smenor/tangents
Agnostic
Descripción
Image: Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860s. He was the first to decisively coin the term agnosticism. By Ernest Edwards National Institutes of Health public domain [https://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B11455] Full transcript: Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents Well, today is the sixth of I was going to say December for some reason, but November 2025, it is kind of hard to believe They're like a blink ago, I started my job, my last job at ASU, and that was in like two years ago, basically, a little bit more And then I blink ago after that, that job ended I was planning on going to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, and then I did that, and then I was back And I've been back like two months now, and it's disturbing how fast time goes I mean, I know this is not the most profound observation that anyone could make But I remember when I was a kid, I was a kid, and like a week seemed interminable It seemed like forever And kind of in a bad way, in some sense, I mean, it wasn't a terrible experience, like I wasn't always complaining, but there would be things where you'd be looking forward to something, and it'd be a week away And it just seemed like a forever And now, I blink my eyes and years have gone by I've been, like, I'm back on Facebook, don't feel great about it, but I am And because I started my account there, I'm still connected to the people I was connected to before And there are a bunch of people that I'm connected to there who, and didn't link them as well, who I knew in graduate school And I look at these guys, and they're like, what the fuck happened to you, you're old now And, you know, so many of them also, the dudes, obviously lost their hair, they're bald And you're seeing these bald guys, and you're just like, what the fuck happened? And then of course, the weird thing is, I didn't actually, like, they're very old now I'm not, I don't know how that happens But no, I mean, like, we're all kind of the same age And it's just weird, it's just fucking weird I was just talking to somebody I used to work with after my PhD, and his wife is the sister of someone I used to date And her kid, who she had, after we broke up, less than a year after we broke up, not mine But, I have a history for some reason of being with people right before the end up getting pregnant, like, you know, just a month or two, and then they get with somebody else and have a kid In her case, I guess I don't want to talk too much about it, but I was not in a great place to be in a relationship that was sort of long term then There was someone in grad school who I really liked And I don't know that she ever would have considered me as even a potential partner But she definitely was very flirty, let's just say, and was very hot and cold Like, the first time we started talking online, this was back when we had the Google talk, or so I think that was what it was called She talked And it was Friday night, and she just message me out of the blue And we had, I guess that the transcripts are probably someplace, not that I want to go back and look through those, but we had a really good talk for hours and hours that night And I would kind of see her every once in a while, and we'd hang out a little bit, and then she'd get fucking weird, and then she'd be hot again and cold again, and it was, we'd never, we'd never, to be clear, dated or anything like that But it was just weird It was, and, you know, I was quite infatuated with her I was, it was one of my last real, like strong, lemurance kind of experiences I've had, don't give me wrong I've had a few sense, and not a few before But somehow with her, just was extremely, extremely interested And, you know, I knew that that wasn't gonna work And so, you know, ended up in a couple of other relationships But I wasn't really, I don't know, hadn't really let go of the idea of maybe And also, like there was this thing that, you know, with my ex-wife, I mean, it's not that I wasn't, like, didn't care for her, but we weren't, you know, she was the first person I was ever really with romantically, or physically, for that matter I kind of, like, soft-dated a couple people before, but then, you know, nothing had all serious One of, one of those actually, also, she had a kid, not long after we sort of soft-dated And, I don't know, soft-dated as the rape, but, you know, not really quite dating, but that, whatever it is Not, you know, not dating, per se, but, you know, like, fault-dated ish in the vicinity of a date, or several But, anyway, we sort of parted ways, and then she got with some English guy who, I think they were only together very briefly, but got pregnant, had a kid And that kid, I mean, years ago already, this is, you know, not the date myself here, but years ago, that kid was already 18 And I think maybe going to school, I say going to school, I mean, university And then you just think about, like, the time and the, it's just wild So, and you think, also, like, if I would have had a kid with her, not that we were going to have a kid, but you know, it's like, at that time, just for time scale, I would have a kid who is probably could have a PhD by now for all I know It's wild, it's hard to wrap your mind around, how fast time goes And especially, like, it just keeps accelerating And I think about, like, how fast it must go for my mom, you know, like, it goes faster and faster for me, and she's had decades more So, it's just like, you And, I don't know, I think about that, and then I think, getting back to this person that I was with, was actually with We were together And I, of the people that I've been with, I think probably, you know, that, I guess in the scale of, like, if you have the perspective of all the relationships that you've been in, probably the one that I would have stayed with, except, like, a couple of things With one, again, I was still not really completely letting go of this other one That wasn't really even a relationship But, you know, and it was very, I don't know, she was, I don't want to get too much into that But it was, like, I've not had many people on Facebook where I've been disconnected and reconnected, disconnected and reconnected, even once And with her, it was, like, a half dozen times And, like, I wouldn't see her for nine months, and then we get chummy again, and then wouldn't see her for a little while, and then it'd be, like, every day we're having coffee in our office for a while And then it was just fucking weird It was just in retrospect and in perspective, it was just weird, and unfortunate But, I don't know, like, if she ever was interested, I don't know how that would have gone Yeah, it's one of those things, like, maybe the idea is better than the reality I don't know, I really don't But, I was with this other person, and I think, I think it would have been actually kind of okay, but her sister was, yeah, she got married, she was pregnant, she was having a kid, and there was, like, we weren't together that far or that much at this point And she's already really interested in having a kid and getting married And it's just, like, the weird thing is now, at this, at, by current, big age, not that big of age, but, like, in my current age, looking back, like having a kid doesn't seem like the worst idea Now, I can imagine, I'm not exactly jealous of people with them, but I do see, like, I watch a lot of pilots on YouTube And there's one that I don't really watch that much, but occasionally, and he has a couple daughters, and he's taught them to fly, and they fly together, and all those kind of stuff, and actually, I see that, and it's like, that kind of, yeah, I see some appeal to that I see some, I think that I have some things, some qualities, and I don't mean, like, in the sense of passing them on genetically, but just like raising somebody with them, I think they would actually be good qualities to the past on, and to maintain, and I think they would actually be, that I think they would