If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention | Hacker News Reader

If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

156 pointspasswordoops120 comments

Computers used to be absolutely magical to me until I studied and worked with embedded systems and compilers - much of it is well-defined and not magical at all. One of my biggest regrets is studying computer science, because the magic was stripped from me once I learned or intuited even a little bit of how the black box worked.

I'm not sure I understand the premise at all - to me, the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes. Maybe that's why I'm miserable.

So you are essentially saying "ignorance is bliss"?

There's an old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If learning about technology makes it insufficiently advanced then it is distinguishable from magic.

If magic is enchantment, the world (as concerns the technology) is no longer enchanted.

So yes: Ignorance is bliss.

Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world.

So yes: Ignorance is bliss.

> Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world.

Yeah, that's the main selling point of never-never land.

I'm probably just too inexperienced in the whole Computer Science world, but I become even more fascinated by modern computers and the people who worked on them, the more I learn.

I remember learning about the inner architecture of CPUs for the first time and being amazed at the genius of early computer architects.

Maybe this will change in the future, but right now I feel this enchantment more, the more I learn about technology.

> Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier

Makes sense, most of whats shown on the news is just daily misery, without any relevance. My wife watches the 8 o clock news daily and most days the only news of any relevance is the weather report. The rest is just a barrage of ''in some country (usually a million miles away) some people got stabbed/a bus crashed/a terrorist attack happened/some environmental disaster/a company made a bazillion dollars profit/a politician did a thing''. Its all completely worthless to know, its forgotten five minutes afterwards and all it does is increase anger, fear and/or anxiety just a little bit more every day.

You should study ML/AI advanced mathematics.

I was struggling to comprehend some math concept, read the theory on my own and tried hard to get it for like 5-6 hours until I went to a colleague that scribbled a drawing and made me understand it in 5 minutes. Felt like I was in a wizard story

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Any technology you can understand is insufficiently advanced.

also probably why all wizened and powerful wizards are usually old grumpy men. "So it's actually just THIS that's creating my lightning spell?"

In Cherryh's Rusalka series, the trouble with magic is it has side effects, so wizards document all their magical actions, and while young wizards may cast spells with wild abandon, old wizards are tied up with heaps of magical debt and must carefully consult their lore before attempting anything new.

The author is doing several things here which might bother you. Among them is mixing the meaning of "enchantment" with the meaning of "wonderment." He begins the article by defining enchantment as "magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents" but through the whole body of the article only treats it as a sense of wonderment, which is not the same thing. You are right to be irritated by this. Another thing he is doing is repeatedly asserting the enchanting qualities of the world without ever addressing why these things are enchanting, with the implication that the why isn't worth addressing or maybe isn't possible to know, when it is obvious. In most of his examples, the reason is because we are naturally reductive and reduce complex phenomena to much simpler mental models. Then when we look closer, we marvel at the far more complex reality. The author behaves as if this is some sort of deep mystery of the universe.

Magic without mystery? Why not. Look ahead now, what can you make? New things every day.

Reading books about the early days of the computing industry might help renew your enthusiasm. Feeling the secondhand excitement of the old school wizards, especially when they faced so much more friction - is contagious.

Computers have never been magical to me. It's always been more machinery than magic in my mind. I find other things magical, like people and how they can love and care for you.

If current RF technology(or even 100 year old RF technology) doesn't seem like magic.. what do you require then?

The way photons behave in our universe seems pretty damn magical if you ask me. Sure, it's not Harry Potter, but we let fiction reset our expectations to a level where we'll never be happy.

It is kind of hard to explain but the first time I learned about digital/analog conversion and wired up a very simple speaker and made it play any note I wanted by simply tweaking the processor’s clock, the magic left me. Before then I couldn’t even fathom how that worked, then it was like “that’s it?”

Just an overwhelming sense of disappointment in how much sense it made that it worked that way and not a myriad of more spectacular ways I’d imagined when I was a kid taking apart ancient IBM color monitors for fun

Biochemistry is pretty magical, have you tried digging into that? Immunology or protein folding might be just the thing for you.

You can get exactly the same kind of feeling with RF too, I worked around that space for a decade or so and the structures and effects that felt magical I look at and just see capacitance, inductance, coupling, loss etc. - still interesting, but it hasn't felt like magic for years anymore.

