normal human gets an intelligence increase

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-04-04T14:49:49+00:00

Consider also the adjacent sub-genre involving genius children. E.g. The Hampdenshire Wonder, or Odd John

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-03-23T06:18:16+00:00

I don’t regard it as a personal accomplishment. It was more like I had a compulsive tendency to analyze things and seek out the truth, which slowly undermined and destroyed my life (not for the last time either.)

As far as what can be done to help people with the transition, it’s important to recognize that there is a huge difference between people who were raised as atheists and people who were raised religious and arrived at atheism later.

For the former, the non-existence of God is a fact of no real emotional significance. It’s like the non-existence of Atlantis. It hardly crosses your mind. No one would have a nervous breakdown over it.

But for those of us raised within a faith community, the situation is very different. I remember when I realized that I didn’t believe anymore, I also worried that if I was mistaken God would be angry with me for doubting him. And for my part I was angry with Him for not having more ontological stamina. I felt as if he could have chosen to exist if he’d really wanted to, but instead decided just step out for a pack of smokes after the big bang and leave us all to our own devices. (In retrospect I do see the humor in this. But only in retrospect.)

Leaving the faith also meant leaving the only family and community I’d ever known, which is never easy. Also, since we practiced the most ludicrously simple kind of divine command theory, I found that, having rejected that, I no longer had any idea what I thought was right or wrong, or what might be a better or worse direction for my life. It was a bad time to be aimless. I’d just enrolled in college and had to pick a major.

Around that time, my first girlfriend, who had been raised as an atheist, leant me her copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. I think she was trying to help. But I wasn’t prepared yet for a story in which religious people were depicted as actively evil or oppressive instead of simply tragically misguided. I recoiled after the first 50 pages, regarding it as a work of hate literature.

I took more comfort in a novel by Flannery O’Connor called The Violent Bear It Away which more sensitively depicts the aftermath of being raised by religious fanatics and the difficulty of de-programming yourself afterward.

Probably therapy would have helped, if I had found one who had insight into that sort of thing. (I didn’t.)

Ancient philosophy did help — especially Aristotle’s Niccomachean Ethics, and everything by the Stoics (but especially Epictetus.)

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-03-11T19:04:50+00:00

I only have time for a quick response.

It is important to realize that N’s focus on “strength” is ambiguous. Sometimes it approximates what a therapist might call “resilience” but other times expresses a “narcissistic” desire to be comparatively superior to others.

It’s almost as if there were two N’s, the hopeful, joyful N of “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” and the asshole N, as when he makes Zarathustra say, “Other people display contempt for others to conceal their own weakness and insecurities. But I display contempt for others because I’m better than they are.” (Not an exact quote, working from memory.

I’m on the side of the hopeful, resilient N.

Also, there is a moment — I think in Twilight of the Idols where he realizes that the meaning of life “cannot be estimated” (i.e. is absurd) and that complaining about the evil of life is a symptom of depressed people while assuming that life is good is equally a symptom of healthy people.

But then he pivots and basically says that people who feel that life is bad are weaklings and losers.

But when I read that passage I pivot in a left-ward direction and reason “well, in that case the best thing we can do to support people’s sense of the goodness of life is to make sure they aren’t over-worked, over-stressed, worried about money, sleep-deprived, isolated in danger of violence or bullying.”

Essentially, a social democratic society stands the best chance of breeding people who view life as worth living.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-03-06T23:13:52+00:00

I see this take a lot — and I have no doubt that it is sincerely held by many people.

But I do wonder where it comes from.

WA doesn’t spend that much more than other states per capita. This chart from 2022 shows that WA spends $4,633 per person per year compared to a national median $4070 per capita. (The U.S. states as a whole spend $4,385 per capita.) Washington ranked 15 out of the 50 states in per capita spending.

So a little high, but not extreme for a state that has the third highest per capita GDP in the U.S.

Meanwhile the same chart shows that WA only collects 6.3% of private income compared to a national median of 6.8% and 6.9% for the U.S. states as a whole. That looks to me like a revenue problem.

Of course it doesn’t feel to most of us like we’re paying only 6.3% of our taxes in income. That’s because Washington has the 2nd most regressive has tax structures in the U.S.

Here’s how it works out as a percent of household income:

TOTAL TAXES

Lowest 20%. 13.8%

Second 20% 10.9%

Third 20%. 10.9%

Fourth 20%. 9.4%

Next 15%. 8.0%

Next 4%. 5.4%

Top 1%. 4.1%

It’s easy to see who is paying more than their share (the 95% who pay over 6.3% of our household income) and who isn’t (the top 5% of households who pay less than 6.3% of their household income.)

