My Top Tweets During Ink Haven
"The rats in MIT, subject to the vast selection power of student-made traps over many generations, surpasse average human intelligence. The smartest rat has applied to the school and just got his reply. Opening the envelope, he is struck suddenly by spring-loaded steel."
"I outsourced calculation, for I am not a computer. I outsourced spell checking, for I am not an editor. I outsourced writing, for I am not a writer. I outsourced reasoning, for I am not a clever man. Then they came for my inner light, and none of my tools advocated for me."
"I heard this Eliezer Yudkowsky is famous for his erotic writings. Naturally, I read How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside. It's not my "thing" but no shade to those who are into it."
"Raising Terry Tao was difficult. There was a lot of child proofing involved."
Long tweet on the aesthetics of Light Haven:
I was asked about the aesthetics of Light Haven. As happens to me on occasion, I made a joke I thought was funny and an awkward silence followed. Still the aesthetics here are interesting and worth articulating.
I was slightly depressed my first days here. I am not sure why. I was unused to being around so many people in such close proximity, which may be part of it. But also when I went to get my COVID vaccine the day before my flight, the pharmacist asked which vaccines I needed, I replied: "COVID and flu, but what else have you got?" My arm full of perhaps too-many attenuated viruses, I asked Claude a few days later why my mood was so low. It mentioned a single vaccine can induce a temporary depression in some people for a few days. And I had more than two in my arm. This melancholy, likely, contaminated my first impressions.
My cytokines now approaching normal levels and mood now high, I can judge aesthetics better. I am not the most visual person, but I can relay impressions. I would say it feels a bit Chestertonian. The Rose Garden Inn as patient zero, infecting various houses around it. The Chestertonian bit, in my imagination, is the implicit mad scheme to slowly undermine various stifling norms of city planning. One house at a time, seeds of freedom spread. I imagine this spirit infecting first the neighborhood and then the city of Berkeley itself. At a key moment, the planning commissioner will be turned and the revolution completed.
There is an artificial lawn. And though you'd think artificial grass would be tacky, it does somehow work. Once again, materials scientists have outdone God. There are "onions," strange functional sculptures in which one can sit and have conversations. They look to me like large demonic hands transfigured from the artificial turf by some strange wizards, but in a pleasant way. There is a snack-bar, which is perhaps too generous with its offerings. I would recommend hiring Stephan J. Guyene as a consultant to ruin everyone's good time.
The aesthetics, then, I will describe as Post-Bureaucratic-Apocalypse chic. Planning laws and an aesthetically dead, inhuman, architectural tradition preventing any new beauty being constructed, those with taste must take the old and put it to new purposes. And this LightHaven has done.