Image: Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860s. He was the first to decisively coin the term agnosticism. By Ernest Edwards National Institutes of Health public domain
Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents
Well, today is the sixth of I was going to say
December for some reason, but November 2025,
it is kind of hard to believe
They're like a blink ago, I started my job,
my last job at ASU, and that was in like
two years ago, basically, a little bit more
And then I blink ago after that, that job ended
I was planning on going to Japan, South Korea,
China, Vietnam, and Thailand, and then I did that,
And I've been back like two months now,
and it's disturbing how fast time goes
I mean, I know this is not the most profound observation
But I remember when I was a kid, I was a kid,
and like a week seemed interminable
And kind of in a bad way, in some sense,
I mean, it wasn't a terrible experience,
like I wasn't always complaining,
but there would be things where you'd be looking forward
to something, and it'd be a week away
And it just seemed like a forever
And now, I blink my eyes and years have gone by
I've been, like, I'm back on Facebook,
don't feel great about it, but I am
And because I started my account there,
I'm still connected to the people I was connected to before
And there are a bunch of people that I'm connected to there
who, and didn't link them as well,
who I knew in graduate school
And I look at these guys, and they're like,
what the fuck happened to you, you're old now
And, you know, so many of them also, the dudes,
obviously lost their hair, they're bald
And you're seeing these bald guys,
and you're just like, what the fuck happened?
And then of course, the weird thing is,
I didn't actually, like, they're very old now
I'm not, I don't know how that happens
But no, I mean, like, we're all kind of the same age
And it's just weird, it's just fucking weird
I was just talking to somebody I used to work with
after my PhD, and his wife is the sister of someone
And her kid, who she had, after we broke up,
less than a year after we broke up, not mine
But, I have a history for some reason
of being with people right before the end up getting
pregnant, like, you know, just a month or two,
and then they get with somebody else and have a kid
In her case, I guess I don't want to talk too much about it,
but I was not in a great place to be in a relationship
that was sort of long term then
There was someone in grad school who I really liked
And I don't know that she ever would have
considered me as even a potential partner
But she definitely was very flirty, let's just say,
and was very hot and cold
Like, the first time we started talking online,
this was back when we had the Google talk,
or so I think that was what it was called
And it was Friday night, and she just message me out of the blue
And we had, I guess that the transcripts
are probably someplace, not that I want to go back
and look through those, but we had a really good talk
for hours and hours that night
And I would kind of see her every once in a while,
and we'd hang out a little bit, and then she'd get fucking weird,
and then she'd be hot again and cold again,
and it was, we'd never, we'd never, to be clear,
dated or anything like that
It was, and, you know, I was quite infatuated with her
I was, it was one of my last real,
like strong, lemurance kind of experiences
I've had, don't give me wrong
I've had a few sense, and not a few before
But somehow with her, just was extremely, extremely interested
And, you know, I knew that that wasn't gonna work
And so, you know, ended up in a couple of other relationships
But I wasn't really, I don't know,
hadn't really let go of the idea of maybe
And also, like there was this thing that, you know,
with my ex-wife, I mean, it's not that I wasn't,
like, didn't care for her, but we weren't, you know,
she was the first person I was ever really with romantically,
or physically, for that matter
I kind of, like, soft-dated a couple people before,
but then, you know, nothing had all serious
One of, one of those actually, also, she had a kid,
not long after we sort of soft-dated
And, I don't know, soft-dated as the rape,
but, you know, not really quite dating,
Not, you know, not dating, per se,
but, you know, like, fault-dated ish
in the vicinity of a date, or several
But, anyway, we sort of parted ways,
and then she got with some English guy
who, I think they were only together very briefly,
but got pregnant, had a kid
And that kid, I mean, years ago already,
this is, you know, not the date myself here,
but years ago, that kid was already 18
And I think maybe going to school,
I say going to school, I mean, university
And then you just think about, like, the time
So, and you think, also, like, if I would have had a kid
with her, not that we were going to have a kid,
but you know, it's like, at that time, just for time scale,
I would have a kid who is probably
could have a PhD by now for all I know
It's wild, it's hard to wrap your mind around,
And especially, like, it just keeps accelerating
And I think about, like, how fast it must go for my mom,
you know, like, it goes faster and faster for me,
and she's had decades more
And, I don't know, I think about that,
and then I think, getting back to this person that I was with,
And I, of the people that I've been with,
I think probably, you know, that, I guess in the scale of,
like, if you have the perspective of all the relationships
that you've been in, probably the one that I would have stayed
with, except, like, a couple of things
With one, again, I was still not really completely
letting go of this other one
That wasn't really even a relationship
But, you know, and it was very,
I don't know, she was, I don't want to get too much into that
But it was, like, I've not had many people on Facebook
where I've been disconnected and reconnected,
disconnected and reconnected, even once
And with her, it was, like, a half dozen times
And, like, I wouldn't see her for nine months,
and then we get chummy again, and then wouldn't see her
for a little while, and then it'd be, like,
every day we're having coffee in our office for a while
And then it was just fucking weird
It was just in retrospect and in perspective,
it was just weird, and unfortunate
But, I don't know, like, if she ever was interested,
I don't know how that would have gone
Yeah, it's one of those things, like, maybe the idea
is better than the reality
I don't know, I really don't
But, I was with this other person, and I think,
I think it would have been actually kind of okay,
but her sister was, yeah, she got married,
she was pregnant, she was having a kid,
and there was, like, we weren't together that far
or that much at this point
And she's already really interested
in having a kid and getting married
And it's just, like, the weird thing is now,
at this, at, by current, big age, not that big of age,
but, like, in my current age, looking back,
like having a kid doesn't seem like the worst idea
Now, I can imagine, I'm not exactly jealous of people
with them, but I do see, like, I watch a lot of pilots
And there's one that I don't really watch that much,
but occasionally, and he has a couple daughters,
and he's taught them to fly, and they fly together,
and all those kind of stuff, and actually, I see that,
and it's like, that kind of, yeah, I see some appeal to that
I see some, I think that I have some things,
some qualities, and I don't mean, like,
in the sense of passing them on genetically,
but just like raising somebody with them,
I think they would actually be good qualities
to the past on, and to maintain,
and I think they would actually be,
that I think they would be good
I think they would be good
They're the things that the world would be a better place
with more people, with certain things that I have
And, you know, like I'm saying, I don't know,
maybe I'm just, everybody thinks too highly of themselves,
or whatever, but I do think I have some things
I think, like, one of them, and actually,
this is the thing I wanted to talk about today,
that's the title of this, is agnosticism,
or agnostic, I think is what I'm gonna call it
And the funny thing is, I'm not agnostic
I'm absolutely not, I don't think at any point in my life,
I have ever been anything that I would call agnostic
I've basically always been non-religious
I was raised without religion, and frankly,
I am, I've talked about this a few times,
but I'm very thankful that I was raised without it
I'm very thankful that it wasn't really imposed on me,
that I didn't, the thing here is I just,
I see people who were raised with it,
and it's just very difficult for them, especially,
I mean, you know, like, I'm not saying like day-to-day,
always they seem to find some community
and comfort in it, sometimes
But you see people where they lose a kid,
or have some kind of tragedy before them,
or whatever, anything, anything like that
And you have this problem that you have to sort of resolve
with yourself, especially when I talk about religion,
I'm here talking primarily, like,
Judeo-Christian sort of traditions
But, you see people with these things,
and they have this idea of a single deity that is all loving,
and good, and powerful, and all those kind of stuff
And then their kid died, and how do you deal with that?
And I'm not saying like, anything could make that a okay thing,
but I just, I find great comfort in not being religious
Or for a lot of reasons, I think, you know,
but one of the biggest ones,
I did at one point when I was kind of like in high school,
I sort of thought about like the age of the universe,
and I was just, it was keeping me up at night,
thinking about like how long a human lifetime is,
and my perception of time at the time, especially
And so, you know, you think about that,
and then you think, on the planet at the time,
I don't know how many billions of people there were,
they were like six, less than probably less than seven,
time is wild, another or over eight
But, you think about that, that means every year,
that obviously have people going to sleep,
so it's not exactly, say, six billion, seven billion years
of experience of, I mean, really,
if you think like a third of your life,
you're asleep more or less,
that means it's really like,
say there were six billion people at the time,
I don't know how many it was,
but just like, rough numbers, six billion people,
and two thirds of that is actual subjective experience, it's time
And so that means, what does that,
four billion per year?
That means that every few years,
you've got the lifetime of the universe,
And then on top of that, you think about like,
well, that is a few years,
the duration of human,
like the extent to which humans have lived on the planet,
even though the population was long ago, much smaller,
do you add all that time up?
