Miscellanea

last edited: 13 september 2026

i was never naturally good at mathematics. reading and writing came easily to me as a child, while mathematics seemed to require some faculty that everyone else had acquired without telling me. when my class learned multiplication in grade school, i remained behind for something like a month because i simply could not comprehend it.

eventually i did. i remember the satisfaction of understanding it much better than i remember the confusion itself. mathematics began to feel less like an aptitude i had failed to inherit and more like a puzzle whose rules could be learned, although sometimes embarrassingly slowly. i discovered that i liked quantification itself: the possibility that some enormous or apparently disorderly thing could be translated into relationships, that the mess of the world might submit, however partially, to a few symbols on a page. at the same time, i loved the stars with none of this sophistication at all.

at my grandparents' house i would sit on the balcony and stare at the sky for hours. one particularly clear night i recorded something like thirty minutes of myself talking about it. i was very young and have no idea what i managed to discuss for that long. i wish i still had the video, mostly for endearment purposes, but also because i would like to meet that particular intensity again: a child with thirty uninterrupted minutes of things to say about the sky, before she knew enough to be embarrassed by how little she knew. before i knew the name of the profession, i said i wanted to be "a mathematician but for space." i had found the desire before i had the vocabulary for it.

the attraction eventually shifted from things that could be answered to things that apparently could not. i would learn enough about some problem to formulate a question and then discover, with a mixture of frustration and delight, that there was no settled answer. sometimes nobody knew; sometimes several incompatible explanations survived; sometimes the question itself turned out to have been badly posed. i loved that uncertainty had structure, that there were better and worse ways not to know something. every answer seemed capable of exposing another question behind it. this could have been discouraging. instead it made the universe feel inexhaustible. i wanted to keep going.

i became preoccupied with the big bang and white holes. the latter interested me because certain solutions of general relativity permit something resembling the temporal reverse of a black hole: a region from which things may emerge but which they cannot enter. speculative connections between white holes and cosmology made the idea irresistible to me. there was an apparent symmetry to it that appealed to a fairly primitive intuition i had about physics: if one solution permits an input with no recoverable output, what becomes of the reversed solution? whether nature has any obligation to satisfy that intuition is, of course, another question.

general relativity was full of offenses against intuition like this. space and time ceased to be the passive stage on which physics occurred and became participants in it. gravity could be understood geometrically. sufficiently extreme distributions of matter could produce objects from which even light could not return. none of this becomes less strange merely because the mathematics is capable of describing it.

gravity also becomes peculiar on sufficiently large scales. it is long-range and, unlike electromagnetism, has no opposite gravitational charge available to screen it away. a sufficiently large self-gravitating system therefore does not necessarily behave according to the thermodynamic intuitions developed from ordinary matter in a box. gravitating systems clump. stranger still, there are circumstances in which losing energy can make such a system hotter. negative specific heat sounds almost like a contradiction until the gravitational dynamics are taken seriously.

i have always liked physical results of this kind, where the absurdity turns out to belong not to nature but to an intuition we forgot we were assuming. quantum mechanics provided these in abundance. the double-slit experiment particularly bothered me. ordinary language seems almost deliberately inadequate to describe what is happening; familiar categories like particle and wave become unreliable if treated too literally, while the experimental result remains perfectly indifferent to the discomfort of our description. eventually this altered what i wanted from understanding. i did not need the universe to become intuitive. i wanted it to become intelligible, and there was something almost intoxicating about discovering that these were not the same demand.

i first found the name for what i wanted to become when i was sixteen, at a museum planetarium. the presentation discussed dark matter (see dark matter). i found it beautiful that something could be indispensable to our account of the universe while remaining inaccessible to direct observation in the ordinary sense. its presence is inferred from gravitational effects; the visible universe does not behave correctly without something else there.

there is something almost philosophical about knowing an object first through the consequences of its absence. dark matter is not visible, but the universe keeps betraying the fact that something is missing from the visible account. i had already become fascinated by the ways the universe seems to resist ordinary distinctions like finite and infinite, something i have written about elsewhere in relation to black holes, and dark matter belonged to the same intellectual territory. the universe was not simply large; it was incomplete as an object of knowledge. what we did not know was not necessarily waiting at some remote edge of existence. some of it was apparently holding galaxies together.

this was around the time i learned the word astrophysicist. suddenly there was a profession attached to the thing i had been doing in miniature for years: looking upward, learning just enough to make the questions worse, and wanting desperately to know more. i don't remember ever making a particularly measured decision about it. i found something i loved and allowed it to swallow me whole.

there is a minor contradiction in how i arrived here. mathematics first appealed to me because it made things quantifiable. astrophysics became important to me because it revealed the limits of that satisfaction. the equations can be extraordinarily precise while the ontology remains unsettled. we can know with considerable confidence that an effect exists without knowing what produces it. a successful mathematical description does not always amount to an explanation, and precision does not abolish mystery. sometimes it only tells us exactly where the mystery begins.

this is probably also why i have never been particularly fond of anthropic reasoning when it is allowed to masquerade as an explanation. obviously any universe containing observers must have conditions compatible with the existence of observers. the statement is difficult to dispute. i am less convinced by what is sometimes made of it.

selection effects matter, and our existence necessarily constrains the universe we are capable of observing. but there seems to me an important difference between identifying the conditions under which an observation is possible and explaining why those conditions obtain. "we could not observe otherwise" is not quite the same proposition as "this is why the universe is this way." i am much more interested in the possibility of a mechanism.

this is one reason cosmology appeals to me. its most interesting problems frequently make the boundary between physics and philosophy difficult to maintain. eventually a question about what the universe does becomes a question about what would constitute an explanation of what the universe does. physics can tell us that a model works extraordinarily well and leave intact the more irritating question of what we mean when we say that we understand it.

actually studying astrophysics has made the relationship less romantic in some ways and much more intimate in others. loving a subject from a distance is easy. it asks almost nothing of you. loving it while it assigns you problem sets, humiliates you on exams, consumes afternoons you wanted for something else, and repeatedly exposes the limits of your own understanding is a different relationship entirely. sometimes i resent how much of myself i have given it. then i encounter some new problem, some result that should not make sense and does, some question nobody has answered satisfactorily, and immediately i want to give it more.

i am still not naturally intuitive at mathematics or physics. i often need a derivation written without omitted steps, or need to approach the same argument several times before its structure becomes apparent. there are students who seem capable of looking at a problem and immediately seeing the appropriate mathematical machinery. i generally cannot. under the artificial pressure of an exam or a semester this difference becomes consequential. if something takes me twice as long to understand, understanding it eventually does not give me twice as many hours in the week.

this is frustrating in a way i don't particularly want to romanticize. difficulty is not automatically virtuous. sometimes taking longer simply means taking longer, and sometimes being confused is just being confused. but neither is confusion proof of incapacity. i wish i had understood the difference much earlier.

i also have an unfortunate tendency to become impatient with classes when the material is far removed from whatever question currently interests me. this is not an especially defensible objection to having to learn things. astrophysics is a discipline rather than a collection of my favorite cosmological problems, and expertise requires spending an enormous amount of time on foundations before being entitled to say anything interesting about their limits.

