Atvelonis's recent activity
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Comment on How to build real peace in ~humanities
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Comment on A shortage of sulphur could hurt mines and farms everywhere – and how we can replace it in ~enviro
Atvelonis (edited )LinkNo working Wayback link, but the full article is readable on the other archive. Sulfur (sulphur) is a component of sulfuric acid, a non-naturally occurring oil refining byproduct used in various...No working Wayback link, but the full article is readable on the other archive.
Sulfur (sulphur) is a component of sulfuric acid, a non-naturally occurring oil refining byproduct used in various electronics and in copper mining. For this reason, ironically, it’s currently a core part of the global energy transition.
Just as Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda (2008) accidentally initiated the chain of events that led to the realization of his terror—a messenger goose and a fearful feather leading to the escape of the Dragon Warrior-in-want, Tai Lung, from Chorh-Gom Prison, bringing war to the Valley of Peace,—so too it seems that the oil and gas industry has long produced a chemical byproduct that underlies the very foundation of the clean energy technology that is poisoned to dethrone it, a rocky transition but surely one that leads to a better world.
Except that the price of sulfur has risen by an order of magnitude in two years!
There are lots of uses for this chemical that I don’t know much about (the article talks about fertilizer), but the one that will probably get the most attention in environmental contexts is copper mining.
Reduced supplies pushed prices of sulphur cargoes from many regions past $1,000 a tonne in June, a record. They have come down a little since, not because supply has risen but because such high prices have crushed demand outside China.
Of the buyers, chipmakers are the least affected: they need only tiny amounts of acid. Copper and nickel miners, by contrast, use loads of it to leach metal from ore.
The price of sulfur hit its peak this summer and has fallen since then, but it’s still high and the drop might be false hope. The price of sulfuric acid has also risen much and fallen only somewhat since the peak. That’s all related to the war. Long-term, the acid’s price will presumably rise in proportion with any desirable cessation of oil refining for the purpose of generating electricity.
The Economist article doesn’t offer any alternatives to the current industrial process, but I remember hearing in August an exceptionally good podcast episode on The Green Blueprint about the microbial solution to our massive copper shortfall.
Liz Dennett, CEO and founder of Endolith, thinks the solution lies in material that has already been pulled from the earth. Endolith uses naturally occurring microbial communities, paired with real-time data, to extract more copper from low-grade ore at existing heap leaches. By bringing a mobile bio-rig directly to mine sites, Endolith continuously adds optimized microbes into existing sulfuric acid irrigation lines, essentially turning decades-old, multi-billion-dollar assets into precision engineering tools without disrupting downstream operations.
In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Liz about why the climate tech bias against biological approaches needs updating, how to navigate the notoriously risk-averse nature of the mining industry, and why she deliberately kept corporate venture capital (CVC) off her cap table to preserve the company's optionality.
Dennett is a brilliant communicator and I found the concept truly unique. She is also very realistic about what she’s trying to accomplish: bio-based efficiency gains on top of a mature mining process. It’s not a disruptor as much as a complement. But the science evidently works in the real world, so given the price environment & trajectory of sulfuric acid, the logical question is whether extraction leading with bacterial communities could be a more comprehensive replacement.
We’re at a point where environmentalism is mainly politically viable through affordability messaging. Except in conservation circles, the affective argument feels like a relic from the 2010s. But Dennett’s success implies that there can be a more romantic marriage between enviro–chemical research and traditional industrial applications, with downstream benefits to household finances. I’d be very interested to see where research in this field leads over the next decade and whether science communicators and policymakers can be effective in threading together a clear narrative around investment into creative scientific endeavors.
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A shortage of sulphur could hurt mines and farms everywhere – and how we can replace it
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Comment on How do you handle being around other people? in ~talk
Atvelonis LinkIt’s easier to enjoy company when the environment is such that everyone is predisposed to be kind and in a good mood. How can we structure our lifestyles to increase the probability of pleasant...It’s easier to enjoy company when the environment is such that everyone is predisposed to be kind and in a good mood. How can we structure our lifestyles to increase the probability of pleasant interactions?
