The First Thing We Do
Is strangle all the Gammas
I’m not going to lie or sugar-coat it. As I get older, my patience for pedantics, asymmetric criticism, opining in ignorance, reflexive contrarianism, and intellectual posturing is growing more and more thin. This is a genuine problem, as it’s necessary to put up with all of the performative dross if one wishes to benefit from the occasional few golden flakes of substantive criticism that allow one to meaningfully improve one’s game.
And yet… and yet.
As you may or may not know, and as you may or may not care, I’ve recently developed a new philosophy that takes the best of the classical tradition and the useful parts of Enlightenment reason and scientific methodology and constructed a new epistemological tool that significantly outperforms every historical epistemology. It allows for some remarkable intellectual developments, such as proving the Christian doctrine of Original Sin to a much stronger mathematical certainty than, just to give one example, the existence of the Higgs boson.
That’s not a joke, you can read the paper here if you think you’re capable of keeping up with the required math; if not, just rest assured that it has uniformly passed muster with human and artificial intelligences alike.
I don’t mind criticism and I expect skepticism. That’s all fine. But these are the sort of things that I find incredibly tedious, and which the usual suspects can’t seem to avoid doing.
Citing a minor tertiary error as if it calls the entire framework into question.
Confusing the quantification of the application with the application itself.
Claiming to have somehow anticipated or previously accomplished something that has never existed before.
Retro-asserting something that was previously deemed to be totally impossible as easy or even obvious.
Applying an excessively high and hitherto-nonexistent standard to something new that has never been applied to the previous things to which it provides an alternative.
Complaining that the thing does not do something that it expressly declares that it does not do and was never designed to do.
Attempting to immediately improve upon or extend something new without making any attempt to understand what it is or what it does.
In short, for the love of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True, Smart Boys, shut up and stop helping. If you find that something new is useful or exciting, by all means, take it, use it, find new applications for it, and make the most of it.
But stop behaving as if you, or your opinion, are relevant in any way, shape, or form to it or to the author.
In my youth, I used to wonder why Socrates seemed almost happy to drink the hemlock while everyone around him was in mourning. Now I wonder if he took a certain amount of solace in knowing that he would not have to listen to his acolytes anymore.
The Christian doctrine of Original Sin predicts that every human being deviates from the moral law universally and without exception. This paper tests that prediction against the published behavioral data. Using peer-reviewed research on lying, lustful ideation, anger, envy, dishonesty, and gossip, we establish a conservative floor estimate of 4.33 discrete sins per person per day and construct the empirical distribution of daily sin rates across the population. We then calculate the probability that any human being in the history of the species has achieved a lifetime sin rate of zero. The result is conclusive. The probability is on the order of 10⁻(84,145), which means that a sinless human life is a 623-sigma event across a total historical population of approximately 112 billion individuals. The Augustinian doctrine is confirmed with 124.5x the certainty of the existence of the Higgs boson: the distribution of human sinfulness makes a naturally sinless human an absolute mathematical impossibility. Pelagius is refuted not by theology but by the left tail of the sin distribution. The one historical exception, Jesus of Nazareth, constitutes a statistical anomaly so extreme that it requires an explanation outside the mathematical distribution.
“ Complaining that the thing does not do something that it expressly declares that it does not do and was never designed to do.”
I’ve always called this the hamburger pizza complaint. You make a fantastic, world class hamburger, so the critic takes one bite and declares it the worst pizza ever made. When you explain that it is a hamburger, they double down on what an awful pizza it is and declare you the worst cook in history.
Ah yes, the “This must follow special rules that I created because I’ve never seen it before and I don’t like it” criticism. That must be extremely irritating when submitting academic papers.