Transmission

by Collin Lysford

an excerpt from Vasiliy Grossman’s Stalingrad

H — Living people take their energy to reform the environment in a certain way, a stable way. They have cached their energetic capital into order. If a building can be killed, how alive is it now?

C — Think of Cretto di Burri. To remake the lines of a destroyed city is to prohibit any future growth. No one can live there, but it can retain the trace of the past. This is the only way a structure is preserved.

a diagram of pace layering

S — The pace of change is the pace of reliability. Eddies form when water hits obstructions. The stuff right next to the rock goes slower, the stuff outside curls, goes faster, and turns the slow stuff into counterforces.

C — An extremely durable and reliable place is one that is de-identified. Individualism is less reliable.

S — The same sweatshirts keeps meaning something different because people want to seize cultural capital. The meaning of an artistic, indvidual object isn’t fixed the way a building is; it’s constantly open to re-interpretation.

H — It’s not always a case of individualism and durability being opposites. Think of a beaver in a cage who is released into the wild. Now he is free to do what he wants: manipulate his environment in a more stable way. The whole system of the beaver, the forest, the river, and the dam can settle at a non-random point that flows more easily through time because “individuality” here meant building such a configuration.

C — All the people in Brooklyn doing the same watercolors in the park aren’t asserting individuality. It’s entirely form, with no aboutness.

M — Canopy trees grow tall not because they are in love with the sun, reaching out in the vain hope of someday touching the celestial sphere. The tall tree stretches out to strangle the shrubs below them to death, an inching murder that can be difficult for humans, in our everyday time consciousness, to fully apprehend.

H — Life is a special case where the information you send forward through time must be information about sending information forward through time; nothing else will do. There’s no such thing as life without aboutness, because being alive is the aboutness. Art does not have this restriction. Buildings dance in the space between; a blanket fort has meaning without durability and a commieblock has durability without meaning.

M — When a ‘commieblock’ building no longer pleases, it may be swept away and replaced by another, and the commonly understood morality of the unique and the individual affords no refusal. The gaily-(muted) (shambles)-house stands out in both presence and absence: a million spectators may tut-tut, canvas with tents and banners tinted deeper than the paints, burn torches brighter than its sitting room, draw knives glittering colder than its windows, should anything ever change.

C — There is a canon of art that deliberately eschews aboutness, distinct from simply lacking it. A return to pure materiality. And yet it flows — because it is part of a canon that sustains it, in a way that Brooklyn watercolors are not.

H — Art can come alive because we send more than our fair share of information forward in time. Our genetic and cultural patterns not only let us flow, but give us plenty of space to take other ideas with us. This privilege is often pointed to by the word “consciousness”. What a terrible responsibility! By keeping ideas alive that can’t perpetuate on their own, we have to decide when it’s their time to die.

an excerpt of Vasiliy Grossman’s “Everything Flows”

Magic rites in the lore of economics

by SQCU

In the folklore of the men who call themselves economists there is a story of a magic ritual. In this ritual, when two men meet in body, they meet in mind. When two men meet in mind, and exchange one thing for another thing, there is a Determination of Value. The thing and the other thing are so alike in the world of the economist we might call them by the same name, say Th. Th and Th have such a poverty of difference that it cannot be said that Th has a value different from Th. And yet. To the economist, this is a time and place of great power.

For when one man and another exchange Th for Th, despite the two Th having precisely equal value, in the two worlds of the two men’s minds, they each see themselves, happier, prouder, standing ever so taller, if these two items change hands, are repossessed, and walk away with these two men as their paths through the world twist, shift, and judder away from one another. To the economist, Value stayed the same. but something that never before existed has been brought into the world: Expected Value.

(expected value, lowercased, is a crass term of the uncontrollable gambler, foretelling the prices they ought set for bookie’s tables and coins for cards, in the oldest etymology of the term. How the lowercased term came to coincide in speech sounds with the uppercased Expected Value of the decider is a mystery for another time.)

Let us sum up this exchange in a more expedient form: To the economist, when a thing and another are exchanged, their Values must be taken to be equal, for if their values were not equal, neither thing’s owner would accept a trade. And yet, at the exact same time, despite the equal Value, one owner or another must envision a greater Expected Value at the end of this transaction than they saw at its start, or else neither owner would be willing to spend their time and attention on this rite of exchange.

