mudita

Yes, thank you for this explanation. I didn’t know that they were not fully ordained, I learned something from you today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilashin (although one could argue whether to call them nuns or not in English. The wikipedia article still calls them “Burmese Theravada Buddhist nun” and they were called nuns in English where I practiced - I’d say their culture’s concept of “nun” does not map perfect to the Western concept, so details get lost in translation, but your explanation is fundamentally correct and very helpful. )

This definitely makes clear again my lack of deeper understanding of their culture and the hubris of me judging their culture after having been in Burma for only a month.

That being said, there definitely were signs of sexism, women did not have the same standing and we should not close our eyes to this part of Buddhism. I don’t mean “and therefore Buddhism is bad”, but “as a Buddhist I think we can and should strive to do better”.

When Buddhism supports and reinforces misogyny, racism or jingoism from the surrounding culture, this is also a failing of Buddhism.

There are many Buddhist teachers (including Jack Kornfield) who absolutely do emphasise more virtuous and emphatic living as a core teaching and result of Buddhist practice. As a simple example, metta meditation is often advertised as actually helping you be more compassionate in “real life”.

My own personal experience differed from yours. In a retreat in Burma I observed a lot of traditions, which made it very clear that men had a higher standing than women. When forming a line for going to lunch, the monks were first, then the laymen, then the nuns and then the laywomen; only the monks ate on a raised platform, but not the nuns or laypeople etc.

This was not just old books, which nobody cared about, but pervasive everyday practice.

I very much believe that you had different experience and am happy for it. There’s a lot of Buddhists and different traditions and it’s very difficult to generalise. I myself also practiced in - more western - communities, where there was no noticeable gender imbalance. But I am also sure, that there are Buddhist traditions and communities, which are sexist.

There are several slightly different possible solutions, nobody agrees on which solution is best and nobody dares - or cares enough - to actually do something without having the ok from everybody else. Finally the discussion just peters out without anything happening.

You can see the wiki’s admins talk about it here: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Admin/Archive_3#Home...

It ends with “Aye aye, I certainly won't be implementing anything before passing it by here first.”

In my personal experience all the somewhat successful non-hierarchical communities I’ve been part of, had some principles which make it easy to get stuff done without waiting for an explicit agreement from everybody else. For example the consent-based government system Sociocracy encourages people to ask for objections instead of asking for agreement from the the others.

Which to me raises the question: Are there any possibilities to increase the absorption of methane somehow?

And it seems like there are methods for capturing methane: https://news.mit.edu/2022/dirt-cheap-solution-common-clay-ma...

I suspect that you are not really familiar with the historical background of the situation, a new "Marshall Plan” is not something AlexCoventry came up with right now in this discussion, but a widely discussed option, which many experts agree would have been helpful, but was mostly not implemented because of the costs involved. I recommend reading a historical book, which goes into more detail than a hacker news discussion could, if you really want to understand the situation at the time.

The following is from Paul D'Anieri, “Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War”. The chapters before this are also quite important, but I omitted them, because this got long enough as it is:

The end of communism prompted talk of a new “Marshall Plan,” in which massive western aid would support rapid and far-reaching economic reform in Russia. The investment bank Morgan Stanley estimated in January 1992 that reforming the post-Soviet economies collectively would require at least $76 billion per year for at least three years to transform sectors such as energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and food.

However, several factors conspired to undermine that hope. First was uncertainty over Yeltsin’s staying power in Russia. While he had defeated the coup, many in Russia strongly opposed the “shock therapy” being advocated. In August of 1992, when the IMF committed $1 billion to help stabilize the ruble, the reform plan of Yegor Gaidar was already faltering, and conservatives in the Congress of People’s Deputies were already seeking this ouster. Second, there was a significant perception in the United States that with the end of the Cold War, the United States would be able to focus less of its attention overseas. American citizens and politicians hoped for a “peace dividend,” through which money freed up from defense spending could be redirected to domestic spending to combat recession. Third, 1992 was a presidential election year. With the economy struggling, and Bush under attack by a Clinton campaign whose mantra was “it’s the economy, stupid,” it was impossible to muster the support needed to take a really bold and expensive policy.

In March 1992, former president Richard Nixon, who had promoted détente with the Soviet Union, produced a “secret” memo to US leaders, the contents of which were soon leaked to journalists. He warned that the consequences of failure would be that “war could break out in the former Soviet Union as the new despots use force to restore the ‘historical borders’ of Russia.” Bush did not disagree. “Where we might have a difference, is we’re living in a time of constrained resources. There isn’t a lot of money around. We are spending too much as it already is. So to do the things I would really like to do, I don’t have a blank check for all that. In April, he proposed what became the Freedom Support Act, which largely repackaged existing commitments and presumed contributions by allies that had not yet been consulted. One important component of that proposal, a $6 billion stabilization fund, never materialized. Moreover, the Freedom Support Act aid was divided among the fifteen successor states.

