Dancing is a good example, though not perfect. It's hard to convince a club to have a salsa/bachata/tango/swing centered evening, because the interested crowd actually comes to dance and socialize. It is much more profitable and easy to turn down the lights and up the music and get customers that buy alcohol.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
I think it's important to distinguish Acts which individuals perform from the culture around those Acts.
Commodification of a subculture is spoken about as if it is a binary a purity test but that isn't reflective of reality. You can pay $500 to watch some aged punk rockers perform in an arena, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an illegal Warehouse show going on at the same time in the same city.
I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!
Like you say, computers nowadays can do basically anything. It is then a funny feeling to take an old computer, one that was once abandoned over all the minor frustrations that surrounded it, and revisit it today, only to be filled with wonder and parent-like pride in what the cute little thing is still able to do. Even trivial things, like playing mp3s! Despite being older in time, this antique relic of the past has its place in a younger part of my mind, and so feels more childish and immature. And yet, look at it go!
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
This phrase is repeated many, many times in the legendary fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality (HPMOR)[1], which I'm sure many here are familiar with already.
It is perplexing to hear people making room for their favourite pseudoscience using the excuse that "there are things science cannot explain". See, the annoying thing about science is that if something can as much as be observed, then it can be observed repeatedly, and then reasoned about - effectively allowing us to do science on it. That's even the case for magic, if it were real, as illustrated in HPMOR.
Even the most absurd and chaotic phenomenon, bereft of any discernible pattern or rhyme or reason, can at least be observed to behave chaotically and then be described as such. Et voilà : science !
There are many that would strongly object to this conclusion. I have heard friends describe their inner life as almost entirely verbal, that they "think in words", and are totally unable to relate to anything else.
When we say "communication", I think there is an implication that the goal is communication with others. But there is also value in communication with oneself. To verbalize is to condense ones thoughts into words, and when we hear words they get unpacked and evoke meaning. The resulting feedback loop can be amazing for refining ideas.
It should be no surprise that humans might end up relying on this internal monologue when thinking to the point that they mistake it for thought itself.
I think in words. There is always an internal dialogue. Even when doing music, or painting, I'm always anticipating what's next by some words; here comes the bridge, goes to Am now, gonna paint leaves in this shape, or maybe this other. I can visualize things and sounds, but words are always involved. That's probably why I'm not very talented at music or painting.
The thing is: I'm fairly confident my subconsciousness is the actual thinking part and my consciousness is kinda dumb if that makes sense. The part of my brain that does think in words is pretty slow and gets a lot of information from the "processor" behind without actually realizing it.
I visualize it as the 2 man start up where there one tech guy and one who sells it outwards.
I surprised my freshman-year Spanish teacher on the last day of classes when he did an AMA. I asked "do you think in Spanish"? This question was nonsense to him—another student got it, but he was baffled by what I was asking. It wasn't until years later when I found out that some people didn't have an internal monologue that his confusion made sense.
Are there really people with no internal voice at all? I understand that not everyone has this constant internal chat as I do, but it's hard to me to imagine, for example, solving math problems without "thinking" the numbers aloud.
I have an internal monologue and I struggle to imagine how someone can think without one. Yet I also wonder if bypassing the need to articulate thoughts in words is actually more efficient. Do those people have a higher thought throughput? I suspect we may never know.
I've abandoned the idea of all humans use language the same way a long time ago. However I hope everybody does not use language as a tool to drive a car and looking at the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan I'm pretty sure no language was involved before it sparked.
Took me a moment to get that heatmap. An axis labelled 1-10 from pale to red seemed absurd to me at first. "On a scale from-one-to-ten, how expensive are houses?"
It is a shame how vulgarization of science and statistics seems to necessitate a simplification of the data set to the point where its usefulness becomes debatable. It always seems to me like I want access to the axes that they've simplified away down to just a mean or an average. I get that presenting data is hard, but if I'm left more puzzled than informed at the end, what have you really presented to me?
In this case, I wish I could see the distribution of salaries through time and by location, as well as that of home prices. There ought to be a more interesting metric available than simply calculating the average of either and dividing the two.
I was eager to see the data, but exporting from the first source only gives the same data shown in the article, although in a spreadsheet.
The explanations in your second link are more like definitions than justifications for why this and those boiled down quantities are worth talking about.
