Dan Kim

I started reading Descartes' Meditations during my first year of highschool and I've been reading stuff informally here and there since then. I used to take it all very seriously, but now I really only read to try and clean up ideas that bother me (or get to the point were things get so bloodless and boring that I can't remember why they bothered me in the first place) and to prep myself for more serious comic projects.

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These days I don't really like the idea of having a favorite, but I can say that reading the arc of Richard Rorty's stuff in my mid-late 20s really helped me get my feet back on the ground and take the whole shebang as one more human activity amongst others and not as an attempt to somehow leap outside yourself, see into Reality As It Really Is, and take the "view from nowhere". I think that was healthy change. I am less enthusiastic about his political writings these days... I think we're too constrained by biology and our own uniquely perverse natures to be the kind of cruelty-hating, self-creating poets that he hand in mind... but it was a nice dream.

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Right now I'm reading through some stuff by Jaegwon Kim and David Chalmers in preparation for On The Subject of Witches. Well, more like they're on the too-read pile since I'm still busy working on this Ubi sideproject thing. >: T

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For a nominalist / pragmatist, the entire idea of "redpilling" doesn't make much sense. There's no such thing as getting the true description of the world, only various descriptions that are better or worse for helping us get certain things done. So when I see stuff like "ALL WOMEN ARE LIKE THAT" or "ALL MEN ARE LIKE THAT" , that seems to me to be mostly stipulative-- kinda in the way that someone might look at a chuck of carved wood on a tiled surface and say "ALL ROOKS ARE LIKE THAT" when it moves in straight lines. That is, you're doing a bunch of stuff at once: saying you're playing a certain game, reinforcing the vocabulary of the game, insisting you play the same way, insisting on a certain idea of correctness within the game, etc. But folks can always choose to play a different game or have different purposes in mind that make incorrectness within the (implicit, socially reinforced) rules of that game moot. In fact the guy moving that carved piece across the "gameboard" may insist he's just scratching a bit of dirt off the table, not playing a game at all and the idea of "moving in a straight line" has no weight at all.

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And even if all the redpill evo-psych bro-science were true, it would be nearly useless. All that redpill stuff applies to entire populations as described under a particular vocabulary, but the only thing that matters to the individual is what is possible and not possible for them /as an individual entity/, under a variety of descriptions (and description-to-be, as of yet uninvented). You could split people into programmers and non-programmers if you like and find all kinds of interesting regularities, but there's no reason why you have to do that. And such regularities are of no help at all when trying to figure out what's going with an individual entity considered as something outside the programmer/non-programmer grid you've set up for yourself. It certainly doesn't reveal some facet of reality that's been previous hidden from you -- at most, you might have something useful that be more or less useful for, say, keeping programmers and non-programmers happier at work, on average, using different techniques... or something like that. It certainly wouldn't tell you whether a particular programmer would be happy with this or that new policy from HR. It's of no use when you want to know about a individual entity as a baker, sister, or MMO addict instead of a programmer.

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Anyway, that's why I advocate, at most, a general stance towards life that's just a loose collection of bumper stickers (be your own master, roll your own rock, etc) rather than committing yourself to this or that theoretic or heuristic tool. The tools can come and go with the times and circumstances -- what never changes is that you're the one that has to live your life. Be the captain of your own ship, decide where to go, and let the chips fall as they may.

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Well, it's a bit of a non-answer as usual, but that's the way I roll, bub.

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