> One of my biggest regrets is studying computer science, because the magic was stripped from me once I learned or intuited even a little bit of how the black box worked.

A fun part of hiking mountains is getting to spots where you can look out and see the view from where you've gotten to, and maybe even (parts of) the trail you came up.

>the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes.

I believe that author is referring to things outside the scope of our daily routines, and/or routine acceptance of marvels we are taking for granted. That can happen for some things when we focus on them daily.

I'm finally reading machinist/engineer Dunn's 'Lost Technology of Ancient Egypt' and he notes that while people have been walking past its statuaries for centuries, immune to their details. When he started looking at them as an engineer that he noticed the incredible precision achieved worked the hardest rocks with unknown tools 5000 years ago. He remains gobsmacked by it.

I think that's marvelous in its own way. One of the defining experiences for me as a software engineer was hearing my boss tell a story about another engineer — there was a problem that had been hanging over the team for over a year, every engineer on the team had tried to solve it, and everybody thought it was going to be a huge effort, until one day this engineer came up with a solution. His solution was so simple that he was able to implement it by himself in a couple of months, and it was so elegant that a year later, nobody could remember why they thought the problem was hard in the first place. Having seen the solution, they were so changed that the person they had been before they saw it was unimaginable to them.

Ever since I heard that story, that's what I have aspired to. Is it disenchantment? I don't think so. The mystery is merely moved, from "how could this be possible?" to "how can a thing go from impossible to boring?" and "what currently impossible things will become boring in the next 50, 100, 500 years?"

If you go further down (to the level of fundamental physics) you'll see there's plenty of mystery left. Even in our technological age, we still don't even have a solid explanation for what makes an apple fall to the ground. The world is far from dull.

Opposite for me, the more I learn internals, the the more amazing it is -- how some useful complexity can arise from such simple things (e.g. electron/hole pairs jumping over PN junctions -> transistors -> NAND gates -> CPUs -> programming languages -> high level architecture)

Yeah, same for me. The more I learn the internals, the more magical it gets. We are literally making pieces of sand, rock- think. That's magical.

The same happened to me when I studied Physics with great care.

I like to say that we teach sand to think.

More commonly, I refer to myself as a writer of executable poetry that moves the hearts of machines.

Or how we can wrangle simplicity out of such a baklava of complexity in multiple interconnected layers.

> ... "the more I learn internals, the the more amazing it is" ...

This is how I've come to feel about a lot of "computer things" I've learned over the years. Example #1: Game development - Them folks perform some real art and magic (and engineering) to create the amazing games we've gotten to enjoy over the years. Speaking of "art" - Example #2: Computer CGI (movies, TV, & game development) - Knowing how it works actually makes it just that much more amazing when you see it done really well. Matter of fact, it makes it easier to know when what you're looking at is "done well", and to appreciate how utterly magical a really good 3D artist can be. The more I learn, the more impressed I am at the folks who first did these things, and those who came after and improved upon them by "standing on the shoulders of giants".

> the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes

I feel you because I was like that too, but at some point, my brain bit-flipped to the other polarity. I wish you the same.

The more I learn the more I feel awed and amazed. "Reality is surprisingly detailed". The surprises are never-ending. Finding abstract and concrete pattern-relationships between phenomena is an unending source of delight. The universe is fractal and deeply interconnected. Being able to see / feel / imagine even the smallest spec of that is the magic of our moment in eternity.

Even my own personal struggles got re-framed as an exercise in observing what the hell is even going on between my ears. The otherwise-only-painful struggles have become equal parts horrible (lived experience in the moment) and fascinating (interpretation / hindsight / insight into one's mechanisms and traits). A person is a prisoner (of their conditioning) only to the extent that it ($Prison) binds them against their will.

Consciously and deliberately attempting said bit-flip is a difficult road and never complete, but it can be a road to progressive self-liberation. Like many other personal phenomena / belief change, it doesn't happen for a long time, and then one day it does.

(edit: add clarifying words)

Sounds like it's time to do some Common Lisp, my friend.

Technology seems magical but that sense of magic might dissipate when better understood (although magnets and electricity still seem magical to me).

Nature seems magical and that sense of magic intensifies when better understood. I've yet to meet a biologist who can describe the fundamentals of life without some hint of magic (whether they see acknowledge it or not).

