from:"uǝlƃ ☣"

d willingness to use both) in the face of 
>> those they disagree with or disapprove of.   The ones I call friends 
>> probably don't even realize that their "gun talk" has a bullying undertone 
>> they don't recognize it is so "under".
>>
>> I have a plethora of anecdotes (really, me?) on this topic but the 
>> general theme seems to be to alert and remind others that they have the 
>> willingness and ability to assert their will through deadly force 
>> *at-a-distance*.   These are not (just) varmint guns (e.g. .22 single-shot 
>> rifles suitable for exterminating nuisance rats, squirrels, gophers, skunks, 
>> bunnies, raccoons, and even coyotes and bobcats from a dozen yards away) or 
>> even "deer rifles" (small capacity, medium caliber, bolt action, possibly 
>> scoped, suitable for killing a medium sized animal from up to 100 yards 
>> away), but instead most often weapons designed for *modern* warfare 
>> variously with the potential for *very* high capacity magazines, rapid-fire 
>> shooting (even without a low-tech bump-stock), specialized ammunition 
>> (variously for piercing armor and/or causing extreme hydrostatic shock) and 
>> precision targeting at a great distance (high-velocity rounds, extreme 
>> optical magnification and even night-vision). When noted that such are not 
>> useful for any obvious *legal* or *sane* application, they stakes get raised 
>> to implying the need to "throw off government tyranny".   My "local" police 
>> department (Pojoaque Pueblo) has all of these weapons as well, and more, 
>> including  armored personnel carriers handed down from the military (yay?).  
>>  They had them on prominent display for years but recently seem to have 
>> found a garage somewhere to keep them in, I doubt they have relinquished 
>> these "toys", I think I see them out for maintenance now and then.
>>
>> I don't talk much with my gun-nut friends about their arsenals, I'm prone to 
>> end up saying things like "Come the Apocalypse, while I don't own any guns, 
>> I know lots of people who do, and where they keep them and whether they 
>> actually properly secure them".   This really raises hackles, so I don't 
>> even start down that path.    It all (including my implied threats) seems to 
>> be a (re)assertion/corollary to "Might makes Right" which is obviously 
>> compelling to the logic that builds and maintains bullies.
>>
>> The paradox of intolerance applies acutely to the reality of bullies...
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> On 12/13/21 10:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>>> Pack the Court
>>> https://electoral-vote.com/#item-3
>>>
>>> Don't pack the court:
>>> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3982144
>>>
>>> This evokes the paradox of tolerance: 
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
>>>
>>> As Trump et al have shown us, that sect of the right *will* pack the court 
>>> when/if it suits them. Biden will probably decide *not* to make the 
>>> attempt. But there will be no political will to pass a law *preventing* 
>>> court packing. So the moderate Dems won't pack the court. But they'll 
>>> happily leave the option open to the next Republican administration. It's 
>>> an excellent example of how tolerance eliminates tolerance by tolerating 
>>> intolerance.
>>>


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of the intolerant

It's interesting that you went to guns in response to court packing. It's been 
in the news a lot with Newsom's response to SB8 and the SCOTUS ruling: 
https://www.vox.com/2021/12/12/22830625/newsom-california-guns-texas-abortion-law-supreme-court

The whole category of adversarial policy-making evokes tit-for-tat, maybe no 
longer the absolute optimum strategy, but still a good candidate inside the 
fast, good, cheap triangle: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

Discussing this in parallel to the (not just Popper's) idea that *criticism* is 
necessary for the modulation of metaphysical frames seems telling. On the 
surface, tit-for-tat seems like a terrible way to run the government ... 
gerrymander for your party because they'll damn well gerrymander for their 
party ... appoint partisan hacks to SCOTUS because you know they'll appoint 
partisan hacks to SCOTUS ... etc. But, really, maybe tit-for-tat is the BEST 
strategy for governing? Take that you consistency hobgoblins, overly committed 
to your Modernist [ptouie] paradigms. >8^D


On 12/13/21 10:36 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Thanks for the link to this specific treatment of intolerance. In my youth, I 
> was known to claim: "I am tolerant of everything except intolerance" which of 
> course was at best aspirational and more likely just plain delusional.
> 
> While it applies well and obviously to the "culture wars" somewhat unevenly 
> but not without exemplary exceptions,  it also seems to apply by extension to 
> the elaborated context of the 2nd Amendment.   As a "western man" raised on 
> guns, guts and glory, I am comfortable around guns and know that they can in 
> fact be "useful tools" though less and less so in modern society and most 
> especially for a vegetarian like myself.   What I am *intolerant* of is their 
> use as tools for bullying.   Among my gun loving acquaintances (some to be 
> called proper friends) there is a habit of brandishing the fact of their guns 
> (and ammo and ability and willingness to use both) in the face of those they 
> disagree with or disapprove of.   The ones I call friends probably don't even 
> realize that their "gun talk" has a bullying undertone they don't recognize 
> it is so "under".
> 
> I have a plethora of anecdotes (really, me?) on this topic but the general 
> theme seems to be to alert and remind others that they have the willingness 
> and ability to assert their will through deadly force *at-a-distance*.   
> These are not (just) varmint guns (e.g. .22 single-shot rifles suitable for 
> exterminating nuisance rats, squirrels, gophers, skunks, bunnies, raccoons, 
> and even coyotes and bobcats from a dozen yards away) or even "deer rifles" 
> (small capacity, medium caliber, bolt action, possibly scoped, suitable for 
> killing a medium sized animal from up to 100 yards away), but instead most 
> often weapons designed for *modern* warfare variously with the potential for 
> *very* high capacity magazines, rapid-fire shooting (even without a low-tech 
> bump-stock), specialized ammunition (variously for piercing armor and/or 
> causing extreme hydrostatic shock) and precision targeting at a great 
> distance (high-velocity rounds, extreme optical magnification and even 
> night-vision). 
> When noted that such are not useful for any obvious *legal* or *sane* 
> application, they stakes get raised to implying the need to "throw off 
> government tyranny".   My "local" police department (Pojoaque Pueblo) has all 
> of these weapons as well, and more, including  armored personnel carriers 
> handed down from the military (yay?).   They had them on prominent display 
> for years but recently seem to have found a garage somewhere to keep them in, 
> I doubt they have relinquished these "toys", I think I see them out for 
> maintenance now and then.
> 
> I don't talk much with my gun-nut friends about their arsenals, I'm prone to 
> end up saying things like "Come the Apocalypse, while I don't own any guns, I 
> know lots of people who do, and where they keep them and whether they 
> actually properly secure them".   This really raises hackles, so I don't even 
> start down that path.    It all (including my implied threats) seems to be a 
> (re)assertion/corollary to "Might makes Right" which is obviously compelling 
> to the logic that builds and maintains bullies.
> 
> The paradox of intolerance applies acutely to the reality of bullies...
> 
> - Steve
> 
> On 12/13/21 10:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> Pack the Court
>> https://electoral-vote.com/#item-3
>>
>> Don't pack the court:
>> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3982144
>>
>>

Re: [FRIAM] Popper on Darwinism

Right. Sorry if I painted you with that brush. I thought about adding an 
addendum of my own opinion, but thought it important to clarify Popper without 
muddying it with my own thoughts.

Now, I feel free to stir up the silt. *Some* concept (not nec. Popper's) of a 
metaphysical program should work well for those other efforts. As we've 
discussed, here, much of it dangles off of a scaffold built on the concept of 
consistency (writ large). A great deal of (pure?) mathematics is interesting in 
it's flabergasting feeling of how well it all hangs together. It's that same 
"seeking"/apophenic drive that we find in QAnon "researchers" and quantum woo 
fans. "It just all makes so much sense!" Similarly with people who are 
convicted of their own metaphysics. To my mind, if it makes that much sense, 
then it must be *false*, not true. The world is always and everywhere *messy*. 
But I'm clearly in the minority in that aesthetic.

As I tried to argue before, though, consistency is only half the justification 
for a metaphysical program. The other half is completeness ... which isn't 
given as high a priority amongst our rationality-obsessed brethren. Going back 
to the idea I broached to EricS recently about adjointness (in it's "weakly 
equivalent" sense), we can imagine a world where relations (or operations) are 
lossy, including the consequence/cause relation. And we can imagine an 
inference system (language?, algebra?, etc.) where relations are *not* lossy. 
Then regardless of how well that inference system hangs together (is 
consistent), there will be thing-a-ma-jigs in the world that it doesn't cover 
... those interdigital parts that are ignored/abstracted by the inference 
system.

Natural selection *attempts* to meet both consistency and completeness with 
vast, persnickety, story-telling that comes off a bit like special pleading at 
times. But it does seem like a good program because it treats both. If the 
story-telling in Jung et al tried seriously to address both consistency and 
completeness, then it might work for them, too.

On 12/13/21 10:25 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Thank you glen. This clarifies a lot and addresses Steve's question as well.
> 
> i included creationists with a great deal of trepidation, because i assumed 
> it would prompt immediate rejection of the entire question. 
> 
> I do think there is some validity in considering the framework / testable 
> scientific theory question with regard things like Whitehead's process 
> philosophy, Jung's alchemy, some portion of the science-faith reconciliation 
> efforts, and, of course, mysticism and altered states of consciousness.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2021, at 9:44 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> The creationists have been peddling this rhetoric for a very long time. 
>> It's important to read Popper's recant and clarification. From Popper's 
>> 1978 paper "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind":
>>
>> "However, Darwin's own most important contribution to the theory of 
>> evolution, his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test. There 
>> are some tests, even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such 
>> as the famous phenomenon known as "industrial melanism", we can observe 
>> natural selec- tion happening under our very eyes, as it were. 
>> Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural selection 
>> are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable 
>> theories in physics or chemistry.  The fact that the theory of natural 
>> selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and 
>> even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A 
>> tautology like "All tables are tables" is not, of course, test- able; 
>> nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to 
>> hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves 
>> formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology 
>> that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. 
>> And C. H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in 
>> other places) that "Natural selection . . . turns out ... to be a 
>> tautology". 6 However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an 
>> "enormous power ... of explanation". Since the explanatory power of a 
>> tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here.
>>
>> Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists 
>> as Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and 
>> others.
>>
>> I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influ- 
>> enced by what these authorities say,

[FRIAM] tolerance of the intolerant

Pack the Court
https://electoral-vote.com/#item-3

Don't pack the court:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3982144

This evokes the paradox of tolerance: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

As Trump et al have shown us, that sect of the right *will* pack the court 
when/if it suits them. Biden will probably decide *not* to make the attempt. 
But there will be no political will to pass a law *preventing* court packing. 
So the moderate Dems won't pack the court. But they'll happily leave the option 
open to the next Republican administration. It's an excellent example of how 
tolerance eliminates tolerance by tolerating intolerance.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Popper on Darwinism

The creationists have been peddling this rhetoric for a very long time. It's 
important to read Popper's recant and clarification. From Popper's 1978 paper 
"Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind":

"However, Darwin's own most important contribution to the theory of evolution, 
his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test. There are some tests, 
even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such as the famous phenomenon 
known as "industrial melanism", we can observe natural selec- tion happening 
under our very eyes, as it were. Nevertheless, really severe tests of the 
theory of natural selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of 
otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry.  The fact that the 
theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, 
anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a 
tautology. A tautology like "All tables are tables" is not, of course, test- 
able; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear 
that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the 
theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that 
leave most offspring leave most offspring. And C. H. Waddington even says 
somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that "Natural selection . 
. . turns out ... to be a tautology". 6 However, he attributes at the same 
place to the theory an "enormous power ... of explanation". Since the 
explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong 
here.

Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists as 
Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and others.

I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influ- enced by 
what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as "almost 
tautological", 7 and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural 
selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific 
interest. My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most suc- 
cessful metaphysical research programme. It raises detailed problems in many 
fields, and it tells us what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these 
problems.

I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research pro- 
gramme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability and the 
logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an 
opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a 
little to the understanding of the status of natural selection. What is 
important is to realize the explanatory task of natural selection; and 
especially to realize what can be explained without the theory of natural 
selection."

On 12/13/21 8:32 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Dave, to clarify:
> 
> What does Popper (or what do you) take to be the referent for the tag 
> “Darwinism”.  The term has gone through so many hands with so many purposes, 
> that I am hesitant to engage with only the term, without a fuller sense of 
> what it stands for in the worldview of my interlocutor.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 13, 2021, at 10:33 AM, Prof David West > <mailto:profw...@fastmail.fm>> wrote:
>>
>> “/Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research 
>> program—a possible framework for testable scientific theories./”  
>>   Karl Popper.
>>
>> I like this distinction but immediately wonder if it might provide some 
>> analytical / research means that could be applied to other "metaphysical 
>> research programs" — creationism for example, or the plethora of efforts, by 
>> scientists, to reconcile their faith with their science. Or, Newton's [and 
>> Jung's] (in)famous commitment to Egyptian Alchemy.
>>
>> Would it be possible to use the Tao de Ching or the Diamond Sutra or 
>> Whitehead's Process Philosophy (not a random selection, I group the three 
>> intentionally) as a metaphysical research program and derive some 
>> interesting and useful science?
>>
>> davew

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] arg!

2021-12-10 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

I know, right? Now, they're saying that we vaccinated people are the problem, 
not the solution:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/fully-vaccinated-omicron-infections/620953/

Pffft. Renee' and her colleagues are swamped and burnt out, dropping like 
flies. But I'll be damned if I'm gonna give up ma beer lunch just because some 
unvaccinated people will go to the hospital or die. Some good news, though: 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/10/this-victory-of-starbucks-employees-in-buffalo-will-reverberate-across-america

On 12/10/21 2:48 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Oh oh oh oh oh oh ooh
> De listed
> A few days ago the courts had said trying to get people vaccinated is bad 
> mmmkay. and blah blah blah biden shouldn't try to telll people what's healthy 
> blah blah blah blah.
> 
> Oh right and second street is still closed because...reasons! ma' beer lunch! 
> where we solve all the worlds problems!
> AND! the Smiths was out of  Fudge, and Cholate Cookie Dough Ice Cream! do you 
> know hard that is to do... Well neither do I I though Fudge and Choclate 
> treats was a holiday stapple? how do you run out of that as well as cookie 
> dough icecream? oO
> ND they were all out of IPA's! how! hoow is that possible!
> 
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 2:22 PM ⛧ glen  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> [sigh] I was in such a good mood this morning. Maybe this is just fake 
> news designed to irk me. But probably not. Byline is biased, but not that bad.
> 
> Peter Thiel’s Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge 
> University REVEALED
> 
> "Peterson’s return was not a victory for ‘free speech’ as Dr Orr and his 
> colleagues claimed. Instead, it was the culmination of a concerted campaign 
> by what one of them dubbed “the Thiel network” to use free speech as a cover 
> to wage war on the perceived liberal threat to heartfelt theological beliefs, 
> and to normalise pseudoscientific theories of scientific racism."
> 
> -- 
> glen ⛧
> 
> 
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-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] arg!

2021-12-10 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Bah, I forgot the link:

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/12/10/peter-thiels-free-speech-for-race-science-crusade-at-cambridge-university-revealed/

On 12/10/21 1:22 PM, ⛧ glen wrote:
> [sigh] I was in such a good mood this morning. Maybe this is just fake news 
> designed to irk me. But probably not. Byline is biased, but not that bad.
> 
> Peter Thiel’s Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University 
> REVEALED
> 
> "Peterson’s return was not a victory for ‘free speech’ as Dr Orr and his 
> colleagues claimed. Instead, it was the culmination of a concerted campaign 
> by what one of them dubbed “the Thiel network” to use free speech as a cover 
> to wage war on the perceived liberal threat to heartfelt theological beliefs, 
> and to normalise pseudoscientific theories of scientific racism."
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

2021-12-03 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Very nice! I was completely ignorant of that history. If anyone has the full 
Weinberg paper and is willing to send it to me, I'd be grateful. I've managed 
to download the others.

This post should probably stop there, on a pro-social "Thanks!" 8^D But 
Eddington monkey that I am, I'm constitutionally incapable of such. So I  have 
to disagree with only 1 aspect of your post. The point about phenomenal 
Lagrangians, swapping out symmetry for conservation, [re]normalization (in this 
obtuse domain *or* the banal scaling or regularizing of data), etc. is very 
much on topic for the thread.

While SteveS' response to EricC is well done, it isn't adversarial enough for 
me. I wrote an incompetent response arguing something similar to the argument 
that triggered Dave to accuse me of talking like Rupert Sheldrake. In my 
unposted draft, I argue that only identical modelers can produce identical 
models. And the upper bound on accuracy of a model reverse engineered from a 
real artifact is set by the similarity between the original modeler and the one 
doing the reverse engineering. None of that changes the fact that the models 
*must* mismatch the world. (And if you buy Wolpert's argument, if they don't 
mismatch the world, then there's only 1 of them. I.e. they'd be identical. And 
if you buy Robert Rosen's argument from parallax, it would take an infinity of 
reverse engineered models to well-approximate the original model.)

But your salvo, here, does provide us with another option for thinking about 
parallax ... something akin to equivalent efficacy, a way for models to 
nearly-complement each other such that it's justifiable to put blinders on and 
work with the more tractable near-complement when it's useful to do so. This 
echoes and gives pragmatic strength to arguments made by Jon (re: near 
equivalent adjointness) and SteveS' constant reminders about utility.

I still think this focuses too strongly on *duality* rather than plurality, 
though. I'm too ignorant of renormalizable theories in physics to know whether 
there are multiple "complements" amongst which we can flip to and fro, 
searching for the most "natural"/convenient representation, like a dilettante 
programmer choosing a programming language for a given task. We certainly have 
that in the more banal forms of normalization of, say, databases. And that 1st 
page from Weinberg (and the history as you lay it out) seems to indicate there 
are, at least, other/older methods, however sloppy. The flex and slop suggested 
by both SteveS utility and Jon's adjointness *feels* to me like an argument for 
pluralism over mere dualism.

On 12/3/21 4:16 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> So what’s left to be irritating enough to deserve comment, on this question, 
> in the Wiki page’s “balance”.  They comment that some people feel that the 
> infinities were “merely an artifact of human ignorance” as opposed to 
> something “real”, or however they put it.
> 
> This, to me, invokes the language people have been bandying about for entropy 
> for decades: is entropy a “real aspect of natural phenomena”, or “merely an 
> artifact of human ignorance”?  (That language is uncalled-for there, too, but 
> that is for other threads, in which my participation is now mercifully dead 
> and buried.)
> 
> That way of saying it isn’t strictly wrong, of course, but let me offer an 
> alternative rendering of the same strict meaning that carries a connotation 
> that I think is more relevant:
> 
> "The interpretation that `all Lagrangians are phenomenological Lagrangians', 
> within which infinities never arise in the course of doing calculations, 
> entails the conclusion that humans have not yet worked out a complete and 
> final theory accounting for all aspects of the nature and hierarchy of 
> matter."
> 
> Gosh, stop the presses….
> 
> 
> Of course, I know that wasn’t what the main thread was about, and was merely 
> a drive-by shooting in your post.  Don’t know where this leaves your 
> assertion about physicists as monists.  I think I don’t understand why anyone 
> who claims to be a monist bothers to say anything, since the act of choosing 
> one word rather than another, or writing any sentence, would be obviated if 
> all things are one thing.  I assume the physicists can just ignore all that 
> and keep trying to do work.
> 

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Re: [FRIAM] A thread for why did we first eat or drink that?

2021-12-02 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Not sure if this is in the same vein. But:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-catnip-plant-repels-insects-mosquitoes-chemical-receptor

On 12/2/21 11:13 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Gil=
> 
> I don't have a good answer to this one, but experience it myself all the time.
> 
> SNL writers sure put a fine point on it though:
> 
> https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/bad-decision-family/2868100
> 
> In the spirit of thread-twining...   I wonder if this "instinct" (habit?) 
> isn't rooted in some kind of group-survival by helping (some of) us escape 
> the local minima of "one bad experience"... smearing the distinction (maybe?) 
> amongst possible worlds?  A semantic/cognitive/perceptual mechanism for 
> annealing in CS speak?
> 
> Also, it might be noted that natural pesticides include things like garlic 
> and capsacin, suggesting that we are drawn to them *because* they are even 
> harsher on our possible parasites than they are on ourselves?
> 
> Somewhere I once read something about the positive correlation between 
> health-promoting phytonutrients and the commonly associated 
> bitter/sour/astringent tastes they come with.   This source barely references 
> it... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11101467/   and this one addresses the 
> bitter/toxic correlation: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7878094/
> 
> My own PseudoCalvinist upbringing instructed me "it has to taste bad to be 
> good (for you)" contradicting (or explaining) Poppinses idea about "a 
> spoonful of sugar".
> 
> It is also the case that "adult tastes" are almost all "acquired".  Few of us 
> really liked our first shot of tequila or even sip of beer or wine, and 
> definitely not the first puff of tobacco (or any other herb) smoke...
> 
> I think I'll go s(n)ort through the stuff in the back of my fridge now!
> 
> and another one for the causality impaired:
> 
> https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/do-you-know-what-i-hate/n9296
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> On 12/2/21 11:17 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
>> While making lunch. I got curious about what might have gone through the 
>> first people to not just eat, but keep eating peppery things. I'm sort of 
>> picturing a conversation between to dudes where one decides "that thing that 
>> just set my mouth on fire? yeah! let me have more!".
>>
>> What on earth might have possessed humans to keep eating spicey foods? I 
>> also wonder the samething about coffee. A hard green fruit seed that you 
>> have to flambe to make edible or drinkable.

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

2021-12-02 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Thanks for the monist re-statements. From a perspective of inconsistency 
robustness (and a flowering of alternative consequence relations), Yagasawa's 
extension makes some attractive sense. But it seems to *break* Lewis' handling 
of consistency and completeness. I'm guessing we could argue that this is an 
inherent flaw in all monist conceptions. Pluralism allows for enlarging the 
universe of discourse as needed, maybe similar to the distinction in the 
conception of the universal Turing machine between an infinite tape versus a 
finite, but infinitely extensible tape. Are infinities real? Or a convenient 
fiction? I think those of us who believe in actual infinities *should* tend 
toward Lewis' modal realism and avoid the sophist[icated] prestidigitation 
inherent in monism. Even the hedging compromise of the parallel worlds 
interpretation of QM gives too much credibility to monism by metaphysically 
asserting universal laws across the multiverse, and using "dippy" trickery [Ω] 
to skirt infinities. En garde! >8^D

Ultimately, your pining for symmetry in, presumably bidirectional, traveling 
along a modal dimension (as opposed to the one way trip of a branching 
multiverse) sounds like a fideistic clutching to egalitarianism. Life isn't 
fair. It sucks; then you die. 8^D

I haven't the slightest idea how to respond to the Bildungsroman hook. I 
*think* Galen Strawson addresses ontogeny somewhere ... perhaps in "The 
Impossibility of Moral Responsibility", though Lewis handles Strawson's 
argument well, I think.

[Ω] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Attitudes_and_interpretation

On 12/2/21 8:21 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> All systems (existing within the same light-cone) are "nearly decomposable" ?
> 
>     Herb Simon Sez: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1909285
> 
>> One of the attractive qualities of modal realism is that it addresses both 
>> consistency (through concrete possible worlds) and completeness (through 
>> counterpart theory) in positing and testing various models. The problem 
>> becomes one of discovering which world you inhabit *from the data*, not from 
>> whatever abstracted models you may prefer.
> 
> Lewis's Modal Realism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism> is a new 
> one on me, but very interesting framing.   Only skimming the Wikipedia 
> Article on the topic leaves me with only enough information to be 
> dangerous...  so I am refraining from rattling on about all of my reactions 
> to it's implications (for me) and in particular some of the objections listed 
> there to his theory.  From this thin introduction I think I find Yagasawa's 
> extension of possible worlds being distributed on a modal dimension rather 
> than isolated space-time structures (yet) more compelling/useful?
> 
> And what would Candide <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman> have to 
> say about this?
> 
>    
> 
> 
>> On 12/1/21 6:35 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>>> Me -> We've imputed in all cases. Certainly we can assume artificial 
>>> systems were designed for a purpose, but we still don't know what that 
>>> purpose is without imputing a model onto that system. And, in both cases, 
>>> we could proceed to experiment with the system, in order to test the 
>>> predictions of the imputed model and increase our confidence that we have 
>>> imputed correctly. The ability to do these things does not distinguish 
>>> between the two types of system. There are long and respected scientific 
>>> traditions using experimental methods to gain confidence in our 
>>> understanding of why certain systems were favored by natural selection, 
>>> i.e., to determine the manner in which they help the organism better fit 
>>> its environment. 
>>>
>>> Me -> Well it might be reification in some sense, but that term usually 
>>> implies inaccuracy, which we cannot know in this case without 
>>> experimentation. Even with a system we designed ourselves, where we might 
>>> have a lot of insight into why we designed the system the way we did, we 
>>> certainly don't have perfect knowledge. All we have there is a model of our 
>>> own behavior to impute off of. Once again, this doesn't clearly 
>>> differentiate the two situations. In all of these situations it is a 
>>> mistake to uncritically reify our initial intuitions about the system's 
>>> purpose. 

