Tag: opticratics
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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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Value Clarity 2.0
C. Thi Nguyen’s “value clarity” concept (advanced in 2020’s Games: Agency as Art) is a useful one, whose basic idea goes like this: Nguyen believes games “work” (compel us) largely by providing value clarity for their players—that is, game worlds are characterized by artificially narrow and unambiguous set of priorities and purposes over which the…
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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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Letter to Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro
“In each part of the poem, the goddess of cancer orders the evolving entities to compete, but the goddess of everything else recasts it as a two-layer competition where cooperation of the internal layer helps win the competition on the external layer.” A Sextant Colder Honor culture isn’t dead, just mutated. Alternate titles: The Public-Private…
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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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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…
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The Dark Miracle of Optics
Epistemic status: no idea how original any of this is; it just connects a lot of nodes in my brain. I’ve been told there’s a real debt to Robert Trivers, which I hope to educate myself on shortly. I may just be reinventing signal theory. Alternate titles: The Public-Private Information Gap Rules Everything Around Me…
Suspended Reason 