I intentionally learnt that low level stuff to destroy the magic. I don't like magic. It doesn't mean I don't appreciate the beauty in computing and the world, though.

Computers have always been sort of magical for me, but the magic isn't in how it works, but that it is an infinitely malleable canvas.

I've been writing a Gregorian chant typesetter, and it's sort of magical to resize the window and watch the notes flow onto the next line. (Barring bugs; those break the enchantment)

Mark Twain wrote about this phenomenon in 1883 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-eng-102-college-writi...

I've found it to be generally true, especially for activities one finds leisurely. For instance, understanding a game deeply enough to create a hyper-optimized "min-maxed" strategy ends up stripping the joy from it.

Wonderful reference and a piece of writing I've always held dear to my heart, thank you. Absolutely true about min/maxing the fun out of a game as well, although for some people, I don't doubt that is the fun. Unfortunately, it becomes a playstyle everyone thinks they have to do to have fun and it ironically does the opposite - thinking of WoW classic here specifically.

I personally find software development to be enchanting and am often thankful to have a job like this.

I get to make in the comfort of my home creations where I am only limited by my knowledge, imagination, and attention. I can experiment easily and explore completely different designs with an ease that any other discipline would be envious of. And then I can allow millions or billions to have access my creation with ease.

That seems pretty enchanting and almost god-like and magical to me.

Seems as good a place as any to ask: how do I get back to this state?

I used to feel exactly this way, but after 3 years now slinging code for money I’ve become very disillusioned. Anyone have any tips for finding the magic again?

start with creating a smol indie game you yourself would want to play

Write a lecture about best practices to avoid burnout.

Computer science is such a new human endeavor that there is so much uncharted territory about what the future of training the next generation looks like.

Obviously, some pretty bad habits led to the massive amount of burnout I am seeing amongst computer scientists.

> after 3 years now slinging code for money I’ve become very disillusioned

.. with hardware/software or the systems of humans which create them?

Both. It feels even now like we're just monkeys sitting on a tower of cards swinging around tools we don't understand. There are a lot of very smart people that have built the software and hardware we have today, and lots of smart people coming in to replace them; but the majority of engineers are not that, and (myself included) largely pretend at being wizards while in reality we are all the sorcerer's apprentice.

The systems we've built for society are even worse. For every story about how tech is improving lives, you hear another two about yet another horrible dystopian usecase for the same technology, and it's never hard to imagine a dozen more.

> We are all the sorcerer's apprentice

Back in the mists of time at BigCo internship day1, the incoming cohort of interns was briefed by outgoing cohort, without managers present. One of their pearls of wisdom was that a great manager (and by extension, team) could lead and defend an oasis of excellence in a desert of industry detritus. Today, this dynamic can also be seen in serial founding teams and spinoff projects.

If time is more spiral than linear, then cyclical patterns are not merely swings of a pendulum, but a recursive opportunity for redemption or relapse. In that worldview, merely waiting would be enough to experience a different set of local maxima. But human actors with agency can move to new contexts instead of waiting for cyclical change, or work with peers to spark new cycles.

Stargate/Fringe/Eureka posit multiple universes and versions of ourselves, each universe further having multiple timelines. If it were possible for us to see an infinite tapestry of futures, would we be invigorated or paralyzed by choice? Looking in the other direction, we have access to the near-infinite, unfinished work of our ancestors, some of whom deserve the sorcerer moniker.

One way to gain perspective on local minima/maxima is to step back to a different scale of time or space. The classic film "Powers of 10" [1] offers a spatial perspective. There are history of technology books which span decades to centuries, showing recurring patterns of both good and bad. One tiny example is the decoding of the Maya language, which was unsolved for centuries, then cracked by an art history teacher on vacation.

There is a 1930s sci-fi book [2] which spans 2 billion years and many generations of humans going through cycles of technology and social structures. The successor book has an even longer timeframe. As a thought exercise, it leaves one with the impression that everything has already happened before, and will happen again, but slightly differently in future spirals of time and space. Where does that leave mortal humans prioritizing action within finite lifespans?

If we can't find a sorcerer from whom to learn, we can choose which sorcery we want to teach. Be the change.

