Category: Blog
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Pfeilstorch Progress: Games, Dialectic, Spirit
I launched a [Discord server with a] small community of friends, which has this year, 2021, evolved into an online forum. Our mascot is the pfeilstorch. We’re interested in the inexact sciences, and moreover, in the rigorizing pipeline that got us from natural philosophy to biology, or alchemy to chemistry.
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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…
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Kaitlin Phillips as PopLit
It was spring, around 11am and cold; we had teas with condensed milk in a small Malaysian place in the Lower East Side and I held up an AbEx painter book that was on sale and you made a joke about the page layout. For about a week the prior May I’d wondered whether or…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Suspended Reason 