Yeah, much of what's being done here is us-them disambiguation. It's not clear to me that Sarah is
using sarcasm so much as irony, folding the concept back on itself nicely. And Steve's appeal to
identity scoping is very present in her video, as well. So while Marcus' and Eric's call to some
sort of objectivity in the form of measures of intelligence, survival, or "fitness" is
attractive, they don't seem *causal* to me. It's fine for some kind of post-hoc pattern matching,
but will most likely fail for anything predictive or particular. "Intelligence" is so
ill-formed as to be useless. I'd argue survival is, too. Does one move away from the farm for their
children? Or for themselves? Just 'cause they're bored? Or because they have easier access to
fentanyl in the city? The mechanism is woefully under-specified.
But Eric's right to call out [N|Y]IMBY. I've never seen a clear divide there
either. E.g. my neighbor's fine with high density housing in our back yard ...
just not low income housing. She's fine with billions of neighborhood dogs (and
their urine), but not glyphosate. Etc. Back at Lockheed, I spent all day in a
lab with multiple 400 Hz machines buzzing all day long, to which I said both
Yes and No on a daily basis ... sometimes simultaneously. Is Sabine's flip-flop
on Geometric Unity cynical? Or simply evidence of her gaming ability ...
something we all wish we had more of when we're laid off or lose funding?
All these categories are just as false as every other way of parsing the world.
And the more convicted we are to our parse, the more obsolete we are, to be
replaced by those with more fecund imaginations - more niche constructing
generativity. The world advances one funeral at a time.
On 10/9/25 9:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
I appreciate this point of view. If I may, it feels to be a celebration of an
anastomosic view of pattern recognition and how it places us (human individuals) in the
spreading field of adjacent possibles as evolution (in some general sense) explores
morphospace and a "dance amongst competencies and affordances"?
I am still letting bubble into me a more complex (broad/deep) apprehension of the way we human
individuals (conscious beings with a complex model of self-other) have our interests (and
identities?) registered on many scales across many dimensions. While our most immediate-obvious
allegiance is to the sac of organic material contained roughly within our skin, we have
identity/interest across broad scales (life, the universe and everything) and dimensions (as
familiar as humans with similar physiognomy and as unfamiliar (to many due as a "vague
abstraction" perhaps as "adaptive learning systems".
On 10/9/25 8:01 am, glen wrote:
While I appreciated the video, my old saw about the privilege of those of us with more
"compute" power than others arose again. Sarah wraps up with the ethic "dignity of
their choice". This argument came up again at the pub with a very liberal [⛧] friend. I think
the essence of his claim is that *their* filter bubbles and echo chambers limit *their* ability to
even register that they're missing information that would inform their decisions.
If I believed that were true, then I'd lob that at Sarah's argument. It's akin to viewing
addiction either as a disease or a moral failure (where those "grown adults with a
good amount of wealth" are classed with the latter).
But I don't believe it. Because concrete/actual things can only be completely
circumscribed by infinite descriptions, *nobody* "understands the choices they are
making". If you think you do understand the choice you're making, you're delusional.
So the categorization isn't disease-vs-failure, ignorant-vs-informed, or [un]intelligent.
The distinction is imaginative-vs-unimaginative. Those of us who know we are
always uninformed keep our imaginations exercised. We *anastomose* the space of
possibilities whenever and wherever we can. And it's that active imagination
that allows us to be just enough more resilient than our less imaginative
siblings. Further, ethically, those of us with fertile imaginations have a duty
to exercise the imaginations of our less imaginative friends. It seems Sarah
tried; and she seems to feel like she fell short. That happens a lot. And it
sucks. Kudos for trying. But the reaction to the failure isn't to bail and
leave the unimaginative to their Just Desserts - like some billionaire's
cowardly retreat to Galt's Gulch. A better answer is to discover and work on
the causes (as opposed to the symptoms) of the dearth of imaginative power.
[⛧] Not left, liberal, but with a good dose of recognition for collective
action, despite his individualism.
On 10/8/25 11:01 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I grew up in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, very productive farming country
(in addition to forestry).
This describes the farmers I knew – including cousins and uncles.
Millionaires on paper, yes. The desire for near slave labor, yes. The older
ones, angry and racist too.
I’ve never been sympathetic to farmers just because they are farmers.
At least big agribusiness has some form of corporate rules and supervision.
The younger relatives from these farming families pivoted, as intelligent
people do, to other businesses that made sense at modest scale.
*From:*Friam <[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Santafe
*Sent:* Wednesday, October 8, 2025 10:17 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] non-sycophancy
It’s not all bad.
Sometimes, over the fog of nonsense that crowds most of the broadcast channels,
there are explainers who know what they are talking about and make useful
observations.
I think I mentioned Sarah Taber some years ago as someone who comes
well-reputed. I don’t try to follow her (or anybody else) regularly, but this
popped up on my feed, and sounds realistic:
Why Farmers Voted For Trump <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=badGHJLDpP8>
youtube.com <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=badGHJLDpP8>
For me, one useful little bit of clarity on who’s out there, and how they are
making their choices.