It’s also been said that being occasionally annoyed is the cost of having a real community.
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America’s next big healthcare reform might already be underway
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Comment on Advice on new PC build in ~comp
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentI'm seeing the headline that burn-in "hasn't improved" in the last few years, but if 2023 model lifespan is similar to 2017 at much higher (+52%) brightness, it follows that reducing brightness...I'm seeing the headline that burn-in "hasn't improved" in the last few years, but if 2023 model lifespan is similar to 2017 at much higher (+52%) brightness, it follows that reducing brightness lengthens lifespan.
Higher light output generally places more cumulative stress on OLED pixels. Lowering the brightness setting should therefore reduce wear when the TV regularly displays bright static elements.
It might be overblown, though:
Burn-in is unlikely to be an issue for the vast majority of viewers, as most will regularly vary their content. The risk increases when the same bright static elements are displayed for thousands of hours, particularly with prolonged news viewing, desktop use, or repeated play of the same game.
Visible permanent image retention developed primarily where static elements remained on screen. [...] Areas that displayed varied content didn't exhibit any noticeable burn-in. [...] Eighteen thousand hours is equivalent to roughly 10 years of viewing at five hours per day.
They didn't test monitors from 2024–26, which presumably follow the same trend. I can imagine some eventual burn-in from desktop use, but I'm not too worried about video game HUDs. It seems like a CRT screensaver would minimize the risk. Some monitor companies apparently use software tricks to minimize the problem and suggest behavioral changes.
The first is called “Orbit”: this feature shifts the entire picture by a single pixel, in a circle, every three minutes. It’s imperceptible, too, which makes it a very user friendly solution. The other feature to help is that the monitor will run an “image retention refresh” cycle when you turn it off, but only if it’s been on for eight or more hours. This refresh cycle takes about six minutes.
For gamers, keep HUD opacity at 50–70% or use dynamic/minimal interfaces that change frequently. Auto-hiding the taskbar and enabling dark mode for Windows or browsers dramatically reduces static bright elements that drive localized wear.
If desktop burn-in becomes noticeable at, say, 10,000 hours and my screen time is 70% desktop/browser and 30% videos/games, then at 6 hours per day, the monitor would be pristine for 6–7 years. (I'd be surprised if I used it that often.) Reducing brightness by just 10% would extend the lifespan by another year or two. That's not far off from my LCD/TN monitor, which has had failures of its own.
At that point, I feel like taskbar tweaks and dark mode would largely eliminate the problem in any practical timeframe. I wish that someone would publish more realistic test cases!
Has anyone here used an OLED monitor for this length of time? Is it really that bad?
It seems to me that the color depths outweigh the longevity concerns, but I've never used one of these screens.
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Comment on Advice on new PC build in ~comp
Atvelonis Link ParentNorthern hemisphere! Summer 2027 is admittedly rosy. 12+ months is more realistic, and at that point new graphics cards are presumably due for release, which is why I'm inclined to take the 3070...Northern hemisphere! Summer 2027 is admittedly rosy. 12+ months is more realistic, and at that point new graphics cards are presumably due for release, which is why I'm inclined to take the 3070 for now.
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Comment on Advice on new PC build in ~comp
Atvelonis Link ParentMost of what I play is decades old, but someone gifted me Cyberpunk 2077 which I haven't been able to run. As I work through the old Tomb Raider games, I'll eventually get to the new fancy-looking...Most of what I play is decades old, but someone gifted me Cyberpunk 2077 which I haven't been able to run. As I work through the old Tomb Raider games, I'll eventually get to the new fancy-looking ones. I like all the nice sunsets and detailed grass textures in AAA games, which my 970 could never handle.
