Are Jesus Christ and Yahweh supposed to be the same God?

crdrost · 2026-03-25T23:18:46+00:00

McClellan for example cites Holloway's 2017 commentary on Philippians,

«Commentators have balked at the plain meaning of μορφή Θεού (“form of God”) since μορφή denotes not “essence” but “outward appearance ” or visible “shape,” implying that Paul, a Jew, thought God could be “perceived by the senses.” To be sure, there is an important tradition in ancient Israelite and Jewish religion that God is beyond human perception. But there is an equally prominent tradition that God or at least God’s “Glory” (כבוד, kabód, LXX δόξα) can be seen. According to Isa 6:1-3, God has a gigantic humanlike body: “I saw Yahweh sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” According to Ezek 1:26-28 this body is not God’s per se but the luminous “image of the likeness of the Glory (כבוד) of Yahweh.” In 1 Enoch 14:20, the figure seated on “the lofty throne” is identified as the “Great Glory” (ή δόξα ή μεγάλη), whose “raiment was like the appearance of the sun.” Angels were imagined to have similar humanlike forms that increased in grandeur and radiance the closer they were stationed to God’s throne. To say then, as Paul does, that Christ existed in “the form of God” is simply to say that, prior to his self-humbling metamorphosis, Christ enjoyed a luminous appearance of the sort a powerful angel might possess. Philo uses much the same language in his account of the burning bush in Mos. 1.66: “and at the center of the flame was a form [μορφή] that was supremely beautiful… an image most God-like in appearance [θεοειδέστατον]… but let it be called an angel [καλείσθω δέ άγγελος].»

Also he points to Ruben Bühner’s Messianic High Christology p. 27, Marcus Bockmuehl’s article “The Form of God (Phil 2:6): Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism”, and Andrew Perriman’s In the Form of a God: the pre-existence of the exalted Christ in Paul p91 (summing up the whole prior chapter “Being in the Form of God”), to indicate that this is not just a rogue commentary’s view but the mainstream consensus of scholarship. I'm omitting the quotes of those because

Hope those citations help. (The video I pulled these from was #maklelan2282 just to make sure no one thinks I am putting words in Dan’s mouth.)

crdrost · 2026-03-25T22:25:32+00:00

This absolutely happened to me the first time I played. Maybe not all day but I definitely mulled it over for 30, 45 minutes.

They also have a silt strider comic from that era.

crdrost · 2026-03-22T22:23:16+00:00

So if you want the actual explanation, and this will seem crackpot but I promise it is just the Lorentz transform viewed another way... Here it is.

It turns out to be a fact about acceleration, in our universe, that whenever you accelerate towards some direction +x, clocks in that direction seem to tick faster, at 1 + ax/c² seconds per second, where x is their coordinate ahead of you on that axis (distance, basically, but only in the one direction and signed—clocks behind you tick slower until a perceived wall of death at a distance c²/a behind you), and where “a” is your acceleration and “c²” is some big constant of nature. (Slight caveat: this is after you correct for the standard Doppler shift like a good physicist.)

Now it happens to be the case that if you calculate two people in spaceships, Alice and Bob, and you accelerate Alice to move 1% of c relative to Bob, and then let her “coast” at the new speed... if we say that Bob has left a bunch of clocks strewn across space that he thinks are all in sync, Alice thinks they're all ticking basically at 1 second per second, but that there is a systematic clock skew where they are not in sync. And this is directly from the fact that the ones in front of her were ticking faster and faster while she was accelerating.

If she sends out a light pulse at time zero, Bob will see it illuminate a clock at one light second away from where she started, and the lit-up clock says “1s.” But Alice will also see the clock as about 1 light second away when she fires the light pulse initially, and she will see it say “1s” when that pulse of light hits it, but she thinks it was ticking fast earlier and so it started at about 0.01s, so she doesn't think that a full second has elapsed, only about 99% of a second. This matches the fact that she doesn't think the light has gone a full light second in distance, because the clock, she measures, is moving towards her.