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

2021-12-02 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

I'm glad we agree. I made the same points here:

https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2021-November/090981.html
https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2021-November/090983.html

To reiterate, we can't reverse engineer a builder's intention from the 
artifact. To go even further, we can't even do a *complete* job of 
characterizing the aspects of a thing, the aspects of environments, or the 
relations between them. Parallax is needed across all scales and in both 
directions. Polyphenism is parallax on the thing. Robustness is parallax on the 
environment. And counterfactuals are parallax on their coupling. 

One of the attractive qualities of modal realism is that it addresses both 
consistency (through concrete possible worlds) and completeness (through 
counterpart theory) in positing and testing various models. The problem becomes 
one of discovering which world you inhabit *from the data*, not from whatever 
abstracted models you may prefer.

On 12/1/21 6:35 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Me -> We've imputed in all cases. Certainly we can assume artificial systems 
> were designed for a purpose, but we still don't know what that purpose is 
> without imputing a model onto that system. And, in both cases, we could 
> proceed to experiment with the system, in order to test the predictions of 
> the imputed model and increase our confidence that we have imputed correctly. 
> The ability to do these things does not distinguish between the two types of 
> system. There are long and respected scientific traditions using experimental 
> methods to gain confidence in our understanding of why certain systems were 
> favored by natural selection, i.e., to determine the manner in which they 
> help the organism better fit its environment. 
> 
> Me -> Well it might be reification in some sense, but that term usually 
> implies inaccuracy, which we cannot know in this case without 
> experimentation. Even with a system we designed ourselves, where we might 
> have a lot of insight into why we designed the system the way we did, we 
> certainly don't have perfect knowledge. All we have there is a model of our 
> own behavior to impute off of. Once again, this doesn't clearly differentiate 
> the two situations. In all of these situations it is a mistake to 
> uncritically reify our initial intuitions about the system's purpose. 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

2021-12-01 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Variables are ... well, "things that vary". So in the language surrounding 
iteration, I'm not saying "variable X occurs before Y". I'm saying X and Y take 
on values *before* an iterate. And they take on values *after* an iterate. Then 
ΔX and ΔY may be non-zero. I.e. x1, x2 ∈ X and y1, y2 ∈ Y and the iteration 
looks like Iter(x1,y1) → .

In this context, X is not a cause of Y. Iter() is a cause of the variation in X 
and Y.

What Frank said was that the variation in X might be *predictive* of the 
variation in Y. So, even if you don't know the values y1 and y2, you can "get a 
feel for" y1 and y2 by looking at x1 and x2.

Re: "latent variables" - Iter() might be defined in terms of 3 variables, X, Y, 
and Z. And we might have access to X and Y, but not Z. (I.e. we know the values 
x1, x2, y1, and y2. But we don't know the values z1 or z2.) It's possible that 
X be predictive of Y whether or NOT X and Y depend on Z. But if they do depend 
on Z, then we might be able to go beyond merely "predictive of" and say 
something about causality ... e.g. we might be able to say something like Z 
causes both X and Y, which would then explain why X and Y correlate.

I hope that helps.

On 11/30/21 4:10 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> My problem is, of course, that if variable X occurs before Y and is 
> predictive of it, then it is a cause, by definition.  I am groping for an 
> understanding of a “latent” variable.  I promise I am not arguing, here. 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

2021-11-30 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

lear on where/why one draws the line between artificial and 
> natural.   Artificial things have resulted from natural processes.  These 
> higher-order and relatively sharp fitness landscapes have mesas we call 
> features.   They usually don't involve people dying or failing to reproduce, 
> but they do involve organized behavior by humans stopping, e.g. companies 
> that go bankrupt.    A continuous integration system running regression tests 
> seems to have some properties of selection.
> 
> >
> 
> > -Original Message-
> 
> > From: Friam  <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On Behalf Of ? glen
> 
> > Sent: Monday, November 29, 2021 6:14 AM
> 
> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
> 
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation
> 
> >
> 
> > Right. Agnostic discovery of the artifacts resulting from an artificial 
> machine comes much closer to what happens in natural systems, yes. Those 
> artifacts would only be considered secondary or side-effects IF the 
> exploration were NOT agnostic, motivated. You can only separate the artifacts 
> into primary vs secondary IF you had a purpose in the assembly. No purpose, 
> no distinction of primary vs secondary.
> 
> >
> 
> > But what you can do is measure the impact of all the resulting 
> artifacts, on some scale, and order them that way, a distribution of primacy. 
> Outcome O1 might be Y times more impactful, downstream than outcome O2. If 
> THAT were what we meant by "secondary" effect, then it would be less laden 
> with intention.
> 
> >
> 
> > But that's not what Nick seems to be doing. By insisting that some 
> effects are, by definition, secondary and others primary, he's asserting an 
> intention/purpose to the assembly.
> 
> >
> 
> >
> 
> > On November 28, 2021 9:40:42 PM PST, Marcus Daniels 
> mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> 
> >> An ab initio simulation of a biochemical system would have a 
> foundation of some human-engineered code and the atomic model simulated might 
> have some simplifying assumptions.    The low energy configurations and 
> dynamics are discovered, not engineered.  Yet it is all reproducible on a 
> digital computer with precise causality and in some cases has shown fidelity 
> with physical experiments.
> 
> >> 
> 
> >>> On Nov 28, 2021, at 9:14 PM, ⛧ glen  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> >>> 
> 
> >>> This sounds like impredicativity, which can be a problem in parallel 
> computation (resulting in deadlock or race). Unimplemented math has no 
> problem with it, though. And I'm guessing that some of the higher order proof 
> assistants find ways around it. A definitional loop seems distinct from 
> iteration. So, no; I don't see a problem with iteration in digital 
> computation. I simply don't think the intelligent design we do when 
> programming is analogous to biological evolution. The former clearly has side 
> effects (epiphenomena). I argue the latter does not.
> 
> >>> 
> 
> >>>> On November 28, 2021 5:40:31 PM PST, Marcus Daniels 
> mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> 
> >>>> Glen had said something a while ago implying that (that trivial 
> meaning for) loops were somehow more challenging for digital computers.    I 
> didn’t get it.
> 
> >>>> 
> 

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

I fixed the larding for you. 8^D

Yes, I would accept "played little role in". That's what I've been arguing for 
the entire time ... a *scoping* or scalar measure. When you say 
"epiphenomenon", you imply a clear cut, obvious category. When you say "played 
little role in", you're making it obvious that there is a *measure* in there 
somewhere. What measure are you using that shows the "little role"? Can we 
change the measure so that what seems like "little role" by the first measure 
shows "lots of role" with the next measure? Etc. Such measure-variation is 
necessary to the parallax method you mentioned using the words "flashlight" and 
"across points of view".

Ranked choice voting is just a human-in-the-loop example of dimension 
reduction. And reduction usually involves abstraction, the ignoring of detail. 
So, if, during your exploration of the object using multiple points of view 
(parallax), you *discover* that all the possible points of view show effect E 
to be of small primacy, then sure ... reduce/abstract/elide it away. But if E 
shows small primacy under one flashlight and large primacy under another, then 
you want to keep it for awhile at least.

Ideally, some subset of all effects will show small primacy under *all* 
feasible flashllights. Then you get dimension reduction that limits the amount 
of information you throw away.

But the above depends, even further back in our assumptions/workflow, on a 
stable set of distinguishable effects. You can't really talk about the primacy 
of effect E1 versus E2 without slicing the object into 2 disjoint effects (E1 
vs E2). What if the distribution of effects is kindasorta smooth? And there is 
no clear line between E1 and E2? Then, we have an even more primitive analysis 
to execute where we parallax our binning methods ... before we even engage in 
the process of reducing the number of bins. Binning method B1 might produce 10 
effects, where binning method B2 produces 2. And b3 produces 72. What does that 
mean? Etc.

On 11/29/21 11:43 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 11/29/21 10:51 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> My only beef in this conversation is the implicit intelligence, intention, 
>> and purpose in Nick's incessant use of "epiphenomenon". The 1st and 2nd 
>> paragraphs of Nick's trolling text were well composed, nothing with which to 
>> disagree. It was the 3rd that triggered me (making me wonder if I understood 
>> the 1st 2). Therein, he said "We will argue for a definition of an 
>> epiphenomenon as a consequence of a structure’s (or behavior’s) design which 
>> has played no 

> */[NST===>Ach!  I always get in trouble for overstating my cases:  whistling 
> in the dark, it is.  Obviously, every cause feeds back on its effects to SOME 
> degree.  So, would you accept “played little role in”?  If so, my apologies. 
> <===nst] /*

>> part the development of that structure (or behavior)." Every consequence 
>> plays a part in the development of the structure. That's, to some extent, 
>> what we *mean* by "consequence".

> */[NST===>I like the idea that we limite the idea of consequence in this way, 
> but I don’t think it will fly out there in the world.  <===nst] /*

>> I'd be fine if, for example, our chosen measure was that some outcomes (and 
>> their generating machinery) dissipate through the iterations. Some dissipate 
>> faster than others. We could talk about the half-life of a given 
>> consequential pattern. And if the half-life was short, we could call that a 
>> less primary effect than those with large half-lives, perhaps even so 
>> drastically less as to call it "ancillary" or some other such word.

> */[NST===>I totally agree with all of this, and that makes me think that many 
> of my disagreements with Glen arise from my rhetoric, my asserting greater 
> confidence than I actually feel.  As I say, Whistling in the Dark. <===nst] 
> /* 

> */[NST===>Do we need ranked choice voting to determine which effects are 
> primary?  <===nst] /*

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

[sigh] All the effects are loopy effects. So if loopy effects are primary, then 
*all* the effects are primary. 

On 11/29/21 11:23 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> This is the kind of work that Frank has done.  We will hear from him 
> momentarily, I assume.  As I understand it, such work can rank the efficacy 
> of a cause for each of its effects.  But it does not tell you to care only 
> about the most effected effects.  That is something you are doing. That’s 
> your frame.  My frame, as a development/evolutionist blah blah tells me to 
> privilege effects that feed back on causes because these are the only kinds 
> of effects that in time can shape the development of a biological of 
> technological artifact.  So loopy effects are “primary” to me.  Perhaps I 
> should use your word “salient”, in this case.  Yes, I think that would be 
> better. 

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

 analysis and stress testing on a spectrum *with* 
>> hacking. Penetration testing is on that spectrum, bridging between hacking 
>> and using the device as intended.
>>
>> As for the word, itself, I tend to use "hack" to mean anything *playful* and 
>> "crack" as the exploitation for personal gain. So while a white hat hacker 
>> tries to find exploits, a black hat "hacker" tries to crack the device for 
>> exploit/profit.
>>
>> But to each her own. It's not the word that's important. It's the concept 
>> and the behavior.
>>
>> On 11/29/21 9:19 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> Isn't the *point* of hacking to discover ways to use "bugs" of an 
>>> intentionally designed system *as* "features", often in combination with 
>>> other bugs/features?   Maybe *I* impute too much into the idea of 
>>> "hacking"?  (does one impute *into* or *onto* BTW?)
>>>
>>> I admit, when I follow clickbait with "hack" in the title sometimes the 
>>> target of the hack is a system *not* designed/built by humans with 
>>> intentions which the "hack" is overcoming/circumventing/re-tasking... but I 
>>> don't think of that as a "hack" as much as "thoughtful understanding".  The 
>>> vernacular use of "hack" seems overly broad to me.
>>>
>>> I suppose the character of Sherlock Holmes is characterized by the overlap 
>>> of these two abilities (encyclopedic knowledge of human-built and natural 
>>> systems, along with an acute analytic ability to deduce and infer and and a 
>>> similar acute ability to synthesize disparate elements of those systems to 
>>> achieve a specific purpose)?   Though I suppose the latter is more in the 
>>> domain of the Archetype "McGuyver", leaving Sherlock more to the domain of 
>>> engineering *humans* to admit to or demonstrate their culpability in 
>>> something or another.   McGuyver seems to be intent on breaking or remaking 
>>> things to fulfill his own current desire.

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

I argue, No. The point of hacking has nothing to do with bugs. It has to do 
with exploits. You can exploit either a purposefully designed in feature *or* 
an accidentally built in bug.

We can put sensitivity analysis and stress testing on a spectrum *with* 
hacking. Penetration testing is on that spectrum, bridging between hacking and 
using the device as intended.

As for the word, itself, I tend to use "hack" to mean anything *playful* and 
"crack" as the exploitation for personal gain. So while a white hat hacker 
tries to find exploits, a black hat "hacker" tries to crack the device for 
exploit/profit.

But to each her own. It's not the word that's important. It's the concept and 
the behavior.

On 11/29/21 9:19 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Isn't the *point* of hacking to discover ways to use "bugs" of an 
> intentionally designed system *as* "features", often in combination with 
> other bugs/features?   Maybe *I* impute too much into the idea of "hacking"?  
> (does one impute *into* or *onto* BTW?)
> 
> I admit, when I follow clickbait with "hack" in the title sometimes the 
> target of the hack is a system *not* designed/built by humans with intentions 
> which the "hack" is overcoming/circumventing/re-tasking... but I don't think 
> of that as a "hack" as much as "thoughtful understanding".  The vernacular 
> use of "hack" seems overly broad to me.
> 
> I suppose the character of Sherlock Holmes is characterized by the overlap of 
> these two abilities (encyclopedic knowledge of human-built and natural 
> systems, along with an acute analytic ability to deduce and infer and and a 
> similar acute ability to synthesize disparate elements of those systems to 
> achieve a specific purpose)?   Though I suppose the latter is more in the 
> domain of the Archetype "McGuyver", leaving Sherlock more to the domain of 
> engineering *humans* to admit to or demonstrate their culpability in 
> something or another.   McGuyver seems to be intent on breaking or remaking 
> things to fulfill his own current desire.

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

I agree. I use the distinction (artificial vs natural) as a rhetorical crutch. 
What we *should* do, what I've asked Nick to do, is talk about how we *measure* 
outcomes, how they *scale*. If we run something like a principal component 
analysis on all the outcomes and let the data tell us which parts are primary 
and which parts secondary, then we don't need the artifical vs natural 
distinction (or the epi- vs phenomena distinction) at all. This outcome's 
salience is 0.1, that outcome's salience is 1.0. 

Of course, if you change the measure, you get a different distribution. But if 
we don't talk, at all, about the measure(s) being used for the classification, 
then we're just talking nonsense.

I don't like the following words. But the distinction between [un]supervised 
learning is similar. Except there, I tend to argue that there is no such thing 
as unsupervised learning. The very choice of any family of models biases the 
eventual model you select.

On 11/29/21 9:10 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I'm not clear on where/why one draws the line between artificial and natural. 
>   Artificial things have resulted from natural processes.  These higher-order 
> and relatively sharp fitness landscapes have mesas we call features.   They 
> usually don't involve people dying or failing to reproduce, but they do 
> involve organized behavior by humans stopping, e.g. companies that go 
> bankrupt.A continuous integration system running regression tests seems 
> to have some properties of selection.
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of ? glen
> Sent: Monday, November 29, 2021 6:14 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation
> 
> Right. Agnostic discovery of the artifacts resulting from an artificial 
> machine comes much closer to what happens in natural systems, yes. Those 
> artifacts would only be considered secondary or side-effects IF the 
> exploration were NOT agnostic, motivated. You can only separate the artifacts 
> into primary vs secondary IF you had a purpose in the assembly. No purpose, 
> no distinction of primary vs secondary.
> 
> But what you can do is measure the impact of all the resulting artifacts, on 
> some scale, and order them that way, a distribution of primacy. Outcome O1 
> might be Y times more impactful, downstream than outcome O2. If THAT were 
> what we meant by "secondary" effect, then it would be less laden with 
> intention.
> 
> But that's not what Nick seems to be doing. By insisting that some effects 
> are, by definition, secondary and others primary, he's asserting an 
> intention/purpose to the assembly. 
> 
> 
> On November 28, 2021 9:40:42 PM PST, Marcus Daniels  
> wrote:
>> An ab initio simulation of a biochemical system would have a foundation of 
>> some human-engineered code and the atomic model simulated might have some 
>> simplifying assumptions.The low energy configurations and dynamics are 
>> discovered, not engineered.  Yet it is all reproducible on a digital 
>> computer with precise causality and in some cases has shown fidelity with 
>> physical experiments.
>>
>>> On Nov 28, 2021, at 9:14 PM, ⛧ glen  wrote:
>>>
>>> This sounds like impredicativity, which can be a problem in parallel 
>>> computation (resulting in deadlock or race). Unimplemented math has no 
>>> problem with it, though. And I'm guessing that some of the higher order 
>>> proof assistants find ways around it. A definitional loop seems distinct 
>>> from iteration. So, no; I don't see a problem with iteration in digital 
>>> computation. I simply don't think the intelligent design we do when 
>>> programming is analogous to biological evolution. The former clearly has 
>>> side effects (epiphenomena). I argue the latter does not.
>>>
>>>> On November 28, 2021 5:40:31 PM PST, Marcus Daniels  
>>>> wrote:
>>>> Glen had said something a while ago implying that (that trivial meaning 
>>>> for) loops were somehow more challenging for digital computers.I 
>>>> didn’t get it.
>>>>

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Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

Yes, that's the point. Thanks for stating it in yet another way. 

The word "epiphenomenon" is loaded with expectation/intention. It works quite 
well in artificial systems where we can simply assume it was designed for a 
purpose. But in "natural" systems (like the hyena case), if we use that 
concept, we've imputed a *model* onto the system.

I would go even further (encroaching on Marcus' example) and argue that even if 
someone *else* designed a system, you cannot reverse engineer that designer's 
intention from the system they built. The agnostic approach is to treat every 
system you did not build yourself, with your own hands, as a naturally 
occurring system. (This is the essence of hacking, including benign forms like 
circuit bending.) I would ... I want to ... but I can't take that further step 
without a preliminary understanding that "wild type" systems don't exhibit 
epiphenomena at all. They can't, by definition. If some effect *looks* like an 
epiphenomenon to you, it's because *you* imputed your model onto it. It's a 
clear cut case of reification.


On 11/29/21 8:49 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> glen wrote:
>> ... Purposefully designed systems have bugs (i.e. epiphenomena, unintended, 
>> side-, additional, secondary, effects). Biological evolution does not. There 
>> is no bug-feature distinction there.
> 
> In trying to normalize your terms/conceptions to my own, am I right that you 
> are implying that intentionality is required for epiphenomena (reduces to 
> tautology if "unintended" is key to "epi")?
> 
> This leads us back to the teleological debate I suppose.   The common 
> (vulgar?)  "evolution" talk is laced with teleological implications...  but I 
> think what Glen is saying here that outside the domain of human/sentient 
> will/intentionality (which he might also call an illusion), everything simply 
> *is what it is* so anything *we* might identify as epiphenomena is simply a 
> natural consequence *we* failed to predict and/or which does not fit *our* 
> intention/expectation.
> 
> We watch a rock balanced at the edge of a cliff begin to shift after a rain 
> and before our very eyes, we see it tumble off the cliff edge and 
> roll/slide/skid toward the bottom of the gradient but being humans, with 
> intentions and preferences and ideas, *we* notice there is a human made 
> structure (say a cabin) at the bottom of the cliff and we begin to take odds 
> on how likely that rock is to slip/slide/roll into the cabin.   *we* give 
> that event meaning that it does not have outside of our 
> mind/system-of-values.   The rock doesn't care that it came to final rest (or 
> not) because the cabin structure in it's (final) path was robust enough to 
> absorb/reflect the remaining kinetic energy in the rock-system and the cabin 
> doesn't care either!   We (because we are in the cabin, because we built the 
> cabin, because we are paying a mortgage to the bank on the cabin, because we 
> intend to inhabit the cabin, because we can imagine inhabiting the cabin 
> before/during/after the collisions) put
> a lot of meaning and import into that rock coming to rest 
> against/on-top-of/beyond the cabin, but the rock and the cabin *don't care*.  
>  If instead of crushing the cabin, the rock grazes it on the side where there 
> was a dilapidated porch you intended to demolish, carrying it away and 
> crumbling it's bits to compostable splinters in the ravine *below* the cabin 
> out of your site, you might want to refer to the epiphenomenal nature of 
> rolling stones as clever demolition and removal crews?
> 
> I'm probably just muddying the water (at the bottom of the ravine, now filled 
> with cabin-deck bits).

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

2021-11-23 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

But your use of "should" implies aligned values. I suppose it's reasonable to 
criticize my artificial distinction between engineering and natural science. 
Victor Orbán (and apparently many of our Republican friends who fawn over him) 
is engineering his piece of society according to different values than we are 
(or you might feel we *should* be) engineering our piece. So, maybe I should 
have used a hedge prefix like "meta-engineering" or somesuch. But the issue 
remains that we do NOT share values.

Completely reasonable people can make the case for the death penalty, which may 
not *seem* like violent confrontation. But tight control of "violence" is 
different from non-violent. Other, seemingly reasonable people, can make the 
case for spanking their children, or industrial meat, ... or paying $50 to see 
2 people beat the snot out of each other. Many of us (less reasonable) people 
feel that a punishment should fit the crime, eye for an eye and whatnot, 
leading to things like chopped off hands or violent indoctrination in a prison 
for years as a result of selling some arbitrary recreational chemical.

The law *should* push some of us into violent confrontation, apparently [⺈]. 
Which people and which types of confrontation depends wholly on the values we 
choose as our engineered requirements.

[⺈] Hume's guillotine is either just plain false or limited to ideal deduction. 
I can't remember if I posted my arguments against it, here, or not.

On 11/23/21 9:09 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> I hope I only said that the law should be designed not to push us into 
> violent confrontation.  Delete that paragraph when you send it to the Times. 

> On 11/23/21 8:46 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> The question raised by the IDEA report is one of engineering vs natural 
>> science and shared values. So, this is our justice system, where evil-doers 
>> like Rittenhouse and Reinoehl simply reap the persnickety, artifactual, 
>> consequences of the way it's semi-structured. Do we let it stand? Or do we 
>> reform it? What shared value(s) would we target as engineers? And if we 
>> choose reformation, is it a nudge approach? Overhaul approach? Etc.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

2021-11-23 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Spot on, Steve. I mean, I reject Lerner's suggestion that procedural rights, 
covering abortion to some greater or lesser extent, are somehow less 
fundamental than "substantive" rights. "The law" can only be *complete* if it's 
considered a model of the entire society, which leads to your natural 
conclusion that it's everywhere (and nowhere, if we're careful about that 
word), in both definition and computation.

The question raised by the IDEA report is one of engineering vs natural science 
and shared values. So, this is our justice system, where evil-doers like 
Rittenhouse and Reinoehl simply reap the persnickety, artifactual, consequences 
of the way it's semi-structured. Do we let it stand? Or do we reform it? What 
shared value(s) would we target as engineers? And if we choose reformation, is 
it a nudge approach? Overhaul approach? Etc.

When literally everything from SCOTUS down to the use of leaf blowers is 
suspect, where should our skeptical attentions be applied? I mean, I can 
forgive the right wing morons marching against vaccine mandates because *I* 
don't know where to put my energies, either. We're both confused. We're all 
just a little bit arrogant in thinking our motivated slicing is somehow more 
important than others' motivated slicing.

