When describing the trajectories of other people’s lives, we sometimes make statements that I’ll call claims of ultimate ruination. They take the form of “X ruined his life”, where X is a very specific event or experience. Whatever X was, it changed the person’s life permanently and irredeemably. Examples of X: a breakup, a professional failure, an unsettling spiritual experience, an injury. These claims are appealing in their drama and simplicity, and terrifying in their implications.| kasra.io
Do abstractions exist? Here we go for the 641st time… This piece is largely a response to silenceinbetween’s excellent post A Case For the Reality of Abstractions. (For brevity I will refer to the author as S going forward.) S frames the problem as such: The central tension here is that physics, as we currently understand it, operates like so: there was an initial set of conditions and laws which operate on those conditions.| kasra.io