be good I think they would be good They're the things that the world would be a better place with more people, with certain things that I have And, you know, like I'm saying, I don't know, maybe I'm just, everybody thinks too highly of themselves, or whatever, but I do think I have some things I think, like, one of them, and actually, this is the thing I wanted to talk about today, that's the title of this, is agnosticism, or agnostic, I think is what I'm gonna call it And the funny thing is, I'm not agnostic I'm absolutely not, I don't think at any point in my life, I have ever been anything that I would call agnostic I've basically always been non-religious I was raised without religion, and frankly, I am, I've talked about this a few times, but I'm very thankful that I was raised without it I'm very thankful that it wasn't really imposed on me, that I didn't, the thing here is I just, I see people who were raised with it, and it's just very difficult for them, especially, I mean, you know, like, I'm not saying like day-to-day, always they seem to find some community and comfort in it, sometimes But you see people where they lose a kid, or have some kind of tragedy before them, or whatever, anything, anything like that And you have this problem that you have to sort of resolve with yourself, especially when I talk about religion, I'm here talking primarily, like, Judeo-Christian sort of traditions But, you see people with these things, and they have this idea of a single deity that is all loving, and good, and powerful, and all those kind of stuff And then their kid died, and how do you deal with that? And it tortures them And I'm not saying like, anything could make that a okay thing, but I just, I find great comfort in not being religious Or for a lot of reasons, I think, you know, but one of the biggest ones, I did at one point when I was kind of like in high school, I sort of thought about like the age of the universe, and I was just, it was keeping me up at night, thinking about like how long a human lifetime is, and my perception of time at the time, especially And so, you know, you think about that, and then you think, on the planet at the time, I don't know how many billions of people there were, they were like six, less than probably less than seven, time is wild, another or over eight But, you think about that, that means every year, that obviously have people going to sleep, so it's not exactly, say, six billion, seven billion years of experience of, I mean, really, if you think like a third of your life, you're asleep more or less, that means it's really like, say there were six billion people at the time, I don't know how many it was, but just like, rough numbers, six billion people, and two thirds of that is actual subjective experience, it's time And so that means, what does that, four billion per year? That means that every few years, you've got the lifetime of the universe, worth of subjective time And you think about that And then on top of that, you think about like, well, that is a few years, the duration of human, like the extent to which humans have lived on the planet, even though the population was long ago, much smaller, do you add all that time up? And then you think about all the other is sentient beings on the planet And you add all that time, I'm up And it just, it really fucked with me And I was just thinking about how long the universe has been here, and that really fucked with me And then you think also about the heat death, or anything like this And it just things like that kind of mess with me And I don't think I ever really came to a durable transferable conclusion about all of that stuff Like it didn't resolve in a way that I could tell you this, and then that is going to comfort you But in going through that exercise myself, it's sort of at first overwhelmed me And then I sort of started accepting it And then I started being okay with it, and then more than okay with it And I, the universe that I inhabit in some sense is sort of chaotic and random, and there's no, I'm not saying like, it's just some extent to agnosticism But as far as I know, there's no higher power Now, the reason I say I'm not agnostic is agnostic implies, I think it basically is that you don't have any understanding And it's even impossible to know the nature or existence of airports God The problem with that is of course it assumes the context of there is a God or there isn't a God And it's specifically that sort of monophistic today of Christian type of God, especially Christian God And so you kind of think about it, and it's like, it's still like Pascal's wager, which it sounds, it's one of those things that gets sounds like a reasonable deal if you're coming from that tradition if you were raised with it And this is one of the reasons why, again, I'm very thankful I wasn't raised with it, because I think when people are raised with certain belief systems like these, even the ones that I know who have left them, that the people who have become atheists in time or agnostic or whatever, they never really fully sing to escape that framework that was laid out for them that they sort of like, God, when the cement in their brains was wet, they got the sort of spiritual understanding of the universe, like the universe works in a certain way And even when they take away the sort of formal religion or anything like that, they still have this sort of spiritual thing that they talk about and all those other stuff That the way that I see the universe does not have any of that And in fact, to me, that stuff doesn't make sense And like, I mean, part of it is also, and I don't mean to get all like super, oh, I'm a physicist, but I am a physicist And you think about what would be, what would it even mean to have a spiritual plane? And you can't see it, but I'm doing giant novelty ear quotes, or anything, what does that even mean? Do you have, because you could have something, let me really just do the exercise with me You could either have something that exists outside of the universe or, you know, and essentially like, in a way that you can't couple two, you can't connect to And then does that even have a real meaning? Or you have something that exists that somehow is connected to reality, and then how is that different than an electromagnetic field? Or, you know, in any kind of like the Higgs field, or whatever And so you think about that, and so it just sort of, it doesn't make it like there, it doesn't exist But to me, basically, it says, if it does exist, then it's amenable to scientific method and to the epistemology that, and I mean, obviously there is the good-o incompleteness theorem that says, you know, any logical framework has unanswerable questions within the framework and this kind of stuff So you could use that in way of your hands But you know, basically, as I see it, either that stuff exists in a way that is not really special, or it doesn't exist in any meaningful way And similarly, and this probably comes, I really kind of blame, obviously, like a lot of different things But I think our track, the next generation, really sort of did the nail on the head for meaning on this It just kind of eliminated the chance of me even ever thinking about any of this stuff as a real thing, or in a meaningful way Because in there, they have this character cue And cue comes from a civilization, which is basically from the perspective of humans omnipotent omniscient And you know, essentially very godlike in terms of, again, the sort of Christian god or the Judeo-Christian god, trying to be careful between, I don't wanna just munch all the stuff together because I know there are a lot of, a lot of details, and then if you go to other god systems, another religious systems, things get very complicated It's a problem, it is definitely also a problem It's one of the reasons that there are a lot of reasons why I also don't call myself an atheist Because atheists, agnostic says you don't know and you can't know, atheists says that you know that a god doesn't exist And my non-religious