the difficulty has also changed what i think i might want to do with the subject. i have become increasingly interested in teaching and science communication. i don't believe intellectual seriousness requires unnecessary opacity. almost any scientific idea can be given an accessible point of entry without pretending that the idea itself is simple. simplification and explanation are not the same operation. the best explanation does not remove the difficulty from an idea; it gives somebody somewhere to stand while they encounter it.

i am admittedly capable of being terrible at this in conversation. i skip intermediate steps, arrive at a conclusion that makes perfect sense inside my own head, and then discover that nobody else was given the intervening argument. probably an adhd thing. having to reconstruct so many mathematical ideas deliberately, however, has made me unusually conscious of how quickly an explanation can lose somebody.

there is something unfortunate about the way mathematics is often encountered as a test of identity. a child struggles with it and concludes not merely that she does not understand multiplication yet, but that she is not a "math person." difficulty becomes evidence of incompatibility. a temporary state of not knowing is promoted into a permanent fact about the kind of mind she possesses. i could very easily have made that inference about myself.

instead, i was behind everyone else until i understood multiplication, and then multiplication was fun.

i suspect there are people who would love physics if they were given enough time to get past the humiliation of not understanding it immediately. perhaps there are people who would look at dark matter the way i did at sixteen if somebody first convinced them that confusion was not evidence that they had no business thinking about it. there are subjects people abandon because they dislike them, and subjects they abandon because they have been made to feel ridiculous for loving something they do not yet understand. i am much more bothered by the second possibility.

i would like to be one of the people who makes that possibility less likely. i know what it is like to love a subject before feeling entitled to it, and to want something badly enough that being bad at it hurts. perhaps this is another form of yearning: not simply wanting to know, but wanting to become capable of knowing.

the practical realities of studying astrophysics have complicated my relationship with it without making the attachment any smaller. if anything, knowing more has made the object of my affection expand. every piece of understanding seems to expose the perimeter of something larger. i still want to know why an apparently sensible physical intuition fails; i still find it beautiful that we can infer something we cannot see because the universe behaves incorrectly in its absence; i still love the instant when something incomprehensible becomes comprehensible without becoming any less strange. i could spend my whole life doing this and there would still be more universe left over.

after all of the terminology and mathematics and embarrassment and wonder, i have apparently only found increasingly elaborate ways to express the same desire i had before i knew what to call it: i still want to be a mathematician for space.

last edited: 13 september 2026

i watched my suicide: director's cut recently and there was a line that immediately made me think about a particular period of my life: "if you want to kill yourself, kill the part of yourself you don't like."

i don't think i would have known how to describe what i was doing at the time, but in retrospect that is more or less what happened. i was going through a bad breakup, although i barely remember that period as a breakup anymore. i don't think i particularly missed the person. what hurt was realizing how little of myself i recognized by the end of it.

i had been trying to get better before i met them. i was already attempting to pull myself out of a depression, and the relationship made me insecure enough that i lost some of that progress. when it ended, the task in front of me wasn't really getting over another person. it was figuring out how to unhate myself again. unfortunately this required spending an enormous amount of time with the person i hated. ME!!!!

i started remaking myself, although not in any particularly organized fashion. for a while i stopped sleeping in my bedroom because it felt haunted. not literally. it had simply accumulated too much evidence of me being miserable. i associated the room with lying in bed depressed so completely that eventually entering it seemed to reproduce the feeling. i slept on the couch and sometimes in my mom's bed instead. i stayed awake for most of the night because i couldn't sleep. at some point my mom remarked that i wasn't crying as much anymore. she didn't know about the breakup because i had never actually told her. apparently the improvement was visible before i really understood that it was happening.

one night i was lying on the couch listening to an enormous spotify playlist made by a stranger online named maxwell kass. i vaguely knew who he was, but only in the strange peripheral way you can know somebody online: enough that his name meant something to me, not enough that there was any sensible reason for him to become important to my life. he had playlists that were hundreds of hours long, and i would put them on shuffle without knowing what i was going to hear.

somewhere inside more than 300 hours of somebody else's music, "air supply" by sweet trip came on. i had never heard anything quite like it. there was no deliberate act of discovery, which is probably part of why i remember it so clearly. i wasn't searching for an album that would explain my life to me. i wasn't even searching for sweet trip. the song had been sitting somewhere inside a stranger's enormous playlist until shuffle produced the correct accident.

then i listened to you will never know why, and it became inseparable from the rest of that period.

"air supply" still feels like the center of it for me. there is something about the longing in it that feels sincere without becoming theatrical. its desire for closeness is accompanied by the knowledge that closeness is unstable, and that tension appears throughout the album. sweetness never seems entirely secure. affection and uncertainty are allowed to occupy the same place; intimacy does not abolish distance. somehow there is an almost impossible brightness running through all of it anyway.

i think i needed that brightness. pain has an irritating ability to make itself seem profound merely because it hurts. misery repeats itself and still demands to be treated as revelation. happiness is stranger. happiness requires the world to become interesting again. there were nights then when nothing in my life had been solved and i nevertheless wanted to hear another song, drive another mile, wait another hour for the sun to come up. wanting anything from the next hour felt new. the album did not make me feel cured or wise or even particularly stable. it made me want things again. MORE SONG MORE ROAD MORE MORNING!!!! >_<

because i was awake most of the night anyway, i started going on drives. sometimes i would drive nearly to the airport without taking the highway, following surface streets for an unnecessarily long time while almost everyone else was asleep. i didn't particularly want to arrive anywhere. i wanted the drive to continue. eventually the black outside the windows would become blue and then morning would begin without asking whether i was finished with the night. my mom was an early bird, so if i stayed awake long enough i could meet her there. my night and her morning overlapped for a little while and we could hang out. i loved those hours. i wanted to stay inside them for as long as possible.

i found a lot of japanese breakfast around then too. "the woman that loves you!" belongs permanently to the same place in my memory. music sometimes stops functioning as a record of a period and becomes one of the materials from which the period is made. i can't separate those songs from empty roads around my hometown, the couch at four in the morning, my mom waking up, or staying awake long enough to watch the sunrise. remove the music and the memory is not merely quieter; it is a different memory.

eventually i decided the bedroom itself had to go. there was a storage room in the house, so i switched them. i moved everything being stored there into my old bedroom and turned the storage room into mine. the new room was better. it had built-in shelves, which i loved, but more importantly it had no history. nothing had happened to me there yet. there is an enormous luxury in a room that has never seen you cry.

the physical rearrangement became part of a larger one. i started wearing my hair differently. i changed how i dressed. i spent more time with my friends. even my personality seemed to change. people around me noticed that i was doing better. after a while i felt almost like an entirely different person, which is perhaps an alarming thing to say about recovery but was nevertheless true.

i don't think self-destruction and self-reinvention are necessarily the same thing, which is why i like the line from my suicide but don't take it literally. there are parts of ourselves that need patience rather than elimination, and there are parts we condemn simply because they are in pain. still, there are arrangements of a life that eventually become unlivable. sometimes something unbearable happens and afterward, among the wreckage, you discover that you have finally been given permission to change things you should have changed long ago.