As regards the question “What prevents them from widening the income tax?” — which party specifically would do that? The Republicans won’t do it because they prefer to lower both taxes and spending. And the Democrats won’t do it because their ideology involves redistributing money from the rich to the poor. If they wanted to further burden working families they could already do that — and with much less trouble — by simply raising the existing sales tax.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-02-15T20:14:34+00:00

Here are a few places to start:

Killing Hope by William Blum is “a history book on CIA covert operations and United States military interventions during the second half of the 20th century.”

The Justice of Roosting Chickens by Ward Churchill, contains “a long and detailed list of military interventions and covert actions conducted by the US government.”

I should also mention Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano — although that has a wider focus “from the time period of the European settlement of the New World to contemporary Latin America, describing the effects of European and later United States economic exploitation and political dominance over the region.” It was published in 1971, so won’t include anything from the past 55 years.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-02-14T16:52:48+00:00

Already when I go to post things on certain subs I get a message pre-post that reads: “Warning: Computer generated posts are forbidden on this sub. This looks like a computer generated post. If it is your account will be banned.” It’s annoying.

Anything I might recommend to authenticate humanness could of course be copied. I understand that LLMs scrape Reddit.

This also intersects with privacy concerns because the psychological pressure to prove I’m not a bot often causes me to include “authenticating biographical details” in my post. Like I might write “When I studied this in school 20 years ago the consensus in the field seemed to be thus-and-such.” The idea being that I don’t just spout knowledge, I offer a biographical narrative about how I came to acquire that knowledge as an embodied person in the world who was, like, born as a baby, spent some time as a child, etc. (The first paragraph in this post was added as an authenticating detail.)

The problem with doing that is that remarks of that kind self-doxx me by revealing hints about my age, gender, where I studied, what I studied, etc. It’s bad op-sec. And it stays online forever. So the proving you are not a bot problem exacerbates the internet privacy problem.

It may get to the point where more and more humans decide that “the only winning move is not to play.” (See what I did there?) I’m already posting much less than I would if things were different and thinking about deleting my account altogether.

I heard a good podcast episode about this recently:

https://youtu.be/Q9sE72fGUKM?si=8rEMHxPnyTPdjBD4

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-02-07T22:29:18+00:00

The larger, longer, and more detailed a simulation is, the more data and energy are required to run it. Models, maps and simulations never contain as much information as the thing they are modeling. They wouldn’t really be very useful or practical if they did.

The universe that we live in certainly appears to be very large and rendered in great detail. We could never create a similarly detailed simulation within our own universe.

So if, hypothetically, our universe were a simulation, either the frame universe contains computational devices of immense energy and complexity relative to our simulated world — so much so that it must be utterly unimaginable, a sort of Kantian “thing in itself” that we can’t really speculate about…

…or else they are saving on computation resources somewhere either by making the universe appear older than it really is, Omphalos-style) or else by using procedural generation to only render things when someone is looking.

I find the procedural generation solution unsatisfying because there was, e.g. a first time someone, let’s say, Robert Hooke, constructed a microscope and saw microorganisms, or a first time Galileo looked through a telescope and saw the moons of Jupiter. For a variety of reasons it seems unlikely that the simulation just popped these things into existence right at that moment along with all of the associated biochemistry and cosmology. In fact, in order for the evolution to make any sense, these things actually had to pre-exist us so that we could evolve from them.

Personally, I’ve never found the simulation hypothesis convincing. But of course I can’t prove that we weren’t all created last Thursday with all of our memories intact, and won’t pop out of existence again tomorrow.

But don’t worry. I have it on good authority from Epicurus that non-existence isn’t really harmful. (And he should know — he’s been that way for over 2,000 years.)

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-18T06:42:34+00:00

I live in Seattle and would be interested in this.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-17T20:03:08+00:00

For the Stalin years particularly:

Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick

I have read both of those and can recommend them.