I had some fun with Cities: Skylines and would play a more advanced city sim if they ever invent one. Sometime I'd like to try Kerbal Space Program. And I'll probably never play much of it again, but I used to love Minecraft. Those all feel CPU-bound to me. Seems like I just want expensive everything.
No plans for any special use-cases. I can do most of my work in a word processor. I might spend more time in virtual machines in the future, but I'm rarely working with large amounts of data. When I was younger I thought I might like to make videos, but realistically I will never do that.
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Comment on How cringe took over culture in ~arts
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentIt seemed a strong word for the style, which would be indelicate in an academic journal, but felt ordinary in a magazine. It's whimsical and not really aggressive/condescending so I didn't find it...It seemed a strong word for the style, which would be indelicate in an academic journal, but felt ordinary in a magazine. It's whimsical and not really aggressive/condescending so I didn't find it offensive. I was being too pedantic. The substance of your comment was very good and provoked a line of questioning (the rest of what I commented) that I hadn't considered yesterday when I first read the article, so thank you.
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Advice on new PC build
Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet...
Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet lithographic bridge, at the other side of which we'll someday reunite to play Skyrim together again.
In the meantime, I would like another PC on which to play various modern AAA games except for The Elder Scrolls VI. I'd intended to replace my machine ~4 years ago when it was in fairer health, but other efforts took priority. Since then, the product market has inflated in price and all the SKUs have changed, so I'm back to being mostly clueless about the state of the industry.
I put together a parts list from some basic research and would like a gut check. I'm coming from an i5-4460, GTX 970, and 16 GB RAM at 1080p 144hz, which may as well be neolithic. I only really need this PC to play video games smoothly and to do standard workstation tasks (nothing remarkable).
Rationale and notes:
- 60hz to 144hz was the greatest upgrade I ever made and now it seems like 180hz or 240hz is the new 144hz. I've also wanted to move to 1440p for years. I reviewed the Gamers Nexus GPU benchmarks and it seems like 120fps+ is broadly possible at this resolution.
- Nvidia's cards seem unreasonably priced. A friend of mine offered me his RTX 3070 for free, which I would be happy to accept as a stand-in to keep the initial cost down, and in a year I might come back to get a newer card like the 9070 XT or whatever replaces it?
- I'd like an M.2 to keep cable management to a minimum.
- I will not overclock or undervolt the CPU. I'd just like it to run.
- I'd love for the thing to be quiet.
My questions are:
- Does the build feel balanced? Are there any egregious oversights?
- How much RAM is prudent, at what speed/latency? Do we expect prices to drop anytime soon?
- M.2 PCIe 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 x4? Does this matter for games? Is a dedicated OS drive still best practice?
- IPS or OLED? WOLED or QD-OLED? Is Freesync Premium sufficient? (@AugustusFerdinand we spoke about this some time ago; has your opinion changed?)
I thank you in advance for your insights. I'm not going to buy this immediately (this summer at the earliest), but I'd like to know how close to reasonable I'm being.
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Comment on How cringe took over culture in ~arts
Atvelonis Link ParentI don’t find anything “detestable” about this piece and I appreciate the variety of its citations. Yes, this is a valuable observation. The author refers to cringe as “a new term for an old...I don’t find anything “detestable” about this piece and I appreciate the variety of its citations.
Is there something to be said about what cannot be held as ‘cringe’ because it is too powerful?
Yes, this is a valuable observation. The author refers to cringe as “a new term for an old thing.” For all the centuries that we’ve felt embarrassed for someone else, powerful people have attempted to elevate the public idea of themselves beyond human emotion. In some royal courts, looking at the monarch without permission was criminal. The will to power obfuscates innate social connection.
It is said that today’s poor taste is tomorrow’s high art. Cringe works in reverse: What was high art yesterday can seem like a lapse in taste today.
The US executive attempts to occupy the superposition between aurelian and everyman; between classical statuary and disregard for formal convention; between gilded private clubs and press conferences at a landscaper’s garage; between ostensible displays of military might and a stream of consciousness on Twitter, straight to the masses.