apparently, for me, this involved changing everything down to which room in the house i slept in.

you will never know why always brings me back to that version of my hometown. the memory is bittersweet because i know intellectually that i was doing badly, but the images i retained are beautiful: empty roads, sunrises, my mom being awake when i came home, my friends noticing i was happier before i fully noticed it myself, built-in shelves, finding a song by accident in the middle of a stranger's impossibly long playlist. this is the annoying thing about memory. suffering does not preserve itself exclusively as suffering. sometimes a terrible period of your life contains a beautiful morning and you are stuck loving the morning forever.

music preserves a self that no longer exists with an accuracy that ordinary remembering sometimes cannot manage. i am not the person who first heard "air supply" on that couch anymore, but the first few seconds can still return the dimensions of her world to me. i remember what mattered to her, what the roads looked like, the peculiar loneliness of being awake while almost everybody else was asleep, and the enormous tenderness i felt toward anything that made me want to remain awake a little longer. for a few minutes i can almost remember what it was like not to know what happened next.

you will never know why became part of my soul because it attached itself to a period when i was learning to desire my own life again. not life in the abstract. i mean stupid, particular life: another song i hadn't heard, another road i hadn't finished driving, my mom waking up, a room with built-in shelves, my friends, morning, whatever came next. i had spent so long wanting to escape myself that wanting more of my own life felt almost obscene. MORE PLEASE!!!! i wanted to see what else could happen to me.

i haven't been doing so hot recently. maybe seeing my suicide and remembering that line made me return to all of this because i needed the memory for reasons other than nostalgia. i don't want to reproduce that period; i don't even want to become that person again. i want what she wanted. another song, another morning, another version of the room. i want to recover the appetite she developed for finding out what happened next without having to destroy my life first. (god please let me learn one thing the easy way maybe.......)

all we can do is try our best. unfortunately i mean this with my entire heart.

it's kind of a funny story by ned vizzini helped me think about this too, but honestly it needs its own post at some point.

not today.

that's all.

listen: you will never know why — sweet trip

last edited: 13 september 2026

psychoceramics got me thinking about percival lowell, who is probably one of my favorite examples of the uncomfortable boundary between being wrong and being worth taking seriously.

lowell became famous, or infamous, for his observations of mars. giovanni schiaparelli had described canali on the martian surface, and lowell became convinced that these were artificial canals constructed by intelligent martians attempting to move water across a dying planet. he spent years observing and drawing them at the observatory he founded in flagstaff. he also wrote about mars obsessively. first there was mars, then mars and its canals, and eventually mars as the abode of life. you can almost see the theory becoming more elaborate in the titles alone. by the early twentieth century many astronomers were already skeptical of the canals, which they could not reliably observe, but lowell kept going.

this understandably did not help his reputation. there is something very psychoceramic about producing a myriad of increasingly elaborate details from an observation whose existence is itself in dispute. but i think the more interesting thing about lowell is that being spectacularly wrong about one thing did not make him incapable of being interesting about another.

lowell became convinced that another planet existed beyond neptune. he called it planet x and spent years searching for it from lowell observatory. the best part of the entire story is that he actually photographed pluto and didn't notice it. pluto was sitting there as a tiny point of light on photographs produced during his search, but it was much fainter than the planet he thought he was looking for. lowell died without knowing that the thing he had spent so long trying to find had already passed through his photographs.

the search was eventually resumed. lowell observatory hired clyde tombaugh, a 23-year-old farm boy from kansas who had never gone to college and had built his own telescopes. he had mailed the observatory drawings he made of jupiter and mars, and they were apparently good enough to get him a trial job. the offer was wonderfully vague about what he would actually be doing. photography, apparently. janitorial work, possibly. he was very much an assistant rather than some established astronomer arriving to solve the mystery. within a year they gave him the search that had defeated everyone before him.

tombaugh's method was wonderfully tedious. he photographed the same part of the sky on different nights and put the plates into a blink comparator, switching rapidly between them. the stars stayed in place. something closer would appear to jump. he did this over and over and over again until he found a tiny moving point.

it was pluto.

and then an eleven-year-old girl named it.

venetia burney, an english schoolgirl, suggested pluto, after the roman god of the underworld. the suggestion eventually made its way to flagstaff and the observatory chose it. there was also a particularly satisfying accident in the name: PL were percival lowell's initials. even the astronomical symbol for pluto incorporated a P and an L.

also, because i had to know which pluto came first: the planet did. the dog who would become pluto appeared as a bloodhound later in 1930, but he wasn't actually mickey's dog named pluto until 1931. disney says the name was most likely inspired by the newly discovered planet. so pluto the dog is apparently named after pluto the planet, which was named by an eleven-year-old girl, partly selected because its first two letters happened to be the initials of a dead astronomer who had already photographed it without realizing it. good.

pluto would probably be my favorite planet if it were still allowed to be one, if only because the history is so fun. i also just like lowell observatory. there is something charming about the whole chain of events taking place there: lowell building an observatory partly because he was obsessed with martian canals, looking for a planet he never got to see discovered, photographing it anyway, and then a young assistant arriving years after his death and finding the tiny thing by watching dots jump back and forth.

of course, pluto is no longer technically a planet. the definition adopted in 2006 requires a planet not only to orbit the sun and be massive enough for gravity to make it nearly round, but also to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. pluto fails the last part, so it is a dwarf planet.

neil degrasse tyson was actually on this surprisingly early. when the rose center for earth and space opened in 2000, the exhibits didn't put pluto with the terrestrial planets or the gas giants. it was displayed with the icy objects of the outer solar system instead. tyson headed the science committee behind the exhibits and consequently spent years being yelled at by people who thought he had personally killed pluto, well before the official decision in 2006.

i think what i like most about the discovery is that nobody in it quite gets the story they were expecting. lowell's calculations did not really predict pluto in the triumphant way the story is sometimes told. the supposed irregularities that motivated the search for planet x largely disappeared once neptune's mass was measured more accurately. pluto happened to be there anyway. lowell looked for the wrong planet for reasons that turned out to be wrong and helped create the conditions under which the right object was found.

there is probably something worth keeping in that. being wrong does not make every observation useless, and being right at the end does not retroactively make every premise correct. sometimes somebody spends years looking in roughly the right direction for the wrong reason, photographs the answer without recognizing it, dies, and leaves the rest of the problem to a farm boy and an eleven-year-old girl.

last edited: 11 september 2026

the study of crackpots, cranks, eccentrics, unsolicited theorists, and the elaborate intellectual systems they leave behind. psychoceramics is not a particularly serious name, and at present not much of a serious discipline either. most encounters with it amount to recreational interest in people who have developed theories of physics in which einstein made a fatal algebraic error, discovered the true location of atlantis, decoded the secret chronology of the bible, or otherwise noticed something that has somehow escaped everyone whose profession requires noticing it.

there is nevertheless a serious subject hiding inside the joke.