says that the concept, that it's a statement that doesn't have any meaning Like, what does it mean to say that a god exists or not? Because if you have an endothical, like, back to this Q thing, but what properties would your god have or gods have that really or distinct from something like that? Or even, you don't even have to go that far I mean, you imagine if you're a human being, you can get a pound of sugar and take that to an ant colony And that is like so much, they can inconceivable amount of resource for them that they just couldn't, it basically makes you on netizen If you wanted, you could pour molten lead into their colony That's so much energy compared to what they have access to It's so much material, it's so much destruction It's just, and you think about that sort of thing except now you're the ant And there's somebody else with a technology, whether it's an individual or a species or civilization or whatever, some kind of technical ability to muster that kind of level of energy, or that level of mass or whatever You know, they certainly with a flick of the wrist could flatten you I mean, you don't even have to get that advanced because humans already have, like, we've got thermonuclear weapons, right? They're not, they're not huge They're not like destructive on the scale of the planet going away But you can make a city go away in a blank, like literally you could make a building go away And you think about, from the perspective of being just an individual human, if you were trying to dismantle, it's an interesting thing actually because if you go back, I think it was the Assyrians They raised cities and had to just do a quick search to make sure I was not attributing this to the wrong person But yeah, it was the ancient Assyrians would raise cities And when I say raised cities, I mean, they would salt the earth, they would destroy everything And essentially, like a nuclear bomb went off But you think about the amount of time and effort it would take or a bunch of people to do that, versus the flash of light and explosion from compressing plutonium or whatever And yeah, especially if you have, do a little fusion after that or boost some stuff and do fusion fusion vision or whatever you want to do Any of that kind of stuff And that is our level of technology now If you imagine you have the ability to, with a snap of your finger, muster orders and orders of magnitude more than that, literally just Zarbama's all day, every day across the whole surface of a planet And that's not a big deal to you That's very god-like Now that's in the disruptive sense, but you could imagine also staying in the framework of Star Trek If you have replicators and phasers and all this kind of stuff, you can carve mountains You could build a building Or some intricate detailed artwork that would take a thousand artisans a thousand years to build You could do it in minutes And that's not that hard to imagine someone with that kind of technology Even if you don't have like actual replicators or not, something that you could have, you could certainly have like 3D printers that are very efficient and very fast, or something that's like that, or nanofabrication on a massive scale, or you could just sort of imagine and having that level of technology, how is that different in a meaningful way from something god-like, or something that you might call a god? And in fact, you might even say, if I have that technology and I wanted to impersonate a deity, how would you know the difference? Especially if you are coming from a civilization where you're like the ant If you want anything, you want a million tons of gold, it's like, okay, I mean you And it's there Just no effort It's not a big deal for me And to you, it's the biggest deal in the world Yeah, or whatever it is, whatever resource it is, you're in the desert, you want huge amounts of water, and I can snap, I shingers, and all of a sudden there's a massive lake in the desert You just imagine that sort of thing Somebody who's coming from a primitive society might very well think that is very god-like And you start thinking practically what would be, this isn't really where I wanted to go specifically but this is just part of why I'm non-religious again instead of agnostic But what would it take to say, okay, this is something that only what you're calling a god could do or could be? And I guess this does get into, if you're agnostic, you don't know the nature of that being You could say, well, there's something unknowable about it And I guess you could go to like Hindu traditions where deities are sort of outside of time and space and then things get a little bit more, yeah, there are things you could talk about that sort of maybe are a little bit different but how is that necessarily different, even? I mean, if you imagine, you're a super advanced technology or a species that just happens, yeah, you're not even that advanced, you just happen to exist outside of what we think of as space time and you exist in a different way What does that really mean? So I'm not questioning the distance or the existence of such a thing I'm not denying it, I'm not saying it exists I'm just saying, I don't know that that's any different than saying there's an alien technology and alien species that's just vastly more powerful than us, maybe And, you know, what does it really mean? So I think part of the thing that people need for that agnosticism is the structure where you have a specific kind of God or religious system in mind Because, I mean, if you take it seriously, like you don't know the nature, and part of not knowing the nature would be you don't know even what that is And so it doesn't, it almost means you wouldn't have that system, but what people really mean, I think when they say agnostic is they don't know about the specific, you know, basically the God that they were raised with, whatever that happens to be, with some small variations, you know, they have an idea of what that is, and they just don't know And this gets to, again, I started talking about a bit of Pascal's wager This is a thing that I noticed, I do, sometimes I go off on tangents and I don't complete the thought Even when I have notes, I have notes now I almost always let that thread hang But the Pascal's wager thing, if you have, the idea, I guess if you don't know it, is basically if you, whether you believe or not, if you believe, then, you know, maybe you get eternal reward And if you don't believe, then you get eternal punishment And so the wager is basically saying, well, okay, well, if that's the case, then you might as well just believe just in case And I guess that's very compelling, if, if you think that there's only one possibility The problem is it really falls apart badly when you start realizing, well, there are just on this planet, thousands and thousands in human history of different religious systems and different deities who are in many ways mutually exclusive So if you're gonna be doing Pascal's wager, you can't even, if you wanted to, believe in them all, just in case So now you have to start picking and choosing And now you're gonna really pick pickle because if you believe in, you know, the Christian God, and it turns out that it's actually the invisible, all-powerful bunny who doesn't like people who believe in that other one, now you fucked yourself, you know, your Pascal's wager, and then you can think they're endlessly many, not only incompatible, but like different things that if you believed in all the other ones, they would even just in case They would, yeah And then also there's that just in case thing, because there's like, if you imagine some kind of omniscient, this is something that actually gets to me about, and especially in Israel, there's this thing where they have a lot of technologies that basically, because I'm unsure about, you're not supposed to, you're not supposed to do certain stuff, right? You're not supposed to like flick switches and watch, turn on TV or turn on machines or any, you're not supposed to do certain kinds of