Tag: strategic interaction

• Epistemic Strategies, pt. 1: Contests of Assessment

  This is the first of a two-part essay on strategic manipulations of other agents’ epistemic states. Part One lays the groundwork by tying together theories of metonyms, expression games, and signals vs. cues. Part Two lays out the epistemic axes of legibility vs. illegibility, commitment vs. flexibility, and ignorance vs. knowingness, and the situations in…

  suspendedreason

  May 12, 2021

  Essays

  abduction, epistemology, Erving Goffman, generalized reading, intrinsic empowerment, keeping upwind, metonyms, OODA loop, perception, predictive processing, signaling theory, sociality, strategic epistemology, strategic ignorance, strategic interaction, Thomas Kuhn, William James

• 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

• 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

• Economics thinking

  Mistakes in business or in science are costly and deplorable, but mistakes in the conduct of life are usually dangerous to life itself. To the tack of illuminating man’s progress toward a better understanding of human nature, this book is dedicated. Alfred Adler (1927) Everybody gets something out of every transaction. House of Games 1.…

  suspendedreason

  October 27, 2020

  Essays

  Agnes Callard, all communication is manipulation, David Mamet, evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Franzen, Knut Hamsun, psychology, reciprocity, strategic interaction, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Schelling, Tyler Cowen

• 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