In doing so, he manages to produce a new sort of cringe, which is the revealed tastelessness of an entire nation of people. We can try to cringe at the head of state, who is constantly embarrassing himself, but it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for such a powerful and unpleasant person. I think it’s more embarrassing to watch a hundred million of my neighbors, enthralled by the parasocial intimacy of presidential online-ness, sleepwalk into economic rejection. The earnest, desperate confusion that the most clueless among us now express (“I thought we were going to have lower prices!”) is difficult to bear; it’s cringe to put so much faith into a candidate so dishonest when the financial stakes are actually high. It’s like inviting someone to dinner with colleagues and then being personally ridiculed by that very person. One feels schadenfreude until one remembers that these voters are also just human. I think the resulting feeling has all the hallmarks of cringe except that it can’t really be funny, as you allude. At best it’s more like a cynical empathy. Or maybe just a new antisocial detachment.
The “post-cringe” we refer to might not be a rejection of cringe per se, but—not dissimilar from other elements of the postmodern—an electronically enabled dispersion of cringe so vast that it subsumes the original context of social error. It’s not about one person’s faux pas anymore, but the collective failure of every institution (social, spiritual, governmental, and otherwise) that leads to an industrial-scale, irrecoverably cringeworthy screw-up. What’s more socially awkward than embarrassing yourself in front of someone important? Maybe the destruction of global energy infrastructure and the collapse of international trade norms, followed by the slow decline of your country, and all loss of life that arises from a rejection of vaccination and global aid and the principle that war is bad.
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Are we a favourite shape of the universe?
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Comment on Do you think you're special? in ~talk
Atvelonis LinkThere is that of the Spirit in every one. Perhaps I have something unique to offer to my family, friends, and community, but I am no more immanently worthy or virtuous than anyone else, in whom...There is that of the Spirit in every one. Perhaps I have something unique to offer to my family, friends, and community, but I am no more immanently worthy or virtuous than anyone else, in whom the Spirit also lives.
I used to think I was individually special, or destined for great things, or deserving of certain privileges, because it was how we were raised. In hindsight, I think that sets people up for disappointment. It also instills feelings of entitlement and sometimes elitism that affect a lifetime of political decisions, which is unfair to others.
As a mortal, subjective creature with limited emotional capacity, it's not physically possible to care equally about every atom in the universe. The self is a fair, simple point of centrality for any consciousness, but it's unfair to use that to justify extreme inequality or cruelty. When I'm following my best habits, I center the Spirit. As an imperfect person, I am not always successful. We are always learning: this is continuing revelation.
Some people are able to accomplish special things, which is laudable, and I think earned entitlements are different than inferred ones. This need not be obsessively hierarchical. We could all do a better job of listening for and supporting each other's gifts. Comparison is narrowly useful but not when it leads to bitterness.
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Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life
Atvelonis Link ParentIt's not my expertise, but over the last few years I've become more interested in how zoning regulations affect the experience of community and lifestyle. (It's too complicated and city-dependent...It's not my expertise, but over the last few years I've become more interested in how zoning regulations affect the experience of community and lifestyle. (It's too complicated and city-dependent for me to fully grasp: no wonder it's an entire field of law.) One consistency is that hyper-local zoning control ends up limiting housing supply and inadvertently (or not?) exacerbating the accessibility problem you describe.
I live in a rather charming downtown neighborhood where everyone resides in apartments above shops. (Some people even work in the same building they live in, which is otherwise rare here.) It's a quaint and almost European feeling. We're seeing a fair bit of new construction, which I'm grateful for because it means more people will get to experience the cafés and trees and museums and bicycle lanes and transit that drew me here years ago. My neighbors seem not to mind either, but I think that's exceptional. For aesthetic reasons, the next neighborhood over doesn't allow much multi-family or mixed-use zoning, which keeps it quieter but means my friends there have to travel further to buy or do most things. And when I used to live in a suburb, infill development matching the density of the main street was pretty much unheard of; "those new condos" were always maligned. So, no wonder downtown prices are high if even the most transit-accessible neighborhoods with the space (horizontal or vertical) to build more homes are refusing to issue variances and permits.
