Hacker News Reader

Comment by Boogie_Man | Hacker News Reader

The Catholic Church does retain elements of Aristotelian metaphysics in its theology. A great example is the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation, wherein subject and accident terminology is utilized to explain how bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ while retaining the characteristics of the original elements. Church history is fascinating, even if one isn't a Christian.

View on HN

The bit about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin also becomes more interesting after one realises the question was not one of determining some finite number, but finite or infinite — do angels* have volume?

(I don't think theologians distinguished countable infinities from other infinities; that's much more recent, right?)

* this is probably also a lesson that, before spending a thousand years arguing over whether class C has property P or not, it might be wise to demonstrate, first, that C is indeed inhabited?

Re: zero-extension of Golden Path. Only riffing on out-of-fictional-universe concepts

if the father (pre-god) showed that prescience was possible, then the son must show that that immunity to prescience is trivial, and one (& only?) Way to achieve that is to make sure everything happens at once..

Re: metal vs stone

https://www.dong-chinese.com/wiki/%E4%B9%90

Note that the bell was a later addition. Earlier (de)script(ion) only had gourds on a (wooden?) base, retconned to threads on a base.

Phonology further hints that the metallic twang* (in qing/zhong) hadn't encroached on the vibes yet. In parallel (I guess), the qing evolved from the qin -- a completely organic instrument

https://www.360doc.cn/article/31905874_1086747931.html

（immortal inventors)

*bronze bows?

metallophones vs xylophones are machines vs mandalas* in music?

* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/between-mandala-and-...

Something which I've only been vibing thus far is the idea that Morlocks/Children of Martha ought not to be worried about the mandalas of Eloi/Children of Mary (except when practising husbandry for sustenance!), which is a very machine orientation.

In the CH context, I hope we're aiming for the upper right quadrant, with Solidarity driving the caring and Know-how driving the knowing, with generally accepted ideas being that the more we know, the more we can afford to care, and the more we care, the faster we can make knowledge-positive adjustments across a society not all of whose members are particularly knowledge-adjacent. (the former emphasised on the centre-right and the latter on the centre-left)

As with other electorates, the centre is clearly weaker than it was two decades ago, but it still exists (if reduced to a single "the middle" party); when the far right truthfully claims to be the largest party, they mean they are currently the largest within a 5-major-party system. Also something I take to be a positive sign: when I first came here, the far right, as is customary, wrapped their candidates in the flag; part of their electoral success has been via moderation: making such blatant emotional appeals more rarely.

Very nice, I hadn't read that either..

>wrapped their candidates in the flag

Captain Helvetica? Who shall captain Finningia?

Let me know what orientation you think MAC is

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345337

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175664

(Mutual Adoption Club)

MACs really remind me of my hobbyhorse of constructing a "felt of society" (an irregular interwoven structure is fairly isotropic) instead of a "fabric of society" (a regular structure produces cleavage axes along which it's easily torn). Unfortunately marketing (of both the economic and the political kinds) aims squarely at the latter.

(also, the english phrase "kith and kin", which I've heard Bay Area denizens interpret as "kin are the ones you didn't get to choose; kith are the ones you do")

I'd call them on the caring end: the "traditional" (in the sense that the middle class cares, and cared, about them in a picture-postcard way the most) family is mechanistic because it is so legible. I'd say in my limited working class experience that the working class is more pragmatic than sentimental and so you'll find more MAC-like arrangements (if not so far along, but certainly acknowledged more than among the neighbours of Mrs. Grundy) because in that milieu, whatever works, works.

[Captain Helvetia would explain .ch; at least my 5 CHF coins indicate Helvetia is traditionally female, agreeing with the Suomi-neito, who can be depicted in the shape of the country, either realistically: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ApJcldK7o4HS89KSKHIQ... or anime-style: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/23/a9/1923a92eb1364852df38... ]

On fairly isotropic irregularity:

(Well then, Joseph As Sabra technicality resolved itself, it seems)

Chris Isham[0] in his 地獄楽 chapter only (the first one), hinted at the geometric applications of locales, which, I've heard elsewhere, quantales are one noncommutative generalization of. Not familiar? Nothing in Tanya's brother's slides indicate any connection, however, so I'll have to peer at his student's..

[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Modern+Differential+Geometry+f...

Irreversible (& hence useful) quantum XOR-gate? I love microcosms (gradschool, insurance industry) where something so banal as [rethinking] accounting [principles from scratch] has macrocosmic implications.

How can we incentivize the CoMartha to care about the mandalas instead? [Or introduce fairly bluecollar isotropic irregularities into accounting.] Not marketing, what then? Good faith nondeterministic obsession inducers, tearing a microblackhole at the origin of the Bartle Chart?

