reddragdiva | How to make powerful hallucinogens from ordinary household chemicals.

How to make powerful hallucinogens from ordinary household chemicals.

Oh, Google+. The only thing you had to do to win was not be Facebook. You're making them look good. At least joining Facebook doesn't risk your email.

I am on holiday. Freda is as well, so things are somewhat less relaxing than they would be otherwise. The kitten mostly doesn't shit places it shouldn't.

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful ... Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police." (PDF.) "I am not an anarchist, but I find I quite like the ones I've met. Am I in danger of holding potentially illegal political views? Please advise."

(My actual problem with anarchism is that I'm the sort of arsehole who eventually takes power just at sheer frustration with their faff. Of the wide variety of strains of ideologically sound thinkers I've interacted with, no-one does faff like anarchists. No-one.)

(I have tested Debian on this Mini 9 and gotten the wifi to work, and proprietary multimedia formats are less faff in Debian than Ubuntu. Ubuntu has useful things like the PPAs, though, which I run a lot of stuff out of. We'll see how much 11.10 embraces the suck.)

My current intellectual faff goes by the tag "Bayesian postmodernism." Though the name is thorougly explanatory, I'm giving away nothing because anyone who understands one won't understand (if they've heard of) the other, attempting to explain the first to the second may be pedagogically impossible and attempting to explain the second in terms of the first is leaving me feeling like I don't understand anything. Also, I'm taking it on faith that Derrida is in fact rigorous, and not just being deliberately annoying in a stereotypically French manner. I have about a page of notes and a head full of vague images. It's a quintessential Official Slacker Handbook-level project: something to obsess over and produce very little tangible concerning. It's like being in my twenties again.

Ahh, suburban highlife. Dashing out to rescue the washing from the neighbour's barbecue. Love people. I thought smoky fuels were illegal in Greater London. Dammit.

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I'm an anarchist and am tempted to helpfully send them 'any information about anarchists' as requested. Potted biographies of Bakunin, Proudhon, Stirner, and of course Kropotkin for starters. And then perhaps a historic overview of the debate about means and methods that anarchists have engaged in with each other from the C18th to now. Oh, and there have been some pretty vigorous debates about Bakunin, Lenin, the International and all that. Ooh, and information about troop movements around the Kronstadt rebellion, and stats about industrial output in Catalonia around 1936. Hmm - come to think of it, what I have for lunch every day clearly falls under their definition.

One seeks to be helpful where one can be without compromising one's principles.

I generally like anarchists, but don't have the patience to actually be one. Which is to say, my experiences are similar to yours.

I am intrigued by the Bayesian postmodernism idea, the combination of the two feels intuitively valuable to explore. I shall look forward to your further discoveries.

It was when I noticed that differance, insofar as Derrida actually admits there's a definition, looks very like how a Bayesian update would feel from the inside.

Also, postmodernism says "nothing is certain" and Bayesian epistemology says "and this is precisely how uncertain."

Basically, I've either struck gold or I've struck crack. This may be what being a crank feels like from the inside. Which has entertainment value in itself.

Pedagogical barrier: Bayes involves mathematics. Postmodernists are frequently innumerate to actually dyscalculic.

Though to be fair, postmodernism involves ambiguity. The largest flaw with the Bayesian crowd as I've encountered them is that they're horrible about ambiguity, and largely like Bayesian inference because it lets them replace ambiguity and spots where they have to say "Actually, this is very complicated and there's not a clear answer" with numbers.

You should really tackle some Derrida for yourself though. Or go for someone that the Sokal crowd really hates. Sokal, after all, spared Derrida the worst of his wrath. Try Irigaray or Lacan or someone that really gets the Sokalites frothing, usually because they don't understand how "metaphors" work.

-Phil Sandifer

Yeah. Getting them to admit the complicated bit is still there, and it's called knowing what the hell your prior probability actually is - and it's more complicated than that, because it's a distribution, not just a number - can be like pulling teeth.

(I have a couple of nice texts on the subject here, intended for second-year statistics courses. Really, most people's heads will explode on this stuff. So to explain it to aestheticians, I have to explain it without alluding to calculus. These books explain it as: the hard part in the frequentist approach is picking which cookbook method to use; the hard part in the Bayesian approach, from which the entire frequentist cookbook is mathematically derivable, is knowing what the hell your prior actually is. This is why statisticians get the dumptrucks full of money.)

I like the Bayes stuff because when I started to get the idea about it, I thought "um, wow, this is how me learning new things in my favoured aesthetic fields actually works. I think." I could be wrong, but it seems to.

It helps and hinders that Bayes is one thing but postmodernism just isn't.

I'm reading translations of the Derrida and explanatory guides that aren't much better. I'm trying to remember what I thought I knew before.

(Oh, and I discovered the Freudian thing in postmodern analysis was Guattari's fault. It may just be used as a trope now, but he actually thought it.)

[And goddamn Deleuze and Guattari are a mix of gold and crack.]

I still think I'm hot on the trail of something! Like I said: I've struck gold or I've struck crack. Possibly both. It should keep me nicely out of trouble, in any case.

Oh, definitely both. You don't go postmodernism without some healthy crack.

Deleuze and Guattari are really interesting. I've found very little in either of their work that isn't useful, and nothing that isn't interesting, but my God do they miss on "right" sometimes.

And which Freudian thing in postmodern analysis do you mean?