Let us be a little bit more expedient:

To the economist, there are Transactions. The Values of things are found by their transacting. When two things are transacted for one another, their Value must be exactly identical at the moment of transaction. Nevertheless, a second, immanent, more magical value is revealed, the Expected value. It increases with all exchanges.

More expedient still:

• In a transaction, thing1 and thing2 are not identical objects.
• In a transaction, the values of thing1 and thing2 are made identical.
• In a transaction, a secondary quality called Expected Value is brought into the world from nothing.

To the economist, Expected Value is always increasing.

Even though Expected Value is bound up in objects whose values may not be measured or understood within the transaction, the Expected Value may be known through pure faith.

Expected value is immaterially connected to the material objects of exchange, and may only be brought about through their substitution.

So. Why would we care about the construction of the ritual of The Exchange, or the legend of the origin of the Expected Value in The Exchange? Because this is a post about moral hazard, and the explicitly magical foundation of the belief in the men of economics in the moral value of exchange.

Moral hazard, as it is commonly told, is a story about insurance. In the story, when people ‘are insured’, they are blessed people. When the insured experiences extreme, unpredictable bad fortune, they may shrug off their ill fate, and continue their everyday affairs as if they were far luckier. To the economist, one of the greatest sins one might perpetrate, of course, is being the customer of an economist who has mispriced a contract. Were an insured party to hold a contract mispriced in their favor, the customer might choose many courses of action where their best laid plans are sure to be profitable, minus costs, (including insurance,) when all desired outcomes and undesired outcomes are fully considered. Most typically, the economist’s slang of ‘moral hazard’ serves as a handle for the far longer statement: ‘when my insured customers predict the economic returns of their own actions, they choose braver, more profitable actions. even though my contractual insurance fees did not adequately increase in proportion with the bravery-borne risks. I am bad at math.’

Amusing as this picture of the naive economist might be, it is worth considering that there is an interesting structure of morality embedded within the story, one that might resonate well with other sorts of thinkers. The notion of ‘moral hazard’ can be extended to any distancing of one party from harms that their conduct might cause to others with which they contract. As with the economist’s happy insurance customers, errors in the structure of contracts can allow one participant to experience greater realized value even as their counterparty experiences lesser realized value. This has some interesting similarities of structure to the ‘rite of the exchange’ described above: Situations with ‘moral hazard’ seem to correspond to a violation of the critical assumption that the values of two sides of an exchange must be equal at the moment it is made real, or else there must be a negative ‘expected value’. This interesting inequality need be explored no further, however, as it is adequate to explore the incentives to distort the signs and measures of the economist’s rite.

Economists are men of the markets, men of the futures, and literally subsist on the financialization of what has not yet been financialized.

However, this is a vocation so stratified and so demanding of resources that economists are compelled to huddle together into larger institutions to earn their thinly divided shares of real transactions. It is extremely unlikely for a self avowed economist to venture into the world as their own market-maker, to found their own brokerage, or to invent, profit from, and disseminate an original form of contract. While economic thinkers might found their reasoning on mercantilism, the mercantile spirit does not flow through their bodies.

So, for an economist to eat, he must take commissions on the settlement of transactions. They can’t just think about transactions, you know. If they don’t interpose themselves into human activity, there is no origin for their own ineffably-valued ‘transactions’ and immanent ‘expected value’. And, of course, where a person may only earn their keep in the world through inducing other people to enter into contracts, which they themselves are not prepared to support as buyer or seller, the second form of moral hazard emerges!

We should note that the ‘positive immanent value’ theory of transactions is a story of a triple intersubjectivity, closer to the homestuckian troll romance quadrant of auspisticism (♣) than any relationship well developed in traditional human folklore. (the blessedly innocent reader may interpret ‘auspistice’ as ‘mediator between two rivals who otherwise might destroy one another’.) The economist need only spectate on a true relationship (of contracts) between two actual partners, and the economist is free to imbue the actual deal, whether auspicious or destructive, with the same ‘conciliatory romantic feeling’ as any equal valued transaction that brings about positive expected value.

Ultimately, we might properly view the economist, as distinct from a contract lawyer, softare mercantilist upstart, or actual capitalist, as incentivized not to nurture and cultivate autopoietic contracts, where Values really do equalize, and Expected Values really do increase. Rather, the economist is under extensive selective pressure to persuade themselves and their counterparties to transact as many times, in as many ways, and in as many situations as can possibly sustained by the institutions which expose markets. Whether or not the transactions are truly of the axiomatic, internally legitimate form demanded by the foundations of their thought. In fact, the economist can survive even if both partners in a transaction are brought to ruin!