On 11/23/21 6:12 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> It seems trite but I'd say the law was *everywhere* and *nowhere* at the same 
> time.   Jacob Blake was killed *by the law* because he was presumed to be 
> afoul of "the law", but many felt that the "lawmen" who killed him were 
> operating outside or above "the law".   When "the law" couldn't hold them 
> accountable for this presumed "unlawful" action, a large portion of the 
> citizenry decided to *push the law* by expressing their *lawful right* to 
> demonstrate but then with some of them stepping over some lines of *the law* 
> with various acts of property violence (and perhaps violence against police 
> in a few cases?)   When Rittenhouse obtained a semi-automatic assault rifle 
> he did so *outside the law* and then when he showed up on the street claiming 
> (in his mind and after the fact to the jury) to be there to *enforce the 
> law*, it seems that he is at least *pushing* the law as hard as the 
> protestors on the street *threatening* violence with their mere 
> presence/posture.  Carrying a (n
> apparently) loaded weapon in public (especially during civil unrest) is 
> nothing less than a *threat* of violence and a strong risk of breaking *the 
> law*. "Don't take your guns to town" as Glen has invoked before.
> 
> The police who drove past Rittenhouse, even offered him a bottle of water 
> *after* having shot 3 people were "being the law" in some sense (doing their 
> job as they understood it?)...  and then when he was collected (on 
> his/family/lawyers') terms rather than hunted down (like the Antifa-presumed 
> fellow in WA about the same time) and executed in the street (apparently 
> within the law because the officers/shooters felt they saw he might have a 
> weapon?)  The jury trial (starting with charges, continuing with judge 
> assignment and jury selection) was all an exercise of *the law*.   The 
> courtroom scene unfolded "according to the law" even if some of us might 
> question some of the activities/postures the judge adopted, I don't believe 
> he exceeded his authority or jurisdiction.   The jury exonerated Rittenhouse 
> on *all counts* precisely as the system is designed to work, even if I am 
> personally concerned about various implications of that decision.   For the 
> most part, the protests in WI
> and across the country *after* the decision were executed *within the law*, 
> but as with the initiating protests, have an overtone of threatening 
> violence, threatening to break out of the confines of "the law", as did 
> Rittenhouse when he swaggered down the street with a loaded military style 
> assault weapon at-ready.
> 
> So, while I sympathize with Nick's ideation that "well crafted, executed, and 
> defended laws" *should* yield a kind/gentle/just/healthy society, I think 
> virtually everything we are seeing today indicates that the limits of that 
> have been exceeded.   Unfortunately, this circumstance just feeds the 
> authoritarian ideation which is that one *must* clamp down as hard as 
> necessary to obtain compliance with *the law*.  I say unfortunately, because 
> history indicates that such exercise of absolute power, even within the 
> constraints of well-designed laws, becomes it's own problem pretty quickly.
> 
> Add in the "authority" of God (or similar) and it gets yet-more-squirrely 
> because in fact one can ju

Re: [FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

2021-11-22 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

No, I was "here". I just couldn't read the couchiness thing. About 2 paragraphs 
in I felt like I was wasting my time ... which is bad because my time isn't 
valuable. And I completely agree with Gil re black flashlights, which means 
there's no reason for me to write anything.

The Lerner posts seemed to echo a bit of Jon's and your objection to 
bureaucracy, but also evoke a larger argument I've had with several people 
about institutional/systemic knowledge. And Jon mentioned "jury nullification" 
awhile back, which is a similar subject. *Where* is "the law"? Not only where 
is it defined, but also where is it executed/computed? This strikes me as an 
unsettled question ... even a couple hundred years on in this experiment.

On 11/22/21 12:12 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Glad to have you back.  Seems like you had gone silent for a while.  
> 
> It seems to me that the law is to blame in the Rittenhouse case.  It is 
> precisesly the duty of the law to keep individual human beings out of the 
> situation Rittenhouse and his opponents found themselves in.  If trained 
> police cannot make the kind of hair-trigger decisions that Rittenhouse and 
> the others were forced to make, how can we expect untrained citizens to.  Put 
> a 17 year old kid, pumped up with ideology, provided with an assault rife, 
> into the midst of a riot in a unfamiliar city,  what could possibly go wrong? 
>  Throw the legislature in jail.  
> 
> n
> 
> Nick Thompson
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2021 11:04 AM
> To: FriAM 
> Subject: [FRIAM] corruption and impartiality
> 
> IDEA has (the) US listed as backsliding:
> 
> https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Figure%206_global.png
> 
> It seems mostly because of a loss of "impartial administration":
> 
> https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Global_07.jpeg
> 
> Outlined here:
> 
> https://www.idea.int/gsod/global-report#chapter-6-impartial-administration
> 
> Of all the myriad things this brings to my mind (from postmodernism to 
> federated computing), the most obvious one is the illusory "neutrality" of 
> SCOTUS and the semi-religious hermeneutics around "the rule of law". The 
> Rittenhouse verdict and this series of posts 
> <https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/18/the-second-amendment-vs-the-seventh-amendment-substantive-vs-procedural-rights-part-1-similarities-and-differences/>
>  biased me even more. ("procedural rights"? Pffft.)
> 
> But the real question, here, is who is to blame? Mirroring Donald Trump, am 
> *I* to blame for losing trust and constantly questioning the motivations of 
> the Justices? (Is Trump to blame for questioning the election 
> result/process?) Are we, me re SCOTUS and Trump re ... well ... everyone but 
> himself, *imputing* partiality by our very insistence that it's there? Or, is 
> it actually there?
> 
> There's something to be said, here, about secrecy and distributed tasking. 
> While SCOTUS isn't secret, it is fairly centralized (into 9 
> appointed-for-life already elite lawyers ... fvcking lawyers for crying out 
> loud). And the problem with secrecy isn't really about the secrecy. It's 
> about diversity, including hyper-reductive reasoning as well as perspective 
> and noisy application (universality). Twain's observation ("two people can 
> keep a secret if one of them is dead") evokes this nicely. Distributed 
> systems are leaky. And it's a feature, not a bug.
> 
> COVID-19, like blockchain tech and social media, brought both opportunities 
> for more corruption and opportunities for less corruption. There are no more 
> demes. We are awash in *pan*demics of various different kinds, from yahoos 
> thinking they can read the Constitution just because they can read Harry 
> Potter to 8-bit graphic artists issuing NFTs for their silly emotes. Get off 
> my lawn!
> 
> Which of the Grand Unified Theories of Everything explains this stuff? I have 
> no idea what's going on.
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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[FRIAM] corruption and impartiality

2021-11-22 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

IDEA has (the) US listed as backsliding:

https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Figure%206_global.png

It seems mostly because of a loss of "impartial administration":

https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/inline-images/Global_07.jpeg

Outlined here:

https://www.idea.int/gsod/global-report#chapter-6-impartial-administration

Of all the myriad things this brings to my mind (from postmodernism to
federated computing), the most obvious one is the illusory "neutrality" of
SCOTUS and the semi-religious hermeneutics around "the rule of law". The
Rittenhouse verdict and this series of posts
<https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/18/the-second-amendment-vs-the-seventh-amendment-substantive-vs-procedural-rights-part-1-similarities-and-differences/>
biased me even more. ("procedural rights"? Pffft.)

But the real question, here, is who is to blame? Mirroring Donald Trump, am *I*
to blame for losing trust and constantly questioning the motivations of the
Justices? (Is Trump to blame for questioning the election result/process?) Are
we, me re SCOTUS and Trump re ... well ... everyone but himself, *imputing*
partiality by our very insistence that it's there? Or, is it actually there?

There's something to be said, here, about secrecy and distributed tasking.
While SCOTUS isn't secret, it is fairly centralized (into 9 appointed-for-life
already elite lawyers ... fvcking lawyers for crying out loud). And the problem
with secrecy isn't really about the secrecy. It's about diversity, including
hyper-reductive reasoning as well as perspective and noisy application
(universality). Twain's observation ("two people can keep a secret if one of
them is dead") evokes this nicely. Distributed systems are leaky. And it's a
feature, not a bug.

COVID-19, like blockchain tech and social media, brought both opportunities for
more corruption and opportunities for less corruption. There are no more demes.
We are awash in *pan*demics of various different kinds, from yahoos thinking
they can read the Constitution just because they can read Harry Potter to 8-bit
graphic artists issuing NFTs for their silly emotes. Get off my lawn!

Which of the Grand Unified Theories of Everything explains this stuff? I have
no idea what's going on.

--
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Application of robo-pigeon in ethological studies of bird flocks

2021-11-12 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

這在 IRC 中會容易得多。

On 11/12/21 11:27 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> "这就是你想让我说的吗？ 我们现在可以在中国推出我们的软件吗?"
> 
> 是的，你做得很好。尝一口香港。


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] "chilling effect"

2021-11-12 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

I agree it's a useful distinction. Neither are epiphenomena in the 
"unintentional" sense. In the Snowden case, it's difficult for me to imagine 
Snowden, as a whistleblower who felt he had to escape from one "oppressive" 
regime to take harbor in another oppressive regime, *not* having thought 
explicitly about any chilling effect such a blown whistle would have. He's too 
smarmy for me to credit him with naivete. And the NSA may have more stupid 
members than we think 
(http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/); but most of 
us know that measuring a system often modifies the system being measured.

But your use of "investment" helps lay out, perhaps, that there are 
*categories* of side effect, in the "additional" or "secondary" sense. At least:

  • don't care
  • nice to have
  • collateral damage

I still argue as I did with SteveS, that such a concept, qualified with 
categories or not, is only relevant in a closed game or axiomatic system. In an 
open game, those categories explode and cross over too much for any of it to be 
useful. I.e. epiphenomenon is a useless concept in any real world context.

On 11/12/21 8:15 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> I can see that I was being too clumsy. In the SLAPP case and the
> SB8 case chilling is pretty straightforward, but in the case I linked[☃]
> (which jumps to a highlighted section "Chilling effects on Wikipedia
> users" on the Wikipedia page for *chilling effect*) I see an example
> where I don't believe that Wikipedia, Snowden, nor the NSA had any
> investment in chilling out Wikipedia users. Instead, it seems more like
> a novel side effect, a consequence of the subject matter, many citizens
> perceptions of their government, and a revelation of information.
> So I suppose like anything, things may have side effects, and I am not
> sure it contributes anything to mention it.
> 
> Comparing "Wikipedia Foundation versus NSA" with the *Clear Channel
> memorandum*[♪] is interesting to me (a sarcastic thanks again to the
> Telecomm act[⏚]). There, a decision was made to preemptively chill the
> radio of its "affects and percepts"[D]. I'm not entirely sure what the
> concerning response to hearing Lennon's "Imagine" was supposed to be and
> less so for "She's not there" by the Zombies.
> 
> [☃] 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#:~:text=13%5D%5Bfailed%20verification%5D-,Chilling%20effects%20on%20Wikipedia%20users,-%5Bedit%5D
>  
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#:~:text=13%5D%5Bfailed%20verification%5D-,Chilling%20effects%20on%20Wikipedia%20users,-%5Bedit%5D>
> [♪] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_memorandum 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_memorandum>
> [⏚] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996>
> [D] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy)#In_Deleuze_and_Guattari 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy)#In_Deleuze_and_Guattari>

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Re: [FRIAM] Application of robo-pigeon in ethological studies of bird flocks

2021-11-12 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Ha! You have no idea. One of my high school classmates, a hard right winger 
last I checked, actually writes for Epoch:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/author-alan-wakim

All good jokes carry a kernel of truth, I guess.

On 11/11/21 7:38 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Nick, get out your dagger repellent you Trumpist you!
> 
> I have heard, almost verbatim, your entire paragraph from the mouth of the 
> Donald, and seen the exact same notions discussed, ad nauseam,  in Glen's 
> favorite newspaper, /The Epoch Times./ [Don't shoot me glen, it is a joke.]

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Re: [FRIAM] Is Chemero TRULY a pragmatist.

Primarily: There can be an ultimately arrived at position that is not the prior 
waypoint positions. The 2 named claims (metaphysical and epistemological) might 
be "out of the way" waypoints toward that *other truth* which is neither 
metaphorical nor instrumental. From this perspective Chemero's gist seems like 
a targeting of that possibility ... an attempt to see further down the process. 
That sounds pragmatic to me. And even if we arrive at the latter first (a 
metaphorical or instrumental thing-a-majiggy), it doesn't imply that's the end 
of the settling out process. We don't know. We won't know ... until the 
universe ends in heat death. 

Secondarily: Computationalists need not be representationalists. Analog 
computing is the process of modeling by which one uses non-representationalist 
things as *behavioral* stand-ins for other non-representationalist things. 
True, it's very difficult for us analogists to stop others from 
representationalizing our thing-in-the-loop things ... coming up with schema by 
which some things can be replaced by other things and classifying all the 
things that can stand in for some thing into symbolic classes. But we continue 
to *try*. This is why the concept of an analog is distinct from the concept of 
a metaphor.

Nick is the dyed-in-the-wool representationalist, not a stereotype of 
computationalists. The Lady doth protest too much. >8^D

On 11/11/21 10:29 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> And I quote:
> 
>  
> 
> When one proclaims oneself to be an antirepresentationalist, as proponents of 
> radical embodied cognitive science do, there are two things one might be 
> saying.  First, one might be making a claim about the nature of cognitive 
> systems, namely that nothing in them is a representation.  For the rest o 
> this chapter I will call this the metaphysical claim.  Second, one might be 
> claiming that our best explanation of cognitive systems will not involve 
> representations.  I will call this the epistemological claim.  These are 
> pretty clearly separate claims.  It is easy to imagine, for example, that the 
> metaphysical  claim is true and that humans really are just complex dynamical 
> systems, but they are so complex that the best way for us (with our limited 
> intellects) to explain them is by metaphorically or instrumentally ascribing 
> [to] them mental representation.  [Chemero, A. 2011. /Radical embodied 
> cognitive science./  MIT: Cambridge, MA. p67.] 
> 
>  
> 
> Given the pragmatic Maxim concerning meaning, /that the meaning of a term is 
> just those practices of investigation that the term’s use would imply/, how 
> is this passage not anti-pragmatic?  What other truth is there but a 
> metaphorically or instrumentally best explanation? 
> 
>  
> 
> Chemero’s overall position is that his RADICAL  embodied cognitive science is 
> the only rightful heir of the American Naturalism of which Peirce and James 
> are the progenitors.  Therefore you, many FRIAMMERS just might just see this 
> as a internecine dustup in the anti-representationalist coven, and because 
> you are computationalists (ergo, representationalists), ignore it.  That’s 
> OK.   Others may say “-ist, -ist, ist; blah, blah blah.”  That’s ok too.  But 
> perhaps those few of you who are members of the coven may want to help me 
> square this circle.  

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Re: [FRIAM] "chilling effect"

OK. Well, as Nick pointed out recently, the Constitution (just for example) was 
*intentionally* gamed ... even before it was written. So even before the game 
is defined, the "unintentional" side effects are already being considered as 
primary effects. So, what *seems* epi to one player isn't seen as epi to 
another player. In fact, if I can trick you into either not seeing some effect, 
say, for hundreds of years, then I'm likely to win the game.

The point being that the qualifier "epi", if applied to the actual thing in the 
world like a law or a stone, implies something much deeper (and I argue 
fictitious) than "epi" as applied to, say, a single player's understanding of 
the rules of some game.

Since chilling effect has such a long history and has been explicitly designed 
for, it's not "epi" if attributed to the things, themselves. But they could be 
considered tricks effectively played on various opponents.

In a totalitarian "closed world" game, it's sensible to attribute "epi" to 
parts of that game, bugs that become features. But in an open world game, there 
is no epi. There are no bugs. They're all features from day one even if some 
particular player is ignorant of them.

On 11/11/21 9:43 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I saw it as "epi" in the sense that it started out NOT as part of the legal 
> system and emerged as a technique which eventually got formalized.   Perhaps 
> you are accurate that this transition moved it from epi to first-class, but I 
> see it as having emergent/epi origins?
> 
> I didn't decode Jon's URL far enough to determine if he cut/pasted it in the 
> middle of an edit attempt or not...  I *do* often, myself read the "talk" 
> pages of a wikipedia page when I'm curious about whether certain 
> controversial issues have been discussed about the page.

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Re: [FRIAM] "chilling effect"

How is it epi? In both the SLAPP case and the SB8 case, it's a directly 
targeted effect. And it has a long history in prior things like informal 
policies for segregation and other law-gaming. There's no "epi" here.

And what's with that Wikipedia link? Were you trying to edit the page but your 
auth attempt failed? 

On 11/11/21 8:02 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> "Chilling Effect", now that's good epiphenomena. By that, I suppose I
> mean that "chilling effect" is more general than a simple gag or
> restraining order, it aims to inhibit or dissuade behavior. The content
> of chilling seems to live in the question of "why should a legal system
> dissuade or inhibit legal actions"? My first impression is that such a
> need arises in any legal system that is ultimately too rigid and unwieldy
> (or too ill-founded) to rigorously target the subject of its domain. So,
> probably, every non-trivial legal system.
> 
> On the one hand, "chilling" seems a natural choice for better fitting
> the letter of the law to its "spirit", but doing so also creates a lever
> connecting goals to functions (a la' Charles and Thompson):
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#:~:text=13%5D%5Bfailed%20verification%5D-,Chilling%20effects%20on%20Wikipedia%20users,-%5Bedit%5D
>  
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#:~:text=13%5D%5Bfailed%20verification%5D-,Chilling%20effects%20on%20Wikipedia%20users,-%5Bedit%5D>


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[FRIAM] "chilling effect"

So, I'd thought the conversations around SB8's "chilling effect" on abortion 
providers was merely a vernacular expression, not a legal one. E.g.

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/11/02/limiting-principles-and-sb8/

But it looks to this non-lawyer like anti-SLAPP laws, explicitly punishing 
law-gaming, targets a "chilling effect" directly. E.g.

https://theintercept.com/2021/11/10/proud-boys-antifascist-tweet-chad-loder-court/

Chilling free speech, which is an explicit right, has a different status than 
chilling abortion, which is only a derived right. But that chilling is 
explicitly considered at all. It evokes, for me, some sophisticated ethical 
considerations around scalable relations, from interpersonal up to corporate 
policies up to constitutional law ... maybe even down to eusocial genetics. 
That a bureaucratic technology might be a mechanism for navigating/scaling 
persnickety ethical issues is pretty interesting.

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Re: [FRIAM] The danger of a single story

2021-11-10 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Sorry for my ill-stated point. I only brought Lagrange and Euler into the 
conversation to link to the (suspect) conclusion that deeper structures of math 
are innate and finer ones learned. In the control population, my guess is 
there's stiff competition between sight and proprioception, though the latter 
is way more diverse. Proprioception would be more along the lines of walking a 
graph, operational, functional, whereas sight would be more metric space 
oriented. 

I'm completely ignorant of p-adic numbers. But the apparent difficulty grokking 
the geometry of a p-adic-normed space *and* the idea that spaces can be 
understood as graphs (and vice versa), hinging on whatever norm is chosen, 
destroys the intuition evoked by the word "center". If it were replaced by 
"equidistant" or something, it might make more sense ... but even "distance" is 
a bit flawed. Perhaps "fallacy" is too strong a word. But I think I'd locate 
the flaw(s) in your (a) and (c). I don't want to hinge on the singularity of 
"center", but on the definition of it. So rather than say every vertex is a 
center, I'd say something closer to your statement: "Every point is the same 
[number of steps | distance] from the edge."

But, again, my ignorance prevents me from saying anything clear about 
p-adic-normed spaces. My real goal was to target the meaning of "koan". Koans 
don't have to be paradoxes. But they're also not *mere* riddles. They're levers 
to help you dig into some set of concepts a little deeper than whatever 
preemptive binding you might otherwise snap to, much like my recent defenses of 
the commission of other fallacies like ad hominem and strawmanning. I also plan 
to defend the commission of tu quoque one day. I just haven't found the right 
opportunity.

On 11/10/21 11:36 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> """
> For lack of a better (or more ironic, since Euler went blind) dichotomy
> lever, the operational conception might be called Lagrangian and the
> latter Eulerian. From a Lagrangian perspective any point in an open ball
> is infinitely far from the outer bound as long as our operations are
> functions of that outer bound. But from an Eulerian perspective, it's
> trivial to see the boundary is just fuzzy and all we need do is take
> constant steps to leave the ball. That renders the koan a simple fallacy
> of ambiguity, hinged on the conception of "center".
> """
> 
> I am unsure that I can address everything here, and I feel like my
> reasoning has been sh!t lately, but here is an attempt to work out your
> suggestion of a "fallacy of ambiguity"[⊬]:
>   a) the term shared by the two premisses
>   b) the subject of the conclusion
>   c) the predicate of the conclusion
> 
> a) Perhaps here you are talking about *center of a ball* as the shared
> concept between a Lagrangian and an Eulerian perspective? Or maybe the
> *center of a ball* as shared between the p-adic and euclidean conceptions
> of space? In this last case, maybe the "missing premise" is that we are
> making an analogy to balls and centers when we move to non-archimedean
> norms? The fallacy might then appear as:
> 
> "All Euclidean balls have a single center. x is the center of a p-adic
> ball. Thus x is the single center of the p-adic ball."
> 
> b) I am not sure how to finagle this one a wholes and parts argument,
> but let me try. Maybe it is that centers are things that balls have but
> are not properties of points? That attributing center to a point becomes
> a category error?
> 
> c) Perhaps you feel that *center of a ball* fails operationally, that
> centers of balls are singular by their very nature, privileging insights
> of Archimedean experiences? I haven't worked it out, but I (perhaps
> falsely) assume that any one of these centers can be handled as a center
> of mass, a barycenter, maximally situated away from the ball's closure.
> Here, I suppose, is where your Gordian step is apt? From each "center"
> it takes the same number of constant steps to leave.
> 
> All of this is to say that I would like to better understand the *fallacy*.
> In terms of the larger metaphor, I like the image of many individuals,
> all within the scope of one another, granted the center of their shared
> milieux.
> 
> [⊬] https://www2.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Fallacies%20of%20Ambiguity.html 
> <https://www2.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Fallacies%20of%20Ambiguity.html>

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Re: [FRIAM] The danger of a single story

2021-11-10 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

I argued with Jon about whether such complementarity can be flattened to an 
enlarged universe using the Necker Cube. We (some of us) clearly have the 
ability to push ourselves into others shoes ... to pretend like we're them, 
swimming through the *same* milieu [⛧]. And we (some of us) clearly have the 
ability to pop ourselves out of others -- and perhaps our own -- shoes ... to 
pretend we're an objective/behaviorist Demon watching our subject swim through 
the milieu. I argued, like with the Necker cube, you can't do both at the same 
time. Jon questioned that ... implying disagreement.

But that's not my point, here. I think this setup might help us understand gate 
keeping like liberal vs woke. How much *easier* is it to put yourself in 
another's shoes if that other is within scope? I mean, let's face it, it's WAY 
easier for me to disagree with, say, Jon or SteveS than it is for me to 
disagree with Chimamanda or perhaps some hypothetical and nameless individual 
in Mexico. You can't disagree (or agree) with someone with whom you're not 
_familiar_. (a-gree -- adhere to the pleasing or ... adhere to the similarity) 
Any disagreement I might claim to have with, say, an anti-vaxxer Trumpist *must 
be* evidence that I've strawmanned the other, right?

[⛧] Chimamanda's story also allows distinctions between different milieus (?). 
I'm trying to keep it simple for this setup.

On 11/9/21 9:16 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Kind of explains how the left is prone to being wedged apart.  The liberal 
> and the woke are relatively close, but the distances that matter are the ones 
> within that type.   
> 
> Corollary is that familiarity breeds contempt. 

> On 11/9/21 8:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> The fact that such distance (euclidean as well as non-euclidean as well as 
>> network) is a heuristic for "otherness" seems very much implicit in life 
>> itself, most familiarly among visual creatures, less so for audio, and even 
>> less so for chemical (smell/taste) and least for tactile (if I am not 
>> touching it, it doesn't exist?).
>> 
>> Implicit in Chimamanda's single story about not-single-stories is that there 
>> are other dimensions to distance than the physical/kinshipLinguisticNetworks 
>> that "distance" us from one another (people, animals, geography and other 
>> life-forms).   I don't know what to do with this awareness exactly, but it 
>> seems to leaven or balance the *judgement* against those who appear myopic 
>> in their apprehension of the world.  It is somewhat about priorities.
>> 
>> In my rant/rave about emergent collective consciousness, the ability to 
>> apprehend "Other" at a "Distance" more better is an adaptive trait, yet we 
>> also cannot afford to let that overwhelm circumstances like "relevance" for 
>> which proximity is a mild proxy.   It is about dynamic (re)prioritization I 
>> suppose.
>> 

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Re: [FRIAM] The danger of a single story

2021-11-10 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

The conclusion that the deepest math structures are innate and the "finer" 
structures are acquired is interesting and suspect. Do we have source material 
for that? I didn't see any in the knots book.

Intuitively, following my post about how some tonic behaviors are more easily 
expressed with some biological/anatomical structures than others, I'd guess 
proprioception would be more self-oriented and operational (swimming through 
the milieu), whereas visual perception would be more other-oriented ("watching" 
objects swim through a stationary frame). I think a properly controlled trial 
would expect proprioception to be a confounder. So you would have to include 
both visually and proprioceptively disabled subjects 
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-021-06037-4> to compare with 
the control subjects.

Your "koan" is spot-on for riddling that out, I suppose. Were I not already 
canalized by my answer to Dave's question about Jungian archetypes. For lack of 
a better (or more ironic, since Euler went blind) dichotomy lever, the 
operational conception might be called Lagrangian and the latter Eulerian. From 
a Lagrangian perspective any point in an open ball is infinitely far from the 
outer bound as long as our operations are functions of that outer bound. But 
from an Eulerian perspective, it's trivial to see the boundary is just fuzzy 
and all we need do is take constant steps to leave the ball. That renders the 
koan a simple fallacy of ambiguity, hinged on the conception of "center".