And then you think about all the other
is sentient beings on the planet
And you add all that time, I'm up
And it just, it really fucked with me
And I was just thinking about how long the universe
has been here, and that really fucked with me
And then you think also about the heat death,
And it just things like that kind of mess with me
And I don't think I ever really came
to a durable transferable conclusion about all of that stuff
Like it didn't resolve in a way
that I could tell you this,
and then that is going to comfort you
But in going through that exercise myself,
it's sort of at first overwhelmed me
And then I sort of started accepting it
And then I started being okay with it,
and then more than okay with it
And I, the universe that I inhabit in some sense
is sort of chaotic and random, and there's no,
I'm not saying like, it's just some extent to agnosticism
But as far as I know, there's no higher power
Now, the reason I say I'm not agnostic is agnostic implies,
I think it basically is that you don't have any understanding
And it's even impossible to know the nature
or existence of airports God
The problem with that is of course it assumes
the context of there is a God or there isn't a God
And it's specifically that sort of monophistic today
of Christian type of God, especially Christian God
And so you kind of think about it,
and it's like, it's still like Pascal's wager,
which it sounds, it's one of those things
that gets sounds like a reasonable deal
if you're coming from that tradition
if you were raised with it
And this is one of the reasons why, again,
I'm very thankful I wasn't raised with it,
because I think when people are raised with certain belief
systems like these, even the ones that I know
who have left them, that the people who have become
atheists in time or agnostic or whatever,
they never really fully sing to escape that framework
that was laid out for them that they sort of like,
God, when the cement in their brains was wet,
they got the sort of spiritual understanding of the universe,
like the universe works in a certain way
And even when they take away the sort of formal religion
or anything like that, they still have this sort of
spiritual thing that they talk about
and all those other stuff
That the way that I see the universe
does not have any of that
And in fact, to me, that stuff doesn't make sense
And like, I mean, part of it is also,
and I don't mean to get all like super,
oh, I'm a physicist, but I am a physicist
And you think about what would be,
what would it even mean to have a spiritual plane?
And you can't see it, but I'm doing giant novelty
ear quotes, or anything, what does that even mean?
Do you have, because you could have something,
let me really just do the exercise with me
You could either have something that exists outside
of the universe or, you know,
and essentially like, in a way that you can't
couple two, you can't connect to
And then does that even have a real meaning?
Or you have something that exists that somehow is connected
to reality, and then how is that different
than an electromagnetic field?
Or, you know, in any kind of like the Higgs field,
And so you think about that, and so it just sort of,
it doesn't make it like there, it doesn't exist
But to me, basically, it says, if it does exist,
then it's amenable to scientific method
and to the epistemology that,
and I mean, obviously there is the good-o incompleteness theorem
that says, you know, any logical framework
has unanswerable questions within the framework
So you could use that in way of your hands
But you know, basically, as I see it,
either that stuff exists in a way that is not really special,
or it doesn't exist in any meaningful way
And similarly, and this probably comes,
I really kind of blame, obviously,
like a lot of different things
But I think our track, the next generation,
really sort of did the nail on the head for meaning on this
It just kind of eliminated the chance of me
even ever thinking about any of this stuff
as a real thing, or in a meaningful way
Because in there, they have this character cue
And cue comes from a civilization,
which is basically from the perspective of humans
And you know, essentially very godlike
in terms of, again, the sort of Christian god
or the Judeo-Christian god,
trying to be careful between,
I don't wanna just munch all the stuff together
because I know there are a lot of,
a lot of details, and then if you go to other god systems,
another religious systems,
things get very complicated
It's a problem, it is definitely also a problem
It's one of the reasons that there are a lot of reasons
why I also don't call myself an atheist
Because atheists, agnostic says you don't know
and you can't know, atheists says that you know
And my non-religious says that the concept,
that it's a statement that doesn't have any meaning
Like, what does it mean to say that a god exists or not?
Because if you have an endothical,
like, back to this Q thing, but what properties
would your god have or gods have that really
or distinct from something like that?
Or even, you don't even have to go that far
I mean, you imagine if you're a human being,
you can get a pound of sugar
and take that to an ant colony
And that is like so much,
they can inconceivable amount of resource for them
that they just couldn't, it basically makes you on netizen
If you wanted, you could pour molten lead
That's so much energy compared to what they have access to
It's so much material, it's so much destruction
It's just, and you think about that sort of thing
except now you're the ant
And there's somebody else with a technology,
whether it's an individual or a species
or civilization or whatever,
some kind of technical ability
to muster that kind of level of energy,
or that level of mass or whatever
You know, they certainly with a flick of the wrist
I mean, you don't even have to get that advanced
because humans already have,
like, we've got thermonuclear weapons, right?
They're not, they're not huge
They're not like destructive on the scale of
But you can make a city go away in a blank,
like literally you could make a building go away
And you think about, from the perspective
of being just an individual human,
if you were trying to dismantle,
it's an interesting thing actually
because if you go back, I think it was the Assyrians
They raised cities and had to just do a quick search
to make sure I was not attributing this to the wrong person
But yeah, it was the ancient Assyrians would raise cities
And when I say raised cities,
I mean, they would salt the earth,
they would destroy everything
And essentially, like a nuclear bomb went off
But you think about the amount of time
and effort it would take
or a bunch of people to do that,
versus the flash of light and explosion
from compressing plutonium or whatever
And yeah, especially if you have,
do a little fusion after that or boost some stuff
and do fusion fusion vision or whatever you want to do
Any of that kind of stuff
And that is our level of technology now
If you imagine you have the ability
to, with a snap of your finger,
muster orders and orders of magnitude more than that,
literally just Zarbama's all day,
every day across the whole surface of a planet
And that's not a big deal to you
Now that's in the disruptive sense,
but you could imagine also
staying in the framework of Star Trek
If you have replicators and phasers
and all this kind of stuff,
You could build a building
Or some intricate detailed artwork
that would take a thousand artisans a thousand years
You could do it in minutes
And that's not that hard to imagine
someone with that kind of technology
Even if you don't have like actual replicators
or not, something that you could have,
you could certainly have like 3D printers
that are very efficient and very fast,
or something that's like that,
or nanofabrication on a massive scale,
or you could just sort of imagine
and having that level of technology,
how is that different in a meaningful way
from something god-like,
or something that you might call a god?
And in fact, you might even say,
if I have that technology
and I wanted to impersonate a deity,
how would you know the difference?
Especially if you are coming from a civilization
where you're like the ant
you want a million tons of gold,
it's like, okay, I mean you
It's not a big deal for me
And to you, it's the biggest deal in the world
Yeah, or whatever it is, whatever resource it is,
you're in the desert,
you want huge amounts of water,
and I can snap, I shingers,
and all of a sudden there's a massive lake in the desert
You just imagine that sort of thing
Somebody who's coming from a primitive society
might very well think that is very god-like
And you start thinking practically
what would be,
this isn't really where I wanted to go specifically
but this is just part of why I'm non-religious again
But what would it take to say, okay, this is something
that only what you're calling a god
could do or could be?
And I guess this does get into,
if you're agnostic, you don't know the nature
You could say, well, there's something unknowable about it
And I guess you could go to like Hindu traditions
where deities are sort of outside of time and space
and then things get a little bit more,
yeah, there are things you could talk about
that sort of maybe are a little bit different
but how is that necessarily different, even?
I mean, if you imagine,
you're a super advanced technology
or a species that just happens,
yeah, you're not even that advanced,
you just happen to exist outside of
what we think of as space time
and you exist in a different way
What does that really mean?
So I'm not questioning the distance
or the existence of such a thing
I'm not denying it, I'm not saying it exists
I'm just saying, I don't know that that's any different
than saying there's an alien technology and alien species
that's just vastly more powerful than us, maybe
And, you know, what does it really mean?
So I think part of the thing that people need
for that agnosticism is the structure
where you have a specific kind of God
or religious system in mind
Because, I mean, if you take it seriously,
like you don't know the nature,
and part of not knowing the nature would be
you don't know even what that is
And so it doesn't, it almost means
you wouldn't have that system,
but what people really mean,
I think when they say agnostic is they don't know
about the specific, you know,
basically the God that they were raised with,
whatever that happens to be,
with some small variations, you know,
they have an idea of what that is,
I started talking about a bit of Pascal's wager
This is a thing that I noticed, I do,
sometimes I go off on tangents
and I don't complete the thought
Even when I have notes, I have notes now
I almost always let that thread hang
But the Pascal's wager thing, if you have,
the idea, I guess if you don't know it,
is basically if you, whether you believe or not,
if you believe, then, you know,
maybe you get eternal reward
And if you don't believe,
then you get eternal punishment
And so the wager is basically saying,
well, okay, well, if that's the case,
then you might as well just believe just in case
And I guess that's very compelling,
if, if you think that there's only one possibility
The problem is it really falls apart badly
when you start realizing, well,
there are just on this planet,
thousands and thousands in human history
of different religious systems and different deities
who are in many ways mutually exclusive
So if you're gonna be doing Pascal's wager,
you can't even, if you wanted to,
believe in them all, just in case
So now you have to start picking and choosing
And now you're gonna really pick pickle
because if you believe in, you know,
the Christian God, and it turns out that
it's actually the invisible, all-powerful bunny
who doesn't like people who believe in that other one,
now you fucked yourself, you know,
your Pascal's wager, and then you can think
they're endlessly many, not only incompatible,
but like different things that if you believed
in all the other ones, they would even just in case
And then also there's that just in case thing,
because there's like, if you imagine some kind of omniscient,
this is something that actually gets to me about,
and especially in Israel,
there's this thing where they have a lot of technologies
that basically, because I'm unsure about,
you're not supposed to, you're not supposed to do certain stuff,
right?
