Tag: institutional theory

• Surrogation, or why we can’t have nice things

  X: Representation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Y: True, but but anything before that probably couldn’t be called the human race.

  suspendedreason

  July 22, 2021

  Blog

  artificial intelligence, Campbell's Law, degenerate play, games, generalized reading, Goodhart's Law, institutional theory, Karl Friston, Markov blankets, mesa-optimization, microsociology, representation, selection games, signaling theory, strategic interaction, surrogation, wireheading

• Selection games

  rock’s apparent shape, size, and kind. The rock has no perception of John’s selection, nor any interest in whether or not it is selected. It is unable to change itself or its appearance in any way to increase or decrease its chances of selection, even if it were aware of, and interested in, the selection…

  suspendedreason

  May 28, 2021

  Essays

  alignment, Erving Goffman, games, generalized reading, institutional theory, Pfeilstorch, selection games, strategic interaction, the inexact sciences, The Wire

• Actor-evaluator interaction

  

  suspendedreason

  May 1, 2021

  Diagrams

  institutional theory, strategic interaction

• The surrogation matrix

  The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays…

  suspendedreason

  February 2, 2021

  Essays

  alignment, deception, Friedrich Nietzsche, games, institutional theory, Karl Friston, Markov blankets, opticratics, proxies, spirit vs. letter, strategic interaction, surrogation, wireheading

• From measurement to degeneration

  There is no characteristic that is common to everything that we call games… It is a family-likeness term. Think of ball-games alone: some, like tennis, have a complicated system of rules; but there is a game which consists just in throwing the ball as high as one can, or the game which children play of…

  suspendedreason

  January 15, 2021

  Essays

  C. Thi Nguyen, Campbell's Law, degenerate play, flopping, game studies, gamification, Goodhart's Law, institutional theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein, metrics, opticratics, optics, psychology, signaling, social science, surrogation, systems theory

• The Dark Miracle of Optics

  Epistemic status: Very little of my thinking here is original. Details are greatly simplified in the name of brevity (e.g. tit-for-tat is used to stand metonymically for complex cooperation patterns). Alternate titles: In the beginning, there was the defection. We can treat a prisoner’s dilemma as an elegant stand-in for coordination more generally. A one-off…

  suspendedreason

  July 10, 2020

  Essays

  bullshit, gamification, generalized reading, institutional theory, Jean Baudrillard, mimicry, opticratics, optics, signaling, signaling theory, simulacra, strategic interaction, The Wire, Zvi Mowshowitz

• Institutional Myth in Contemporary Art

  I’ve spent a lot of time in & around the New York visual art scene the past few years, and it’s been a very strange & uncanny & informative experience. A lot of the preference falsification and undead prestige cultures of, say, academia, or science, or politics are in play, but here the emperor can…

  suspendedreason

  July 10, 2020

  Essays

  ambiguity, illusio, institutional theory, Janet Malcolm, Pierre Bourdieu, sacredness, Sarah Perry, visual art