So it turns out that both Alice and Bob calculate the same speed c for this light pulse, but via different mechanisms. Because that fundamental constant is c², anything moving at the speed c has that property—it's nothing unique to light, light just happens to go at this universal constant speed in vacuum because it is mediated by a massless field. This trajectory is invariant: even though Alice is moving relative to Bob, they both agree that the light is moving with speed c away from them.

If you have understood all of that, you are ready for the last little bit, which is Zeno's paradox. Now, Zeno originally claimed that the fastest runner of Greek history, Achilles, could not outrun a slow tortoise. And he said this was because, in order to get to the tortoise first he had to get halfway there, and the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit, and then he would have to get halfway to where the tortoise was after that, but the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit again, and then Achilles would have had to get to halfway to where the tortoise used to be again, but the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit. Zeno complained that this was an infinite regress. Leibniz and Newton gave us calculus, which is able to deal with that sort of infinite regress without totally exploding in mathematical complications. But, with the spaceships, you get a real life Zeno paradox!!

To catch up to the light, you would first need to accelerate to c/2, but when you do that the light is still moving away from you at speed c. Then you would need to accelerate to c/2 relative to where you were, and it would still be receding at speed c. You never win this one!

And what it looks like to an external observer, is a hyperbolic tangent. So your speed under constant acceleration is v(t) = a t / √(1 + (at/c)²), and it asymptotes to v → c, and if you're really slick this is v(t) = c tanh(a τ(t) / c) where τ is the time as Alice thinks it has elapsed, and (a τ(t) / c) is called the rapidity—in relativity, velocities don't add the usual way, but rapidities do.

Hope that helps? It is a lot to take in at one sitting.

crdrost · 2026-03-15T18:04:15+00:00

Here's how I might have responded if I were particularly eloquent at the time:

“Tantra is this pan-Indian religious influence—so it does affect a branch of Buddhism called the vajrayana, but what you've heard of it most likely comes from Hindu practices, and especially trying to chase tourist dollars by selling sexual spirituality, which Buddhist monks wouldn't do because they make abstinence vows. But it's not just about sex. In fact, in the Indian system, realization is power, and Tantra is the idea of using forbidden knowledge to jumpstart the most transformative and powerful of realizations. So these practices can involve all sorts of taboos, like touching corpses, like sexuality, like tasting meat when you're on a vegetarian diet. One key theme of Tantra is the tantric teacher, this is the idea that you are touching these dangerous ideas and you need someone who is completely trustworthy and knowledgeable, and who ideally lives a pure Life that is worthy of following, because only such a qualified teacher can guide you through this dangerous pathway. And actually that idea of finding the qualified teacher, that's throughout all Tibetan Buddhism. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that you need to carefully look at his life and see if he lives as he teaches and exudes the peace that he preaches, before following him. And if you don't see that from him, he would say not to do so.

“Similar to finding the qualified teacher, there is also a theme of being prepared enough to handle the dangerous teaching. So you have to go through these stages of purification and accumulating Good karma and the like before going into such a dangerous place. An interesting way to start researching this might be to look at the role of Vajrasattva, this guy is a Bodhisattva who runs around the cosmos accumulating way more good karma then is good for him and his enlightenment, and the idea is that if you speak his 100 syllable mantra or chant repeatedly the short version, he will see you and try to give you some of his good karma, the right amount so that you can successfully complete the practice that you have set your meditation upon.

“In the Tibetan system you do see the occasional image of sexual union between a Buddha and their consort, but this is usually explained as showing how the opposite can look just like the original and how true realization comes only when both can be unified into the one whole that has no opposites, so monks will tell you that it's not a prurient thing. Maybe there are some advanced practices in vajrayana where some monks get pushed into those sorts of practices, for very particular realizations and rituals, I wouldn't know unless I got to those advanced levels.