On 11/10/21 12:37 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> """
> The fact that such distance (euclidean as well as non-euclidean as well
> as network) is a heuristic for "otherness" seems very much implicit in
> life itself, most familiarly among visual creatures, less so for audio,
> and even less so for chemical (smell/taste) and least for tactile (if I
> am not touching it, it doesn't exist?).
> """
> 
> I wonder about the price paid for privileging sight. Trivedi recounts
> an observation of Sossinsky[☍]:
> 
> “It is not surprising at all that almost all blind mathematicians are
> geometers. The spatial intuition that sighted people have is based on
> the image of the world that is projected on their retinas; thus it is a
> two (and not three) dimensional image that is analysed in the brain of
> a sighted person. A blind person’s spatial intuition, on the other hand,
> is primarily the result of tile and operational experience. It is also
> deeper – in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense.
> 
> recent biomathematical studies have shown that the deepest mathematical
> structures, such as topological structures, are innate, whereas finer
> structures, such as linear structures are acquired. Thus, at first, the
> blind person who regains his sight does not distinguish a square from a
> circle: He only sees their topological equivalence. In contrast, he
> immediately sees that a torus is not a sphere”
> 
> Which dovetails nicely with my mathematical goal of the day to think
> about p-adic metrics, a subject where *visual* habits seem to get in my
> way or otherwise lead my intuitions astray[p, p²]. P-adic considerations
> lead to formal koans like:
> 
> "Every point in an open ball is a centre of the ball."
> 
> [☍] https://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/blind-geometers/ 
> <https://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/blind-geometers/>
> [p] 
> https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2225905/interpretation-of-open-balls-with-the-p-adic-metric
>  
> <https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2225905/interpretation-of-open-balls-with-the-p-adic-metric>
> [p²] https://www.math.uh.edu/~haynes/files/topgps5.pdf 
> <https://www.math.uh.edu/~haynes/files/topgps5.pdf>

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Re: [FRIAM] The Possibility of Self Knowledgke

Yeah, I feel like we trash things we don't have good explanations for. 
Biology's done a nice job of steadily filling in gaps with real science, 
replacing any need for "morphic resonance". I guess this is one of the reasons 
I still want to read Goertzel's book: 
https://bookshop.org/books/evidence-for-psi-thirteen-empirical-research-reports/9780786478286

We've seen the same thing with the resurgence of "Lamarkian inheritance".

On 11/8/21 11:35 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> your second paragraph is a nice channeling of Rupert Sheldrake — minus the 
> morphogenesis.
> 
> davew
> 
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2021, at 12:17 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> Both your and SteveS' comments address scope/extent directly. Nick 
>> refuses to do that. I don't know why.
>>
>> If we allow for a spectrum of scope, we can say that the fast/small 
>> loops "within self" provide those images, sounds, emotions you 
>> experience in the deprivation tank. Even if they were programmed in, in 
>> part, by experiences outside the tank, they keep "ringing" (standing 
>> wave, persistent cycles) while in the tank. Like a tuned stringed 
>> instrument, properties of your body/brain facilitate some tones over 
>> others. If your body is grown over generations to "hold" some tones, 
>> then that could be the source of the Jungian archetypes that continue 
>> ringing under deprivation. And, arguably, those tones will ring longer 
>> and louder than more transient ones learned before going into the tank, 
>> that your body/brain aren't as effective/efficient at maintaining.
>>
>> Just outside the fast/small loops might be medium loops like dream 
>> journaling, meditation, or exercise. That may extend to family or 
>> regular contact with some things in the world. The SteveS' extended 
>> mind might extend out slow/large loops like *knowing* that you have 
>> your smartphone and can use Google at any given time, or *expecting* 
>> that a city you're arriving to for the first time will have things like 
>> overpasses and coffee shops, not only because your prior experiences 
>> have programmed that in, but because you know other humans, with 
>> similar bodies/brains (and archetypes) built those cities.
>>
>> Traveling to a completely foreign city like Pyongyang will expose 
>> "other" not-self in the same way trying to learn a new game or sport 
>> will expose "other" not-self.
>>
>> A discussion of self is meaningless without a discussion of scope.

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] The Possibility of Self Knowledgke

Because "what inputs" is ambiguous. If I were generous, I could interpret your 
rhetoric as pushing for a difference in degree, not kind. As when you talk 
about privied or non-privied "knowledge". You're simply saying that it's all 
the same ... planted in the same, flattened space. And that would be FINE, if 
you would actually talk about that space ... i.e. define your distance 
measure/metric. But if you don't talk about distance/scope/extent, the ordering 
by which some fact is more than or less than some other fact, then you're not 
discussing scope. You're simply flattening everything without talking about how 
differences of degree might either be:

a) mistaken for differences in kind, or
b) emergent, amassing/accreting such that what reductively is a difference in 
degree *becomes* a difference in kind.

You simply assert your way along, never engaging with anything anyone else ever 
says. You can change this by discussing scope/extent directly. But you won't.

On 11/8/21 11:42 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Just how does this question,
> 
>  
> 
>> /"What inputs do we use to infer facts about our selves?"/
> 
>  
> 
> not address the issue of scope?

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] The Possibility of Self Knowledgke

 
>> not at all (or only barely aware of)... we are products of growing up in, or 
>> living in currently a landscape, a cityscape, etc.)
>>
>> I know this is somewhat oblique/tangential/orthogonal to the point you are 
>> making, but I nevertheless felt compelled to make it here as it schmears the 
>> question of self-knowledge in a (I believe)  significant way.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> On 11/7/21 10:33 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com 
>> <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Eric inter alia,
>>
>>  
>>
>> The position I have taken concerning self knowledge is that all 
>> knowledge is of the form of inferences made from evidence.  To the extent 
>> that some sources of knowledge may lead to better inferences-- may better 
>> prepare the organism for what follows--  some may be more privileged than 
>> others, but that privilege needs to be demonstrated.  Being in the same body 
>> as the knowing system does not grant  the  knowing system any */a priori/* 
>> privilege.  If you have followed me so far, then a self-knowing system is 
>> using sensors to infer (fallibly) the state of itself.  So if Glen and 
>> Marcus concede that this is the only knowledge we ever get about anything, 
>> than I will eagerly concede that this is “self-knowledge”.  It’s only if you 
>> claim that self-knowing is of a different character than other-knowing, that 
>> we need to bicker further.  I stipulate that my point is trivial, but not 
>> that it’s false. 
>>
>>  
>>
>> I have cc’d bits of the thread in below in case you all have forgotten.  
>> I could not find any contribution from Eric in this subject within the 
>> thread, although he did have something to say about poker, hence I am 
>> rethreading.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick . 
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick Thompson
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
>> <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
>>
>> 18
>>
>>
>>   uǝlƃ ☤>$via <https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en> 
>> redfish.com 
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nov 1, 2021, 4:20 PM (6 days ago)
>>
>>
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>
>>  
>>  
>>
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> to friam
>>
>>
>> Literal self-awareness is possible. The flaw in your argument is that 
>> "self" is ambiguous in the way you're using it. It's not ambiguous in the 
>> way me or Marcus intend it. You can see this nicely if you elide "know" from 
>> your argument.  We know nothing. The machine knows nothing. Just don't use 
>> the word "know" or the concept it references.  There need not be a model 
>> involved, either, only sensors and things to be sensed.
>>
>> Self-sensing means there is a feedback loop between the sensor and the 
>> thing it senses. So, the sensor measures the sensed and the sensed measures 
>> the sensor. That is self-awareness. There's no need for any of the 
>> psychological hooha you often object to. There's no need for privileged 
>> information *except* that there has to be a loop. If anything is privileged, 
>> it's the causal loop.
>>
>> The real trick is composing multiple self-self loops into something 
>> resembling what we call a conscious agent. We can get to the uncanny valley 
>> with regular old self-sensing control theory and robotics. Getting beyond 
>> the valley is difficult: https://youtu.be/D8_VmWWRJgE 
>> <https://youtu.be/D8_VmWWRJgE> A similar demonstration is here: 
>> https://youtu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8 <https://youtu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8>
>>
>>
>> Attachments area
>>
>> Preview YouTube video Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze 
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8_VmWWRJgE=0>
>>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8_VmWWRJgE=0>
>>
>>     <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8_VmWWRJgE=0>
>>
>>  
>>
>> Preview YouTube video Mark Tilden explaining Walkman (VBug1.5) at the 
>> 1995 BEAM Robot Games 
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ncDPoa_n-8=0>
>>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ncDPoa_n-8=0>
>>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ncDPoa_n-8=0>
>>
>>  
>>
&

Re: [FRIAM] lurking

Thanks, Steve. A reminder the movie event is this Thursday: 
https://watch.eventive.org/aware/play/615f2c9cfb31210037ecade7

And although these may be overvalued, they and ones like them are finally 
showing some progress:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CMPS?p=CMPS&.tsrc=fin-srch
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MNMD?p=MNMD&.tsrc=fin-srch

The argument surrounding plant awareness and expression is interesting. It 
makes sense to me to argue that if plants are "sentient" in any operable sense, 
their communication and self-sensing would occur at the molecular scale, 
perhaps going outward a bit to tissue and inward a bit to coherence. 
(Interesting, if a bit romantic, essay here: 
https://quantumfrontiers.com/2021/11/07/entangled-fields-and-post-anthropocene-computation-quantum-perspectives-for-a-healthy-planet/)
 But my guess is most of the larger scale sounds plants generate are 
non-sentient acoustic emission, like your motor clicking after you shut it off. 
But who knows, vibration may be similar to "force-based" treatments like 
physical therapy or massage ... or even acupressure. Just because acupuncture 
seems like pure pseudoscience, other force-based therapy, including 
vibration-based may have finer grained impact than we can currently account for 
(e.g. 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/ultrasonic-cavitation).
 Heliotropism is also a thing, I guess.

On 11/1/21 1:37 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I found this article on consciousness interestingly broadening of my own view 
> of it:
> 
> https://www.geekwire.com/2021/neuroscientist-recounts-long-strange-trip-plumb-depths-consciousness/
> 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] effective altruism at work!

2021-11-03 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Ha! No, Musk can't have whatever values he has. His values impinge on the world 
around him. And that impingement will result in a recoil counter-impingement. 
Our society is still liberal. So such people are allowed a lot of slack. But 
there is a price to pay somewhere, by someone, for such hubris.

E.g. more Rationalism at work:

My Experience with Leverage Research
https://scribe.rip/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b

Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1

On 11/2/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> And referencing your hilarious "let them eat space" remark, one can 
> distinguish between saving the design or prototype for human life from the 
> current instances of life.   Democratic government is concerned with 
> governing, supposedly on behalf of the instances, and Musk can whatever 
> values he has.  


On 11/2/21 2:04 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> 
> Let them eat space! Elon Musk and the race to end world hunger
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/02/elon-musk-race-hunger-world-food-programme-global-disaster
> 
>> Musk’s excuse for not handing over a tiny portion of his wealth to the WFP 
>> is hardly original. Billionaires love to sorrowfully declare that they are 
>> dying to pay more tax, but they can’t bear to see their money used 
>> inefficiently, so, for everyone’s sake, they had better hoard it instead. 
>> Last week, in response to a (very short-lived) plan by the Democrats to tax 
>> billionaires, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would happily part with more 
>> of his dosh if there were assurances it would be spent well. “If we could 
>> find solutions where the money could be directed in a proper way, I have 
>> more to give.” Fellow billionaire Ray Dalio also said he would willingly pay 
>> more tax if it accomplished “greater productivity” but sadly, he wasn’t sure 
>> that it did. Musk, meanwhile, insinuated that he was doing us all a favour 
>> by not paying more tax. “My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars 
>> and preserve the light of consciousness,” he tweeted last Thursday. A couple 
>> of days later he darkly warned that a billionaire tax would trickle down. 
>> “Eventually they run out of other people’s money, and then they come for 
>> you.”
> 
> 
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

2021-11-03 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Yeah, I agree. But context is Queen. When the virus is created in the lab, it's 
done with real stuff distilled from the soupy world. Given enough of a 
difference in context, the robot may not be able to re-constitute the life 
because the soupy world surrounding the robot doesn't have the real stuff 
required. Such drastic context changes could be a result of translation through 
space or time. E.g. trying to construct, on Mars, an organism read/serialized 
on earth. Or e.g. trying to construct an organism read millennia ago, millennia 
in the future. It's naive to talk about "science" as if any given read-out 
formula thereby expressed is *complete*. Science is abstraction to a large 
extent ... maybe not as abstracting as math, of course. And science must remain 
"open" precisely because any formula it expresses is suspect, perhaps 
incomplete.

My favorite example is the magic brewing stick: 
https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/
 It *was* scientific to lay out the magic stick as a critical element of the 
brewing process, only to discover later that the stick isn't the important part.

On 11/2/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Even if that were so, viruses have been pulled from history or tweaked and 
> created in the lab.   So we have a design specification, and the means to 
> make it.One could imagine a robot fabricating the close-to-the-metal 
> machine too.   There is a story one can write down how it is done.   If there 
> is no story, it is not science we are talking about, it is something else.  

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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[FRIAM] effective altruism at work!


Let them eat space! Elon Musk and the race to end world hunger
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/02/elon-musk-race-hunger-world-food-programme-global-disaster

> Musk’s excuse for not handing over a tiny portion of his wealth to the WFP is 
> hardly original. Billionaires love to sorrowfully declare that they are dying 
> to pay more tax, but they can’t bear to see their money used inefficiently, 
> so, for everyone’s sake, they had better hoard it instead. Last week, in 
> response to a (very short-lived) plan by the Democrats to tax billionaires, 
> BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would happily part with more of his dosh if 
> there were assurances it would be spent well. “If we could find solutions 
> where the money could be directed in a proper way, I have more to give.” 
> Fellow billionaire Ray Dalio also said he would willingly pay more tax if it 
> accomplished “greater productivity” but sadly, he wasn’t sure that it did. 
> Musk, meanwhile, insinuated that he was doing us all a favour by not paying 
> more tax. “My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve 
> the light of consciousness,” he tweeted last Thursday. A couple of days later 
> he darkly warned that a billionaire tax would trickle down. “Eventually they 
> run out of other people’s money, and then they come for you.”



-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

tu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8 
> <https://youtu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8>
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> On 11/1/21 2:08 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> In fact, strictly speaking, I think literal self-awareness is impossible.  
>> Because, whatever a machine knows about itself, it is a MODEL of itself 
>> based on well situated sensors of its own activities, just like you are and 
>> I am.  There is no privileged access, just bettah or wussah access.


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> In fact, strictly speaking, I think literal self-awareness is impossible.  
>>> Because, whatever a machine knows about itself, it is a MODEL of itself 
>>> based on well situated sensors of its own activities, just like you are and 
>>> I am.  There is no privileged access, just bettah or wussah access.


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

Well, I could be wrong. But both Nick and EricC seem to argue there's no 
privilege "in the limit" ... i.e. with infeasibly extensible resources, perfect 
observability, etc. It's just a reactionary position against those who believe 
in souls or a cartesian cut. Ignore it. >8^D

But I don't think there can be *complete* privilege. Every time we think we 
come up with a way to keep the black hats out, they either find a way in ... or 
find a way to infer what's happening like with power or audio profiles.

I don't think anyone's arguing that peeks are expensive. The argument centers 
around the impact of that peek, how it's used. Your idea of compiling in 
diagnostics would submit to Nick's allegation of a *model*. I would argue we 
need even lower level self-organization. I vacillate between thinking digital 
computers could [not] be conscious because of this argument; the feedback loops 
may have to be very close to the metal, like fpga close. Maybe consciousness 
has to be analog in order to realize meta-programming at all scales?

On 11/2/21 7:36 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> My point was that the cost to probe some memory address is low.   And all 
> there is, is I/O and memory.  
> 
>  It does become difficult to track thousands of addresses at once:  Think of 
> a debugger that has millions of watchpoints.   However, one could have 
> diagnostics compiled in to the code to check invariants from time to time.   
> I don't know why Nick says there is no privilege.   There can be complete 
> privilege.   Extracting meaning from that access is rarely easy, of course.  
> Just as debugging any given problem can be hard.
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 3:20 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
> 
> Literal self-awareness is possible. The flaw in your argument is that "self" 
> is ambiguous in the way you're using it. It's not ambiguous in the way me or 
> Marcus intend it. You can see this nicely if you elide "know" from your 
> argument.  We know nothing. The machine knows nothing. Just don't use the 
> word "know" or the concept it references.  There need not be a model 
> involved, either, only sensors and things to be sensed. 
> 
> Self-sensing means there is a feedback loop between the sensor and the thing 
> it senses. So, the sensor measures the sensed and the sensed measures the 
> sensor. That is self-awareness. There's no need for any of the psychological 
> hooha you often object to. There's no need for privileged information 
> *except* that there has to be a loop. If anything is privileged, it's the 
> causal loop.
> 
> The real trick is composing multiple self-self loops into something 
> resembling what we call a conscious agent. We can get to the uncanny valley 
> with regular old self-sensing control theory and robotics. Getting beyond the 
> valley is difficult: https://youtu.be/D8_VmWWRJgE A similar demonstration is 
> here: https://youtu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/1/21 2:08 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>> In fact, strictly speaking, I think literal self-awareness is impossible.  
>> Because, whatever a machine knows about itself, it is a MODEL of itself 
>> based on well situated sensors of its own activities, just like you are and 
>> I am.  There is no privileged access, just bettah or wussah access.
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

Literal self-awareness is possible. The flaw in your argument is that "self" is 
ambiguous in the way you're using it. It's not ambiguous in the way me or 
Marcus intend it. You can see this nicely if you elide "know" from your 
argument.  We know nothing. The machine knows nothing. Just don't use the word 
"know" or the concept it references.  There need not be a model involved, 
either, only sensors and things to be sensed. 

Self-sensing means there is a feedback loop between the sensor and the thing it 
senses. So, the sensor measures the sensed and the sensed measures the sensor. 
That is self-awareness. There's no need for any of the psychological hooha you 
often object to. There's no need for privileged information *except* that there 
has to be a loop. If anything is privileged, it's the causal loop.

The real trick is composing multiple self-self loops into something resembling 
what we call a conscious agent. We can get to the uncanny valley with regular 
old self-sensing control theory and robotics. Getting beyond the valley is 
difficult: https://youtu.be/D8_VmWWRJgE A similar demonstration is here: 
https://youtu.be/7ncDPoa_n-8

On 11/1/21 2:08 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> In fact, strictly speaking, I think literal self-awareness is impossible.  
> Because, whatever a machine knows about itself, it is a MODEL of itself based 
> on well situated sensors of its own activities, just like you are and I am.  
> There is no privileged access, just bettah or wussah access.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

 from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space 
>>> to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more 
>>> than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say 
>>> there *do exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered 
>>> with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. 
>>> But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being 
>>> splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask 
>>> whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, 
>>> the answer to which is "yes and no".
>>>
>>> Feel free to pick yet another bone.
>>>
>>> On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> Glen writes:
>>>>
>>>> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker 
>>>> prowess, this is the world.>
>>>>
>>>> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy 
>>>> swimming in  them.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 1, 2021, at 7:20 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Holy fire hose, Batman!
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's 
>>>>> blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to 
>>>>> highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to 
>>>>> decorate it with text.
>>>>>
>>>>> • gaming & play
>>>>>  - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
>>>>>  - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?
>>>>>
>>>>> • digitization ⇒ virtualization
>>>>>  - parallelism theorem
>>>>>
>>>>> • corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
>>>>>  - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
>>>>>  - explosive bursts → escape from local optima
>>>>>
>>>>> • preservation & provenance
>>>>>
>>>>> • ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
>>>>>  - corruption ← idealism
>>>>>  - meta-games ← abuse
>>>>>  - formal idea ⊂ dirty real
>>>>>
>>>>> Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones 
>>>>> to pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all 
>>>>> the nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread 
>>>>> through the whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether 
>>>>> hyper- and meta-games are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the 
>>>>> Highlands, to Jon and Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, 
>>>>> Doug's transhumanist assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of 
>>>>> the polity, the fire hose presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming 
>>>>> in a sea of the dirty real.
>>>>>
>>>>> The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games 
>>>>> can be devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't 
>>>>> survive contact with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and 
>>>>> any given video game, however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target 
>>>>> Jochen's and Jon's disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to 
>>>>> eliminate abuse, corruption, corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a 
>>>>> large extent, those forces are, if not welcome in themselves, inscrutably 
>>>>> intertwined with all the other forces. It's the same machine that 
>>>>> produces both good and bad. And that machine lives in this world, not 
>>>>> some ideal world formalized by a (provably) myopic subset of that world.
>>>>>
>>>>> So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting 
>>>>> the armies of actual great people that came before ... and as 
>>>>> cringy as it is to see Pepe the Frog and wonder whether it's a 
>>>>> racist meme or just juvy gamer silliness ... or as cringy as it may 
>>>>> be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, this is the 
>>>>> world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and miraculous that 
>>>>> many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive glory. Ha! 
>>>>> Maybe it's not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my part. 


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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[FRIAM] quantified self (was lurking)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self

The question, maybe, is what does the obsessive measuring and the implied 
hyper-socialization do that's bad? I got in an argument recently. Surprise! I 
told a couple of dudes that I like working out in a fasted state, lately weight 
lifting after a 36 hour fast (or preferably at the tail end of a 42 hour fast). 
I described how cool it was to get that vertigo while working out, especially 
after the dead lift. And how cool it was to see my blood sugar spike from ~79 
(before) up to ~100 after the workout. They were all like "Why?!?! Why would 
you do that?" My 1st tack on explaining it was about discovering "helicopter" 
as a kid, where you spin around until you're so dizzy you fall into the grass 
and stare at the spinning sky. Then as a teen, you graduate to, maybe, Nitrous 
whip-its from aerosol can of whipped cream. Then, if you're of the bent, maybe 
you graduate to serious game-changing chemicals or "enhancements" of some other 
kind (including AR/VR). There are plenty of competitive purposes to such 
things. In college, a critical part of boxing was to do somersaults up and down 
the gym until we puked ... in order to get used to fighting while dizzy. But 
there are hosts of non-competitive purposes.

Anyway, that these 2 dudes couldn't "play along" at all ... had no way to get 
into the idea that working out while fasted was at least interesting, if not 
Good For You, frustrated me. So, I lamely launched into the glycogen story, 
insulin resistance reset, pre- & type 3 diabetes, etc. Whatever. That tack 
works kindasorta. But it's WAAAYYY lamer than my actual reason, which is simply 
because it's fun.

But such measures can, I agree with you, become a sickness. And when you make 
yourself sick that way, it's just sad.  When you do it to other people, it's 
despicable.

