Tag: signaling
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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…
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Seventies Interior Design
In the seventies, carpets were a way to signal a certain level of middle and upper-middle-class affluence. As such, they could be found almost everywhere. Today, stained wood stands as a similar socioeconomic indicator, at least in coastal American culture. There is the angle by which this is purely contrarian signaling — the upper-class picks a style (e.g. carpeting);…
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A Conversation With Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor at Ribbonfarm, and the author of Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (Nine-Banded Books, 2014). Perry occupies a Gertrude Stein-esque role in the intellectual community of post-rationalism, helping bring people together into a salon-like digital space while also producing vitally important work of her own. Perry’s writing has dealt with issues ranging from…
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Camera Obscura’s Let’s Get Out of This Country
Camera Obscura’s breakthrough Let’s Get Out of This Country was released ten years ago this June. Had I known of the record at the time, it would likely have been relegated to the category of guilty pleasure: something to be listened to but not shared; something enjoyable but not worthy. Rock music, especially after a nineties-alt makeover, was still…
Suspended Reason 