Musings of a carbon-based life form

[timothytrig]

The utter glee with which certain sections of the internet descended on Hank Green is so horrifying to watch. People are absolutely delighted when someone messes up a little (which he barely even did), because dunking is fun. Witch-hunts are fun.

It's scary.

[littledeviantsworld-deactivated]

Did you ever just feel so lucky for knowing someone you met online? Like.. I was one click away from not following you. I was one second away from never even knowing of your existence.I would never have been this happy!!!...

[timothytrig]

There's a remarkable dearth of World Chase Tag content on Tumblr. I suppose I'll have to do something about that myself, shall I?

[odd060]

My theory is that they’re making the off seasons so short bc they don’t wanna make off season layover podcast eps

[timothytrig]

Sam doesn't want to make off-season episodes, because the first three minutes of each episode will be Ben & Adam roasting him for how bad his intro is.

[timothytrig]

I have a bunch of half-written stuff. Some worldbuilding (including religious schism backstory) and half the plot of a novel which doesn't go anywhere. Some explainer stuff. I enjoy explaining things. Some job applications.

I have no motivation to finish anything.

[nottithonus]

He is on one this episode

[timothytrig]

I believe he records Lateral in a studio in Dublin, for some reason, so Union Jack boxers are a choice.

[jetgrime]

I think Adam is a very good caretaker. Which I think is like, very necessary in this specific context. Because if you're traveling all around the world, you're in these stressful situations, these exhausting situations – I am always glad Adam is there. Because, again, I'm never like "I'm gonna die!" Adam has ensured at every moment that I do not die.

[timothytrig]

Ben: I would not be good in a survival situation.

Adam: No, I've never thought you would be.

[cephalopod-celabrator]

I think it's really funny that reading the discworld witch books (at least the ones that are Weatherwax+Ogg+Magrat), Granny immediately seems like the scariest one by far. She seems like a terrifying force of nature accompanied by a jovial old grandma and an insecure young woman. But as the series progress, the times when Granny holds back and Nanny and Magrat jovially engage in brutal physical violence add up. Now I'm not saying you *shouldn't* be scared of Granny, I'm just saying that she has a rather strong conscience in her way, whereas Magrat and Nanny will both sucker punch you, kick you between the legs and happily step over your groaning body. Granny is to be feared, but Nanny doesn't fight fair and Magrat will kill a motherfucker. Terry Pratchett really knew how to write female characters.

[timothytrig]

I love how different all of Pratchett's witches are, even the ones we meet only for a brief scene.

[buried-in-stardust]

Playing with the shadows in Xishuangbanna

[timothytrig]

"Do deformed rabbit. It's my favourite!"

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

I wish they’d made me memorise more

I had a good education, in a school system that had left behind the Bad Old Days, when teachers would hit you with a stick if you didn’t rote-memorise endless facts. I was basically never required to memorise anything by rote. I was never threatened with violence either (at least, not by teachers)^1, and I think those two things may be related. I mean, you do basically need to threaten kids to get them to do rote memorisation - even they can see that there’s no point to it. You can just look things up! What’s the use of stuffing your head full to bursting with a load of dry dusty facts?

Except, that’s not how learning works, is it? The brain doesn’t store knowledge like a hard drive, with a fixed amount of space that you can fill by learning, and if you learn too many things you have to erase other things to make room. The brain stores knowledge like a network, or a graph. You learn new things by connecting them to things you already know. New facts aren’t just inserted into the brain in the next empty space, they’re added to the existing structure, connected up to the surrounding knowledge.

If you come across a fact that has no connection to anything you know, your brain decides (usually correctly) that this fact is not useful to you - you can’t do much with it. A beautiful old stone building you walk past every day has a plaque that says “1667”. Ok, so what? If you don’t know anything else related to that, why would your brain bother to hang on to the number? It’s meaningless. The only way to get that kind of fact to stay in your head, without connecting it to your existing knowledge, is sheer repetition ^2.

But if you do have some related knowledge, like, perhaps you know that the Great Fire of London was in 1666, well, now that plaque means something to you. This building was built the year after a huge fire burned down most of the city. I wonder what was there before? Then later, you read in passing that the plague killed like 20% of Londoners in 1665, and again this date might have been meaningless, but now it has things to connect to, so instead of sliding off it, you think “Wow, what an incredibly shitty time to be in London. The vibe while they were putting up that building must have been wild”. And so on. Each thing you know gives more places for new facts to stick to, and those new facts give you yet more possible connection points. The more you know, the easier it is to learn.

And once you know enough, you can connect up the different parts of your knowledge into one huge graph that makes most new facts you come across just automatically stick in your brain without trying. It is a joy to go through life with your understanding of the world effortlessly growing and deepening each day, in a virtuous cycle.

