April 29, 2026 ·
Lots of humanities folks tend to have the idea that they're ultimately superior and shall inherit the earth and rule over everyone nerdy and technical. Conversely, there's this idea of the revenge of the nerd where a technical person who perceives themselves as oppressed schemes to fight back and also inherit the earth. Feels like some high school or college level rivalry and both kinds are probably some universal wet dream of colonizing one's neighbors dressed up in intellectual garb with different sounding stories on top. A general thing to remember is that formal systems inevitably exist inside informal systems, so one must be humble and learn both.
I bring this up because I've seen two recent instances of Slavoj Žižek now where he brings up quantum mechanics, goes on a 10 minute rant on philosophy, and leaves the listener thinking as if they're not sophisticated enough to understand his points, and that everyone should shut up and listen to him as he has many important contradictions to point out. Meanwhile it's a total mask-off moment for me listening to him talk, revealing he's blabbering without knowing what he's saying and just saying physics words nonsensically. I'm not sure of his philosophical standing outside this, but I start to have a very deep sense of skepticism on every other opinion he holds after hearing him talk about quantum physics.
It's the asymmetry. Again.
Anyway, in other news, I did a big transaction on the ethereum blockchain today. Those always feel nice. I re-watched the Hindi film Khosla Ka Ghosla recently in which the story revolves around an unjust land transaction, and it had me thinking of the whole the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed thing. Because the way transactions work is so archaic in a big part of the world. And because normal people don't actually do that many big transactions through the course of their life, the problem of having better mechanisms for transactions is an invisible problem to most. Or a luxury toy.
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