Eric
On Oct 7, 2025, at 16:28, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I can't get the phrase "tone deaf" out of my head:
AmEx "There's nothing like platinum"
https://youtu.be/KjYyG4FgmPQ?si=XukUoeky00YT_cs5
<https://youtu.be/KjYyG4FgmPQ?si=XukUoeky00YT_cs5>
Battlefield 6 Trailer
https://youtu.be/LqWVp3p-FPk?si=VCbhrJ1xdZBRl3ba
<https://youtu.be/LqWVp3p-FPk?si=VCbhrJ1xdZBRl3ba>
Andrew Tate Car Collection
https://youtu.be/DDSlF3iI2-s?si=pGAzZJfUCjbXiTD7
<https://youtu.be/DDSlF3iI2-s?si=pGAzZJfUCjbXiTD7>
Maybe it's just me. But these things all seem wildly outside the zeitgeist. And
that's in spite of my disgust, registered here, with people like Sabine Hossenfelder
for her blatant shift to the grift or Lex Fridman's self-aggrandizing sycophancy
(https://youtu.be/Z1Ua1hVRtdE?si=e5-SJeSPI11svpqV
<https://youtu.be/Z1Ua1hVRtdE?si=e5-SJeSPI11svpqV>).
But I guess it's an obvious next step after the hustle culture we've forced
ourselves into. Success is measured by your accumulation of status symbols,
shame be damned. There are some glimmers, though. E.g.
ICE List
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ficelist.is%2f&c=E,1,QANFi6FQr9QcCSo11t5g_ffDhED7dVTWyJDjJB0ZjDcRFXHLSrNfrtF2jC6SpBxMoZnTdB6u9EWa3eHzFyqIpKFOrshXRcXWkYoD5-ZTdxWa&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ficelist.is%2f&c=E,1,QANFi6FQr9QcCSo11t5g_ffDhED7dVTWyJDjJB0ZjDcRFXHLSrNfrtF2jC6SpBxMoZnTdB6u9EWa3eHzFyqIpKFOrshXRcXWkYoD5-ZTdxWa&typo=1>
The Reckoning
https://www.youtube.com/@PFthereckoning
<https://www.youtube.com/@PFthereckoning>
DDoSecrets
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fddosecrets.com%2f&c=E,1,pfIZjkK9sn_mYQUuM8ZrBmRVVRRIfxs7KJTHf0YPsAbLNbkHalceJ5qUElLk6XQ-6JA2wUOVMQbrnpqT6mKqr4hMoQVSBTHgnY3DeC0HPg4,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fddosecrets.com%2f&c=E,1,pfIZjkK9sn_mYQUuM8ZrBmRVVRRIfxs7KJTHf0YPsAbLNbkHalceJ5qUElLk6XQ-6JA2wUOVMQbrnpqT6mKqr4hMoQVSBTHgnY3DeC0HPg4,&typo=1>
The purpose, though, is not to decrement the status but to hone in on whatever
"accountability" might mean now. How can we, each of us, understand what it
means?
On 10/7/25 12:27 PM, Santafe wrote:
Yeah. Nice.
I just got back in the country a few days ago, and got to experience
the White-Nationalist ICE recruiting ads that I gather started fairly recently.
Like recruiting ads for war criminals, or those who hope for the chance to be.
I guess they are being run everywhere, as a quick google search shows local
news reports from a bunch of cities in many states.
The impressive thing is how belligerently, flamboyantly trashy it all
is. It's like, anything anybody ever considered low, degraded, or depraved,
they scent-roll in, just to binge on their ressentiment. If I were trying to
think of ways to mock somebody for being stupid and ugly, I would never have
the imagination to put together the scripts they use.
It almost feels superfluous to spend time thinking about how to deal
with the people in various offices, when they are ballasted by a sector of the
public that thinks this is what they have wanted for so long and can finally
have. Unless one could figure out how to rehabilitate that disease to any kind
of state of health, it’s very hard to see what, short of a heavy collapse that
just clobbers the whole country, will thump them hard enough to push them back
into whatever corner they came bursting out of, and let the rest of the public
get coordinated enough to re-establish some agency over how the country
operates. Not that the “rest of the public” knows what to do; the status quo
ante was the python squeeze that got us into this whole mess, and we can’t be
aspiring to go back to that. But something short of the whole country’s
pouring gasoline on itself and setting itself on fire would be nice.
I have thought, too, that americans are going to get to experience
something that many of my Russian friends have known most or all their lives:
how do you go about trying to be a good and decent person, in a country with a
uniformly bad government (corrupt, cynical, and murderous with no mitigating
benevolences toward anybody) that you don’t see work for yourself to change?
Eric
On Oct 7, 2025, at 14:48, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fweval.org%2fanalysis%2fsycophancy-probe%2fad51e9a522f01e98%2f2025-09-04T17-50-49-741Z&c=E,1,RyTKGFwr1wjARn9k5vTd-WC-XLWBsqDCtuIl7B4-zdfEGde94UyemTKPbutU21Znk5UHrObUvCB4noUNqNJfjZgpEjXEqVt8KlXtEncB9g,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fweval.org%2fanalysis%2fsycophancy-probe%2fad51e9a522f01e98%2f2025-09-04T17-50-49-741Z&c=E,1,RyTKGFwr1wjARn9k5vTd-WC-XLWBsqDCtuIl7B4-zdfEGde94UyemTKPbutU21Znk5UHrObUvCB4noUNqNJfjZgpEjXEqVt8KlXtEncB9g,,&typo=1>
If only we could find the political will to amend the Constitution
with something like this. Or at least add it to Senate advice and consent.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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