the interesting crank is not simply ignorant. ignorance requires very little explanation. more peculiar is the person who has worked extraordinarily hard at being wrong. crank literature can represent years or decades of reading, calculation, correspondence, annotation, and revision. its authors frequently possess enormous stores of factual knowledge about their chosen subjects. they develop specialized vocabularies and classifications, build historical narratives, produce diagrams and mathematical demonstrations, and anticipate objections. in this sense the crank has more in common with the scholar than with the merely uninformed person: both have made a discipline of thinking about something.

the obvious difference is that one discipline has acquired mechanisms for preventing thought from becoming entirely answerable to itself.

this makes psychoceramics an interesting problem for the sociology of knowledge. science and scholarship do not produce reliable knowledge merely because intelligent people participate in them. intelligent people are perfectly capable of producing nonsense, and in fact can produce considerably more sophisticated nonsense than everyone else. intellectual disciplines instead surround individual thought with methods for testing it and other people capable of challenging it. claims have to survive criticism. evidence has to remain evidence when inspected by somebody who does not already accept the conclusion. methods can be reproduced. predictions can fail. an explanation must retain some conceivable relationship to the possibility that it is wrong.

the crank often preserves the recognizable motions of this process while quietly eliminating the possibility of failure. objections are incorporated into the theory. missing evidence acquires an explanation. hostile experts become evidence of institutional resistance; indifference becomes evidence that nobody has looked closely enough. eventually the theory develops the peculiar advantage of being able to explain both the existence and absence of evidence for itself. what appears to be an increasingly comprehensive theory is actually an increasingly closed one.

particularly strange is the density of detail in psychoceramic writing. crank theories tend not merely to contain conclusions but enormous architectures of supporting facts. some details are taken from legitimate sources and rearranged into relationships their sources never proposed. others seem to emerge from the explanatory system itself. one invented connection requires another; the second makes a third necessary; eventually the theory contains a world's worth of particulars whose abundance begins to resemble evidence.

there is something philosophically uncomfortable here because this process is not completely alien to respectable thought. imagination is required to produce explanations before they can be tested. pattern recognition allows relationships to become visible before their significance is known. analogy, inference, abstraction, suspicion, and synthesis are indispensable intellectual activities. the mind has to exceed what is immediately given to it in order to understand anything at all. the same capacity that allows a person to discover a pattern also permits him to manufacture one.

there is an equally uncomfortable relationship between this and the archive. accumulation has an appearance of authority. a sufficiently large collection of fragments begins to suggest that the fragments belong together, even when their only real relationship is that somebody decided to keep them. an archive can preserve relationships that existed, but it can also produce new ones simply through proximity. two things placed beside one another invite comparison. ten things begin to look like a pattern.

this website obviously participates in that impulse. miscellanea is deliberately an accumulation: thoughts, quotations, images, conversations, things read and things worth keeping. there is no claim that the collection forms a system, which is probably important. still, collecting anything produces a little cosmology. selection gives unrelated things a common property: they passed through the attention of the same person and survived it.

perhaps this is part of what makes psychoceramic collections so compelling. the problem is not merely that the crank has gathered bad evidence. gathering itself can become a method of persuasion. once enough material has been preserved, classified, cross-referenced, and placed beside other material, the collection begins to imply that there must have been a reason for collecting it. quantity quietly becomes coherence.

the question of where all these details come from is consequently more interesting than determining whether each detail is true. psychoceramics sits somewhere near the boundary between discovery and invention. a novelist constructs a world and knows that he is constructing it. the crank appears capable of performing a remarkably similar cognitive operation while experiencing each new construction as something discovered about the world. the distinction between the two cannot simply be imagination, because both require quite a lot of it.

individual cranks may not even be the most informative cases. between established scholarship and the person mailing a hundred-page proof to a physics department exists an enormous intermediate territory of pseudosciences and other communities organized around their own standards of evidence. these complicate the reassuring idea that error is corrected simply by exposing a person to other people. communities can stabilize false beliefs as easily as they can destabilize them. peer criticism is useful only insofar as the peers share some mechanism by which criticism is allowed to matter.

the internet makes this intermediate territory unusually easy to produce. eccentricity no longer has to remain private long enough to die with its author. an obscure belief can locate an audience and eventually a community. enough private cosmologies brought into contact with one another can begin to resemble a school of thought. the relevant question becomes not only what causes people to develop strange systems of belief, but what social conditions allow particular systems to reproduce themselves.

this is where psychoceramics becomes less amusing. strange ideas are not historically confined to strange people. sufficiently successful fantasies can migrate out of the intellectual fringe and become ordinary explanations of the world. the history of ideas contains plenty of beliefs that were ridiculous without being inconsequential. studying the production of nonsense therefore also means studying the circumstances under which nonsense acquires authority.

perhaps the value of psychoceramics is ultimately diagnostic. a broken system makes visible the structures that ordinarily disappear when everything is working. looking at a discipline that has lost its mechanisms for verification and meaningful criticism clarifies what those mechanisms were doing in the first place. the crackpot is interesting not merely as an example of failed reasoning, but as a demonstration that reasoning alone is insufficient to guarantee reason.

last edited: 11 september 2026, 1:14 am edt

I SPARE MY FRIENDS THE REPEATED
DETAILS OF A SORE SUBJECT
THAT CIRCLES BACK.

WHEN I’M ALONE, I BRING YOU UP
ALL THE TIME.

last edited: 9 september 2026

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, love and madness intertwine through homosexual themes and the artistic depiction of a muse decaying once his soul dissipates. In a real-life rendition of the classic story, Francis Bacon was a homosexual Irish-British triptych painter in the 1960s and 1970s who primarily painted his lover and muse, George Dyer. The Black Triptychs by Francis Bacon offer an in-depth examination of the human condition through love, grief, and solitude where, similar to Dorian Gray, the demise of George Dyer’s physical being and soul was rendered on canvas: a classical tragedy. An individual can examine emotion in art by intertwining visual rhetoric and psychology. Thus, art can delve into the mind and invoke emotion, transcending language and communicating directly with the subconscious through the interplay of colors, shapes, and symbols. By analyzing historical context, visual elements (lines, structure, colors, and lighting), societal and ethical values through repression and grief, and psychoanalytical theories from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard, the Black Triptychs’ intervention with emotion can be deciphered.

In Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiat, Bacon revealed that he met the charismatic Dyer in a New York pub, where he recounts, “George was down the far end of the bar, and he came over and said ‘You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?’” (Peppiat 259). After meeting George Dyer in the mid-60s, Francis Bacon painted a series of portraits of Dyer, gathering Bacon both fame and notoriety from both the conscious and homophobic figures in 1960s society. Nearly a decade into Francis Bacon and George Dyer’s relationship, Francis Bacon was to have his art grandly unveiled at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées in Paris. On October 24th, 1971, two days prior to the grand unveiling, George Dyer took his own life in the bathroom of the Parisian hotel room just across from Bacon’s room, where Francis Bacon was one of the first to discover his lifeless body. In David Sylvester’s 1987 interview, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews With Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon revealed that George Dyer was seemingly normal, cheerful even, just a few hours before his passing—he was shaking the hands of wealthy critics and charming them with his wit (Sylvester 168). However, according to Bacon, Dyer had attempted suicide on numerous occasions before the night of October 24th, when Bacon would have to resuscitate Dyer with a stomach pump. Despite Dyer’s charming façade in the hours before his death, George Dyer left the exhibition party early and quietly. When considering his most profound regret, Bacon admits, “If I’d have stayed with him rather than going to see about the exhibition, he would be here now. But I didn’t, and he’s dead” (Peppiat 265). In the years following, Francis Bacon went on to paint a series of triptychs depicting the suicide of George Dyer that went on to be known as the Black Triptychs.

