Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Isocrates and Kant both held their major works until their old age, using their early and middle years to achieving mastery through teaching.

What iſ life if not a gamble?
What if life iſ not a gamble?

The ten attic orators are really great and you should read them. Real master classes in style.

Make it illegal to spell Superbowl as two words. It is one word.

To be clear, I think that writers should have something like a "no zero days" standard, if it can be humanely implemented, but I believe such a thing is basically irrelevant to the breakthrough capacity of some writers to massively overproduce.

I am coming around to the view that 10x variance is possible in writers, but it has less to do with the ability to avoid left-tail variance ("no zero days") and more to do to the ability to capture windfalls from right-tail variance.

Remember that a major writing project is a moonshot. And even at its flashiest moments, the people within the moonshot spent some time on a rocket ship at 24,000 mph and some time driving a rover at 8mph.

An evocation is an ancient Roman ritual to steal the favor of your enemy's god by giving that god a better temple and better cult in Rome. It's dominating someone else by "owning" their idols.

I think this is good and should be brought back to the culture war.

Roman law: CONTRACT IS THE BASIS OF THE LAW

Romans: ok

Roman law: IF YOU HAVE A CONTRACT YOU HAVE TO SWEAR TO IT IN PERSON. THERE'S A BUNCH OF RULES ABOUT HOW YOU SWEAR TO IT.

Romans: (break contracts effortlessly by not following all the rules of swearing to it)
... Problem, officialis?

After playing the same jazz song for five years every day, the algorithm has determined that I am using it to calm a dog, so I am now getting recommendations for "calming jazz for dogs."

Psychopaths are about 4.5% of the general adult population:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/

Honest to God, I can tell you specific colonies in colonial New England that had better "level 1" literacy than the contemporary USA. Those are the same colonies that established public schools because they believed Satan was tricking them into Catholicism.

So if I hand seven people from my state a sheet of paper that simply says, "If you ask me for money right now I will give it to you," six of them will get it and one will not.

15% of adults in my state can't retrieve a single piece of information from a basic document written in simple vocabulary.

We have had public schools in this state for 159 years.

What's the greatest crime of the 21st century, and why is it a 21% functional illiteracy rate among US adults?

" Social controls intensify in service of a vague and predictable resentment. De­corum is endlessly renegotiated. New forms of authority and litigiousness come to dominate human affairs and yet hold to no positive law. The young person is given the choice between participation in this stilted pantomime of discourse on the one hand and resigned disengagement on the other."

"... emotions [must] be cauterized at the source. To be mature now is to fend off any incursions of the world on the self. The central task of the therapeutic system is to suspend this state indefinitely, to manage an increasingly feeble impetuousness of life"

"A strange new ethic of detachment is emerging: one must never allow oneself to feel, to commit, to sin or to repent, to stake one’s ground. Options must remain open. As the structures which have lent direction to the individual fall away—civil society, family, courtship, apprenticeship, citizenship, patronage, education, belief—the self is at once bared to the world and made limp. Masks drop, relations flatten—and the walls around the heart and mind draw tight in defense."

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/the-zoomer-question/

Regular reminder that thesis-antithesis-synthesis isn't an idea we receive from Hegel but Fichte, with a basis in Kant's table.