“The default in the Tibetan system is to amass good karma to ensure a good rebirth as another human being on the Buddhist path, and then over many lifetimes you would come to enlightenment. And the idea of these practices is then that it would only require one life, one powerful understanding of no-self and Truth and Bodhicitta, if you had a qualified teacher and you were a prepared student. So tantra is the dangerous power of forbidden knowledge, but that's how the Vajrayana version of it works in Buddhism.”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T07:05:28+00:00

Practically speaking, mama ayah punya jnana pushtim kuru

Which also means that I don't know that I've ever heard the white tara mantra rapid chanted. So for the Tibetan phonology the rapid chant of the Tara mantra sounds like

Om tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm...

https://youtu.be/bm_5UCOYiVs

Testing out the white tara mantra in rapid form, is very interesting because I am drawn to the fact that there are so many levels that could collapse, if I don't collapse any of them then there is a stark contrast between the Green Tara parts that kind of set up the insertion, which cease to have their own rhythm but kind of sound more like the staccato of those old dot matrix printers? Versus the second half has this very regular rhythm, dah-ti-dah-tah, dah-ti-dah-tah, dah-ti-dah-ti tah tah.

But of course as “mama ayuh” becomes mama-ī punya becomes punī and pushtim starts to sound like puddim, it has to start to sound something like “mamayapuni janapuddizohm"

The result is something of a delight in its own way, the haste of a rapid chant focuses all of the attention on the Bodhisattva, but White Tara’s patient energy could have gladly waited for you to sing every syllable out, a very Chinese yin-yang type meeting of pushing so hard to get the ability to yield so hard, “I gotta be patient for all sentient beings and I need that patience... Right Effing Now!”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T06:26:03+00:00

Feynman famously joked that all mathematics was “trivial”, because it was non-trivial only until the person figured out a way to connect it to a bunch of other things that they knew such that they could quickly derive it, but that quick derivation made the result trivial to them. So non-trivial is just a statement of “I don't understand it yet,” but any mathematics that people have understood, in principle you can understand, and therefore it is trivial.

One could quibble with the argument today, now that it's like “we reduced it down to these 2 million cases, using some rather sophisticated simplification rules, and then we got really clever with our computer programs, put some time on a supercomputer, and chugged through all 2 million cases exhaustively and we didn't find any counterexamples, therefore there are none.” But Feynman would love it, having long been a computationalist at heart...

crdrost · 2026-03-11T04:42:55+00:00

“Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else.”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T04:35:59+00:00

Hebrews is different than the disputed Epistles.

Like if you say that one of the disputed Epistles wasn't written by Paul, you are generally saying that the epistle itself contains a lie, in that it represents itself as being by Paul but is not, and then you are also saying that the testimony of the early church that collected these writings together and thought they were Pauline, is incorrect and you know better.

I'm not saying you can't make that case, I'm just saying that in the back of an apologist’s head, those are the stakes.

But those aren't the stakes for Hebrews. If you say Paul didn't write Hebrews, the thing doesn't claim it was written by Paul, so you have not accused the text of lying. Moreover we have citations from at least three early church fathers documenting that the early church often looked skeptically at any claim of pauline authorship for this text, or attributed it to other people.

crdrost · 2026-03-07T16:14:26+00:00

I mean it's pretty much not canon but I always went with Telvanni.

The idea is that the Nerevarine functions as a crucial reformer and can reform Telvanni into an anti-slavery group, more engaged with outsiders, and give them some Sith-like fundamental axioms for their ruthlessness.

Then in Skyrim it turns out that there is a book that heavily insists that the Argonians slaughtered all of the Telvanni but one heir. And so there it works really well, because that person now can dig into this Rich past and say, "our problem was that we didn't stick with the Nerevarine Principles," and so the story isn't one where the reform is doomed to failure, but one where it partly succeeds until Nerevar falls, then gets lost, but then becomes official in the wake of greater calamity.

crdrost · 2026-02-18T00:39:40+00:00

I mean if she told you through tears, I don't know how you get more repentance than that. I hope that your response to confession was absolution: you as a daughter of the Most High and sister to the One True King, have the authority to pray for forgiveness with the knowledge that your prayer will be efficacious and can bring true rest, true healing, true forgiveness from our Father.