You're not supposed to like flick switches and watch,
turn on TV or turn on machines or any,
you're not supposed to do certain kinds of work, basically
I'm being very high level there, but you know,
you're not really supposed to do stuff
But there's a lot of like lawyer and God kind of stuff,
so it's like, well, you're not supposed to do this,
but what we'll do is we'll make a machine
that randomly flushes the toilet,
so you're not flushing the toilet,
but you're getting the benefit of flushing the toilet
And a certain point to me, it's like,
I don't know, if you really think that there is a God
and they have these rules for you, for whatever reason,
and you're sitting there trying to game the system,
I don't think you're gonna fool that being
If you think that there's a God
and you're just believing just in case,
it's another problem with the pastels, what do you do you think?
They probably know, and is that really believing
if you're doing it just in case shit?
And it also gets to another thing that gets to me,
which is like, in grad school, there was a guy,
he's, I think he's now an atheist actually, which is wild,
but he was a young earth creationist
He was getting his PhD, I think in chemistry at the time,
and he, so young earth, so he understands chemistry,
understands a lot of stuff that would tell you
the earth is ancient, and when I say ancient,
I mean, like a couple thousand years old,
but because if his religious upbringing
believed the earth was like 10,000 years old,
or whatever, whatever they believe
And yeah, believe also that people who don't believe
are going to suffer eternal damnation
This is one thing that, when I started realizing this,
started really getting to me,
because if you really genuinely believe that
and you're walking around with that and you see people,
how fucked up is it?
Like, truly, and I'm not saying I want you
to really proselytize to me or try to save me or anything,
But if I thought that you were going to burn and pain
and fire and torment and all this kind of stuff forever,
I think I would probably try to at least tell you,
like I try to go like, you know,
maybe you should think about this, but they never do
They never pretty much never do the only ones
that occasionally would do that
is like you get the proselytizers that come out to your door,
or you get these people who are like hanging out
just on campus or whatever
And the watch tower drove as witness people
And they're not even, I don't think that they're really,
I don't know what their religious system is
to be honest, I don't know anything about them specifically,
other than the fact that they're out there
And they don't seem to mind the fact
that they bought a two-letter domain,
which two-letter.com domain, you fucking expensive
I brought this up, I've talked to them a couple of times
I brought this up to them and it didn't really register,
but somebody spent a lot of money, a lot of money on that
And I don't know how much they spent actually,
but I'm sure it was not cheap
A four-letter domain is expensive,
three-letter domain is expensive,
a two-letter domain is fucking expensive, it has to be
how much fucking money did you waste on that?
Maybe it's two-letters.org, I don't even know
Whatever it is, it doesn't matter
And don't follow it and don't go to their, the cult, but yeah
It's just, I look at that and the whole idea
It also also actually, as long as I'm talking about this,
there are always in pairs and just like the Mormons,
the LDS people who are going out and proselytizing to you, too,
who, you know, like, I lived in Gilbert, Arizona
And in the neighborhood that I was in,
there would be kids doing their missions
And they come out and they're on bikes,
and they're always together, always in pairs, it's very important
They say that it's for safety, I'm sure,
or some other bullshit, but what it really is for is a bonding experience
Because you're going out into the world
and you're facing a lot of people who are not in your cult
And for them, you know, some of them are going to be assholes
Some of them are going to be hostile
And even the ones that are nice, they're not probably going to entertain you
and you're not in sense too much
So that sort of stuff you are getting hardened by that,
And even if not that, they're just sitting out there,
like you drive around Gilbert now, they're like seven again
There are two fuckers out there sitting at a bench,
either talking to each other, or sometimes they would not be talking to each other
They look, some of them even look kind of like they're a couple,
and they're just nothing to say to each other, which is weird to me
But whatever it is, it's like, it's a bonding experience
This is why cults send people out to recruit people
Because a recruiting people is the thing that's at a cult grows,
but also part of that is indoctrinating you further
It's partly hardening you
It's partly showing you, like, oh, see how hostile the world is,
see how uninviting, see how rude people may be,
or any of this kind of stuff
And then people kind of have that experience,
and then suddenly a little bit more inclined to stay in the fold
You're more inclined not to go out and venture and escape,
and all this kind of stuff
Incidentally, also not to keep harping on this stuff,
but I knew, I don't want to say anything specific that's going to identify people,
but I have known in my life people who were in these cults,
who I'm pretty sure, you don't know, but I'm pretty pretty pretty sure we're gay
And you think about it also,
if I was gay, my parents would have been fine
Like it would not have been a big deal
It would not have been like the end of the world, certainly
I wouldn't have gotten excommunicated from my community and all this kind of stuff
But some of these religions, if you are, either you do the conversion therapy,
which is fucking ridiculous, or, and horrible torture,
or, you know, like, the people that leave,
whether it's that they're gay or just like, I've known people also who've left,
and the people who've left, especially,
and I'm thinking on the Mormons a lot, because I know several people who either,
they weren't Mormon, and they lived in a Mormon community,
and they were just shunned, and it was shitty, or they were Mormon,
and they were gay, and fucked up their shit, or they were Mormon,
and they didn't want their kids to have to be polygamous, so they had to move,
or they were Mormon, and they decided that they weren't religious,
and then they lost their entire fucking social network
Like, not just the community members around, but like, they're fucking family,
other than, like, one or two people abandoned them, and, and that
I have some animosity toward people that are shitty like this
And also, like, there's a certain, I don't mean, again, I don't mean to pick on a specific religion
I'm not a fan of most of the major religions
I'm not a fan even of the ones that are, I would say,
warp in high, but especially like the, especially the Christian Catholic,
all those kinds of derivatives, somehow, particularly not my thing
And, because there are a lot of, it's that thing, you know, I like your Christ,
but not your Christians, they're, that guy, they talk about, that they have the stories about,
seems a clinical guy, seems like a pretty, you know, he's like,
appreciates sex workers, is cool with people, likes immigrants, feeds people,
very charitable, you know, turn the other cheekets, all of these things,
they're, they're all fairly, I would say, noble attributes,
but you actually look at the people in these religions, and they're fucking horrible people,
and a lot of them also, I'm just thinking about Republican Congress people here,
but you know, like, they're, they're supposed to be loving and caring and all this shit,
and I swear, like, I don't think these people, I'm convinced a lot of the very religiousy
people that you see, especially in government, if they really believed, I don't think they would act
in the ways that they do, I don't think they would do the things that they say,
and I really think a lot of them are more non-religious than I am, they just pretend,
which is weird and gross, like it's worse than, I would rather they actually be genuinely like
true believey kind of people, or really I would rather than that, you know, but never mind that
Getting back to, uh, getting off that tangent and trying to get back to what I'm talking about here,
the agnostic thing came up, because I was on, I'm on the loose guy, not a huge fan of the
people that run the place, they are techno-libertarian, uh, giant air quotes on this, free speech,
absolutist, and I always remember, I've talked about this a few times, sorry if I'm repeating
myself, but I always remember when I was a kid, and I remember ACLU was defending Nazis,
and I think it was my dad that I was talking to, I don't even remember who I talked to about it,
but I talked to somebody about it, and I said, what, why, why, why are they defending them?
And then I'd hear the story, which is what the free speech absolutely does always say,
which is like, well, they have the whole marketplace of ideas nonsense, and, and then they have
this thing where it's like, well, you know, Scott, it's very important, it's most important
that we protect the right for people to have terrible ideas and speak about those,
because if we allow their speech to be abridged, then in time that will just open the door
And the thing that's funny about this is this is the argument, this is actually
a good argument, if you're talking about, you should not allow the government to strip people
You should not allow, I don't even think you should allow the government
to detain people indefinitely
I think that's actually probably pretty fucked up
should not be allowed to deprive people of life, like premeditated murder by the state, is wild,
the fact that anyone's okay with that is just absolutely ridiculous beyond ridiculous
But also let the ability to take away people's right to vote, if you give the state the
power to take away the right to vote
Think about what that means
Think about what that means
That means there's something you could do, you don't even have to do it, just somebody can decide
And now you cannot vote, you lose your representation in the state
And I always talk to people about this, and it's one of those things that people,
I don't know if they just not thought about it or if they really are true believers in this idea,
but I think it's one of these things
I think that what it is, I think maybe I'm just being
overly charitable here, but I think what it is is they never really thought about it,
and then you talk to them about it
And instead of really interrogating it, they kind of just
default the trying to defend this position that they have, that it's okay to do
But you should never, never, ever, ever, ever give the state that ability
And you think about it also, it's like, well, I talked to people about that and they're always like,
well, what about somebody who, and they come up with some horrible crimes that somebody might have
committed, and also like, this gets actually to, I'm not, again, agnostic, but in my epistemology,
my way of understanding what is and how things are and how you know stuff
know anything with absolute certainty
You don't know anything definitively one way or another
Everything is kind of an approximation
And you could be really, very, very confident about something,
but there's still like a sliver of doubt, no matter what
And you could be very uncertain about things
In fact, the default position is you just don't know
This is a thing, I wish more people were
just okay with, I don't know, as an answer
And like, I don't know is the greatest thing that you
could say, and the second greatest thing is I was wrong, I think
Those are, if more people would
be able to say those things, and we're comfortable with them
I was at a coffee shop this morning, and there were two women talking,
this is not related to that, but this is also a thing that I think, they were talking about
one other kids was having issues with constipation
And it was like, I guess, really,
I'm not, there's no way, like, I don't even know who these people are, so I'm not
developing private information about somebody that anyone would know
Just some kid has constipation,
very embarrassed about it
And the fact that we are like, we're trained to be ashamed of just
basic bodily functions and issues
Like, it's, it's fucking weird, it's fucking weird, because we all
have bowels, right? I mean, unless you're very unlucky, we all have physiological needs, we all have,
you know, like, processing of food and things like this, and we don't talk about that shit
You know, and it never mind talking about, like, reproduction and reproductive health and
sex ed, and all that kind of stuff
And if you wouldn't even get into that, this gets to,
coming a little bit back full circle, the grad student that I was super
infatuated with, you know, our culture doesn't teach you at all, like, how to deal with,
and I'm not even going to say rejection, but just like relationships in a really good way
And it's not just, we don't, like, sex, you just have this idea that, oh, you just know how to do it
And you don't talk about it very much, and it's kind of very ashamed
There's a lot of weirdness around it
And you think about, like, relationships, too,
like asking for consent is such a weird thing in our society
Like, I mean, I'm not saying,
I'm just saying that the way that our society is,
asking if, you know, we can kiss or can I touch you or something like that? Can I hold your hand?