On 11/1/21 11:32 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> < You keep focusing on competition. >
> 
> I'm more irritated by the desire to measure (via observed communication or 
> testing), to hyper-socialize, and to specialize, than to compete.   I think 
> that people have an interesting unique consciousness that is disrupted by 
> these measurement and categorization protocols.  (The behaviorists can piss 
> off.)  It also could be true that people that fail to participate in some 
> cooperative or competitive games have their own deficits.   I am advocating 
> for the first, because the second I think is already a well-represented 
> position.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] lurking

 game "blind", having 
>> the "fun" the game maker intended. I agree with you that this isn't really 
>> *play*, not in the loaded sense you and SteveS were using it. It's simply 
>> following along with the author's intent. It always involves a lot of things 
>> like suspension of disbelief. In written fiction, that's psychological. In 
>> video games, it's a willingness to overlook artifacts and bugs like 
>> ill-fitted textures or a failure in constructive geometry, as well as 
>> inconsistencies in the "lore".
>>
>> But after that blind playthrough, gamers ... being gamers ... will start 
>> playing, actual play, in the sense you mean it. Such play is, in software 
>> words, an attempt to find the edge cases. Here, the willingness to overlook 
>> the bugs becomes a focus on the bugs ... "cheesing bosses" ... using 
>> exploits to win at PvP, etc. While this is play, it's not the best play. The 
>> best play is when the edge cases are plugged by other players as is done in 
>> MMOs. You're trying to exploit a feature while they're blocking your 
>> exploit, perhaps with another exploit. This is no different from 2 tiger 
>> cubs learning the relationships between their body, the other cub, gravity, 
>> etc.
>>
>> So, lumping all gamers into the category of dolts who only follow the 
>> storyline isn't accurate at all. I've never met a gamer who does that. Even 
>> in the worst cases, say, where people claim to be big fans of trash fiction 
>> ... they do play with it at least a little bit. Harry Potter is a great 
>> example, just off the tail of Halloween.
>>
>> And lumping all gamers into hyper-competitive maximizers isn't accurate 
>> either. Yes, some gamers are just jerks. My dad was a classic example. He'd 
>> throw a hissy fit if my mom screwed up a hand and they lost at bridge. His 
>> competitive obsession prevented him from understanding the larger game ... 
>> the meta-game. Most gamers are not like your caricature ... even those who 
>> explicitly game the system so that they win. In office games, it's often 
>> enough to simply signal to the gamer that you know they're gaming it and 
>> they will change their tactics on the fly. Which tactics they use and how 
>> they react to your signal can tell you what kind of gamer they are ... 
>> hyper-competitive morons or truly appreciative of the world.
>>
>> The real problem, in my experience, are the people who play the game but 
>> refuse to admit they're playing a game ... insist that what *they* do is not 
>> a game or that it would be wrong, immoral, to gamify it.
>>
>> On 11/1/21 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Games are indeed everywhere.   Topics of inherent interest sometimes fall 
>>> under the category of (professional) work.  Approaching those topics in the 
>>> way I would like would be much less structured if it were up to me.  But 
>>> no, work is another effing game, so I must try to keep the monsters (that 
>>> is, some reliable fraction of my colleagues) at bay.  People who care about 
>>> nothing but maximizing their status in the organization by gaming the 
>>> system of rules associated with the organization and their position in it.  
>>>  
>>> Play and games are not the same thing.   Games are a social construct.  
>>> The gamers are the people that impinge my ability to reflect and be 
>>> creative.  They are a source of anxiety and distraction.  They work in the 
>>> world of extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation.  
>>>
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>>> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 8:27 AM
>>> To: friam@redfish.com
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>>
>>> Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning.
>>>
>>> But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space 
>>> to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more 
>>> than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say 
>>> there *do exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered 
>>> with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. 
>>> But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being 
>>> splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask 
>>> whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, 
>>> the answer to which is "yes and no".
>>>
>>&g

Re: [FRIAM] lurking

t; And lumping all gamers into hyper-competitive maximizers isn't accurate 
> either. Yes, some gamers are just jerks. My dad was a classic example. He'd 
> throw a hissy fit if my mom screwed up a hand and they lost at bridge. His 
> competitive obsession prevented him from understanding the larger game ... 
> the meta-game. Most gamers are not like your caricature ... even those who 
> explicitly game the system so that they win. In office games, it's often 
> enough to simply signal to the gamer that you know they're gaming it and they 
> will change their tactics on the fly. Which tactics they use and how they 
> react to your signal can tell you what kind of gamer they are ... 
> hyper-competitive morons or truly appreciative of the world.
> 
> The real problem, in my experience, are the people who play the game but 
> refuse to admit they're playing a game ... insist that what *they* do is not 
> a game or that it would be wrong, immoral, to gamify it.
> 
> On 11/1/21 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Games are indeed everywhere.   Topics of inherent interest sometimes fall 
>> under the category of (professional) work.  Approaching those topics in the 
>> way I would like would be much less structured if it were up to me.  But no, 
>> work is another effing game, so I must try to keep the monsters (that is, 
>> some reliable fraction of my colleagues) at bay.  People who care about 
>> nothing but maximizing their status in the organization by gaming the system 
>> of rules associated with the organization and their position in it.   
>> Play and games are not the same thing.   Games are a social construct.  
>> The gamers are the people that impinge my ability to reflect and be 
>> creative.  They are a source of anxiety and distraction.  They work in the 
>> world of extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation.  
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 8:27 AM
>> To: friam@redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>
>> Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning.
>>
>> But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space 
>> to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more 
>> than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say 
>> there *do exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered 
>> with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. 
>> But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being 
>> splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask 
>> whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, the 
>> answer to which is "yes and no".
>>
>> Feel free to pick yet another bone.
>>
>> On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Glen writes:
>>>
>>> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker 
>>> prowess, this is the world.>
>>>
>>> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy 
>>> swimming in  them.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Nov 1, 2021, at 7:20 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Holy fire hose, Batman!
>>>>
>>>> I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's 
>>>> blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to 
>>>> highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate 
>>>> it with text.
>>>>
>>>> • gaming & play
>>>>  - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
>>>>  - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?
>>>>
>>>> • digitization ⇒ virtualization
>>>>  - parallelism theorem
>>>>
>>>> • corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
>>>>  - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
>>>>  - explosive bursts → escape from local optima
>>>>
>>>> • preservation & provenance
>>>>
>>>> • ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
>>>>  - corruption ← idealism
>>>>  - meta-games ← abuse
>>>>  - formal idea ⊂ dirty real
>>>>
>>>> Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones 
>>>> to pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all 
>>>> the nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow

Re: [FRIAM] lurking

Right. But by citing the gamer glossary, I'm attempting to point out that 
gamers *are* playful. The speedrun is an excellent example. Some earnest game 
maker(s) put together what they think is an interesting and fun, often a bit 
collaborative, fiction. A typical gamer plays the game "blind", having the 
"fun" the game maker intended. I agree with you that this isn't really *play*, 
not in the loaded sense you and SteveS were using it. It's simply following 
along with the author's intent. It always involves a lot of things like 
suspension of disbelief. In written fiction, that's psychological. In video 
games, it's a willingness to overlook artifacts and bugs like ill-fitted 
textures or a failure in constructive geometry, as well as inconsistencies in 
the "lore".

But after that blind playthrough, gamers ... being gamers ... will start 
playing, actual play, in the sense you mean it. Such play is, in software 
words, an attempt to find the edge cases. Here, the willingness to overlook the 
bugs becomes a focus on the bugs ... "cheesing bosses" ... using exploits to 
win at PvP, etc. While this is play, it's not the best play. The best play is 
when the edge cases are plugged by other players as is done in MMOs. You're 
trying to exploit a feature while they're blocking your exploit, perhaps with 
another exploit. This is no different from 2 tiger cubs learning the 
relationships between their body, the other cub, gravity, etc.

So, lumping all gamers into the category of dolts who only follow the storyline 
isn't accurate at all. I've never met a gamer who does that. Even in the worst 
cases, say, where people claim to be big fans of trash fiction ... they do play 
with it at least a little bit. Harry Potter is a great example, just off the 
tail of Halloween.

And lumping all gamers into hyper-competitive maximizers isn't accurate either. 
Yes, some gamers are just jerks. My dad was a classic example. He'd throw a 
hissy fit if my mom screwed up a hand and they lost at bridge. His competitive 
obsession prevented him from understanding the larger game ... the meta-game. 
Most gamers are not like your caricature ... even those who explicitly game the 
system so that they win. In office games, it's often enough to simply signal to 
the gamer that you know they're gaming it and they will change their tactics on 
the fly. Which tactics they use and how they react to your signal can tell you 
what kind of gamer they are ... hyper-competitive morons or truly appreciative 
of the world.

The real problem, in my experience, are the people who play the game but refuse 
to admit they're playing a game ... insist that what *they* do is not a game or 
that it would be wrong, immoral, to gamify it.

On 11/1/21 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Games are indeed everywhere.   Topics of inherent interest sometimes fall 
> under the category of (professional) work.  Approaching those topics in the 
> way I would like would be much less structured if it were up to me.  But no, 
> work is another effing game, so I must try to keep the monsters (that is, 
> some reliable fraction of my colleagues) at bay.  People who care about 
> nothing but maximizing their status in the organization by gaming the system 
> of rules associated with the organization and their position in it.   
> Play and games are not the same thing.   Games are a social construct.  
> The gamers are the people that impinge my ability to reflect and be creative. 
>  They are a source of anxiety and distraction.  They work in the world of 
> extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation.  
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 8:27 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
> 
> Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning.
> 
> But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space 
> to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more 
> than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say 
> there *do exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered 
> with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. 
> But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being 
> splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask 
> whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, the 
> answer to which is "yes and no".
> 
> Feel free to pick yet another bone.
> 
> On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Glen writes:
>>
>> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker 
>> prowess, this is the world.>
>>
>> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy

Re: [FRIAM] lurking

Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning.

But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space to 
agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more than 
hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say there *do 
exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered with sh¡t. And 
they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. But if you actually 
hang out with such people, you'll notice that being splattered with sh¡t does 
lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask whether they enjoy being 
splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, the answer to which is "yes and 
no".

Feel free to pick yet another bone.

On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Glen writes:
> 
> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, 
> this is the world.>
> 
> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy 
> swimming in  them.
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 1, 2021, at 7:20 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$  wrote:
>>
>> Holy fire hose, Batman!
>>
>> I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's 
>> blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to 
>> highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate 
>> it with text.
>>
>> • gaming & play
>>  - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
>>  - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?
>>
>> • digitization ⇒ virtualization
>>  - parallelism theorem
>>
>> • corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
>>  - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
>>  - explosive bursts → escape from local optima
>>
>> • preservation & provenance
>>
>> • ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
>>  - corruption ← idealism
>>  - meta-games ← abuse
>>  - formal idea ⊂ dirty real
>>
>> Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones to 
>> pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all the 
>> nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread through 
>> the whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether hyper- and 
>> meta-games are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the Highlands, to 
>> Jon and Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, Doug's 
>> transhumanist assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of the polity, 
>> the fire hose presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming in a sea of the 
>> dirty real.
>>
>> The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games can 
>> be devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't survive 
>> contact with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and any given 
>> video game, however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target Jochen's and 
>> Jon's disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to eliminate abuse, 
>> corruption, corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a large extent, those 
>> forces are, if not welcome in themselves, inscrutably intertwined with all 
>> the other forces. It's the same machine that produces both good and bad. And 
>> that machine lives in this world, not some ideal world formalized by a 
>> (provably) myopic subset of that world.
>>
>> So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting the 
>> armies of actual great people that came before ... and as cringy as it is to 
>> see Pepe the Frog and wonder whether it's a racist meme or just juvy gamer 
>> silliness ... or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their 
>> Poker prowess, this is the world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and 
>> miraculous that many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive 
>> glory. Ha! Maybe it's not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my 
>> part. >8^D

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
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 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

[FRIAM] lurking

Holy fire hose, Batman!

I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's blast 
of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to highlight. 
I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate it with text.

• gaming & play
  - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
  - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?

• digitization ⇒ virtualization
  - parallelism theorem

• corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
  - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
  - explosive bursts → escape from local optima

• preservation & provenance

• ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
  - corruption ← idealism
  - meta-games ← abuse
  - formal idea ⊂ dirty real

Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones to 
pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all the nits 
that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread through the 
whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether hyper- and meta-games 
are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the Highlands, to Jon and 
Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, Doug's transhumanist 
assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of the polity, the fire hose 
presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming in a sea of the dirty real.

The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games can be 
devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't survive contact 
with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and any given video game, 
however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target Jochen's and Jon's 
disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to eliminate abuse, corruption, 
corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a large extent, those forces are, if 
not welcome in themselves, inscrutably intertwined with all the other forces. 
It's the same machine that produces both good and bad. And that machine lives 
in this world, not some ideal world formalized by a (provably) myopic subset of 
that world.

So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting the armies 
of actual great people that came before ... and as cringy as it is to see Pepe 
the Frog and wonder whether it's a racist meme or just juvy gamer silliness ... 
or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, 
this is the world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and miraculous that 
many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive glory. Ha! Maybe it's 
not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my part. >8^D



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Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

as a group -- I say 
>>>> fair enough. 
>>>>
>>>> -Original Message-
>>>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>>>> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2021 9:40 AM
>>>> To: friam@redfish.com
>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)
>>>>
>>>> There's an opportunity to dovetail the pandemic-hastened restructuring of 
>>>> the work force, cancel culture, upward trends in socialism, and climate 
>>>> change. At the last salon, I was berated, yet again, for allowing my pet 
>>>> cats free access to the outdoors. The tack I took in the conversation, 
>>>> because we weren't just chatting, we were "in salon" (whatever that 
>>>> means), was a crypto-criticism of Utilitarianism. I chose this because my 
>>>> gank [] of opponents are "ecologists", asserting the debatable 
>>>> devastation of domestic cats on biodiversity. Yes, this post is also about 
>>>> value alignment and the arrogant grand narrative of Societal Engineering 
>>>> for Biodiversity.
>>>>
>>>> I will not be able to retire, nor will most of the people my age or 
>>>> younger. Or, you could slip a little on the binding and say most of us 
>>>> have retired many times, from many different jobs, to clear space so we 
>>>> can launch a career in another dead-end job. What is it we're doing, as a 
>>>> society? If we buy that cultural evolution is a thing, what are the 
>>>> operators? Are we witnessing new operators or are these the same old 
>>>> operators, just percolating into our privileged space from their endemic 
>>>> home amongst the underprivileged classes. There are several essays on how 
>>>> tribal life was NOT "nasty, brutish, and short", but more laconic ... like 
>>>> a cat's ... explosive efforts of hunt or defend, punctuating periods of 
>>>> resting and futzing with the tools. Modern "anti-workers" 
>>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/quit-your-job-join-anti-work-movement-elle-hunt>
>>>>  sound a bit like cats, to me.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, there is the stereotype of a solitary stray living under 
>>>> constant stress, scraping through dumpsters or hunting moths between 
>>>> desperate fights with other strays and their bacteria-poisoned teeth and 
>>>> claws. But this is, I think, a bit of a myth born of fallacious 
>>>> inter-species mind-reading by hedonic humans. Part of the reason cats are 
>>>> so devastating to "wildlife" is because they are not hedonic at all. 
>>>> They've all got a thrill-seeking death wish. Well, most do. We have a cat 
>>>> who has a mental illness, maybe many. She stays in her Princess Dungeon 
>>>> all day every day, only exiting to use the box or make the terrifying 
>>>> journey to the water and food upstairs. But every other cat I've ever 
>>>> interacted with is part of the nihilistic thrill-kill cult. Of course 
>>>> we'll take the rare opportunity to rest comfy in a dry puff of dirty 
>>>> laundry sometimes. But mostly, we'd rather be squinting in the cold rain, 
>>>> statue-still, waiting to pounce, chase, kill, and rend.
>>>>
>>>> So, like my cat-hating ecologist gankers, I don't feel pity for the 
>>>> homeless, suffering kitten scraping by out there. This is the world. Life 
>>>> sucks. Then you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it.
>>>>
>>>> I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how 
>>>> this relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, 
>>>> explaining it ruins it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms
>>>>
>>>> On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>> It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious 
>>>>> in their remarks.   What difference does it make if they inflame?  It 
>>>>> isn't like they could be fired for it.   Old habits die hard, I guess.
>>>>
>>>
>>
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

ental illness, maybe many. She stays in her Princess Dungeon all 
>>> day every day, only exiting to use the box or make the terrifying journey 
>>> to the water and food upstairs. But every other cat I've ever interacted 
>>> with is part of the nihilistic thrill-kill cult. Of course we'll take the 
>>> rare opportunity to rest comfy in a dry puff of dirty laundry sometimes. 
>>> But mostly, we'd rather be squinting in the cold rain, statue-still, 
>>> waiting to pounce, chase, kill, and rend.
>>>
>>> So, like my cat-hating ecologist gankers, I don't feel pity for the 
>>> homeless, suffering kitten scraping by out there. This is the world. Life 
>>> sucks. Then you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it.
>>>
>>> I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how this 
>>> relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, explaining 
>>> it ruins it.
>>>
>>>
>>> [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms
>>>
>>> On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious in 
>>>> their remarks.   What difference does it make if they inflame?  It isn't 
>>>> like they could be fired for it.   Old habits die hard, I guess.
>>>
>>
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

s some ideas pass through her head about thrill 
>> kills.   So long as it is all good -- individually as a group -- I say fair 
>> enough. 
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2021 9:40 AM
>> To: friam@redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)
>>
>> There's an opportunity to dovetail the pandemic-hastened restructuring of 
>> the work force, cancel culture, upward trends in socialism, and climate 
>> change. At the last salon, I was berated, yet again, for allowing my pet 
>> cats free access to the outdoors. The tack I took in the conversation, 
>> because we weren't just chatting, we were "in salon" (whatever that means), 
>> was a crypto-criticism of Utilitarianism. I chose this because my gank [] 
>> of opponents are "ecologists", asserting the debatable devastation of 
>> domestic cats on biodiversity. Yes, this post is also about value alignment 
>> and the arrogant grand narrative of Societal Engineering for Biodiversity.
>>
>> I will not be able to retire, nor will most of the people my age or younger. 
>> Or, you could slip a little on the binding and say most of us have retired 
>> many times, from many different jobs, to clear space so we can launch a 
>> career in another dead-end job. What is it we're doing, as a society? If we 
>> buy that cultural evolution is a thing, what are the operators? Are we 
>> witnessing new operators or are these the same old operators, just 
>> percolating into our privileged space from their endemic home amongst the 
>> underprivileged classes. There are several essays on how tribal life was NOT 
>> "nasty, brutish, and short", but more laconic ... like a cat's ... explosive 
>> efforts of hunt or defend, punctuating periods of resting and futzing with 
>> the tools. Modern "anti-workers" 
>> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/quit-your-job-join-anti-work-movement-elle-hunt>
>>  sound a bit like cats, to me.
>>
>> Of course, there is the stereotype of a solitary stray living under constant 
>> stress, scraping through dumpsters or hunting moths between desperate fights 
>> with other strays and their bacteria-poisoned teeth and claws. But this is, 
>> I think, a bit of a myth born of fallacious inter-species mind-reading by 
>> hedonic humans. Part of the reason cats are so devastating to "wildlife" is 
>> because they are not hedonic at all. They've all got a thrill-seeking death 
>> wish. Well, most do. We have a cat who has a mental illness, maybe many. She 
>> stays in her Princess Dungeon all day every day, only exiting to use the box 
>> or make the terrifying journey to the water and food upstairs. But every 
>> other cat I've ever interacted with is part of the nihilistic thrill-kill 
>> cult. Of course we'll take the rare opportunity to rest comfy in a dry puff 
>> of dirty laundry sometimes. But mostly, we'd rather be squinting in the cold 
>> rain, statue-still, waiting to pounce, chase, kill, and rend.
>>
>> So, like my cat-hating ecologist gankers, I don't feel pity for the 
>> homeless, suffering kitten scraping by out there. This is the world. Life 
>> sucks. Then you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it.
>>
>> I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how this 
>> relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, explaining it 
>> ruins it.
>>
>>
>> [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms
>>
>> On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious in 
>>> their remarks.   What difference does it make if they inflame?  It isn't 
>>> like they could be fired for it.   Old habits die hard, I guess.
>>
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

I'm a bit surprised nobody has replied to this. I can't contribute much, being 
ill-suited to formal education. But that raises a point. If we divide causation 
into 2 types, which I'll call "push" and "pull", structuring a school like what 
you seem to be doing will require canalization. Your purpose is to put in place 
a (complex) estuary, as it were, that balances the student's natural pull 
(desire, curiosity, etc.) against some set of heuristics you want to push, to 
instill ... the topology of the estuary.

There are similar schools in various places, I suppose mostly liberal arts 
schools. And, in my travels, I've run across people who have *still* not found 
a path through the tangled canals that were "pushed", no matter how 
accommodating. Similarly, I've found people (like a couple of old roommates at 
aTm) who simply want someone to tell them what to learn so they can move on, 
get a job, have kids, and retire.

So ... admittedly having only barely guessed at your plans ... how do you plan 
to balance the push and pull? Must all your students be super go-getters? Or 
will you plan to knead the lazy and shiftless ones, too? Will you use 
classifiers like Myers-Briggs to route some into the arts and some into STEM 
canals? Or rely exclusively on implicit self-classification? And since you plan 
to facilitate both poor and wealthy students, how do you plan to handle some 
in-group/tribal influences like the draw some of our poor get towards gang 
membership or even working the family farm?

On 10/27/21 11:25 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> The public education system in South Africa is largely broken. For those who 
> can afford it, we have very good schools, but the majority cannot and the 
> education options for them are bleak.
> 
> I plan to do something about it.
> 
> This is my second attempt. About three years ago I started a school as a 
> proof of concept with a radical model to have very high quality yet very low 
> cost education and it failed miserably. (I managed to make plans for the kids 
> and I don't believe any suffered from the experience - I pulled the plug 
> before too much harm was done). I've thought, and discussed it a lot, and I'm 
> ready to roll out my second, very different attempt.
> 
> The basis of this is that there are plenty of resources available for free, 
> and provided you manage the environment properly, kids can and will teach 
> themselves.
> 
> My plan is a model with two legs, both legs offering very high quality 
> education, but the first leg is relatively expensive and has "bells and 
> whistles" to attract the wealthy and the second is bare bones to make it 
> affordable for those kids whose parents can't pay.
> 
> The profit from first leg schools then cross-subsidise the costs of the 
> second leg schools. 
> 
> The concept for both legs are copied from https://www.khanlabschool.org/ 
> <https://www.khanlabschool.org/> , adapted for local conditions of course. 
> The second leg schools will just be a low cost version, but the education 
> offered will still be world class.
> 
> Our academic year starts in January. I'm working flat out to have my first 
> school of the first leg open in January 2022. Then to have the first school 
> of the second leg open in January 2023. Then to learn from the experience, 
> adapt and roll it out so that every child in South Africa has access to world 
> class education in five years time.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

ng by out there. This is the world. Life sucks. Then 
> you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it.
> 
> I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how this 
> relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, explaining it 
> ruins it.
> 
> 
> [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms
> 
> On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious in 
>> their remarks.   What difference does it make if they inflame?  It isn't 
>> like they could be fired for it.   Old habits die hard, I guess.
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] we are lost

2021-10-28 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Nah. Irony is more than a guilty pleasure. It's a crucial tool in the 
authentication toolbox. That becomes obvious when considering gate keeping 
between subcultures. It's easy to assume such gate keeping is bad. 
Hyper-democrats make such assumptions all the time. But gate keeping is simply 
a form of establishing us vs. them. And it's not merely binary, either. There 
are scales to irony. When you express a layered irony, based on the feedback 
from it, you can distinguish Them from Tourists from Ally from Us. This is, 
essentially, [Counter ]Intelligence 101. 

As for what categories want, there's a perfectly non-teleological connotation 
of "want" that we could have used to respond to Roger's question, that hooks 
almost like lock and key, or hand in glove, to the recent thread(s) on duality. 
But, again, "know 10 things. say 9."

On 10/28/21 11:29 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 10/28/21 7:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> 
>>> So, not only do we attribute teleology to inanimate objects, weather, 
>>> animals, and people, but also to the platonic solids.  Which probably leads 
>>> to:
>>>
>>>   What do categories want?
>> 
>> Love, recognition and safety?   Someone phone HR and get the ball rolling on 
>> a new policy!
>> 
> 
> Spoken from the high perch of Irony.  Irony is like wormwood, delightful in 
> small doses but ultimately toxic.  Do we not all want love, recognition, and 
> safety?  Do we also want excitement and challenge.  Go figure!   Some of us 
> crave more of the one; some more of the other.  Given the contradiction 
> between those things, can we expect the right balance be guaranteed for each 
> and every one of us, for all time?  No.  Of course not.   But is that reason 
> to mock human striving toward these goals?  Or to mock Utilitarian attempts 
> to facilitate their achievement?  No.  I don’t think so.  Irony is a guilty 
> pleasure.  Even though I use it and enjoy it, I have to admit that it is a an 
> abdication and fails as a policy. 
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

2021-10-28 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

There's an opportunity to dovetail the pandemic-hastened restructuring of the
work force, cancel culture, upward trends in socialism, and climate change. At
the last salon, I was berated, yet again, for allowing my pet cats free access
to the outdoors. The tack I took in the conversation, because we weren't just
chatting, we were "in salon" (whatever that means), was a crypto-criticism of
Utilitarianism. I chose this because my gank [] of opponents are "ecologists",
asserting the debatable devastation of domestic cats on biodiversity. Yes, this
post is also about value alignment and the arrogant grand narrative of Societal
Engineering for Biodiversity.

I will not be able to retire, nor will most of the people my age or younger.
Or, you could slip a little on the binding and say most of us have retired many
times, from many different jobs, to clear space so we can launch a career in
another dead-end job. What is it we're doing, as a society? If we buy that
cultural evolution is a thing, what are the operators? Are we witnessing new
operators or are these the same old operators, just percolating into our
privileged space from their endemic home amongst the underprivileged classes.
There are several essays on how tribal life was NOT "nasty, brutish, and
short", but more laconic ... like a cat's ... explosive efforts of hunt or
defend, punctuating periods of resting and futzing with the tools. Modern
"anti-workers"
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/quit-your-job-join-anti-work-movement-elle-hunt>
sound a bit like cats, to me.

Of course, there is the stereotype of a solitary stray living under constant
stress, scraping through dumpsters or hunting moths between desperate fights
with other strays and their bacteria-poisoned teeth and claws. But this is, I
think, a bit of a myth born of fallacious inter-species mind-reading by hedonic
humans. Part of the reason cats are so devastating to "wildlife" is because
they are not hedonic at all. They've all got a thrill-seeking death wish. Well,
most do. We have a cat who has a mental illness, maybe many. She stays in her
Princess Dungeon all day every day, only exiting to use the box or make the
terrifying journey to the water and food upstairs. But every other cat I've
ever interacted with is part of the nihilistic thrill-kill cult. Of course
we'll take the rare opportunity to rest comfy in a dry puff of dirty laundry
sometimes. But mostly, we'd rather be squinting in the cold rain, statue-still,
waiting to pounce, chase, kill, and rend.

