I find myself in a similar situation. Drafting an email to an academic. And as I decipher her motivations with respect to her own work from micro-expressions she had in an interview, I start to think we're not that different. I'm falling in love, how embarrassing ...

> impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts.

https://imgur.com/a/CKE0V37

https://anonpaste.pw/v/db571281-c2b0-489e-b121-29959add1947#...

    ## Final Structure
    
    **Sweet pastry**
    → **Almond cream**
    → **Homemade jostaberry jam**
    → **Small raspberries**
    → **Vanilla cream**
    → **Chantilly-lightened vanilla cream**
    → **Large fresh raspberries**
    → **Icing sugar**

No it's not.

There is almost nothing more Western than this kind of self-criticism: blaming oneself for not having imagined a wider range of possibilities. By the time this reflex reaches your shore, any criticism you might address to it has already been pre-assimilated into its canon. Worse: you may not even be heard, because the whole discourse is already busy talking about the voices it has supposedly suppressed.

That is the trick. It is often less interested in articulating what was actually suppressed than in endlessly reaffirming that something was suppressed. Self-criticism becomes a passion of the self: the subject punishes itself for not being the idealized Other, and in doing so expands its own range of motion.

Criticism becomes assimilation: it uproots you from the very world it claims to redeem. And the only way out of the double bind is to set off for distant shores, carrying the trial with you.

— J. Lacan, lesson of April 15, 1975, in RSI.

https://anonpaste.pw/v/ab148fcf-6827-4b8c-a6d1-a9239d643ae7#...

> This is a message we need right now.

Feels good man. The solution found by the private parties driving technological change is sainthood. Or aiming for it. At least, better than you. They have the vision of what's good for the herd, but the more time I spend as a sheep, the more it seems the "herd" is just a way to recycle the story of their own exceptionalism stripped of any mark of individuality. A simple visit to fiftyyears.com will greet you with "We back the indispensable". I guess it's the same "we".

Yuri Manin – Reception speech at the Paris Academy of Sciences

> I see the process of mathematical creation as a kind of recognizing a preexisting pattern. When you study something—topology, probability, number theory, whatever—first you acquire a general vision of the vast territory, then you focus on a part of it. Later you try to recognize “what is there?” and “what has already been seen by other people?”. So you can read other papers and finally start discerning something nobody has seen before you.

Yuri Manin – Good proofs are proofs that make us wiser

> The central figure of a philosophic dialogue is a wise man, whereas modernity generally and systematically replaces wisdom by training. Wisdom seems to be an inborn faculty slowly ripened by life experience; as such it is rarely met and even more rarely put to any use. Training is a democratic surrogate for wisdom which, in spite of all of its (mainly aesthetic) drawbacks, is superior in one respect: it produces professionals.

Yuri Manin – Mathematics as Metaphor

R. Buckminster Fuller – Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

> Delusional interpretation is a false deduction drawn from an accurate perception. The subject perceives correctly, but reasons wrongly; in him, judgment is impaired by affective disturbance, while the senses remain normal.

> Delusion progresses by accumulation, radiation, and extension; its richness is inexhaustible. The plan of the edifice does not change, but its proportions keep increasing.

> Every new fact, however insignificant, is immediately incorporated into the delusional system, where it becomes a fresh piece of evidence. The patient lives in a state of perpetual suspicion, searching everywhere for guiding threads, clues, correlations.

> Interpreters are not hallucinated subjects; they are logicians gone astray. Their point of departure is an intuition or a false belief, but the consequences they draw from it follow one another with an apparent rigor that often deceives the superficial observer. It is order within madness, logic in the service of the absurd.

> The need to write, graphomania, is in many interpreters a major symptom. They accumulate immense files, endless memoirs, interminable correspondences, in which every detail of their existence is dissected, analyzed, turned over and over, in order to bring to light what they believe to be the truth.

Sérieux & Capgras — Reasoning Madness: The Delusion of Interpretation

> The madman is, rather, the free man: the one who does not allow himself to be chained by the false appearances of common reality. Delusion is not an insult to logic; it is logic driven to exasperation. The paranoiac is a tireless translator, a man who spends his life deciphering the signs of the world in order to find in them the key to his own destiny. Far from being chaos, psychosis is an attempt at rigor, a complete theory that the subject constructs in order to account for his own genesis and his place before the Other. The risk of madness is measured by the very attraction of the identifications through which man alienates his freedom.

> following Fontenelle, I surrendered myself to that fantasy of holding my hand full of truths, the better to close it over them. I confess the ridiculousness of it, because it marks the limits of a being at the very moment when he is about to bear witness. Must one denounce here some failure in what the movement of the world demands of us, if speech was offered to me once again, at the very moment when it became clear even to the least perceptive that, once again, the infatuation of power had only served the cunning of Reason? I leave it to you to judge how my inquiry may suffer from it.

Lacan — Remarks on Psychic Causality

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16563160

80 bucks!

René Girard