> For every story about how tech is improving lives, you hear another two about yet another horrible dystopian usecase for the same technology, and it's never hard to imagine a dozen more.

If one looks into the history of tech, they can find initially benevolent tech that was twisted into dystopian purposes. But there are also examples of tech designed for one purpose, later adapted to positive use. Even hostile social media can be tamed by manually curated lists of non-hostile writers. With the proliferation of open-source, it has never been easier to Embrace & Extend, or harder to choose a direction.

If you have the space/time/tools to build something tangible that fuses software with the physical world, it can combine the dream-catcher inspiration of software with physical constraint. If lacking inspiration, recreate a pioneering tech demo or meet a hyper-local need, then extend that foundation.

[1] "Powers of 10", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

[3] "Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide." --Heinz von Foerster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018832

Find another profession and make programming a hobby instead.

Some fortunate people can make their professional life also their passion and derive fulfillness from it, but not everyone can be like that. For everyone else, work makes damn near anything miserable even if it's something you otherwise love.

You loved programming before you made money from it, and you hate programming now that you make money from it. The problem is clearly money and you need to decouple it from programming.

Yes, I'm aware changing your line of work is more easier said than done, but that's the only proper way of resolving your conflict in my opinion.

i did this, i get much more enjoyment from computing and tech without all the tedium, and i can dream of projects i want to work on (and sometimes do them :p) - only for my own enjoyment ofc.

Get a hobby

Yes I also went through this state.

There are a couple of unlocks:

Do you remember how cool building software was when you were starting out? The only problem then was you couldn't. Well now you can, most people don't realize that. You can create the software for your loved one, or friend, or yourself that you always wanted.

The thing is to take it slow. Use a language you always wanted to use. Change that color scheme. And when you type, do so slowly, cherishing each keystroke.

We take so much for granted. The fact that writing text can make atoms move about and transistors turn on or off millions of times a second is just astonishing. You are taking part in humanity's most sacred rituals. Give it it's due and soon you will have the love come back.

All hail the Faustian screen ;)

I recommend the youtube channel Posy. He only uploads about once a month but every time it is an exploration of something that seems so simple but it sparks that child like wonder in the world. The good sense of humour helps as well.

https://www.youtube.com/c/PosyMusic

Second that. He's got some of the highest production quality YouTube has to offer. High effort content.

Here's the one that got me hooked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSS6yAMZF78

This is the same video that got me hooked! I love Posy. It always feels magical to know that there are so many other curious people in the world. HN feels like a natural gathering point for that crowd as well.

I loved this one and tried a bunch of different techniques to replicate it. Finally settled on ffmpeg, with something similar to this:

https://gist.github.com/chigozienri/0ac602c3bc7d6c5fab9f0c68...

I made a chrome extension that does that on youtube videos (can do on any video). Could do basic motion extraction. Got clueless on how to do all the rest of the things he did in that video.

Can you link to it please (if it's public)?

https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/motion-extraction

Found some changes on my laptop which i also just uploaded. Can't guarantee if its still working correctly. But you will get the idea.

Posy is fantastic. I also highly recommend his Lazy Posy channel.

Or Technology Connections who made me watch a 20 minutes videos on the color brown and makes it feel like magic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

I think the right word in my case would be 'cursed'. There is mystery and magic behind the scenes but it's not positive.

Everything positive in my world is stuff that I can see, explain and influence to some extent. Everything bad is the stuff I can't fully understand; the things that I have little visibility and no control over; yet those exert a very strong force over my reality.

Things like government, monetary policy, globalization, the media, cultural changes. I don't have much visibility or control over those but they all have a huge negative impact on my world.

Everything bad that happened so me, I cannot trace back to a specific thing I did. I consistently sacrificed the present for the future, optimized for career, yet the invisible hand keeps making things worse somehow.

I can't help but wonder what happened to the people who always lived for the present. If my future is looking so bleak, what about most people who didn't sacrifice anything for the future? Victims of the opioid crisis? Or maybe everything has been flipped on its head? Maybe the future belongs to those who YOLO everything?

I am not going to try to change your outlook to be more positive, but you have to admit that it’s somewhat (tragically) amusing that we can find ourselves on a website full of people who are extremely technically capable (and highly intelligent), have access to devices that can connect to billions of others devices instantly, and can profit from said system allowing them to better their lives, yet this same community can only dwell on the negative of their situation instead of the positive.