More TK on what "the sword" refers to in the context of weird/hypernormal/healthy/unhealthy/imbecile: I have something more than just vibes, but needs cleaning up..

Placeholder for when I find that Science article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054007

I'd've assumed the Finn was expressing his inner Shu: https://youtu.be/J3_sovfY2uA

>在三星堆遗址中发现的乐器除了玉石磬可以肯定为乐器之外，铜铃、似锣铜挂饰等是否是乐器还需要更多的研究

https://m.fx361.cc/news/2009/0703/5821451.html

>有的学者认为：艺术本身起源于巫术，因为艺术旨在施行某种巫术来招引部落赖以维生的动物

The Lord Tensens gave me a new referent for what I normally think of as a mountain range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_Shan Vegetative cloning sounds almost like a shout-out to the The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)?

I'm aware of the other applications, but as I got to quantales by discovering what other people called the structure I'd gotten to via forcing distribution on informatics-friendly semantics*, rather than from another application, I'm still pretty ignorant of their wider use. In particular, my quantales are unital but not idempotent (but insofar as the pattern fragment also gives rise to a Heyting algebra, maybe I should learn more?) so that's why I haven't poked around with locales much. Maybe I should reread slides 18+ of https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~hap/tancl07/tancl07-abramsky....

* I want sequences (Hehner's "strings") to be noncommutative monoids, and alternatives (Hehner's "bunches") to be commutative monoids, and for them to distribute (in particular countably infinitely wrt to the Kleene star): AB* == A⊗∑B^i == ∑A⊗B^i (i running from 0,..ω)

My views on the intersection of (chart overlap on the manifold between) the Tao of Jigokuraku and the Action of Hamilton (as filtered through the syllabus taught according to the Fédération Française d’Escrime):

- a swordsman's Dao/chi/posture is an open in phase space. (in particular, the traditional location of the dantien is suspiciously coincident with the centre of gravity[0])

- a duel is a system tensoring the chi of both participants.

- 戦場ではラグランジュ力学はその場で調達する

which together imply:

- the greater the chi, the higher the entropy, the more possible futures

- one should not look for eigenvectors of the participants alone, but the eigenvectors of their symmetric and antisymmetric combinations. in particular, one attempts to rotate in phase space so that one's control vector is greater than one's opponent's over distance/ma/{whatever this is in chinese}.

- "waves" in the Dao are phase evolutions in phase space. Mei says "strong, strong: no way — Tao: strong, weak" because (absent superhuman energy sources and musculoskeletal constraints) strong motions are necessarily low frequency and hence low entropy, while weak motions give access to the high frequency, high entropy[1] domain.

There's also an impedance notion in play, as mentioned in Jigokuraku: if you are too "strong"[2] you won't sense (« le sentiment du fer »[3,4]) your opponent's techniques, only their sword (and definitely not their spirit!). It takes dialing down far towards "weak"[5] to ascertain their spirit[6].

Around eps 9-10 of the anime, the humans in Jigokuraku begin to read the Tensen's Dao, but I think even earlier there's an occasion where Sagiri realises a Tensen is reading hers, and so (as I mentioned to you I've used profitably) she dials down her spirit, her intentions, so her Dao cannot betray her: no intent, no tells, no betrayal.

Similarly, the FFE teaches that you[7] should be surprised by your own attacks, finding yourself in media res with them already launched...

[0] when I was playing kid's football, they always told me to look at an opponent's belt buckle for the same reason: it's easy to throw fakes with arms and legs, but faking with the dantien is hideously energetically expensive.

[1] I was never a seriously competitive fencer, for whom pistol grips are de rigueur, so I tried to learn the french grip, and when it works it's beautiful because you can do things with the hand that you can't with a pistol grip. (this is partly a defense against time: you can have very satisfying bouts with older people by forgoing use of the legs, turning it into a contest of hand vs hand, where they remain very strong)

[2] I believe the former 3-dan All-Japan Champion's problem, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HPDAFqN74A , at 8-dan is exactly this: he is used to winning by overpowering the opponent, whereas at 8-dan the examiners want to see that you can shape the match: deliberately allowing, not opportunistically forcing, your opponent to make mistakes.

[3] consider also the notion of having a "round heart": too strong, and your heart is very ellipsoidal... (which ties in with controlling the system variables in phase space, not just your own)

[4] sentiment du fer is very interesting, because 24 frames per second fool the eye, and the ear doesn't notice 22+ kHz, but touch has way better temporal resolution

[5] like a good tango lead, a good epeeist should be feline: not snappy but stalking. Bonaparte is quoted as recommending: "while your opponent is making a mistake — don't interrupt them!"