In late April, just after Bush announced the Freedom Support Act, Los Angeles exploded into riots, contributing powerfully to the belief that US leaders needed to focus aid efforts domestically, not at Russia. In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: “The Russian aid bill’s limbo reflects the ambivalent moment in which American foreign policy finds itself after the cold war. One day officials and lawmakers say the United States is the world’s only superpower, and therefore it must lead on issues, such as Russian aid or peacekeeping in Yugoslavia. The next day, though, the same officials and lawmakers say that domestic problems should take precedence, foreign initiatives are too expensive, and therefore Washington cannot afford to lead. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots in particular, the latter mood seems to be dominating“

Yes, Germany was under pressure - and Germans including me were disgusted that our politicians caved in to that pressure, when another European country is getting invaded and so much more is on the line.

A long time ago I read Dan Simmons series article “Writing well”, where he argued that Shakespeare greatly profited from his education in a - very uncreative -grammar school, which emphasised learning of latin and imitation of latin rhetoric.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170411075439/http://www.dansim...

The point has been made about books before, see, e.g. gwern: https://www.gwern.net/Culture-is-not-about-Esthetics

I made a transfer with a mistyped IBAN once in the online interface of my German bank. The bank called me a day later and said that there’s something wrong with my IBAN, so I double-checked, realised my mistake and did the same transfer to the correct IBAN. I did not loose any money.

You might like this story about Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman having a road trip:

https://youtu.be/1Rr3ZWt1ULQ (the whole interview is very interesting and contains a lot of stories of meeting other physicists and mathematicians, it’s broken up into a series of snippets of a few minutes each on youtube)

In the end this trip lead to one of Dyson’s biggest contributions to physics, he could talk to Feynman about his research on the road trip and visited Schwinger afterwards and as such was in a unique position to recognise and formalise the equivalence of Feynman’s, Schwinger’s and Tomanaga's formulations of quantum electrodynamics. This was an important step towards the acceptance of Feynman diagrams.

I also really liked "Maker of Patterns”, Dyson’s autobiography through letters.

... and another map for Europe: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europ%C3%A4ische_Was...

According to Wikipedia similar devices were mentioned for example by Cicero, Archimedes supposedly wrote a now lost manuscript on the construction of devices like the Antikythera mechanism...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...

Yes, utility as a concept in decision theory is great, but it’s not the same as the concept by the same name from utilitarianism. In my understanding, coldtea is doubting not decision theoretic utility functions, but utilities as they are used here.

Most importantly a decision theoretic utility function is only defined up to any positive definite transformation. Inter-agent comparisons like "Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40” don’t make any sense in terms of decision theoretic utility functions.

Yes, I have a master’s in computer science and was a PhD student in machine learning, before I decided to fully go for dance.

Slightly off-topic: I’m a professional dancer, we specifically train hugging.

For contemporary dance, because it’s an important skill for a lot of partnering moves, like jumps involving two persons (an example of partnering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1BbxTWsoO4&t=13s). One important detail I found interesting is that for contemporary dancers, it’s not only about the arms, but how to use the whole body for the hug. Many people in everyday life unconsciously lean forward while hugging to keep some distance between their hips. Close hips feel much to intimate in Western culture for most people. We trained to not do that. Instead we trained to stand with slightly offset feet, so we could stand very close to each other and stay upright and to hug with the whole body. This is both aesthetically and especially biomechanically advantageous for dance.

Similarly in couple dances like Tango the quality of the hug is very important. I remember many female Tango friends would praise an experienced dancer for his abrazo before anything else.

In some dialects of German they go even further, using “quarter five” for “16:15” and “three quarter five” for “16:45”.

"Ermüdungsgesellschaft" is indeed the original title, it was written in German and published in 2010. The translated English version came out in 2015.

The term Bonhoeffer used is "Dummheit". As a German "stupidity" seems to be a more accurate translation to me.

I wonder if it would make sense to do backward search, even if the forward and backward branching factors are very different. For example if the branching factor for forward search is 10 vs. 100 for backwards search, wouldn’t it make sense to do one step of backward search for every two steps of forward search? Or more generally log(b)/log(f) backward search steps for every forward search step, where the forward branching factor is f and backward branching factor is b?

This is all based on spontaneous intuitive ideas of mine and very superficial reasoning (and probably not even new).

I am not sure whom you mean, when you talk about "tech people”, but just in case you’re not aware: The author of the blog post is Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics.

