I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again

Maya Angelou on the joys of being edited

“Nothing is out of my reach if I want to understand it” is 100% the right way to go. I think believing with all your heart that you can learn stuff is the only real intellectual superpower. (And also something we should be way better at making everyone believe!)

I did however enjoy the “oh you miss going to restaurants with your friends? I guess you love torturing service workers” discourse.

I do think there was an insufficient amount of “it does actually really suck not to hang out in lively indoor spaces for months or years but the alternative is worse” messaging.

As in the paper is a how-to for prompt writing? Sounds boring!

Overheard about the matcha latte in line at the cafe across the street: “The barista looks hella nonbinary so it must be good.”

You might find more of this in a quantum mechanics course than a QFT course, since you'd see a lot more stuff that's directly related to experimental outcomes. These articles look like they have a lot of useful stuff too:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-q...
www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/intro-...

I don't think I get the distinction between law and constraint. If I say that PV=nRT is a constraint, aren't I saying that in all possible worlds, these quantities do verify that equation?

That's great to hear!

Are you contrasting that with a pov that defines laws directly in terms of causality? Or what's the meaning relative to which the modal part is extra?

Frank Herbert I apologize for ever doubting you

Not sure what I expected but the new M.I.A. album is…not good

Yeah exactly

I guess saying "I was caused to bring a jacket because it was cold out" feels strange to me, though maybe just linguistically rather than conceptually. I'm not sure.

Or maybe not a problem but just multiple distinct notions of causality?

Now, this doesn't seem consistent with the fact that I do regularly say things like "I'm going to bring a jacket because it's cold outside", so maybe there's some problem with my thinking here.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think where I'm coming from is wanting to make cause very much about direct actions I as an agent can take in the world. And it seems to me that "move this object from here to there" is a direct action in a way that "change the pressure" is not.

I suspect my reaction, if I'm really trying to think in causal terms, would be to ask how the pressure is changed. I'm curious now how much data we have about people's intuitions on these things.

That's true, but don't you include position explicitly in the model in all cases? After all, the box is moved from one region to another. Maybe I'm being too nitpicky. I'm trying to think of how I'd react to "The pressure of a box of gas is increased" with no mention of space.

Ok this is a nice framing of it I think! My intuition though that here what I'm directly intervening in is position in all cases. Clearly this is a very rich set of examples!

Ah ok, that makes sense to me -- is it fair to say you'd view claims about which things are causes as claims about a DAG that exists for an individual as a mental representation?

I think we had a discussion along those lines regarding quantum stuff at some point, and you linked me to a paper about how causality can be reconciled with determinism, which I read through a "real patterns" (pragmatic?) lens that seemed pretty different from how you read it.

I think for me causality is not something that feels metaphysically fundamental, whereas it may be for you?

Ah sorry, yeah I was just talking about the stationary box cases. I'm proposing (but not necessarily claiming) that the cause in the other cases is the *motion* of the box to a region with a different pressure. Maybe I even want to say that the cause is the *act of moving* it.

This one: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11676/

I mean motion of the piston or box, not motion of the gas particles. I.e. motion causes the volume to increase and also causes the pressure to decrease, but neither of those changes causes the other.

It was one where he showed there isn't a well-defined limit of the Schwartzschild metric as mass goes to zero, suggesting there's no way to talk in GR about "what would happen if the sun suddenly vanished". But the proof seemed to rely on using 1/R instead of R as the Schwarzschild radius.

Maybe I do believe that, in that I want to say the "primary variables" (in some imprecise sense I'm making up right now) are the positions of things. I'm aware though that this may be at odds with my strongly held quantum foundations beliefs, so I'll tread lightly!

Nice! I'm kind of tempted to say that in all cases the cause is motion, and the effects are all the changes in state variables, but I'm not sure I actually believe that.

Re: pressure and velocity being equally (or equally possibly) directly observable, I find that hard to accept but acknowledge that this is probably because I'm too familiar with seeing stuff and thinking that that is the same as directly perceiving reality.