New Idea - Drafts
Before thinking about the Games and Puzzles, this post is about perfecting the “youtube for writing” approach to this platform.
Things I like most, as a writer:
- Having a forum for half-formed ideas (so I can get started, without letting perfection be the enemy of the good)
- Having a forum for fully-formed ideas, so I have "something to work towards" (to improve my writing and clarify my understanding, which is my real goal)
- Having these spaces be connected? (seems obvious, but I don't even know what this means)
Things I like most, as a browser/“scroller”:
- Lots of content, comment sections, etc. (this is solved by above (1))
- ?
On the culture of truth-seeking
Two quotes from Grothendieck for today:
“Discovery is a child’s privilege. I mean the small child, the child who is not afraid to be wrong, to look silly, to not be serious, and to act differently from everyone else. He is also not afraid that the things he is interested in are in bad taste or turn out to be different from his expectations, from what they should be, or rather he is not afraid of what they actually are. He ignores the silent and flawless consensus that is part of the air we breathe – the consensus of all the people who are, or are reputed to be, reasonable.”
— Alexander Grothendieck
“In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.”
— Alexander Grothendieck
The Potence of Experiment?
Thought of the day. When I read the Ancient Greeks, I am filled with admiration. Euclid, Democritus, Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle were all remarkable thinkers. And yet in my experience, modern people love to poke fun at the ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle in particular. It seems that people consider scholastic philosophy impotent, especially compared to modern Science. In particular, people believe that Plato and Aristotle were "armchair" thinkers/rationalists who never looked at the outside world, and so aren't worth engaging with.
But this perspective is untrue. I don't want to fixate on this point, but I will briefly try and make it. I will start with Aristotle, who made extensive biological observations. He systemized Marine Biology. In fact, he was practically the founder of zoology. Darwin himself said his "two gods" were Linnaeus and Cuvier, but they were "mere school-boys to old Aristotle". As far as physics, it is considerably more complicated. However, first think of the common refrain: "Aristotle thought heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects!" This is obviously wrong, right?