So, like my cat-hating ecologist gankers, I don't feel pity for the homeless,
suffering kitten scraping by out there. This is the world. Life sucks. Then you
die. The trick is learning to enjoy it.

I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how this
relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, explaining it
ruins it.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms

On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious in
> their remarks. What difference does it make if they inflame? It isn't like
> they could be fired for it. Old habits die hard, I guess.

--
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

[FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution)

How is what I wrote ad hominem? Suggesting you modernists might be suckered 
into a narrative? Calling you a modernist? Is "modernist" an insult? I just 
don't get it. Sorry.

Re: what cannot be said - There are no sacred cows. Anything can be written. 
SteveG does step in to moderate, but rarely. The real argument isn't about what 
cannot be written. It's about the appropriateness of this forum, this type of 
forum, for some *styles* of writing. Email fora are not well-suited to 
chatting. For that, use Twitter, IRC, Discord, Slack, Zoom, group texts, etc. 
That's what they're designed for. Some fora like Instagram and TikTok also 
tolerate chatting nicely. But it's ideally for pictures or short videos. 

In this particular case, your "neener, neener, neener" meaning *might* have 
been clear to me had we been in a different type of forum, one suited to 
chatting. But this ain't it. And, in such a chat-friendly forum, it might also 
be more clear that my calling you a modernist was not an attack on your person 
... though you may perceive it as such, I suppose.

Re: Frank's question of persons other than the participants reading these 
conversations - Let's ask the Eye of Sauron:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aredfish.com+thompson=firefox-b-1-e=AOaemvKCtwPlUCr4nkZpjQnEipMX_sWOoQ%3A1635362865987=Mah5YZDiO9ja0PEPjPye6AU=0ahUKEwjQvtK1qevzAhVYLTQIHQy-B10Q4dUDCA4=5=site%3Aredfish.com+thompson_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAM6BwgAEEcQsANKBAhBGABQ6RBY6RBg-BJoAXACeACAAYsBiAGLAZIBAzAuMZgBAKABAcgBAsABAQ=gws-wiz

On 10/27/21 10:39 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 10/26/21 12:55 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> Well, I'm not fluent enough to know how deeply social contract thinking had 
>> embedded itself in the people who *liked* the document at the time. But 
>> social contracts are only one, very debatable, construction for "inalienable 
>> rights". Just because it makes the most sense to you, doesn't mean it 
>> provides the solid foundation you're looking for. It looks more like 
>> postmodernist sand, to me. You modernists, who faithfully buy into Grand 
>> Narratives that fit your priors would be suckered in by it. But I don't.
>>
> … all packed and gussied up with its ad hominems.  All this is meant to be 
> playful, and the moment it stops being fun, is the moment it should stop.  If 
> I have brought us there, please accept my apologies and let’s let it go. 
> 
>  
> 
> All this is trivial compared to Glen’s suggestion that we have to be careful 
> what we say here, not just because of possible hurts endured by one another 
> (which I do care about) but because of who might be listening.  This is the 
> second such suggestion from a person I deeply respect that has been offered 
> me this week and I find it deeply concerning.   I am so used to the freedom 
> that my professional obscurity conveys that I never worry about such 
> reputational concerns.  Also, being an up-tight easterner, I am probably more 
> self-canceling than many of you.  Finally, my die is already cast.  But 
> */should I/* be listening to what I write with an Other Ear?  For your sakes, 
> at least? 
> 
>  
> 
> I suggest we start another thread:  “What Cannot Be Said On Friam” and 
> explore this matter carefully. 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Excellent! Thanks.

My complete ignorance forced me to duckduckgo it. The results were mostly 
useless. But Urban Dict seems to work:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Neener-neener

One of the definitions also raises the brinkmanship aspect Nick seemed to 
include (with "I'm more pomo than you"). It's still not clear to me if Nick 
thinks *I* was brinking him or if he simply had no serious response to my 
criticism and just defaulted to his own brinking. Whatever, my criticism still 
stands: that Rawls' was a neoliberal justificationist, not any kind of deep 
egalitarian. But I'm working off very old and faulty memory. So, I wait with 
baited breath for a counter.

As always, treating posts to a permanent, public forum like this as if they 
were chatty conversations seems ill-advised. I'm guilty of it, too. But ... tu 
quoque, I guess. 


On 10/27/21 8:11 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> On 10/27/21 7:53 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Most people would spell that, "nanner, nanner, nanner", I think.  It's heard 
>> on playgrounds all over, or it was in the 40s and 50s.  In Mexico they sing, 
>> "lero, lero, lero",  using the same notes.
> 
> It would seem there are many regional and quasi-generational dialects of 
> Silly Taunts...  I believe my playground training involved something more 
> like "Nyah, Nyah, Nyah!" with a sprinkling of allusions to one's grandma 
> wearing army boots.  We also were issued lariats along with dodge-balls and 
> were allowed (up to injury that drew blood) to chase one another around and 
> try to "head" or "heel" one another.   I never understood what the teachers 
> were thinking, though I did enjoy the "game", both as roper and ropee... go 
> figure.
> 
> I think this thread backs into a metaphor of mail-list-as-playground/sandlot 
> and some of the kind of bullying the Jon tried to reference.  
> 
> 
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 7:35 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$  wrote:
>>
>> I have no idea how to respond to this post. I don't know what "neener, 
>> neener, neener" means, unfortunately. But the grand narrative I'm talking 
>> about is the (I suppose Rawlsian?) social contract, including the wall of 
>> ignorance. That's distinct, I think, from the altruism of joining a 
>> collective effort to take responsibility for the future. The social contract 
>> argument seems fundamentally self-serving, especially the wall of ignorance 
>> fulcrum. It's a neo-liberal rhetorical device used to bridge the chasm 
>> between self-serving and pro-social perspectives.
>>
>> It's that bridge that is the grand narrative of the social contract. If 
>> you don't buy into that story, then the whole thing comes crumbling down. 
>> Most of my generation (X) and the Y's and Z's are calling the emperor naked 
>> at this point. So when you tell the story of the pre- and post- civil war 
>> understanding of the constitution to anyone under, say, 50 years old, you 
>> *might* want to consider that.
>>
>> For some reason, I feel like King Arthur at the base of the French 
>> castle in The Holy Grail: https://youtu.be/QSo0duY7-9s
>>
>>
>> On 10/26/21 1:03 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > Grand narratives. Oh, neener, neener, neener.  I assume that we are 
>> all endowed with a very fuzzy ruleset from which patterns of association 
>> arise.  What's grand about it.  I admit to a desire to join with others in 
>> taking responsibility for our future.  I think that such a joining is a 
>> "good", even while conceding that, given complexity, that the future we plan 
>> for is unlikely to be the future we get.
>> >
>> > How DARE you pin me with a categorical pin.  Besides, I am much more 
>> pomo than you are. 
>> >
>> > As I said: Neener, neener, neener.  And so's your old man.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

That's unhelpful. 8^D What does it mean?

On 10/27/21 6:53 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Most people would spell that, "nanner, nanner, nanner", I think.  It's heard 
> on playgrounds all over, or it was in the 40s and 50s.  In Mexico they sing, 
> "lero, lero, lero",  using the same notes.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 7:35 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> I have no idea how to respond to this post. I don't know what "neener, 
> neener, neener" means, unfortunately. [...]
> 
> 
> On 10/26/21 1:03 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com 
> <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Grand narratives. Oh, neener, neener, neener.  [...]
> >
> > As I said: Neener, neener, neener.  And so's your old man.
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

I have no idea how to respond to this post. I don't know what "neener, neener, 
neener" means, unfortunately. But the grand narrative I'm talking about is the 
(I suppose Rawlsian?) social contract, including the wall of ignorance. That's 
distinct, I think, from the altruism of joining a collective effort to take 
responsibility for the future. The social contract argument seems fundamentally 
self-serving, especially the wall of ignorance fulcrum. It's a neo-liberal 
rhetorical device used to bridge the chasm between self-serving and pro-social 
perspectives.

It's that bridge that is the grand narrative of the social contract. If you 
don't buy into that story, then the whole thing comes crumbling down. Most of 
my generation (X) and the Y's and Z's are calling the emperor naked at this 
point. So when you tell the story of the pre- and post- civil war understanding 
of the constitution to anyone under, say, 50 years old, you *might* want to 
consider that.

For some reason, I feel like King Arthur at the base of the French castle in 
The Holy Grail: https://youtu.be/QSo0duY7-9s

On 10/26/21 1:03 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Grand narratives. Oh, neener, neener, neener.  I assume that we are all 
> endowed with a very fuzzy ruleset from which patterns of association arise.  
> What's grand about it.  I admit to a desire to join with others in taking 
> responsibility for our future.  I think that such a joining is a "good", even 
> while conceding that, given complexity, that the future we plan for is 
> unlikely to be the future we get. 
> 
> How DARE you pin me with a categorical pin.  Besides, I am much more pomo 
> than you are.  
> 
> As I said: Neener, neener, neener.  And so's your old man. 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Well, I'm not fluent enough to know how deeply social contract thinking had 
embedded itself in the people who *liked* the document at the time. But social 
contracts are only one, very debatable, construction for "inalienable rights". 
Just because it makes the most sense to you, doesn't mean it provides the solid 
foundation you're looking for. It looks more like postmodernist sand, to me. 
You modernists, who faithfully buy into Grand Narratives that fit your priors 
would be suckered in by it. But I don't.

A stronger foundation would be one grounded in physics, chemistry, and biology 
... and I suppose a "harder" psychology and sociology we might develop one day.

On 10/26/21 12:45 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Look.  Rights are things we give one another by incurring obligations.   The 
> document should have  read: "All people are created equal and they are 
> endowed by their association with certain unalienable obligations, basically, 
> not to get in one another's way more than is absolutely necessary and to help 
> one another when the chips are down.  "  It's funny because it's a 
> declaration of independence; it never occurred to them that they had to write 
> a declaration of association.   Hence the constitution, six years later.  
> 
> Nick 
> 
> 
> 
> Nick Thompson
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2021 12:08 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution
> 
> Ugh. Sorry for this: Holton, not Houlton: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Holton
> 
> And the semantic slippery slope from moral equivalent to inalienable rights 
> is just nonsense, trickery that should never be forgiven. Now, where I 
> disagree with Dave is that it might be possible to establish some intrinsic 
> properties of living systems (e.g. negentropy) that do imply intrinsic 
> rights. So the moral equivalence lies somewhere in the technical definition 
> (perhaps via integrated information theory or somesuch). But the extension to 
> "rights" would then be "Every negentropic kernel has the *right* to *try* to 
> maintain/increase order within -- and thereby increase disorder without." 
> I.e. a "right to life". But even if they fail in their execution, they were 
> still negentropic for at least a little while. And they are equal in that 
> temporally and spatially scoped technical sense.
> 
> 
> On 10/26/21 10:22 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>> I agree with Houlton that “All men are created equal AND they are endowed by 
>> their Creator with certain unalienable rights …”  is a pretty good place to 
>> start.  You will recall that I even think this leads in theory to a 
>> prejudice against inheritance and in practice to taxing the crap out of rich 
>> people, in which category I count most of us.
>>
>>  
>>
>> With respect to Dave’s “Boo God” comment, I of course agree.  My only 
>> acquaintance with god was as something that came into being when my father 
>> hit his thumb with a hammer.  But it is fascinating to read the above words 
>> in context.  See 
>> https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript 
>> <https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript>
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Ugh. Sorry for this: Holton, not Houlton: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Holton

And the semantic slippery slope from moral equivalent to inalienable rights is 
just nonsense, trickery that should never be forgiven. Now, where I disagree 
with Dave is that it might be possible to establish some intrinsic properties 
of living systems (e.g. negentropy) that do imply intrinsic rights. So the 
moral equivalence lies somewhere in the technical definition (perhaps via 
integrated information theory or somesuch). But the extension to "rights" would 
then be "Every negentropic kernel has the *right* to *try* to maintain/increase 
order within -- and thereby increase disorder without." I.e. a "right to life". 
But even if they fail in their execution, they were still negentropic for at 
least a little while. And they are equal in that temporally and spatially 
scoped technical sense.

On 10/26/21 10:22 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> I agree with Houlton that “All men are created equal AND they are endowed by 
> their Creator with certain unalienable rights …”  is a pretty good place to 
> start.  You will recall that I even think this leads in theory to a prejudice 
> against inheritance and in practice to taxing the crap out of rich people, in 
> which category I count most of us.
> 
>  
> 
> With respect to Dave’s “Boo God” comment, I of course agree.  My only 
> acquaintance with god was as something that came into being when my father 
> hit his thumb with a hammer.  But it is fascinating to read the above words 
> in context.  See 
> https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript 
> <https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript>

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

It raises, I think, the question of whether large diagrams/visualizations like 
these are *categorically* different from close examination of the "physics" of 
the system. For the CA, VoC gives you not only the presets for the rule, but 
the ability to edit the rule. It reminds me of Andy Wuensche's DDLab: 
http://www.ddlab.com/, except DDLab was inversely oriented.

It all evokes the prior questions like "Are virii alive?" SteveS and I have an 
ongoing disagreement about the ... h ... fundamentality of visualization. I 
think they're tricks ... deceptive trickery to get you to *feel* something ... 
I suppose a bit like how fake news is designed to tweak your feelings of 
affinity or hostility more than to give you information. My colleagues are very 
fond of eye candy. I have to fight about it on a daily basis. Pretty pictures 
are flat out dangerous ... THE scourge of the simulation world.

On 10/26/21 9:49 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> The eye-candy that your link leads to is absolutely stunning.  Every time I 
> see a three D image of a virus or a protein I wonder how on earth in that 
> forest the active site is found.  

On 10/26/21 4:34 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> I also thought VoC might help you bridge to some of Jon's intuitions about 
> DLA:
> 
> https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/category/diffusion-limited-aggregation/

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Very cool! I've added Fragments to my wishlist. I'm wondering how/if it relates 
to black radicalism, of which I'm still completely ignorant. 

Egalitarianism was briefly covered in the podcast:

Holton: [...] Can you and I, as an intellectual exercise, think of anything 
wrong with, all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain 
inalienable rights? That’s not the whole story, but I can’t find anything wrong 
with that. Can you?

Bouie: [...] I find it difficult to find something wrong with it as well 
because, to me, it is a statement of sort of the inherent dignity of all human 
beings and an inherent dignity that must be respected in our governments and 
our institutions. It’s such an extraordinarily powerful statement that, for as 
much as I can recite every criticism of Jefferson, it makes it hard to dismiss 
him, right, as a person worth taking seriously and worth, in some sense, even 
admiring, at least admiring the part of him that wrote that.

As I alluded in my previous post to this thread, this is charisma of the 
*idea*, despite all and any evidence that the idea is obvious garbage. It's 
like the hype around AI ... or consciousness. We *want* to believe in things 
like "equality". So we believe in them, in spite of all the evidence around us 
that such a thing doesn't exist.

But if we steal a bit of persnickety semantics from the philosophers, we can 
better express the sentiment as "moral deserts", treating persons as ends, not 
means. We can be equivalent in our moral status, yet wildly different from 
every other perspective. Although this smacks of dualism, it doesn't have to be.

On 10/23/21 12:23 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> This seems like an appropriate point to recommend a small book:
> 
> /Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology/
> David Graeber (asst. Prof, anthroplogy, Yale)
> Prickly Paradigm Press   [love the publisher name]
> Chicago
> www.press.uchicago.edu <http://www.press.uchicago.edu>
> www.prickly-paradigm.com <http://www.prickly-paradigm.com>
> 
> I believe that, within the book, some seeds for answers to Nick's question 
> "how do we achieve coalition without charisma," and contributions to a lot of 
> other ideas that have popped up in various threads: "great man theory," 
> egalitarian societies, post-capitalism, political theory, etc., might be 
> found.
> 
> From page 1:
> 
> /"What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and 
> tiny manifestos — all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of 
> radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possible exist 
> at some point in the future./
> 
> /Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought 
> to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn't — or, for that matter, why 
> an anarchist sociology doesn't exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist 
> literary theory, or anarchist political science."/
> 
> I also have on order — prepublication — Graeber's 500 page rewrite of 
> history. Supposed to be full of insights like:
> 
> /"Before [Marcel] Mauss, the universal assumption had been that economies 
> without money or markets had operated by means of "barter"; they were trying 
> to engage in market behavior (acquire useful goods and services at the least 
> cost to themselves, get rich if possible ...) they just hadn't yet developed 
> very sophisticated ways of going about it.  Mauss demonstrated that in fact, 
> such economies were really "gift economies." They were not based on 
> calculation, but on a refusal to calculate; they were rooted in an ethical 
> system which consciously rejected most of what we we would consider the basic 
> principles of economics. It was not that they had not yet learned to seek 
> profit through the most efficient means. They would have found the very 
> premise that the point of an economic transaction — at least, one with 
> someone who was not your enemy— was to see the greatest profit deeply 
> offensive."/

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

I simply don't get this part of your post. If I replace "textualism" and 
"textualist" with "originalism" and "originalist", then it makes some sense. 
But the textualists are trying to keep the document *current*, right? It's the 
originalists who want the document to mean the same thing it meant when those 
vile white men wrote it. Have I swapped the terms?

I thought Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer were textualist, whereas Thomas, Alito, 
& Gorsuch were originalist. I'm not clear on Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Re: appreciating the produce of diseased minds -- I still think Lovecraft is 
the ideal case because, unlike disintegrated personalities like Jefferson and 
Washington, Lovecraft's art was a direct expression of his racism. Washington's 
and Jefferson's were very banal consequences of fractured, plectic, 
personalities ... much like everyone's. Lovecraft was well integrated ... 
almost a model of the Consistent Man.

And Lovecraft also disambiguates the question of charisma. It's not about 
charisma of the person so much as charisma of the *idea* ... the hype ... the 
fideistic commitment to a thing in spite of glaring evidence of its failure. 
One could argue that, because Lovecraft had a bunch of friends, his 
interpersonal charisma "bled out" into his mythology. No doubt having many 
different people contributing to the mythology helped solidify it and flesh it 
out. So maybe there's a thread from interpersonal charisma to idea-charisma. 
But I doubt it. He (similar to Poe, Jung, and Nietzsche) tapped into something, 
if not universal, very translatable.

On 10/23/21 11:09 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> What I love about this is that illuminates for me what is going on in our 
> current debates over textualism.  The Textualists are trying to get us back 
> to the pre-Civil War constitution which was dedicated to preserving the 
> prerogatives of the privileged classes.
-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Ha! Of course. Well, since you don't say what the "error" was, I suppose it's 
no skin off my nose. Both Windows and NetLogo are abominations. You choose your 
poison. >8^D If we take your "schooled to write a program yourself" point 
seriously, VoC would be the clear choice. If, instead, Miles is familiar enough 
with NetLogo to "write a program himself", then NetLogo is the clear choice. 
You'll get "errors" no matter which one you choose.

I also thought VoC might help you bridge to some of Jon's intuitions about DLA:

https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/category/diffusion-limited-aggregation/

But the old "I can't get it installed" problem is the very thing "edge 
computing in the browser" is supposed to solve. So, c'est la vie. 


On 10/25/21 8:05 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> It was quite clear that CHAOS was a much more "powerful" program, but I got 
> an error message when I went to download it, and about that time Steve's 
> message came in.  Miles has some passing familiarity with NetLogo and I don't 
> think we need the power to demonstrate the essential point that a process can 
> be fated to come out in a particular way even tho' none of the participants 
> has any idea of what that fate is.  How Sophocles-esque!  But we do have the 
> "Behe Problem".  How does natural selection select for the genes that make 
> the fate when the fate is a non-linear consequence of the genes.  I suppose 
> somebody has tried to select for different patterns as an outcome in a Net 
> Logo model and see if selection could somehow dig down to the eight "genes" 
> that make up the model.   I used to think I understood how this was possible, 
> but right now it seems like a hot potato again.
> 
> Maybe CHAOS would let me try that experiment.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

2021-10-25 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

FWIW, the windows program I pointed you to is very broad, allowing program-free 
experimentation with all sorts of "complexity" stuff. Way easier.

On 10/25/21 1:12 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Thank you everybody, thank you Steve.  The netlogo model was exactly what I 
> was looking for.  I thought I had done my due diligence on that cite, but 
> indeed, as usual, I hadn’t.   
> 
>  
> 
> I will get it to them straight way.
> 
>  
> 
> Friam is the greatest!
> 
>  
> 
> Nick
> 
>  
> 
> Nick Thompson
> 
> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
> 
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
> <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
> 
>  
> 
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Stephen Guerin
> *Sent:* Monday, October 25, 2021 1:34 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] 
> development
> 
>  
> 
> Nick,
> 
> I put the standard Netlogo CA model set to rule 30 online here
> https://redfish.com/models/CARule30.html 
> <https://redfish.com/models/CARule30.html>
> 
> Hit setup or setup-random then go.  You can play with the rule set on the 
> left. Note as a binary bits, the CA number ranges from 0-255 depending on 
> which bits are switched on. Play with the show rules button too.
> 
> 
> 
> There are hundreds of others on the web, but the Netlogo version is easy for 
> Miles to download and modify. And, he can get into agent-based modeling of so 
> many other phenomena. We showed him a bit during his internship. There's also 
> slime mold aggregation example in netlogo of which I previously posted Owen's 
> agentscript.org <http://agentscript.org> version:
> 
> 
> https://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#https://www.netlogoweb.org/assets/modelslib/Sample%20Models/Biology/Slime.nlogo
>  
> <https://www.netlogoweb.org/launch#https://www.netlogoweb.org/assets/modelslib/Sample%20Models/Biology/Slime.nlogo>
> 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

2021-10-25 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $


Here's a kitchen sink program. I downloaded and tested it. 

https://softology.com.au/voc.htm


Here's the results of my test for rule 30:

https://youtu.be/sG-XZBta20M

The highlighted rows in the middle were used to generate the horizontal banner 
at the bottom, which makes MIDI music out of that region. I didn't include the 
audio in the video.

On 10/24/21 10:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Perhaps you are the person to answer this question:  I have snared both of my 
> grandchildren in CA #30, the -son because he is interested in pattern 
> formation in regenerating planaria and the -daughter because she likes really 
> neat stuff.  I would like to give them simple programs so they could generate 
> any one of the 256 rules and see the consequences of them.   I thought I 
> would find several readily at hand, but what I did was a serious of sites 
> which schooled me to write such a program myself.  I am too old for that.  Do 
> you know of any I could email to my -children?  It is the first time in years 
> that I have actually caught their fancy with something, so it would really 
> make me happy.

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] Breakfast in Santa Fe

Well, to contrast that a bit, I've had guns pointed at me (aggressively) 3 
times. (Many more "playfully".) None of them pulled the trigger, luckily. But 
that just proves that they do NOT take guns seriously. They are more toy, less 
weapon ... which makes them even more dangerous. Also, 2 of my friends from 
high school were murdered, one with a gun, one with a knife.

This country is more violent than privileged white dudes might have you 
believe. Jochen would be wise to take vacation in a civilized country.


On 10/22/21 2:50 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Jochen,
> 
> I've spent more than 1/3 of my 78 years in New Mexico including the last 22.  
> I've never been shot at, I've never seen anyone be shot, and I've never known 
> anyone who was killed or wounded by gunfire.  I used to shoot rabbits when I 
> was a teenager but I regret that very much.
> 
> The police I've interacted with are courteous and try to be as helpful as 
> possible.  My original comment was said tongue-in-cheek.  I should have used 
> a smiley.
> 
> 
> Frank
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 3:08 PM Merle Lefkoff  <mailto:merlelefk...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> No.  If you read the article carefully, sometimes guns with blanks and 
> guns without bullets can kill people, and it has happened befofe on movie 
> sets.  It was a terrible and tragic accident.  I'm sure we'll learn what went 
> wrong.
> 
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 9:55 AM  <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> J-
> 
> __ __
> 
> Your note does seem to suggest that you are coming.  I would greatly 
> look forward to meeting with you, if that is the case.  
> 
> __ __
> 
> It is my understanding that loaded guns are normally prohibited on 
> movie sets for the obvious reasons.  Somebody must have been effing nuts.  
> 
> 
> __ __
> 
> Nick Thompson
> 
> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
> 
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
> <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
> 
> __ __
> 
> *From:* Friam  <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Friday, October 22, 2021 7:52 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Breakfast in Santa Fe
> 
> __ __
> 
> Too many loaded guns in NM.
> 
> __ __
> 
> Are you coming here Jochen?  We used to meet at St John's College 
> coffee shop.  There are many excellent places to have breakfast here.  I 
> recommend Saveur.
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> __ __
> 
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 2:06 AM Jochen Fromm  <mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:
> 
> Today in the morning Santa Fe was in the news on TV. They 
> reported that Actor Alec Baldwin has accidentally shot a camera woman, 
> because the gun used for acting was fully loaded. It is rare that Santa Fe is 
> mentioned here in the news
> 
> https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-new-mexico-movies-santa-fe-915b39db68b559f03103171fdaecca79
>  
> <https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-new-mexico-movies-santa-fe-915b39db68b559f03103171fdaecca79>
> 
> Where do you go for breakfast for normal FRIAM meetings (not 
> virtual ones)? What are the best coffeeshops and cafes in Santa Fe?
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Breakfast in Santa Fe

The Guardian article on this incident mentioned Brandon Lee's death under 
similar circumstances. And claims the autopsy turned up an actual slug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Lee#Death

Regardless. Nobody wins in any of these scenarios. Our gun fetish is a problem.