work, basically I'm being very high level there, but you know, you're not really supposed to do stuff But there's a lot of like lawyer and God kind of stuff, so it's like, well, you're not supposed to do this, but what we'll do is we'll make a machine that randomly flushes the toilet, so you're not flushing the toilet, but you're getting the benefit of flushing the toilet And a certain point to me, it's like, I don't know, if you really think that there is a God and they have these rules for you, for whatever reason, and you're sitting there trying to game the system, I don't think you're gonna fool that being I don't really don't If you think that there's a God and you're just believing just in case, it's another problem with the pastels, what do you do you think? They probably know, and is that really believing if you're doing it just in case shit? And it also gets to another thing that gets to me, which is like, in grad school, there was a guy, he's, I think he's now an atheist actually, which is wild, but he was a young earth creationist He was getting his PhD, I think in chemistry at the time, and he, so young earth, so he understands chemistry, understands a lot of stuff that would tell you the earth is ancient, and when I say ancient, I mean, like a couple thousand years old, but because if his religious upbringing believed the earth was like 10,000 years old, or whatever, whatever they believe And yeah, believe also that people who don't believe are going to suffer eternal damnation This is one thing that, when I started realizing this, started really getting to me, because if you really genuinely believe that and you're walking around with that and you see people, how fucked up is it? Like, truly, and I'm not saying I want you to really proselytize to me or try to save me or anything, like this, I don't But if I thought that you were going to burn and pain and fire and torment and all this kind of stuff forever, I think I would probably try to at least tell you, like I try to go like, you know, maybe you should think about this, but they never do They never pretty much never do the only ones that occasionally would do that is like you get the proselytizers that come out to your door, or you get these people who are like hanging out just on campus or whatever And the watch tower drove as witness people And they're not even, I don't think that they're really, I don't know what their religious system is to be honest, I don't know anything about them specifically, other than the fact that they're out there and they proselytize And they don't seem to mind the fact that they bought a two-letter domain, which two-letter.com domain, you fucking expensive I brought this up, I've talked to them a couple of times I brought this up to them and it didn't really register, but somebody spent a lot of money, a lot of money on that And I don't know how much they spent actually, but I'm sure it was not cheap A four-letter domain is expensive, three-letter domain is expensive, a two-letter domain is fucking expensive, it has to be And they bought that And you just think like, how much fucking money did you waste on that? Maybe it's two-letters.org, I don't even know Whatever it is, it doesn't matter And don't follow it and don't go to their, the cult, but yeah It's just, I look at that and the whole idea It also also actually, as long as I'm talking about this, there are always in pairs and just like the Mormons, the LDS people who are going out and proselytizing to you, too, who, you know, like, I lived in Gilbert, Arizona And in the neighborhood that I was in, there would be kids doing their missions And they come out and they're on bikes, and they're always together, always in pairs, it's very important They say that it's for safety, I'm sure, or some other bullshit, but what it really is for is a bonding experience Because you're going out into the world and you're facing a lot of people who are not in your cult And for them, you know, some of them are going to be assholes Some of them are going to be hostile And even the ones that are nice, they're not probably going to entertain you and you're not in sense too much So that sort of stuff you are getting hardened by that, you're getting isolated And even if not that, they're just sitting out there, like you drive around Gilbert now, they're like seven again There are two fuckers out there sitting at a bench, either talking to each other, or sometimes they would not be talking to each other They look, some of them even look kind of like they're a couple, and they're just nothing to say to each other, which is weird to me But whatever it is, it's like, it's a bonding experience This is why they do it This is why cults send people out to recruit people Because a recruiting people is the thing that's at a cult grows, but also part of that is indoctrinating you further It's partly hardening you It's partly showing you, like, oh, see how hostile the world is, see how uninviting, see how rude people may be, or any of this kind of stuff And then people kind of have that experience, and then suddenly a little bit more inclined to stay in the fold You're more inclined not to go out and venture and escape, and all this kind of stuff Incidentally, also not to keep harping on this stuff, but I knew, I don't want to say anything specific that's going to identify people, but I have known in my life people who were in these cults, who I'm pretty sure, you don't know, but I'm pretty pretty pretty sure we're gay And you think about it also, if I was gay, my parents would have been fine Like it would not have been a big deal It would not have been like the end of the world, certainly I wouldn't have gotten excommunicated from my community and all this kind of stuff But some of these religions, if you are, either you do the conversion therapy, which is fucking ridiculous, or, and horrible torture, or, you know, like, the people that leave, whether it's that they're gay or just like, I've known people also who've left, and the people who've left, especially, and I'm thinking on the Mormons a lot, because I know several people who either, they weren't Mormon, and they lived in a Mormon community, and they were just shunned, and it was shitty, or they were Mormon, and they were gay, and fucked up their shit, or they were Mormon, and they didn't want their kids to have to be polygamous, so they had to move, or they were Mormon, and they decided that they weren't religious, and then they lost their entire fucking social network Like, not just the community members around, but like, they're fucking family, other than, like, one or two people abandoned them, and, and that I have some animosity toward people that are shitty like this And also, like, there's a certain, I don't mean, again, I don't mean to pick on a specific religion I'm not a fan of most of the major religions I'm not a fan even of the ones that are, I would say, warp in high, but especially like the, especially the Christian Catholic, all those kinds of derivatives, somehow, particularly not my thing And, because there are a lot of, it's that thing, you know, I like your Christ, but not your Christians, they're, that guy, they talk about, that they have the stories about, seems a clinical guy, seems like a pretty, you know, he's like, appreciates sex workers, is cool with people, likes immigrants, feeds people, very charitable, you know, turn the other cheekets, all of these things, they're, they're all fairly, I would say, noble attributes, but you actually look at the people in these religions, and they're fucking horrible people, and a lot of them also, I'm just thinking about Republican Congress people here, but you know, like, they're, they're supposed to be loving and caring and all this shit, and I swear, like, I don't think these people, I'm convinced a lot of the very religiousy people that you see, especially in government, if they really believed, I don't think they would act in the ways that they do, I don't think they would do the things that they say, and I really think a lot