Alorael at Large

I can and often do use a trackpad for gaming. I'm accustomed to it, and even use it most of the time, but I still prefer a mouse for games that require quick reflexes and good mouse pointing skills. That's not actually very many games that I play, but for those few the mouse is not indispensable but very handy. —Alorael, who believes the true hardcore answer is gaming with a peripheral not intended for that use. Like by singing exactly the right tones into a microphone.

The Earth is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, judging by comparing current extinction rates with fossil records. How big? We can't know when we're in the middle of it. How bad is it? Oh, the Earth's ecology always bounces back from mass extinction. The question is how uncomfortable it will be for us. —Alorael, whose actually not convinced that even large losses of megafauna will make much difference. Losing insects is bad news, though. And climate change is really uncomfortable whether or not species vanish.

Nonsense, Kel! This place is ruled benevolently by shared goodwill and common consent. If you ever even hint at disagreement I will make you rue the day you first registered. —Alorael, who wants you to know that this dictatorship is benevolent by definition and that the definition is very strictly and violently prescriptivist.

But if there's a question that really seems unresolved in that or any other thread, I'm all for a necro so the answer has a context. Then we can all learn something! —Alorael, who does not consider the odd necro-post a terrible sin. It's bad if it's a steady stream that serves no purpose.

Except that mentor archetype is older than girls as fantasy heroines. I think the gender is probably mostly just artifacts: it used to be boys with men as mentors, then girls could have men as mentors too. We'll get women as mentors as our culture glacially progresses through the confusing era of non-explicit but still heavily implicit sexism. And the coolness is also much newer as a concept than the wise and powerful mentor. We'll get more vampire-mentors and more women mentors and more vampire-women-mentors with time. —Alorael, who sees perfectly good examples above of the implicit sexism problem. And even when the author doesn't internalize it, he or she might realize it's there and write with it in mind for the audience. But why can't there be female mentors who point guns at things and blow them up? Masculinity's pretty much out, but they can still be smooth, wise-cracking, strong, morally ambiguous, and deadly. No different, really. Even, one day, with impressive scars and artistic smudges of dirt and blood instead of perfect makeup at all times.

You know, the term "vampire" here is completely unhelpful. SoT actually gave a clear definition of what he's actually talking about in the first post, and vampire seems like a tongue-in-cheek Twilightism. The characteristics are really describing "an over-the-top all-round awesome secondary protagonist who initiates the ordinary young main protagonist into an extraordinary world." Let's talk about super-special mentors, not vampires. Nothing SoT says is about romance between the mentor and the primary protagonist, although of course it's an option. My hunch, and it's just a hunch, is that SoT is onto a bit of a larger common thread in YA fantasy. There's a protagonist, who's young but special. The protagonist meets or is found by a mentor, who is special. Perhaps in the same way, perhaps the mentor recognizes a much greater talent, or perhaps the mentor is simply able to recognize this specialness that he or she lacks. Mentors are often cool characters. Maybe SoT's arbitrary point values are wrong, but the cool mentor archetype seems pretty obvious to me. Gandalf's a kind of prototype, lacking coolness but steeped in awesomeness. It's just a modernization of the Gandalf, really. But I don't know enough YA lit, and I do think YA is likely to be where this comes through most, to really opine. The fact that Buffy/Angel work messily with this probably speaks more to those shows' very complicated approach to characters and roles. The characters changed over time; their relationships changed, and the initial premise of Buffy is all about playing with standard archetypes. —Alorael, who also thinks hostility to SoT's literary analysis and predilections in a past topic are clouding things here. This thread is not that one. This hypothesis is not that one and should stand or fall on its own merits.

No real advantage for Dvorak has ever been rigorously demonstrated, as far as I know. It's all hype and anecdotes. I learned Dvorak, found it inconvenient to switch a lot and not noticeably more efficient than QWERTY, and switched back. —Alorael, whose anecdote counterbalances yours. Unfortunately it's a very hard thing to study. You can't exactly double-blind typists.

When trying to deal with the angst of being a creature of the knight, a damnéd soul for all eternity, it's best to find prey with a high blood alcohol content. —Alorael, who thinks this scale has more to do with Mary Sue than vampires. But for that use it's not half bad.

These are both passive voice, though; I'm not sure how having slaves be subjects of objects changes that. "All slaves in the USA gained their freedom with the passing of the 13th Amendment," would make them subjects of an active sentence; "The passing of the 13th amendment granted freedom to all slaves in the USA," makes them the object of an active sentence. They're all perfectly good constructions depending on the emphasis you want to give. —Alorael, who doesn't actually think subject vs. object has all that much weight unless you craft tortured constructions that make the choice obvious and forced. Replace "gained their freedom" with "were freed" in the first active sentence and no one will notice much of a difference, except maybe that the latter is less wordy.

