Yes! I think my attempts to rattle people out of canals stems from my that old and deep
chip I keep on my shoulder. As a kid, I was absolutely jealous of my narrative frenemies.
How do they keep all that sh¡t straight? Why don't they have to re-learn everything from
scratch every fscking time they do some task? Do they really "believe" the long
tail inferential nonsense that comes out of their mouths?
But my experience with all the AIs, including but less so Claude, is their refusal to give up some prior part of the
context while abandoning some other prior part. E.g. I've forgotten which AI (not Claude, maybe Kimi or Gemini). But I
recently wanted to explore Cormac McCarthy's portrayal(s) of women. In one of my prompts, I used the word
"idealized". That turned out to be a mistake. No matter how I caveated what "ideal" might mean, it
continued to tell me I was wrong to think, e.g. that Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses was in any way
"idealized". It insisted that she was a very practical/cynical character and a "voice of reason".
It couldn't recognize that *that* is also a form of idealization. The only way out of the trap was to reset the context
entirely ... not unlike the exercise of slow-walking a right winger at the pub into appreciating socialist artifacts
like roads and utilities.
What i need is a narrative stack, a branching tree, each with its own upstream
dependencies. With such a structure, I can hot-swap nodes, flip pairwise
premise ordering, jump entirely from one branch to another, merge branches, etc.
On 3/16/26 7:56 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Claude Opus often says, when solving a problem, "I need to think about this in a
different way." Then it does so, instantly.
It is just sampling from some other promising probability mesa like it is
nothing. I am distraught.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2026 6:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A bold meteorological theory
That's some good advice, there. Narratives like the naked Emperor are crucial
tools for posers and con men. Each and every metaphor you identify in a missive
is evidence of the authors' (plural possessive - no such thing as a sole
author) Bad Faith. And the number of metaphors is directly correlated with the
extent of the Bad Faith.
None of us are innocent. None of us are the child in the narrative. It's a venomous
fiction, injected by the fangs of the storyteller. Even literal babies bring along their
own "genetic memory", in utero accretion, biases, and expertise. The story,
that story and all others, is there to persuade, to trick you, to canalize you into
thinking in some particular set of ways.
Now I'd like you to stop thinking about elephants.
On 3/15/26 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Perhaps I should just drop the metaphor and speak to the beliefs the metaphor
represents to me. Expertise both sights and blinds us; great expertise sights
and blinds us greatly.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
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