Homo Moto
It’s one of those days where I’ve had too much coffee and my heart feels like it’s resting rate is 10bpm faster than it should be. It has been a productive morning. I handed in my first large coursework of the semester, 30% of a course that is itself 40% of the semester, and so a hand in that’s worth 4% of my overall degree. Either way it went smoothly despite the absence of my partner this morning. I’m ahead in most of the coursework for the semester, with half either handed in or 95% of the way there. It feels like a comfortable space to be in.
In other very exciting news I’ve agreed to buy a motorbike from a local seller. It’s an old Kawasaki ER-5, initially built in 1997 and registered in 1999. Despite being only a year younger than me, it’s in pretty good shape. The guy I’m buying it from put a lot of money into the bike, new exhaust, new rear shocks, new fork seals, new sprocket and chain. Overall it’s a very fair deal and a good runner. My Mod 2 isn’t for a little while yet but it’s very exciting to have this ready for when I am road legal.
I had my dad with me when I went to look at the bike, he used to ride himself, and as an electrical engineer/kit car builder in the past it was extremely handy having his opinion. I’m just as grateful for the conversations something like a bike can set off. We get to talk about the purpose of mechanical objects, how he’d rather I didn’t ride one, but can’t hold it against me since he has in the past. We talked about how you obviously don’t want your loved ones to take on unnecessary risk, but you do want them to live and enjoy their lives.
My sister’s very adventurous, far more so than I am. A great pursuer of Type II Fun. One of my favourite stories of hers is from Alpine crevasse training. With three of them roped up together on the glacier (one instructor, two learners), they found a good looking crevasse, and took turns walking off the edge into thin air. It would be the responsibility of the two at the top to arrest the fall, set up an effective ice axe pulley system, and pull the third from the crevasse. Of course practicing this with an instructor around, when you’re expecting it to happen, all of that is to set you up for the situations when you don’t know it’s coming, when one of you suddenly steps off the edge.
There’s not much more point to that story but I love the images in it. Maybe the point is that nobody in my family can blame me for doing something statistically risky in the pursuit of a little fun and freedom. I’ve been reading Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive recently, still very early on, but I’m very much enjoying it so far. It’s in the same vein as his book The Case for Working with Your Hands, partly a cry against a purposeless modernism that seems to crush meaning for the individual, and partly a worship of how clever the things we’ve made are, how they can help us engage with the world. Please take that with a pinch of salt, it’s a crude summary. I like his writing and his thinking, only getting to engage with this side of it now I am becoming a driver, what he calls homo moto. For a while too I’ve tried to get on my way to Hannah Arendt’s homo faber, the fundamental part of us that just wants to make things. With an old bike I’ll have plenty to practice on.
Reading list
- You don’t have free will, but don’t worry
Another objection that I’ve heard is that I should not say free will does not exist because that would erode people’s moral behavior. The concern is, you see, that if people knew free will does not exist, then they would think it doesn’t matter what they do. This is of course nonsense. If you act in ways that harm other people, then these other people will take steps to prevent that from happening again. This has nothing to do with free will. We are all just running software that is trying to optimize our well-being. If you caused harm, you are responsible, not because you had “free will” but because you embody the problem and locking you up will solve it.
- Lionel Barber’s diaries
- Anki as a learning superpower
- Six lessons from six months at Shopify
- Low-cost, freelance pen-testers
- How I got hacked, lost crypto, and what it says about apple’s security
- Structured procrastination
- Big tech collaborates to conquer
- Call for Microsoft to resign from the RIAA
- McConnell played Trump
- Type in the exact number of machines to proceed
- Misremembering the British Empire
- Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease & Desist to NYU
- The art of decision making - really enjoyed this article
- How did things ever get this good?
- How a little money laundering can affect a market
- Facebook Charged Biden a Higher Price Than Trump for Campaign Ads.