Academia, at least in the sciences, has very strong pressure towards keeping length to a minimum. That doesn't fix the problem. Students' bloated writing is a separate issue, although one with a similar element of imitating the crap that has come before. And appropriating jargon to appear smarter. —Alorael, who distinguishes between authors and writers. There may be dozens of authors but it's only the first one, maybe two, who actually turned research into words.

First person and first person plural. And I prefer it. Passive voice has its place, as I said. X was measured with Y is fine. But then formulas were devised, two hundred thousand apples were peeled, and then each pair of mice was sutured together by the tails, and spontaneous combustion of graduate students was observed. There's room for saying that we did and saw those unholy things in the name of science! Mostly, though, the flaws in science writing aren't simple matters of silly word choice (I'd actually be entertained by "beastly" amidst technical jargon!) or passive voice. There are bigger problems of tortured constructions and long rambling sentences written to sound scientific instead of being clear and concise. There's jargon used because jargon is expected. One word never suffices when two will do, and one had better be Greek, Latin, or longer than five syllables. ESL papers have their own flaws, but native speakers still churn out garbage prose. To some extent it's because scientists are neither expected to nor trained to write well, but there's also a culture of bad writing. I don't know if editors drive it by demanding impenetrable verbiage or whether it's entirely self-motivated, but it's pervasive. —Alorael, who did not bring effulgence into the discourse. That was all Mistah Q.

If you think there's ever a solution to near-homophonic words in idiomatic phrases you've got another thing/think coming. —Alorael, who rarely finds that passive voice adds effulgence. On the contrary, it shows up in medical and scientific writing all the time because of a bizarre but fortunately not universal belief that the performers of procedures and research should be entirely invisible, and it's a (small) part of the plague of execrable science writing.

I know someone who didn't capitalize any letters in a post and he died. —Alorael, who hopes that doesn't happen to you. To be sure, you'd better forward this thread to ten friends in the next week.

Casual and formal writing are different. I use Oxford commas. I use the passive voice in moderation; knee-jerk rejection is ridiculous and can lead to contortions of language, but overuse makes for bad writing. I split infinitives; that rule's a holdover from trying to make English be like Latin, where you can't split the infinitive because it's one word. I use whom, probably less than I should, but not fewer than I should. Whom is necessary even if it can't figure prominently in my signature. Subjunctive is a lost and possibly dark art that I try to maintain. You can count my spaces for yourself. —Alorael, whose opinions on like and as do not fit within the margins of this text.

Once again siding with Nalyd. Physical determinism just says that the universe can be thought of as a kind of state machine. At any given moment, everything has a bunch of set properties. Those properties determine the state of the universe one "tick" (Planck time, probably) forward into the next state. Think of it like a simple Newtonian physics situation: if you know the positions and velocities and masses of all your objects on your ideal plane you can predict their positions and velocities out infinitely. The universe is like that, but on a massively larger and more complicated scale. No one can ever hope to measure or calculate the current or next state, but it's at least theoretically possible. There's no teleological cause, just physical cause. On the other hand, quantum mechanics and their probabilistic rather than fixed results may throw a wrench in that. And the uncertainty principle states that you can't actually know the position and velocity of all the particles; they can't actually have both properties to arbitrary precision. So maybe the universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic and there's some room for randomness. I think randomness isn't any help at all for free will, though. Because if you're told that instead of getting to make a decision someone's going to roll dice to make it for you there's freedom but absolutely no will at all. —Alorael, who will bring philosophies crashing into each other. From a utilitarian perspective it's better to believe in free will and act as though it exists than to believe in determinism and act as though you have no choices. Thus the debate is purely academic. Seize the opportunities that appear to be before you even though they are probably illusory!

That's possible, but there's a rather large difference between -0.1 and -8. I think there may be more room to the left of you than you're aware of. The political compass test isn't perfect by any means, but it does mean something. —Alorael, who can't be bothered to retake it yet again. He's usually been around -8, -6, and imagines he hasn't moved much. Say ±1 on both of those. That's a good couple of minutes saved.