And I don't mean that it's actually weird
to have some weirdness around it
We don't have that protocol
And it's just, like, the way that you have that, the way that you have this idea,
like, there's so much stuff
If you look at movies and, you know, it's interesting
like, I think Romeo and Juliet was making fun of this more than anything, because I was just listening
to somebody talking about this
And in the thing, I'm terrible with names
Romeo is with, I guess, Juliet's cousin or something
And she's not into him or something
He's like super-infatuated
And she's the son all this stuff
And then all of a sudden, he's into this Juliet, who is also,
I think, like, 13, which is, you know, fucking, I might be off on the age, but, yeah,
They're definitely way the fuck too young
They've known each other for
I think Shakespeare's making fun of it
I think he's, like, pointing out how fucked
But if we have this idea, this hyper-romantic idea that, A, you don't know if somebody
and you should be super, you know, like, love it for sight or whatever, like this
you know, there's this idea of, um, the airport's friend's own stuff
And it, which is kind of ridiculous
Because the, the relationships that I've actually had, especially the good ones, they started out,
like, it wasn't, you have this social idea that you're supposed to ask somebody on a date
And then it's, it's all weird
And it's kind of like, there's a lot of pressure to it
And then you have this stuff where everybody's kind of pretending to be somebody else
making a, a different version of yourself
And then you, you get to know each other there
And then now you become, like, now you have to know that actual person
The relationships that I've had that have actually been good and the, the way that I've preferred
to, to get into a relationship with somebody is not, like, it's not even the friend's own
It's like, you meet somebody
And, you know, like, things just
And we don't talk about this stuff
We have a lot of models, especially in pop culture of terrible versions of this
You have a lot of models of, like, oh, somebody gets drunk and then they get taken advantage of
And, you know, I mean, to, I say take an advantage of, I mean, that's, that's code for raped
Basically, or, or, you know, I'm not saying that every time you have sex under the influence of
But there's a lot of, like, really transgressive stuff in our pop culture
just don't fucking, like, they take that to be normal
They take, I mean, it's one of the reasons
I think that they're stalking
And it is also, like, you get to the whole bullshit, uh, I, again,
with the air quotes that you can't see
I need, I need a, a way to, like, end the thing I've, like,
Um, you know, because I'm like, I don't want to actually say something
and have it sound like I'm actually saying it, uh, without the giant air quotes around it
But, uh, and I got so, and I got so hung up on that, I forgot what the fuck I was going to
The, the whole idea of, like, not taking no for an answer, love it for sight, um,
you know, that dealing with for you actually, that was it
along the, uh, Linus epidemic, air quotes, air quotes, air quotes
Um, that whole bullshit thing
Also, like, I, I was, uh, according to museum culture, I was kind of a
I never, like, I, I, I never, and there, there was somebody, my sister's friend
had a sleepover, and we kissed, uh, like, 14 or something
That was very consensual,
and very sort of driven by her
I didn't have been younger than that
we're both, she might have been a year younger than me or something, but that was, that was a thing
And then didn't go anywhere
And I wasn't really, other than that, like the next time I,
and I was not a very social person, like, in high school, really didn't have any friends
I've been in talk to people, and you had, but that's not really any friends
for the first couple of years, I had, there were a couple of TAs
There was one TA that I really
There was, uh, there were a couple of TAs that I kind of got to know a little bit,
but in terms of, I was never really very comfortable with people my age
in the relationship, like romantic relationship way
I just mean, especially with the little kids
I didn't, I never really felt that comfortable with them
I never really felt like when I was a little
kid, I always got along much better with adults
I didn't, um, I didn't feel like one of the kids,
And, you know, as I got older, I sort of grew, well, I don't know if I grew into it,
or I just like, the people around me got to be the age group that I was, you know, feeling comfortable
And then sort of like the end of undergrad, I start connecting with people a little bit,
getting to graduate school, and connect a little bit more, and then after I finished my masters,
gotten to my PhD, and, you know, start connecting with people more, and also, and I don't know how
I don't think it's a thing you can control, but I'm at somebody who every
introvert should meet, uh, you kind of need one of these people, uh, socially extroverted and
sort of person connector, uh, who has a lot of friends and does a lot of stuff and plans a lot
of stuff, and you get, you get somebody like this in your life, and you suddenly, I've had a
handful of them, and it's just like night and day
It went, in fact, like from my,
there was one point in time where I never, just never really was that social, and I kind of,
I felt bad that I wasn't getting included in stuff, and then it almost overnight,
I mean, it wasn't overnight, it was, you know, months, but at, at some point, it kind of flipped,
and it was like every fucking weekend, I had shit to do, and in the weekdays, I had shit to do,
not every day necessarily, but, like, too much, and then it started being like, I was invited to
stuff, and at first, I was getting invited to stuff, and I was like, I have to go to fucking everything,
and it was partly because I didn't want to not get invited, and partly because it was just,
like, for so long, I never gotten invited to shit
It wasn't like people excluded me, it was just
to, like, nobody knew me enough to do it, but, you know, and I kind of felt like I wanted it,
and then it got to the point where I was like, okay, this is not, I need time to myself,
and now it's like to the point where almost to an unhealthy extent, I get invited to stuff,
and I just don't want to, you know, but basically never want to do it, and this is not that I don't
do stuff, and usually if I go out and do stuff, I actually enjoy it, but pretty much, like,
even if I'm going to enjoy it, somebody invites me to something anymore, and I'm just, you know,
there are some rare exceptions for the most part, hey, I get that, and I'm like, oh, it seems,
it's not a thing I want to do
It's a weird lip, and, you know, because there was a time where, like,
anyone could have invited me to anything, and I would have absolutely done it, and, you know,
I don't mean in the sense of being susceptible to social pressure and that kind of stuff,
but, you know, like, to get to go someplace with people, I would have been, I would have been way down
Anyway, rambling around here, the thing getting back to this agnosticism, I'm on blue sky,
the people who run blue sky, I started talking about those, but they're left, they're not left,
they are techno libertarians, and, again, with the giant air quotes, free giant air quotes,
speech, giant airports, uh, absolutists, and I got the ACLU thing, defending Nazis, and all this kind
of stuff, I am increasingly convinced that when people say they're free speech absolutists,
what they really mean is that they want mid-white dudes to be able to say the inward and the
f-word, I don't mean to fuck there, and, you know, just to be very unrestricted, it's kind of weird,
because it's like, you're, you're a white dude, you could do anything you could talk about anything,
you have a lot of stuff, you have a lot of privileges, and any kind of little limitation
It's like, you know, you, you, how dare you not allow me to say,
like, I mean, people literally basically talk about stuff like that, it's the most fucking ridiculous
ass and I should, but these techno libertarians are like that too, and they're also not to get too
much into the blue sky bullshit, but the second, like they did not want to implement
Blocking was part of the design of at protocol, which is the thing that they claimed that
they were trying to build, and then you bunch of bullshit, but anyway, they did that,
didn't want to implement blocking for the longest time, and then they finally implemented it
because some asshole, I don't, I don't even want to say his name because he's a massive
He's, he's a journalist who is known, journalists is not the right
word, he's like a writing entertainer or something, great shitty articles, and his main thing is,
his whole shit is easy, but I think all themselves heterodox bullshit thing, you know,
I'm a contrarian, and the contrarian part is like you're just an asshole troll,
and basically his whole, his whole thing, and they're, they're a bunch of people like this
is saying shit that is either transgressive or inappropriate or you're just fucking wrong,
and then stirring up a shit storm, and then the shit storm gets him a lot of attention,
and you know, it's how trolls work, and it just increases his profile, and then he's got more
people, and then he gets to do it more, and he's just, I'm sure he gets paid really well for it,
he probably comes from, I don't know his history, but anyway, the point is he got on here,
and people started shooting on him correctly, but he got upset about it, and then he finally
finally, people who were making the site into implementing blocking, so he could block people,
that's why they implemented blocking
They also, as part of that, I don't want to make this
up loose cracking, but as part of that, they did it in a way that was kind of, they didn't want
to do the blocking, so they made it in a way that just broke stuff, like it would block stuff,
and it just disconnected threads, like if somebody, and if somebody blocked somebody in the thread,
it just nuked everything, every interaction thereafter, and people, it actually, they called
it the nuclear block, they didn't, not the blue sky, people, but the people using it,
and it was, it was a nice, accidental feature, it made it, like if somebody was shitty,
the trolling, all it took was you block them, and they no longer have your mentions
