I Need A Nap

Superbloom 2017; diamond valley lake, california

and it's tempting to just leave it at that, right? to just say OK, economics is the best you can do in making social science "hard" and it sucks, let's just go back to the physical sciences which are actually tractable. But you can only punt on the social questions individually, not systemically. We need to make decisions about social structure and policy somehow, and they're definitionally important. In the long term, I'm not sure it's possible for even the worst social science to have a more harmful effect on society than no social science, because the worst social science is mostly just using the trappings of science to legitimize pre-existing notions that would otherwise be legitimized differently. And there's no question of "if that's the best we can do, let's at least stop wasting money on social science" because ha, there's no money for the science part and the PR part will never die

Maze, 1972 by Alice Aycock   

“I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.”

“I had once told Daedalus that I would never marry, because my hands were dirty, and I liked my work too much. But this was a man with his own dirty hands.”

“Odysseus, son of Laertes, the great traveler, prince of wiles and tricks and a thousand ways. He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”

“A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.”