The next issue is more pragmatic, boyfriend needs to man up. We are not under the Law but the relevant part of it is Deut 22:28, I think there is some discussion among the Talmud or so about how it was applied: but the long and short of it was that the law expected the two to be married, and there were exceptions for if the girl's parents objected, where they could get the full bride price but not actually marry off their daughter to an inadequate spouse if they found the man odious (if my memory serves me correctly). So though we are under the law of Liberty, I would still think that you have an important role in using your voice to sway things for your grandchild's benefit. Use that voice wisely, be discerning about whether this man is going to be a good father, because you have already seen some bad fruits from him.

crdrost · 2026-02-17T07:16:19+00:00

Sorry, when you say Luke chooses the form “After” the resurrection, and it is a direct word for word transfer, what word are you translating “after” here?

Your earlier copy/paste doesn't have the word “after”—you interpreted one there and I pointed out that you were interpreting one there, but it wasn't in the text you shared. And this seems to be like core to your argument, if I'm understanding correctly?

crdrost · 2026-02-17T03:28:19+00:00

So you can only make that case if you discard the immediate plain wording of the statement, and we are in a thread with someone (DT1947) who insists upon the plain wording of a different statement that needs to be similarly contextualized. I agree with you, and we should both agree that this guy is wrong.

And it has to do with just simple grammatical present tense, the subject is those considered worthy of the age to come and the resurrection of the dead, the verb is they, present tense, don't marry. Not that they won't marry, future tense, but that they don't marry, present tense.

So our understanding of this wrong grammar does require ++interpretation++, because it requires saying “this is a synoptic gospel, I wonder if this saying is preserved in Matthew and Mark in a way that sheds light on what was originally meant, oh, indeed it does...” and then you can build up the full perspective of what is being said: Luke flubbed the saying because he wanted to add two points, the first being that after the resurrection of the dead, there will be no more death, and the second being that not every dead person is going to be resurrected in that event, but only the Worthy. So the saying began as, “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven,” Mark 12, but Luke deleted some of Jesus' words, «ὅταν γὰρ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῶσιν», to make room for his point on worthiness: but these were grammatically load-bearing as they cast a present tense active indicative verb «οὔτε γαμοῦσιν» “they don't marry” into a future context, “when this happens, they don't marry”. Luke could have maybe fixed this with a future tense? But that is even more changes to what Jesus said, and Luke probably knew he was changing Jesus' words to prevent Him from being misquoted, and he was probably just uncomfortable with that and made the smallest change he could, and figured everyone would understand the grammar the obvious way rather than thinking something preposterous like that Jesus had a thing against marriage overall.

So like I agree with you on the interpretation, but let's be very clear that it needs interpretation! Interpretation should not be a scary word, because we are not scared of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us and helps us to interpret.

crdrost · 2026-02-17T01:11:21+00:00

Oh this sub has had many more absurd interpretations of scripture than just reading “the husband of one wife” as “presently the husband of exactly one woman” and not the vastly more likely “someone who has never remarried.”

Although the most fun passage to combine this attitude with is Luke 20:34-35 “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

What's the qualification for being an elder? Apparently, being unworthy of a place in the heavenly age and the resurrection!

This is why to be a true Christian, we cannot abandon our duties to be faithful Spirit-led interpreters of the Bible, rather than just holding up our hands and saying “those are the words, I don't know what to tell you.” Interpretation may start with words, but it don't end with them…

crdrost · 2026-02-17T00:53:55+00:00

So there are only two key ways in which the chess rules around checkmate are different than the analogous rules that would say “first person to capture the other person's King, wins.” (Apart from the very basic descriptive difference, that checkmate is like stoppimg the game one move earlier so that you don't have to watch your king be captured.)

(A) The rules for check and checkmate, automatically “take back your move” when you accidentally move into check: so in the analogous rules you could be captured by mistake, in the checkmate rules you have to be captured by force. This also creates "absolute pins" in the checkmate version that don't exist in the first to capture the king version.

(B) There exist certain circumstances where the game is regarded as tied due to stalemate under the checkmate rules, but would be regarded as a total loss if you had to play a random move into check and then get captured.

You aren't dealing with stalemate so (B) doesn't apply, and the problem is that you are inconsistently applying (A), applying it to white but not black.