the game traction, and it's magical, because people would just, there's a lot, people came on there,
tried their anti-social bullshit, which works in other social media platforms, because most
of them are designed so that, as my ex-wife used to say, negative attention is still attention,
and so they would give people a reward for being shitty, because you're shitty, you say shitty
stuff, and then you'd have a lot of interactions, and more and more people would see you,
and people would start following them, and because they had a lot of followers, there's a
thing, it's, it's, I guess it's this bandwagon thing that people do, but it's, it's still
fucking annoying, people will follow people just because they have a lot of followers, you see,
somebody's got like a million followers, well shit, I'm gonna be one of the million, I don't know why,
it doesn't make sense to me, I see that and I'm like, yeah, I'm good, but just not to say,
I don't follow people with a lot of followers, but you know, it doesn't, if anything it
discourages me, but for some reason, for a lot of people that is attractive, it's an interesting
thing, but, you know, they, they do that, and then they get interactions they get seen, and that
means that some of them, because they're getting a lot of interactions, people will follow them,
because they're being shitty, sometimes there will be people who are attracted to the, to the
shittyness, and they'll follow them, and it just keeps building on itself, because they, the more people
they've got following them, the more interactions they get, and then, you know, it's this exponential
growth thing, and it's just, it's one of the things I really hate about the way these things are
structured, that it just absolutely rewards the worst people, the people who, because it's negative stuff,
not that there's negative embossed emotions and all that's going to stop, but, you know,
the stuff where it's people being shitty and trolling and all this stuff, I guess you could call it
negative, if you like, I'm, I'm not sure that's the right word, but whatever it is, anti social
counter, you know, bullshit, that kind of stuff, it lights up people's amygdala's and gets
much more traction than the, the good stuff, and it's annoying, because these people, I mean,
it's like the, the right wing media stuff being more popular than the more boring stuff,
it just builds and builds and builds on itself, and it's annoying, and I hate it, and it, you know,
it's a terrible thing, that nuclear block, more time, prevented that, because trolling is no fun,
being an asshole is no fun, if you do it, and then you get no pushback, you do it, you don't get anything
out of it, and so people would do it, they disappeared, I mean, they, their interactions would just go
away, and then they'd get no traction, and they'd have like a small number of followers there,
and they had a lot of followers on Twitter, and so they just go back to Twitter
Anyway, the, the thing that I'm getting to, with all of this, I'm on blue sky today,
somebody came up with something about agnosticism, and it was, I wish I could remember the context,
actually, now because I, it's the whole point of this episode is based on this little interaction
that we had, and we went back and forth a few times, and they were explaining how silly they
think agnosticism is, and I'm sitting there saying, like, I personally am not agnostic,
and it is not something that would be within, within me, really, but I can understand that if you
have a certain epistemology, like a certain way of knowing things, and you have a certain
sort of framework for how the universe works, which basically puts you into this idea of a specific
kind of God and religious system or non
Then agnosticism is probably probably almost the
correct answer subject to those assumptions, and we went back and forth, or I don't want to
get into the logic of that, although I do think like philosophy of science is a, it's a course
that I've taken, I think it's worth in, you know, studying empiricism, studying epistemologies,
not just that one, but you know, like other ones too, to learn about other ways of thinking
I think it's kind of important, I think, I really think like, I've never had a class
that, and I don't want to get into the like the Steve Jobs sat in on, on type setting, and that's
why you have post script and all those bullshit, but I do think every class that I've ever taken,
whether it's Native American religious traditions or dating myself again at the time it was
called the Women's Studies, now it's called Gender Studies, that kind of stuff, it's all been
very beneficial to me going forward
I can't think of a class optics
Actually, undergrad optics,
there was the only class, not even that was probably useful, but the professor for that class
who, I guess you could probably look up, I think he's retired and we're just now, it doesn't matter
It's probably pretty hard to figure out when I was there and who was teaching all that kind of stuff
it doesn't, I don't think I'm embarrassing somebody or talking shit about somebody specifically, but
worst professor I've ever had, truly, in terms of teaching, because the way that he taught,
especially, my memory is not as good now as it used to be, but it used to be if I was paying attention
in class and I could understand how stuff worked, I just owned it
And it's still true, if I understand
something now, I just understand it
Like I just, yeah, it's, I'm not saying it's easy, but it just
It's why I can, I could not use calculus for a couple of years and then figure it
Like it might take a little bit of time to brush up, but it would come back to me pretty quickly,
Even like, reman versus lip egg integration and all that kind of stuff,
I probably couldn't write some proof, so it would take some time, I'd probably have to do some work
to figure it out, but I could get there
But I'm not doing like a complex analysis proof right
now that it's not going to happen
But the stuff that I really understand, it kind of understands it
And so if you understand it, you kind of own it
I think that is, I know people think differently
and they learn differently and all that's going to stuff
But for me, especially with physics,
like in all of the exams, there would always be this thing, the ones that I taught and the ones
that I took, they'd always let you take a cheat sheet and a cheat sheet and air quotes,
which was like a bunch of page or, yeah, one page both sided and formulaes or whatever bullshit
And there are always people that would have like microprint, full both sides,
dense text, like how to fuck did you write that kind of stuff? And in reality, you know,
most of the stuff that you needed to know either, one of the better professors I had,
the guy that I took a differential apology with and general relativity and advanced algebra,
which was a very cool class
I've talked about him before, but he, he's actually one of the
few people that I'm like my professors that I'm actually still connected to on Facebook
always said this thing, which was like, yeah, you, to do the proofs, what you want to do is learn
how to garden and take a pack of seeds with you and the seeds are like the little things that you
start with and then you learn how to, you kind of know where you're going and you take those seeds
and then you can kind of work from them
And he was right, it really, especially for the proofs,
like that that we would do, it really worked
I'm sure, like if you're trying to do like
format's last theorem, it might be a little bit challenging, but for the proofs that we were doing
Yeah, that was a good class, rings and fields and groups and all that kind
I miss, it was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago or so,
And I mean, obviously, like part of it is just a year at a certain time,
it's like a moment in your life where things are a certain way
it was not socially for me
There were a lot of things that were not
But one thing that was awesome about undergrad for me, especially one semester
I was working and working while you're going to school sucks
But most of it, I was getting
student loans living at home and so I didn't really have that many expenses
not disposable income, but I could go to movies or eat or stuff like that
And some of the classes were not great
Some of the classes were things that I
wasn't that excited about
But most of the classes were pretty interesting
also, I almost forgot, well, I do kind of regret
I would have liked to have taken more
literature classes or history or a few languages, but it would have been nice to take more
It would have been like undergrad if money was not an object
I always used to say that I would, and I would still would do this, like collect
alphabet soup after my name
I just get a bunch of doctorates and get a JD and get an MD
I don't think I would ever get an EDD
It's kind of a weird thing
I don't know that I would get an MBA
I might do it just like, if I was
really going to live like hundreds of years and just be like essentially, you know, as healthy
as you are biologically, you're like you're 30 and money's no problem and you can just do whatever
Okay, I probably get an MBA just to just do it
I would definitely do that
and practice for a little while
I probably practice surgery for a little while
But then you think about the MBA, the business degree, you can't see the whinsing on my face,
but it's not a pleasant look
It's not like, it's more like it you
out of curiosity, but I don't know that I can tolerate it
I probably get sick of it
But anyway, getting rambling around here, rambling is what I do
listening to this, you hopefully like the rambling because if you don't, you know, listen to
It's kind of the thing that you need to, I don't have an, or I don't have
like a massive audience, but if you're cultivating an audience, you probably want to not perform
too much that's too difficult or too far outside of who you are because if I was doing like a song
in dance or if I was doing like jokes, imagine, imagine that you'd make a podcast and your whole
thing is just jokes, just like material that you're working out
And on one hand, you can get pretty
efficient at, you know, taking stuff and understanding how to grab a garden and picking up the seeds
and growing the jokes and all that kind of stuff
