Statements that have stuck with me this week

[anecdata]

"Neurons that fire together, wire together"

I came across this while reading the book Fluent Forever. It has since inspired me to create a flashcard deck that does not descriminate by topics. A single unified flashcard deck in Anki (my SRS program of choice) seems to yield many benefits.

It has changed the app from being a language study program to something more preternatural in my life- a memory lockbox. As long as I put it in there, it is highly unlikely I will ever forget the card. That is, afterall, the beauty of SRS. It takes the understanding of the forgetting curve and selectively brings back cards that are about to be forgotten. Having facts, languages, and pictures intertwine makes things difficult for sure. Because I can't just "set" a mode for my mind and just study that. However, this has the benefit of allowing more interdisciplinary thought and makes it easier to remember language lessons.

It also makes my daily flashcard routine a lot more varied and enjoyable.

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I was considering Guy DeBord's "Society of the Spectacle" from the lens of the food that we eat. It seems convenient to think that the reason that we have the number of folks who are comfortable eating meat in the regularity that we do because we live so distanced from the production. I had thus thought that if folks saw the meat for what it was, i.e the pig in the farm and not just the cubes of pink meat you buy at the store, then we would likely have fewer people eating meat. But the following statement was made to me by my cousin.

why stop at the pig, why are those the units by which you measure the spectacle

Why indeed? It seems like the reasonable stopping point because it is an organism. But if your only concern is the caloric value of the thing, then this line that we have been drawing from us to the thing we eat might continue until the meat is a bundle of molecules, and the molecules that get digested / processed to form Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) in your body. And if that's the stopping point for your spectacle, then this could actually mean an increase in the amount of meat consumption because meat is typically more energy dense than plants and such. This lead to the questions of what normative choices that a philosopher has made. Why this and not that?

Comments

[catness]

I'm curious what do you add to your flashcards for interdisciplinary study? I understand that images should strengthen the memorization, but there's no point in remembering images themselves, unless you also study famous paintings and such, but it would be pretty hard to establish correspondences between paintings and vocabulary...

My cynical criteria for eating meat is basically, eating cute animals (dogs, cats) is bad, but eating ugly animals is fine. I've been at farms, I saw pigs, sheep, cows, chicken and such, and they all look ugly and dirty to me, so, no problem ;) Same with fish, excluding pretty fishies you can see in aquariums.

Maybe if I actually lived on the farm, I'd be more attached to farm animals. But on the other hand, as far as I know, no one who lives in a village / on a farm has any problem with raising animals for food, it's only the refined urban dwellers who are bothered with such ethical issues. I think the whole assumption about distancing is wrong - the closer to the nature you live (like humans hundreds of years ago), the more you're comfortable with doing things the nature's way, which includes eating other animals.

[anecdata]

I have been adding cloze for facts that I want to remember. The main idea that I've been toying with is that there are no categories. Though cards on the table, this is still very much in the infancy and I don't know what I'm doing. I've been adding images (honestly this is harder than I thought it'd be, because some concepts and things just don't have an image that works). But I'm noticing it is just as much about the memory of searching for images as it is the image itself.

I think a lot more folks than would care to admit follow your criteria for eating meat. You're definitely right on the money when you put the ethical concerns of eating meat/ etc as something more prevalent in urbanized/industrialized societies. I don't know for sure, but I think that's one of the distinctions that Debord makes. These things are spectacles to us precisely because we are so distanced from the actual means of production. Living in a farm? Well, you are the production - so you wouldn't have any of these so called disillusionments.