Economics is a "science" that studies and formalizes human behavior and its emergent properties. I say "science" because science without the quotation marks is rigorously experimental, unpoliticized and capable of making halfway decent predictions about the world, which would exclude the "science" of economics on all counts. Oh well, at least it's not sociology.
Linguistics is a field of study for understanding and processing the formal systems of human language. It is an electric topic, contingent to psychology, history, computer science and anthropology, but is still known as a universally bad career choice.
In the mandatory footsteps of logical positivism, I must tout science as the be-all end-all source of knowledge in the world, which even if it were true would be shaken by the fact that its analytical tools are in the hands of a tribal species who can hardly convince itself that an objective world exists out there. The long-term goal of science is to turn the human race in to a pack of artless autists, purged of any of the "irrationalities" that actually make the human experience unique.. or human.
Technology is the joint product of modern science and modern capitalism and is the only thing keeping us from realizing how culturally and socially muddled and degenerate we have become in the material wealth and wellbeing that it has afforded us.
Culture is the set of peculiar and irrational practices that any given group of people practice. For the Sambia tribe of Africa, culture may be fellatio of an older tribesman as a rite of passage for boys, while here, culture is neurotically listening to "local" bands and mutilating male genitals upon birth. Culture was formerly known as the "pursuit of the best of what is thought and said in the world," but now we're to the point where we have to flagellate ourselves in penance for daring to think that any cultural trait could be "better" than any other.
Now there's nothing I could say here about religion that hasn't already been said too many times in YouTube comments, but loosely, religion is the set of cultural beliefs that are most recalcitrant and immune to diffusion. Religion widely entails anthropic consciousnesses governing the universe and afterlifes where everyone's supposed to get what's comin' for them.
The word "politics" describes the social interchanges that are the direct heirs of the simian alpha-male contest. Along with sports and religion, politics is a special place where anyone can come and feel free to abandon reason and orgiastically give into all of their most primal and otherwise derisible tendencies and irrationalities. Here I pretend not to like to write about it.
I grew up in Atlanta. I studied economics in school and did a degree in that. I know a number of languages. I went to graduate school studying historical and then theoretical linguistics. Theoretically I am an Ph.D. candidate in linguistics, but I don't think about that much. I now have a very low opinion of institutionalized science and I don't think it's worth effort to try to contribute to it at this point. I learned how to use Linux/Unix several years ago and that tends to be what defines me in the public eye. I now live very remotely and strongly support independent people to escape cities soon.
Most people know me because of a YouTube channel I have. This, of course, is highly ironic because the core message of the channel is to divest from technological life. Here is some biographical information that is more or less public.
I’m an American born and raised in Atlanta. I did university work in economics and linguistics, but I was always principally interested in cybernetics—that doesn’t mean robots or transhumanism, but how complex systems interact. I seriously pursued academic work with the eyes on that as a career. In a more sane world, this would’ve certainly been my vocation. I got a B.A. in International Economics and Modern Languages, focusing on Spanish and Chinese, with an economic concentration also in economic history. I quickly became disenchanted with the state of mainstream economics, went into historical linguistics: I had learned Latin and Greek as a teenager and was interested prehistoric language reconstruction and other theoretical issues, but in grad school, I went into the more cognitive and generative side of things (mostly, as I viewed it, to fix absurd problems with the field).
This of course was naïvety about the state of institutionalized science, and I wasted a couple more years in academia before cutting my losses. I did my M.A. work at the University of Georgia and Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. I became more interested in technology and GNU/Linux around this time (starting “late” in my mid to upper 20’s). This is when I started the YouTube channel, originally covering LaTeX and vim things I was learning, just to put up videos for friends originally.
Any talk about high technology has to come with talk about the implications of it in our world, and as time went on, more of my public presentation became heuristics and lifestyle as I myself moved out for a rural lifestyle, but more importantly, a divestment from the world and the anti-human direction it carries itself. For a brief period in early 2018, I had left my career and was living in cheap appartment doing about a YouTube video a day while working in a cabinet workshop to recover from life in academia. I bought property in a rural place after skrimping and saving.
At the end of my academic career, I also became highly interested in epistemology or what could be called philosophy of science, which when I was younger I would’ve thought of as being silly word games. However, my experience in academia, especially with the philosophical bankrupcy of out post-logical positivist assumptions of basically all modern people (especially academics) makes me recognize that all institutionalized science is not only prey to external interests, but is built to be philosophically blind, which means it must be scientifically so.
Most crucially, I have become and Orthodox Christian, which was partially based in me questioning some of the assumptions that had led me to atheism as a young man. That in itself was one of the most mysterious developments, even to me, but certainly the most important. I won’t belabor it here because I had the mind of an atheist for years and I remember how the eyes glaze over at the very mention of religion, but nonetheless, that is the pinnacle of it all. Now my objective is to work out my salvation with fear and trembling.
I have learned a lot as time has gone on, mostly how to correct errors. If you ever hear me say something that hurts your feelings, don’t worry—I never really intend to attack others, only my own past sins and misunderstandings. The most important thing is not to be emotionally attached to what might be what habits, ideas or dispositions are causing you harm.