Colleagues tell me that the City Council passed some upzoning bills to build more homes near the rail lines, possibly overriding a few of those local rules, which of all locations sounds quite reasonable given our price crisis. It doesn't seem like the township trustees outside the city want to try the same thing, though? The few suburban town meetings I went to in the past were always hostile to development, for good or bad reasons. So, okay, no new houses. I've read a lot of magazine pieces about the death of local businesses at the hands of big-box and online stores, so you'd at least think people would be amenable to zoning even a handful of additional community spaces in residential areas, like coffee shops or lounges to socialize into the evenings or play backgammon, or little corner stores to get daily groceries or hardware or appliances or haircuts or new furniture. Yet in my experience it seems that suburban people often object strongly to living near useful shops, fearing an onslaught of traffic, noise, or criminal outsiders. This reaction seems exaggerated to me. So they build nothing, and prices keep going up, while the local businesses don't do any better. I always found it strange because these same people, my neighbors for many years, loved visiting European cities and buying fresh goods at the local boulangerie or pâtisserie instead of driving for 30 minutes to a Walmart, as though these places were created to be visited rather than to be lived in. Some creative dissonance there.
It reminds me of being a kid and coming to my parents with a problem, proceeding to reject every one of their patiently offered solutions, and then leaving in a huff with my problem unresolved because I wouldn't compromise anywhere. I've always been proud to live in a democracy, but it's possible that some technical decisions are better handled at a higher level of elected government (as long as everyone's voice can still be considered), so that some decision-maker actually moves forward.
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Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentI’m not convinced there’s a dearth of third places or social activities out there. There’s a lot going on, even in quiet towns. But when our communities are physically designed for social...I’m not convinced there’s a dearth of third places or social activities out there. There’s a lot going on, even in quiet towns. But when our communities are physically designed for social interaction to occur only in certain places, it’s predictable that transportation (by proxy time and cost) is the barrier to engagement, which disproportionately affects certain people.
Land use seems like a factor: we seem to voluntarily seek larger homes and lots in quieter (more disconnected) places in order to achieve some perceived comfort—after all, a setback from the street is nice, and so is an extra bathroom. Perhaps as a result of living great distances from peers, children must persuade their parents to drive them to the playground or park to kick around a ball—where they can remain under perpetual supervision, enclosed and protected from traffic and evildoers. It’s also more in vogue for young people to live alone and not marry—why hurry? why sacrifice your career or your habits? And we’ve shifted most friendly communication to text—it’s instant!—through which a digital party invitation may not be as enticing as a half dozen childhood friends physically knocking on your door to go play baseball in the sandlot.
In other words, we’ve justified structural isolation for various reasonable enough reasons. If instead we want to become structurally connected, then perhaps we have to reevaluate how much we value philosophical individualism and some of these perceived comforts. I can imagine a few ways to do this today, at great emotional cost, but it seems more likely that it would happen after we’re all aged and dead and the next generations naturally develop their own opinions.
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Comment on I could have painted that in ~arts
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentI sometimes enjoy visiting an art piece without any prior knowledge of its background or creator. For film, I think this increases rewatchability: my first interpretation can be totally different...I sometimes enjoy visiting an art piece without any prior knowledge of its background or creator. For film, I think this increases rewatchability: my first interpretation can be totally different than after I read about the director’s intentions.
But I don’t feel this way about most visual art. I love the stories behind paintings—without them, the art is still nice to look at, but it’s not really any nicer than the art in my living room. I think some curators withhold analysis and history to avoid poisoning the audience with their own views, but often I find that this leads to an excessively minimalist and dry exhibit.
