Soatok Dreamseeker
Mark Dominus“The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.”
robin@mjd 8.
All writing about despair is ultimately insincere. Putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is secretly an act of hope, however faint—hope that someone will read your words, hope that someone will understand. Someone who truly feels despair wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it because they wouldn’t expect it to do anything. All text produced in despair, then, is ultimately subtext. It shouts “All is lost!” but it whispers “Please find me.”
@esoterra There were several passages I wanted to quote, but I decided to leave it at 1. That was one of them though.
Progressive Tom
J. "Henry" Waugh@mjd in a similar vein to 3, a sad story that to me is paradoxical hope
Dr. August Dvorak devoted his life to typing and created his own keyboard layout -- which millions of nerds, including me, use (I'm using it right now)
But he never knew that. Not only was he rejected at every turn because typewriter manufacturers didn't want to change what sold, but it didn't even become an ANSI standard until 2 years after he died
He died believing his life was a waste
His work is used by millions
Helen Horstmann-Allen@mjd having opened a window and forgotten how I got there, I thought both how much you would like this, and also how you were maybe my best example of someone who gets good at thinking, then writes it down.
Walt Mankowski@hhorstall @mjd Thanks for sharing this. It's really brilliant and thought-provoking!
@waltman @hhorstall This guy is often really good. I recommend his blog generally.
@waltman @hhorstall By the way, this is the same guy who wrote this article complaining about the NIH's “Cancer Moonshot”, which you hated. Maybe give it another look.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/whos-got-the-guts-to-go-to-the-moon
@mjd @hhorstall Oh right, the dude who wrote “Maybe curing cancer in the 2020s is way harder than going to the moon in the 1960s. I have no idea.” If you think about it, that’s obviously true, because we went to the moon.in the 1960s, but we haven’t cured cancer in the 2020s. Actually there are some cancers that have effectively been cured, but most still haven’t. And actually cancer isn’t one disease but 100s of them. Some, like pancreatic cancer, generally don’t present any symptoms until it’s too late to treat them.
I had a hard time reading beyond that line, but I tried, and it’s honestly not clear to me whether his gripe is with the word “moonshot” or the entire way research is funded. Given his thoughts on cancer research I can’t really trust his judgement on the other research projects he mentions in his essay.