But before you can fly, you have to get up off the floor! If new facts hit your brain one at a time at random, each fact will probably find nothing to connect to, and just fall out again, leaving no purchase for the next one. A few will stick, so eventually you will start to build out from the basic things you started off knowing, but only very slowly, because you’ve haven’t got much surface area for new knowledge to stick to. Most of the information you’re exposed to will bounce off and be wasted.

What you really want, to get this feedback loop kick-started, is a kind of low density ‘scaffolding’ of facts, that covers a wide area, so that new incoming facts of all kinds have a decent chance of finding something nearby to stick to. You could think of it like, you want to spread out a wide area of ‘nucleation points’ for new clusters of knowledge to start growing around.

For example, in order to have dates not just bounce off, you could learn the dates of major historical events: to get full coverage, you probably want to know the boundaries between periods - starts and ends of wars, reigns of the rulers, that kind of thing. To give information about places a chance to stick, you might want to just learn what countries there are, and maybe their capitals.

It doesn’t make sense to go crazy with this, you only want a small fraction of your learning to be this kind of memorisation, since it’s a much harder way to learn any given fact than just slotting it into an existing structure in a way that makes sense. But if you use memorisation efficiently to build a framework skeleton to grow the rest of your knowledge on, it helps enormously.

The problem is, I didn’t realise this kind of thing was a good idea until after my formal education was done, and to be honest I haven’t been very successful at doing it on my own, without external motivation structures. And the worst thing is, now I’ve had years and years of valuable information just bouncing off my brain, where a lot of it might have stuck if I’d only had the structure in place to catch it. I wish the value of memorisation was explained to me early enough to make the most of it.

Footnote 1: I dimly recall that one of my teachers (an older one when I was very young), still kept the stick in the classroom and would talk about how he’s not allowed to use it any more.

Footnote 2: (or mnemonic techniques, which basically all work by artificially inventing connections between the fact and things you already know).

[timothytrig]

This is a fascinating thought and I love it.

[respectissexy]

My absolute least favorite type of "neurodivergence" (used colloquially to only ever mean "Autism and ADHD") misinformation is the type that posits that being neurodivergent makes you a better person.

"Justice sensitivity" does not mean "neurologically I am a good person who stands up for what's right." It means you have a strong reaction to perceived injustice. But it does not mean your moral compass is calibrated well. The white dudes who are most obsessed with taking away Affirmative Action likely also have "justice sensitivity" -- their sense of injustice is just triggered by something different from what triggers mine, because we have different values. Some people's sense of injustice is triggered by pretty much any situation ever not working out in their favor. Those people can still be "justice sensitive" even if you wouldn't think of them as good people.

Also, there is no neurodivergent condition that makes you automatically capital-H Honest. Some Autistic people aren't good at intentionally lying or find it very uncomfortable to intentionally lie, but others lie just fine and I've met some who did it all the time. "Intentionally lie" is also doing a lot of work here, as you can be very dishonest without intentionally lying if you are prone to lying to yourself, which neurodivergent people are no less likely to do.

There is no neurotype that confers superior moral reasoning or instincts.

[json-derulo]

jet lag the game is like. okay. so you know how traveling is already a Saw trap? what if we kept all of the regular things that make it stressful and made it even MORE stressful by throwing in A) RNG mechanics and B) three guys who all dress like different types of lesbians and are hunting each other for sport

[timothytrig]

𓂸

One wonders why people use the aubergine emoji 🍆 as a phallic symbol when, thanks to the inclusion of Egyptian hieroglyphics in Unicode, we have 𓂸 available.

[timothytrig]

It's apparently my 2-year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳 I'd have guessed it was closer to six months.

[sanealex]

When I find myself in times of trouble Granny Weatherwax comes to me Speaking words of wisdom I can't be having with this

[deckardv]

What I think the absolute coolest thing about mathematics is, is that everything already exists. It's all out there already, in the universe in some fashion, as some sort of concept, even if unknown by anyone. The hat and the spectre, i.e. the first discovered aperiodic monotiles, both always existed as some sort of concept, they just had to be found by someone, and they eventually were. In the same way that far away planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies exist out there that we as the human race continuously work towards finding, mathematics is also out there somewhere, except instead of being millions of light years away from us, it's RIGHT HERE, it's within us, our minds, and we just have to keep digging within ourselves to find and discover it.

[timothytrig]

Mathematics is so joyful, and this is one reason why.

[curseofthelemonphylactery]

adam looking at sam here.......... crazy

[timothytrig]

I know I can see it, but I still refuse to believe that Ben has a beard.