I think, when you’re very smart, you are just many steps ahead of the average person in pattern recognition. You can literally store more information and pattern match against it, so you’re going to pattern match up the power hierarchy and think about things that have a negative impact on you that you can never directly affect without traversing up the hierarchy. If most people here (not saying you specifically) would instead just focus on “what is the biggest problem in my life that I have complete control over?”, I think they’d find that focusing on the greater powers that be has little practical consequence since they’re just not at the level where they can exert influence over those powers. There is almost certainly a path to local maxima, and from there, a greater and greater maxima.

Some background context:

- I self-taught myself coding at the age of 14 in 2004 with Flash/ActionScript using computers in my school's library. Very few people in my small town were interested in coding at the time so it was unusual.

- Studied Software Eng at university. Graduated early with a Info Tech degree due to high number of job opportunities (I was already working part time).

- I got in early on the web development trend.

- Joined an ed-tech startup. Got some shares. Has been slow steady growth but they haven't exited yet. Not sure I'll ever be able to sell.

- Launched an open source library which got thousands of stars on GitHub.

- Joined a startup backed by big investors including Y Combinator, Greylock Partners, A16z.

- Joined a $4 billion market cap crypto project in 2017 which got into the top 10 crypto projects in the world at the time. I was developer #6; the project started using the open source library I had built. Although the project slid in the rankings due to lack of marketing, it's still worth hundreds of millions and hasn't been hacked in 4 years since it started using my open source library. A lot of weird stuff started happening in my career after joining this project.

- Earned like $50K per year (average) from blockchain forging for about 3 years. I was earning 200% yield on my investment each year for 3 years which I used to fund my own time to work on side projects. Then crypto had a big crash though my principal is about the same as when I had started.

- During that time, I launched 6 different side projects with other people. All still running but none earning any revenue yet. Algorithms don't give them any exposure.

Unfortunately, even with this track record, none of this translated to significant long term income or opportunities. I have fewer opportunities today than I did when I just graduated from university in 2012.

That’s great context. And I’m very sorry. I’m an optimist, but I’m also a realist, and, yeah, the delta between getting close to making it over and over and having that high of an expectation and then nothing coming to much fruition after so much work would make anyone discouraged.

It takes a ton of effort and courage to have hope in a situation like that. Because you will have to believe something is possible that you have no indication of being possible based on prior experience.

Or you will have to change your outlook to not care about massive financial success as much. But that’s not easy either since that requires a world view and possibly a values shift. Very very hard.

And yeah if I were stuck in that spot, I would feel cursed too and like the higher forces are fucked. It’s totally natural. I really hope for the best! I know you will be good in the end, but I’m sure that’s the last thing you really want to hear since it’s invalidating of how you’re feeling.

I appreciate this comment.

There are only two types of advice which I find useful nowadays: "The odds of success are extremely low, you need to keep rolling the dice." or "You need to find people who are willing to help you."

Everything else feels like gaslighting because I already tried so many things and clearly that was enough to sent me on an upward trajectory.

But definitely I do sometimes feel like there is a conspiracy because I know quite a few people who were not competent who succeeded... This seems to rule out the 'low probability' scenario. I feel like, in my case, there is an element of being rejected due to obscure 'human' factors that are beyond my understanding.

personally, the post resonates strongly. focusing on this way of seeing has improved my life tremendously. based on the very little I know of you (your two posts) it sounds possible that the point isn’t landing. you seem to be living near the “control = safety/happiness” realm, where the high order bit of life is controllability.

try reading it again, and notice how little specific advice is given towards how to cultivate the sort of attention he’s pointing at (maybe his most concrete advice is in the form of a painting of an owl). are you convinced that by trying hard enough the future can belong to you, or that life owes you something? you can create an arbitrary amount of suffering for yourself by living that delusion (or the opposite one, that you can’t influence anything).

the notion expressed in the post is really worth trying, and simple, but hard to explain. one idea: the next time you see something you personally find beautiful (a flower, the sky? the fact that the earth supports you effortlessly?) you could investigate whether you did anything to “deserve” that.

Honestly I thought you were aiming for the more notable criticism: if you consider yourself a smart person but then say you "don't know how the government works" then you're just too lazy to find out (or uninterested in challenging your pre-conceptions).

