Discover Top Posts Tagged with #rattumb

Popular Recent

Dance like no one is watching, love like you've never been hurt; sing like no one is listening, and blog like it’s never going to be found and publicized after you’re involved in a multibillion dollar international cryptocurrency fraud

#shitposting #caroline ellison #worldoptimization #rattumb

Top 10 Proverbs

1. "Have fun!"

2. "Don't panic!"

3. "Slow down and smell the flowers!"

4. "A stitch in time saves nine!"

5. "Measure twice, cut once!"

6. "Quit while you're ahead!"

7. "Turn that frown upside down!"

8. "Relax, it's just a flesh wound!"

9. "Let the punishment fit the crime!"

10. "There's no such thing as a free lunch!"

#rattumb #m-accost

Daoloth, the Render of Veils

Having read Exploring Egregores...

Daoloth is one of the Mythos deities invented by Ramsey Campbell, and hasn't had much press to its name. Its classic description goes as follows:

"[It] was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognize no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between these rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them."

Daoloth is inexhaustible, infinite, overly complex. A set of simple, interconnecting parts, laid out for long enough, can calculate the answer to any question at maximal efficiency. The familiar shores of everyday numbers slowly give way to unending ocean - the supermajority of integers couldn't be written down if you used the whole universe as a chalkboard. Primes, groups and cyclotomic polynomials are the symbols (and simples) we use to make the world properly digestible.

More than this, Daoloth is the aspect of reality that provides unexpected bounties, rivers of experience you never expected to find. It's what you encounter during original seeing. It's why John Cage claims that "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." This is the slash in the veil - sit being bored for long enough and you start poking permanent holes.

But this is a Great Old One, and not to be trifled with; Daoloth's abundances can fatten, choke and drown. You look something up on TVTropes and hours later you're somewhere completely different, hours lost to the Pavlovian buffer of new knowledge. You paint to express your adoration of the beauty of light and slowly lose it to the maelstrom of other things you can express, only to wind up painting about painting. We're attracted to new information in the same way that our eyes are attracted to motion, but for the same reason the things that we find meaning in are few and far between. Whatever you want, most of existence isn't it.

Interdisciplinarians brush against Daoloth, dimly viewing the "spaces between". Every subject seems to elevate its own importance - open an intro text for a field and see it list all of the pies it has fingers in. Two people talk on a streetcorner - an expression of facts in biochemistry, neurology, psychology (the people), physics, acoustics, linguistics, sociology (the talking), geography, architecture, politics, history (the streetcorner). Every sentence a dozen concepts apply - conflict, war, love, desire, scripting, authenticity, the past and future.

Daoloth is a titan whose joints are reality, and we peer between them feeling watched. It's the sum total of that we don't yet see, even in front of us. It is the hidden object of all contemplation. Summoned directly without containment, it could envelope the world in its form and extinguish all life - but on distant Yuggoth its priests, who can sustain the brain in machinery long after the body decays, call on it to divine the past and future, and to see things as they truly are, to their extensions in "the last dimension."

Ia, Daoloth! Ia, lw'nafh shugg sgn'wahl phlegeth-or! Ia!

#daoloth #cthulhu mythos #egregores #rattumb #ramsey campbell

Splitting this off into its own thread:

If you didn’t have a teenage phase of taking a wrong idea far too seriously, only to later be horrified at how thoroughly you had fooled yourself, I don’t trust you as a rationalist. It’s a key formative experience in learning to not trust your own sense of what’s obvious.

#rattumb #hot rationalist takes

I have a lot of effective altruists on my tumblr dashboard. I also have a lot of people who have serious criticisms of effective altruism on my tumblr dashboard. This means I see them bicker a lot about how to do charity and what the right way to help people is. And there's this pattern I keep seeing over and over again where the EAs and the people who don't like EA keep getting into huge arguments-- because they're not actually talking to each other.

I posted this to the rationalistdiaspora dreamwidth- just some thoughts about a pattern of argument I keep seeing on my dash.

#meta #the rationalist community #rattumb

How in the world does someone describe Rationalist Tumblr to an outsider?

A tumblr community centered around discussions of philosophy, politics, science, and history? Doesn’t seem to quite capture it, sounds a bit too hoity-toity for what we do.

#rationalist community #rationalist tumblr #lesswrong #Less Wrong #rattumb