I'm not trying to excuse them, I just had similar questions and googled around a bit and those looked interesting to save the next person a couple minutes! I also shamelessly sorta use my own HN comments as a brain dump sometimes for myself in the future.
I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.
But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.
Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.
> "Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express."
That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.
I totally agree. I've spent time learning several poems of Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Spell of the Yukon, The Men Who Don't Fit In) because I've enjoyed reading them. Now, I don't need a book, I just recall one from memory any time I like. I'm not an actor so I had none of the techniques that they would use to learn lines. It was purely rote memorization through repeated readings and recitation.
I agree, but I think it does depend on what the objective is. If preserving the literal accuracy of the source material is important, then memorization deserves it's bad rap and is worthy of much criticism.
That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.
On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.
This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they would walk from room to room and recover memories, for example to tell very long stories.
> If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.
(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)
I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years, as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at teaching the language, but did get us to read the script and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0] despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not having prayed for maybe 15 years.
Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have known and used this for millenia.
The difference between your experience and mine is that I have no idea what the verses are saying! They almost never pop into my head because I can't relate them to situations.
It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.
I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.
> I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.
Worth noting that India's oldest poetic/litergical traditions, the Vedas, were transmitted orally for at least 1500 years, and developed elaborate systems of memorization and pronounceation to ensure they passed down (almost) unmodified.
In Mauritania there is a village where most people who lived there are blind. This is how they learn to memorizw the Quran which is more than 600 pages, each have 15 lines.
Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called Hafiz memorize the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid, that the entire written copies either physicallly or digitally of the Quran are completely destroyed, it can be recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered a living miracle since no other holy book has this crucial feature and it is also well known that even the Pope do not memorize the complete Bible.
The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.
The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.
To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.
After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.
Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.
The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.
> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.
Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.
A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.
I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.
I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.
Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.
Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].
Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].
The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.
But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:
Isaiah 40:8
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Matthew 5:18
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
I sincerely hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but this seems like a worldly solution to a Godly problem. Is the God in the Quran not sovereign? Why would He need humans to protect the Quran?
Why would any almighty deity need humans to do anything at all?
This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.
(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)
There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)
The Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGSJ) has also been memorized by some people. It’s much rarer than in Islam, but the GGSJ being written in verse with defined melodies/meter helps with memorization. It is much longer than the Quran though, and there isn’t as much emphasis on memorizing the whole thing (the daily prayers are commonly known though).
A little tricky to read this. With the ground constantly changing underneath your feet, there's a feeling that rules and words get introduced then redefined willy nilly. The whole thing has a sense of "Numberwang" about it, which I think is part of why it comes across as satire. Another big part is no doubt how ridiculously the bootstrapping stage was written, but that seems intentional.
There's clearly something deep going on, but I will have to come back to this after an even deeper cup of coffee.
There's a lot to explain, and it has occurred to me that I have explained it in a suboptimal manner. Writer of this post, by the way. The problem is that there is just so much to communicate (the design for this language with Matthew took 3 weeks of back and forth communication over several hours a day). A lot to fill in for people that don't know me in real life.
I’m a non programmer, and while I can often just barely grasp what might possibly be going on in a “normal” language, I can’t even begin to pretend to make sense of what you’ve made. I’m glad some are able to appreciate what you’ve done.
I suspect the reception of it being suspected to be a joke, is the mention of lisp and brainfuck priming them for a joke, combined with examples and concepts that seem to require a much stronger than normal technical background. So for the average Joe it ends up in the “turbo encabulator” zone where it’s not quite clear if what’s going on is real or in jest. The prerequisites for understanding just aren’t there.
I also suspect a non-zero percentage of the readers have involuntarily audio flashbacks of Soulja Boy when they see that many “cranks” on a page.
I thought it was cool if a little impenetrable without extra effort! Reminded me a bit of Urbit’s old theorycraft, which I think is still an open question as to whether it’s an elaborate ruse, so the idea did cross my mind that I’m getting my leg pulled, but it seems to be in earnest. I have some similar thoughts in a related but different domain but user-extensible syntax is certainly a nice and uncommon language feature.
oh yeah, Urbit; I'm quite aware of the project and can recognize that to some I might just be explaining it in an intentionally confusing manner, perhaps. I do think the original intent of Urbit was to naturally select nerds, basically (I mean Curtis Yarvin talking about the old UseNet made it really seem like it), and no, that was not the intent here. It literally is just hard to figure out how to communicate the core concepts of Cognition and why we wanted it to be that way.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
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