Category: Blog

Year In Review

Bla bla bla, 2020 was a big year for me. I started off doing philosophy of language and ended up at “strategic interaction.” For the uninitiated, think game theory meets microsociology, or check out a slide deck. Add a side plate of institutional theory, debt, and philosophy of science. Though our press, Not Nothing, was…… Continue reading Year In Review

Re-engineering “taste”

One way I’ve found helpful to think about “culture,” at a more manageable scale, is through the metaphor of an unending variety show, with many theaters and stages (think music festivals—GovBall, Coachella). This neverending show presents a class of problems to any audience member attempting to grok an act, or to any act attempting to…… Continue reading Re-engineering “taste”

The telephone effect, and the reciprocity of perspectives

In F. L. Allen’s Only Yesterday, a history of the 1920s published in the early 30s, Allen writes about the revolution in manners and morals that began to pick up in the early years of the decade: Like all revolutions, this one was stimulated by foreign propoganda. It came, however, not from Moscow, but from…… Continue reading The telephone effect, and the reciprocity of perspectives

Overhaulism

overhaulism (n): related to Chesterton’s fence, Hayek’s “fatal conceit,” Christopher Alexander and James Scott’s “high modernism,” Taleb’s “modernistic intellectualism,” and John Gall’s “systemism.” A belief in the power of individuals’ synchronous reasoning & intelligence to intervene in a complex system; correspondingly, an attitude of bearishness toward evolved solutions. Ethical overhaulism is an arguable facet of…… Continue reading Overhaulism

Published
Categorized as Blog

Sidebar: Mutual Hostilities

This is an entry in an ongoing series of posts, which will work through the ideas advocated by Eliezer Yudkowsky and other amateur philosophers from the LessWrong community, and attempt to understand the extent to which their ideas are novel as opposed to reinventions of the wheel. Link to introductory post for context and motivation.…… Continue reading Sidebar: Mutual Hostilities

Meta-Sequences: Introduction & Criteria

I have offered bounties to anyone who can identify a precedent, in mainstream philosophy, for an idea advanced by Eliezer Yudkowsky as his own. These bounties are in the service of a larger accounting: Background & Motivation LessWrong rationalists and mainstream philosophers are two tribes made up of generally intelligent & knowledgeable people, focused on…… Continue reading Meta-Sequences: Introduction & Criteria

Wait, what? Sense-breaking in contemporary art

x-post from Carcinisation In a recent paper, my collaborator Tom Rutten and I advanced a tentative theory of how contemporary visual artworks might interact with a predictive error minimization (or “predictive processing”) system in human viewers. The predictive processing model of cognition is a relatively recent figuration of the age-old problem of inference (how humans…… Continue reading Wait, what? Sense-breaking in contemporary art

Wasting Our Time

Karen Horney’s (pron. “Horn-eye”) Neurosis and Human Growth is an influential but heterodox work of psychoanalytic theory that argues on behalf of self-realization (her coinage). It’s a good book that would’ve been a great essay, so I want to compress its framework of ideas here and sort what felt resonant from what didn’t. Here’s the…… Continue reading Wasting Our Time

Superstates

I don’t buy the intentionalist tone here, though I can imagine there being a natural attraction toward, and desire for, control emanating from the State which slowly leads us to the same place. Anyway, what I think’s important about this passage is that it illuminates the way the local cultures of a relationship, of a…… Continue reading Superstates

Junkspace

OtherInter.net, a small consulting group co-run by my friend Toby Shorin, has started up a series of workshops with folks from the community. Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus is teaching a course called the Digital Transformation of Physical Space, which I’ll be enrolled in over the the next four weeks. I’ll be keeping track of…… Continue reading Junkspace

Tossouts from The Color Purple

As I wrap up editing the follow-up volume to 2017’s La Vento, I wanted to preserve some of the quotes and lines and ideas that won’t make it into final cut. Simon Reynolds, Shock & Awe The impossible perfection of a Moment or an Image—it could be a lover, or the tableau of the in-crowd…… Continue reading Tossouts from The Color Purple

Published
Categorized as Blog