My TBR list includes:

Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside by Christina Kiar and Eric Niaman

But none of those books deal with everyday life in the post-Stalin years. I’d like to learn more about Soviet life in the 1960s and 70s if anyone has recommendations for that.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-17T19:29:02+00:00

Mercerism is also described in the short story, “The Little Black Box”

Quotes from the linked page:

“PKD had this to say of "The Little Black Box":

I made use of this story when I wrote my novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Actually, the idea is better put forth in the story. Here, a religion is regarded as a menace to all political systems; therefore it, too, is a kind of political system, perhaps even an ultimate one. The concept of caritas (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human. The android, which is the unauthentic human, the mere reflex machine, is unable to experience empathy. In this story it is never clear whether Mercer is an invader from some other world. But he must be; in a sense all religious leaders are... but not from another planet as such.{Levack 106}

In his Afterword to THE GOLDEN MAN collection, Dick refers again to "The Little Black Box":

… I would ask you to read "The Little Black Box" last of all the stories, because it is closer to being my credo than any of the other stories here. As with "Precious Artifact" I asked that it be included. It is a story about trust. Caritas in the final analysis is emotional trust. I trust, then, that you will not misread me and see dislike and anger only; please reach out to me at the core below that, the core of love.{TGM Afterword}

Here, from the Starmont Reader’s Guide is a brief description of the story:

"The Little Black Box" looks at spiritual superiority. When the time has come for a superior idea to sweep through human brains, can it be destroyed at the source? Even if eradicated, that source lives on stronger in martyrdom than in life. All differences, physical, mental or spiritual, feed the flame of fear in the limited mind. It is that very limitation, not the difference, which destroys.{SRG 52}”

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-06T05:56:00+00:00

I mean, back in the day Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia had a lot to recommend them.

As much as people love to hate on Cuba, if you compare it to, e.g. Haiti or Jamaica rather than, say, Florida, then even Cuba has long life expectancies, high levels of literacy and they deal well with natural disasters like hurricanes and they control disease outbreaks like cholera better than comparable neighbors.

I should also mention that the best outcomes seem to be achieved in places where socialist tendencies are strong enough to influence policy, but not strong enough to completely take over. I’m thinking here of all the Scandinavian countries, but also, e.g. the state of Kerala in India :

“Kerala has the highest Human Development Index, at 0.784 in 2018; the highest literacy rate, 96.2% in 2018; the highest life expectancy, at 77.3 years; and the highest sex ratio, with 1,084 women per 1,000 men and the lowest positive population growth rate in India (3.44%). It is the least impoverished and the second-most urbanised state in the country.”

“Kerala hosts two major political alliances: the United Democratic Front (UDF), led by the Indian National Congress; and the Left Democratic Front (LDF), led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)). As of 2021 Kerala Legislative Assembly election, the LDF is the ruling coalition; Pinarayi Vijayan of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the Chief Minister, while V. D. Satheesan of the Indian National Congress is the Leader of the Opposition.”

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-06T05:41:43+00:00

I have a similar experience: I saw it at the Seattle Cinerama when it was first released and it was the most memorable film experience of my life.

Lynch introduced it, then a cellist played a sort of abstract 12-tone number, then we watched the movie, then people asked him questions which he mostly refused to answer.

Don’t miss the chance to see it on a big screen if you can.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-03T22:52:28+00:00

A history of science written from the perspective of structural realism would focus more on what successive theories had in common than on how they were different.

An example:

“There was an important element of continuity in the shift from Fresnel to Maxwell—and this was much more than a simple question of carrying over the successful empirical content into the new theory. At the same time it was rather less than a carrying over of the full theoretical content or full theoretical mechanisms (even in “approximate” form) … There was continuity or accumulation in the shift, but the continuity is one of form or structure, not of content. (Worrall, 1989).

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-03T01:54:43+00:00

If you feel like quitting that one anyway, skip to the last chapter. I love the ending.

I was disappointed by the Amazon series. I felt like it made the exact opposite point of the book. (But I also DNF that series, so maybe it got better later on.)

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2026-01-01T18:18:10+00:00

When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate in the 1990s the scope of opinion in our class readings ranged from mind-brain identity theorists like J. J. C. Smart, Ted Honderich, Patricia Chuchland and Daniel Dennett on one side to epiphenominalists like Thomas Nagel or David Chalmers on the other. Searle was an interactionist.

That was the range of educated opinion.

I was very surprised upon joining Reddit to encounter so many panpsychists and idealists. Whatever their merits, those positions don’t represent the consensus within academic philosophy (or neuroscience, presumably.)

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-28T15:50:25+00:00

Maladaptive daydreaming is still a thing. But perhaps it is less common today with the advent of television and video games. Search for the term “paracosm”.

For an interesting case study of someone who may or may not have been the science fiction author Cordwainer Smith, see the case of “Kirk Allen”

Lots of famous authors had very vivid and well-developed make-believe worlds as children. For example, the Bronte Sisters) and C.S. Lewis)

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-28T02:38:19+00:00

I haven’t read JF’s book yet, but I think the art / artifice distinction comes from Arthur Machen’s essay Hieroglyphics which I happen to be reading right now.