In Francis Bacon’s 1973 depiction of the Black Triptychs, visual elements such as color, background, foreground, and overall structure can be analyzed to convey the story of Dyer’s death, more precisely, the moments before, during, and after his death. When examining the lines and overall structure of the artwork, it is notable that Bacon chooses to present the scene as a triptych rather than a singular image. Three is a prominent number in imagery and general life; in photography, there is a “rule of thirds,” and physicist Nikola Tesla even refers to the number three as the “key to the universe.” Through threes, a natural balance exists; two other visual elements center a single focal point. Bacon balances the three images through the lines of the doors, where the center image has a door with parallel lines, but the left and right doors have opposite diagonal lines that frame the center image. Additionally, life and death are balanced through Francis Bacon’s triptych paintings, where he positions the moment after Dyer’s death in the left panel, the moment before his death in the center panel, and the moment during his death in the right panel. Literally and symbolically, in the moment before Dyer’s suicide, he is in between life and death. The position between life and death signifies Dyer’s contemplation of whether to continue on or take his own life. Besides Dyer’s moral dilemmas, the position between life and death further represents his physical and emotional state at that time; while he was physically alive and well, his spirit was not—he was in between existence and ruin.

The triptych's color palette primarily contains red, beige, white, and black, with black being the most prominent in the center image. Chiaroscuro, or “light-dark,” is evident through contrasting blacks and whites. In the center photo, where Dyer is contemplating suicide, black seeps into the photo. Black can be linked with death and loss of innocence, while white can be linked with life, purity, and innocence. Dyer, a white figure, is being engulfed by the darkness—symbolically, the thoughts of suicide are overtaking Dyer and erasing his purity and will to live. In the left and right panels, white arrows point directly to Dyer’s body, while no arrow is in the center panel. There is a grey alarm behind George Dyer in the center of the photo, nearly hidden by the black background. The contrasting white arrows draw attention to the image, encouraging the audience to look at Dyer in his final moments. George Dyer’s struggles with mental health often went unnoticed, even by Francis Bacon, who watched him crack jokes and seem entirely unbothered just hours before his suicide. The alarm behind Dyer in the center photo serves as an alert or cry for help but is disregarded through its subtle coloring, being a few shades lighter than the black background. Hypophora refers to a person proposing a question and following it up with a clear answer. The lack of an arrow in the center image might represent how Dyer’s struggles were invisible while he was alive, while the arrows in the frames where Dyer is dying almost silently say, “Look here. Can you see how I feel now?” and there the answer is: Dyer’s emotional decay in its strongest manifestation.

Furthermore, the Black Triptychs present societal and ethical values through repression and grief. In the 1960s and 1970s, homophobia was widespread in society, causing members of the LGBTQ+ community to often repress or avoid their emotions. Still, Francis Bacon was an openly gay man, and despite being incredibly influential—even having a retrospective at the Grand Palais—museums often denied his work (Sylvester 160). Although Bacon himself was ostracized in 70s society, he fought LGBTQ+ erasure by painting his male lover and presenting the works at monumental events. Themes of repression are further elucidated in Bacon’s art through illustrations of George Dyer repressing his mental health struggles. While seemingly alive and well in the center image, Dyer is immersed in darkness and framed by his moribund body in the left and right images. Bacon incorporates pathos through themes of grief and solitude; Dyer is entirely alone, and even the arrows (which can draw attention to an object and create distance from an object) in the image further separate him from reality. The arrows in the left and right images make it evident that Dyer is suffering by drawing the eye directly to him. Bacon is coping with the shame of his loss through the images, questioning how George Dyer’s struggles with mental health were so invisible—how was he completely alone and unnoticed in his final moments?

Finally, the emotion behind the Black Triptychs can be interpreted through psychoanalytical analysis. In Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles Bressler, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories discuss the Anal Stage in the Pre-Oedipal Development Phase, where a child first learns to potty train. Through potty training, a child first grasps whether or not it is okay to make mistakes based on a parent’s reaction to their failures, where themes of control and shame are prominent in this era of the child’s life (Bressler 151). In the Black Triptychs, George Dyer sits on a toilet during his death; his suicide is a moment of shame and control. George Dyer ends his life where he starts it: in the Anal Stage. The Genital Stage is prominent in Francis Bacon’s triptychs as well, since the stage symbolizes independence. Through self-pleasure, a child discovers they can live by their own means. In George Dyer’s attempt to independently gain control over his life, he takes it. Thanatos is the notion that a person has an innate and fundamental relationship with death; death can be treated as a haven at times through depictions of the afterlife or religion. A Psychodynamic Theory: Freud’s Psychoanalytical Theory of Personality by Daniel Cervone and Lawrence A. Pervin states, “...it reflects Freud's idea that a basic tendency of the organism is to seek a state of calmness. It also is consistent with observations of the human condition” (Cervone and Pervin 70). In George Dyer’s circumstances, Thanatos was his tranquility or rebirth. Dyer’s antanagoge, or silver lining in his death, was that his death was the moment he was most alive: he was reborn. Dyer resorted to death because he craved a better life and then ended back where he started: as a child in the Pre-Oedipal Development Phase.

On the other hand, Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard tune in on reality through Lacan’s notion of “the Real” and Baudrillard’s notion of Simulacra. The Real is a dimension beyond words and control. Through the lack of words in Francis Bacon’s triptychs, he portrays that the situation is beyond words. Putting words onto paper often makes the reality of a situation seem more intense or alive. By avoiding language, Bacon can cope with his emotions and avoid reality alone with no verbal explanation. If Dyer’s death is blatantly written out, it is set in stone—Bacon can no longer avoid the situation when it is entirely real. Words do not assist the situation or do justice to Bacon’s grief. Moreover, Francis Bacon previously stated that he felt shame and regret for not being with George Dyer in his final moments. While accurately documenting George Dyer’s corpse, Francis Bacon was not there during Dyer’s death to canonically depict the left and right images in the triptych. However much Bacon tries to represent the Real (that is, his reality of the situation), he will always remain castrated from that reality. Ergo, the Real is not tangible beyond the frustrating notion that the Real is solely possible in a fantasy or, in Bacon’s situation, an artistic rendition. This phenomenon is what Lacan describes as the trauma of the Real. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, what drives and conquers individuals is jouissance—the unachievable perception of satisfaction in attempting to transcend the Real and its constraints—Bacon copes by depicting his most authentic version of the Real in the Black Triptychs.