It is possible, to an enormous level of detail because none of it is secret, to understand how the apparatus of state works - very little of the whole is actually off-limits.

Cause eventually you realize that we’re here to plant trees we won’t see fruit.

Sorry, but if "everything positive in my world is stuff that I can see, explain and influence" then that means that stranger on the Internet doesn't have any real friends.

Anything you try to do beyond being that person's very first friend is likely lost on them. And even friendship would be alien and likely rejected.

I couldn’t agree more.

A few weeks ago I was driving and saw a creek. I should check that out, I thought.

I walked along the creek bed which had mostly dried, and in some puddles and pools, I noticed tiny figures flitting around in the water and ripples on the surface.

Could they be fish? No, at first all I could see was little water striders congregating around the edges of the water. I decided to look closer.

After waiting 30 seconds or so, I saw them: tiny little fish coming out of hiding from behind submerged roots and branches, rocks, and overhangs of the creek bank. Dozens in each puddle, thousands in close proximity along the creek bed.

I decided to pull out my camera and start recording them. I discovered that they were mostly coho salmon, born maybe 4 months earlier, weathering the driest part of the summer yet in these rapidly vanishing pools. Many weren’t making it. Thankfully we’ve had heavy rains since then so they’re likely doing well now.

My recordings picked up a vast, lively, diverse array of tiny creatures. Everything from water mites to daphnia to frogs. Water beetles would spontaneously sneak out and shoot around a pool, searching for what, I have no idea.

Tiny prickly sculpins hid under the stones, occasionally coming out to find food or choose a new hiding spot.

The geology of the creek was a beautiful blend of strange black volcanic rock, soft clay, and the hallmark sandstones of this part of the island I live on. Every bend of the creek revealed new and interesting features. The layers of the clay and sandstone sometimes revealed bizarre swirling patterns. I couldn’t guess the way in which they formed.

I was surrounded by the echoes of at least a dozen ravens at any time, picking through the trees and creek bed for food. They were so fascinating to listen to and watch.

I was transported to another world. It was so deeply enchanting in those woods. Millions of lives playing out in this ridiculously beautiful yet precarious creek bed. Dense woods filled with moss, ferns, and towering cedars.

And the world is filled with these places. I will find another place to pull over soon, and my heart will be filled with wonder again.

It’s all there if you look for it.

Why record it? Why not just be present in the moment?

Upon reading that comment, it sounds to me like they were present...

I just dropped the camera in the pool and walked away.

https://steve-adams.me/coho

I'm not sure I understand what the author is talking about, but I'd rephrase it in other way: if your world is not enchanted, you didn't look close enough. You can believe that you understand how the world around you works, but you don't, the understanding is an illusion. All this complexity is unbelievable, I would say it is impossible, if I was not immersed in it.

Reminds me of that recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41021951

"Don't forget the cavernous structures which people are forbidden to enter, buzzing with the activity of objects controlled by those enchanted crystals, like the magic brooms in Fantasia, performing myriad arcane rituals with rare and exotic materials to make more enchanted crystals."

"And the high priests guarding the knowledge."

"They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals."

Whether we see the world as sad and dull or beautiful and magick is a question of perspective.

Humanity's greatest skill is ignoring the beauty that surrounds us.

And secondly self deception!

"Our three greatest skills are ignoring the beauty that surrounds us, self-deception, and an almost fanatical dedication to the pope."

. . . and the Spanish Inquisition.

Our four greatest skills are . . .

Self deception is our #1 skill. That's why we couldn't progress before science. It's also what makes us see beauty when there's none.

I think it’s more appropriate to say that self-deception is a consequence of overfitting based on other primal instincts. Our #1 skill lies in pattern recognition and imitation. A lot of time, it’s faulty because it’s guided by fear/anxiety for perfectly valid reasons of survival.

We "couldn't progress before science" but developed metallurgy, mining, sailing, astronomy, democracy, ... well before the enlightenment and the development of the scientific method? Heck, we domesticated plants and animals before recorded history.

Perhaps you're talking about empiricism rather than science? Empiricism is old as the hills, presumably these discoveries were made from observation and experimentation. The scientific method builds on empiricism, but incorporates mechanisms to make it more difficult to fool ourselves (such as reproducibility and peer review), and so is distinct.

