Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: well-attested and frequently mentioned and talked around, but often not actually talked about explicitly. For IL.) "Truth is stranger than fiction." "Stories are sometimes truer than hard facts." "Elith-mirta, true-truth, must never be confused with ainai-mirta, beauty-truth; such would be a severe heresy." "Long, long ago, when crows were white..." "As a writer, your job is harder than God's. God simply made things be true. You have to make them make sense." There's something lurking here. Can you see it? There's a slippage of language around truth here. Sometimes it hides behind the verb "to be". It seems to have to do with two senses of "truth". One sense lives in the world of atoms; of cause and effect; of axioms, theorems, and proofs; of studies of psychology and economics; of precisely how everything that objectively exists is, precisely how it is, devoid of any subjectivity or in...

(Epistemic status: a long-held theory/frame that I am finally feeling OK with putting on this blog; may now be somewhat obsolete; definitely incomplete. Descriptive in a very loose way, only barely prescriptive. Please do not cancel me about this. For PR, JM, and probably IL.)   I have this theory of gender, built on some obvious-seeming observations and frankly sorta facile charts as started to make the rounds on the internet circa 2014. Then I thought about it, and elaborated it. Then I thought about and elaborated it some more. The core is this: there is a high-dimensional (or perhaps hyperbolic) genderspace, individual people inhabit points in that space (mostly nearby to the perihuman gender manifold), what a "gender" is is a natural-seeming cluster in that space, and the number of genders you are willing to accept to exist affects which genders you consider there to be. Let's break that down, more slowly this time. Consider those cute little two-axis gender graphs o...

(Epistemic status: taking a framework other people have started on and then abandoned; actually kind of predictive. Probably not complete, but the frame seems unique to me and I want other people to think about it. For NC, JM, and PR.)   Intelligence! A famously hard thing to pin down and operationalize. The part where people often assign it some kind of moral or valuative dimension - in both directions - and then allocate universally vital resources based on who seems to have it and who doesn't makes that even harder. The part where people either deny that it has a genetic basis and thus focus on misguided environmental schemes or consider the predominant genetic basis to be so all-important as to try to push breeding programs based on it makes it harder yet. Worst of all, some people even go as far as to deny that "intelligence" in the abstract even exists as a meaningful property of a person let alone a measurable one, or go heinously egregiously wrong and try to tie i...

(Epistemic status: Totally a dispatch from a version of Earth in a nearby Everett branch that diverged a few thousand years ago, tops. Totally.) While thinking it over, I realized that not only does my culture and its [counterhistory] which I'm not from have a handful of emotions that this Earth's societies largely lack, but we also divide up basic emotions somewhat differently. In contrast to the classic four-way distinction of Happiness, Anger, Fear, and Sadness, my culture does it a little differently. I'll say more about this in a later post, but where this Earth mostly classes emotions by only valence (positive/pleasant vs negative/unpleasant) and arousal (high vs low energy), my culture recognizes a third major category of classification - temporality. There are thus several schools of thought as to how many major classes of emotion there are, but the least contentious is six, with a common classification having eight and some recognizing up to twelve, depending on te...

(Epistemic status: I'm not claiming that this is actually how cognition works, but I do claim that it's a useful frame, and one which I find predictive. For and with thanks to NC, IL, and M/T.)   You know how sometimes there’s something you think you want to do but whenever you try to do the thing you mysteriously lack energy? You want to do the task. You know you need to do it. You even know what to do, and how. But every time you take a run up at it to try, you lose all motive force and find yourself sliding off to some onerous chore instead, tidying up or doing dishes instead. How mysterious! Or: you have something you need to write. A paper, a grant application, an email, whatever. You sit down to work on it. It's right there in front of you. You have the time and the tools and the necessary knowledge. And yet... nothing happens. You stare at the half-finished writeup before you. You close the file. Then you open it again. You read the same paragraph three times without...

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context again. There’s a point to it, I promise. Dedicated to Grandma Kim on the occasion of her 86th birthday.)   You've been through so much. You escaped North Korea, survived the Korean War and the loss of your father - my great-grandfather - and got married terribly young. You uprooted completely in pursuit of more stability and better education for my mother and her sibings, showing them all the best schools in the nation. You ran a department store for decades, mostly on your own; I will never forget the days I spent at 5 W 32nd Street when it was still yours.  You're canny and willing, even wanting, to learn, even in your old age; you're a good deal smarter and more alive than more people are at your age. The ESL courses you took for years, ending up with a much better grasp of English, are evidence enough of that. You've got grit to you, persistence, as well, even now - more so, again, than most people do in their late 80s. ...