Analects

Cats grieve fellow pets. Science. Here’s a Guardian article explainer.

One Friend In One Month: cute, if sad essay about how hard it is to make friends in the modern era.

I’d resigned myself to a life of catch-up coffees, halfway intimacies, and adult softball leagues. I told myself it took bravery to confront this reality. Maturity.

One wonders if the happy ending was an editorial decision.

A Globally Integrated Islamic State. Reminds me of John Robb’s ‘open source warfare’: low cost and low risk systems dysruption allows for much smaller governance. It is notable that the scarier implications have not come to pass.

Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs? Maybe because it makes us feel connected to others.

Why Do Dogs Turn Their Heads to One Side?

the head tilt could be a sign of mental processing — meaning that the pups are likely paying attention or even matching the toy’s name with a visual memory of it in their head.

On ‘romantic friendship’:

Murdoch’s own account of love. In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), she theorised that love is vision perfected. It is seeing the other person with clarity, as she really is, in all her particularity and detail. In Murdoch’s view, love is a willingness or a choice to see another person this way. But it is also more than this. Love is a desire – a desire to really see the other person and to be seen by them in return.

On the value of nurture. “Exploring how different brain states accompany different life stages, Gopnik also makes a case that caring for the vulnerable, rather than ivory-tower philosophising, puts us in touch with our deepest humanity.”

You are a network. A concise way of phrasing everything is ideology and spirituality of the mind:

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

See also The mind does not exist, from Aeon.

On prosocial flaking.

Quite often, I will make an agreement, and then find myself regretting it. I’ll commit to spending a certain amount of hours helping someone with their problem, or I’ll agree to take part in an outing or a party or a project, or I’ll trade some item for a certain amount of value in return, and then later find that my predictions about how I would feel were pretty far off, and I’m unhappy.

With suggestions on how to rectify in a very rationalist way. Amusingly overcomplicated, but also insightful.

The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. Interesting enough exploration of our ‘silent years’—the huge gap between modern physiology and modern civilisation. The thesis: when society is small enough for each of us to know each other, society is organised through social pressure. When we exceed that, natural social hierarchy breaks down and we are forced to use other tools (i.e. civilisation). ‘Gossip’ is posed as a constraint on innovation. The outro suggests that social media has brought back the ‘gossip trap’.

It is not clear precisely to me how this is entirely a bad thing, although the author things so:

The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.

I’d be more likely to agree that this modern form of the gossip trap is a bad thing, and point to the loneliness epidemic, the hydraulic trap and the amusement trap as examples. But I’m inclined to suspect the gossip trap facilitated not by social media but by actual connections to people brings many benefits we are quick to dismiss or ignore.

Kin-based institutions as an inhibitor of economic growth. Once again, a throwback to Parsons and Murdock: community should be secondary to civilisation. One is always left wondering whether the happiness trade-offs are worth it. Effective Altruists certainly seems to think so.

little attention has been paid to the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions: kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, clan membership, post-marital residence and family organization … we establish a robust and economically significant negative association between the tightness and breadth of kin-based institutions—their kinship intensity—and economic development

The Dynamics of Givers and Takers in Conversations:

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

Love, in the ancient Greek world, is not about sacrifice but eudaemonia:

Diotima shows Socrates that love is a kind of joint ascension towards something greater. Love leads us towards good and beautiful things, the highest of which is knowledge. Loving then, according to Diotima, is helping each other to become better people

Romantic Friendships and Their Unique Dynamics:

there is nothing essential or inevitable about the ways we conceive of romantic relationships

Romantic friendships take some of the elements of a traditional romantic relationship – the desire for intimacy, the commitment to build one’s life around another person, and even sex – without having to take all of them at once