I really like the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the powerful, but sometimes cryptic imagery and how she plays with language, the use of alliterations.... Sorry, that's very generic things to say about poet, but there's something in her poems that resonates with me - not necessarily on the level of content, but in how she writes - and right now I can't express better what it is.

Maybe a bit off topic, but can anyone recommend other poets, which someone who loves Plath might like?

Here they call the number in the British television show QI: https://youtu.be/zUrYRdIxYp8

"WarVOX spent 60 seconds on every call, whether it was answered or not. This resulted in a wardialing speed of 1 call/minute. For 56874 calls, this means roughly 40 days calling day and night."

Seems like he did actually call at night times.

I discovered a similar thought the first time in the amazing science fiction novel Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling:

"Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically.

'It's a joke!' he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.

[...]

'It's a joke,' Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. 'This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred—' "

Maybe I am mistaken about this, but I think the "browser locale" shows the preferred languages, not where the user lives. As such it would be the wrong information to use for this. For example, I am German and live in Germany, but my browser locale is en-US.

Like suicide bombers?

One of the central characteristics of art, is that it is trying to break out of boxes. As such it resists any attempt to define it and I personally think that’s is actually a really good example of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance).

But, in my opinion, even if a definition could capture what’s art, it won’t be a lazy definition like "Art" is "better than I can do”. Art cannot be limited like that and there are many things people do “better than I can do”, which are not art.

Art has a long and complex history of grappling and negotiating with the role of skill, perspectives range from equating art with skill, over seeing skill as a tool for carrying out a vision to a conscious rejection of virtuosity. Even the rejection of virtuosity can create great art.

For example in dance, my profession, there are whole fields like postmodern dance or non-dance, which reject traditional dance skills, and non-dance artists like Jerome Bel create amazing, touching art, by authentically showing people failing to do “better than I can do”.

(Although you could maybe argue that in this case the artistry is just shifted to another level, the level of composition and ideas instead of the dance itself.)

To see one example of how an artist reflects on the importance of skill/virtuosity in art, here’s an excerpt from Jonathan Burrows “A choregrapher’s handbook”:

“Virtuosity is just another way to help the audience to care what happens next.

Virtuosity raises the stakes to a place where the audience knows something may go wrong. They enjoy watching this negotiation with disaster. Will the performer fall, or forget what they’re doing, or will they get through it?

The resulting anticipation, poised on the brink of success or failure, suspends time in a moment of in-breath. This slowed-down time, in the midst of risk, is as much of a pleasure for the performer as for the audience.

However, if everything is virtuosic then there’s nothing against which to read the virtuosity: it has to be in balance with other modes of engagement.”

I quickly googled the saying - which was familiar to me - to check and it is indeed etymologically correct.

The origin is the proto-germanic word kunnan, which means “to recognise, to know (how to be able)”.

According to Wikipedia, the first known usage of the phrase by the German poet Johann Gottfried Herder is actually a bit more complex and references both the knowing and the being able to:

“Kunst kommt von Können oder Kennen her (nosse aut posse), vielleicht von beiden, wenigstens muß sie beides in gehörigem Grad verbinden. Wer kennt, ohne zu können, ist ein Theorist, dem man in Sachen des Könnens kaum trauet; wer kann ohne zu kennen, ist ein bloßer Praktiker oder Handwerker; der echte Künstler verbindet beides.”

Quick and dirty translation:

“Art is derived from being able to do and knowing, maybe from both, at least art must combine both in proper measure. Who knows, without being able, is a theorist, whom one cannot trust with regards to being able to do; Who can without knowing, is a mere practician or craftsman; the real artist connects both.”

By the way, I don’t know you, I don’t want to offend you and the very little info I have from your comment is evidence that you’re a intelligent, well educated, open-minded and complex person…. but to be honest, when I see the phrase “Kunst kommt von Können” my first association is of a narrow-minded square, who doesn’t like anything they are not familiar with. Again, this is not directed at you, I just wanted to share what kind of associations this phrase creates in me in general from my personal, limited experience with people, who used it.

When you're learning latin, it's usually not mainly about the practical application, anyway, and aesthetically it feels somehow so much more pleasing to use the “correct” pronunciation - to me at least.

Furthermore it can help to understand historic and linguistic relationships in unexpected ways:

For example the German word for emperor “Kaiser” looks very different to the Latin “Caesar” and the relationship between those words remains obscured by the way most Germans pronounce Caesar. But it was a revelation to me, when I learned that “c” and “ae”are actually pronounced the same way as the “k” and “ai” in the German “Kaiser”. We literally still call emperors Caesar in German!

I am very much not interested in what Cade Metz has to say after the way he treated Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex. (see, e.g. https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-framers-and-...)