phf: people who can't clearly visualize a cause and effect graph trying to do science. dogen is laughing at them all the way from 13th century ☟︎

phf: lobbes: i suspect yes, since a111 got !#

phf: pete_dushenski: there's a lot of vague, mystical takes on dogen, but i think that most of the time he makes very straightforward points, like in the wild fox koan, he just says that everything is bound by cause and effect, and if you think you can have a magic talisman against it, you're going to suffer

phf: i think it's impressive how he manages to think his way out of nothingness. his baseline is basically 15 year old monks in training, who need to be taught not to shit on their hands, etc. knowledge transfer consists of dialogues about buddha teachings. it's very much the case of grinding lens by hand to study astrophysics

phf: there are some interviews with feynman where he's trying to explain how doing science is a constant game of catching yourself lying to yourself long before it becomes a question of "scientific community" etc.. dogen is coming from the opposite direction of learning to see things clearly as a goal, and a lot of his essays are descriptions of what he saw

phf: further obscurantism comes from people who don't see clearly, but in a markov chain thinking relay what they heard before "of course that's how it is, i heard it from joe, and it was tired then, what dogen is actually saying is this flowery shit i pulled out of my ass"

phf: mircea_popescu: i read nishijima translation, and the guy went out of his way to make it unreadable, but as precise as he could render. i can read japanese grammar, and nishijima's version comes with a lot of kanji annotations. i've checked some of his claims, and they check out as far as it goes.

phf: "theosopy"

phf: madam blavatski and her followers did a lot of damage for years to come. it was literally in her writing that original meaning doesn't matter, as long as the translation sounds cool (there's a rationalization for why that somehow supposed to make sense) ☟︎

phf: and majority of azn/indian translations came from theosophists

phf: until mid 50s or so

phf: "shobogenzo for people who hate all this shit"

phf: there's a series of russian koan parodies from the 90s internet called "dao-kakao" which among other things made fun of chinese names like that

phf: http://www.behigh.org/library/dao-kakao.html

phf: i like the one about old women, http://www.harms.ouc.ru/vyvalivayuschiesa-staruhi.html

phf: i kind of want to believe that dogen wasn't a bore, nor a stickler, but otherwise their goals are unrelated to each other.

phf: i walked right into that one

phf: fwiw that approach is gossip-proof, there was a thread in logs, that there's not really such a thing as "log" in gossip model, and the conclusion was that logging will need to be reexamined. inline quoting though remains

phf: in the old definition of log, i.e. illuminated scroll "thus spoke saint alf"

phf: asciilifeform: we started with a single canonical log though, where kako's testimony was implicitly the word of tmsr. there was some anathem/"A Canticle for Leibowitz" jokes about it, the log files were deeded, etc. while working on btcbase i realized that there can be no canonical log without arbitration, i.e. because of netsplits, lost messages, out of order, clock skews you need a single authority to decide what ultimately goes into ☟︎

phf: log. so at some point we were in "log according to btcbase" situation. with the recent move to multiple bots and more importantly multiple logs, we now have "log according to ..." model, which we can still though attempt to reconcile. once we move to gossip there can't even be a talk of single log. it's always "log according to whoever heard and relayed it" by design. ☟︎