Comment by manarch on The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life · 2018-09-26T07:52:35.272Z · LW · GW

Interesting post. I wonder what Lovecraft would make of "the world" in 2018 given what he goes on to write after the quoted line? Your conclusion reflects in a way what someone said to me a couple of decades ago - there's a very good reason why trash is on prime time TV, it's something to consider being thankful for.

Maybe it's because I've only recently started to learn more about this kind of enquiry (I'm a slow starter and learner and still haven't progressed out of the Enlightenment era), but I can't help but wonder whether the possibly improbable conceptual problem can be reframed more broadly into a simpler proposition that says that individually making sense of "the world" is mutually exclusive to collectively knowing more about it. It would make sense of the conclusion that Mediocristan is the best of worlds even if only on merely merciful grounds.

(ps : thanks for the site - I'm new to it so have only just started to dig and read, but am excited to find somewhere that isn't reducing thinking to match digital attention spans.)