As for "seeing beauty where there is none," that's nonsense. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you see it, it's real. You can critique someone else's ideas of beauty, you can disagree with them, but to say that they are somehow objectively wrong is just chauvinism.

You may as well tell someone that when they're thinking, it's just the illusion of thinking. Or when they're enjoying a meal you dislike, they're only imagining that they're enjoying it. What would that even mean?

Humans are machines that are wired to be motivated by change. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be beautiful or enchanted, it just has to _change_ and be _changeable_ by the person.

When people feel down, it's not usually because they can't sense enchantment, it's because they're stuck on something they can't currently change.

It's not a "skill," it's a devastating statement on the nature of the world we live in and how little power supposedly free people actually have in the face of a crushing government technocratic corporate welfare state.

Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention

Modulo the attention that leads to enchantment is a privilege. When a person's world is full of actual danger, bending down to smell the flowers can be a fatal vulnerability.

Or to put it another way, lack of enchantment is not a moral failing any more than disenchantment is a virtue. Other people's circumstances are not what bliss-ninnies project upon them any more than they are the projections of cynics, conspiracy theorists and paranoids.

I’m not sure privilege is the right way to think about this- but chronic stress definitely shifts the world to being unenchanted. I remember living in an enchanted world as a kid, and it can return with something as simple as a breathing exercise, meditation, or sitting in a forest hot spring.

I imagine — so I admit it might not be the case — your childhood contained ample food and not a lot of violence, want, and abuse. That’s why I used “privilege.” There is probably a better word but I can’t think of it.

I think you’re talking about emotional trauma- which can be caused by a lot of things- including but not limited to the type of difficult childhood you are mentioning.

What does "modulo" mean in your first sentence?

It's a maths people phrase - usually it means something like "this is true if you ignore these counterexamples".

For instance: my code is perfect, modulo all the bugs everyone keeps finding.

I guess the analogy is the modulo operation removing a whole bunch of stuff from a number? I don't know haha.

My interpretation is that it's related to modulate. Like how you might modulate the volume to reduce it (without muting it), "X is true modulo Y" means that Y makes X less true (but not untrue).

I didn't find any evidence for this etymology from casual searching however (other than that the roots are related).

The number of people in that actual danger is absolutely minute and not worth commenting on.

I’m not really sure what their point was. My world is (mostly) not enchanted (I am a Maritimer with Irish roots, after all, so the weird isn’t that far away), as I am a reductionist at heart.

Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering?

Not only “no”, but I would say that it is doubled or more by being able to appreciate the blue of the sky and the reflected blue of the water while understanding the mechanisms...

just like how my appreciation of both optics and E&M deepened tremendously when I realized that the former was just a simple expression of the latter...

the same “latter” that led Einstein to the Lorentz transformation to solve the problems of additive velocities causing ridiculous magnetic fields, and thus gave us SR.

I mean, wow, just wow.

My world IS enchanted, but by math and its wondrous ilk.

> Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering?

Richard Feynman asked a similar question, IIRC about knowing how the color and smell of flowers is conveyed to your senses and processed by your brain. He said he had a friend who claimed that knowing the science behind such things diminished them, and Feynman said "I think he's kind of nutty."

I feel wonder and awe at the grand mathematical structure of the universe, and to me that's exactly what the point was. I hope the author would agree.

> Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”

> One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

Disenchantment would be if knowing about Rayleigh scattering made rainbows less beautiful.

A more radical definition that I have heard of, is about the disappearance of (the belief in) powerful but quite alien non-human beings. But then that's much older than the current atheism : something that monotheistic religions started a long time ago already with their "exclusivity".

The lady squatting in the abandoned house next to my place seems to be talking to, yelling at, and/or stalked by things I can't see on a pretty regular basis, and I'm pretty sure she lives in a much more enchanted world than I do, but it definitely doesn't sound like the fun kind of enchantment.

As with anything, the middle way is probably a better option. Enchantment is good - to a point.

Middle-mad is better than all of this, then? I can only hope that someone can show me just the right middle-mad . . .

Maybe Vermin Supreme? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermin_Supreme

God help me where in NOLA is this, Treme?

Tremé holds no copyright on batshit .. this is a tale as far flung as London, Sydney, Tokyo, Broome, Jo-berg and beyond.