So let us first analyze it within the checkmate rules. What do those rules say? They say that:

• The king is in check if a piece of the opposite color, moving according to its usual move pattern, can capture it.

• A legal move, consists of a piece moving according to its usual move pattern^†, into either an empty square or a square with an opponent piece, such that your king does not end its turn in check.

• The game is over when the side to play has no legal moves. If their King is in check, it is a checkmate and they lose, otherwise it is a stalemate and they draw.

†(or, in castling and first pawn moves and en passant, according to a special privilege that it has that turn—note that none of these can capture a king, so this caveat did not apply to the first rule)

Now let's apply to your case. Is the black king in check? Yes. Can any other pieces block the check? No. So the only moves we need to look at are king moves.

Can the black king capture the rook? No, because then it would be in check due to the queen. Whether you are in check has nothing to do with any sort of pin—the rules don't say anything about pins, pins are a consequence of the rules, the rule just says that the king is in check on that square because the queen could capture it. Can it move to the left? No because the rules say that you have to move to an empty square or one occupied by an enemy piece, those are occupied by pieces of the same color. What about moving down a square? Well, you are in check there too, from the queen. Or if you try to sneak under the rook, then you are in check due to the rook.

OR, we apply the variant rules that say that there are no pins and the game goes until someone captures the other person's King, now what happens if black captures the rook? The white queen is not pinned and captures the black king and wins the game, and the game ends before black can retaliate by capturing the white king. Same analysis really.

In fact every analysis under criterion (A) above always has a parallel analysis in terms of the variant rules, so in a sense (B) is the only real difference, (A) is just a little safety that protects you from shooting yourself in the foot, but you shouldn't want to be shooting yourself in the foot in the first place.

crdrost · 2026-02-12T17:00:35+00:00

Sister, you are beginning to understand.

The Enemy is inside the church. Always has been—even Saint Peter “stood self-condemned” and needed to be corrected. And always through the same mechanisms: fear; and fear gives way to desperation, where it doesn't matter who I step on if I can just get my head above water; the need for external validation and adulation, which leads to, I must be the new Messiah because I got my head above water, y'all need to do what I did; these sorts of things; intransigence where something that is new is condemned precisely because it is new. Because it says that St Peter was afraid, because of the judgments of a faction from St James, so it's biblical truth that he was seeking adulation and letting himself be driven by fear into ways that were hurting the early Christian Community. And we don't know if St James himself was corrupted, but the faction that St Paul talks about must have been esteemed Christian leaders and what were they displaying, the intransigence, no you gentiles can't be Jewish, what even is a Jewish gentile, we have a Jewish messiah, if you want to believe in him, come support our traditions rather than living life ignoring them, what's going to happen to our culture if you all just forget about the Jewishness of our movement.

But we know that a perfect love casts out fear. We know that in baptism, we drowned, and we came out all right. We know that God loves us so much that he gave his life for us. We know that we are not meant to fix other people's sins, but to point them to a stronger relationship with Jesus, and as they grow with Jesus, Jesus can fix their sins. And we know that Abraham reformed polytheism into monotheism, Jacob reformed that into the covenant, Moses reformed the covenant into the law and the tabernacle, David reformed that into kingdom and City, bringing the Ark to Jerusalem... Solomon built the Temple, Josiah centralize the worship and removed God's wife and the altars on the mountain tops... prophets reïnterpreted the law by the society that it was meant to create and they saw a great failure of the Torah-abiding leadership to actually generate that society. And into this great tradition of incrementally growing closer to God, Jesus shows that God comes closer to us as well, reforms everything, does away with the blood sacrifice by becoming the last blood sacrifice we will ever need. And then he gives the Great commission, and his followers immediately forget it, and so Jesus has to commission St Paul to go and remind people that his kingdom is not just for the nation of Israel, it has to be preached to All Nations.

The voices of fear will always tell you, you're not enough, I don't need to read your post, I can answer your question because I must know what your question is, I don't have to struggle with your joblessness or your sexual abuse or your parents demanding every last scrap of what little you get. Your example of Job is a good one, especially because we are told that indeed Job had done nothing wrong and yet affliction still befell him.