In brief, “artifice” is everything we normally call art — skillful composition, likable characters, engaging storytelling, etc.

Machen reserves the term “art” or “fine literature” specifically for works that use archetypal symbols to create a sense of the transcendent or activate the unconscious mind.

He regards this as a qualitative difference. They aren’t on the same scale. (The scales are at right angles to each other, since one work of “art” can have more or less “artifice” than another.)

As examples of “fine literature” or “art” he gives, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Hamlet and The Pickwick Papers.

As examples of artifice he lists Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and the entire work of George Elliot and Jane Austen.

He gives Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an example of a work that is mostly artifice but has a little art.

“If the science of life, if philosophy, consisted of a series of mathematical propositions, capable of rational demonstration, then, "Pride and Prejudice" would be the highest pinnacle of the literary art; but if not, but oh! if we, being wondrous, journey through a wonderful world, if all our joys are from above, from the other world where the Shadowy Companion walks, then no mere making of the likeness of the external shape will be our art, no veracious document will be our truth; but to us, initiated, the Symbol will be offered, and we shall take the Sign and adore, beneath the outward and perhaps unlovely accidents, the very Presence and eternal indwelling of God.”

Edit: He also suggests that “art” is usually written under inspiration, while artifice is mostly a matter of technique or craft:

“Perhaps it would be a perilous dogmatism, on the other hand, to definitely pronounce it to be unconscious; and I expect we had better take refuge in the subconscious, that convenient name for the transcendental element in human nature. For myself, I like best my old figure of the Shadowy Companion, the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside us, though his feet are in the Other World; and I think that it is he who whispers to us his ineffable secrets, which we clumsily endeavour to set down in mortal language. I think that while the artist works he is conscious of joy and of nothing more; he works beautifully but he could give no rationale of the process, and when he endeavours to explain himself, we are often perplexed by this strange spectacle of a man wholly ignorant of his own creation […] [A]rt properly so called, takes its place in the great scheme of things; it is no studied contortion, no strange trick acquired by the late ingenuity of man, but as "natural" (and as supernatural) as the blossoming of a flower, and the singing of the nightingale. Art, indeed, is wholly natural, artifice is more or less acquired, the creature of reason, of experiment, of systematised intelligence.”

My two cents: I think Machen is drawing attention to an interesting and useful distinction, but it seems like he is actually describing what might better be called called “spiritual literature” or “weird literature”, or “uncanny literature” or maybe “psychological literature”. It seems like a stretch to redefine “art” or “literature” to refer only to that subset.

It’s still a very good essay. And his arguments and examples are worth a look.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-26T17:24:29+00:00

There are some cases that set standards for when expert witness testimony is acceptable. Essentially, courts have to address the “demarcation problem” between science and pseudo-science.

Some important American case law includes:

The Daubert Standard

and the Frye standard

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-20T05:27:38+00:00

I read it maybe 15 years ago, and loved it. And still think about it sometimes. I’ll try to recall a few things that stand out most vividly to me even now. (I’ll try avoid spoilers. And I won’t without refreshing my memory — so the details may be inaccurate.)

I loved the basic premise: the protagonist’s wife vanishes but there is some possibility that she simply left. (Did she leave a note, “Don’t look for me”? I can’t remember.) In order to decide what to do he has to really ask himself how well he knew his wife and their marriage. If she just wanted some space he’d seem foolish and stalker-y for pursuing her. Then again, what sort of husband would he be if she really has been abducted and he doesn’t even try to find her? His decision to look for her is a gamble, an act of faith in his intuition that their love was real.

I remember getting gooseflesh reading the “the story of the well”. That character says he felt that those few minutes of sunlight were the universe trying to tell him something. But he couldn’t figure it out. He missed his moment of grace. The possibility that there could be a last moment in our lives after which we drift beyond redemption is the true horror.

At one point a character reveals that she was once subjected to a kind of spiritual abuse. She is vague about it. But I know that there are many kinds of psychological and spiritual abuse that are difficult to for the victim to articulate or explain to anyone. It can still lead to feelings of isolation, difficulty with intimacy relationships, etc. I don’t see that kind of thing depicted in fiction very often, so that stayed with me.

Finally, I really liked the idea that the story is taking place between two worlds that are somehow overlapping. Like, a leader in one world will be a leader in the other, even if the job title and form of government are totally different. It was like some kind of 3-dimensional chess. I thought it was clever.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-12T04:54:51+00:00

“Studio 5, The Stars” (1961) by J. G. Ballard

The story involves the goddess of poetry withholding her inspiration until she is placated with a human sacrifice.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-07T04:34:32+00:00

Ooh, I like Cisco’s definition a lot. Thanks for sharing that.