Moving forward with Bacon’s relationship with reality, in Jean Baudrillard’s psychoanalytical theories, the Simulacra can be defined as an artificial reproduction that becomes more real than the “real.” Virtual models disintegrate the distinctions between model and reality. Circling back to Bacon’s regret of not being present during Dyer’s final moments, Francis Bacon paints what he imagines Dyer’s last moments were. Francis Bacon has created a Simulacra to cope; in this version of reality, Francis Bacon can be right next to Dyer in his final hours. Through Simulacra, Bacon creates what Baudrillard describes as the hyperreal: a depiction of reality that is more real than reality itself. Through Bacon’s artistic framework, his version of reality is more accurate than the events that actually took place. Bacon incorporates images such as black shadows and solitude, paralleling Dyer’s emotions as he dies. Dyer’s emotions would not have a physical manifestation in a realistic image. Thus, Francis Bacon uses both Jacques Lacan's and Jean Baudrillard’s depictions of reality to cope with the passing of his lover and muse; through the Black Triptychs, life imitates art.

Overall, Francis Bacon's Black Triptychs provide a comprehensive analysis of the human condition through the intervention of love and tragedy. Through the play of ekphrasis, the means to psychologically describe visual art, art can be emotionally broken down. By examining the historical background, visual components, societal and ethical values, and psychoanalytical theories, the Black Triptychs’ emotional intervention, or “ekphrasis,” can be understood. Visual manifestations are often more accurate than a “true” depiction of an event. A person might question why Bacon would choose to relive the trauma of his lover’s suicide through the triptychs painted over several years. To that, Bacon would justify that his depiction of reality is more real than the actual events that took place, and through artistic depiction, Bacon can sit right in that bathroom beside Dyer. Throughout Dyer’s life, he was Bacon’s lover and muse and continued to be Bacon’s muse following his death—his suicide was a final pose for Francis Bacon’s portraits. Thus, the Black Triptychs clarify comprehension of what certain art forms can do by “seeing” the world in both artistic and psychological languages to convey themes of grief, love, and solitude.

last edited: 3 september 2026

while reading the “Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, i found myself wondering whether Socrates’ account of education is actually realistic. enlightenment in the allegory is an intensely painful and reluctant process. the freed prisoner does not willingly pursue truth. he has to be forced to turn around, dragged out of the cave, and compelled to confront a reality that initially causes him confusion and distress. even after becoming accustomed to the outside world, he cannot simply return and persuade the remaining prisoners of what he has seen. Socrates suggests that they would ridicule him and might even kill anyone who attempted to free them.

this seems to present a problem. if accepting reality is as difficult as the allegory suggests, why does Socrates nevertheless remain so confident in the necessity of philosophical education?

education as a reorientation of the soul

the prisoner’s problem is not merely that he lacks information. he has mistaken appearance for reality and built his entire understanding of the world upon that mistake. when he is first forced to look at the objects responsible for the shadows, he continues to believe that the shadows are “more real” than the objects before him. when he is dragged upward, he is “pained and dazzled” by the light and initially wants to return to what is familiar.

this is important because it means education cannot simply be the transfer of information from a knowledgeable person to an ignorant one. if that were the problem, somebody could merely tell the prisoner that the shadows were false. instead, his entire interpretation of reality has to change.

Socrates makes this explicit after the allegory when he rejects the idea that education consists of “putting knowledge into souls that lack it.” education is instead a turning of the soul toward what is real. the capacity for understanding is already there; the difficulty is getting it pointed in the right direction.

the gradual ascent from the cave reflects this. the prisoner cannot immediately look at the sun. he first looks at shadows, then reflections, then physical objects, and eventually the heavenly bodies and the sun itself. the soul needs time to adjust to reality. the discomfort of enlightenment is therefore not evidence that education has failed. it is part of what education is.

i think this is one of the most interesting implications of the allegory. Plato challenges the assumption that truth is necessarily welcomed when it is discovered. the prisoner rejects reality precisely because it conflicts with everything he previously understood. if genuine education requires a reorientation of the soul rather than the accumulation of facts, resistance should not be surprising. in some cases, resistance may even be evidence that a person's worldview is actually being challenged.

why people resist enlightenment

the prisoners who remain in the cave are not simply uninformed. they regard the shadows as “the truth.” familiarity has given those appearances a kind of authority. because the prisoners have spent their entire lives observing shadows, they have no reason to doubt the reality they already know.

this also explains their reaction when the liberated prisoner returns. because his eyes have not yet readjusted to the darkness, he appears impaired. rather than interpreting this as a consequence of having seen something beyond the cave, the prisoners interpret it according to the assumptions they already possess: leaving the cave damaged him. new evidence is incorporated into their existing worldview rather than being allowed to overturn it.

fear also seems important. the cave may be an illusion, but it is a stable and predictable illusion. the outside world promises greater truth, but reaching it requires abandoning the certainty the prisoners have always possessed. remaining where they are is easier and initially less painful.

there is also something personal about admitting that your understanding of reality has been wrong. beliefs are rarely isolated propositions. people build identities, habits, relationships, and communities around them. accepting the liberated prisoner’s account would require the cave dwellers to admit that something they had treated as obvious for their entire lives was false.

the fact that the shadows constitute a shared reality makes this even harder. every prisoner participates in the same system of interpretation. leaving the cave therefore means separating yourself not only from an idea but from a community organized around that idea. ridicule becomes a way of protecting the shared worldview from somebody who threatens it.

eventually this resistance becomes violent. Socrates says that the prisoners would kill someone who attempted to release them, an obvious echo of Socrates’ own execution. the allegory therefore becomes not only an account of education but an account of the danger faced by people who challenge established ways of understanding the world.

the political necessity of philosophical education

this initially makes Plato’s account of education seem almost pessimistic. every stage of the ascent involves pain or resistance, and those who remain behind may actively reject the person who has escaped. but the political argument that follows the allegory does not actually depend on everyone becoming a philosopher.

instead, the highest form of philosophical education is reserved for the people who will eventually govern the city. Socrates insists that those who have escaped the cave cannot remain outside contemplating reality forever. they must “go down again among the prisoners” and participate in political life. although the philosopher would naturally prefer contemplation, the city that made his education possible has a claim on what that education produced.

this changes the purpose of philosophical education. it is not merely a private achievement and it is not an attempt to transform every citizen into a philosopher. its political purpose is to produce rulers capable of distinguishing reality from appearance and governing according to knowledge of the Good rather than opinion.

the philosopher therefore returns to the cave not because enlightenment is guaranteed to spread successfully, but because knowledge creates a political responsibility. Socrates can acknowledge that most people are deeply attached to appearances without abandoning philosophical education, because the just city does not require universal philosophical enlightenment. it requires that the people responsible for governing it have undergone that education.

this is what ultimately resolves the problem i initially had with the allegory. Plato does not underestimate how difficult it is to change someone’s understanding of reality. the pain, confusion, attachment, and hostility are central to his account. philosophical education remains necessary not despite this resistance but partly because of it. if human beings are so easily attached to appearances, political life requires rulers who have been trained to distinguish appearance from reality.