On 10/22/21 9:43 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
> There is so much speculation about this, so I would like to add a bit of my 
> own. A trustworthy source tells me that "blank" bullets come in many 
> different forms. Some of them can be dangerous at close range. Also, it is 
> not uncommon for something to get clogged in the barrel of a gun, and when 
> the next blank fires it shoots the clog like a bullet. 
> I am speculating that it was actually a supersonic clog that shot out of the 
> gun instead of a bullet. I say this because it does seem effin nuts that live 
> ammo would find its way onto a movie set. 
> 
> Cody Smith
> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 9:55 AM  <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> J-
> 
> __ __
> 
> Your note does seem to suggest that you are coming.  I would greatly look 
> forward to meeting with you, if that is the case.  
> 
> __ __
> 
> It is my understanding that loaded guns are normally prohibited on movie 
> sets for the obvious reasons.  Somebody must have been effing nuts.  
> 
> __ __
> 
> Nick Thompson
> 
> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
> 
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
> <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
> 
> __ __
> 
> *From:* Friam  <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Friday, October 22, 2021 7:52 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Breakfast in Santa Fe
> 
> __ __
> 
> Too many loaded guns in NM.
> 
> __ __
> 
> Are you coming here Jochen?  We used to meet at St John's College coffee 
> shop.  There are many excellent places to have breakfast here.  I recommend 
> Saveur.
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> __ __
> 
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 2:06 AM Jochen Fromm  <mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:
> 
> Today in the morning Santa Fe was in the news on TV. They reported 
> that Actor Alec Baldwin has accidentally shot a camera woman, because the gun 
> used for acting was fully loaded. It is rare that Santa Fe is mentioned here 
> in the news
> 
> https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-new-mexico-movies-santa-fe-915b39db68b559f03103171fdaecca79
>  
> <https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-new-mexico-movies-santa-fe-915b39db68b559f03103171fdaecca79>
> 
> Where do you go for breakfast for normal FRIAM meetings (not virtual 
> ones)? What are the best coffeeshops and cafes in Santa Fe?


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] for the dog lovers

Maybe. The Jester's fond of deep fakes. But if it is, it's a good one. You can 
see the front two dogs eyes moving, a little tail vibration in one dog's, etc.

https://youtu.be/j5M1hpllqDg

And even if it's fake, it doesn't change the point I *actually* made in the 
post.


On 10/22/21 9:05 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Surely it's a fake.  Stopped image with a little birdsong added.  Eh?
> 
> N
> 
> Nick Thompson
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Friday, October 22, 2021 9:24 AM
> To: FriAM 
> Subject: [FRIAM] for the dog lovers
> 
> 
> https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1451218350126809088?s=20
> 
> I still can't separate abuse from good stewardship. What are those puppies 
> thinking while they're standing there like that? Is it cathartic to ... wait 
> for it ... wait for it ... wait for it ... GO!!! Does that feel good? Or is 
> it stressful? Maybe one or two of them are dyed in the wool *competitors* and 
> love the intense wait for the chirp. But the third is thinking "OMG! OMG! 
> OMG! What if I don't perform well enough?!"
> 

-- 
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[FRIAM] for the dog lovers


https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1451218350126809088?s=20

I still can't separate abuse from good stewardship. What are those puppies 
thinking while they're standing there like that? Is it cathartic to ... wait 
for it ... wait for it ... wait for it ... GO!!! Does that feel good? Or is it 
stressful? Maybe one or two of them are dyed in the wool *competitors* and love 
the intense wait for the chirp. But the third is thinking "OMG! OMG! OMG! What 
if I don't perform well enough?!"

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

2021-10-21 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Ah, thanks. So you were talking about robustness in both cases. Sorry for my 
confusion.

I suppose there's also some ambiguity in "global". Sometimes I use "non-local" 
to indicate information bound to the context, but where there are still 
encapsulated/opaque regions. And then "global" means *everything* is 
accessable, even if it's encapsulated inside some sub-region.

Your comment about colorings sounds like you're expressing doubt about 
univalence axiom. But, in my ignorance, it seems to rely on a singular 
definition of equivalence. For well-defined things like graph coloring, rules 
like "no adjacent color" seem to establish an unambiguous equivalence. But such 
things rarely obtain over dirty objects like humans (or even computing in the 
wild e.g. intrusion detection or forensics). As long as our authentication 
methods assume such tight equivalences, we'll be susceptible to adversaries. 

A great example are these silly authentication apps. Sure, it's harder to steal 
one's authenticator creds than it is to capture one's SMS traffic. But the 
flaws are in the same category. The biggest joke is the big 3 credit agencies 
tendency to have you verify against your previous addresses ... or vehicles 
you've owned. Pffft. For those sites that make you select a series of personal 
questions, I pity the poor fool who answers them with actual historical facts 
from their life. If you're targeting me and you *don't* know my mother's maiden 
name, then you're a *terrible* hacker. 8^D

On 10/21/21 8:57 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> """
> Could the verifier be allowed a global understanding using something
> akin to homomorphic encryption, though?
> """
> 
> In some sense I would suppose yes for FHE, but the method of verification
> in ZKP seems not to be. Again, you mentioned playing fast and loose with
> the bindings. It would be great to really understand FHE systems better,
> and there is always plowing through the Gentry paper or checking in on
> how far Google has publicly gotten with it. From what I understand about
> FHE, one encrypts some data (whole databases, perhaps) and then one can
> operate on that data in its encrypted form via homomorphisms. Now one
> can operate meaningfully on the data without having access to the data.
> I would suspect it is necessary to present a limited DSL of homomorphic
> actions to make this privacy truly work. One wouldn't want one of those
> accessible homomorphic actions to be to simply decode the database.
> 
> 
> """
> So, I would have said: Just like propositions participate in many
> proofs, identities can employ many agents. But we're playing fast and
> loose with our bindings. "Agent" often means the object/thing, whereas
> "identity" means the attributes of that object/thing. So, maybe you
> accidentally flipped that as you went along in the post?
> """
> 
> I am considering the bipartite (hyper?) graph at the top of Stephen's
> earlier Wikipedia reference[ω]. There they use the word entity instead
> of the word agent. I do mean many proofs for a proposition, for instance,
> the proposition could be that there are an infinite number of primes.
> A piece that I could easily be missing is in the "colorings" formal
> analogy. There, do different formal proofs of a statement give different
> colorings? Is there ultimately an isomorphism between possible proofs
> and possible colorings? This part doesn't seem right to me, I would be
> surprised. So, I know I am missing something.
> 
> [ω] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Identity-concept.svg 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Identity-concept.svg>

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Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

2021-10-21 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Could the verifier be allowed a global understanding using something akin to 
homomorphic encryption, though?

I'm thinking along the lines of your side note that propositions have many 
proofs (polyphenism) and agents have many identities (robustness). I worry that 
I've missed your point, though, because polyphenism isn't analogous to 
robustness, they're complements. So, I would have said: Just like propositions 
participate in many proofs, identities can employ many agents. But we're 
playing fast and loose with our bindings. "Agent" often means the object/thing, 
whereas "identity" means the attributes of that object/thing. So, maybe you 
accidentally flipped that as you went along in the post?

In any case, I see the authentic human/organism as at least somewhat opaque to 
an infinitely extensible peek process, verification process. Their essence is 
always encrypted out of reach. Then we do verify that any communication is with 
them "up to taste" ... or fit to context purpose. So when we do this 
authentication and attempt to retain self-sovereignty, we're simply inferring 
some sort of *signature* that is as unique as their "soul", but is not a 
structural analogy to their (unique) soul.

I can't help but think someone must already be working on a well-stated problem 
like this. SteveS mentioned Cardano awhile back. And I'm constantly on the hunt 
for distributed VMs I can actually use (you know, like you would use Linode 
<https://cloud.linode.com/linodes> but pay with some crypto coin instead of 
monthly draws from your credit card). It seems that somewhere in the smart 
contracts space, someone should already be working on this problem. Have any of 
you actually used such a dApp, paying with ADA or ETH or whatever?

If so, what's more interesting re: this thread is the adversarial stance. If 
you're doing some computation, can I *hack* it and steal your computation (or 
your computational result)?

On 10/20/21 5:27 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> I suppose the slogan could be:
> "Proofs are to propositions as identities are to agents",
> and in the context of zero knowledge protocols, the parallel extends to:
> 
> φ: Verifying a proof without exposing the proof.
> ψ: Verifying an identity without exposing the identity.
> 
> To the degree that φ is the case and that the formal analogy connecting
> φ to ψ holds, I suspect ZKP is sufficient for establishing self-sovereign
> identity.
> 
> In practice, I imagine that to each agent a provable proposition (of
> some significant computational complexity[κ]) is assigned. The statement
> is then converted into a 3-coloring problem[З] while the proof is
> transformed into an instance of one such 3-coloring. The rest is pressing
> plates. It seems worth mentioning that just as a proposition may have
> many proofs, an agent may have many identities.
> 
> A thing that has always impressed me about ZKP is that the verification
> process is constrained to be a local process. That is, at no point does
> the verifier get a global picture[λ] of the proof (as that would give the
> proof away) and instead, in the spirit of a Las Vegas algorithm, one
> verifies only up to taste.
> 
> For those interested, I highly recommend this numberphile episode:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ovdoxnfFVc_channel=Numberphile2 
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ovdoxnfFVc_channel=Numberphile2>
> 
> [κ] Where the proposition is about products of RSA group elements, some
> discrete log problem, or some other trapdoor function.
> 
> [λ] In my much earlier post to Nick on limits of inference, I attempted
> to connect this locality to physical limitations such as light cones,
> and propositions to phenomena like spin. Unfortunately, EricC shrugged
> and nothing more came of it ;)
> 
> [З] 
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.419.8132=rep1=pdf
>  
> <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.419.8132=rep1=pdf>

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Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

2021-10-20 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

I think we can distinguish questions in that way, if we think in terms of what 
we can *do* rather than thinking in terms of what things *are*. Marcus' point 
is well-received. There are plenty of things like Core Wars that differ from a 
typical (more purposefully engineered) thing. The distinction between good old 
fashioned games and hyper- or meta-games is another. Specific vs general 
intelligence is another. Discussion vs debate is another.

So if we distinguish between niche construction and stigmergy, what can we *do* 
with that distinction? I'd argue that making stigmergy a compositional part of 
niche construction would allow us to ask "What non-niche-construction things 
can also be built from stigmergic systems?" I.e. can we build a system with 
shared memory and unbound (or schematically bound) manipulation of that memory 
that does not construct a niche? 

My (ignorant) conception of niche construction is that the "freedom" or 
diversity of the consequent is *different* from the "freedom" or diversity of 
the antecedent. I say different to avoid the controversy over whether it has to 
increase or decrease the options available. (And, tangentially, to allow for 
different types of difference, not more or less, but multiple types.) But niche 
seems to me to imply that the space of options/behaviors is constrained or 
limited in some way. So it seems the typical direction for the diversity would 
be more of it before, less of it after.

But stigmergy seems *less* strict than niche construction. So, if we say that a 
niche is more constrained, and we can build a system (using stigmergy as a 
component) where the consequent is less constrained, then we've done a good job 
distinguishing stigmergy from niche construction, as part to whole.

On 10/20/21 2:49 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When I was a very very little kid, there was a “question” my parents pointed 
> out to me, which they thought might be an important puzzle to work through, 
> but they were busy enough holding life together (more or less like hoping 
> they could keep the various dams from breaking from one day to the next) that 
> they didn’t lose a lot of time on it.  That one was:
> 
> “Is a tomato really a fruit or really a vegetable.”
> 
> I wonder if we can give a name to the class of constructions that are of this 
> general kind, and distinguish them from the class of constructions that are 
> of some other kind.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
>> On Oct 19, 2021, at 11:34 PM, Nicholas Thompson > <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>   I am in danger of confusing it with niche construction.  The concept 
>> offers an  alternative to Lamarckian mechanisms for an organism to direct 
>> its own evolution.  It's like the inheritance of acquired environments.  I 
>> think of it as including such phenomena as squirrels and jays putting acorns 
>> in the ground and thus providing an environment rich with food for the 
>> winter and also, perhaps, in the very long run, future oak trees.  In some 
>> sense, the environment that selects the organism is an environment that is 
>> selected by the organism.   
>>
>> I think the word does have a use, but only if we distinguish between things 
>> left behind that positively affect  those that follow.  To my surprise, the 
>> word is apparently of recent origin having been specifically invented to 
>> apply to ant pheromone trails in the fifties.  So, I suppose we might narrow 
>> it's meaning to objects left to convey information and leave niche 
>> construction to apply to objects that provide shelter, nutrition or other 
>> benefits to  the finder, eg., acorns, beaver dams, 

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Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

2021-10-19 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

com>>
> 
> Subject: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development
> 
>  
> 
> Friends,
> 
> Beware.  As usual, I am trying to get you to think for me.
> 
> My grandson is working on a regeneration project in his freshman biolab  
> (Planaria) and his sources and texts are replete with cognitive language like 
> “signal” and “memory” etc., which implies that as the worm regenerates it is 
> influenced by a guiding idea of what it is producing.  My basic intuition, as 
> you know, that this doesn’t happen in human cognition, let alone worm 
> regeneration and that processes that produce a functional head from a slice 
> of the rear end of a flatworm have no idea what they are doing even when they 
> are done.  Thus I imagine an advancing edge of structure with each new bit 
> influencing the rules by which the next bit .  Which, of course, puts me in 
> mind both of stygmergy and of Cellular Automata.  So to my questions:
> 
> Are Cellular Automata a good model for Stygmergy?
> 
> Is Stygmergy a good model for organismic development? 
> 
> Why? Or Why not?  Discuss.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, is there a good website, citizen-friendly, steep learning curve, where 
> my grandson and I could explore the relation between developmental processes 
> and ca’s.  I looked at  NewLogo Library and did not find there any models of 
> regeneration, but may not have known where to look.  I did find THIS 
> <https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/>  which deep down in the Table of 
> Contents seemed to have three regeneration models including one named 
> “Planaria”, but I could no see how to go further with it.  If somebody could 
> have a look at it and give me some tips for how to use it, I would be ever so 
> grateful.
> 
>  
> 
> Good to be back.

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

2021-10-19 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Yes, some types of CA can be stygmergic. The separation between the environment 
and the agent is clear in that the "agent" is the per-cell algorithm (some CAs 
have multiple algorithms, a spectrum from a global algorithm updating all cells 
to a different algorithm for each cell). The "environment" is the state of the 
cell at any given time. You might even go so far as to allow for the evolution 
of the algorithm(s) based on the contents of the cell ... or the evolution of 
the structure of the cellular state based on its history (the simplest form 
being where each cell accumulates state).

But, no, not everything is stygmergic. A typical CA, with a global, 
synchronized, buffered update and all you're looking at  is the historical 
visualization of that state would not be. The primary problem is the buffering. 
If the buffer is flushed every cycle, there's no cumulative effect. So your 
example below is not stygmergic.

On 10/19/21 12:24 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Let me try to stretch the point and see if I can bring you on board.  In the 
> first place, mimimally, stygmergy need not involve sociality.  So, If I go 
> out on a hike and cut blazes on trees on my way out so I can find my way 
> home, that is stygmergy in good standing, right? 
> 
>  
> 
> Now let’s try a very simple ca where the rule is, if nothing is written, 
> write x; if x, white o beside; if o, write x beside. 
> 
>  
> 
> X
> 
> OXO
> 
> XOXOX
> 
> ETC. 
> 
>  
> 
> Now, if we consider what is written at each stage as a thing put out in the 
> environment and the “rules” what the organism brings to the table  then each 
> line is the joint product of the previous line and the rule, hence stygmergy. 
> 
>  
> 
> Am I stretching a point.  Is everything not stygmergy?

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] The Paper Architect.

2021-10-19 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

 never again exist, is the deepest sob and
> most hopeless utterance of a postmodern era. A thumb in the eye of 20th
> century decadence and waste, a glorious and honorable suicide.
> 
> [턞] Where he smokes a j before browsing youTube for samples to mix into
> a two-hour sound collage.
> [턢] http://www.nowthatsclass.net/ <http://www.nowthatsclass.net/>
> [⌁] Francis Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle
> [¶] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl 
> <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl>
> [1948] https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/467 
> <https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/467>
> [⊲] As an aside, two days ago was the anniversary of Marie Antoinette's
> date with the guillotine, vive la révolution, perhaps there will be
> cake!
> [⌦] 
> https://www.google.com/search?q=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland=isch=2ahUKEwiY0fTfxNTzAhUHm54KHfbLBHwQ2-cCegQIABAA=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland_lcp=CgNpbWcQA1CzfljahgFgwocBaABwAHgAgAHdA4gB6AySAQkwLjQuMy4wLjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ=img=2LVtYZiFGIe2-gT2l5PgBw=766=1440
>  
> <https://www.google.com/search?q=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland=isch=2ahUKEwiY0fTfxNTzAhUHm54KHfbLBHwQ2-cCegQIABAA=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland_lcp=CgNpbWcQA1CzfljahgFgwocBaABwAHgAgAHdA4gB6AySAQkwLjQuMy4wLjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ=img=2LVtYZiFGIe2-gT2l5PgBw=766=1440>
> [⌽] Sure, feel however about your Wrights or Mies van der Rohes, but the 
> empire has become too exhausted to birth another just as it cannot birth 
> another Rachmaninoff.
> 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

2021-10-18 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Right, which came on the tail end of the argument about anti-vaxers' claims of 
bodily sovereignty. Part of Kim's argument *for* the vaccine mandates is that 
one's self doesn't really stop at one's skin. We're permeable to, participants 
in, the molecular/organismal stew in which we swim. In this context, bodily 
sovereignty is clearly bogus. Sure, back before the industrial revolution the 
concept of person/entity autonomy carried some water. But in an age where we 
get everything from our body dysmorphia from TikTok to our meat shrink-wrapped 
and shipped from some fly over state, bodily sovereignty is nonsense.

But in their defense, these membranes are not permeable to *everything*. My 
attempt to bridge the gap between Jon's argument and Kim's was presaged by my 
discussion of "free will" with EricC. Pragmatically, even if we *know* some 
diseased mind like Ted Kaczynski isn't autonomously responsible for his 
behavior, we still toss that psycho in jail, delineating him from his 
environment by way of his skin. I suppose analogous to quantum decoherence, 
given a particular context, it's within epsilon accurate to treat him as an 
atomic object. (Not Schroedinger's Meme, here but a kind of uncertainty 
principle. You either know what the meme is about or you know where the meme 
resides. But you can't know both?)

So, bodily sovereignty works in some contexts and fails in others. Disagreement 
dissolved. Quaff your pint and relax. 8^D

But I agree with Marcus. Unless we can get autonomy and panmixia to elegantly 
*fall out* of a unified construct, it'll remain a buzzword bandied about by 
hucksters and the delusional. This is yet another reason the Stadler paper on 
the ... mechanisticality (mechanisticness?) of integer hyperflows triggered me. 
These threads also evoke the conversation Jon tried to have about 
zero-knowledge proofs. It seems like ZKPs (perhaps including tech like 
homomorphic encryption) hint at a more elegant construct for demonstrating 
one's authenticity while preserving one's place on a spectrum between autonomy 
or panmixia.

On 10/18/21 10:43 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> At VFriam with Glen and Jon.  as I came into their discussion on identity, I 
> brought up Self-Sovereignty Identity as something we're designing for in our 
> day job with Realtime.Earth.
> 
> If we classify Web 1.0 (1993-2005) roughly simple pages with databases and 
> forms. Web 2.0 (~2005-2015) was an era of social media, user-generated 
> content and mobile. In the Web 3.0 (~2015-present)  buzzword space, 
> self-sovereign identity is one of three primary components:
> 
>  1. Geospatial: AR, VR, digital twin, and physically interacting in the world
>  2. Decentralization: blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFT, Acequia
>  3. *Self-Sovereign Identity:* web 2.0 identity was dominated by Google, 
> Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Verizon, Government (if in China not USA- we can't 
> even manage a vote with government identity) 
>  1.  Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity>
>  2. image.png
> https://www.powells.com/book/-9781617296598/2-0 
> <https://www.powells.com/book/-9781617296598/2-0>
>  3. Sandy Pentland's New Economy: Data as Capital
> https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-new-economy 
> <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-new-economy>
> https://youtu.be/Jgg2N1Tnnw8 <https://youtu.be/Jgg2N1Tnnw8>

> 
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 11:21 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
> The Diverse Meanings of Digital Sovereignty
> 
> https://globalmedia.mit.edu/2020/08/05/the-diverse-meanings-of-digital-sovereignty/
>  
> <https://globalmedia.mit.edu/2020/08/05/the-diverse-meanings-of-digital-sovereignty/>
> 
> "
> 1) Cyberspace sovereignty
> 2) State Digital Sovereignty
> 3) Indigenous digital sovereignty
> 4) Social movements digital sovereignty
> 5) 'Personal' digital sovereignty
> "
> 
> Oh how I hate that word "digital".

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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[FRIAM] *-sovereignty

2021-10-18 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $


The Diverse Meanings of Digital Sovereignty
https://globalmedia.mit.edu/2020/08/05/the-diverse-meanings-of-digital-sovereignty/

"
1) Cyberspace sovereignty
2) State Digital Sovereignty
3) Indigenous digital sovereignty
4) Social movements digital sovereignty
5) 'Personal' digital sovereignty
"

Oh how I hate that word "digital". 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] Heart Rate

2021-10-17 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

This is well argued, despite Frank's mischaracterization. We've had this 
conversation a lot, including the discussion of seemingly cruel actuarial 
dollar values of human lives:

Risk-Aversion Sets Life Value
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/the-value-of-life.html

I often wonder if someone will eventually "cancel" me by weaponizing some 
arbitrary thing I say or write the way Frank's weaponizing Jon's comment. As 
we've discussed before, it can happen to anyone:

The New Puritans
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

We'd all like to think we're better than the New Puritans. But to me, it's 
simply more evidence this forum isn't appropriate for chat. Arguably, the zoom 
meeting would be appropriate. But because some of us can't/won't make the 
distinction, we end up in this awkward situation.

My favorite recent example of a confused privied white dude misunderstanding 
appropriate fora is Peter Singer:

Faculty at Rhodes College Urge Cancellation of Online Talk by Peter Singer 
(updated)
https://dailynous.com/2021/09/28/faculty-at-rhodes-college-urge-cancellation-of-online-talk-by-peter-singer/

The whole situation is absurd. And if you don't appreciate the implicit humor, 
you'll never grok the Zoomers:

what makes gen z humor so interesting?
https://youtu.be/a1LyTThf7V0

On October 16, 2021 11:39:32 AM PDT, Jon Zingale  wrote:
>"""
>
>Also on Friday you said that you are happy when people my age die.  So it
>doesn't matter to you that 95% of people who die are unvaccinated.
>
>"""
>
>
>Something similar to that, so thank you for this opportunity to
>clarify. What are examples of goals that others not like yourself
>might have? For one, they may not think that saving a few million
>lives is worth preserving the status quo, the power structures that
>have the world veering toward its death. I suggested (with tongue only
>partially in cheek) that mother nature offered a solution for
>recalibrating the power distribution and that we found a vaccination
>for it. Sure, hot words, but not that much more triggering than the
>shit we usually say in a Friam meeting. I hear ageist, racist and
>classist remarks nearly every Friday, so shrug.
>
>
>For instance, you made it clear that everybody in Pittsburgh knows who
>is black and who isn't. Another suggested that life was easier back
>then. EricC slid one under your radar by asking if it was based on the
>standard definition that of having 1/4 black heritage, to which you
>thoughtlessly agreed. Nick or maybe someone else pointed out that the
>studies did not hold up in Africa and that the correspondence was
>maybe not the result of "race" (whatever that is) but relatively
>recent cultural pressures (the descendants of those that did not die
>on a difficult journey across the ocean and into slavery to serve your
>ancestors[!]).
>
>
>It is clear that continuing to push your personal work is your own
>narcissism and not because it is relevant to anything (like your
>anecdote about StuK and you bullying some researchers that actually
>did work into adding you both onto their paper). What could it mean to
>be relevant? I leave that to you as an exercise.
>
>
>All said, I care about you Frank, and I also must call a spade a spade
>(that is a saying isn't it?) There is no reason for you to collect
>more per month now than anytime in your working life when so many
>people continue to work harder than you could have ever imagined for
>yourself, often risking their lives so that some silver fox can demand
>a refund for their steak being a little overcooked. I am not asking
>that you give away your comfort, but to acknowledge and maybe even
>attempt to set things right. Btw, I recognize and deeply respect the
>good things you are doing for your grandchildren.
>
>
>What I am asking for is the vulnerability to hear that others may be
>upset and their reasons worth feeling. Generationally speaking, I am a
>genX-er and we are very clear that there were never enough of us to
>matter and that the protests of our generation were quickly silenced
>by a phony war on terror. There is no part of me that wishes for what
>you boomers had (and squandered in your great numbers), but rather, I
>wish to understand how to support the generations after mine that are
>left with the legacy of boomer self-obsession. So, um... whatever
>dude.
>
>
>[!] But please, tell me again about your native american heritage.