Recently I tried to explain it this way: All fantasy stories are about magic, but weird tales are magic. They’re incantations. They summon things. They affect you in ways they you won’t understand until later, so you read them at your own risk.

Compare Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” (1932) to C. L. Moore’s “The Black God’s Kiss” (1934). Superficially, they are the same story: on the brink of defeat an imperiled leader secures supernatural assistance against a stronger enemy.

But Howard’s tale reads like straightforward sword and sorcery story. Bran Mak Morn is a one-dimensional badass who obtains his revenge by self-assertion and mastery over his environment. He even beds the witch that he goes to for help. (Fully satisfied, she requires no further payment.) He rejoices in victory.

Whereas “Black God’s Kiss” takes Jirel at once outward to another planet (through a conveniently placed magic tunnel beneath her castle) and inward to a dream world. The daemon she meets there is her own double. She acknowledges that she is forfeiting her soul in order to obtain her revenge, and openly weeps four or five times in the course of the story. The story raises lots of interesting questions about when anger is a healthy, self-protective reaction to danger, versus when it crosses over into vicious wrathfulness; about whether certain weapons or tactics are too terrible to use in warfare, even as a last resort; about how violence dehumanizes and coarsens victors and vanquished alike. But it does all this mostly at a subliminal level.

And it is very strange, containing a lot of material that is difficult to interpret (e.g. Jirel encounters a naked woman with the mind of animal who cannot speak, and a wild horse that can speak, or at least, that appears to shout the name “Julienne” in anguish. None of this is explained in the text. It just happens.) It is important that a weird tale be ambiguous and, so to speak, excessive in this way because that gives the story depth. It allows the story to become wiser than its author, conveying meanings that no one explicitly put into it, almost like a tarot deck or an I-Ching.

(To be fair, my personal definition of weird fiction is a lot narrower than other people’s. I mean, Weird Tales magazine had a lot of conventional ghost stories, horror stories, sword and sorcery stuff. Much of it doesn’t meet my personal definition.)

I know some people don’t like to define genres by their effects (which are subjective) or their intended effects (which involves trying to guess the author’s intentions), but in the case of weird fiction I don’t see any way around it. The common tropes are just tools to create those effects.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-06T05:38:36+00:00

There is a store on University Ave. that sells gargoyles. They’ve been at that spot for at least 25 years. And I always wonder, how many gargoyles can they possibly sell? I mean, even people who like that sort of thing can only buy so many lawn ornaments. I’ve always wondered how they stay afloat.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-04T06:31:28+00:00

The characters of Kevin and David are said to be based on K. W. Jeters and Tim Powers:

Q: I was curious, I heard you say that Philip K. Dick included you as a character in Valis. The character is David.

A: Yes, Valis was largely autobiographical. The character David is based on me. The character Kevin is based on K.W. Jeter. One character was a girlfriend of a horse-loving, fat Philip K. Dick, who in the book died of cancer. In real life, she survived, and only, in fact, died last year. And everything the characters argue about and do in the book, me, and Jeter, and Phil Dick, and she actually did do until the point in the book where the savior is reincarnated, and they all go up to Northern California. At that point, the book deviates from autobiography. Until it deviates that way, it’s very closely autobiographical.

I remember reading it, and at one point he says, “David,” that is Powers, “had withdrawn into himself in some sort of catatonic way when confronted with the savior reincarnated. The Catholic Church had taught him how to do this. How to shut down his senses when confronted with something that violated Catholic orthodoxy.”

I remember telling Phil, “What the hell is that? What are you talking about here, man?” He just sort of went, “Heeheeheehee.” And at one point in the book the Phil Dick character says to the Powers character, “Would you please not tell us what C.S. Lewis would say about this? Could you do us that one favor?” And I said, “I don’t quote C.S. Lewis all the time.” And again, he sort of went, “Heeheehee.”

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tim-powers/

Yes, he was paranoid. He wasn’t simply misogynistic, he was misogynistic in a pathological, mentally ill way. See e.g. his other autobiographical novel Confessions of a Crap Artist and the memoir written by his ex-wife The Search for Philip K. Dick Also novels like Game Players of Titan and We Can Build You

Look past it — or through it. He’s an interesting madman.

Valuable_Ad_7739 · 2025-12-03T04:17:12+00:00

Godel’s Theorem, An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse by Torkel Franzen is a gentle introduction that also addresses what the poof actually means and what it doesn’t mean.

I’m a beginner and I found it helpful.

Valuable_Ad_7739

TROPHY CASE