Useful without being true

almost taiwan

1) It does not always make sense to eradicate stories and customs that do not have inner logical validity. They maybe useful without being inherently true.
2) Seeing people acting correctly, does not show that they know what they are doing.

Yechezkel Zilber

On walking away from bad food

There used to be a good Sichuan restaurant near here, with the owner from Chengdu. Most of the food was inedibly hot, but - and I've been to Sichuan - it was the real thing. I went there a month ago and the food had gone downhill a lot, perhaps a combination of static prices / inflation / catering to local tastes. I gave it another go tonight and was left filling up on beer and sunflower seeds. The food was no good, so I didn't eat it. At one time I'd have thought that was wasteful, but now I understand that as long as something rots it's being eaten.

I often feel bad for not posting more often, but a truly erratic man is Yechezkel Zilber, who goes weeks with nothing and then several entries in one day. His latest:

Unhealthy food, should be thrown away as soon as you realize that it is negative to eat it. "Do not waste it" is irrational and unethical. The Talmud recognized it two millenia ago, when saying that the prohibition of wasting stuff, is irrelevant when the body is the counter party." The waste of the body is more important".

There has been times when it was crucial to keep food. Nowadays our trouble is the opposite and attitudes should be adjusted accordingly.

His previous post:

cool + true observations...
- how much do you do for your body (instead of wasting time on ... whatever)?
- and why the body as a measure, why not the soul, the spirit, the other ... or what?

English is not his first language. His blog is here.

Dancing with Mishima

Unintentional [?] humor in the Mishima biography:

I have seen Mishima "lose himself" to the Monkey or the Watusi in the mid-sixties and it was like watching a studied imitation of a dancer; he always looked horrifying sober, though clearly his movements and expressions were intended to create the effect not merely of spontaneity but enthrallment. In any case, he was a bad dancer, uncoordinated and apparently deaf to music. In 1946 and 1947, when he was still a wan, emaciated figure, his jitterbug must have been awesome sight.

p86

The studied mask of normalcy. When I decided to move among people I tried to learn their actions and enthusiasms, but it became tiring to keep up, and in any case I was bad at it. The fact was I didn't care what they were doing, but needed society for $ and sex. The life I've made out here is one that's been cobbled together out of necessity from various sub-optimal outcomes, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Yechezkel Zilber has an interesting blog on happiness.

Many times we feel that the world is highly irrational and sub-optimal (i.e. things can be done is a much better way). This is sometimes the case, but maybe less than as it seems. Our eyes are very misleading about it.

The reason is because the hypothetical reality (that is before any decision has been made) contains a huge space of possibilities. The decision and actions people take are usually relatively good among the overall space of possibilities.

But the decisions people take may not be the absolute optimum. That is they are not the very best set of decisions. But they are still very good.

After the fact thinking will start off with what decisions already made, and try to look for alternatives based on this optimized decision. Insofar that the decision was not the absolute optimal it will look like there are better decisions and the decision maker was a fool.

Suppose there are a billion possible compositions one can lead to by various combinations of decisions. Suppose further that we sort them throught a single measure. If the actual decision ranked 100th, it should be a great decision, but starting from there one will see that it is the worst out of hundred possibilities.... [continues...]