of them are more non-religious than I am, they just pretend, which is weird and gross, like it's worse than, I would rather they actually be genuinely like true believey kind of people, or really I would rather than that, you know, but never mind that Getting back to, uh, getting off that tangent and trying to get back to what I'm talking about here, the agnostic thing came up, because I was on, I'm on the loose guy, not a huge fan of the people that run the place, they are techno-libertarian, uh, giant air quotes on this, free speech, absolutist, and I always remember, I've talked about this a few times, sorry if I'm repeating myself, but I always remember when I was a kid, and I remember ACLU was defending Nazis, and I think it was my dad that I was talking to, I don't even remember who I talked to about it, but I talked to somebody about it, and I said, what, why, why, why are they defending them? And then I'd hear the story, which is what the free speech absolutely does always say, which is like, well, they have the whole marketplace of ideas nonsense, and, and then they have this thing where it's like, well, you know, Scott, it's very important, it's most important that we protect the right for people to have terrible ideas and speak about those, because if we allow their speech to be abridged, then in time that will just open the door to a bridging ours And the thing that's funny about this is this is the argument, this is actually a good argument, if you're talking about, you should not allow the government to strip people of civil rights You should not allow, I don't even think you should allow the government to detain people indefinitely I think that's actually probably pretty fucked up They certainly should not be allowed to deprive people of life, like premeditated murder by the state, is wild, the fact that anyone's okay with that is just absolutely ridiculous beyond ridiculous But also let the ability to take away people's right to vote, if you give the state the power to take away the right to vote Think about what that means Think about what that means That means there's something you could do, you don't even have to do it, just somebody can decide you did something And now you cannot vote, you lose your representation in the state And I always talk to people about this, and it's one of those things that people, I don't know if they just not thought about it or if they really are true believers in this idea, but I think it's one of these things I think that what it is, I think maybe I'm just being overly charitable here, but I think what it is is they never really thought about it, and then you talk to them about it And instead of really interrogating it, they kind of just default the trying to defend this position that they have, that it's okay to do But you should never, never, ever, ever, ever give the state that ability And you think about it also, it's like, well, I talked to people about that and they're always like, well, what about somebody who, and they come up with some horrible crimes that somebody might have committed, and also like, this gets actually to, I'm not, again, agnostic, but in my epistemology, my way of understanding what is and how things are and how you know stuff Basically, you don't know anything with absolute certainty You don't know anything definitively one way or another Everything is kind of an approximation And you could be really, very, very confident about something, but there's still like a sliver of doubt, no matter what And you could be very uncertain about things In fact, the default position is you just don't know This is a thing, I wish more people were just okay with, I don't know, as an answer And like, I don't know is the greatest thing that you could say, and the second greatest thing is I was wrong, I think Those are, if more people would be able to say those things, and we're comfortable with them It would help so much This is a weird thing I was at a coffee shop this morning, and there were two women talking, this is not related to that, but this is also a thing that I think, they were talking about one other kids was having issues with constipation And it was like, I guess, really, I'm not, there's no way, like, I don't even know who these people are, so I'm not developing private information about somebody that anyone would know Just some kid has constipation, very embarrassed about it And the fact that we are like, we're trained to be ashamed of just basic bodily functions and issues Like, it's, it's fucking weird, it's fucking weird, because we all have bowels, right? I mean, unless you're very unlucky, we all have physiological needs, we all have, you know, like, processing of food and things like this, and we don't talk about that shit You know, and it never mind talking about, like, reproduction and reproductive health and sex ed, and all that kind of stuff And if you wouldn't even get into that, this gets to, coming a little bit back full circle, the grad student that I was super infatuated with, you know, our culture doesn't teach you at all, like, how to deal with, and I'm not even going to say rejection, but just like relationships in a really good way And it's not just, we don't, like, sex, you just have this idea that, oh, you just know how to do it basically And you don't talk about it very much, and it's kind of very ashamed There's a lot of shame around it There's a lot of weirdness around it And you think about, like, relationships, too, like asking for consent is such a weird thing in our society Like, I mean, I'm not saying, you shouldn't do it I'm just saying that the way that our society is, asking if, you know, we can kiss or can I touch you or something like that? Can I hold your hand? It's weird And I don't mean that it's actually weird It should not be weird But we're trained to have some weirdness around it We don't have that protocol We don't have the social construct around it And it's just, like, the way that you have that, the way that you have this idea, like, there's so much stuff If you look at movies and, you know, it's interesting Actually, like, I think Romeo and Juliet was making fun of this more than anything, because I was just listening to somebody talking about this And in the thing, I'm terrible with names But in the beginning, Romeo is with, I guess, Juliet's cousin or something And she's not into him or something Something is happening It's not going very well And then he jumps He's like super-infatuated And she's the son all this stuff And then all of a sudden, he's into this Juliet, who is also, I think, like, 13, which is, you know, fucking, I might be off on the age, but, yeah, definitely too young They're definitely way the fuck too young They've known each other for no time at all I think Shakespeare's making fun of it I think he's, like, pointing out how fucked up it is But if we have this idea, this hyper-romantic idea that, A, you don't know if somebody and you should be super, you know, like, love it for sight or whatever, like this And then also, you know, there's this idea of, um, the airport's friend's own stuff And it, which is kind of ridiculous Because the, the relationships that I've actually had, especially the good ones, they started out, like, it wasn't, you have this social idea that you're supposed to ask somebody on a date And then it's, it's all weird And it's kind of like, there's a lot of pressure to it And then you have this stuff where everybody's kind of pretending to be somebody else And you're making a, a different version of yourself And then you, you get to know each other there And then you get more relaxed And then now you become, like, now you have to know that actual person The relationships that I've had that have actually been good and the, the way that I've preferred to, to get into a relationship with somebody is not, like, it's not even the friend's own thing It's like, you meet somebody And you get to know them And, you know, like, things just kind of progress Or they don't And we don't talk about this stuff We don't really