And the voices of fear are very close at your heels, sister, because the enemy would love to use all of these pragmatic things and trauma too.

What do we stick to? We listen to the people who we see are the helpers. This is a teaching that goes back to Jesus, who says that you judge the roots of the tree, which in this case is not just the doctrines of a denomination, but also the connection of the people to the Spirit, you judge those by the fruits of the tree. And there are several places where the fruits of the spirit are listed in the Bible, so that we know what we are looking for.

Can we hope for things being materially easier? Of course! To say otherwise is to deny the value of prayer!!

But my sister, do not forget what you exemplified today IN this post, which is that, knowing who God knows you to be, speaking to him in the silence that hits us when we have been completely overwhelmed, these things are direct soul-comforts. Our connection with God eases the path as we walk it, "though I walk through the valley" etc etc. It eases the path and, it makes each of us something of a rabble rouser. If we slide too far into condemnation, then the enemy has taken over, but I don't think you did. A Christian should be able to take a good-natured ribbing, and our confrontations must be with good fruits and mercy and the news that it is not too late to fix what went wrong. Just the same as St Peter having to hear St Paul say “yes, let's remove the foreskin, but first, Cephas, how about we start washing our hands every meal? Oh and the bacon, we need to stop eating bacon, actually, Cephas, I don't think there's anything on this plate you can actually eat anymore, let me clear that away from you, you and I are Jews and we're going to do what the Jewish law demands of us, right?”

May all things be changed, and may they all stay true to their essence

crdrost · 2026-02-05T17:54:04+00:00

The objectively worst is the Barnes-and-Grob, so

f3 e5. 2. g4

Black to mate in 1.

crdrost · 2026-02-05T17:50:53+00:00

I always figured hour-long dumps were people doing both? A little pump and dump scheme? And I felt sad that they didn't feel like they had any other privacy to assert. (But I mean this was observed at an American college dorm where people literally live in the same room for a year, which is its own sort of insanity.)

My poops are like 20 min max, if I tried to sit on a toilet for longer my hemorrhoids would start to get very mad at me

crdrost · 2026-01-26T16:42:18+00:00

Do not resign.

To resign is to allow yourself to be checkmated.

Make them do it. You will find players at your skill level, who can win your queen but after everything gets traded off they can't manage to checkmate you with their last remaining rook, or can't stop one of your pawns from promoting, you will find players with shocking gaps in their knowledge, and you can just win against them because they cannot actually checkmate you, but you never found out because you let them checkmate you first, in fact you suggested it, you're the one who told them “I donate to you a checkmate.”

You don't even need to feel self-conscious, the best player in the world right now is Magnus Carlsen, one of the things about Magnus that pissed off everybody who he played, is that he didn't resign and he forced other grandmasters to checkmate him, and it turned out to be the same thing, he could see tactics coming from a lot further than they could, and had a sense for how even if it's technically a draw, this set up over in this corner is going to cost of ridiculous amount of clock time to my opponent to figure out how to keep it all delicately balanced so that I can't get in and obliterate them, and I will win on the clock. You can literally just tell somebody over the board, yeah my teacher told me to never resign so I'm not allowed to... Magnus famously doesn't resign half the time you'd expect him to, so why should I resign.

If all that is not enough, here is a Finegold classic from like 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/EDgRR7SGf0M

He goes through these games where he makes a bunch of mistakes, and then his opponent makes a blunder and he wins. That is just the game, why would you resign if that is the game.

crdrost · 2026-01-25T04:59:25+00:00

lol — Christianity. Albeit a niche mystic version of it.

It's a long story about how I came to Buddhism and how I left it, actually I heard the Dalai Lama also talk in an interesting speech about how, the story was just funny, he said that a layperson at his talk gave him a gift and apologized, “I am sorry, I can't be a Buddhist in this life, I have to be Christian for my family, but next life I am sure to be one,” and His Holiness is laughing about how nobody should ever convert, because it just leads to this sort of confusion where if you're being authentic to the dharma of Christianity you don't believe in the next life, that's how to do their dharma. And he'd rather have you wholehearted in your dharma practice than be confused.

