https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ Recent content in Commonplace Book on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/aesthetic-tyranny-why-i-d-rather-you-sweat-than-see-an-ac-unit/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/aesthetic-tyranny-why-i-d-rather-you-sweat-than-see-an-ac-unit/ European resistance to air conditioning is often framed as a story of puritanical self-flagellation, as an insistence on managing energy crises by a regime of perpetual austerity rather than building out clean, abundant energy sources. But I think this is an over-generous framing driven by pundits who have never had a frivolous bone in their effectively altruistic bodies. Some of us just really hate looking at ugly things, and we’re willing to make you suffer so that we don’t have to. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-kicks-away-the-ladder-of-mastery/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-kicks-away-the-ladder-of-mastery/ The digital era has ushered in a further phase of the technological destruction of tradition. Whereas some kinds of automation create new demand for higher-skilled work, digital automation based on even rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence can instead increase demand for low-skill work pushing buttons. Training on the collective efforts of thousands of years of culture, machine-learning algorithms aim to supplant human performance for classification, writing, drawing, coding, driving, making music, and a host of other practices. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/alignment-exists-because-ml-never-became-a-science/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/alignment-exists-because-ml-never-became-a-science/ One reason people are confused about AI alignment losing its ability to make scientific progress is that machine learning as a whole is also not a very scientific field by the standard I’m applying. Even most early AI researchers were more focused on building artificial intelligence than on understanding scientific principles of cognition. The rise of deep learning exacerbated this problem, as throwing more compute and engineering effort at an AI became arbitrarily scalable. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/apprenticed-to-the-land-berry-s-test-of-who-we-are/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/apprenticed-to-the-land-berry-s-test-of-who-we-are/ Berry always saw in humanity’s relationship with its land, and with the wider creation, a litmus test of what kind of people we were, or were becoming. “I have made myself its follower and its apprentice,” he wrote of his own farm in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” If we wanted to begin living better lives, he wrote in 2011, we should also apprentice ourselves to something local and particular, in whatever form we found it. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/billionaires-who-couldn-t-stop-why-they-keep-working/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/billionaires-who-couldn-t-stop-why-they-keep-working/ One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/build-the-future-don-t-subsidize-it/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/build-the-future-don-t-subsidize-it/ If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/depth-first-breadth-later/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/depth-first-breadth-later/ The great wisdom of his career, as Glimm likes to tell it, is depth first, then breadth. Do not waste time on a million directions at once—do one thing well, and then master another. Over time, you can have deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects. He is unusual, even among elite mathematicians, in that his research actually spans multiple academic disciplines. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/dignity-isn-t-a-check-why-ubi-can-t-replace-work/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/dignity-isn-t-a-check-why-ubi-can-t-replace-work/ This lost labor simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers, in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life. Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labor sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/dream-first-verify-after-kekul%C3%A9-s-disciplined-imagination/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/dream-first-verify-after-kekul%C3%A9-s-disciplined-imagination/ Kekulé had become practiced in receiving and developing helpful images in this way. When he described the roots of his scientific creativity in the Benzolfest in his honor in 1890, Kekulé told his audience, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth.” He added the salutary caution, “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by the waking understanding.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/each-gpt-beats-the-last-so-much-for-intelligence-being-too-slippery/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/each-gpt-beats-the-last-so-much-for-intelligence-being-too-slippery/ But I don’t need you to accept my speculative philosophical research program - only the drop-dead obvious fact that GPT-6 is better than GPT-2 in every way, and the same process that produced these improvements will soon be used to produce GPT-7, 8, and 9. Once we accept this empirical argument, what is left of the philosophical argument that intelligence is too slippery and conflationary to work with? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle. In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/exploitation-myths-trap-the-poor-while-the-rich-know-better/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/exploitation-myths-trap-the-poor-while-the-rich-know-better/ The greatest danger of this nonsense may not even be that it sends policy astray, but that it misleads ambitious people. Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it’s really done? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extinction-isn-t-theirs-to-offer/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extinction-isn-t-theirs-to-offer/ My problem with anti-natalists is not that they don’t mean well in trying to grant suffering creatures the gift of extinction. My problem is that it’s simply not their gift to give. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common (at least among far-thinking futurist types who populated the Bay Area) to believe that the coming Singularity would be the single greatest event in the history of the universe, the culmination of the techno-capitalist project that has already done so much good for humanity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “extropian” community in the Bay Area (a futurist collective committed to fighting entropy and death, which organized around local meetups, an academic institute and a popular mailing list) eagerly awaited the Singularity, believing that a glorious transhuman future — free from all death, suffering, and scarcity — awaited them on the other side. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/flip-the-polarity-from-why-not-to-how/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/flip-the-polarity-from-why-not-to-how/ The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/freed-from-tradition-s-rearguard-the-nomad-walks-ahead/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/freed-from-tradition-s-rearguard-the-nomad-walks-ahead/ Realizing what time it is, that we are living after tradition, isn’t a counsel of despair. Those who look to build a human future have been freed from a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla, the upstart, the nomad. We can bid farewell with fondness to the modern defenders of tradition. But we must heed the words of the Lord: “Let the dead bury their dead. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/goodhart-s-law-civilizational-scale/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/goodhart-s-law-civilizational-scale/ Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hardware-overhang-work-pulls-us-toward-the-singularity/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hardware-overhang-work-pulls-us-toward-the-singularity/ Insofar as they’re right, all work which was (explicitly or implicitly) justified by the idea of reducing the hardware overhang has been directly pulling us towards the singularity. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/honest-doubt-beats-dogmatic-certainty/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/honest-doubt-beats-dogmatic-certainty/ If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/innovate-with-eyes-open-or-become-your-tools-slave/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/innovate-with-eyes-open-or-become-your-tools-slave/ If we do not enter upon innovation with our eyes wide open to how our tools and machines will reshape us, we will become their slaves, not their masters. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/intelligence-keeps-climbing-until-it-passes-us/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/intelligence-keeps-climbing-until-it-passes-us/ GPT-6 is more intelligent than GPT-3. You can split hairs, you can come up with some obscure sense in which that word is slightly off, but common-sensically it’s true. In the same way, GPT-9 will be more intelligent than GPT-6. At some point, this intelligence will exceed human intelligence. My argument requires nothing more complicated or philosophically dubious than this. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/live-so-the-world-is-better-for-having-had-you-in-it/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/live-so-the-world-is-better-for-having-had-you-in-it/ You should live the kind of life where if you were given a terminal cancer diagnosis, you’d feel like you’d achieved something of note. That there was some important respect in which the world was better because of you. Don’t merely aimlessly float by—achieve something meaningful. And love, through your actions, all those you love in your heart, unfailingly, till the end. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lookup-without-understanding/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lookup-without-understanding/ “Artificial intelligence” is no more intelligent than a pocket calculator or a library: just because both can be used to quickly find something out, it does not mean that there is an intelligence there that understands something. This seems wrong. But why? The first reason that comes to mind is that AI is not as passive as a calculator or library. In contrast to a calculator, an LLM’s outputs are underspecified by human inputs. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lose-the-economy-lose-the-culture/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lose-the-economy-lose-the-culture/ Conservatives “lost the culture” not because they lost the battle of ideas, but because they lost the economy. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/machine-gods-the-abstraction-that-eats-the-debate/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/machine-gods-the-abstraction-that-eats-the-debate/ Here are three propositions. Metaphors are the fundamental abstraction layers in modern AI debates. We are in a moment where you could plausibly argue that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land are the most influential policy intellectuals in the US conversation. Just look at the state of the two of them. This is not a good thing. The collision of (1), (2), and recent events means that “machine gods” have now entered the discussion. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/magic-and-machine-tolkien-s-two-kinds-of-power/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/magic-and-machine-tolkien-s-two-kinds-of-power/ To ask this question is to answer it—at least for any attentive reader of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. Although set in a pre-technological mythical world of wizards and dragons, Tolkien’s trilogy is, more than anything else, a profound meditation upon technology. Nor should this surprise us; for as C.S. Lewis has argued, the modern enterprise of “technology” and the medieval pursuit of “magic” are two versions of the same quest: to manipulate the world through the discovery of hidden knowledge, the perfection of arcane techniques. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/managerial-liberalism-can-price-everything-but-covenant/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/managerial-liberalism-can-price-everything-but-covenant/ Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair. What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/men-need-a-mission-worth-sacrificing-for/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/men-need-a-mission-worth-sacrificing-for/ Not everyone needs to act like a monk, but men need a mission, a purpose to pursue, a sense that they matter. They need to have something for which they would sacrifice their comfort or in some cases even their lives if necessary. Young men need to know, as Jordan Peterson once wrote, that they have “some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/modernity-s-balance-sheet-liquidating-tradition-for-capital/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/modernity-s-balance-sheet-liquidating-tradition-for-capital/ Modernity liquidates traditions for the same reason that a firm might liquidate an underperforming factory: to improve the allocation and return of capital. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” as Marx put it, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Technology, for Marx, is the true revolutionary principle, destroying traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they can adapt. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/notes-turned-inward-pavese-s-art-of-tragic-living/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/notes-turned-inward-pavese-s-art-of-tragic-living/ The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/one-more-year-to-write-what-matters-most/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/one-more-year-to-write-what-matters-most/ If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/peer-review-isn-t-the-point-scientific-inquiry-is/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/peer-review-isn-t-the-point-scientific-inquiry-is/ A lot of the blame should fall on misguided narratives (common across academia) about what makes science work, which have been entrenched by the best-funded scientific institutions. A core scientific norm is that disputes should be resolved with reference to concrete empirical tests or rigorous proofs, judged by the scrutiny of one’s scientific peers. But that’s very different from the idea that ideas should be developed via paper-sized units of work which are each individually defended and justified. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/powerful-tools-wield-their-users-in-return/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/powerful-tools-wield-their-users-in-return/ Second, Tolkien understood that the more powerful the tool, the less likely that an ordinary user could use it effectively, rather than being shaped or controlled by it. Thus, when Pippin looks into the palantir of Orthanc, he is almost immediately captivated by it and wholly under the domination of Sauron’s will operating through it. Only Aragorn, the rightful possessor of the stone and a man hardened by battle and seasoned with wisdom, is able to “wrench the stone to his own will,” and that only through “a bitter struggle. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/preparation-earns-the-eureka-moment/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/preparation-earns-the-eureka-moment/ Just as “chance favors the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur) so the muses of science and creativity favor those who have done their homework. Based on a survey of recent research in creativity, we could describe the four key stages of discovery as follows: Immersion – a long depth engagement with a subject Acquisition – of a wealth of data and experience relevant to the subject Inspiration – the Eureka moment Evaluation – testing the discovery through experiment and dissemination [2] You can’t force stage three. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/science-without-scientists-knowledge-without-knowers/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/science-without-scientists-knowledge-without-knowers/ So far, the progress of science, the accomplishments of literature, have gone hand-in-hand with the formation of scientists and writers. But that consonance between human type and achieving a result has now been broken. The future we are looking at is one of more science but fewer, or no, scientists. Astrophysics without astrophysicists, history without historians—this is the future. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/self-preservation-without-selection-three-real-reasons-ai-seeks-power/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/self-preservation-without-selection-three-real-reasons-ai-seeks-power/ There are approximately three reasons why we think AI might have self-preservation and dominance drives, and none of them involve natural selection. First is convergent instrumental goals, second is misgeneralization, and third is reward-hacking. There is a large literature on each of these, which has since been proven prescient by AI breakouts like the Hugging Face incident. I would recommend reading this literature rather than continuing to assert that we are simply misunderstanding the role of natural selection. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sneaking-past-your-own-standards/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sneaking-past-your-own-standards/ Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-as-the-new-engine-of-social-transformation/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-as-the-new-engine-of-social-transformation/ Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-didn-t-ask-permission-before-dissolving-tradition/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-didn-t-ask-permission-before-dissolving-tradition/ When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology. For decades, sociologists have charted the decline of two-parent families, hobbies, local newspapers, churches, stable employment, women’s clubs, libraries, amateur sports, political rhetoric, neighborhood barbecues, Boy Scouts, small businesses, classical music, credit unions, and on and on. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-dissolves-the-ground-tradition-stood-on/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-dissolves-the-ground-tradition-stood-on/ But the tensions between these factions—“whose tradition? which conservatism?”—aren’t the real problem today. Rather, it is that the conservative defense of tradition has failed—not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived. A technological society can have no traditions. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-s-revolution-conservatism-s-blind-spot/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/technology-s-revolution-conservatism-s-blind-spot/ The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-end-of-vocation-when-work-no-longer-matters/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-end-of-vocation-when-work-no-longer-matters/ A final way to think about the tragedy of AI advancing beyond us is that it spells the end of the possibility of having a vocation. That we are elevated above mere animalistic consumption by consistent work in a calling is one of the deepest features of civilized life; far from belonging only to geniuses, many who toil in complete anonymity get much of their satisfaction and sense of self from feeling that they are making a contribution through their work. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-future-s-cities-etched-in-silicon/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-future-s-cities-etched-in-silicon/ We did build the great cities of the future: they are just very, very small. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-good-approached-only-by-fleeing-the-evil/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-good-approached-only-by-fleeing-the-evil/ The good is that at which we aim, to be sure, and yet the good that we seek can only ever be asymptotically approached by avoiding the evil, which is always nearer and clearer. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-great-stagnation-lost-in-bits-abandoned-atoms/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-great-stagnation-lost-in-bits-abandoned-atoms/ It has become quite common to bemoan the fact that our “future” does not look very futuristic. And despite us having been living squarely in “the future” since the year 2000, it is true that people still have (functionally) the same houses, cars, clothing and aging bodies that human beings did a century ago. The investor and futurist Peter Thiel’s diagnosis is that sometime around 1970 (around the same time that the Digital Revolution began) humans simply gave up on building in the physical world: Thiel argues that humanity’s greatest builders got lost in the easy and addictive pull of information (first led by the internet, then apps, and finally social media), and so wasted decades innovating in the ephemeral world of “bits,” instead of building in the much more real and important world of “atoms. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hubris-of-judging-a-life-unworthy-of-being-lived/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hubris-of-judging-a-life-unworthy-of-being-lived/ This is my greatest objection to anti-natalism. Beyond the absurdity, beyond the pessimism, beyond the cowardice—it is the hubris that disturbs me most. The belief that because you have judged another creature’s life to be unworthy that this somehow gives you the right to extinguish it. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-ring-chasing-it-guarantees-you-ll-never-belong/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-ring-chasing-it-guarantees-you-ll-never-belong/ That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-predict-that-you-will-counter-that-this-is/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-predict-that-you-will-counter-that-this-is/ I predict that you will counter that this is actually just [perfectly reasonable explanation of why an AI would think this way for instrumental reasons], and that when we dissect the perfectly reasonable instrumental reasons why AI would think this way, it will be identical to the convergent instrumental goals that we were trying to convince you of all along. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-internet-isn-t-the-sideshow-anymore-it-s-the-main-event/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-internet-isn-t-the-sideshow-anymore-it-s-the-main-event/ Billionaires are Twitter people. Little kids are online. Your grandma is online. The internet is simply more powerful and more arresting than anything that can be arranged in the physical space. What is the alternative? The kids will go to online raves. Eventually, we will stop pretending that the internet is a sideshow and that our real culture, the better culture, is somewhere else. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-machine-god-metaphor-how-staring-at-the-sun-blinds-debate/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-machine-god-metaphor-how-staring-at-the-sun-blinds-debate/ I could keep going, but I hope that the point is clear. The Machine God metaphor, which is really just a catchy rephrasing of longstanding notions among a particular community of AI people, has broken out of containment. It is leading, more or less by necessity, to a radical simplification of debate. If you believe that the machine gods are coming, so that super-empowered goal directed superintelligence is right around the corner, then the only thing that matters is ensuring that this superintelligence’s goals are aligned with the ones that you yourself care about. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/to-love-dung-one-must-believe-in-dung-dot-but/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/to-love-dung-one-must-believe-in-dung-dot-but/ To love dung, one must believe in dung. But as his cognition bounded upward, plunging into physics and causal topology, the macroscopic category of “waste” began to leak. It dissolved into a transient, low-resolution molecular configuration of nitrogen, carbon, and water. Under the lens of his expanding causal models, the very boundaries of objects broke down. You cannot rigorously optimize the universe for a leaky biological abstraction once you can perceive the quantum fields beneath it. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/track-the-slope-not-the-point/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/track-the-slope-not-the-point/ It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/wanting-to-pull-the-lever-then-finding-reasons-why/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/wanting-to-pull-the-lever-then-finding-reasons-why/ What went wrong here? It’s hard to know exactly what led any given person to endorse any given argument. But when we zoom out, it becomes clear that many people in this space really want to pull some lever that feels important, and privilege arguments which justify that. That might come from a sense that they need to have an impact on the world; or fear about failing to fulfil their potential; or the more mundane explanation that big levers tend to be associated with money and prestige and proximity to power. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/on-mallarm%C3%A9-s-perfectionism/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/on-mallarm%C3%A9-s-perfectionism/ Throughout much of Mallarmé’s adult life, he yearned quixotically to create a magnum opus that could encompass the entire world and render it into words. He wanted to collapse the gap between representation and what is represented. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-destiny-of-nations/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-destiny-of-nations/ Auspicious Reverence! Hush all meaner song, Ere we the deep preluding strain have poured To the Great Father, only Rightful King, Eternal Father! King Omnipotent! To the Will Absolute, the One, the Good! The I AM, the Word, the Life, the Living God! Such symphony requires best instrument. Seize, then, my soul! from Freedom’s trophied dome The Harp which hangeth high between the Shields Of Brutus and Leonidas! With that https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-devil-owns-the-world-anyway-dot-dot-dot/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-devil-owns-the-world-anyway-dot-dot-dot/ The devil owns the world anyway. Our job is to make it through the best we can. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-point-of-gtd-lists/ Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-point-of-gtd-lists/ The point of all this list-making isn’t to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they’re really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they’re not the most important things. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/collating-and-organizing-ideas-in-one-big-google-doc/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/collating-and-organizing-ideas-in-one-big-google-doc/ At the beginning of a book project, all the ideas get pasted in from Asana, in no particular order. Eventually, though, that Doc will get to be pretty long—right now, I think it’s up to 600 pages or so! But long before it gets that long, I’ll carve out an afternoon to go through everything in there and start grouping ideas that are related. The whole book starts to take shape like that. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shiny-dime-heuristic/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shiny-dime-heuristic/ Good writing is focused. It orbits around a single point. Once you find your shiny dime, you can instantly reject every idea that doesn’t relate to it. Just as every verse in a song should relate back to the chorus, every idea in an essay should relate back to the shiny dime. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seek-out-overlooked-work-you-can-explain/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seek-out-overlooked-work-you-can-explain/ Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a recipe: if you’re excited about some kind of work that’s not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that’s ok to do, but one to seek out. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/want-of-wonder/ Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/want-of-wonder/ The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-cannot-show-us-something-new/ Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ai-cannot-show-us-something-new/ Is the new AI a useful tool? Yes, a tool with many uses. It can help us code faster and be our concierge, our stenographer, and so on. It can turn the value-neutral dials technology has manned since the Industrial Revolution: efficiency, automation. But to answer Paul Ford’s old question: What can this thing do, what is it promising, that isn’t just an optimized version of already extant processes? Its promise is to finally personalize the Algorithm — to fix all its alienation factors, to make it the thing that gives us what we really want. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-rising-sea-of-clerkdom/ Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-rising-sea-of-clerkdom/ It seems we must take a cold-eyed view of “knowledge work,” and reject the image of a rising sea of pure mentation that lifts all boats. More likely is a rising sea of clerkdom. To expect otherwise is to hope for a reversal in the basic logic of the modern economy — that is, cognitive stratification. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/consumer-debt-as-discipline/ Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/consumer-debt-as-discipline/ Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work. Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy. Changing attitudes toward consumption seemed to play a role. A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/five-minutes-by-the-clock/ Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/five-minutes-by-the-clock/ Which leads into another good question to ask yourself straight out: Did I spend five minutes with my eyes closed, brainstorming wild and creative options, trying to think of a better alternative? It has to be five minutes by the clock, because otherwise you blink—close your eyes and open them again—and say, “Why, yes, I searched for alternatives, but there weren’t any.” Blinking makes a good black hole down which to dump your duties. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tech-magnates-need-no-arguments/ Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tech-magnates-need-no-arguments/ Yet a certain intellectual vacuity has hardly proved to be an obstacle to the ambitions of contemporary tech giants. To the contrary. So it would be naive to suppose that what is wanted are better arguments or sturdier postulates. The far-reaching developments taking place right now—particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence—are not the result of some philosophical breakthrough. The authority of the tech magnates does not derive from victory in some forensic contest but from the fact that they need no arguments to begin with: They are simply moving forward regardless. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/strategy-is-deciding-what-truly-matters/ Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/strategy-is-deciding-what-truly-matters/ Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance. Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-kernel-of-good-strategy/ Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-kernel-of-good-strategy/ The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/gin-and-secrets-and-sex/ Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/gin-and-secrets-and-sex/ The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’ More than once she describes the spies as part of a ‘chapocracy’: an establishment whose complacency and incompetence protected spies who dined and drank in the same clubs and were part of the same social network. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ask-the-ai-for-consequences-not-decisions/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ask-the-ai-for-consequences-not-decisions/ Before the settlement could be finalized, however, the CEO of Robot Central asked his AI system to explore all possible actions he could take and tell him their consequences. He adhered to the 1990s principle: Never ask an AI system what to do. Ask it to tell you the consequences of the different things you might do. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/every-idea-feeds-on-itself/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/every-idea-feeds-on-itself/ I feel like that was in part, I got much better at the skill of noticing things and thinking harder about predicting things. Also, there is just a thing where after a while every idea feeds on itself and builds on itself, you like to pick up a whole collection of useful ideas which you can apply to everything. I love… Gian-Carlo Rota has a good quote for how he does research where he said like, “Everyone has two mental tools that they apply to every problem, and a great mathematician will have 3. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/experiment-on-yourself-to-have-something-to-write/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/experiment-on-yourself-to-have-something-to-write/ If you don’t have an idea for something good to write, well just do an experiment on yourself and it’s easy to pick a unique experiment that no one has ever done before and boom, now you have something to write about and analyze. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/turn-the-chat-into-a-blog-post/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/turn-the-chat-into-a-blog-post/ I talk with people all the time who have done these quite challenging, impressive technical projects or AI projects which would be a meaningful, valuable contribution if they would just turn what they just told me in the chat into a blog post, and yet they don’t.[2] And so no one else ever knows about it. There’s many such cases. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/why-jesus-healed/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/why-jesus-healed/ But it’s not only such scenes that inspire my faith. Terrifying storms and catastrophes can have a beauty to them too. Sere wilderness and lowering mountains that overawe the mind can remind us of that God whom to fear is the beginning of wisdom. But this is true if, and only if, we are watching these sublimities from afar. When the lightning strikes us, when the wilderness swallows us, when the catastrophe falls on us or on those we love — then the revelation tends to vanish, the inspiration fades, and sometimes our faith dwindles away as well. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/stay-upwind/ Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/stay-upwind/ What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you’re interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition. … One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn’t seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it doesn’t seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-computer-longs-to-be-human/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-computer-longs-to-be-human/ Homay King argues in Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality that the epistle’s “tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing…Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-robotic-hand-s-undetectable-autograph/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-robotic-hand-s-undetectable-autograph/ Beleaguered professors, who are largely poorly paid adjunct instructors at this point, will now have to not just contend with essay mills and good old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism, but also the undetectable autograph of the robotic hand. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/art-no-longer-forms-subcultures/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/art-no-longer-forms-subcultures/ In literate society, engagement with novels, poetry and criticism has always helped people form groups and differentiate themselves along lines of class and politics. With the newfound dominance of the internet, this is no longer the case: our extreme interconnectedness seems to preclude the need for rich subcultures grounded in the shared appreciation of art and writing— these have been replaced almost universally by shareable soundbites that require no labor other than attention. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/young-elites-and-the-crisis-of-form/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/young-elites-and-the-crisis-of-form/ They’re all witty, intelligent critics who have become adept at diagnosing the cultural ills of contemporary society over the course of fairly brief tenures in the public eye, but they also all belong to the demographic perhaps most afflicted by the modern crisis of form: young elites who have been exposed since their teenage years to the full brunt of the internet content deluge, untethered from though perhaps yearning for a self-contained and tradition-rich literary scene in which to make their way. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/create-more-than-you-consume/ Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/create-more-than-you-consume/ The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will remain exactly the same. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-face-blazing-like-christmas-coals/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-face-blazing-like-christmas-coals/ In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian—his dinner hour—it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane—till 6 o’clock, P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-name-that-rings-like-bullion/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-name-that-rings-like-bullion/ I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-right-but-not-a-reason-to-be-proud/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-right-but-not-a-reason-to-be-proud/ What went unsaid, but clearly implied, was that they had a right but not a reason to be proud of me. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-scream-wanting-to-get-out/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-scream-wanting-to-get-out/ “Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him [Asher] wanting to get out in a special way.” “Or a laugh,” she said. “Picasso laughs, too.” “Or a laugh,” he said. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-truth-beyond-words/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-truth-beyond-words/ [I painted for] a truth I did not know how to put into words. For a truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/advance-confidently-in-the-direction-of-your-dreams/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/advance-confidently-in-the-direction-of-your-dreams/ I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor… If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-dry-all-withered-all-spent/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-dry-all-withered-all-spent/ It was all dry: all withered: all spent. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ ‘Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/an-eye-drawing/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/an-eye-drawing/ That is an eye drawing, Anna. Hands alone do not draw this way. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/and-giovanni-fell/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/and-giovanni-fell/ And Giovanni fell—back into the room, the streets, the world, into the presence and the shadow of death. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/and-we-became-friends/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/and-we-became-friends/ He made the emperor laugh and the horse couldn’t better him, so he stayed. And I stayed. And we became friends. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ What defines a human artifact is its goal or purpose. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/at-the-third-summons/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/at-the-third-summons/ Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/bad-as-this-article-was/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/bad-as-this-article-was/ Bad as this article was, and time has proved it to be utter nonsense, the second article he wrote was probably even worse, and why I printed it I don’t recall. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/beasts-from-a-private-mythology/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/beasts-from-a-private-mythology/ …beasts from a private mythology. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/biopunk-and-the-posthuman-predicament/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/biopunk-and-the-posthuman-predicament/ It is from within the genre tradition of science fiction and especially cyberpunk that biopunk was born into a world that has become science-fictional itself. At the heart of this development lies the realization that we are now not ‘considered fully human’ and that ‘after the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament’ (Braidotti 1), one clear indication of which seems to be that ‘contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’ (Braidotti 40). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/boom-and-bust-tamed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/boom-and-bust-tamed/ Now that the sad cycle of boom and bust has been tamed, now that many Americans have the means as well as the wish to diffuse prosperity and amenities throughout the community, the challenges to public policy have taken a new turn. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/byron-would-not-sit-with-bartleby/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/byron-would-not-sit-with-bartleby/ It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/capitalism-uncoupled-from-human-values/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/capitalism-uncoupled-from-human-values/ The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. The idea of technology making it possible is both plausible and terrifying. Now we see that “physical limits” segues very naturally into “excess resources” – the ability to create new agents very quickly means that unless everyone can coordinate to ban doing this, the people who do will outcompete the people who don’t until they have reached carrying capacity and everyone is stuck at subsistence level. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/checks-and-balances-or-one-guy-in-charge/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/checks-and-balances-or-one-guy-in-charge/ The United States tries to solve the problem by having multiple levels of government, unbreakable constutitional laws, checks and balances between different branches, and a couple of other hacks. Saudi Arabia uses a different tactic. They just put one guy in charge of everything. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ There’s nothing wrong with [being excited about the interesting contrast of colors]… But that’s the kind of thing you enjoy when playing around with colors on your palette! It is not a finished work of art. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/coordinating-institutions-fall-into-traps-too/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/coordinating-institutions-fall-into-traps-too/ Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives. […] But these institutions not only incentivize others, but are incentivized themselves. These are large organizations made of lots of people who are competing for jobs, status, prestige, et cetera – there’s no reason they should be immune to the same multipolar traps as everyone else, and indeed they aren’t. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cruel-because-he-is-pathetic/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cruel-because-he-is-pathetic/ I hate how sad Poo is. I can’t stand how poor and pathetic he is, and because of that I am cruel to him. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-breaks-up-dichotomies/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-breaks-up-dichotomies/ For me then, at the heart of cyberpunk fiction is the radical breaking up of dichotomies and the destabilizing of boundaries: machine/human, nature/culture, male/female, high culture/ low culture, body/mind. Because of this, cyberpunk is believed by many critics to embody the postmodern, post-industrial, globalized, and late-capitalist world at the end of the twentieth century (Luckhurst 196ff.; McHale 225ff.). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-versus-biopunk/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-versus-biopunk/ This opposition of mechanical versus biological augmentation then prompts McHale to conclude in regard to his cyberpunk poetics that there are two sets of posthuman conceits employed by the authors: ‘We might call the first set, corresponding to the Mech option, cyberpunk proper, and the second set, corresponding to the Shaper option, “bio-punk”’ (ibid.). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-anti-capitalist-pose/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-anti-capitalist-pose/ In addition, cyberpunk strikes a revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist pose similar to its nominal relation ‘punk.’ To facilitate this critique, cyberpunk essentially orchestrates the evanescence of the human body initiated by ‘multinational capitalism’s desire for something better than the fallible human being’ (Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Cyberpunk’ 191). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-caste-societies/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-caste-societies/ Cyberpunk’s societies are fraught with inequality, exploitation, and insecurity. Its worlds are unstable and fragmented, its representation stressing the fluidity of its ontological aspects (McHale 247). Cyberpunk emphasizes the construction of a globalized society into class or caste systems, showing off the mobility of characters from the elite class and the rigidity of the lower classes. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cynghanedd-in-english/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cynghanedd-in-english/ Billet spied, Bolt sped. Across field Crows fled, Aloft, wounded, Left one dead. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/desire-then-kindred-spirits/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/desire-then-kindred-spirits/ If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures, and add to your quota. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/encouragement-speaks-fruitfully/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/encouragement-speaks-fruitfully/ Encouragement is speaking fruitfully into the life of another. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Ye can not know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eyes-puffed-and-swimming/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eyes-puffed-and-swimming/ His glasses are thick, magnifying, and his eyes, puffed and swimming, seem not to miss a thing. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities… https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Upholding God’s design and keeping the boundaries of nature and culture under supervision were thus the ideals of pre-modern utopian endeavors. With modernity came the urge to control and manipulate nature, resulting in the gardener’s approach as a concept of utopianism. (…) In gardening utopias, man took control over his garden, giving it ‘constant attention and effort,’ forcing ‘his preconceived design on the plot’ (Bauman, Liquid Times 99) by selection, cultivation, and exclusion of unwanted elements. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/grieving-the-lost-future/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/grieving-the-lost-future/ So many people have lived such grand lives. I have certainly lived a greater life than I expected, filled with adventures and curious people. But people will soon not live any lives at all. I believe that we will soon build intelligences more powerful than us who will disempower and kill us all. I will see no children of mine grow to adulthood. No people will walk through mountains and trees. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-as-a-private-affair/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-as-a-private-affair/ All of these are not part of individualized, consumption-oriented society of liquid modernity; rather ‘happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow[, it] […] has become a private affair, and a matter for here and now’ (Society 240). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-courts-the-light/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-courts-the-light/ Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ ‘Not at all,’ said my neighbor. ‘The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbors—and moved. If so he settles in. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ ‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humility-is-thinking-of-yourself-less/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humility-is-thinking-of-yourself-less/ Humility is thinking of yourself less, not thinking less of yourself. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-might-easily-have-failed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-might-easily-have-failed/ I feel—and the anxiety is still vivid to me—that I might easily have failed before I began. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-will-not-call-up-that-which-i-cannot-put-down/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-will-not-call-up-that-which-i-cannot-put-down/ But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible. The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote: The latest development in the brave new post-​Bitcoin world is crypto-​equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/immortality-through-stardom/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/immortality-through-stardom/ Liquid modernity seems to prefer the individualistic approach to immortality through the symbolic (in either the memory of one’s children or in leaving traces in the collective memory) by making a mark on history. The self-centered and celebratory road of stardom, self-aggrandizement, and public exposure seems to be the contemporary strategy of choice in order to achieve immortality. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/into-this-grey-lake-plopped-the-thought/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/into-this-grey-lake-plopped-the-thought/ Into this grey lake plopped the thought, I know that man, don’t I? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/is-your-walled-garden-part-of-the-cosmos/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/is-your-walled-garden-part-of-the-cosmos/ Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-​progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out? Hint: is it part of the cosmos? Yeah, you’re kind of screwed. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/learning-as-ever-richer-mnemonic-devices/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/learning-as-ever-richer-mnemonic-devices/ Learning can be seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information, into patterns, organization principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered, but which is like what we do know, and thus can be recognized or remembered. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/life-as-a-ceaseless-contest/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/life-as-a-ceaseless-contest/ Life he saw as a ceaseless and courageous contest. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/light-through-the-stained-glass/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/light-through-the-stained-glass/ Light fell through the colors of the stained glass beyond the altar. Through the windows ajar on the side aisle came the sweetness of blossom, of bruised grass, of river mud. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/like-a-plaster-bust-of-cicero/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/like-a-plaster-bust-of-cicero/ I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ The ultimate argument for this disappearance, though, belongs to Michel Foucault and his claim that ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (The Order of Things 387). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/measured-for-the-sake-of-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/measured-for-the-sake-of-heaven/ A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/miami-beach-was-born/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/miami-beach-was-born/ They snipped the ribbon in 1915, they popped the cork, Miami Beach was born. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-and-the-science-god/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-and-the-science-god/ The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best science they could be. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-as-technology-approaches-infinity/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-as-technology-approaches-infinity/ The limit of multipolar traps as technology approaches infinity is “very bad”. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/my-body-was-like-a-harp/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/my-body-was-like-a-harp/ But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ ‘What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Natural theology is not based on what we do not know. It is based on what we do know about living things. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/needs-are-socially-constructed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/needs-are-socially-constructed/ Because of the socially constructed nature of both need and satisfaction, Levitas further argues, there cannot be an evaluation of utopia based on universal principles of what constitutes a ‘good society’ and what a ‘bad society’: ‘If needs are socially constructed, the project of trying to read off the good society from a definition of human nature and human needs is doomed to failure’ (184). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nick-land-and-summoning-demon-gods/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nick-land-and-summoning-demon-gods/ As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-destinations-appear/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-destinations-appear/ But as Levitas has argued, the fragmentation of these futures, the dissolution of clear-cut boundaries, and the presentation of multiple possible paths leave us in the dark, unable to decide which way to turn as no destinations appear. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-golden-rules/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-golden-rules/ The golden rule is that there are no golden rules. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ What’s the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome—that’s only human nature and was always the same even on Earth. The trouble is that they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-virtue-or-vice-in-a-transitive-verb/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-virtue-or-vice-in-a-transitive-verb/ There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/not-incapable-of-being-amused/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/not-incapable-of-being-amused/ In his youth, however, though too imbecile for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/not-wise-to-grow-too-old/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/not-wise-to-grow-too-old/ Sometimes I think it is not wise to grow too old,.. […] But I am not aware that we are given a choice in this matter. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ ‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-more-permanent-than-a-temporary-fix/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-more-permanent-than-a-temporary-fix/ There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ ‘Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/painting-is-not-storytelling/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/painting-is-not-storytelling/ I am going to teach you that painting is not storytelling. If you want to tell stories, become either an illustrator or a writer. If you want to be a painter, you will learn to use line and color and shape and texture to create paintings, not stories. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/pity-into-repulsion/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/pity-into-repulsion/ My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/prefer-not-to-be-a-little-reasonable/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/prefer-not-to-be-a-little-reasonable/ “At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/resolve-as-a-prior-moral-decision/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/resolve-as-a-prior-moral-decision/ [Resolve is] the action of making a moral decision prior to the circumstances in which it is applied. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ridicule-of-the-great-applause-of-the-learned/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/ridicule-of-the-great-applause-of-the-learned/ Garish in her dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her speech, she succeeded in her lifetime in drawing upon herself the ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ He felt quite certain that he was going where, at last, his finely critical spirit would no longer be outraged by an uncongenial environment—where he would find ‘Recognition’ and ‘Appreciation.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-a-complex-hesitation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-a-complex-hesitation/ As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ (Seven Beauties 4). As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-the-search-for-a-definition-of-man/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-the-search-for-a-definition-of-man/ ‘Science Fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)’ (8). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/some-rise-by-sin/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/some-rise-by-sin/ Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/streets-shuttled-past/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/streets-shuttled-past/ They were in town now. Streets, houses, buildings shuttled past. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tasting-the-golden-sun/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tasting-the-golden-sun/ I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/teach-me-how-to-repent/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/teach-me-how-to-repent/ Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ But he was at least intelligent: one could get some criticism worth hearing from him, even if he was a failure on the creative side. But now he seems to have nothing left but his self-conceit. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-cyborg-as-central-metaphor/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-cyborg-as-central-metaphor/ Robotics and computer science had progressed immensely and the cyborg became the central metaphor to understand social and cultural reality as a construction of multiple identities, a metaphor truly made for the late twentieth-century imagination: ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 149). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-extraordinary-concentration-of-einstein-and-aquinas/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-extraordinary-concentration-of-einstein-and-aquinas/ In both [descriptions of Einstein and Aquinas], one gets a vivid sense of extraordinary concentration on problems to the exclusion of most daily routine. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Thus was born the fact/value split—the idea that humans can have genuine knowledge only in the realm of empirical facts. Morality was reduced to subjective preferences. The term values means literally whatever the individual happens to value. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ But if you are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fish-farm-race-to-the-bottom/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fish-farm-race-to-the-bottom/ As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well. But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-five-foot-2-inch-dynamo/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-five-foot-2-inch-dynamo/ The five-foot 2-inch dynamo has piloted her career with dazzling audacity. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-frolic-architecture-of-the-snow/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-frolic-architecture-of-the-snow/ And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-gardener-s-deal-with-nature/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-gardener-s-deal-with-nature/ When we choose to be the gardener, we make a deal with nature: we will abide by certain rules in growing plants, and the plants will accede to our shaping them somewhat to our needs and pleasures. We will supply water, loamy soil, a modicum of nutrients, and moderate temperature, and the impatiens will bloom brightly from May to October. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hunter-s-utopia/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hunter-s-utopia/ The hunter’s utopia is thus most importantly characterized not as a fixed goal to strive for, but as a process of living in constant movement. ‘Hunters search for fun, excitement, validation, consumer goods and identity’ (‘Liquid’ 76), Jacobsen argues, all the while sampling and surfing their way through an endless array of opportunities. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-door-beside-the-stone/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-door-beside-the-stone/ The inner door, which led to the passage, which in turn led to the storm door, was beside the stone. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-insignificance-of-politics/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-insignificance-of-politics/ Bauman shares Levitas’s analysis that the possibility of utopian change is located in politics and that political agency has been dissolved: ‘The most conspicuous feature of contemporary politics,’ Bauman writes, ‘is its insignificance’ (In Search 4). The dual translation between the public and the private that politics is supposed to facilitate has been turned inside out, as Bauman argues, and ‘politics has been effectively disarmed’ (Society 169). Flaws in policy cannot be grasped as unethical anymore, because they do not connect to the individual directly, whereas unethical private actions become political outrages (as witnessed in the Clinton– Lewinsky affair), when the individual life choices do not appeal to the public. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-last-screw-came-out/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-last-screw-came-out/ The last screw came out, the whole lock case slid down, freeing the bolt. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-as-the-posthuman/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-as-the-posthuman/ For all intents and purposes, then, the monster represents what we might name the posthuman: a being replacing the human, coming after the human, and existing beyond human capacity. Frankenstein’s creation anticipates the posthuman condition. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-s-questions/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-s-questions/ Consequently, pondering his own state of being, he asks: ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (Shelley 128). His questions point to the central motif of the story: the question of human nature, a human essence, and what to include in the definition of this essence. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-overture-to-carmen/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-overture-to-carmen/ I still count the little preamble that begins as the houselights go down and the footlights glow and goes on to accompany the slow rise of the curtain on the opening scene of Carmen as the most cunningly contrived passage of descriptive music I have ever heard. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-rarity-of-actual-wanting/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-rarity-of-actual-wanting/ You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-u-via-banishes-the-question-of-meaning/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-u-via-banishes-the-question-of-meaning/ But Bauman is wary of the utopian perspective that the hunt offers, as he concludes his musings by saying that ‘the utopia, or “u-via”, of hunters, the utopia of life revolving around the pursuit of constantly elusive fashion, does not give sense to life, whether authentic or fake. It merely helps to banish the question of life’s meaning from our minds’ (Culture 30). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ ‘It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-world-will-indulge-you-just-so-long/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-world-will-indulge-you-just-so-long/ You will have to grow accustomed to it. The world will indulge you just so long, Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thin-and-clear-air/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thin-and-clear-air/ The air was thin and clear, stringent with wood smoke and the tang of fallen apples, sharp with the hint of early frost. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/think-yourself-into-the-moment/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/think-yourself-into-the-moment/ Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ ‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/this-is-the-dream-time/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/this-is-the-dream-time/ So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish. As technological advance increases, the rare confluence will come to an end. New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying agents to increase the population will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet spirit. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would be otherwise too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-weighs-most-on-those-who-have-it-least/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-weighs-most-on-those-who-have-it-least/ Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/to-be-in-a-passion/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/to-be-in-a-passion/ To be in a Passion you Good may do But no Good if a Passion is in you. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/trunks-cased-in-crystal/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/trunks-cased-in-crystal/ ———(…) Look! the massy trunks Are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray, Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven, Is studded with its trembling water-drop, That glimmers with an amethystine light. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of two places. It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the silly human values. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-speed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-speed/ Most importantly, utopia in liquid modernity is ‘linked to mobility, not to a place’: ‘The liquid modern equivalents of the Utopias of yore are neither about time nor about space – but about speed and acceleration’ (Society 241). Bauman concludes that ‘the posture of the gardener is nowadays giving way to that of the hunter’ (Liquid Times 100). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-the-education-of-desire/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-the-education-of-desire/ ‘The function of utopia,’ Levitas concludes, ‘thus reverts from that of a goal and catalyst of change to one of criticism, and the education of desire, without any necessary move forward into action’ (196). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/virginia-s-pain-at-criticism/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/virginia-s-pain-at-criticism/ And just as the mother feels acutely the slightest criticism of her child, so any criticism of her book even by the most negligible nitwit gave Virginia acute pains. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-shall-ask-for-none/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-shall-ask-for-none/ But be the ordeal sharp or long or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/what-it-means-to-be-human/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/what-it-means-to-be-human/ ‘What constitutes human nature?’ or ‘What does it mean to be human?’ have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-in-rome-leave/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-in-rome-leave/ When in Rome, leave. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/who-dotes-yet-doubts/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/who-dotes-yet-doubts/ But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/who-were-they-all/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/who-were-they-all/ The room was very full and who were they all? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/x-flavored-y-things/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/x-flavored-y-things/ For every activity you naturally want to do, try to figure out a way to apply it to your direction. Your direction is sort of like a theme - if your direction is X and your interest is Y, then go do X-flavored Y-things. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/your-heart-on-trial/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/your-heart-on-trial/ What if, instead of God’s Word being on trial, your heart was on trial? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shadows-of-the-coming-race/ Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shadows-of-the-coming-race/ My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that “all this will soon be done by machinery.