have great models of it We have a lot of models, especially in pop culture of terrible versions of this You have a lot of models of, like, oh, somebody gets drunk and then they get taken advantage of And, you know, I mean, to, I say take an advantage of, I mean, that's, that's code for raped Basically, or, or, you know, I'm not saying that every time you have sex under the influence of drugs is rape But there's a lot of, like, really transgressive stuff in our pop culture And people just don't fucking, like, they take that to be normal They take, I mean, it's one of the reasons I think that they're stalking And it is also, like, you get to the whole bullshit, uh, I, again, with the air quotes that you can't see I need, I need a, a way to, like, end the thing I've, like, robbing air quotes Um, you know, because I'm like, I don't want to actually say something and have it sound like I'm actually saying it, uh, without the giant air quotes around it But, uh, and I got so, and I got so hung up on that, I forgot what the fuck I was going to talk about The, the whole idea of, like, not taking no for an answer, love it for sight, um, you know, that dealing with for you actually, that was it That was it That was it The mail along the, uh, Linus epidemic, air quotes, air quotes, air quotes Um, that whole bullshit thing I mean, I think about it Also, like, I, I was, uh, according to museum culture, I was kind of a late bloomer I never, like, I, I, I never, and there, there was somebody, my sister's friend had a sleepover, and we kissed, uh, like, 14 or something That was very consensual, and very sort of driven by her I didn't have been younger than that I don't remember But we're both, she might have been a year younger than me or something, but that was, that was a thing And then didn't go anywhere And I wasn't really, other than that, like the next time I, and I was not a very social person, like, in high school, really didn't have any friends I've been in talk to people, and you had, but that's not really any friends And then undergrad, for the first couple of years, I had, there were a couple of TAs There was one TA that I really liked There was, uh, there were a couple of TAs that I kind of got to know a little bit, but in terms of, I was never really very comfortable with people my age And I don't mean that in the relationship, like romantic relationship way I just mean, especially with the little kids I didn't, I never really felt that comfortable with them I never really felt like when I was a little kid, I always got along much better with adults I didn't, um, I didn't feel like one of the kids, so to speak And, you know, as I got older, I sort of grew, well, I don't know if I grew into it, or I just like, the people around me got to be the age group that I was, you know, feeling comfortable with And then sort of like the end of undergrad, I start connecting with people a little bit, getting to graduate school, and connect a little bit more, and then after I finished my masters, gotten to my PhD, and, you know, start connecting with people more, and also, and I don't know how you can engineer this I don't think it's a thing you can control, but I'm at somebody who every introvert should meet, uh, you kind of need one of these people, uh, socially extroverted and sort of person connector, uh, who has a lot of friends and does a lot of stuff and plans a lot of stuff, and you get, you get somebody like this in your life, and you suddenly, I've had a handful of them, and it's just like night and day It went, in fact, like from my, there was one point in time where I never, just never really was that social, and I kind of, I felt bad that I wasn't getting included in stuff, and then it almost overnight, I mean, it wasn't overnight, it was, you know, months, but at, at some point, it kind of flipped, and it was like every fucking weekend, I had shit to do, and in the weekdays, I had shit to do, not every day necessarily, but, like, too much, and then it started being like, I was invited to stuff, and at first, I was getting invited to stuff, and I was like, I have to go to fucking everything, and it was partly because I didn't want to not get invited, and partly because it was just, like, for so long, I never gotten invited to shit It wasn't like people excluded me, it was just to, like, nobody knew me enough to do it, but, you know, and I kind of felt like I wanted it, and then it got to the point where I was like, okay, this is not, I need time to myself, and now it's like to the point where almost to an unhealthy extent, I get invited to stuff, and I just don't want to, you know, but basically never want to do it, and this is not that I don't do stuff, and usually if I go out and do stuff, I actually enjoy it, but pretty much, like, even if I'm going to enjoy it, somebody invites me to something anymore, and I'm just, you know, there are some rare exceptions for the most part, hey, I get that, and I'm like, oh, it seems, it's not a thing I want to do It's a weird lip, and, you know, because there was a time where, like, anyone could have invited me to anything, and I would have absolutely done it, and, you know, I don't mean in the sense of being susceptible to social pressure and that kind of stuff, but, you know, like, to get to go someplace with people, I would have been, I would have been way down Anyway, rambling around here, the thing getting back to this agnosticism, I'm on blue sky, the people who run blue sky, I started talking about those, but they're left, they're not left, they are techno libertarians, and, again, with the giant air quotes, free giant air quotes, speech, giant airports, uh, absolutists, and I got the ACLU thing, defending Nazis, and all this kind of stuff, I am increasingly convinced that when people say they're free speech absolutists, what they really mean is that they want mid-white dudes to be able to say the inward and the f-word, I don't mean to fuck there, and, you know, just to be very unrestricted, it's kind of weird, because it's like, you're, you're a white dude, you could do anything you could talk about anything, you have a lot of stuff, you have a lot of privileges, and any kind of little limitation is unacceptable It's like, you know, you, you, how dare you not allow me to say, like, I mean, people literally basically talk about stuff like that, it's the most fucking ridiculous ass and I should, but these techno libertarians are like that too, and they're also not to get too much into the blue sky bullshit, but the second, like they did not want to implement blocking Blocking was part of the design of at protocol, which is the thing that they claimed that they were trying to build, and then you bunch of bullshit, but anyway, they did that, didn't want to implement blocking for the longest time, and then they finally implemented it because some asshole, I don't, I don't even want to say his name because he's a massive troll piece of shit He's, he's a journalist who is known, journalists is not the right word, he's like a writing entertainer or something, great shitty articles, and his main thing is, his whole shit is easy, but I think all themselves heterodox bullshit thing, you know, I'm a contrarian, and the contrarian part is like you're just an asshole troll, and basically his whole, his whole thing, and they're, they're a bunch of people like this is saying shit that is either transgressive or inappropriate or you're just fucking wrong, and then stirring up a shit storm, and then the shit storm gets him a lot of attention, and you know, it's how trolls work, and it just increases his profile, and then he's got more people, and then he gets to do it more, and he's just, I'm sure he gets paid really well for it, he probably comes from, I don't know his history, but anyway, the point is he got on here, and people started shooting on him correctly, but he got upset about it, and then he finally finally, people who were making the site into implementing blocking, so he could block people, that's why they implemented blocking They