good first day of conference

That seemed to go well, including the 4’person roundtable at the end. All of this will be available on the net pretty soon.

Also, a nice outing afterward with many of the conference speakers and attendees.

Still have Peter H. and Martin H. tomorrow.

All postings will be fairly telegraphic for as long as I am here. It is just a laptop in the hotel lobby with a fairly used keyboard that does not awlways do what I want it to do.

K-Punk on grey vampires

When I first heard this concept, it sounded vaguely plausible, but I wasn’t sure I knew any grey vampires, and told K-Punk so. But bells rang in my head when I read this part of his post:

“Another tactic – particularly effective at wasting time and energy this one – is the claim [by grey vampires] that all they want is a few clarifications, as if they are just on the brink of being persuaded, when in fact the real aim is to lure you into the swamp of sceptical inertia and mild depression in which they languish.”

This really nailed it home for me, and finally made sense of a person who made me furious for two whole years without doing anything openly hostile. He was a grey vampire, all right. Apparently open and friendly, but always finding some “problematic” point, although rather than trollish contradiction he would ask for clarifications, then pretend to be “puzzled” about one or two things that he didn’t really care about in the least.

The bottom line is this… Just pay close attention to whether any given person makes you feel more energized and excited about thinking, or less energized and excited. We all have a perfectly good animal sense of this basic division of human types, but then we paper it over with rationalizations. (The same distinction, of course, works just as effectively and urgently in personal life, where it is possible to spend months or even longer rationalizing the inherent goodness of someone who’s really just draining you dry.)

I’d also add the qualification that all or many of us might have our vampirish sides. There might be areas of life in which each of us is some sort of bloodsucker, because for most humans there are areas of life where they fail to have a “project” and languish in “inertia and mild depression.”

So, I’m not saying grey vampires should be totally written off as human beings. They may be bloodsuckers when it comes to intellectual work, but you find them miraculously energetic in some other domain.

But the same rule of thumb surely applies in every area– surround yourself with people who have projects.

more from K-Punk on trolls

My favorite sentence in this post is:

“Detached from projects, academic skills become pathologies.”

Second favorite part is:

“if they are actual academics rather than perpetual postgrads – they will be associated with some set of refutable claims for which they can be held accountable.”

Don’t become a perpetual postgrad! Have projects, and finish them.

READ THE WHOLE THING HERE.

out of the second coma

Finally emerged from the second coma. all told, it was 10 hours of sleep, in clothes, with the lights on. That shows how fatigued I must have been. Then an hour up and walking around Zagreb, followed by 8 hours of more conventional sleep. Now I feel refreshed. That only happens once every few years.

It looks as though two posts I made in response to K’Punk before leaving Cairo never went up, and were saved instead as drfts. I will post those now.

telegraphic post

This hotel in Zagreb does have free internet in the lobby, but it is hard to type here.

Fell into a long, coma like state at 430 yesterday afternoon, and was too tired even to get out of bd and turn off the lights.

Just woke up at 230 in the morning, beautiful night with a storm about to roll in. Peter Hallward was walking in from the airport at the exact moment I was walking out post coma.

Istanbul was beautiful yesterday morning, with perfect weather.

Went to visit the facilities in Zagreb for tomorrow. Bozovic and I speak tomorrow, Hallward and Hagglund tomorrow. Sorry no diacritical marks for any of their names, ot at least I cant figure out how to do them on this keyboard.