ecosophia | Magic Monday

Midnight is upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-fifth published book, the sequel to The Witch of Criswell and thus the second Ariel Moravec occult mystery.  Once again, it's eighteen-year-old Ariel and her adept grandfather on the case, investigating the theft of a rare magical book and a trail of clues that might lead to a pirate treasure hidden somewhere in the odd old East Coast port town of Adocentyn. Ariel and Dr. Bernard Moravec aren't the only ones on the trail, though, and the others will stop at nothing to get there first...

In case you can't tell, yes, I'm having enormous fun with these. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, it works for some things, like using the laws of mechanics for setting up finite-element analyses to validate the design of a bridge, right? (At least, as long as you have data from materials science that runs for as long as the intended lifetime of the bridge. And you manage to shut down runaway-feedback errors that invalidate your analytical ontology, like the wind resonances that made the Tacoma Narrows Bridge stop being correctly analyzed as a problem in static mechanics and start being only correctly analyzed as a problem in dynamic mechanics, and shortly thereafter stop being a bridge at all.) And I was mostly hoping to figure out how to convert the systemic scale-independent norms to implied special-case implied norms at the smallest intellectually graspable bottom level.

I'm still in "true X has never been tried" territory, but now it's more like "turns out to require a lot more effort to correctly try than it's realistic to expect almost anyone else to independently produce".

Here's a claim related to yours, that came up for me earlier when I was trying to source one of the quotes above. It's from one of the secondary leaders of the movement, looking back on what went wrong:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jash4Gbi2wpThzZ4k/cfar-takeaways-andrew-critch?commentId=vEBouTPEzwqP2kBsG

> [...] I have a theoretical model in which there are supposed to be cycles of yang and then yin, of goal-seeking effort and then finding the goal has become no-longer-compelling and resting / getting board [sic, should say "bored"] / similar until a new goal comes along that is more compelling. [...] people today seem to me to often try to stop this process—people caffeinate, try to work full days, try to have goals all the time and make progress all the time, and on a large scale there’s efforts to mess with the currency to prevent economic slumps. I think there’s a pattern to where good goals/wanting come from that isn’t much respected. I also think there’s a lot of memes trying to hijack people, and a lot of memetic control structures that get upset when members of the professional and managerial classes think/talk/want without filtering their thoughts carefully through “will this be okay-looking” filters.
>
> All of the above leaves me with a belief that the kinds of not-wanting we see are more “living human animals stuck in a matrix that leaves them very little slack to recover and have normal wants, with most of their ‘conversation’ and ‘attempts to acquire rationality techniques’ being hijacked by the matrix they’re in rather than being earnest contact with the living animals inside” and less “this is simple ignorance from critters who’re just barely figuring out intelligence but who will follow their hearts better and better as you give them more tools.”

1) It does, but only because we have thousands of years of practical experience with bridges undergirding those analyses. Abstractions that work are always developed out of concrete experiences that work; abstractions that don't rest on that kind of basis very often turn out to be empty air.

2) That's also a useful model, since it takes into account the real social and economic contexts in which these theoretical structures have to work. Once again, a more gradual evolution would make that easier to function. I also note that in Herbert's universe Mentat training had to begin in early childhood, when the mental structures are more labile -- just as languages are much easier to learn then, cognitive habits might be easier to establish. Less pressure and more play, too.

Magic Monday

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution