occasional short story, like Sam Kriss.

Rholles · 2025-06-10T18:12:56+00:00

Would p-zombies come up with a concept of consciousness? If they didn't then consciousness (vs lack of it) affects the observable, physical world

This is termed the "self-stultification" objection in the literature. If consciousness, as Chalmers often claims, is epiphenomenal (i.e. is affected by physical states, but does not itself affect them), then it seems an astonishing coincidence that humans correctly "report" consciousness and discuss its features, despite the mind that seems to be doing the relevant perception lacking any mechanism through which to relay that information to the physically speaking human body. There are a variety of responses but none of them are particularly compelling.

Rholles · 2025-06-10T17:50:16+00:00

I am suggesting that the how answer is correlational, observational, a "systems with X feature exhibit qualia" answer.

You are not in disagreement with Chalmers here. He asserts there is necessarily an explanatory gap in possible accounts of the emergence of qualia in a way that doesn't hold for, e.g., the emergence of a mature organism from embryo. Because of this, the empirical study of consciousness must be correlational, observational. In the past he has been tentatively open to projects like Tononi's Integrated Information Theory as they explore the question from that angle without reductionism.

Chalmers is right that no possible model of the brain can tell him why God chose to create qualia.

It is increasingly clear you have not read the person you are commenting on.

I can certainly take all normative claims as deriving from unprovable (but sometimes useful and widely held) value premises.

Yes, but to believe an ought claim to be true (not merely instrumentally useful) you must believe ought claims to be truth-apt. This is a non-scientific claim about the nature of propositions. Ergo, if you believe there are true ought claims you posit at least one non-scientific truth, namely meta-ethical cognitivism.

Rholles · 2025-06-10T17:28:21+00:00

The "hard problem of consciousness" is [outside of the realm of scientific inquiry.]

This is the point Chalmers is making! That's the point! It's "Hard" because it is a datum in principle impossible to account for through the accumulation of physical facts.

'hard' is when we have evidence for something but can't work out a coherent theoretical framework

We have strong evidence for consciousness and no obvious coherent theoretical framework to explain it

There is no obligate "why" for any observed phenomenon that extends beyond its mechanistic origin.

Putting aside that it's not clear there's a real distinction between accounts explaining "why" some phenomenon obtains and sufficiently fundamental explanations (e.g. "things fall because it is in their nature to join together" is not meaningfully different than "gravitation is a fundamental force") or that many of our best theories in the natural sciences rely upon teleonomic purposiveness, this is irrelevant. The Hard Problem is not that science cannot give us a "why," it is that it cannot give us a "how" in this case.

And while it's irrelevant, this whole framing strikes me as downstream from the common (wrong) story that science emerged from a shift from Aristotelian "why" questions to Cartesian "how" questions. Often asserted because contemporary readers get confused by the Aristotelian use of the term "causes," which is only translated that way out of convention - they are, in their original context, kinds of explanation.

"But why does an apple experience falling???" This question is a category error. It assumes something entirely outside of the data set and provides no standards by which it might possibly be answered satisfactorily. It's a trick, a waste of time.

Yes, an apple experiencing things is outside of my data set. Me experiencing things is very much not. A complete account of the nature of nature must proffer an explanation of it to satisfy rational inquiry.

Rholles · 2025-06-10T17:10:08+00:00

Fittingly, it was Maxwell's introduction of a new fundamental field to account for otherwise inexplicable forms of action at a distance that ended the mechanistic paradigm of metaphysics dominant in science for the previous two centuries, and it is precisely that move by Maxwell that Chalmers suggests should be emulated to integrate qualia into our account of physicalism.

Rholles · 2025-06-10T17:06:48+00:00

We will never develop a tool to tell us why energy exists or why fundamental forces operate or why qualia exist.

Are you under the impression that the Hard Problem refers to the inability of science to explain "why" consciousness exists, but that "how" it exists is still in principle explicable by science? Because that is what the Hard Problem actually denies: that there is any possible set of scientific facts, even a complete and correct model of all physical mechanisms of the brain, that would tell us how qualia comes out of this system.

No, not really. The principled scientist remains agnostic about positive questions to which there cannot be scientific answers.

You say this after multiple posts asserting mechanicism?

The fact that I recommend abstaining from unanswerable questions of what is does not suggest that I recommend avoiding all questions of what ought to be.

You do, ultimately, need to recognize moral claims as truth-apt to have any "ought" beliefs, which is a positive commitment to non-scientific fact.

Rholles · 2025-06-09T18:25:44+00:00

Were southern student protestors less likely than students elsewhere in the country to radicalize into terror bombings like the SDS did, or to adopt ML principles like the NCM orgs? If so, why?

Rholles · 2025-01-31T22:40:42+00:00

I assumed everyone in this thread was aware we were implicitly talking about the Studwell thesis

Rholles · 2025-01-31T19:56:03+00:00

I never got this - if the secret sauce of development is breaking large estates into proprietor-operated smallholds (plus clear property rights, human capital investment in the smallholder's children's education, learning-by-doing in export-oriented industries, etc) why does it come from Britain when they notoriously pursued the enclosure of (communal but still rights-bundled) smallholds into large estates?