You could do that too, but it's going to be hard
Unless you're just naturally like, that's the thing you do
And I do, the weird thing is actually,
I do, I do joke around a lot, but it doesn't really come out in this setting
situational and in terms of relationships with people and you're like, I'm in a situation
things happen and then I comment on them and it's kind of fine
And or I do something weird,
or whatever it is, or somebody else does something weird and I error mark on it
down, if you're doing it and you're the people who start listening or the people who want that,
and now you've got to deliver it and you just think about like, how miserable that must be
I can imagine like, I, today, I wrote an outline and I think the outline
is actually not too bad as a thing for me to do
Like, it gives me at least some kind of structure
to hang on and some things that I'm like, okay, I want to say this and this and this and almost always
when I listen to one of these, there are things that I just skip over or I'll like introduce something
and then get side tracked and never come back and say the thing that I wanted to finish with
or I wanted to finish up and it's kind of annoying to me
And that even happens with the notes,
but if I don't do notes, then that definitely is fucked
But you think about like you could be doing
this as something where you have a script, but you've written stuff down and you're just reading it
And I guess for a certain kind of person, Simon Wissler, that works for
thing that he really enjoys and part of it is also, it's not just that he's reading the script,
but he also, as he's reading the script, comments on it and it's kind of stuff
For at least somewhat, I listened to one of his things with my mom and sister,
And it also like, it's interesting, I guess it's a human thing,
but when you're in an audience and stuff falls flat, even if you would normally like it,
it makes you like it less
And so I did not enjoy the one that I was listening to with them
And it's kind of had a lasting effect
I think also like I've heard maybe too many of his things,
But you know, if you're doing something where you're putting in a lot of
work, I understand why people get burnt out
Because especially like I don't edit this this
that or that much, and it's so much work just to edit it a little bit
And especially like when I
was trying to do videos, I think there's something nice, I do think like the, there's something
I like TikTok for the videos, but the problem is also at the same time,
it's just like, I do, yeah, I don't know, do you really, do you really want to put in that much
time and effort? Like if I had somebody to do the editing and all that kind of stuff and I could just
record the video, I guess I'd probably do it, but even even like a minimal amount of editing on a video
And if you really want to do like you make it, like I've
done somewhere, I've put in a lot of time, did a lot of, did a lot of cuts, and you put in some
figures, and you put, and you start doing that, and it gets like so much more time than the actual
duration of recording it and putting it out there
And you just think about like, yeah, I don't,
I would not, if I had to do that every time, even if I had nothing else I wanted to do, like,
I don't think I would, I don't think I'd want to, and, yeah, I don't think it would
What I'm doing here, I somehow can sustain it, as long as I have time and opportunity
to record these, it's something I keep doing
I don't know why that is, it's been, and it's been
something I've been doing for decades
You know, again, I was my, my ex, who was the sister of my friend's
wife who I just talked to today
She and I, well, her kid is 14
So we broke up 15 years ago,
And you just think like, when we get the knowledge other, she was listening
So, and that was not like, I just started it
It was one that I was doing for years
Before that, I just think about like, I've been doing this for a long, fucking time, and it's kind
And the thing is also, like, I have zero interest in, I don't have a real interest
in building an audience per se
I don't have a real interest in monetizing this
monetizing the hobbies is so gross
It's such a weird fucked up thing about our society
thing I also did sucks about it is, like, if I find out, like, I keep myself doing this deliberately,
but I have a thing because you raised in this just gross society that when somebody starts talking
about something that they do, you try to turn it into a fucking business for them
oh, you could, you could actually, maybe you could make some money
And I'm not saying I do that,
but there's a part of you
And it's like, oh, you do those
You could, you know, no, like art should not be,
it's not to say that you can't do stuff for money and for commerce and all that kind of stuff
Going back to Star Trek, you have Cisco's and the this restaurant from the father
And I don't think they exchange money
I don't, maybe they do, maybe they don't,
I don't think they have to
He likes having a restaurant,
he likes the social aspect of it, likes the prop and all that kind of stuff
So you could just do that
And it does get to this thing, like, you see
so many people who think you have to have a gun near your head to do stuff
nobody pays me to do this
Nothing, there's no, you know, but I just do this
This is a thing that I do because I like it
I think if you like making paintings,
you shouldn't have to make a painting that you're selling or even thinking about selling
You just make fucking paintings
You do equations on a blackboard
I used to, I used to love when I was, when I was in high school and undergrad, I used to like
And I would just, especially, and I was, this came up recently,
this gravitation book by, I'm, I'm Myesner Wheeler and Thorne took a second
was that coming to me? But this, they call it the phone book or the telephone book
same professor that I was talking about before, that it did differential topology with
Was, he is the one that called it the phone book for me
But it's this big black, mine was a
I think the soft cover is better
I miss, it's the one physical book that I got
rid of when I moved to France that I miss
I had, you know, I had a box full of books
And there were some that I liked
There were, I had like a cow field theory one
I had, I had a few other books that were, that were pretty good
But I, the gravitation one, I miss
I got that in high school way before I ever took
calculus or anything like that
And that book, it's, maybe I'm just overly romanticizing it
But I'm going through the book and it starts out just like with a description of stuff
And it introduces tensor calculus
It introduces like vector transport
like it didn't get into like tensor bundles and, uh, I didn't get into a lot of like modern
But, you know, it's, it got me to a certain point with a lot of this stuff that I could,
I could certainly, um, you know, like writing down, uh, the field equations and solving like the
Uh, I, I, I didn't, I don't know how I would do on it now
at the time, like I would sit there and I just take a piece of paper and you write down the
coordinates and then you like solve the fourths child equation or something like that
And, yeah, that was fucking cool
Or just like figuring out and thinking about,
uh, relativistic path lengths and doing, you know, what was you learned integration, um,
and especially you learn metric spaces and stuff like this
And now you can start integrating path
And you can, you realize that like, oh, well, in this metric where you have space,
the space or one, one direction
So plus plus plus minus signature minus minus minus plus,
depending on how you want to do it
Uh, minus minus minus plus gives you like three spatial ones
are negative and the time is positive
And then also, you can, you can put Cs in there, but
there's this geometric coordinates thing where time is just, you know, I'm going to try to see
You use a unit of length in the unit of time that are the same
You could do that for all, pretty much all of the units, or most of the major units
You the integration, you figure this stuff out
I learned so much about, you know, like, just like the twin paradox and all this stuff,
But, you know, and it built a lot of intuition and it was fun
And there's that, you know, that, but that was a hobby
It wasn't like I didn't need to be paid for it
I mean, I guess I did pay to go to classes
But I would, if I, if money
was no object and I was essentially retired, I just take, take classes
Just take some, you know,
and it feels like obviously at a certain point you take, you go through the course catalog of
a university, you'll take all of the classes that you're interested in, given enough years
But it would take a long time
Like, you know, you can take, because you just think about
How many languages could you take? And the languages each take, you know,
you're probably not taking five different languages at a time, or maybe you are, but I think
you probably want to take like one language at a time and kind of work on it
Take another language, work on that, get better at it
But I'm put the front say,
I'm a bit of a Spanish, uh, John Gwen, Choto Nyongo, you know, you play with those stuff a
And, yeah, you, um, that would be interesting
I think that would be cool
architecture, learn art, learn mixed media, learn, you know, like take a fucking drama class,
take take several drama classes
I mean, I wouldn't want to do that as a career
It's a thing that's horrible about the, again, it gets to the society in the way that things are
But, you know, like, people have this idea that education has to be vocational training
And, I mean, obviously, like, you need somehow to pay your way through life and always kind of
stuff in the structure that we have, shouldn't have to be that
I really think, like, if you made the world in a better way where people didn't actually have to work,
um, people will find stuff that is productive and useful
And that there will be people,
yeah, again, you don't have to have a gun to somebody's head to go out into the fields and harvest crops
If you made it not miserable, like, I mean, think about it
yeah, it's like, you spend like an hour or two a week
You can go out there and just like chill in the
fields and at a reasonable pace, do some picking in a comfortable set setting
Doesn't seem like that big of a deal
Are you getting enough people to do that?
