new log

content_daily/log/90.mkd

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+---
+title: South America Has Good Red Wine
+date: 2012-09-11
+techne: :done
+episteme: :log
+---
+
+> Donnons-nous à manger à l'Inconnu, non par désespoir, mais simplement pour enrichir les insondables réservoirs de l'Absurde. (Manifeste du Futurisme)
+
+Upgraded my Fitocracy goal from 35 to 50 points/day. (For comparison, 5 close-grip chin-ups are 28 points.) So I'm now at 5x my original rate. I *think* I can go up to 100 points/day, but I'm not sure if I regenerate fast enough, so I'll informally try to go as high as possible, but only enforce 50/day until I have a week or so of data.
+
+For calibration, I checked this week's leading <del>meat bag</del> athlete on Fitocracy who also relies on bodyweight exercise. I found it quite motivating that exercise-wise, he's not doing anything different from me, and in some cases, even does about as many reps per set as I am. (And where he's clearly superior, he's still in a range I consider physically possible, even for me (in due time). It's not like he's lifting trucks or something.) He's just doing *a lot* more sets, and with 100/set, he earns >8000/workout.
+
+So new goal: move up to 200/day asap. That would finally put me in the better half[^half] of Fitocracy users.
+
+[^half]:
+    <% skip do %>
+    Right now, I currently earn ~500 points/week. Fitocracy had ~22k active users on its leaderboard this week. The thresholds for percentiles are:
+
+    - 90% -> 150/week
+    - 75% -> 450/week
+    - 50% -> 1,200/week
+    - 25% -> 2,800/week
+    - 10% -> 5,000/week
+    - 1% -> 12,300/week
+    - best (bodyweight) -> 57,000/week
+    - best -> 183,400/week (wtf?)
+
+    <% end %>
+
+This might be the first time I'm actually feeling ever-so-slightly competitive about something others are actually better at. I'm nourishing the shit out of this emotion because I'll need a lot more of it.[^more]
+
+[^more]:
+    <% skip do %>
+    Whenever I get bored with push-ups, I remind myself that every time I successfully pushed myself up, I have overcome the gravitational pull *of the entire planet Earth*. There's 10^50 of those little atomic fuckers doing their best to keep me down, *and they have all failed*, *every single time*.
+    <% end %>
+
+---
+
+Fiddled more with the subs2srs cards. Don't have the perfect mix yet, but getting there. Also converted a whole bunch of episodes.
+
+---
+
+> Il n'y a plus de beauté que dans la lutte. Pas de chef-d'œuvre sans un caractère agressif. La poésie doit être un assaut violent contre les forces inconnues, pour les sommer de se coucher devant l'homme. (Manifeste du Futurisme)
+
+Sigh.
+
+Tried to write about ambiguity, couldn't get it to work.
+
+There's this weird territory of magic you can't talk about. It's not that it's *forbidden*, it's just that it's impossible. It fundamentally runs on ambiguity. It's like Mitch said:
+
+> I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run, he's fuzzy, get out of here.
+
+I'm not sure if I'm becoming *way* more powerful or going insane again. I'm sitting on more and more incommunicable evidence, and results that work only *because* they are ambiguous and uncertain. The power balance in my head is shifting dramatically. I've given the Taoist a bit more freedom, and now he's running the show. He has resolved half our problems already and vastly improved everything else. I'm not exaggerating - I went through that old 200+ item list of Everything That Is Wrong With My Life and *every single item* has made progress and it's now, like, a 20 item list.
+
+But I *can't* clarify how he does it, what attitudes he induces, what beliefs needed hacking. I can't even *understand* them because that would remove the necessary ambiguity.
+
+There's this quote from some weird crackpot text I once read. It goes like this:
+
+> Q: How can I flow in time? A: You are already flowing in time. Stop flowing out of time.
+
+That's how I feel.
+
+Sigh.

content_daily/log/91.mkd

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+---
+title: Coup de Poing
+date: 2012-09-11
+techne: :wip
+episteme: :log
+---
+
+Did the first half of my [epistemic tag][Epistemic State] update. I wanted to add more fine-grained distinctions, but I had a hard time figuring out how to rank a metaphysical belief. The main problem of accurate belief assignments is that it depends on a good prior. But even getting a well-defined prior (i.e. one that isn't zero on the best answer, which is typically by making it non-zero everywhere) requires you to know what the hypothesis-space even *is*.
+
+Say you've only heard of consequentialism and nihilism, and nothing else. You hear the arguments and assign consequentialism a 60% probability and nihilism 40%. Now Kant comes along and blows your mind with deontology, but unfortunately you've already used up all the probability. Dammit, so you switch over to likelihood ratios. Consequentialism is at least as likely as deontology, and each is twice as likely as nihilism, so it's 2:2:1. Fine, if something better comes along, you can easily add it. But now how can you express how certain you are of consequentialism? You'd have to say "I give consequentialism 2:5 odds, compared to everything else I've heard", but for that to be meaningful, you'd *also* have to tell me *what else* you've heard.
+
+Compression sucks. But wait a minute - I'm a [Yangming][Wang Yangming]-ite, I believe in the unity of knowledge and action. Correct beliefs must result in virtue[^virtue] and vice versa. So why not just express *that*?
+
+[^virtue]:
+    <% skip do %>
+    Yangming only made the argument in case of moral beliefs and actions, but I think it should extended to the general case, but then I also think morality should be extended to swallow everything. (Eventually.) I suspect (but I'm not sure) that Yangwing would agree with that.
+    <% end %>
+
+So now for anything that I believe in, to some degree, instead of saying how much I do believe in it, I'm saying what kind of duel I would accept over it. For a mild speculation, I'd . Sure, I'm likely to lose, but it sounds like fun and I don't mind losing. For something more serious, I'd fight you in Quake 3 *like a [man][Notch Q3]*. For the true hardcore stuff, I'd accept a fight to the death.
+
+If you challenge me, and you win, I concede the belief and accept whatever you hold. If I win, I expect you to do the same. Yes, I'm completely serious. No, there is no hardcore belief yet. (In public anyway.)
+
+Rules are outlined on the [Epistemic State][] page. I've yet to re-tag old pages. (That's the second half.)
+
+(HT to Will for the idea.)