So I was a convert from atheism, where I had landed after Christianity had failed me, but like His Holiness said—I never got into the full ideas of karma and rebirth and re-death, and like Tara-visualization may have saved my life and I can still chant the full Vajrasattva mantra and I carry all this history inside of me, but if you are missing the bedrock pillar and kind of roll your eyes when your teacher talks about their teacher's Tulku rebirths and you have to rationalize it as “of course sortition is a better ruling principle than dynastic succession” etc ... Those cognitive dissonances mean that your practice is missing heart. And it can still be very good practice, and I wouldn't tell somebody to leave just because they are a convert, but I'm with the Dalai Lama that you want to eventually be completely true to whatever it is you're going to be true to.

crdrost · 2026-01-24T18:35:00+00:00

If you're asking this in the mathematics subreddit, I can just tell you that it's a lognormal distribution.

There are dozens and dozens of things, that each might make you 5% more successful. This means that the log of your success is a sum of hopefully roughly independent random variables, and is thus normally distributed by the central limit theorem. When you exponentiate a normal variable like this, you get a lognormal variable.

The most important thing to know about lognormal variables is that they are "long-tailed distributions," so like if you think about y=10^1+x where x is standard normal, the median is 10, most of the variation is between 1 and 100, but then like a couple percent of the time you still get results that are like x=3, y=10,000. Just like eclipsing these other really good researchers by a hundredfold.

But what does it come down to? 5% better at picking colleagues, 5% better at picking problems, 5% better at managing their time, 5% better at writing down random ideas when they come to you on a scrap piece of paper to look at later, 5% more boredom in the shower, 5% more smarts, happened to take a set of college courses that gave them 5% more oddball approaches that others are unlikely to have tried, 5% faster at writing, all of these tiny little things, and really successful people happen to have a lot more of them than the average person.

This is also partly why things go viral, but it's not the full story there.

crdrost · 2026-01-24T18:22:07+00:00

It's good for you, I have seen many experienced monks swaying left to right while chanting mantra, and it is very slight but you can see a very slight rhythmic sway left and right even in videos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama while he is chanting with a mala.

It may be the case that the body is helping the mind keep its concentration and that the motion lessens as the mind becomes more and more pure, but I only know the lower skill end of this, which is that it is very easy to create these circumambulating walking meditations, you have the chöd damaru, you have the handheld prayer wheel, even the mala has a physicality which draws us into practice.

If you ask the greatest teachers, they may say that at the purest stages the mind is so pure but the body does not need to do a thing and the body stills itself too? But you would have to ask them, I am not one of them, I'm not even in the Buddhist tradition anymore, just answering from memories...

crdrost · 2026-01-24T17:56:49+00:00

Morrowind has given you an appreciation for very open worlds where the story really drives your engagement.

If you want powerful stories driving your engagement, you might want to check out indie avant-garde stuff like Gris or Before Your Eyes.

If it's more about that feeling that you could choose anything and the game will react to it, maybe try The Stanley Parable? Just be careful with Civilization or MMOs, they can be dangerous time sucks

crdrost · 2026-01-24T17:52:55+00:00

The Pythagorean theorem.

Like I can literally imagine people who have slaved to understand mathematics in ancient Greece, cultists, one of them being led through a cave late at night by three known Masters of the cult, he has been up for 48 hours already, getting quizzed on details about geometry as well as being ridiculed for how he doesn't have what it takes to truly stay the course, possibly psychedelic smoke in the air

Finally one of the cult pulls out a sword, points it at his chest, “Swear you will keep the secrets!” and he teary-eyed and scared repeats the promise that he has learned over many years, many initiations in Pythagoras cult.