I guess we have the same idea, but I see it as free will and you see it as the antithesis of free will. See, to me having decisions enter the system from nowhere seems like unfree will. I am not some entity outside of reality, I'm a real being running on the laws of physics. My decisions are predetermined, yes, but they're predetermined by who I am and what I want. (Sure, those are predetermined too.) To make other decisions I would have to be someone other than me. If there is outside input, it's not from me. My will is less free because something else, even if it's something somehow freer, is pulling the strings. The only reasonable version of this I can conceive of is a quantum mechanical randomness. Maybe enough ions move, maybe they don't. Maybe that lets an action potential trigger in the neuron, maybe it doesn't. In aggregate, maybe my brain settles on yes, and maybe on no. But then it's not me making any choices, it's the dice of the universe. —Alorael, who finds consciousness to be an inexplicable emergent property. But he's really not sure it's any more inexplicable than a lot of very basic parts of the physical world.

In a deterministic universe there are still choices, and you still make them. They come from who you are and what you want. You're responsible for them. Your choices are determined by you. You are determined by outside forces, but that's not unique to determinism. Nobody reasonably suggests that people and their decisions aren't molded by culture, by upbringing, by mood, by how hungry they are at the moment, and so on. Decisions are always affected by extrinsic factors. People are affected by extrinsic factors. Saying that we are entirely the products of extrinsic factors is a difference in degree, but it doesn't really take away free will. You have a personality and preferences. You make a choice. —Alorael, who again asks the same question. In a non-deterministic universe in which one has free will and can make choices, what is the difference? How do you connect will to choices that are not the product of anything that is the product of anything else?

I believe in fixed four dimensional spacetime. Mostly. Actually I'm pretty okay with the idea that spacetime is probabilistic but not predetermined, exactly. —Alorael, who mostly envisions this as stepwise time being predictable on a macro level and unpredictable on a very fine level, which means it's also unpredictable at more than planck increments of time. Roughly. Which is all very fuzzy but works if you squint at it.

WIll is determined by self. Self is determined by things other than self. But what would be the meaning of will not determined by any external causes? That's not meaningful; it's not even really conceivable. —Alorael, who notes that metaphysical free will is an ill-defined, nebulous, meaningless concept as commonly used. Definitions tend to be either unworkably vague or compatibilist. You can claim that compatibilist will isn't really free in a fit of pique, but at least it's a definition that seems fairly congruent with the intuitive nebulous meaning. Claiming something can't be defined well, so it doesn't exist, which means definitions are deceptive and wrong isn't a helpful practice.

I was being a little bit facetious, but it really is part of compatibilism, or at least one kind. Consider a situation in which you face a decision, be it momentous or completely mundane. You enter the situation with your past, everything that led you to that moment. You have all the knowledge you've gained up to that time, minus everything you've forgotten. You have your preferences and your beliefs. You make a choice, and that choice is an expression of everything that you are and have been through in arriving at that moment. Free will is often taken to mean that you really could make either of two (or more) choices freely. But what does it mean that you, with the sum of who you are, could make a different choice? What would it be based on? The only real way to have two real options is for the options to be random. And that requires physical randomness in your decision-making brain. It's no longer really a choice; it's an expression of physical randomness. —Alorael, who thus believes that free will, with emphasis on will, is nonrandom. Randomness gets you choices, so it's free, but there's no will there.

It's not like nature turned off somehow. We're still natural. We're still living in nature. And cities are ecosystems, too, while we're at it. Appeal to nature is a fallacy unless you're using nature imprecisely when you mean something with actual practical, moral, or other benefit. —Alorael, who is a hard compatibilist. You have free will only to the extent that the future is predetermined.

Most animals have babies that are pretty functional from birth. They have to be; most animals actually have fairly limited ability to physically move, clean, and feed babies, what with having no hands. Predators are a constant threat, especially to helpless young. And so on. Humans and our massive brains required tradeoffs. Human babies are the hilarious underdeveloped runts of the animal kingdom. (In some company, like baby kangaroos, but still! Babies are utterly worthless for years!) That's because there's no way to get giant brains out of human-sized pelvises. The babies have to come out with tiny, squishy, larval brains in soft, open skulls. But there really isn't a lot of room to lose more. They're already coming out with the bare minimum to maintain life, and that still requires an immense outlay of effort by adults. Much more underdeveloped brains and the babies can't do things like swallow or breathe successfully. —Alorael, who notes that even full-term babies have issues with these things. Babies will regularly just stop breathing for a while. They spit up all the time. They are remarkably bad at staying alive.

Babies' head size is already a significant problem for human pelvises. I suspect eggs would require some major overhaul. Oh, and tough but flexible would work a lot better than calcified for the shell. —Alorael, who alternately suggests that brains be redistributed along the spine. Long, thin babies are much easier than round-headed babies.

The goal is to be able to post consistently and relevantly using only QFT. While quoting yourself. —Alorael, who isn't there yet. Somehow his thousands of posts have yet to contain any meaningfully quotable material.