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Against “Self-Expression”
Information and emotion ripple across the social, transforming members’ attitudes and behaviors. Stress breeds stress; anger transfers; to paraphrase Buddha, the only moral imperative is spreading good vibes. This is the idea behind the phrase “all communication is manipulation“: to emphasize the effects of utterances—and similar symbolic gestures—on the social ecology within which they are…
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“Peacemakers” sidebar: Eliot’s egoic ontology
A short post to accompany the Primitive Peacemakers series, with some quotes from Middlemarch that otherwise wouldn’t make it in. Eliot repeatedly returns to the observation that individuals’ sense of the world—from morality to category to truth—is by default egocentric. This, in my read, is a logical extension of pragmatism from the level of cultural…
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Primitive Peacemakers, pt 1: The Fall of Jordan Peterson
This is the beginning of a 5-part series, whose alternate titles might run: “Metarationality & the Frame Problem,” “Function/Form/Fluidity,” and “Cultural Relativism for Rationalists.” It aims to trace a throughline in taoist, pragmatist, and postmodern thinking, and to introduce a certain meta-systematic school of blogosphere philosophy which has crystallized around the frame problem in microsociology,…
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Open questions
Here’s a list of questions that I’m looking for leads on. If you think you can answer any, or are able to point me in the direction of writing that deals with similar issues, please reach out; my contact is suspendedreason(at)gmail.com I’m also looking for:
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Flesh as Surface
“And I must go with stone feet / Down the staircase of flesh”—Ern Malley In the visual arts the past few years there’s been a slough of works that foreground the flesh, shoot meat in macro, and appropriate skin as texture.(Corpus as corpus.) We have Seth Price’s Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad, which showed…
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Michael Clayton
@suspendedreason: Reply or DM with (1) a movie that means a lot to you (2) a couple abstract-ish questions that have been on your mind. And I will watch the movie + write you a tarot-style analysis of what it has to say about your questions @andrewvanhyfte: Michael Clayton (2007) / in my notes app:…
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Ripple
It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are brokenPerhaps they’re better left unsung Grateful Dead, “Ripple” 1. Matching games We went into the pound blind. My aunt works in shelters, and I should have—but didn’t—reach out to gather intel: what are the signs, how do you know, how can you tell? The honest answers to such questions…
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Strategic Conceptualization
When consequences are the result of categorization, people will perform categories to attain their desired consequences. Categories carry with them a mix of connotations (social reputations) and decision rules (conventions for associated practice). Decision rules, that is, are domain-specific actions conditionally undertaken on the basis of whether a object or event under consideration is ruled…
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Précis for an action-oriented theory of language
What is a word, or message, or utterance? It is a move by an agent (~superorganism) undertaken in order to transform the environmental state, in a desired direction, by means of altering another agent’s information state. This transformation may occur directly, if the targeted slice of environment happens to be that agent whose informational state…
A D Jameson all communication is manipulation Alva Nöe ambiguity compression Erving Goffman fashion fitness games generalized reading hermeneutic circle institutional theory Interpretation Jürgen Schmidhuber Karl Friston language games linguistics literary theory literature Maggie Nelson maps meaning music music criticism New Sincerity nostalgia opticratics Peli Grietzer Pierre Bourdieu pop music poptimism predictive coding predictive hermeneutics predictive model predictive processing Sarah Perry selection games signaling signaling theory strategic interaction surrogation the inexact sciences Thomas Schelling vibe theory visual art
Suspended Reason 