also, as part of that, I don't want to make this up loose cracking, but as part of that, they did it in a way that was kind of, they didn't want to do the blocking, so they made it in a way that just broke stuff, like it would block stuff, and it just disconnected threads, like if somebody, and if somebody blocked somebody in the thread, it just nuked everything, every interaction thereafter, and people, it actually, they called it the nuclear block, they didn't, not the blue sky, people, but the people using it, and it was, it was a nice, accidental feature, it made it, like if somebody was shitty, the trolling, all it took was you block them, and they no longer have your mentions the game traction, and it's magical, because people would just, there's a lot, people came on there, tried their anti-social bullshit, which works in other social media platforms, because most of them are designed so that, as my ex-wife used to say, negative attention is still attention, and so they would give people a reward for being shitty, because you're shitty, you say shitty stuff, and then you'd have a lot of interactions, and more and more people would see you, and people would start following them, and because they had a lot of followers, there's a thing, it's, it's, I guess it's this bandwagon thing that people do, but it's, it's still fucking annoying, people will follow people just because they have a lot of followers, you see, somebody's got like a million followers, well shit, I'm gonna be one of the million, I don't know why, it doesn't make sense to me, I see that and I'm like, yeah, I'm good, but just not to say, I don't follow people with a lot of followers, but you know, it doesn't, if anything it discourages me, but for some reason, for a lot of people that is attractive, it's an interesting thing, but, you know, they, they do that, and then they get interactions they get seen, and that means that some of them, because they're getting a lot of interactions, people will follow them, because they're being shitty, sometimes there will be people who are attracted to the, to the shittyness, and they'll follow them, and it just keeps building on itself, because they, the more people they've got following them, the more interactions they get, and then, you know, it's this exponential growth thing, and it's just, it's one of the things I really hate about the way these things are structured, that it just absolutely rewards the worst people, the people who, because it's negative stuff, not that there's negative embossed emotions and all that's going to stop, but, you know, the stuff where it's people being shitty and trolling and all this stuff, I guess you could call it negative, if you like, I'm, I'm not sure that's the right word, but whatever it is, anti social counter, you know, bullshit, that kind of stuff, it lights up people's amygdala's and gets much more traction than the, the good stuff, and it's annoying, because these people, I mean, it's like the, the right wing media stuff being more popular than the more boring stuff, it just builds and builds and builds on itself, and it's annoying, and I hate it, and it, you know, it's a terrible thing, that nuclear block, more time, prevented that, because trolling is no fun, being an asshole is no fun, if you do it, and then you get no pushback, you do it, you don't get anything out of it, and so people would do it, they disappeared, I mean, they, their interactions would just go away, and then they'd get no traction, and they'd have like a small number of followers there, and they had a lot of followers on Twitter, and so they just go back to Twitter Anyway, the, the thing that I'm getting to, with all of this, I'm on blue sky today, somebody came up with something about agnosticism, and it was, I wish I could remember the context, actually, now because I, it's the whole point of this episode is based on this little interaction that we had, and we went back and forth a few times, and they were explaining how silly they think agnosticism is, and I'm sitting there saying, like, I personally am not agnostic, and it is not something that would be within, within me, really, but I can understand that if you have a certain epistemology, like a certain way of knowing things, and you have a certain sort of framework for how the universe works, which basically puts you into this idea of a specific kind of God and religious system or non Then agnosticism is probably probably almost the correct answer subject to those assumptions, and we went back and forth, or I don't want to get into the logic of that, although I do think like philosophy of science is a, it's a course that I've taken, I think it's worth in, you know, studying empiricism, studying epistemologies, not just that one, but you know, like other ones too, to learn about other ways of thinking about stuff I think it's kind of important, I think, I really think like, I've never had a class that, and I don't want to get into the like the Steve Jobs sat in on, on type setting, and that's why you have post script and all those bullshit, but I do think every class that I've ever taken, whether it's Native American religious traditions or dating myself again at the time it was called the Women's Studies, now it's called Gender Studies, that kind of stuff, it's all been very beneficial to me going forward I can't think of a class optics Actually, undergrad optics, there was the only class, not even that was probably useful, but the professor for that class who, I guess you could probably look up, I think he's retired and we're just now, it doesn't matter It's probably pretty hard to figure out when I was there and who was teaching all that kind of stuff So it doesn't, I don't think I'm embarrassing somebody or talking shit about somebody specifically, but worst professor I've ever had, truly, in terms of teaching, because the way that he taught, especially, my memory is not as good now as it used to be, but it used to be if I was paying attention in class and I could understand how stuff worked, I just owned it And it's still true, if I understand something now, I just understand it Like I just, yeah, it's, I'm not saying it's easy, but it just like just sticks It's why I can, I could not use calculus for a couple of years and then figure it Like it might take a little bit of time to brush up, but it would come back to me pretty quickly, because I understand it Even like, reman versus lip egg integration and all that kind of stuff, I probably couldn't write some proof, so it would take some time, I'd probably have to do some work to figure it out, but I could get there But I'm not doing like a complex analysis proof right now that it's not going to happen But the stuff that I really understand, it kind of understands it And so if you understand it, you kind of own it I think that is, I know people think differently and they learn differently and all that's going to stuff But for me, especially with physics, like in all of the exams, there would always be this thing, the ones that I taught and the ones that I took, they'd always let you take a cheat sheet and a cheat sheet and air quotes, which was like a bunch of page or, yeah, one page both sided and formulaes or whatever bullshit And there are always people that would have like microprint, full both sides, dense text, like how to fuck did you write that kind of stuff? And in reality, you know, most of the stuff that you needed to know either, one of the better professors I had, the guy that I took a differential apology with and general relativity and advanced algebra, which was a very cool class I've talked about him before, but he, he's actually one of the few people that I'm like my professors that I'm actually still connected to on Facebook But he always said this thing, which was like, yeah, you, to do the proofs, what you want to do is learn how to garden and take a pack of seeds with you and the seeds are like the little things that you start with and then you learn how to, you kind of know where you're going and you take those