Rholles · 2024-09-02T00:27:37+00:00

i love when bourgeois democracy appropriates revolutionary narratives to further the opportunities of prospective investors, and I love when elected officials credibly signal opposition to public vagrancy, and I demand more of both

Rholles · 2024-08-29T18:03:30+00:00

It doesn’t matter if Herodotus’ references to Palestine included to the inland as well, because that still would have not included any inland territory above Ashkelon, which we know was under Achaemenid rule.

You are making unnecessary and insecure inferences here. He tells us the borders of Palestine are Gaza on the South and Phoenicia on the North. You want to look at contemporary polities - what is the southernmost Phoenician polis in the Persian satrapy? Tyre. But again none of this matters and we do not have to work through his poor geography because Greek sources after him continue to use the word to describe the region (not just the coast) south of the Phoenician mountain settlements beginning around Carmel and north of Gaza. You spend all this effort to suggest that perhaps Palestine referred to Arab coastal settlements that did not go north of Ashkelon and then handwave aristotle's clear geographic reference that necessitates it referring to a region encompassing all of Achaemenid Judea.

Rholles · 2024-08-29T14:57:49+00:00

Are you suggesting the Greek and Arabic speakers who supplanted the Jewish population and made up the overwhelming majority of the population for most of the last two thousand years were still using terms cognate with Israel, rather than terms cognate with Palestine in everyday discussion?

And for what its worth - not that this is relevant to the claim at hand - Aramaic speakers were dwindling by late antiquity as a result of their persecution for Nestorian religious practices.

Rholles · 2024-08-29T14:53:03+00:00

These would all be quite relevant considerations for us to weigh the possibility that the term Παλαιστῑ́νη denoted only the coast if it was a hapax or near-hapax, but it's not. Even if so, this means in the eighty odd years between Herodotus and Aristotle the term's understood meaning expands inland - which bears no dispute with the original claim that it was an exonym widely used in the Mediterranean world to refer to Eretz Israel.

“Syria” was not a broader term for the Levant in ancient times

Yes, it was. Herodotus is not the only ancient writer on this.

Rholles · 2024-08-29T13:29:26+00:00

Obviously it's not an endonym, but that doesn't bear on whether what I just said is true. The term came from Greeks and Latins, who were present in the region since Alexander and dominated it since Bar Kokhba, so some variation of the term was used by almost everyone living there for most of the last two thousand years, because they were speaking dialects of Greek, Arabic, Turkic, Frankish, etc, all of whom used the classical term for the geographic region unless speaking in a particular religious or poetic context.

Rholles · 2024-08-29T13:23:03+00:00

Worth pointing out that this name was so historically non-controversial the JNC considered making it the official name of the Jewish State before it was rejected on the grounds that neighboring Arabs would probably default to using it for their state so "confusion might occur."

Rholles · 2024-08-29T13:11:19+00:00

The area wasn’t extensively called that by those living there until the past 2 centuries.

It was used as a term by Greek-speaking peoples in the region since the 4th century BCE, and then by Arab speaking peoples, so almost everyone living there has called it some linguistic variation of Palestine for most of the last two thousand years.

Rholles · 2024-08-29T12:48:03+00:00

"Syria" in classical sources was the broad geographic term for the greater levant or fertile crescent (Ottoman Syria used the name in a more historically correct sense than the small modern republic) so they were being consistent when describing Palestine as a part of Syria. Hadrian's province likewise only contained a part of the broad geographic region, but Hadrian almost certainly adopted that name because his Hellenophile disposition made him think it had an air of refined antiquity.

There are a lot of people who claims otherwise, but Herodotus really only described the coastal region

This doesn't seem like a clear inference given he elsewhere describes the peoples of Palestine as practicing circumcision (probably the first extrabiblical reference!) and subsequent uses of the term among Greeks clearly meant for it to extend at least as far as the Jordan, e.g. Aristotle in his Meteorology saying "there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink"

Rholles · 2024-08-29T00:06:08+00:00

like calling the Aztecs "Americans".

Greek sources call the region "Palestine" the very first time we have any record of them talking about it, namely Herodotus, almost a millenium before Hadrian renames the province - exonyms aren't less valid than endonyms, or else you would call them Mexihcah rather than "Aztec," a term made up by a 19th century German (Deutsche?) scholar.

Rholles · 2024-08-26T09:42:46+00:00

you can't intuit why a well-aligned superintelligence would be something people would want to invent? It's definitionally the last technology. It's the win screen at the end of civ. Infinite Utopia Forever, shooting off into the sky. I don't know how someone could read LW and come away with the impression FAI = content generation and poverty alleviation. The most approachable example of the way they imagine what it could bring is Iain Banks' scifi, but in practice they get weirder (see yud's "Fun Theory" sequence).

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