Category: Essays
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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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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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Detectives & Dramaturgy
1. There are two potential explanations for why Tana French’s “literary thriller” In The Woods portrays human interaction and detective work how it does. The first is that she read Erving Goffman’s microsociology work, internalizing its principles. Alternatively, she trained and worked for over a decade as an actor. Goffman is famous for the dramaturgical…
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Epistemic Strategies pt. 2
There is probably no contrast more striking, in the comparison of the mixed-motive and the pure-conflict (zero-sum) game, than the significance of having one’s own strategy found out and appreciated by the opponent. Hardly anything captures the spirit of the zero-sum game quite so much as the importance of “not being found out” and of…
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Response to Simpolism on ACiM
Simpolism has kindly written two posts in response to my own recent barrage—the first, “Is Communication ‘Manipulation’?” investigates his gut reaction to the idea that in communicating, he might manipulate others; the second, “On Behavioral Hermeneutics,” tries to figure out what kind of claim ACiM is. The posts make good points, and introduce a number…
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On the vibe shift, pt 1: Worldbuilding
See Part 2: Nameless, Faceless. Chatting with a friend last week, I mentioned I was writing a party report on the Lisbon ETH conferences for Spike. She said she was surprised. That there was a narcissism to the genre she’d expect to turn me off. A reasonable criticism—the format’s short history is ≈ synonymous with…
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Games of Strategy are Games of Reading and Writing
1. Schelling defines games of strategy as any situation in which each player’s best choice of action depends on the actions (he expects) the other player will take (and vice-versa, reflexively). This is in contrast to games of skill and games of chance. “Strategy,” then, is the study of conflicting parties’ behaviors as they are premised on…
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Notes on the Inexact Sciences
“Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”
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Transfer Phenomena & Two-Person Languages
“Spotted: a dirty brown bag crushed under a tennis shoe. Looks like someone won’t be eating dinner tonight. XOXO… Gossip Girl.” The thing about voices is they are contagious. I can’t do accents, but spend a week watching TV re-runs and I can GPT-3 an essay in the narrator’s delivery.
Suspended Reason 