And now you've got an essential thing to, I'm not saying you'd probably want to do that with,
like, cleaning the sewers or something like that
There are things where you'd probably
have to compensate people or do, like, figure out some structure to get people to do it
But you don't need to have this thing where, like, if you don't do it, you're fucked
You don't have to have this thing where if you don't do your shitty job,
you're not, you're going to not eat, you're going to be out on the street
You're going to be just miserable if you, if something goes wrong and, you know, you need surgery
or you crack a tooth or you'd have an impacted molar or you, you know, whatever that you're just
fucked, that you don't need that
And I think really, it's kind of fucking annoying,
because you think about, like, how much, there's also this aspect of, like, how much stuff do you
really need? Because you don't need, it can't capitalism
and a bunch of people who duplicate all the same shit
They're not, like, making, it's something
that really annoys me, actually, between, my perspective on it has changed over time
the iPhone and the Android copying each other
Part of, part of what's annoying about it is
because you have this capitalistic competitive system
Everybody wants to, you know,
Everybody's trying to duplicate the same shit that everybody else is doing
There's not a lot of room for creativity in that
And then you end up with, like, look at cars
You look at, you go to the serial aisle and they're all the same boxes
Basically, like, in terms of composition and, you know, ingredients,
all of those fucking cereals, including the boxes, including the ink, are basically the same
shit with the different shapes and slightly different chemicals to the flavor them and color them
and the coloring on the packages is slightly different than yelling
And, you know, you start going through that and you get, you go through the
usey and grocery store and we have so much shit and so much fake variety and also never mind
the, you know, like, everything, everything is, is like, just had the life cost optimized out of it
Like, you have stuff that is, everything is, is made now to be just, there's something
I feel like I hear like people talking like in the background
but like super muffled and in the distance, but I stopped talking and I, I don't know what it is
It sounds maybe like it's just an electric hum or something behind me
Whatever it is, it's very
Maybe it is people outside, but whatever it is, it's like, if I could actually hear
what they're saying, it would be not so distracting because you can get to filter it out
But the way my brain works, if I sort of like half hear it, I start focusing on it and then I'm like,
if there's a problem to solve my brain in eightly wants to do that, which also goes to that
thing that you're like, you don't have to pay me to do that
You don't have to pay people to make
like 15 different phones that look exactly the fucking same
You don't have to, it's annoying
think is also like you think about like Apple cranking out these giant air quotes AI processors
and then they go to this iOS 26 shit just using really complex filters and all this processing
shit super super processing intensive stuff that they do because the chips are getting too fast
and you know it's like you keep making the chips fast here and so you keep making the stuff
need more power and then it's just the reason that this annoys me is another way to do it,
a better way to do it would be let's make an operating system that does look good and we keep
refining it, but it's efficient, you know like it looks good but it doesn't have to be
requiring like a fucking you know care of lobster machine running at full bore to render the
screen, you know you could do something that's like nice but not that ridiculous and if you did that
well then the processor from 20 years ago might still be fine and then you think about that it's like
well okay what could you do that because we you still keep pushing the envelope and you have the
three nanometer process or one point whatever nanometer extreme ultraviolet process and when you're
doing that one thing that you can do with it is make really fast pretty efficient processors
but another thing you can do with that is take those same processors from 20 years ago
and make them use so little power that like if if you imagine you have a phone UI from 20 years ago
and you can you could refine it a little bit but you have a processor that is the processor from then
updated to a modern process so you don't have like 15 20 billion transistors in there you might
have hundreds of millions maybe you have a billion or two doesn't really matter but you have a
smaller number or maybe you have all of those but a lot of them are dark most of the time
not actively processing if you did that you could get the processing down for your UI to next
you could get to the point like with current technology if the software was better you could have
a phone that would be charged once a week and it would just work you could I mean yeah
obviously the radio is probably probably difficult for that but can you could do something like that
if you didn't really crank it it's annoying to me actually because you can if there are certain
things which are nice to be able to have a lot of processing power for compiling stuff is kind of
processor intensive especially because the the compiler just keep getting better and better
it's stuff and that's more intensive and you know like but you know for the most part for for
day-to-day stuff you could have it really like I mean I'm just looking at my Mac right now
if this was like a Linux machine from 15 years ago and it worked pretty well but you made
something that just would last and instead of like doing planned ups and blessings you just make
better and better versions of things and with the goal that it's gonna last a long fucking time
be you know you focus on power battery life and yeah I mean you make it look again you make it look good
you make it work well you keep refining it not optimizing it but you don't need to you don't need to
build shit just to waste cycles you don't need to build the iOS 26 what do they call it liquid glass
interface or some clone of that you don't need to build all the bullshit fake audible airports
AI shit and and just waste cycles and cycles and have to build these fucking I talked about
this last time but they're the fucking idea that you're gonna build just it's so it's so ridiculous you're
gonna put data centers in some synchronous orbit I can't it actually really pisses me off I saw
something else today that was oh I know what it was this is this will be the last thing I
talked about because it's already an hour and a half and I'm kind of like fading I need to go
for a walk but my mom sent me an article today from BBC and it was like it wasn't even quantum
computers it said oh I just saw it and then I just scrolled the fuck off it said look quantum
be bigger than AI that's the BBC news title and there's a picture of a person there holding
some kind of quantum processor and the answer is now it it's not gonna be bigger than AI and
the also audible air quotes AI the shit that they have now is bullshit it's just fucking bullshit
and it's it's annoying in this case also that in like in both of these cases what is quantum
mean like they mean cube it like quantum processors isn't there it's like what is nano tech
mean to me when you say nano tech it means nano assemblers and like things where you have actual
nano scale or you know sub nano scale features like single atom kind of things and machines
that are at that scale it doesn't mean that you have titanium dioxide particles that are
10 nanometers yeah it doesn't mean like quantum stuff I don't think people mean when they say
quantum quantum encryption or quantum teleportation that's used in networking or stuff like this
or you know like used to do phase arrays like optical phase array kind of stuff I don't think
that's what they mean generally speaking now that's not to say that those aren't real things that's
not to say that you know like there's room in astronomy you know if you're making a super powerful
telescope to build an optical phase array and to have quantum teleportation for taking the phase
information from photons and combining it someplace and having photonic and quantum processors
that kind of stuff is real that's the stuff that you could actually do but this idea that
some how quantum processors are going to be magical it's kind of bullshit it's kind of like we
already first of all that the one thing that they would have been a little scary for is if you could
build like a general purpose large enough like enough cube it's kind of processor we could
attract old crypto systems very quickly very easily with them in principle at least you know
like you could use shores algorithm and factor large numbers and the thing is now we've already
got these post quantum cryptography things so even if you had that kind of a system it wouldn't
magically solve that problem anymore these are these are things that just like even if you have a
processor as far as we know there's no no algorithm it's not I don't think it's provable yet
that you can't make something but so far as far as we know you can't solve and you just think about like
okay well what are you going to do with that shit and you start going down the path and it's like
there's it's not like a magical much faster version of a classical computer and also like you
can't build because you have to have coherence over a large number of cubits to have them do
useful stuff unless and unless you're doing like large processors that are just sort of repeating
the same small problem over and over again many many times you could do stuff like that but like
I mean you look at this picture that's in this article and I don't know how many cubits there
are in the the thing but it's it's a pretty big fucking chip that probably has to be kept at
cryogenic temperatures and I would bet it doesn't have that many cubits and again like that I'm
sure there are applications for it and I'm sure there are applications for getting a couple
orders of magnitude more than that but it's not really it's not going to be a very useful thing
for most people for most you know it's not like you're going to play like kickass video games
on that like I mean maybe maybe you take that technology decades out and you get to the point
where you've got like phototic processors that can do real-time rendering that's indistinguishable
from reality or or something like that but you know like in terms of the stuff that people are doing
now and that they're going to do with these things in the foreseeable future there's no magical
like application for them just like also like and I get I'm a guy who has been for a very long
time in the machine learning and do like thinking computers and autonomous and semi-autonomous
systems and that kind of stuff the stuff that people call audible air quotes AI now and again just
like the quantum thing just like the nanotech thing they munch a lot of stuff together so like you
have all of these things like people have been working on face recognition for decades but I
in the 80s people were doing back propagation and doing neural networks and they were already
starting to do stuff to like recognize characters and optical character recognition kind of stuff
and handwriting and the in principle like faces and stuff and you just look at like the technology
has incrementally advanced to the point where like we had I look up to eigenface paper I don't
remember when that was but that was already pretty good pretty good I'm actually just looking
it up now eigenfaces from the AT&T Bell library and show me the year show me the year somebody show
me the year I'm gonna go see awesome maybe um eigenfaces 2002 so this was already pretty good
in 2002 and identifying faces and things have gotten incrementally much better since then
and like independent of having really good deep neural networks face recognition pretty fucking
recognition has been pretty good for a long time and is that is that AI I don't think so I don't
consider it so it's I guess if you call up machine learning or something but a lot of that stuff
is not even learning in any kind of meaningful sense like learning and thinking those are very
different than anything that these things are doing and yeah like you look at these these large language
models and transformers and all this kind of shit um they're they're very good well
not actually I was gonna say they're very they're okay at like language translation like
the very good I I've spent a lot of time recently the last couple of years and I know a lot of
people have spent a lot of time and doing like irrevict to English translation um it it sucks okay
it actually kind of sucks it's it's pretty good but it sucks if the thing is like they feel
pretty good because you don't know the language as well but when you start really trying you know
and they're fine for like oh I'm gonna write a letter and you have two people who basically are
in the same domain and you're talking about stuff that's kind of similar and yeah it's okay it's
okay but when you start really trying to have like a deep conversation with somebody in another language
with big cultural differences and it's kind of stuff it pretty much is shitty and that is the
best case that is what transformers were developed for and it's kind of like and then you know
you have this whole thing with like all of this um I don't know the thing that really
