Ishan Raval

Building a novel philosophical account of ultimate, objective value

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

I think about this line from @nntaleb a lot: "Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred."
It explains why I am uncomfortable with both Twitter and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is easy to explain: It instrumentalizes words for the purpose of money and clout—completely reverses the natural hierarchy of things, where money and clout should serve writing, which is among the only phenomena where distilled expressions of both the Logos and Beauty can meet in confluence. But LinkedIn desacralizes writing by making it the tool with which one engages in self-serving inauthenticity—an inauthenticity which is so obvious, and which is only multiplied by its ritual setting, in which one person's inauthenticity is met with inauthentic responses from others. Everyone there knows it's all fake, everyone is complicit, yet everyone does it, because we live in vile times in which doing this is rewarded. The place is a butcher-board for the desacralization of the written word.

People on Twitter think this place is a lot better. Takes are smarter, and users are more authentic. Perhaps. The issue is that the deluge of information that comprises the core form factor of the platform fosters a lack of effort to both input and output. You're not meant to slow down, really chew on what is written here—likewise, you throw out thoughts in writing as if that means nothing. There are certainly a lot of things that are very smart here—in fact, the problem is that there are so many of them, that their glut inhibits a collective practice of intellectualism, which cannot be done in haste. And of course, most people aren't even trying to do that, even in haste; it's just information and ideas as ambience—again, a sheer insult to the sanctity of the written word.

It's like when people go into great museums with icons and paintings with religious significance to various peoples, and quickly walk past them, minimally taking them in, just getting stimulated, taking photographs (another travesty, another discussion) and, if edified, only to 1% depth of the multitude of vitality and wisdom contained in those entities. (I have acquired the immense wealth of living a twenty-minute walk from the Met recently. I have gotten a membership, and my plan is to go once or twice a week, and going through the material at a rate that takes me a couple years to make it through the whole museum. It's much better this way. For those who say this can only be done in a place of geographical privilege, well, yes, but then if you are only visiting, still go at the same pace, picking just a handful of paintings you are really interested in to truly commune with.)

As for this platform: This is the written word we're talking about. It isn't meant to be treated as (un)important as "tweets" ("posts" dignifies what happens here somewhat more, but the form factor remains the same, unless you're using, in vain obscurity, this platform for writing small essays such as this). I am suspicious of people who are consummate at scrolling. It suggests you do not treat writing—and by extension, reading—as something of particular significance. It's not something that matters, it's just something you do whenever and wherever, with a spirit of "whatever". Engagement in and of the written word loses so much of its value if it's not done as a rite—and both LinkedIn and Twitter are guilty of violating it by lending themselves to modes of engagement which, though outwardly different, are nevertheless forms of frivolity.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

@pirane023 @DjokovicFan_ What did he say?

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

On the occasion of the ten-year death anniversary of Harambe, here's the monumental essay I wrote about him and internet culture/consciousness then. Interesting to see it now. The quondam cutting edge of the internet and memetics seems so... arcadian now.
https://t.co/1LERCXZmd1

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

Apple season is OVER. Peach season has BEGUN.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

https://t.co/vm7kTgKilo

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

The year has been philosophically very productive. While for a few years till this year I had settled the role of contingency in ontology of objective value (see Vichara 7 in the newsletter in bio), I had not gone beyond that, though I knew there was more. Now I have thought through much more of the terrain, and have resumed publishing. New essay, 'Necessity', linked below: Here I come to account of both contingency and necessity—seen not just as modal categories but having heavier ontic status—come together when we perceive anything as Good, i.e., of intrinsic, non-instrumental value. The Good must amaze, but it also must delight; it must make for a rupture with the hitherto real, but also be right in doing so. This rightness, necessity qua necessity, is immanent to and co-emergent with the rupture, and thereby value emerges. Read below and if you haven't already, sign up; I will be publishing deeper into this system, this metaphysics of value, in the upcoming weeks.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

@starryblueisis This is true. I think the ones pushing back re. Epstein are definitely closer to core MAGA though, and as such closer to the median Republican/conservative voter.
(Sorry, kind of didn't check Twitter for almost three months.)

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

The fact that the Epstein Files, more than anything else over the last decade, are leading to backlash, dissent and even desertion from Trump's core base is super interesting, not just as a reflection of current politics but also as a reflection of human psychology. Yeah the Epstein trafficking and exploitation ring was bad, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, in terms of simply the amount of suffering brought about in reality, definitely, there is no comparison between, say, the Epstein circle's evils and policy level things—the tariffs, the budget/tax cuts—that affect (arguably negatively) exponentially more people.

