Tag: optics

• 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…

  suspendedreason

  May 5, 2021

  Essays

  Batesian mimicry, C. Thi Nguyen, Campbell's Law, capital, coordination, Dave Pizarro, David Simon, extend and retreat, Friedrich Nietzsche, game theory, generalized reading, glory, Goodhart's Law, Homer, Jerry Muller, mimicry, mutualism, Neil Postman, opticratics, optics, prestige, reputation, signaling theory, strategic interaction, surrogation, Tamler Sommers, The Wire

• 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