And yes, you've hit at my other bemusement with the Bayesian crowd, which is that they seem to take on faith that the unknown unknowns, so to speak, are going to be more or less manageable. Whereas I take one of the basic lessons of postmodernism to be "be very, very wary of your unknown unknowns, and consider the possibility of unknown knowns."

Analysis from a Freudian perspective.

Yeah, awesomeness by analysis is going to help with your personal black swans, but (again) it's not going to evade the actual hard bit.

The Freudian thing in postmodern analysis is one of the things that makes me avoid serious postmodern theory. As soon as some Freudian stuff (Lacan or whatever) sneaks in, I become sure it has drifted into nonsense.

My single favourite moment from academic philosophy was when a student had been asked to give a tute presentation on Lacan, gave a concise summary of his theories of art criticism, and the entire tute broke into spontaneous laughter.

My understanding of post-modernism is ropey, but as I understand it there's a fundamental inoompatability between Bayesian Statistics and Post-modernism. Chiefly that in order to use Bayes theorem you need to start with the premise of a coherent underlying reality even if it's one you can't necessarily reach. Therefore you iterate and zero in on the points you can reach and update your models accordingly. Post-modernism on the other hand would in many cases (there are many things that fit under the heading of post-modernism) call this a priveleged viewpoint and reject even the hard synthesis of understandings that Bayesian approaches would come up with.

Or to put things another way, Postmodernism is about embracing ambiguity, the unknown, and multiple viewpoints, Bayesian Statistics are about resolving them.

Postmodernism is several different things of the same name. And it's not just the approaches, it's the resulting texts (and the two are generally conflated). Thus, finding terrible postmodernism is about as hard as finding terrible punk rock, for much the same reasons.

It is quite possible I'm just entirely full of shit. However, even in this case, it's quite likely I can get away with it just by brazening it out.

Yes, more or less where I thought you were heading with this.

Should it work out, there is at least an entire academic career there. And nothing would drive postmodernists more insane than dismissing all attacks on your theory by criticising their grasp of the mathematics.

"Should it work out, there is at least an entire academic career there" is another key indicator of an impossible slacker flight of fancy.

But the prospect of making a lot of annoying people cry is, I must admit, a powerfully attractive factor.

Oh, and of course, it was the eighties - everyone who didn't speak Ideologically Sound as a first language is fluent in it as a second one.

I remember the era well. Probably some of the same anarchists.

Anarchist organised groups in practice tend to empower those who talk to keep doing, rather than those who do to keep doing. I'm not sure if this is insolvable (things like Burning Man have a strong anarchist streak and seem to do OK), but it seems to be a common pattern.

Of the wide variety of strains of ideologically sound thinkers I've interacted with, no-one does faff like anarchists. No-one.

Too true. :-| (Somewhat disaffected? Nah...) I also start wanting to step in and run things like somebody's grandma, just to get something done and some of the bickering stopped. ("You, there, go sit in the corner until you can act like an adult and treat other people with respect! And maybe get some grip on pragmatism!"--without its being voluntary, that is. *snort*) Which does go pretty far toward explaining why I just avoid groups these days. Especially in meatspace. Now I mainly just get into snarkfests with other indigenist types who mostly don't call themselves anarchists (anymore)--which also gets very little done, but in a much more amusing and less apoplexy-inducing way. ;)

They don't specify that said "anarchists" need to be living now--much less in the UK--which opens up a lot more "information relating to" of sorts already mentioned. Especially with the stateless past of, erm, large areas of the world. Just a thought, though I am too lazy to implement something like that to make a point.

I also wish some of our neighbors knew that (or cared), if burning smoky things is legally frowned upon. One houseload of pyros (usually upwind) must go around collecting other people's garden debris to take home and burn. :/ Granted, the climate and post-1666 architecture are not nearly as suited to accidentally burning everything down here, but all the smoke is not great in a densely populated area, no.

Embarrasingly enough, it wasn't until I was in college (and found an anarchist tract by poking around on the then-newish Freenet, of all things) that I realized there was more to anarchism than middle-schoolers graffiti-ing the A symbol on bathroom stalls.

There is?

Yes, I find myself wondering what exactly Google+ is for. I joined it only because several people asked me too - and they seem to mostly be people who I know from Twitter, so that makes it redundant right there.

I hate Gmail with a passion, and never use it. Pay for my own domain and my own addresses.

Huh, I use Gmail because it's the best email interface I've ever used. I actually bother reading my mailing lists, which I never did in Mutt or Thunderbird. YMMV. What I'd like to try is Thunderbird with a clone-to-the-last-detail Gmail interface.

Whereas I use Gmail through Thunderbird because I don't like the Gmail interface and wish Gmail behaved like Thunderbird.

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 in Classic theme, with autohiding panels (this is a netbook). I have to "killall gnome-panel" frequently so the top menu will unhide. It's getting bloody annoying. Anyone else getting this?

I have no idea if the Netbook makes a difference, but I am also using Ubuntu 11.04 in Classic theme, but I don't seem to have autohiding panels (unless you mean what Ubuntu calls srollbars -- in which case I do but I have learned to live).

I expect I turned that function off when I after I did the install.

I thought smoky fuels were illegal in Greater London

As I Weber owner I am not down with that rule. Not down at all.

The things at the top with your menus and the clock and tray, and at the bottom with your running applications.

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