[6] a former olympian once told me he believes that it's after people are on the piste (all in white and masked) that you see their character — instead of perceiving mostly what they portray, when standing around in street clothes. (the TV audience has a very different opinion; does inability of, or disinterest in, perceiving Dao correlate with them being on a couch, watching the bouts?)

[7] compare "me" and "not-me" from Island!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387107

[7] You can tell me Heinlein wrote island and I could believe it but I perhaps shouldnt

[-1,4] imagine, as a machine, your opponent knowing (suspecting?) you can watch him from behind (or from inside his mind, more realistically/usefully, but from behind could be terrifying)

[-4, maybe -3] tech debt is not entropy, but sophistication?

Huxley and Heinlein were born only 13 years apart, so now, over a century later, maybe we can lump them into, if not the same generation, at least the same Zeitgeist.

Somewhere I'd read about a fighting-game AI which had access to all of the human player data (so not the spirit, but knowing the joystick inputs would be a good proxy for "pwn the technique") and was unbeatable, so the programmers nerfed it by giving it only a noisy representation of the human player's avatar's outputs, at which point it returned to satisfyingly mortal.

Doesn't 三体 touch upon (sophons/wallfacers) a watch-from-inside/behind opponent?

Tech debt as sophistication would explain its sign flip over time! It also gives a metaphor perhaps better than "paying off tech debt": it's good if a program is a bit witty, but bad when it starts smelling of the lamp?

> "In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble." —AJP

EDIT: Re: [-1,4] Just as implication allows only 3 possibilities out of 4, my wife likes to say (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42329631 ) that when riding, there should be 2 bodies but 3 minds: what you know, what the horse knows you know, and what you know the horse knows. The rider should have an accurate model of the horse's attention and intentions, but not the other way around. (in particular, you might be very worried about an emergency situation, but the horse should never realise this) I believe this habit helped her with her fencing, because there also we are attempting to hide some aspects of our attention and intentions from someone who is very closely monitoring our posture, in order to discern them.

EDIT2: just as a prelude to a comment on distance: napoleonic sabre cavalry was terrified of an opponent coming up from behind left (strong to their weak) — that's why all the dashing portraits with jackets/cloaks "jauntily" thrown over the left shoulder; ultimately the fashion was very practical, both for defence and for impressing the ladies. Lermontov's karakul nabadi is a particular instance.

  Налетели ветры злые.
  Да с восточной стороны
  И сорвали тёмну шапку
  Ой да с моей буйной головы.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urjAwPfFPqU

The setup of opposing forces leads one to think in terms of entropy ("the fog of war", the manifold of possible mistakes, etc etc)..

Then there's that story about the break even point between French and Mamluks iirc? (And what was the break even point between LGA and the Coalition?)

Somewhere in between we might characterize tech debt; rococo doesn't turn to rubble overnight, & most of it is still around.

Or maybe there are some relatively cheap ways to mitigate tech debt. Always backpropagating debugs to spec, for instance. So we could kick the (meta)grokking/turning point down the road

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nassim-taleb-scien...

>There's no built-in payoff for complexity (or for making things complex). "In academia," though, he says, "there is".

[Make sure your phonebooth expands at around the rate that the range of your (melee) weapons/number of participants increase]

And those promised tubes are annoyingly hard to find http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/02/derek-lowe-to...

Thankfully, Derek has somewhat identified the opponent as, not other scientists, but biology/evolution..

> There's no built-in payoff for complexity (or for making things complex).

Says the hideously (when compared to single-celled organisms) complicated h sap.

Then again, I think social darwinists ought to admit that it's the single-celled organisms who have the fitness they claim to be looking for?

Vonnegut has admitted it?

To riff on your wife's grokking, the number of effective participants increases faster than what one would usually expect: there's what you know,what you know what other academics know, and what other academics know you know

Ditto for "industry" but there the default data structure (nominally) is ____, so perhaps sophistication is monotonic (not accounting yet for immigration, oligarchal or otherwise psychopathic/imbecilic, modelled as using weapons of uncertain range)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42453789

For fog of war:

> "Everything is very simple in industry, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen production." —not CPGvC

Have you heard Niklaus Wirth's joke about God nerfing academia? (via https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/niklaus-wirth-or-the-importanc... )

> On the seventh day of creation God looked at his achievement. He was pretty happy at the result. He started looking at the list of professions and felt good: all —policeman, minister, nurse, street sweeper, interior designer, opera singer, supermarket cashier...— had some advantages and some disadvantages. But then He got to the University Professor row. The Advantages entry was impressive: long holidays, decent salary, you basically get to do what you want, and so on; but the Disadvantages entry was empty! That could not be. For a moment, a cloud obscured His face. He thought and thought and finally His smile came back. What had happened is that He had invented colleagues.