Mid-City.

I live there.

“Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine,” wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times—a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.”

— Carl Sagan: Cosmos

Shortly after I moved to Ireland and had my first walk through the woods near my home, it became clearly obvious why people would believe in magic and fairies. You can’t walk for long before you stumble over a clearly artificial pile of rocks, some with inscriptions made by the hunter-gatherers that first occupied this place. It’s easy to fantasise those were made by fairies or other magical entities.

One really doesn’t need to pay too much attention to see magic everywhere. You just need to allow the mind to wander a bit outside the beaten path.

I was surprised to not see American Beauty mentioned, if you're talking about attention and enchantment I think that's probably one of the most well known films tackling the topic. https://youtu.be/Qssvnjj5Moo

Also reminded me of Joyce who pretty much declared this to be the central job of the artist, comparing it to the Eucharist:

""the artist is a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life"

Time-of-flight range sensors. Time photons traveling 80mm? You've got to be kidding! That was one of two surprising & wonderful recent discoveries for me.

Are curses part of the enchantments ? I think I noticed those

Similarly, I’d go with “if your world’s not Lovecraftian, you’re not paying attention.”

A shoggoth on the roof? That's tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2csnVNai-o#t=40

This has the vague feel of GPT writing. It makes sense, it seems somewhat profound, but doesn't really say much. Was it written by ChatGPT, or just by someone who writes that way?

SEO brought us bland, vapid content farms over a decade ago, and sadly I feel like that's what most of the LLMs got trained on, so here we are. Garbage in, garbage out.

No, L.M. Sacasas is a longtime scholar of McLuhan and Ivan Illich. He most certainly writes these articles himself.

I wanted to come here to state this but didn't want to get downvoted into oblivion - it does read like that, particularly this sentence:

> In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?

This is bad writing but it's hard to tell if it's human generated bad writing. My bias lately though is that all bad writing is likely AI generated or influenced.

Dense style can be found in a lot of pre-LLM writing. It is not necessarily bad, I have grown to treat it as a reflection of author’s ways of thinking. What makes or breaks it is whether it’s truly dense, whether it delivers the point precisely or words can be omitted (in which case it’s bad writing).

McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is notable not only because it is often dense (in a good way), but also since it talks at length about different ways of attending to reality, among which there is no “correct” one, and where a particular way (even if seemingly objective) would bias our understanding of reality and inform further techniques we use to work with it, and how humanity has been lately drifting towards an extreme of one particular way of attending to the world. Similarities end quickly, though, the book offers a much deeper and more rigorous take.

The difference with dense writing produced by LLMs is that it tends to contain inconsistencies and errors if you re-read closely. I personally regularly have to, since a long and dense sentence may not always click right away. In a densely written book I inevitably find that it is I who didn’t parse it right, but with LLM-generated writing it turns out I was fed garbage in the first place.

I think we can now credit GPT and image-gen for robbing us of more sense of wonder and attempts to connect with other humans.

I think many adults re-enchant the world by believing conspiracy theories.

Or drugs. Don't forget about drugs.

Or gods. Which are both like conspiracy theories and like drugs.

100% agree with this.

I think this is why people love Trump, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan etc, they're all conspiracy theorists who preach an interesting narrative, there is some "establishment" which is hiding all the ills and evil, and if they can break it, then we all benefit.

In other words, the more ignorant you are of reality the happier you are about it.

"Very many years ago, when I was about as old as some of you are now, I went mountain climbing in Scotland with a friend of mine. And there was this mountain, you see, and we decided to climb it. So, very early one morning, we arose and began to climb. All day we climbed. Up and up and up — higher and higher and higher — until the valley lay very small below us, and the mists of the evening began to come down, and the sun to set. And when we reached the summit, we sat down to watch this magnificent sight of the sun going down behind the mountains. And as we watched, my friend, very suddenly, and violently, vomited.

Some of us think life’s a bit like that, don’t we? But it isn’t. Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they’ve found the key, don’t they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!"

— Alan Bennett, Sermon

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

Reads like someone who is blissfully privileged and wants to spread their cultivated attitude as some kind of virtue that only requires a change in reference frame to achieve actualization. I'm sure an attitude adjustment is great and all, but things are more complex than that.

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