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Re: [FRIAM] sonification of black hole data

2021-10-15 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Fantastic work. I couldn't find the album on bandcamp, said to be released 
through this group: 

https://ashinternational.bandcamp.com/

And I'm a little embarrassed that I hadn't heard of some of these tools, from:

https://www.valeryvermeulen.net/works/mikromedas/


https://puredata.info/
http://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm
https://cycling74.com/products/max/
https://www.python.org/
https://www.ableton.com/
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synths/reaktor-6/
https://einsteintoolkit.org/
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

I knew of PD, MSP, and MAX (and Octave, Python, obviously). But I'd never heard 
of Einstein Toolkit, Ableton, or Reaktor 6. Cool stuff. Thanks.

On 10/14/21 10:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Interesting sonification and visualization of black hole data: Mikromedas 
> AdS/CFT 001
> 
> Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSSBuKF5_Dk


-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Well, it seems obvious to me (admittedly at risk of imputation or 
Dunning-Kruger) that we all have both modes in our repertoire. Maybe there are 
subsets of us who lean hard one way or the other. But I guess that just kicks 
the can down the road. Too much soldier ⇒ not recognizing when to switch to 
scout mode. And vice versa, like those pitiful truth-s[uc|ee]kers stuck in a 
conversation with a zero-sum logicbro.

It's error-correcting self-attention loops all the way down ... and up. And if 
you're not exercising your  low/fast interrupts (capsaicin , yoga, LSD, 
whatever), then you're probably not exercising your high/slow interrupts 
(active listening, abandoning pet theories, etc.). The idea that we can 
strengthen the high/slow interrupts without also strengthening the low/fast 
ones seems fideistic to me ... like telekinesis or somesuch.

Tangentially, I'm somewhat of a fan of Goertzel. But this worries me:

Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports
https://bookshop.org/books/evidence-for-psi-thirteen-empirical-research-reports/9780786478286

Maybe one of you has read it? I'm told it contains some fantastic nuggets about 
statistics, which makes me want a copy. And this video presents a good 
argument, regardless of the gist:

How I learned to love pseudoscience
https://youtu.be/bWV0XIn-rvY

But I worry about my own ability to switch from scout to soldier ... which is 
why the right-wing morons I talk to at the pub don't immediately murder me. 
Once they get to know me, they don't love me anymore.

On 10/14/21 3:29 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Even with a scout mentality there is the problem of modeling the deck of 
> alternative scenarios that arise from uncertainty in a map.The tendency 
> to take imputed values for a set of unknown variables is a practical 
> cognitive resource limitation that one can acknowledge or fail to 
> acknowledge.To challenge a person’s gut feeling -- all those imputed 
> values -- and to observe the exasperation (even perceived persecution) that 
> may result from the challenge is how I distinguish scouts from soldiers.   
> There are surely some tactical benefits to soldiers running toward the enemy 
> with their bayonets to not spend a lot of time reflecting on how confident 
> they are that the person they are running toward is their enemy.
> 
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
> Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2021 1:17 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated
> 
> 
> The Scout Mindset
> 
> https://bookshop.org/books/the-scout-mindset-why-some-people-see-things-clearly-and-others-don-t/9780735217553

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Ha! No. But if I were to try to publish something showing that religiosity is 
Yet Another True Believer syndrome, similar to all the others, I would use the 
pseudonym Captain Obvious. 8^D What's more interesting are the techniques by 
which we can manipulate our beliefs. 

The latest entry from the downward causation team is:

The Scout Mindset
https://bookshop.org/books/the-scout-mindset-why-some-people-see-things-clearly-and-others-don-t/9780735217553

I'm tempted, but have too much other stuff to read. It wouldn't work as well as 
an rigorous regimen of capsaicin, though. So your plan is better.

On 10/14/21 10:09 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> You are going to publish that first two paragraphs somewhere, right?
> 
> I would not have guessed such a large fraction of people could be taken out 
> with so few words.
> 
> I am now going to go place an order here, 
> https://themalamarket.com/ <https://themalamarket.com/>
> for stuff I have had no access too, and am badly hoping their sources are 
> good.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
>> On Oct 12, 2021, at 4:53 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ > <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I feel that way about anyone who "stands in awe" of anything, actually. 
>> We're consistently bombarded with phrases like "the majesty of" this or that 
>> ... or this or that "takes my breath away" and whatnot. Maybe we could call 
>> such nonsense the Idioms of Awe. Religious belief is the favorite bogey of 
>> atheists. But we find it everywhere. Back in Portland, I abutted so many 
>> "foodies", it literally dis-gusted me. Food is fuel. That's it. No matter 
>> how much the True Believers proselytize the latest fad, that Awesome New 
>> Breakfast Place or whatever. It's just food. Please eat so we don't have to 
>> hear you talk anymore.
>>
>> We see it a lot in our obComplexity crowd. We see it in the Singularians. We 
>> see it in the formalists and even the Dionysians. Runners are especially 
>> bad, coonnssttantly yapping about their religion. But weightlifters are no 
>> better. Even the mobility bros seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Pretty much 
>> anywhere anyone can "get carried away" with something, you'll find the True 
>> Believers waiting in the wings to swoop in and brainwash you.
>>
>> At least the Rationalists have a method for mind-changing, unlike most True 
>> Believers. But rationality isn't *fascinating*. People need to be 
>> fascinated. My own pet theory is that our anatomy has been pressured toward 
>> fascination, a desire to concentrate, to focus for an extended time. The 
>> trick is to ask, given the target domain/problem/issue, how long do we need 
>> to focus on it? Perhaps some domains really do need multiple generations of 
>> concentrating individuals. Perhaps some domains only need a few people to 
>> focus on it for a year or so.
>>
>> In that context, those who are seemingly stuck in some gravity well of True 
>> Belief are more pitiful than repulsive. (Or maybe they're repulsive 
>> *because* they're so pitiable?) What we need is an education program that 
>> gives the pathetic True Believers some tools that help them climb out of 
>> their hole. But like the cops responding to a call from a homeless camp 
>> littered with human feces and used needles, educating the True Believers can 
>> be dangerous. The abyss stares back into you.
>>
>> On 10/11/21 12:38 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> Yeah I don’t know.  
>>>
>>> For some years I was working in ocean-floor engineering, and got a feel for 
>>> seawater.  For all the devices you design, it is all-surrounding and 
>>> omnipresent.  It relentlessly intrudes through any crack, seam, or pore, 
>>> and it corrodes whatever it touches.  For whatever reason, this describes 
>>> the affect of my response to people’s religiosity.  The more genuine and 
>>> sincere they are, the stronger my aversion to that in them.  It’s not even 
>>> the same as being averse to the whole person.  There are people of whom I 
>>> think the world, and to whom I am very attached, in whom I just have to 
>>> work around this one radioactive thing.  n.b., however, that all such 
>>> people are related to me by birth.  There don’t seem to be any ones I have 
>>> sought out as friends of whom that happens to be the case.  Maybe, 
>>> borderline, one or two Jews, who seem to have a decorum and sense of proper 
>>> privacy (those particular people, I mean) for themselves and for others.
>>>
>>> There is another metaphor that also serves.  I have a friend with fairl

[FRIAM] Nim?

This is a great talk. 

Nim Nuggets: Systems Programming & Metaprogramming Magic
https://youtu.be/d2VRuZo2pdA

Anyone here used Nim? https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim It was totally new to me, 
embarrassingly.

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Re: [FRIAM] Schwill Rock?

Although I only understand a tiny percentage of this conversation, I'm tweaked 
by the argument made here:

Chemical Transformation Motifs - Modelling Pathways as Integer Hyperflows
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8171738

Note that breadth-first marking of hypergraphs, and variations thereof, has in 
the literature also been referred to as finding scopes of molecules [33]. 
Breadth-first marking has in those studies been used alone to analyse metabolic 
networks, and define set-theoretical notions of pathways and later of 
autocatalysis [34]. The methods thus do not have focus on the underlying 
mechanism of the pathways, which is our aim in this contribution. ...

The LP relaxation of an ILP yields an integer solution only under special 
conditions. The best known sufficient condition is that the matrix of 
constraint coefficients is totally unimodular (TU), i.e., when all its square 
submatrices have determinants −1, 0, or +1, and thus all entries of the matrix 
are also −1, 0, or +1. This is the case for example for integer flows in graphs 
[14], [32]. As the simple examples in Fig. 8 shows, this not true in general 
for stoichiometric matrices and hence for hyperflows.

We recently discovered the cause of a discretization artifact in one of our 
simulations, which was the (overly simplistic) chunking of object counts into 
(massive) integer values. It was maddening trying to find the cause. (I even 
resorted to ensemble EMD hoping to score a free lunch! No such luck.) But a 
simple switch to double types smoothed it out (pun intended). Although it makes 
face validation easier, I'm thinking it's a mistake to keep that code change 
because the smoothness is the artifact ... making the result *less* 
mechanistic. The discretization artifact is fundamentally because we 
can't/don't simulate *that many* molecules ... on the order of ~2e-16 fewer, in 
fact. 8^D

On October 14, 2021 1:52:25 AM PDT, David Eric Smith  
wrote:
>Yes.  Needing to do graph canonicalization deep in a loop that must run many 
>times was a core problem for these guys:
>https://cheminf.imada.sdu.dk/mod/ 
>They are very Very concerned to use the most efficient algorithm known at any 
>time for graph isomorphism and canonicalization. There are a pair of Dagstuhl 
>Seminars (sponsored by the German Computer Science Society) where the state of 
>the art on these things was one of the themes covered:
>https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=17452 
>
>https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=14452 
>
>The seminars are required to publish a sort of white-paper at the end of each 
>week with topics covered.  Although not suited to learning any given thing 
>from, they may give helpful pointers to which methods are studied in 
>association with each other in various problem domains.
>
>I had mentioned MØD before in a thread that veered near these topics; 
>apologies for repetition, but things gain salience at different times.

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Re: [FRIAM] Where are all the workers going?

2021-10-13 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

And:

https://aidaccess.org/en/
https://aidaccess.org/en/page/952476/texas-bans-abortion-after-6-weeks-of-pregnancy

Exploring the feasibility of obtaining mifepristone and misoprostol from the 
internet
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010782417304754

On 10/13/21 9:00 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> Thanks for sending me to the Atlantic. Cushing's Slack article was great! 
> It's more evidence that the chatty amongst us should start a Slack server 
> (though I'd recommend Discord <https://discord.com/> instead). I didn't find 
> the Brooks article. But I'm not a subscriber and I've read my last free 
> article. 8^( If you can send the link, I'd be grateful. I'm still in the 
> throes of a fugue on "value alignment".
> 
> But I did find this:
> 
> The Abortion Backup Plan No One Is Talking About
> https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/plan-c-secret-option-mail-order-abortion/620324/
> 
> which links to this:
> 
> The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion
> https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-availability-and-use-of-medication-abortion/
> 
> 
> On 10/13/21 8:04 AM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
>> From the Atlantic Magazine this morning.
>>
>>  “Decades of studies have shown that the people most satisfied with their
>> work are those who find a fundamental match between their employer’s values
>> and their own,” our columnist, Arthur C. Brooks, writes. “Too many people
>> who work hard and strive for success self-objectify as excellent work
>> machines and tools of performance,” Arthur explains.  “Employees love it;
>> bosses, not so much,” our Special Projects editor Ellen Cushing writes in
>> our magazine’s technology issue. The software is changing how a generation
>> works—and complains.  “Forget the beanbag chairs and the foosball table.
>> Give your staff clean air instead,” Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor,
>> advises.
>>
>>
>> (I'd like to add that $15/hr. is not a living wage.)
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 8:34 AM  wrote:
>>
>>> From the New Mexican:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The field with the most vacancies is health care, with over 13,100
>>> openings, he said. Hotels and restaurants also are hurting for workers, he
>>> said.
>>>
>>> …
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The number of New Mexicans filing for unemployment claims has dropped from
>>> about 50,000 in early September — when most extended federal unemployment
>>> benefits came to an end — to just over 18,000 this week, Serna said.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Is everybody just “smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.  (Now
>>> don’t tell me; I’ve nothing to do.) “
> 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] Where are all the workers going?

2021-10-13 Thread uǝlƃ ☤ $

Thanks for sending me to the Atlantic. Cushing's Slack article was great! It's 
more evidence that the chatty amongst us should start a Slack server (though 
I'd recommend Discord <https://discord.com/> instead). I didn't find the Brooks 
article. But I'm not a subscriber and I've read my last free article. 8^( If 
you can send the link, I'd be grateful. I'm still in the throes of a fugue on 
"value alignment".

But I did find this:

The Abortion Backup Plan No One Is Talking About
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/plan-c-secret-option-mail-order-abortion/620324/

which links to this:

The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion
https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-availability-and-use-of-medication-abortion/


On 10/13/21 8:04 AM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
> From the Atlantic Magazine this morning.
> 
>  “Decades of studies have shown that the people most satisfied with their
> work are those who find a fundamental match between their employer’s values
> and their own,” our columnist, Arthur C. Brooks, writes. “Too many people
> who work hard and strive for success self-objectify as excellent work
> machines and tools of performance,” Arthur explains.  “Employees love it;
> bosses, not so much,” our Special Projects editor Ellen Cushing writes in
> our magazine’s technology issue. The software is changing how a generation
> works—and complains.  “Forget the beanbag chairs and the foosball table.
> Give your staff clean air instead,” Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor,
> advises.
> 
> 
> (I'd like to add that $15/hr. is not a living wage.)
> 
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 8:34 AM  wrote:
> 
>> From the New Mexican:
>>
>>
>>
>> The field with the most vacancies is health care, with over 13,100
>> openings, he said. Hotels and restaurants also are hurting for workers, he
>> said.
>>
>> …
>>
>>
>>
>> The number of New Mexicans filing for unemployment claims has dropped from
>> about 50,000 in early September — when most extended federal unemployment
>> benefits came to an end — to just over 18,000 this week, Serna said.
>>
>>
>>
>> Is everybody just “smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.  (Now
>> don’t tell me; I’ve nothing to do.) “

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Here's what I posted, for clarity. Your taking 1 sentence out of context is ... 
[ahem] ... slop.

On 10/12/21 11:13 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> "General Semantics" reminds me of this guy: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Raniere
> 
> or perhaps this guy:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard
> 
> (Funny story: We met a customer at the pub the other day who calls himself 
> "Captain". When I asked him "What are you the Captain of?", the bartender 
> answered "The Royal Scotman".)
> 
> More seriously, though, the essentialist program that seems buried in (or 
> perhaps mistakenly accused of) General Semantics seems problematic. It 
> reminds me a bit of the intuitively attractive, but ultimately false, MBPT:
> 
> Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless
> https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless
> 
> which, since we seem to care about AI is unfortunately used: 
> https://v6.typefocus.com/
> 
> As always, the misunderstood geniuses (e.g. Robert Rosen) tend toward the 
> rhetoric that any flaws others find with the system is due to their own lack 
> of effort ... or lack of persistence. But, as Jochen points out, it literally 
> does not matter whether a Country song is good or not. What matters is 
> whether a silly dance on TikTok goes viral.


On 10/12/21 1:57 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> "I post here because I like contextually laden posts."
> 
> Ha. If only. Most of my posts (as well as just about everyone else that
> attempts to write meaningfully) are met with banality with probability near
> one, so don't give me that slop. You made a claim about something
> mattering:
> 
> *"What matters is whether a silly dance on TikTok goes viral."*
> 
> I sincerely asked what it means to matter and I followed my question with
> content that you may or may not value, but hey. As far as my pithy remark
> from weeks ago, I thought I was doing you a favor. You strike me as having
> a religious devotion to balance, and I was pointing out where you were off.
> I thought you would appreciate the spot.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Ha! Don't make the mistake of thinking because I act one way, my actions are an 
attempt to control your actions. You do whatever floats your listing boat. I 
was explaining my is→ought inference, not yours.

However, to whatever extent another finds my laid out rhetoric plausible, they 
are free to refer to it or steal it or ridicule it at their leisure. A 
difference between a pithy witty chat-oriented post and a long-winded 
rhetorically and contextually rich post is that it is *easier* to steal or 
refer to the latter. Those who tend to assume a shared, implicit 
inter-subjectivity produce less referencable, less copyable, less criticizable 
artifacts.

An employee of mine once claimed "you don't understand my process". My response 
was simply, "well, if I don't see at least sporadic interim artifacts, I'll 
never understand your process. Similarly, many of the students and postdocs I 
interact with simply refuse to commit broken (not finished) code to a 
repository. They post semi-reports of "results", if we're generous, but what in 
hell am I supposed to do with that garbage? At the very least, post an entire 
narrative. Those of us who know narrativity is a hallmark of self delusion 
won't *believe* your narrative. But at least we can parse the damned thing.

On 10/12/21 1:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Why should any particular forum adhere to a set of rules or some arbitrary
> definition?  In the CS Department at Carnegie Mellon there was the Opinion
> Bboard.  The rule was that anything goes.  A discussion of erotic fantasies
> (euphemism) emerged.  A woman who was a high level administrator became
> offended.  She posted, "who cares about what turns you kaboom dickheads
> on?" (euphemism)  Unfortunately she posted that pithy question to the
> General Bboard, which was for announcing seminars, visiting speakers, etc.
> Anyway, Opinion was the most followed Bboard, among dozens, in that
> community, I believe.
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 1:58 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$  wrote:
> 
>> Well, similar to your "why must I mean all that" reaction to my past
>> attempt at some kind of state space reconstruction of a pithy post from
>> you, I can construct *many* generative models for your "Matters to
>> what/whom?" post. But if it'll simply end with another pithy rejection of
>> whatever I reconstruct, it feels like a waste of time. It's safe to assume
>> I'm never on the same wavelength. The problem with communication is the
>> illusion that it exists.
>>
>> I could make yet another post to the mailing list asking "what does that
>> mean?" ... but that's not optimal because: a) you don't retain message
>> threading and don't quote much of the prior content and b) email fora are
>> not chat, as I've argued a lot before and don't need to argue again. So,
>> chatty posts to fora like FriAM exhibit a misunderstanding of what email
>> fora (or usenet etc) are and what they're fit-to-purpose usage patterns
>> facilitate.
>>
>> I feel like it might be appropriate to have a Discord or IRC channel for
>> pithy chat. It might be appealing to those who also like the Zoom meetings
>> or maybe even the in person meetings at the coffee shop. But those are less
>> interesting to me. I post here because I like contextually laden posts. I
>> give SteveS a lot of guff for his bloviating posts. 8^D But I like them.
>> Both he and EricS make full posts and tend toward less chatty, witty
>> repartee.
>>
>> On 10/12/21 12:12 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>>> "Bah. I understand it can be fun to troll. But if you can't make at least
>>> an attempt to avoid blankface pithiness, I can't respond."
>>>
>>> Sorry, I thought we were one something like the same wavelength there.
>> Care
>>> to expand? Feel free to call me if you imagine that I am in anything but
>>> good faith chatting with you now.


-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Well, similar to your "why must I mean all that" reaction to my past attempt at 
some kind of state space reconstruction of a pithy post from you, I can 
construct *many* generative models for your "Matters to what/whom?" post. But 
if it'll simply end with another pithy rejection of whatever I reconstruct, it 
feels like a waste of time. It's safe to assume I'm never on the same 
wavelength. The problem with communication is the illusion that it exists.

I could make yet another post to the mailing list asking "what does that mean?" 
... but that's not optimal because: a) you don't retain message threading and 
don't quote much of the prior content and b) email fora are not chat, as I've 
argued a lot before and don't need to argue again. So, chatty posts to fora 
like FriAM exhibit a misunderstanding of what email fora (or usenet etc) are 
and what they're fit-to-purpose usage patterns facilitate.

I feel like it might be appropriate to have a Discord or IRC channel for pithy 
chat. It might be appealing to those who also like the Zoom meetings or maybe 
even the in person meetings at the coffee shop. But those are less interesting 
to me. I post here because I like contextually laden posts. I give SteveS a lot 
of guff for his bloviating posts. 8^D But I like them. Both he and EricS make 
full posts and tend toward less chatty, witty repartee.

On 10/12/21 12:12 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> "Bah. I understand it can be fun to troll. But if you can't make at least
> an attempt to avoid blankface pithiness, I can't respond."
> 
> Sorry, I thought we were one something like the same wavelength there. Care
> to expand? Feel free to call me if you imagine that I am in anything but
> good faith chatting with you now.

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Bah. I understand it can be fun to troll. But if you can't make at least an 
attempt to avoid blankface pithiness, I can't respond.

On 10/12/21 11:25 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> "What matters is whether a silly dance on TikTok goes viral."
> 
> Matters to what/whom? I understand that it is a joke to imagine
> stewardship, but virality and its effects are the consequences of
> structural design.

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] Schwill Rock?

Ha! Well, I wouldn't fault Pandora for playing that tune on my Swill station. 
But I'd thumbs down it. So, perhaps I'm a hypocrite.

My point about pointing was that there are scopes of similarity, some tightly 
focused on the sign, some tightly focused on the referent, some (Korzybski?) 
tightly focused on the interpreter. My guess is that there are algorithms used 
in Pandora (and FAcebook) that target all 3 and their compositions. That stack 
of algorithms can, then, list <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_list>, 
either within that basis or within derived structures.

And from that compositional perspective, no science is absurd (or not absurd) 
in light of aesthetics, nor vice versa. It all depends on what you target with 
your algorithm stack ... if you're purposeful enough to actually target 
something ... instead of staring at all the fingers.

On 10/12/21 10:35 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Wow, Tijuana Cartel, now that's what my morning has been missing. So
> are the similarity algorithms actually different or simply different
> datasets? I get why similarity seems like a good idea at first, but
> clearly, now that the boat is moving... or maybe said a different way,
> "You have your whole life to write the first album and 6 months to
> write the second".
> 
> I guess my assertion is that what looked fine for all kinds of science
> doing is clearly absurd in the cold light of aesthetics.
> 
> ps. Is Andrew WK scwilly?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WccfbPQNMbg_channel=AndrewWKVEVO
> 
> [턢] 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4jbZ6bRf6A=PLamWgSlEr7V9d1DjCDtsT_vnptJ9DGqw4_channel=VBViBeZ
> 

-- 
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Re: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated

"General Semantics" reminds me of this guy: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Raniere

or perhaps this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard

(Funny story: We met a customer at the pub the other day who calls himself 
"Captain". When I asked him "What are you the Captain of?", the bartender 
answered "The Royal Scotman".)

More seriously, though, the essentialist program that seems buried in (or 
perhaps mistakenly accused of) General Semantics seems problematic. It reminds 
me a bit of the intuitively attractive, but ultimately false, MBPT:

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless

which, since we seem to care about AI is unfortunately used: 
https://v6.typefocus.com/

As always, the misunderstood geniuses (e.g. Robert Rosen) tend toward the 
rhetoric that any flaws others find with the system is due to their own lack of 
effort ... or lack of persistence. But, as Jochen points out, it literally does 
not matter whether a Country song is good or not. What matters is whether a 
silly dance on TikTok goes viral.

On 10/12/21 8:50 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> The source of all evil is *'is'*.
> 
> This notion is implicit and semi-explicit in most mystical philosophies and 
> is explicitly applied to thinking in the works of Korzibski and the General 
> Semantics literature that was briefly popular and widespread a few decades 
> back.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2021, at 9:29 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>> Exactly, which is why Hume's Law is a criticism of axiomatic thinking. 
>> We clearly do derive ought from is. Is is the only is that is. Is this 
>> a type of moral realism? Emergentist morality?

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] Schwill Rock?