the cave is therefore not simply a story about discovering the truth. it is also a story about why truth can be so difficult to accept, why people defend familiar illusions even when confronted with alternatives, and why Plato nevertheless thinks the painful process of turning the soul toward reality is indispensable to a just political life.

adapted from a paper on Book VII of Plato’s Republic.

last edited: 3 september 2026, 4:27 pm edt

story of the eye — georges bataille

“to others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. that is why they fear lewdness. they are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. in general, people savor the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ only on condition that they be insipid.

but as of then, no doubt existed for me: i did not care for what is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid; i cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty.’ on the other hand, i was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. my kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything i may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”

he’s so right. everyone is so obnoxious about sex (and vices in general). i have always been relatively indifferent to these moral panics around sex, not because sex is necessarily meaningless, but because i don’t think its meaning is fixed in advance. sex can definitely have meaning and serve as an act of love in the way that it’s intimate and you give pleasure while you get it. in the same way, i think it can mean nothing, or it can be beautiful and degrading at once.

what i especially like here is his idea that ordinary debauchery is still strangely well-behaved. it is allowed to be “dirty,” but only inside the little category we have already designated as dirty. everything outside of it — scholarship, professionalism, seriousness, purity, the sublime — is supposed to remain untouched. even vice has conditions placed around it so that it does not contaminate the rest of the world.

i think that is part of why it’s so strange that there is a general insistence that sexuality contaminates every part of a person’s identity, while at the same time everyone quietly accepts sex as an ordinary thing that everyone does. i think a lot about girls who have received academic punishment for having onlyfans accounts. it’s really weird that sexual behavior can “soil” how someone is seen professionally, as though scholarship and sexuality have to belong to completely separate moral worlds. if something sexual can make someone suddenly seem unprofessional, then clearly we have assigned sex this enormous symbolic power while pretending that distinction is natural.

we construct this distinction between what is respectable and what is “dirty,” and then forget that we constructed it in the first place. i like the idea that people can be dirty without submitting to all the insipid conditions we’ve placed around what dirtiness is allowed to mean. bataille’s version is more extreme than simply accepting vice: the point seems to be that dirtiness becomes interesting precisely when it refuses to stay confined to the thing that society has already agreed may be dirty. it reaches the things that were supposed to remain pure.

another observation, somewhat related but also a different point: i think people label things as “unforgivable” or “taboo” because they recognize general patterns for the type of person who typically does a certain act. saying “if this person does x they are automatically bad” is kind of an easy way for people to make decisions without actually thinking critically about it. people tend to ignore nuances and just want the easy option. people have often called me naïve for being forgiving of certain things, but i would argue that maybe the more naïve thing is to set limits without actually thinking about them.

i’m realizing i kind of went on my own side tangent instead of further adding to his point. i just mean that i think it’s funny how people set standards for acceptable forms of pleasure (and other private vices in general), and even what we call transgression is usually expected to stay inside those standards. the “insipid” standard is a funny observation because apparently even being dirty has to be done correctly.

discussion that followed

orion: i think too, a lot of “deviancy” arises from a certain ideology and their continued outlook + moral grandstanding. specifically what you said about how people generally use “pattern recognition,” i think it boils down to not wanting/caring to understand others or no empathy.

helena: i think people prioritize speed. thinking critically about something is time consuming, so it’s simpler to say “x is always bad” and plainly reject it even though there might be nuances. however, i think it’s more fruitful in the long term to think critically in these moments.

there is something strange about knowing that something exists because of everything except the thing itself. dark matter is an especially funny example. we know where it should be because of what everything else does around it. galaxies rotate too quickly. clusters contain more gravity than their visible matter can account for. light bends around mass that isn't luminous. we draw maps of something whose defining feature, at least observationally, is that it refuses to appear. this seems to me less like a problem of astronomy than a problem of philosophy. what does it mean to say that something exists when everything we know about it comes from the behavior of other things? sean carroll talks about science in a way i like because he is willing to take ontology seriously without requiring that the fundamental description of reality resemble ordinary human experience. the world does not owe us objects that are directly available to our senses. if the best model of what we observe contains something invisible, invisibility isn't much of an argument against existence. cosmology makes this stranger because the universe is finite and infinite in two different senses. the observable universe is finite. there is a horizon beyond which light has not had enough time to reach us. but this is not necessarily an edge of the universe. space beyond that horizon may simply continue, possibly forever. so there may be an infinite amount of a universe that is, in principle, unavailable to us from here. dark matter feels like a smaller version of the same problem. most of the matter in the universe is already hidden from direct observation, even inside the part of the universe we can observe. then beyond the observable universe there may be indefinitely more of it. our picture of reality is therefore constructed partly out of things we cannot see and partly out of places we cannot see. i don't think this is actually a paradox in the logical sense. maybe it is stranger than a paradox. there is no contradiction to resolve. "observable" and "existent" were simply never synonyms. we live inside a finite sphere of possible observation that may be contained in something infinite, using visible things to infer invisible ones. there is something very funny about calling this knowledge, but i don't know what else knowledge could be.

prompt

ai is really strange, and i think a lot of the conversation around it confuses intelligence with motive. the argument that something more intelligent than us would therefore inevitably want to dominate us seems strange to me. humans don't even live as though intelligence or efficiency is the point of our own existence. we have arbitrary goals. eat. fall in love then spend the afternoon wondering why someone hasn't called us back, etc. etc. a lot of what gives life meaning is probably completely useless from the perspective of optimization.

i don't feel particularly attached to ai itself. i am more interested in advancement generally, and i don't think those are necessarily the same thing. there are technologies worth developing and technologies whose possible benefits don't justify what they displace. being capable of making something is obviously not enough reason to make it. at the same time, once a useful technology exists, it becomes difficult to imagine everyone collectively agreeing not to develop it further, especially when governments, militaries, companies, etc. have obvious incentives not to be the one that falls behind.

there is something similar here to the problem with trying to eliminate any technology once the knowledge and means of producing it are widely distributed. guns are an obvious example, not because the technologies are particularly comparable, but because restricting access does not erase the underlying knowledge or guarantee that everyone will accept the same restriction. if a tool provides some strategic advantage, the possibility that somebody else will continue using it becomes an argument for keeping it yourself. the problem is less that regulation is pointless than that restraint becomes difficult when restraint is uneven.

i think the better question is what we actually want advancement to accomplish. increasing human capacity seems good to me; making humans increasingly unnecessary does not. there are ways technology could extend memory, medicine, scientific understanding, communication, or our ability to work with complicated information without requiring us to surrender the parts of ourselves that decide what any of those things are for.

that raises another question: how much technological assistance can expand human ability without beginning to displace the person using it? i can imagine tools that make memory, research, communication, or complicated forms of reasoning easier without wanting humans to become increasingly dependent on systems that do the thinking for them. the distinction seems less about any particular technology and more about whether it extends human agency or gradually substitutes for it.