fucking pisses me off is like people work on these stuff like Sora and you know generating images
and video that looks pretty good uh that's it doesn't look great still like yeah I mean things
are incrementally improved but they don't really look great but they look pretty good and you know
you can do text to video and that that's cool I guess but it also is like what is the what is the
fucking point and for the most part like the amount when you think about especially like the resources
that have gone into just just like the sheer amount of technical and compute resources like
when I say technical I mean like engineering like people figuring shit out all that kind of stuff
so that you could make videos that do a pretty good job of fooling people and then you get the
point where or you can make a text that's just like those shooting people that's that's a great
like that you have to understand this is not a good thing this is not something it's not really
helpful all that really does is sort of confuses and confounds people you got like congratulations
you got stuff where you can make just a fast corpus of bullshit like that's that's really
like your goal is to be able to make something that is a thousand times bigger than Wikipedia
and that kind of sounds like Wikipedia but it's all completely full of shit you could do that
that's a shitty goal it's not a good thing that's not something that you should do it's not
something anyone should want to do your goal is to make video that you could just say George
Bach or George Bush humping a lamp post and then you get a video out of George Bush humping up
but who thinks this is a good idea who really and it goes back to again education versus
vocational training and in this whole problem I think a lot of it is like you get
fucking computer science people who went in and they they weren't even interested in computer
science they're just it's the same problem with fucking doctors they're not people who are like
want to be a doctor that people who like really want to cure people there are a lot of people
who want to make money and so they have some you know that if they found out that making widgets
was the best way to make money they'd be making fucking widgets they don't give a fuck
and so they went into medicine to do that or they went into computer science
they just take computer science courses never take a fucking ethics course never take a philosophy
course never take a fucking art course and you know or they were going to business because they
want to make money you notice actually the problem with all these people the common thread
is this bullshit like pursuit of making a shit set of money for no reason but you have like
people do that and then they don't really study these other things and they never really ask
questions like what is the fucking reason that you're doing this what is what is it good for what is
the it's the most ridiculous thing also because like I for a long time I've tried to work
on some robotics stuff and I've never been able to put together the resources and
time and all that stuff to get very far but I I have a lot of applications for it you know
I have a lot of stuff that it's like and when I say that I don't mean like you know oh that would
be kind of cool I mean I can come up with a lot of stuff that would be really fucking helpful for
a lot of people and then you see these people making this shit and first off they they make these
ridiculous humanoid things with so many unnecessary degrees of freedom and also like you got
something that looks like a person it's creepy because it doesn't work like a person you know it
doesn't quite feel right person is not really a great form factor like evolution got us to this
body plan but it's not it's not really great is you if you're just kind of like starting from
especially like if you don't have a great control system and especially especially if you're doing
this shit that they're doing which is just you know like throwing processing at it and then just doing
high dimensional curve fitting like it really like it I say this in the most disparaging way possible
what they're doing fundamentally is just very high dimensional curve fitting and the same sense
of like if you ever took physics 101 and I mean at that level you do like some kind of thing where
you you drop a ball and you you calculate or you roll a ball down and incline plane and you do
timing stuff and then you you make a plot and you get that plot and you have 20 points right now you could
do a order 20 polynomial and hit every single one of those points and you'll have something that's
kind of a model for your thing you probably don't need that and that's what they're doing is like
that there that got so many extra parameters you can fit stuff very easily if you have enough parameters
and I say very very easily it's computationally expensive but you can do it
it doesn't really tell you anything it doesn't really have any insight to it
and it's just like this whole thing that they're doing is like why what the what the fuck are you doing
what the what the fuck are you people doing and what they're doing essentially is like wasting
so many resources so much time chasing after some bullshit idea building stuff that like what
what are they what do they do they're trying to take away the the fun stuff that people want to do
as hobbies they're like oh we're gonna make stuff that you know fuck you doing photo shop here's
a thing that just does photo shop for somebody this shitty version of it doesn't come out
great but now somebody else who doesn't have that and you just killed somebody's career like
yeah they they're not not even that you're doing it well but you know there are people who
have careers that are nice and graphic design and now you've kind of eliminated that there are
people who have I mean it's it's it's like the same thing it really is like an
in-stage capitalism kind of thing because it's it's the same fucking thing where you had to
all the little mom and pop shops and you make Amazon and Walmart and now you have the
Walton's have all the money that would have come to all the little mom and pop shops in all
these fucking cities you have Jeff Bezos getting all the money that would have gone to all these
little shops and all these little like you think about all the little industries it's because
it's not just the shops it's also like manufacturing it's also like distribution it's also
having like and and you just like copy stuff make cheap burdens of it race to the bottom
and you know everything is garbage and you're selling it and it's just it's just sucks it's just like
the most unsustainable thing and it's also like there's no good reason for it there's no
like I guess if you want to have a world full of wasted shit that people wasted time and money
on but Amazon like everything my mom and sister get a lot of Amazon shit it annoys me actually
what I'm here but you know like it's just this constant constant influx of crap and one of the
things you really notice about it is no matter how small it is it always comes in a giant ridiculous
box or packaging that's like excessive and this is the whole they it is absolutely emblematic of
what it is it's just like garbage it's just garbage waiting to be garbage it's somebody somebody made
it somebody moved it somebody's a picker they picked it they put it on a truck somebody had they
take that shit out of me you think about all the people that had to do shitty boring jobs
so that you could have your little piece of shit it's just garbage that's going to go into the
recycle bin eventually or just take up space and you know like it's just like what are you
guys doing what are you doing just stop that shit like find better shit can do we don't that you
need food right we need food we need to grow food somehow we need sanitation it's very important actually
we need running water we need shelter there's these are things that you actually need
think you're on how to solve those problems and figure out how to like let people be
able to do like the stuff like pursue stuff that's interesting and do worthwhile stuff
and you know build a society around that kind of shit think you're on how to make cities that
don't suck you know figure out how do you and make cities where it's not just a bunch of people
in traffic constantly figure out how to organize society in a way where people aren't just
fucking sitting around dying in a car every day for hours every fucking day and to go to a place
where they're going to do a job that they didn't really need to do that if you stopped doing
that job the world would keep spending and you know it wouldn't matter and then the thing that's
most ridiculous about all this stuff this is this is actually going to be the last thing I say
but you know like the jobs that are actually essential like taking picking up the trash we do
have way too much trash in this country specifically that we make too much trash but if somebody
didn't pick up the trash I thought about this before I was in Paris I was living there during
a trash strike and I visited New York during a trash strike and in both cases you know like you
don't pick up trash for a week it adds up fucking fast yeah if you don't have plumbers fixing
shit things get literally shitty if you don't have somebody you don't have surgeon surgeons are actually
doing yeah to some extent useful and important if you don't have people doing public health
people get sick if you don't have people doing food safety if you don't have people making food
growing food people die people start to death and and you think about like all the stuff that you
actually need all the stuff that is is nice too I mean like there are little treats that you can have
that are nice to have but you know you could make good treats and you could make those in a way
that's not just crap made at the cheapest possible way and with people at every level as miserable
possible you could have stuff where it's like all artisanal it could be it made it scale too but
it's all like artisanally done and nice and people are having fun and they're enjoying it and then
you get a question that tastes good and not like you know some goddamn box full of 10 of these
things that are all just crap and tastes like shit and they're still bad for you or they're worse
for you than the regular one you know it's just like what are you doing what are you doing do
figure that shit out it does it's not even that hard it's that's the frustrating thing because
genuinely speaking not that hard you know to figure this stuff out just like it's not that hard
to figure out how to make a city that's a lot better than the stuff we're doing you know and
just just do it just fucking do it please because it's doing it the way that we're doing it now
we're going to end up so fucked in so many different ways and it is not like you know we're
going to dodge this bullet or you know like some magical technologies a lot of people are going
to die yeah a lot of people are going to die very badly because people wanted to have too much
shit and not even not even good stuff not even like stuff that made them feel good just to have
shit for the sake of having shit and it's just like it's frustrating just like you think about
we could have high-speed trains that are powered by the sun or by hot rocks and they
wouldn't really cause that much damage and we could you know also you could have them set up so
that they're wildlife paths around them to get across the train so you're not killing things
in the process and you're not fucking up the environment and yeah you could you could make a
better world you could make a much better world and you don't and because you don't and you have
all these people trying to have like private jets and doing doing really carbon intensive stuff
and having like a big fuck you truck on the street you're killing little kids and you're also
like burning so much more gas like you could you could even if you're having private cars you could
have so much more efficiency and like why not why not do that why not why not have a car that's
powered by the sun that's actually kind of decent to drive gets you from where do you where you are
to where you want to be and doesn't fuck everything up massively like you could do that you don't
need to fucking giant ass truck with the bed that I was talking with my friend about this also
but you know like he is an old truck and he likes it and he doesn't want to get a new one
and I think he's very right for that and these new fucking trucks that giant can't see the kids
they're a tank and when I say they're a tank I mean like literally the trucks rolling off the
off the line today they're bigger than tanks from World War II like truly like heavier than
and usually it's like why what the fuck are you doing you're going to the story you're going to
fucking go to add here someplace you don't need that you don't and it's it's not even that you don't
need it it's like why wouldn't you even want that why don't you get out of that what is your
you're you're working now so that you get in this giant fuck you truck versus you could have a really
nice car that's kind of comfortable and fast and gets you there fast and you know it doesn't
waste a shit kind of resources you could have one of those Chinese electric cars that cost
$8000 and is nicer than the the luxury ones that we have here you can you could do that
and we don't and it's just like what the fuck why why why do you better think better imagine better
imagine better you could do it with that as ever thank you and