This difference in incentives, and the philosophies it encourages, might affect the rest of us.

Aesthetics as holistic systems analysis

by Suspended Reason

In the world of cars, there are whole subcultures of engine audiophiles who purr with delight when well-configured chrome comes to life.

My friend Jeff, straining to speak over the roar of a Monster Truck rally, asks, “Is it a functional thing? The health and build of the engine? Or is it more aesthetic?” Then my usual razor sliced the distinction apart: ¿Por qué no los dos?. The aesthetic sense had developed as a holistic diagnosis of functional properties.

The aesthetic sensibility of a gearhead is a bit like sexual attraction. Human beauty correlates with all sorts of vitality markers and reproductive indicators, but we don’t experience it that way. We just find certain faces and bodies pleasing. So too with flavor. The concept of a maladaptive superstimulus is given platform by the base assumption of adaptive attraction.

And this is what Dennis Dutton has argued about landscapes: probably not coincidence that the generically beautiful vista has abundant amounts of water and verdure. Show a buncha eight-year-olds pictures of the savannah, and they’ll end up preferring (on vague aesthetic grounds) approximately the sorts of ecologies you’d pick if you were running a functional analysis on survival odds. Many of the elevated perspectives landscape paintings take match roughly to the predictions prospect-refuge theory makes.

No question: aesthetics decouple from function constantly, especially at the tail-end of the distribution, especially when competing agents are fucking with each others’ environmental distributions—hence heroin chic. But I think this aesthetic-functional duality begins pointing us in the same direction as Bourdieu’s habitus, in updating on standard rational-actor models. Sometimes, acting on gut feel, ineffable attraction, and the aesthetic is a form of strategic action.

To close—my hunch is that vibes operate on a similar logic:

In the most reductionist, rationalistic terms available, we can think of [social] vibes as coherent arrays of costly signals. An array might consist of body posture, facial microgestures, vocal tremors and tonality, the actual semiotic content of utterances, clothing. One of the most load-bearing forms of costly signals, in human communication, is the information signal. A given shibboleth—perhaps the pronunciation of a word, or an item of clothing—is easily performed granted one knows to perform it. What is costly and difficult to obtain is the tacit, procedural knowledge itself. It is difficult for a fed to personally infiltrate a countercultural group, because of how lacking in relevant shibboleths of speech, attire, and opinion he is. (Thus he more frequently resorts to turning and bribing insiders.) The best undercover agents spend years or decades gaining intimate familiarity with the worlds they live in; they come to be proper members of those worlds, not so much acting anymore as living their role; and here of course enters the danger of the long-embedded agent, who is helplessly compromised by his time undercover.(src)

We could never articulate this complex constellation of signals, but we carry an intuitive, felt sense of normalcy over our cognitive-sensory arrays—our external and internal landscapes—so that small, systematic deviations will set off our sensors.

Boundaries and agents

by Frances Kafka

(Taking inspiration from “What is an agent?”.)

If we were to start with biology, there’s no reason that we might not start with Freud. And such a Freudian biology gives us an apparatus to talk about what it means to be an agent. Being an agent is an achievement, as something that has to be continually fought for. It can never be a done act, and not something an agent can waver on. Each organism has a boundary that separates it from the world, it invests energy into this boundary, so that it can attain this consistency. Even lone cells have cell walls and cell membranes.

There is however, as Derrida put it, an “autoimmune” element at play (see Vitale’s Biodeconstruction). The paradox: the boundary cannot be fully rigid, because this blocks off all external impulses, which include food and resources, which would kill the cell, and therefore the boundary has to be at least partly permeable. But it is through this partial permeability that allows toxins, poisons, to enter the organism and kill it. The same mechanism that allows an organism to live off its environment are the same mechanisms which allow the environment to kill it.¹

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

But we have more to say of the living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer. This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thence forward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original in tensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it.