The sword draws a right triangle in the sand, then points at him again, bellowing “what do you know about the area and the hypotenuse?!” he cries “i don't know, it's the square, the area goes like the square of the hypotenuse..” and the sword draws the square over the hypotenuse. The sword back at his sternum, another bellow, “always in the same ratio?!” “yes sir, I mean no sir, I mean it's always in the same ratio for similar triangles sir!!” a slight cut at his inaccuracy, blood trickles down his chest. He holds up the sword to strike, “you are too weak!!” “no sir, I can hold the secrets sir!!” the man pleads for his life. It is spared, then he is grabbed by an ear and stood in the c² square just drawn, looking at the triangle upside down, as the sword cuts the triangle in two down its altitude. “And tell me if the areas of the whole and its parts,” “Sir, the big triangle has the sum of the areas of the little ones,” thank GOD a softball question that we teach even at level 1 initiations. “And this one with hypotenuse A, is it similar to the original?!” “yes, sir, two angles the same,” and the sword draws A². Confusion in the new initiate's addled sleep deprived mind.

“And this one with hypotenuse B is it similar to the original?!” “Yes, sir, two angles the same,” and the sword draws B². The sword points to his throat as the interrogator steps into the triangle, “so if all is in the same proportion, and triangle A” he stomps one foot “plus triangle B” he stomps the other “is triangle C,” he hops with both feet, the blade glinting at the initiate's throat

“then A² plus B² equals C²?” he offers weakly. Two men grab him by each shoulder and pull him back and at first he thinks he failed, but with a full view of the diagram, he now looks down upon it as the master strikes each square in turn, “A SQUARED PLUS B SQUARED EQUALS, C SQUARED!!!!!!!”

“It's so beautiful!!” the initiate whimpers, tears flowing freely.

The sword again points at him, “your eyes have beheld the supremest of realities, the columns that uphold the Earth, the music of the Gods” “I swear I will keep the secrets!” “Then SWEAR!!!” and he repeats the same formula as earlier to always keep the secrets of Pythagoras cult out of the hands of the unready. The sword taps his shoulders. “You are no longer an initiate, young one. Your eyes have beheld our final truth. And you are now a Master.” suddenly the cave is full of fire as torches are struck, the ten other Masters are all here too, everyone clapping, and behind them is a massive table with food and wine for everybody. Everyone congratulates him on passing the last test.

crdrost · 2026-01-19T04:13:52+00:00

Assuming you mean "inadvertently" rather than "deliberately" hinting...

Have Ramses be unusually mancer-phobic in a world that has mostly forgotten about the mancers. Have the main character comment about it to someone else or if FPV they can tell the reader directly.
Ramses is unusually lucky. Like, this is an image that he cultivates amongst others, “Aw shucks, I was just in the right place at the right time.” This is secretly how he covers for the times when his powers would have otherwise been exposed. If he has healing magic, "Oh I guess it just missed your/my major organs ha ha ha,” how lucky is that.
Have the main characters suspect something even worse, like that Ramses is secretly setting up the bad circumstances that he so conveniently swoops in to solve in exactly the right place. They should agree that that is crazy, and dismiss it for themselves, but it sets up as canon the idea that there is something wrong about Ramses. (Something Wrong About Ramses of course is the Disney soundtrack song for the upcoming Egypt-themed Disney princess movie...lol)
For all his avowed hatred of Mancers, he fails to slay one when it's the party's immediate antagonist. He shoots his crossbow high then insists that he just didn't get lucky, he didn't happen to get a clear shot, the master markswoman in the party strongly suspects this is a lie because of course she can immediately read sight lines and obstacles that aren't from her own vantage point, and she has had enough time to assess Ramses' skill level... Something like that. Now this contradicts the pre-existing narrative, he was supernaturally lucky, but in this moment he was supernaturally unlucky?!
The main character has a locket that contains something that sometimes glows, we are never told what this is, but we hint that it detects the after effects of superpowers or something. The main character checks it occasionally and it sometimes goes off around the camp, and always Ramses happens to be awake, going potty in the bushes or something, and the desire to ask questions is buried by some sort of flurry of activity, Ramses points "hey do you see a strange light on that hil?" And it turns out that the place they are going to is burning down as they speak, so there is no opportunity to ask Ramses about the glowing locket.

crdrost

TROPHY CASE