seeds and then you can kind of work from them And he was right, it really, especially for the proofs, like that that we would do, it really worked I'm sure, like if you're trying to do like format's last theorem, it might be a little bit challenging, but for the proofs that we were doing in that class, it worked Yeah, that was a good class, rings and fields and groups and all that kind of stuff I miss, it was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago or so, I miss undergrad And I mean, obviously, like part of it is just a year at a certain time, it's like a moment in your life where things are a certain way And I'm not saying like, it was not socially for me It was not a great time There were a lot of things that were not great about that But one thing that was awesome about undergrad for me, especially one semester I was working and working while you're going to school sucks But most of it, I was getting student loans living at home and so I didn't really have that many expenses I had a little bit of not disposable income, but I could go to movies or eat or stuff like that And I could just go to classes And some of the classes were not great Some of the classes were things that I wasn't that excited about But most of the classes were pretty interesting And most of the classes also, I almost forgot, well, I do kind of regret I would have liked to have taken more literature classes or history or a few languages, but it would have been nice to take more languages It would have been like undergrad if money was not an object And I was going to live indefinitely I always used to say that I would, and I would still would do this, like collect alphabet soup after my name I just get a bunch of doctorates and get a JD and get an MD I would do that for sure I don't think I would ever get an EDD It's kind of a weird thing That's interesting I don't know that I would get an MBA I might do it just like, if I was really going to live like hundreds of years and just be like essentially, you know, as healthy as you are biologically, you're like you're 30 and money's no problem and you can just do whatever Okay, I probably get an MBA just to just do it I PhD in psychology I would definitely do that and practice for a little while I probably practice surgery for a little while But then you think about the MBA, the business degree, you can't see the whinsing on my face, but it's not a pleasant look It's not like, it's more like it you Maybe I would do it just out of curiosity, but I don't know that I can tolerate it I probably get sick of it Probably not be a thing But anyway, getting rambling around here, rambling is what I do I guess if you're listening to this, you hopefully like the rambling because if you don't, you know, listen to either the wrong thing It's kind of the thing that you need to, I don't have an, or I don't have like a massive audience, but if you're cultivating an audience, you probably want to not perform too much that's too difficult or too far outside of who you are because if I was doing like a song in dance or if I was doing like jokes, imagine, imagine that you'd make a podcast and your whole thing is just jokes, just like material that you're working out And on one hand, you can get pretty efficient at, you know, taking stuff and understanding how to grab a garden and picking up the seeds and growing the jokes and all that kind of stuff You could do that too, but it's going to be hard Unless you're just naturally like, that's the thing you do And I do, the weird thing is actually, I do, I do joke around a lot, but it doesn't really come out in this setting It's more situational and in terms of relationships with people and you're like, I'm in a situation things happen and then I comment on them and it's kind of fine And or I do something weird, or whatever it is, or somebody else does something weird and I error mark on it That kind of down, if you're doing it and you're the people who start listening or the people who want that, and now you've got to deliver it and you just think about like, how miserable that must be if it's not your thing I can imagine like, I, today, I wrote an outline and I think the outline is actually not too bad as a thing for me to do Like, it gives me at least some kind of structure to hang on and some things that I'm like, okay, I want to say this and this and this and almost always when I listen to one of these, there are things that I just skip over or I'll like introduce something and then get side tracked and never come back and say the thing that I wanted to finish with or I wanted to finish up and it's kind of annoying to me And that even happens with the notes, but if I don't do notes, then that definitely is fucked But you think about like you could be doing this as something where you have a script, but you've written stuff down and you're just reading it And I guess for a certain kind of person, Simon Wissler, that works for It seems to be like a thing that he really enjoys and part of it is also, it's not just that he's reading the script, but he also, as he's reading the script, comments on it and it's kind of stuff It's interesting, it's entertaining For at least somewhat, I listened to one of his things with my mom and sister, they were not impressed And it also like, it's interesting, I guess it's a human thing, but when you're in an audience and stuff falls flat, even if you would normally like it, it makes you like it less And so I did not enjoy the one that I was listening to with them And it's kind of had a lasting effect I think also like I've heard maybe too many of his things, but never mind that now But you know, if you're doing something where you're putting in a lot of work, I understand why people get burnt out Because especially like I don't edit this this that or that much, and it's so much work just to edit it a little bit And especially like when I was trying to do videos, I think there's something nice, I do think like the, there's something nice about the video I like TikTok for the videos, but the problem is also at the same time, it's just like, I do, yeah, I don't know, do you really, do you really want to put in that much time and effort? Like if I had somebody to do the editing and all that kind of stuff and I could just record the video, I guess I'd probably do it, but even even like a minimal amount of editing on a video is so much time It's so much effort And if you really want to do like you make it, like I've done somewhere, I've put in a lot of time, did a lot of, did a lot of cuts, and you put in some figures, and you put, and you start doing that, and it gets like so much more time than the actual duration of recording it and putting it out there And you just think about like, yeah, I don't, I would not, if I had to do that every time, even if I had nothing else I wanted to do, like, nothing on my plate I don't think I would, I don't think I'd want to, and, yeah, I don't think it would be sustainable What I'm doing here, I somehow can sustain it, as long as I have time and opportunity to record these, it's something I keep doing I don't know why that is, it's been, and it's been something I've been doing for decades You know, again, I was my, my ex, who was the sister of my friend's wife who I just talked to today She and I, well, her kid is 14 So we broke up 15 years ago, which is fucking wild And you just think like, when we get the knowledge other, she was listening to my podcast So, and that was not like, I just started it It was one that I was doing for years Before that, I just think about like, I've been doing this for a long, fucking time, and it's kind of ridiculous And the thing is also, like, I have zero interest in, I don't have a real interest in building an audien
Empieza 7 días de prueba
$99 / mes después de la prueba. · Cancela cuando quieras.
- Podcasts solo en Podimo
- 20 horas de audiolibros al mes
- Podcast gratuitos
Todos los episodios
19 episodios
Comentarios
0Sé la primera persona en comentar
¡Regístrate ahora y únete a la comunidad de smenor/tangents!