There is a primal narcissism where the agent has to make itself the focus of all its energies. The parts of an organism all refer to the whole, as Robert Rosen notes (how can there be a whole without a boundary?) Rosen’s work is in the formalization, in mathematical terms, of living systems as (M,R)-systems: metabolism and repair. “This implies that among the products of metabolism are the materials necessary to keep the system maintained due to turn over of its components. What this simple symbolism connotes is truly profound. The system is in a constant turnover. Part of the turnover is the causal basis for the system’s self repair.” (Donald C. Mikulecky)

Freud again:

Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield; the excitations in the deeper layers extend into the system directly and in undiminished amount, in so far as certain of their characteristics give rise to feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. The excitations coming from within are, however, in their intensity and in other, qualitative, respects—in their amplitude, perhaps more commensurate with the system’s method of working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world.a This state of things produces two definite results. First, the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure (which are an index to what is happening in the interior of the apparatus) predominate over all external stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes.

The agent not only has a membrane on the outside, but also on the inside, so that it can maintain its own self and individuality. Suspended points out that consciousness is a cost for this reason. This is where the entire apparatus of censors comes into place. The Freudian organism has to resort to a set of strategies to reframe the impulses coming from within from without for exactly this.

With boundaries inside and boundaries outside, the agent always finds itself split. It is not aligned with itself any more than it can be aligned with someone, because agency itself implies this fundamental difference which cannot be integrated.

On dexterity

by Neil

I blame Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons is where we learned that strength is for the hulking barbarian who wields a two-handed axe, and dexterity is for the acrobatic rogue, the supple contortionist. Of course, that division doesn’t even work in the scenarios the game was designed for. If you think longbows scale with DEX, try bringing a bunch of twinks to Agincourt, see how that works out for you.

If you learn any physical discipline, like dance, you quickly learn that what matters is your active range of motion. Anyone can put their arm behind their back, but not everyone can lift something heavy while it’s there. Ballet dancers can only be so graceful because their pelvic floors are girded with steel. It’s not about the ability to bend like so much gelatin, it’s about bending and staying strong while doing it.

This is what comes to mind for me, metaphorically, when Cris talks about the translator — and notice that Calvino can’t help drawing the metaphor with physical dexterity. But, as Cris notes, to fulfill this role, you can’t be equally unserious about everything; you can’t just coast by on style, nihilistically.

This conception of dance interests me, also, because it points to something paradoxical. Culturally, we think of the dancer as someone who is comfortable with themselves, at home in their bodies and in the world. But any community of dancers is not so easy to slide into. You might be able to fake your way through a wine tasting or a book club, but dance is an unforgeable skill. And while we conceive of dance as a liberating form of natural expression, anyone really good has almost certainly spent a lot of time diligently practicing. This gives rise to some odd psychological types — some dancers seek to become the sort of person who experiences life lightly, and they pursue that ideal with powerful death-drive control.

But this dynamic is not all bad. One time an acquaintance, a rationalist-adjacent fellow I didn’t particularly care for, showed up to a weekly dance I was regularly attending at the time. He told me he had to step outside because he was experiencing strong, irrational negative emotions that he needed to analyze further, and I thought — there’s nothing to analyze, motherfucker, you feel bad because you suck! It wasn’t the most charitable thought, but, you know, gardens need walls. Even if there’s something sadistic and flagellatory about a narrow will to mastery, at least one comes by that sadism honestly.

It is better, I think, than the opposite error, of letting one’s desire to be universally fluent — a natural desire — curdle into a narcissism that sands off or disavows all parts of the world where one cannot already see oneself. Such a narcissist has an unhappy lot. He constrains himself only to the forgeable domains, often ones based on games of language, and so he is never put to the test. Since he can never definitively fail, he will never be cast out, but he will also never “pass” and become initiated. He remains anxiously in limbo, waiting in fear and hope for some immanent sense of identity to emerge from the undifferentiated mass, not realizing that he has already precluded the possibility of any critical event.

A primer on auto-discourse

by Clinamenic

If traditional first-order discourse is characterized by the exploration of a given topic, with the author aptly assuming some degree of authority, there exists a second-order mode of discourse wherein the author’s own understanding of the topic is jointly, alongside the topic itself, the object of inquiry. This latter mode of discourse, here referred to ‘auto-discourse’ insofar as it contains some degree of self-reference to the author’s own understanding of the topic, may perhaps lend itself to didactic applications which the former mode discourse may not, with such prospects being the focus of this piece.

In auto-discourse, the body of discourse itself is partitioned into discourse on the topic, and discourse on the author’s understanding of the topic. Traditional discourse, however, involves conventions whereby the author is often discouraged to foreground their own uncertainty or thought process, for fear of undermining the thesis or the confidence of the reader.

