I used to console myself with the thought that at least I’d been reading masses of news and informed opinion, making myself wiser and better equipped to add my own few cents to the pile. This is getting harder and harder to believe. There’s something fleeting, something trivializing about the Internet. I think what I have actually done is wasted five or six perfectly good hours when I could have been working up a book proposal, fixing a side door in the garage, doing bench presses, or…or…reading a novel.
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I should work out a Plan of Life. No Internet after 11 AM! Two good solid books a week, one of them fiction! Regular daily exercise with free weights! Two hours set aside for household chores!
Yet no sooner do I form the idea than despair and fatalism set in. If I were the kind of person to stick to a discipline like that, I would have done so long since. And hey, at least I’m not that guy on the train, drawn irresistibly, twitching, to his microscopic toy. I don’t watch TV, either, surely saving myself major brain rot right there. And I’m one of the dwindling number of American males who occasionally reads fiction (an almost exclusively female-readership zone nowadays, according to publishers’ lore).
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Human beings weren’t made to work, or think much, or read much. Of our Paleolithic ancestors, Cochran and Harpending remark in The 10,000 Year Explosion that: “If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape…they hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang.”
If they’d had smartphones, they’d have been twiddling.
By the way, here’s my enlightened opinion on the recent… controversy (what a contrast between the word’s neutral blandness and its meaning) featuring that guy:
He’s not really a “racist” at all. He does not have any hatred, irrational or otherwise, of other ethnicities. He’s just a bit of an asshole—or more than a bit. He’s very protective of his in-group and very insensitive to everyone outside it—and flaunts it, at an age when he should really know better. He appears to be not the type of person that we want to encourage in civilized society. I certainly wouldn’t care to meet him. But firing him just for being an asshole was stupid.
Considering what a horrible can of worms the definition of that word is and that “racist” represents a strong political and debating weapon against any enemy, I think society would be much helped to adopt a rationalist taboo on it. Even LessWrong discussions would be improved by this I think.
Yeah, sure. I was going from the minimal (= most right-wing) definition still accepted in polite society today, because I don’t want to hear someone complaining that leftists and postmodernists and Jews are overcomplicating things, or whatever.
John Derbyshire on Ridding Myself of the Day
By the way, here’s my enlightened opinion on the recent… controversy (what a contrast between the word’s neutral blandness and its meaning) featuring that guy:
He’s not really a “racist” at all. He does not have any hatred, irrational or otherwise, of other ethnicities. He’s just a bit of an asshole—or more than a bit. He’s very protective of his in-group and very insensitive to everyone outside it—and flaunts it, at an age when he should really know better. He appears to be not the type of person that we want to encourage in civilized society. I certainly wouldn’t care to meet him. But firing him just for being an asshole was stupid.
Your implicit assertion that hating other ethnicities is a necessary condition for meriting the label “racist” is not universally accepted.
Considering what a horrible can of worms the definition of that word is and that “racist” represents a strong political and debating weapon against any enemy, I think society would be much helped to adopt a rationalist taboo on it. Even LessWrong discussions would be improved by this I think.
Yeah, I’m inclined to agree.
Yeah, sure. I was going from the minimal (= most right-wing) definition still accepted in polite society today, because I don’t want to hear someone complaining that leftists and postmodernists and Jews are overcomplicating things, or whatever.
Nonsense! No one here would say such a thing. There are no Jews on LessWrong.