In a similar vein, I’m reminded of the new Barnes Museum. The original site in Merion was a carefully arranged collection in the collector’s actual house and the art was meant to remain that way in perpetuity. The aesthetics and feeling of the house became part of the art. I understand the circumstances that necessitated a move to the Parkway, but I feel like it reduces the meaning a bit.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a house concert with a Gaelic-inspired ensemble. The music itself was excellent, of course. Yet it was the intimacy of the venue that charged them with energy and lightened the whole affair. When a string broke, the singer recounted the history of the band, which turned out to be hyper-local. I struck up a couple conversations with the musicians during tea and was delighted to hear about their lifelong connections to the tradition. The guitarist was a native speaker of Irish and his family was involved in the revival of the language; the singer was also a step dancer who had grown up in the folk community (and knew many of the halls I once danced in!); the percussionist came from Montréal and brought with her a Canadian flair with its own path from the Isles; a band member was friends with another famous singer of Scots Gaelic whom I’ve recently thought to collaborate with, etc. Because the atmosphere of the concert was so warm, we had the opportunity to connect on a meaningful level and everyone walked away that much more pleased with the course of the evening. It wouldn’t have felt the same in a massive concert venue or listening on a streaming app! The story matters.
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Comment on I could have painted that in ~arts
Atvelonis LinkIt’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?”...The least interesting critique you could make of a piece of art is, “I could have painted that.” […] The question is: would you have painted that?
If you are alive…you have artistic value. […] Saying “I could have painted that”…is just a criticism of yourself.
We’re being encouraged to abandon our natural creativity in the name of “convenience.” And that disregards the only prerequisite for something to be considered art: life.
It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?” And if we can’t bring ourselves to lead with that sort of curious query, are we engaging in ~arts because we actually like art? Or because someone told us that we need “taste” to be perceived as cultured?
In the Museum, we are glimpsing a story. Art history is really the art, which is why many exhibits attempt to showcase the interplay between historical contemporaries. But its meaning is interactive and not deterministic. Formalism was never the end of history—the human experience necessarily envelops it.
Craft, and physical technique, is evidently computable and infinitely replicable within a relatively tight margin of error. And craft has always been admirable, but traditionally for at least two reasons: respect for the work, and respect for the artifact. Today, if any person can instantly create an artifact perfectly mimicking preceding artifacts by using the correct computational tools, then the focus of admiration shifts toward that earlier question: “What went into this?” Do we believe there’s value in interior experience, in laborious creation? Or just in output?
It’s interesting to read about LLMs solving mathematical conjectures. But the reason this is useful is not the display of mathematical characters in LaTeX, which already exists somewhere in the Library of Babel and could be generated randomly by monkeys with typewriters. Rather, we are excited by the knowledge of how these runes connect to a history of prior knowledge. Our theory of knowledge requires the interpreter to situate robot-articulated mathematics in context and independently evaluate the model’s chain of “thought” to understand the output’s correctness—in other words: methodology, a secretly creative experience, underlies verification. Artistic endeavors are parallel: the artifact is interesting when it’s part of something with memory, life, and rhythm to it.
I dance because anyone can do it and not despite it. The real joy of watching an expert performance is less the spectacle and more the knowledge that you are part of a community that supports such effort.
Disclaimer
The video responds to a specific critique about a specific kind of art in a specific context. The presenter is probably not thinking of you personally. It is not telling you that you must like the subjective form of any specific piece. Yes, you are permitted to dislike the strange modern sculpture in front of some building near you, and I probably agree with you that it’s ugly and I wouldn’t have installed it there either. I shared this video because it is simple, short, and has a nice message, which is that you should lean into your own creativity to escape self-minimizing platitudes like this. -
I could have painted that
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Comment on Be careful about what you want in ~life
Atvelonis Link ParentI beg your pardon, then. The piece happens to pose some open philosophical questions applicable to my life—sometimes, even ridiculous people manage to articulate valuable thoughts. The question...I beg your pardon, then. The piece happens to pose some open philosophical questions applicable to my life—sometimes, even ridiculous people manage to articulate valuable thoughts.