3F's I've been mulling about while mucking about with VR triages (Or, trust is the sword that hypernormal&weird (mandies&mechies?) cleaves?)

  Fooser
  Friend
  Fcolleague

The thing that has been low-key disturbing me about YC is one gets creeped out both as users AAND friends of YC founders. (it's a simple case of not paying enough attn to the Mandala side of things, I wonder?) Clearly the inner circle is of Fcolleagues..

(dang seems dangdy af which makes me wonder as well)

(Aside: as I see it they missed the possible point SPJ made for HW to be mandala oriented because he cared about SW; rocks, smoothed by friction, have a special place in his heart)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5906365

Ah ha maybe maybe not For some profs outside CS (but not Rainer I guess) the list includes (grad) students

If the unharvestable part of friction is called entropy, disproportionately produced by the lowest entropy aspects..

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

>redistribution

It will take a long time for piners for noah to get that their enemies trust their gov (& maybe even one another),

To repeat your venn in words "all you need to solidarify around is freedom+cash"?

Was it Pareto or Orwell or someone else who had claimed that every organisation eventually develops an informal inner circle, just due to the limitations of time and socialising? Even the consensus-deciding Quakers have "weighty friends". Note that Jo Freeman certainly dealt with the phenomenon, pointing out that the 1970s-and-currently best known antidote is making decision-making structure and memberships explicit.

(non-advertiser supported sport has a similar problem: if a country wishes to support elite full-time athletes, either a discipline has to have an affluent and widespread group of amateurs who take lessons and clinics, or it has to be able to hide the elite sport budget within the military or police structures)

Heh, now water can crash, or it can flow. I just had a vision of one possible future in which there's an entire generation of chinese "lying flat" at their country houses (furnished with 筆、墨、紙、硯, or at least their digital equivalents?), while there's an entire generation of americans (legally-at-will) working 996 in their manufacturing jobs...

(and speaking of jobs: there's about half a billion years of stratigraphy, before the oldest still-extant sequences, which we're missing and even the most curious geologist probably never can recover)

> I returned, and saw under the sun, that eternity is not to the igneous, nor the metamorphic, nor yet to sedimentary layers; but time and chance happeneth to them all. —not Kohelet 9:11

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To7pOVAQ54Y

This (and other vids) looks so leisurely that you should immediately suspect the sprezzaturistas of being CCP-sponsored:

https://youtu.be/qafzuXnaXNg

(Re: elite sports of the technological societies: are back(-ish) to the moksha-samsara dynamic? Let's say we don't want to invoke TK just yet)

One wonders why jobs was also obsessed with paintings and zen gardens.. the quotes might be polished but IRL the substrata (objective-C? PowerPC?) get cleaned out after barely a generation?

trimming the ink sticks reminded me of nothing so much as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBb9O-aW4zI !

> IRL the substrata (objective-C? PowerPC?) get cleaned out

real artists ship, and shipping (like cherry blossoming) is ephemeral?

  花の雲 鐘は上野か 浅草か

But polished quotes can become immortal even if sophistrical

I would not say taleb (polished public persona) was not even wrong. Complexity pays off when you have an open system. In academia, the complexity pays off to the cloister within the cloister? In arts/industry.. the boundaries are more porous so you can afford to let/can't help having the losers partake in the complexity.

a 5-year-old pack of yoghurt. Has the consistency and flavour of chalk. Thawed mammoth, otoh...

Edit: that may explain which Jacobsian mode of survival becomes dominant. Next up, mode of trust?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mapping-leadership-cultu...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/wowswa/top...

Ottosson's first figure (not linkable, alas?) looks suspiciously, on either branch, like a Thomian catastrophe (a cubic going from one [stable] to three [2 stable, 1 unstable] intercepts).

Interesting that the Old Country shows up as heavily "task-based" trust. I wonder if it could move towards becoming a higher-trust society if enough people were convinced that living together in a civilised manner were a worthy, err, I mean profitable, background task?

>Was it Pareto or Orwell or someone else who had claimed that every organisation eventually develops an informal inner circle

the pervasion of this thought-killer amongst x-percenters makes me indignantly curious about what stuff the actual inner-circlers actually spend their supposedly limited attention on.. shipping?

42471021

As tlb pointed out, since it's hard to distinguish meretocrats from meritocrats, "RAS" may not apply..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com