It's not that simple

One of the primary concepts I take away from Scott Adam's blog can be most easily pared down to a favorite line from The Princess Bride (movie): You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Very, very little about your life, about your relationships, about physics, any of it, is as simple as you think it is, or as simple as you wish it were. We as humans generally require a bit of simplification in many aspects of our lives, just to get through the day.

The Fun Theory Sequence is an amusing (if long) read. I haven't made it all the way through yet, but one of the things that stuck out to me right away is the following paragraph, part of the introduction.

Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil). Our present world has flaws even from the standpoint of such eudaimonic considerations as freedom, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. Fun Theory tries to describe the dimensions along which a benevolently designed world can and should be optimized, and our present world is clearly not the result of such optimization - there is room for improvement. Fun Theory also highlights the flaws of any particular religion's perfect afterlife - you wouldn't want to go to their Heaven.

I've heard a lot lately about how dying babies means there is no god, that kind of thing. A benevolent god would never let such things happen. How God's morality must be different than ours if that is the way it works. That kind of thing.

Scott Adams has some pretty solid views on religion. I'm not certain he would approve of this use of the ideas behind his blog. And yet based on all I've learned from Scott, I'm forced to ask: why does everyone think that life, the universe, and everything is so complex, so feature rich, so full of wonder, and yet insist that God, "His Plan" and Heaven must be simple?

I'm not asking you to take my word for anything. But I am asking you to wonder if things mightn't be more complex than anyone has ever suggested to you before.

PTSD

What is this I don't even

http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/

I don't think I can explain to you why I find this article meaningful. I have not had that kind of trauma.

My brother's death has left me even now more vulnerable emotionally, and I of course have raised higher, thicker walls as a result. I think it is related to that. I'm not sure.

The thing that should not be

I'm of two minds about The Silk Road.

I suspect that "Derrill can't hold his liquor" could be said about cough medicine, so my opinion may not be strongly informed, but I am firmly opposed to the use of narcotics or intoxicants of any kind. I'm pretty sure that the utility of doing so is not worth the relevant consequences. That's the first thing.

The other thing, and the problematic part, is that I'm overjoyed to see people make the internet do things it isn't supposed to do. I don't think The Silk Road is such a great thing in and of itself, but the anti-establishment ideals behind it appeal to me. Further, I'm pleased as punch to learn of Bitcoins, though I suspect I may never use them - the most subversive thing I do is read books on my phone using Google Reader AND Kindle!

Some years back, I read Neuromancer - I read part of it in Asimov's, without really knowing what I was reading, before later reading the book. Since about 1994, maybe 1996, I've believed that Gibson was something of a prophet. He never had the technical side of a lot of it exactly right, but the place in his stories where technology t-bones society is the part that I find more and more accurate.

Bitcoins and this use of Tor are more pieces to the puzzle Gibson presents, and I enjoy watching society's blind, fumbling assembly of it.

-- "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."