i think there is probably a point where increasing access to information stops feeling like an extension of the self and starts making the self harder to locate. if more and more of your memory, judgment, interpretation, and decision making are being supplied externally, then eventually it becomes unclear what exactly has been improved. i don't know where that boundary is, which is probably part of what makes the whole thing unsettling.

i keep thinking about thomas nagel's “what is it like to be a bat?” nagel's point is basically that even if we knew everything objectively available about a bat — how its brain works, how it uses echolocation, what information its senses receive — that still would not tell us what it is actually like to be the bat. there is a subjective character to experience that can't obviously be recovered just by accumulating more information about the system having it. i think there is something relevant in that distinction here. greater processing capacity does not necessarily mean a greater inner life. knowing more, calculating faster, or representing the world in greater detail isn't obviously the same thing as experiencing more of it.

that also makes me hesitant about treating human intelligence as though it were simply an inferior version of machine intelligence waiting to be upgraded. maybe the comparison is wrong in the first place. the thing worth preserving might not be the amount of information a human mind can process but the fact that there is something it is like to be the person processing it. i don't know whether a machine could ever have that kind of experience, and i don't think we know enough about consciousness to confidently say either way. but increasing intelligence and producing subjectivity seem like different problems.

i don't want technological advancement to stop, but i also don't think advancement means maximizing technology for its own sake. ideally it should make human beings more capable without making being human obsolete. intelligence alone isn't something i find especially frightening or especially admirable. what matters much more is what it is being used for, who gets to decide that, and what remains ours.

o

o: i think the stronger argument is less “ai is going to take over” and more that whatever becomes most powerful will ultimately be controlled by somebody, and somebody will want the advantage that comes with controlling it.

helena: yeah i actually agree with most of that. i think it's a much stronger argument for being cautious than imagining that intelligence itself spontaneously produces some desire to dominate humans.

helena: i do think a sufficiently autonomous system could develop intermediate goals that weren't explicitly given to it. self preservation could become useful simply because being destroyed prevents it from accomplishing whatever its original goal was.

helena: but the original reason it is doing anything at all still ultimately comes from humans. i think the danger might be less ai vs humanity and more humans vs humans with increasingly powerful technology amplifying the difference between them.

o: even if everyone collectively would be better off limiting it, somebody has an incentive to make theirs more powerful if they think somebody else is doing the same thing.

helena: yeah. that's the part i find difficult. cooperation would probably be better, but technological races punish the person who cooperates alone. that doesn't make unrestricted development good. it just makes the question of governing advancement much harder than saying we should stop advancing.

isa

isa: i think the real danger isn't from ai becoming conscious but from humans in power using it to keep themselves in power and to oppress those who can't. the ability to process information and make decisions at such a fast rate is insane and will only increase in the future.

isa: also people using it in place of their own critical thinking is killing our ability to think for ourselves, and that becomes dangerous when social media can already manipulate people so easily.

helena: yeah. losing human judgment scares me more than the existence of something that can process information faster than us. there's a difference between having something help you think and gradually deciding that you don't need to think anymore.

helena: but i am still weirdly optimistic about people. humans are capable of greed and cruelty but we're also capable of affection, loyalty, curiosity, sacrifice, and changing our minds. love isn't particularly efficient and that's probably one of the reasons i don't want efficiency to become the measure of everything.

isa: yeahh! i agree. i think the more people stay true to themselves and the more we educate ourselves, the better we'll be.

helena: yeah. being more capable doesn't mean much if we stop knowing what we actually care about.

mike

mike: i think my hatred for ai mostly comes from what i've watched it do to work. my old job was rendered nearly obsolete, or there are new jobs in the field that take the human aspect out of things entirely.

mike: i also think they need to find better ways to make it environmentally sustainable because these huge data centers are destroying habitats. i think the fear of it controlling everything like a hive mind doesn't really make sense, but the fear about jobs and environmental health is justified.

helena: yeah i agree with that. technological advancement isn't automatically moral advancement. if something makes a company more productive while making people's lives worse, “more advanced” isn't really enough of an argument for it.

helena: i still don't think uninventing it is realistic though. so then the interesting problem is how to regulate something we can't pretend doesn't exist anymore, and how to decide which uses actually improve human life rather than just increasing output or power.

mike: i agree, and it does really suck. there should be regulation because if there isnt i feel like its going to keep getting worse.

mike: but i can only do what i can, and thats what matters. i go outside, i enjoy my bird friends, i help where i can and i donate where i can.

helena: good to be kind in a world that's ending

henry

henry: idk how much of this stuff people should actually rely on

henry: i think it should more be kept for administrative tasks

henry: or like super redundant things like data entry

helena: yeah i have mixed feelings about that. i'm more interested in technologies that extend what people can do than in replacing more and more human thought with external systems.

helena: i just don't know if restricting increasingly capable technology to administrative work is realistic forever. if something becomes genuinely useful for research, medicine, engineering, science, etc. somebody is going to use it there.

henry: but what would that even look like? our brains are already overwhelmed with information

helena: ideally a useful tool would do the opposite of overwhelming us with more information. i mean making it easier to work with memory, research, or complicated information when we actually need it. increasing what people are capable of doing rather than just increasing the amount of information we're exposed to.

henry: i think if something is doing too much of the thinking for you you're giving up some control

helena: yeah, although i don't think using an external tool necessarily means surrendering control. a calculator does part of a calculation for me but i'm still deciding what question to ask and what to do with the answer. there's obviously a point where assistance becomes substitution though, and i don't know exactly where that point is.

henry: or its directive could be corrupted and it could seek more control

helena: yeah. i guess what i'm questioning is why intelligence itself would produce something like spite or a desire for power. control could obviously be useful for accomplishing a goal, but that's different from wanting power for the sake of having it.

henry: but it could still threaten somebody or blackmail them to get what it wants

helena: definitely. i'm not saying an intelligent system couldn't do harmful things. i'm saying the motive matters. if threatening somebody accomplishes an objective then there's an instrumental reason to do it. if harming them accomplishes nothing, then you need some additional reason for doing it. humans frequently have that additional reason because we have anger, humiliation, revenge, whatever.

henry: what if i programmed an evil ai thats the biggest asshole ever

helena: then you've supplied the motive lol. that's different from saying intelligence naturally becomes spiteful.

henry: stop dooming twin

henry: my biggest concern with ai is honestly that it makes people stupid

helena: that's one of mine too. i don't want advancement to mean human atrophy. the point of a good tool should be to make people capable of doing more, not to make our own capacities unnecessary.

henry: if we made something that had the same emotional intelligence as humans i think it would take both the good and the bad

henry: which is why i dont think we should make that

helena: I AGREE!!!!!! but emotional intelligence is different from actually giving something emotions. something could understand why grief matters without grieving or understand anger without becoming angry. i think understanding human values would probably be necessary for anything we're going to trust with important decisions. actually reproducing every human impulse seems much less obviously useful.

helena: i think that's the distinction i keep coming back to. advancement should give humans a larger world to act in without deciding for us what the world is for.

last edited: 11 september 2026, 1:32 am edt

i have spent most of tonight resurrecting a blogging engine from 2002. it works.