All of Dale Udall's Comments + Replies

This is false, there are a few genius mathematician who early in childhood proved it is easy for some humans.

Some outliers are hypernumerate. I'm hyperlexic, so attuned to words that I was able to teach myself to read before my childhood amnesia kicked in, so I never had to learn phonics. This doesn't mean the vast majority of humans aren't congenitally literate or numerate. OP's statement may be nominally false, but the exception proves the rule.

As for teaching the aesthetic beauty of math, I would give each student their own blank copy of the 10x10... (read more)

This is a beautifully articulated taxonomy. My first application is to addictions. At the top level, addiction "makes things okay" in a way that makes things very not okay.

Uppers can make someone feel like things are okay. This reduces stress until they wear off and the "not okay" can be seen more clearly, assuming the time spent "up" wasn't used to actually make things okay.

Downers can make someone feel like being "not okay" is okay. This reduces stress by taking away the onus of responsibility for a time.

Psychedelics can induce states of A or B.

Codepende... (read more)

Shakespeare was the Joss Whedon of his day: high concepts and raunchy humor executed with total dedication to the world being created, with witticisms and new phrasings that hit the zeitgeist just right.

We now have a Philippines strain to worry about, there will be more until we solve this globally, yet there is no sense of urgency whatsoever.

The urgency went away with the restaurants, the jobs, the summer protests and the winter elections. "Two weeks to slow the curve" became "Let's make sure the poorest people with the most vulnerable relatives still have to ride the NYC subway to work because a city survives on its underclass, and hey let's stick COVID patients in nursing homes." The pandemic became the one thing that's poison to a news cycle: boring.

Not the existence of a God, but the actions of specific Gods.

The book of the Christian God promises eternal existence to all instead of oblivion, and a really good eternal existence to those who follow the Way of love and choose to accept that God's offer of redemption.

The book of the Muslim God promises a similar pair of eternal destinations.

Those are just the two most famous promises of infinite lifetime tied to interpretations of the holy books of religions which focus on specific Gods. They're extraordinary claims, and so they require extraordinary evi... (read more)

You could simplify Machi Koro:

• just use the one-die cards requiring a roll of 1-5
• remove the first goal card which allows the second die, and the last goal card which requires 22 coins
• first step of complexity is to re-add the cards requiring a roll of 6 and the last goal card.

It actually (didn't) show up in one of the final (and best) novels of the old Star Wars canon, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover.

It also (doesn't) show up in the Elder Scrolls series as Sithis, the Void.

Much of contemporary spirituality, I think, aims at a certain type of unification or “non-duality.” It aims, that is, to erase or transcend distinctions rather than draw them; to reach the whole, rather than the part. Indeed, to the extent that an “existential” attitude aims, ultimately, to encompass as much of the “whole picture” as possible, some aspiration towards unity seems almost inevitable.

But as we raise the level of abstraction, but wish to persist in some kind of existential affirmation, we will include, and affirm, more and more of the world’s h

If one or more exist, then our time is not 100 years but infinite, and our reach not limited to our arms. Worth as much ink as the heat-death of the universe or the eventual extinction of Man, which both rely on the false vacuum not popping before then.

This is the frustrating thing about the culture war. People seem to assume that the sides are clearly delineated in black and white. Just because some activist shouts that you have to call hispanics "latinx" now doesn't mean it's true, and trans issues are no different. The actual people who are supposedly being represented are much more diverse than you might think.

Much of the activism I hear about on the news falls into both the legibility trap and the movement trap. While allies are trying to simplify the issues to build steam for building an institutio... (read more)

It sounds like this is the book that inspired the setting and details of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Philosophy aside, it's a dystopian novel about the science of railroads and steel and the capitalism of continent-wide industry, with a few bits of sci-fi tossed in to make her points.

This is especially relevant in 2021, when Easter and Passover both fall on the same weekend.

I remember looking this up and thinking, "If I ever get trapped in a nonhuman universe, I'll just celebrate it on the weekend of the first full moon of spring."

If nothing else, I hope this essay will leave you feeling grateful that you no longer have to do a decades-long bootstrapping process the way Eliezer and Nancy and I and others like us had to in the before times.  I doubt any of us are sorry we put in the effort, but being able to shortcut a lot of it is a good thing.

Thank you for introducing us to those who built this basilica. Just in looking up General Semantics, I've learned more about the culture wars that preceded the ones we now fight, and I learned who a few of the generals were on both sides.

Would a module on how to overcome the deficits of autism without losing its strengths or becoming a different person be useful for the Character Sheet section of this project, or useful to Rationalist-aligned autistic people in general?

Philosophizing from the beginning: what makes something real? What even is reality?

Something is real to something else if it can affect it. My desk is real to my fist because it absorbs the energy and brings my hand to a stop, also causing a noise from the air particles disturbed en masse. El-ahrairah is real to Fiver and Bigwig as a mythopoeic hero / rabbit celebrity, and Fiver and Bigwig are real to my imagination as well as to my list of well-written fictional characters.

A reality is an arena within which some things are mutually real. Our physical real... (read more)

Great points! In one small reply, you've explained a lot about Trumpism and the resulting reaction:

1. The red tribe was tired of being represented by blue-tribe meta-gamers who seemingly only cared about signals and not substance, so they hired a man whose meta was about smashing the meta.
2. The blue-tribe media realized they literally couldn't afford a President whose substance matched his meta: ignoring the meta of politics and going for the meat of policy through consensus and win-win compromises. The only way to avoid that meta winning would be to prevent co

The meme is trying to mind control you so it can replicate.

Ever since reading the book "Virus of the Mind" (Brodie, 1996), I've been wary of holding any opinion I don't fully endorse or otherwise remember why I started believing in the first place. (This hasn't been true of my opinion about politics in general until I typed that sentence, full disclosure.) I've been especially wary of using someone else's phrasing to spread really sticky ideas. I guess I've got a good memetic immune system?

I think we should raise awareness of the concept of a memetic immune system.

Thank you. I'm currently playing with Excalidraw to create basic diagrams, since Venn diagrams are the best way to introduce the concepts. In fact, whenever I describe it with words, my goal is to simulate these Venns in my listeners' minds, so I'm better off just plopping them into the post.

Now I just have to figure out the best way to include these drawings in the posts. SVG? PNG? Excalidraw native JSON? I'm lurking and reading the faqs to figure that out.

When I turn it into a blog, it might be best to have my own little wiki because of the way my content and terminology are interconnected.

It's interesting that you choose dividing by zero as your comparison to infinity, because there are infinite possible solutions to x/0.

It seems to me that by introducing infinites and infinitesimals to mathematics, mathematicians did something similar to how algebra made addition and multiplication "live together" despite their incompatability. By giving definition to something that sometimes can and sometimes can't work with other parts of math, mathematicians brought the outside in, and fenced the universe.

I also find myself wondering if anyone thin... (read more)

I'm Dale Udall, a self-taught GenX philosopher and Grey-tribe quokka. For twenty years, I've been living my life informed by an original naive philosophy I call Triessentialism. I plan to start making it public under this persona on this site, to distance the philosophy from all the other footprints I've left on the Internet.

Triessentialism is a fractal ontology. It can be used for philosophical realizations and reorganization. I've applied it to ethics, erisology, AI safety, economics, music theory, marketing, sociology, self-help psychology, and more.

I b... (read more)

When boxes A and B hold your sister and a thousand people, respectively, it becomes a classic Trolley Problem instead of a Prisoner's Dilemma.