There are two ways in which the train of thought can go from here. One is that all policy matters are much more debatable in terms of net good or bad than this: The libs may say that deportations create more sadness than happiness, but MAGA can argue back that on the whole, this is what makes for the world with most flourishing, or at least the America with most flourishing or happiness, if that's what they care about. Even for military escalations in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, it's debatable if military aid, even while causing more suffering short-term, can make things better for everyone in the long run. There's no such parallel for the Epstein stuff: The only plus-side was some transgressive sexual pleasure for a small number of guys, which pretty much no one would consider as making up for the suffering that brought about.

But the other direction in which it can go is that it's not about the arguability of what's worse. There are many core MAGA people who thought the tariffs are bad, and would even be affected by them personally, and who would perhaps even agree that from a simple human-well-being equation, the tariffs are worse. But the stridency of opposition that Trump's facing from this affair is at a different tenor. It's like the more intuitive moral framework isn't utilitarianism for most people, but what would fall more under virtue ethics: This stuff is just *bad*, and that's it.

But is it actually "most further?" I might go further, or narrower. Is it maybe the case that insofar as the Epstein revelations implicated liberal/left-of-center/Democratic-aligned figures, liberals/left-of-center/progressive people care less and cared less than conservatives do about this? I have no data to back this up but my intuition is not. It fits our sense of things that being enraged morally egregious acts like this is much more of a RW thing than a LW thing, since it obviously tracks to RW priorities coming more from traditional frameworks and authority structures, which tend to prioritize individual virtue more than modern humanistic analyses that more influence liberalism and the left. But this also reminds me of the research that shows that liberals/progressives are more dopamine-driven, and conservatives more driven by serotonin and other "here and now" chemicals. It's like the brain chemistry of libs make them concerned about net consequences at abstracted scales into the future, which makes things like what Bill Clinton may have been up to with Epstein not that important, while the brain chemistry of conservatives makes them treat what Trump may have been up to with Epstein far more important.

No value judgment about which kind of priming is better or worse of course; just quite interesting...

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

Full moon tonight. Sharad Poonam. I went to the waterfront obviously in time for moonrise. Stayed an hour. Saw few people just admiring, being present to moon. Most stop to click pictures, then walk on. Incredible resistance to accepting the recalcitrance of the moon to be photographed. One woman photographed for five minutes! It won't happen, miss! But no, people think the moon must be captured, and that the only thing to be done is to capture the moon. Sure sign of societal collapse.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

Hello long time today I saw Dave Chappelle and two raccoons how are you?

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

Thanks Google

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

The above reflections brought about by watching the IPL final right now—which is the 18th IPL final, but still seems like this new upstart tournament to this aging mind—and watching the tragic UEFA Champion's League final a couple days ago having also made the mistake to go midtown for it, where the crowds were very young and very PSG, at which point I realized that many of these people would have been in kindergarten or younger when Qatar bought PSG, and thus would only know PSG as a "legacy" team.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

One rough heuristic of maybe when you start to feel no longer fully young but veering toward middle age is when you find that for things that were new and significant when you an adolescent—so things that you didn't take for granted, weren't default existence for you, and in fact were your first introductions to the sense of historical temporality, like "Ah, now the world has this"—there are now post-adolescents to whom they are indeed part of the air that one breaths, that are "just how the world is". This would happen to coincide with one's early-mid 30s—only because the sum of that minimum age when you start to have a sense of history towards new culture (12-15) and what constitutes a post-adolescent (let's say 18) is that. Of course, it's in one's mid-30s as well that the body starts to show the first notable signs of aging, especially for the physically active (or maybe especially for the inactive? I wouldn't know): More injuries and slower recovery, as I'm starting to notice too. That accentuates the sense that one is no longer properly, fully in the category of "young" anymore.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

@phaguetteuwu Read On Pretentiousness by Dan Fox.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

@Paul_Heron_ https://t.co/F9AzJ5BPTK

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

@bikerjon1010 Fake AI generated paintings for the Instagrammers.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

One of my least favorite things that humans do is take pictures of artwork in museums. At the Met today, I chanced upon the gallery with Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses, which also has some splendid others by him as well Monet and Gauguin. Almost everyone...

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

... Museums should start checking in phones, having strict electronic checks to make sure no ones sneaking them in. It is high time for museum fascism. It is the only solution to the picture-taking, which is such a farce of consciousness, such a diminution of existence.

[Ishan Raval @I_are]

... over a dozen pictures of Wheat Field from all sorts of angles, getting in everyone's way through the process, what are they thinking? JUST GO TO THE MET'S WEBSITE WHEN YOU WANT TO SEE PICTURES OF THE ART. JUST TAKE IN THE BEAUTY. HONOR IT. BE PRESENT TO IT. GENUFLECT.