> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
Wow, it is amazing to me that there is a wikipedia page about people who read Scott Alexander's blog. Still, it is (or was) a darn good blog back in the day.
> The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report.
> There are still missing features that the legacy client currently has, like comprehensive social panels and advanced account management options, with its developers "working toward feature parity."
Seems fairly likely it'll get slower as they add all the missing features. I'm not sure a couple of seconds startup time will be relevant to users.
A lot of the reason for hiring a photographer is the raw number of shots you need to take at some events. If someone needs to be dedicated to the task all day, you may as well have someone with experience.
One would hope that there were many thousands of examples of this exact discussion. If you could point me to some of your favorites, I would appreciate it.
No one succeeds in making accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale. Look back at the 20th century, and see the range of range of events, and the kind of technological change, that could occur in a span that long.
Go into things expecting you might have to change careers.
Freeman Dyson said no scientific (or, I think, technological) project should last more than about five years, because the context under which it was conceived changes too much in that time.
> No one succeeds in making accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale.
The sports analogy holds; the future location of the ball may be uncertain, but that is the student's target, and not overcommitting to the present location of the ball. The commenter is expressing disappointment that the commentary seems to be reacting to the present too much.
Science was quite stable in terms of how it works over the last 100 years.
Sure you wouldn’t predict what you would work on exactly. And there were better tools, better communication and so on sure, but no disruptive innovations or seismic shifts really.
I remember talking to an admissions tutor at Cambridge and he said even there most applicants had no idea what they wanted to do for a career. They just drifted into whatever came up.
In the UK only about 30-40% of students end up working in an area related to their degree.
The people who have a realistic plan that works out for them are a minority.
Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)
Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.
you're wrong the church originally did the Mass in Rome in Greek and it allows it in several other languages in other regions from the beginning. When the Mass was changed to latin in Rome it was the speaking language of the people. Learning latin was about important for most of the western history because pretty much every important book was written or translated to Latin
> If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
What an absolutely bonkers concept. I mean, how dare they. I am shocked, I tell you! Shocked! Outrageous. I mean, the Catalonians treated me the same way when I visited Catalonia. I finally just gave up and went home.
The Eastern Orthodox (and other pre-schism apostolic) churches vigorously promote the liberal use of the vernacular in many cases. Even those which had a rather ossified "sacred liturgical" language sort of moved with the times.
With the story about the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to note that the Council of Trent was pivotal here. Trent essentially decreed to suppress/abolish many, many localized liturgies, and replace them all with the Roman-style liturgy. The Latin Church was quite diversified up until that point in the 16th century. Trent looked forward to a truly global and universal church that needed a central point of unity and cohesion. A singular liturgy was ideal to ensure that abuses were minimized and everyone was "playing according to Hoyle" because, as you may recall, two huge continents had just opened up for evangelization beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
So in the days before French became the lingua franca of the U.N. and the world, Latin was truly the proto-lingua-franca. Latin could transmit ideas amongst many people and be well-understood. Latin crossed borders, in ways that German or Euskara or Finnish could not. That is an extremely valuable aspect of a language, and that is why we value English, and Mandarin in much the same way in the 21st century.
The Church did not, however, prevent you from reading Sacred Scripture in the vernacular. The Douay-Rheims was a contemporary of the KJV and many English versions have been produced since then. Many, many vernacular Catholic Bibles. So essentially, if you knew your Scripture, you'd probably figure out the Mass anyway by following along. And as they say, "actions speak louder than words" and also, "a picture is worth 1,000 words" so the act of attending Mass was never quite wasted, as you'd hope to portray.
p.s. The "literal divine Word of God" is Jesus Christ. The Bible, for its part, came later than Jesus, and itself is a product of Sacred Tradition.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
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