every Amos Wollen essay

exciting breakthroughs in the philosophy of lint

I,

Amos Wollen

, the humble author of this essay, do hereby kindly request that you like and restack this post and subscribe and become a paid subscriber to Going Awol on Substack and give me money and become a paid subscriber. In addition to indicating that you like the post, you’ll show me that you like the post and I will get money from you liking the post.

Yesterday, I did something extremely embarrassing. So embarrassing, in fact, that I’d rather not share it here. But I will, because that’s how much I care about you, dear reader. What’s so embarrassing? I wrote a post on Substack. And it would be so embarrassing if you read it at this link here. So whatever you do, don’t click the link and don’t read it. It would be so embarrassing.¹

This embarrassing situation reminds me of an essay I read recently about the philosophy of lint, “Pocket Lint and the Ship of Theseus: If You Remove and Replace Every Fiber, Is It the Same Lint?” by Dr. Dusty Threadwell of Greendale Community College. (Also the host of the blockbuster podcast “Lint Trap.”)

The commonly accepted definition of lint, according to the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, is “the common name for visible accumulations of textile fibers, hair and other materials, usually found on and around clothing.”

But there’s a problem with this!

You see, if lint is an accumulation of materials, that suggests it’s a cohesive mass that grows over time. However, lint is constantly gaining and losing fibers, just like Going Awol is constantly gaining subscribers and

Bentham's Bulldog

is constantly losing them.

Dustin Crummett also tells me there are many insects in lint. When we look at lint, however, we don’t say “that’s a bunch of textile fibers, hair, and other materials, and also bugs” — we just say it’s a bunch of lint. So we must think the bugs are part of the lint.

But if 60% of the mass of what’s indicated by the term lint is actually insects, it doesn’t make sense to say it consists of textile fibers, hair, and “other materials.” The other materials are the biggest part!

Let’s say we want a working definition of opponents of the Shrimp Welfare Project and I propose classifying them as “non-dunderheads who don’t spew verbal diarrhea” and “other individuals.” The dunderheads are the biggest constituency!

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of what people get wrong about lint. Consider what Ayn Rand had to say about it:

Lint is the residue of the unthinking — the physical manifestation of stagnation, of passivity, of the collectivist decay that seeks to settle upon all men who refuse to act. The man who permits lint in his pocket has already surrendered to the morality of the parasite, content to carry the detritus of entropy rather than rise to sweep it away. Do not ask who will remove the lint. The man of reason does not ask — he acts. He alone reaches into his pocket and casts it aside, not for the sake of others, but for himself, for the inviolate purity of his own existence. To tolerate lint is to tolerate the slow erosion of the self. To remove it is an act of moral triumph.

Now, what’s the significance of this?

There is none!

And that’s the point.

I,

Amos Wollen

, the humble author of the preceding essay, do hereby extend my sincerest thanks for your having read it and do encourage you to like and restack this post and subscribe and become a paid subscriber to Going Awol on Substack and give me money and become a paid subscriber. In addition to indicating that you like the post, you’ll show me that you like the post and I will get money from you liking the post.

every Curtis Yarvin essay

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every anti-EA thinkpiece

1. I ultimately find Amos’s argument convincing, but I think he overstates it. As I wrote in his comments yesterday:

I don’t think that on universalism, #1 is convincing. For most things that vastly improve my quality of life, if I benefit from them regardless of my beliefs toward them, I have virtually no interest in learning about them. Modern medicine is great and all but I don’t expend any effort trying to figure out how it works. Ditto for indoor plumbing, tofu mass production, computer science, etc. — I just trust the experts. So why wouldn't the analogous attitude toward religion just be my present approach, i.e., passively and apathetically believing whatever you and Bentham tell me about it?

For #2 (and #1 if you don’t accept universalism) I don’t know how far “non-zero credence” gets you. I have a non-zero credence that I’ll end up in purgatory if I’m anything but an apatheist. If the values are infinite, doesn't that give me infinite reason both to believe and not to believe? If they’re not infinite, it seems like there’s still a limit to what I should be willing to do. I have a non-zero credence that homosexuals do not grow close to God. Should I go into conversion therapy? Now, this objection probably doesn’t also apply to expending a reasonable amount of effort thinking about God (so yes, you’ve convinced me) but I think it's important to clarify the limits of the argument.