Epistemic intervention

One way of understanding the relationship between these two modes of discourse, is in terms of the stage of the reader’s understanding at which the author wishes to intervene. That is, if the author is writing for readers seeking definitive knowledge on a topic, the author may likewise wish to come to a more definitive understanding of the topic, and limit the discourse such that it pertains most directly to said topic, relatively unencumbered by epistemological reflections and metacommentary. If, on the other hand, the author wishes to intervene at an earlier epistemic stage of the reader, whereby the reader is exploring some number of possible understandings of a topic, the auto-discursive approach may be advisable.

What is perhaps the driver of any supposed efficacy of this auto-discursive approach, toward the aforementioned end of aiding the reader in their sensemaking process, rather than prescribing some ostensibly definitive understanding, is the degree to which the author can intuitively convey their own sensemaking processes regarding the topic at hand. In this sense, it is as if the author is tasked not only with conveying the topic at hand, but their own epistemic scaffolding around said topic, in such a manner that the reader may choose to emulate this scaffolding in their own efforts at understanding the topic.

Prescriptive and comparative epistemics

As above understood, auto-discourse may be employed according to a variety of imperatives, based on what the author is trying to achieve. For instance, if the author is trying to prescribe or at least suggest a particular understanding of a topic, they may erect and communicate such an epistemic framework which predisposes the reader toward a particular understanding of the topic. Insofar as this approach involves reconciling or discarding possible understandings into the single prescribed understanding, this may be understood as the arborescent approach to auto-discourse. The manner in which this arborescent auto-discourse differs from traditional discourse, at least according to how traditional discourse is depicted in this inquiry, is that the former involves the author foregrounding a greater bulk of their own sensemaking of the topic, as if the intention is to grease the wheels of the reader’s comprehension in the direction advocated by the author.

If the author, however, does not wish to prescribe any particular understanding of the topic, but rather to foreground a variety of possible understandings of a topic, they may be more drawn to a rhizomatic approach to auto-discourse. This approach would admittedly seem to contain a great deal of formal complexity relative to traditional discourse, and as such its adoption should be carefully considered. It would also seem to require the author to advance multiple fronts of understanding of a topic, thus rendering the topic itself an anisotropism within the context of the discourse, and thus presuming no small degree of cognitive dexterity on behalf of the reader. Not only would the author need to aptly convey the topic to be considered, but they would also need to convey some number of epistemic scaffoldings which the reader may alternatively wrap around the topic itself.

A mode for every season

Depending on the intentions of the author, a decision may be made between employing the traditional mode of discourse, or this mode of auto-discourse. Whereas the former generally limits its focus to the topic, advancing a more or less unified understanding of that topic while keeping the author’s development of said understanding in the background, auto-discourse foregrounds this development such that the focus is split between the topic and the development of the author’s understanding of the itself.

The author’s decision between these two modes may depend on the targeted stage of the maturation of the reader’s understanding of the topic. Within the mode of auto-discourse, the author may prescribe a unified epistemic framework for the reader to emulate, or the author may choose to present a number of such frameworks for the reader to compare. This contingent decision between an arborescent auto-discourse and a rhizomatic auto-discourse would seem to depend primarily on the intentions of the author, namely whether the author wishes to advance, through their discourse, a particular interpretation of a topic, or if they wish to encourage a plurality of interpretations. In any event, an author may feel some additional degree of empowerment in adding these modes of discourse to their creative repertoire.

Everyone is not the same

by Suspended Reason

Pulled this together from old notes circa 2021. Reading Collin’s “Representation & Uncertainty” a few months later helped me clarify my thinking on some of these issues. As a wordcel, I no doubt make some mistakes here, but I wanted to lay out a crude/naive version of the argument, because (1) it helps me understand why early stages of the rigorizing pipeline need to be performed before statistical analysis becomes useful (2) my writing the clumsy version makes it more likely that @collin.lysford will be motivated to respond with a more sophisticated version and correct my errors… It’s also very possible that he’s already written about these ideas elsewhere, but perhaps it’s useful for them to be in the TIS ecosystem and written up in slightly different language. I have no problem if this doesn’t end up on the blog if we don’t think it’s rigorous enough or a meaningful contribution.

