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.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