The question above stands. You can pretend I devised it if you wish not to indulge the author. It’s an old idea anyway. Dozens of great novels contemplate how to achieve supposedly “great” things throughout a lifetime while remaining virtuous, and the perils of taking it too far. Melville in Moby-Dick describes a Captain Ahab overtaken by a desire for a twisted kind of supernatural fairness (revenge), which drowns the Pequod and nearly all aboard. Of course he is extreme, but his employers once thought him sane enough to steer a ship, and there were several discrete moments where reason gave way to mania, like Starbuck’s last-ditch appeal, ignored. The paradox also underlies popular culture: The Dark Knight famously posits that “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” In pursuit of good, we become evil. Or rather, our evil is revealed?
You warn against the dark triad. All people suffer from some presence of these sinful traits, including me, and ambitious people may sometimes exaggerate them. But is not every emotion influenced by one’s environment? We can be led to do unpleasant things, and justify terrors; Arendt describes the banality of evil. Surely the reverse is true; some combination of will and habit can steer us toward virtuous action. Paarthurnax, in the 2011 work Skyrim, offers a surprisingly profound quotation:
What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
I have read plenty of these novels and heard many of the pithy expressions that observe these recurrent human characteristics from century to century. I am looking for the actual experiences of the people on this website. If you are a visionary person, what salad bowl of motivations truly drives you? How do you balance those flavors against the basin of acrid inurement that defines the world of corporate dealing and electoral lobbying? Coming into contact with evil influences is all but inevitable when trying to unsettle the status quo. I am not asking you to advise me personally, necessarily, though you may. What has actually given you the wisdom to keep true course when sirens and whirlpools and monsters have tried to chip away at your rudder, and as you come into conflict with the people you love? This is not an easy strait to navigate, and the more ambitious the person, the more erratically I imagine them to be circulated in the sea of ethical ambiguity.
Hearing stories of people’s trials and tribulations is valuable because it centers their experience and their humanity. In appreciating more of these stories, I would hope to hone my discernment.
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Comment on Be careful about what you want in ~life
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentWell, point taken, though that seems prematurely dismissive. We can avoid the politics! Because I posted this in ~life, not ~society, I was hoping for more expression of commenters’ lived...Well, point taken, though that seems prematurely dismissive. We can avoid the politics! Because I posted this in ~life, not ~society, I was hoping for more expression of commenters’ lived experience on that “low to moderate amount of ennui” you refer to, and other pertinent emotions.
How can you marshal ambition’s energies without being consumed by its insatiable demands? How do you live a driven life, seeking to achieve great things, without becoming a jerk?
To me, this article is not asking how well someone would be judged in the afterlife. It is also not asking how someone ought to live a simple, unobtrusive life. Rather, I see it as evaluating the possibly more difficult task of retaining humanity, interpersonal warmth, charitable measurement, and humility in a professional context that constantly undermines those values.
One might distinguish admirable but common personal achievement (like earning a degree) from pathways that sometimes make you doubt your ability to discern good and your own intentions—beyond questioning and into rumination. Brooks mentions Lincoln because his pursuit was the highest echelon of national politics, and because he apparently struggled to reconcile the opposing forces of simplicity and ambition during that quest. I think it’s useful (and interesting) to reflect on the experiences of people like this, and it doesn’t have to be worship.
Personally, I work in medical technology but devote much free time to what I hope is the betterment of society. (It is certainly not a presidential scale, but it visibly affects many people.) At the moment that tends to be the proliferation of arts & culture, as well as adult education, urban design, transportation and safety, and other more complicated and controversial matters touching on taxation and labor. It is quite easy to take on volunteer roles in causes that already feel good, not think too much on the morals, and leave unceremoniously when passion fades. It can feel comparatively uncomfortable to be in leadership positions that ensnare one’s attention more fully and which at least occasionally focus it toward the vitriol, avarice, and “hollowness” that abounds in the denizens of moral ambiguity who must be parleyed with to accomplish any reasonably impressive organizational mission.
At other times in my life, when I was more concerned with architectural and environmental aesthetics than the systems of municipal government, I may have reached the same conclusion as you—that all one has to do is “go nuts, don’t hurt anyone, and try to leave the place cleaner than you found it.” At those times, I was more privileged by distance from the worst conditions of refuse and exploitation, and I think my morals were just untested. In practice, while it is somewhat easy to do “net good” (in small absolute terms), I find that it is not easy to strictly “do no harm” in weightier politics—that idea is subjective. Even the most obviously good legislation may be opposed with such immense and earnest force that one questions one’s certainty in proposing it. One defensively falls back on scientific study and statistical data to overcome anecdotes—defenses abstracted from lived experience. And it is eventually tempting to detach from justification altogether and think only in partisan numbers: what algorithms must one execute and persuasive techniques employ to “get the votes.” When Brooks mentions “hollowness,” he’s referring to the absence of empathy that leads to this sort of worldview. (Overconfidence and technical elitism is a perilous field. My preference is to avoid that.)
Anyway, to your point on religion, I am thinking through this article and your remarks in both secular and spiritual terms, which one might interpret entirely secularly if they wish. The clearest and most reliable solution to moral quandaries and social awkwardness is, as you allude, to just “do your best, and worry less.” In the course of attempting that, I would still benefit from your and others’ experiences. I appreciate hearing personal stories and learning moments. I am seeking to train my own skill of discernment.
I’ve always appreciated the distinction of “positive peace.” This is a thoughtful article.
I’m curious how generationally rooted the Rojavan cooperative model is at scale. A cohort of dutiful, self-motivated workers is admirable. At the same time, I struggle to conceive of a society where their children would appreciate this degree of labor for self-governance, especially once the most pressing issues (relearning to bake bread) are understood and resolved. Even marginally more abstract or specialized questions are presumably not appealing to young people who would rather be off in their own company.
Municipal management is staggeringly boring—it’s tiring, but it’s mostly just mundane. In a large society (there are 2 million+ Kurds) that finds (or will find) itself reliant on infrastructure and all sorts of mind-numbing administrative functions, this seems impossible to escape. This is not strictly a problem of capitalism. In contrast, modern technology, even when not operated under a profit-seeking framework, is attentionally captivating; for some portion of society, it’s so much easier to stay at home and engage in some media (film, video game, phone call) than to bother going to a presumably dull meeting which requires even moderate social interaction. The article implies much about cultural and economic duty at these meetings but says nothing of fun, and the human brain is lazy.
In Pennsylvania, the Amish maintain a distinctive, peaceable agricultural society in part through a rejection of certain technology. That’s presumably not the specific intention of the Kurds’ communal model, which sounds more concerned with land use and resource distribution. How do the Kurds manage encroachment of the capitalistic environ?
The depth of social organization required to reinforce communal participation across age groups seems almost impossibly vast. I genuinely cannot comprehend it. In my experience in semi-communal settings in the West, quorum to attend to business matters is hard to achieve even when people have nothing better to do and are minimally exhausted. Government attracts a specific kind of person. How can whole-community meeting bodies avoid slowly delegating specialized decision-making in a way that obscures the communal process? And there must be a physical element as well. How big are these meetings? How are communities literally constructed to accommodate attendance? Will not the population naturally grow and make transportation into a spatially difficult problem, as it has throughout the world? How can this model be extended beyond isolated or mountainous agricultural communities and to more complex and urbanized formations of society? What lessons can the rest of us take from this approach while continuing to administer the ridiculously complicated bureaucracy of scaled-up farming, electricity transmission, medical technology, shipping, etc.?
I love the concept here and I’m glad it seems to be working. It is absolutely essential to address the underlying problems of conflict to create durable peace. You’ll have to pardon my skeptical nature. I’m reminded of the adage that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”