Tag: life

How my brain works
Even at the best of times my predominant intellectual ability is being very good at applied ontology: at figuring out the correct categories and organization and architecture of things, at describing what I want and following the logic through. Not creative or lateral thinking. My brain is like a Bugatti Veyron: very fast in a straight line. This is very helpful for things like programming and writing in some sense, because Im very good at seeing the joints in reality and describing things how t...
Intelligence
Things I believe about intelligence, in no particular order, based on what Ive observed in the world: - Intelligence is multiple, possibly overlapping, innate talents or aptitudes. However, intelligence is not isomorphic to individual skills a person might have. The kinds of intelligence instead grant aptitude for generally broad fields of endeavor, such as: - Communication - Theory of Mind - Visual-Spacial Reasoning - Planning - Linguistic Reasoning - Mathematical Reasoning - Pattern Recognitio...
Thoughts on meaning-making: don't force it
Many people struggle to find meaning in their lives. They worry about their purpose in life, they worry about the overarching narrative of their life and how it fits into the grand narrative of the world, they worry about the purpose and meaning of the things that happen to them and how they fit into all those narratives. They also worry about trying to assign some kind of meaning to the things that they do, the objects in the world around them, and the people in their life. Importantly, in all ...
The left has prigs too
Im very tired, but I think its finally time to talk about this. So excuse the awkward prose, and focus on the ideas. Ive spent a lot of time in leftist circles, via social media (up until a year ago, when I quit cold turkey after a particularly unpleasant couple weeks) and in person. Ive begun seeing a pattern in the thoughts and actions of leftists that sincerely and deeply disturbs me. Its not just in other leftists, either, but in myself as well, that I see this pattern of actions and thought...
Why I hate misandry in feminist spaces
Whenever I see jokes or meta-ironic statements made about how men are all evil, or inferior, or should be castrated, or killed, or how theyre all dangerous, or predators, or abusers, or disposable; or even if I see more subtle or toned-down versions of the same mentality, I react very negatively. You might ask why -- after all, Im a trans woman. Those thoughts arent directed at me! First, the fact that something isnt directed at me shouldnt mean I cant speak up against something I think is wrong...
Stop looking at the horrors
New horrors are born every day. Many people seem to think theres some kind of obligation to be informed about all of them, to have an opinion on all of them, to have some kind or prepared statement about them to weave them back into the grand narrative of whatever ideological clique youre a member of. More than all of that, many seem to think that theres some sort of obligation to look at these horrors -- to stare at them until your eyes bleed, drinking them into your soul, forcing yourself to f...
Communities do exist, and they're evil
The classic vulgar individualist quote is that communities dont exist, only groups of individuals. This is false. Communities may not exist as specific located physical entities, but they do exist ontologically, as higher-order meta entities composed of the emergent behaviors, desires, and powers that arise out of the interaction of their component individuals, and perpetuated through time by inherent self-cohesion and self-preservation properties, like gliders in Conways Game of LIfe. The behav...