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David Chapman

@Meaningness

12 Dec

Everything you learned in school about how to write, and most of what you learned in most jobs, is WORSE THAN WRONG.

Here's why your writing sucks, and how you can fix that:

You learned that the function of language is to state facts. [*Cough* rationalism...] FALSE!

Language is the way we do relationships. Writing puts you in relationship with readers.

Relationships are shared caring. Do you care about your readers? Do they care about your text?

DO I CARE? is what the reader asks when reading your title. When reading your first sentence. When reading your first paragraph. Unless the answer is HELL YES, they'll close the tab.

There's another hundred open. And there's the stuff in Pocket, and a subreddit to check, and

Read 13 tweets

David Chapman

@Meaningness

29 Oct

https://twitter.com/rmathematicus/status/1321846535282413568

Starting from Thales, 2600 years ago, rationalists have maintained religious certainty that all existence is bound by mathematical laws, despite for the first 2200 worth there being zero evidence for that, and overwhelming evidence against it.

https://twitter.com/rmathematicus/status/1321846535282413568

The extraordinary triumph of the Copernican Revolution, culminating in Newton: rationalists FINALLY discovered *something*, one thing, that fit their religious preconception. Glory Be!

And if one thing, surely also every thing. And thus: modernity! NEWTONIZE ALL THE THINGS!

Discovering that Newton’s absolute truth was not, after all, true was a cosmic shock now underestimated. The collapse of modernity had many causes; for the intellectual elite this discrediting of the foundation of rationalism was central I think.

Read 5 tweets

David Chapman

@Meaningness

26 Oct

🇺🇸 In the run-up to the last election, I wrote several pieces about politics from a meta-rational point of view. I’m going to tweet links to some of them as a thread over the next few days.

🇺🇸 Our current political divide is rooted in the culture war that began with the New Left & hippie counterculture in the 1960s-70s, versus the Evangelical counter-counterculture of the 70s-80s.

To better understand, I wrote a memetic history of that war: meaningness.com/countercultures

🇺🇸 The two countercultures, though apparently opposed, were strikingly similar attempts at solving the same fundamental problems of meaning—which are still unresolved.

My history of that attempt and its failure is long, so I will tweet only selections…

Read 27 tweets

David Chapman

@Meaningness

26 Oct

@angelvsnovvs

Diane di Prima was one of the few poets I really like.

Thanks to @angelvsnovvs for RTing this to me, and to the several people who separately introduced me to her work decades ago.

https://twitter.com/venepoetics/status/1320521061117661184

@angelvsnovvs

@angelvsnovvs Diane di Prima’s _Seminary Poems_ were written during a 3-month Tibetan Buddhist study/meditation retreat at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center.

They communicate the essence of Vajrayana. Many are also wryly funny (which is not separate from the essence of Vajrayana…)

@angelvsnovvs

@angelvsnovvs I did a similar one-month retreat program (dathün) at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center a few years after her. It was one of the most significant events in my life. Diane di Prima’s descriptions of the place and time and life are highly evocative for me.

Read 8 tweets

David Chapman

@Meaningness

24 Oct

@wolftivy

🎙 @wolftivy and @miltonwrites of @palladiummag on society and politics after postmodernity—the question I care most about in the long run.

Thanks for the shout-out, and for Ash's clear & accurate summary of my vaguely-stated tweetstorm from last week!

palladiummag.com/2020/10/22/pal…

Fascinating in the podcast were thoughts on how to move forward, and what comes after—whereas discussions of postmodernity usually rehash "how did everything fall apart," which we now thoroughly understand.

@palladiummag

@palladiummag asks a key prior question: "if we accept the postmodern critique, why did modernity work as well as it did for as long as it did?"

Standard postmodern talk just tries to discredit modernity, beating a dead horse. meaningness.com/systems-crisis…

Read 8 tweets

David Chapman

@Meaningness

7 Oct

Three obstacles to explaining why representationalism is wrong:

1️⃣ It’s the culmination of the whole 2600+ year rationalist tradition on which our culture mainly rests. Everything points toward it. It’s inexorably deducible from a millennia-enduring zeitgeist. It can’t be considered because it’s implied by too much.

2️⃣ It’s the final reductio ad absurdum of rationalism. Representations inescapably must be physical things that interact with non-physical things. That cannot be accommodated in rationalist metaphysics. Representationalism can’t be doubted because everything else might fall apart

Read 7 tweets

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