shlevy

“I should be able to achieve this goal the way that looks similar to how I imagine a good and capable person would do it, so I’m going to do it that way even if it’s much harder than alternatives with no upside” is really really dumb thinking.

And yet.

The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.

Can you really say that convincingly about a solar farm? What can you say? How about:

But Matt Luke, who was then the Cornwall councillor for the area, said the plans were "the wrong thing on the wrong site for numerous reasons" including the site being "the last green fields in the landscape". Luke said: "The visual impact is far wider than any of you can imagine, this land can be seen from the whole of St Austell Bay. "These are the last green fields in the landscape – the rest has been built on. "It will be visible in the landscape. To say it won't is absolute nonsense."

Well, yes, you'll be able to see that something has been built, and instead of being green it will be green and black. How can anyone get fired up about this? Later in the article:

Councillor James Mustoe, a Conservative councillor whose division contains St Austell Bay, said: "I'm really sorry to see the Bristol-based planning inspector decide, on behalf of the Secretary of State, to overturn Cornwall Council's decision to refuse an industrial scale solar farm on green field land in Carlyon parish." Anesco said the new solar farm would operate for 40 years and generate enough electricity to power 3,880 homes.

i'm confused by the nature of ritual in confucianism. like. most of ritual i get, it feels like normal guy behavior, fills an obvious social role while also having a clear self-interested or devotional motivation. but confucian attitudes towards ritual dont seem like either of these. from the Xunzi:

From what did ritual arise? I say: Humans are born having desires. When they have desires but do not get the objects of their desire, then they cannot but seek some means of satisfaction. If there is no measure or limit to their seeking, then they cannot help but struggle with each other. If they struggle with each other then there will be chaos, and if there is chaos then they will be impoverished. The former kings hated such chaos, and so they established rituals and yi in order to divide things among people, to nurture their desires, and to satisfy their seeking. They caused desires never to exhaust material goods, and material goods never to be depleted by desires, so that the two support each other and prosper. This is how ritual arose

this almost seems like modern moral therapeutic deism? ye olde unitarian universalist. and theres a similar framing, where ritual is just like...the best way to express human emotions. you bury your parents because youd feel bad if you didnt. you give them a special coffin because youd feel unsatisfied otherwise.

and this perspective SEEMS reasonable, except it can't be, because then why the insistence that you MUST follow ritual. if they're just...effective soothing techniques, then different ones will work for different people, and there's no obligation to do them. so it seems to me that these are just ad hoc reasonings, and the actual motivation is something else entirely

That being said, to come at this from a different angle, a lot of what I'm seeing here reminds me of what we'd call institutionalism today. Why is it that the US Legislature can be so backbiting and duplicitious, and yet honour their own rules of procedure? Nobody can enforce that on them if they decide to stop! People talk a lot about how a leader like Trump is disruptive to civic institutions, in a manner not unlike how a Confucian might talk about someone flouting ritual: following insitutions is viewed as "civilizing", but also, in a general sense, of helping to dampen impulsive or extreme action, and to preserve faith in the social order. Nobody would ever rhapsodize about modern political institutions the way Confucius does about ceremonial rites, but I think the idea is a bit similar: they allow the majesty and eternity and truth that we wish to attach to the social order to be stored at a safe remove from specific personalities or factional disputes.

The institutions and processes of the American government, especially those enforcing supremacy of principle and system over whim, are sacred values. The participants in the 1/6 Capitol breach (including Trump) desecrated those values; some knowing, some ignorant, none innocent.

To All You Mainstreamers (e.g. Andrew Granville, Akshay Venkatesh, Michael Harris, Kevin Buzzard, ...) Waxing Eloquent about the Nature of "Proof" and the impact of Computers on Mathematics, all of it will soon be obsolete. Mathematics in Fifty Years will be so different than what it is now, and your admittedly well-written prose will be of only historical (and possibly sociological) interest.