Isaac Sapphire writes:

Everyone is not the same

As I keep poking at the gordian knot that is nutrition, weight, diet, exercise, and all the cultural shit wrapped up around them, the biggest thing that jumps out is that different people are different. The plan that’s good for a 6’ 1” male movie star who’s prepping for a role under the guidance of the trainer he’s been with for a decade and literally goes to the gym as his job is going to be WAY different than the advice that’s good for a 5’ 3” mom who’s binge eating yoyo diet habit is clearly ballooning her weight and destroying her ability to walk and going land her in an electric scooter and probably a grave earlier than necessary, which is different advice than is good for an anorexic with a BMI of 16, which is different than advice that is good for a young person who just started a physically intense job or a person packing for a month-long back country hike.

Culture, class, race, religion/ethics, and gender are packed in to this so densely its insane.

Indexicality is everywhere, and yet inexact science fields’ over-reliance on statistics leads them to search for universal insights.

You know those studies of new medications, where they find it only improved outcomes for like 12% of people in their target demographic, so they abandon it? Sometimes that 12% constitutes its own meaningful subdemographic, for whom a cure with a near-universal success rate was just discovered and trashbinned because researchers couldn’t figure out what properties defined that subdemographic, or how to reliably identify its members. There are no statistics in the Kingdom of God: As we develop an increasingly comprehensive list of preconditions, the success rate of our interventions should approach 100%.

Race, gender, etc are only the most legible, conspicuous axes that people vary on. Most of the iceberg of interpersonal (psychological, neurological, biological, environmental) variation we don’t even have words to describe yet. This is why conceptual engineering—a mode of philosophy, taking place early in the rigorizing pipeline—is so essential to good statistical practices further down the pipeline. You’ll never get statistically significant results if your sampled population is too diluted, and you won’t know whether it’s diluted unless you’ve properly conceptualized the space.

A psychiatrist friend mentioned that the crappy statistics for SSRI efficacy are largely the result of SSRIs getting prescribed to lots of people who are depressed in very different ways for different reasons. You can imagine there being an SSRI-treatable neurochemical imbalance which displayed symptoms superficially similar to those of radically different sorts of problems. (E.g. people who are depressed because their lives are genuinely out of control and they never developed a strong sense of agency.). So SSRIs get used on a buncha people with Y condition, and a buncha people with !Y condition, so that the overall efficacy looks comparable to placebo; as a result, many rationalistic commentators dismiss SSRIs, and think we need to abandon neurochemical theories of depression. OTOH, actual practitioners in the field continue to use it, and to find it useful—likely in part because they themselves are already doing the informal, “soft” conceptualization work up front of identifying patient profiles which are more or less amenable to SSRIs.

Another more cutting example: The same dose of Lexapro can lead to radically different blood/brain levels of Lexapro, depending on individuals’ liver metabolisms. This means that many people in a trial of 10mg Lexapro are functionally getting 2.5mg Lexapro in their bloodstreams, but they’re lumped in as interchangeable for the purposes of the study—which, no wonder why such a study might show poor results.

In conversation with RIPDCB and Neil last year about fantasy football, we talked about sports analytics, and how you’ll get radically different analytic claims depending on how you decide to represent a given situation. Neil called this “the central postrationalist insight.” For instance, a naive statistical analysis would say, X player has Y injury, only 18% of players ever recover to peak performance after Y injury, don’t bet on this guy. But an analyst with a better understanding of the game would put together a finer-grained category for comparison: player X is under 30 years old, he plays a position where Y muscle group isn’t as important, and we know he has a lot of grit, he’ll be in the gym grinding his PT which expedites recovery time. Crispy Chicken called this “conceptualization,” which I think is a good word for it.

NB: This dynamic must already be well-understood and accounted for in statistics—but it seems to be under-accounted for in actual practice, when it comes to statistical analyses performed by non-mathematicians in fields like psychology and nutrition. Perhaps in part out of a fear of (being accused of) p-hacking. (Have preregistration practices exacerbated the problem?) If anyone can point me to more information about these dynamics, I’d be indebted.

I’ll close with a quote from Slime Mold Time Mold responding to Maciej Cegłowski’s 2010 essay “Scott And Scurvy.” Tracing the intellectual history back a bit (from Collin/SMTM/Mastroianni’s writing) “Scott and Scurvy” seems to have played an important role in making these ideas intuitive:

We’re taught to see splitting — coming up with weird special cases or new distinctions between categories — as a tactic that people use to save their pet theories from contradictory evidence. You can salvage any theory just by saying that it only works sometimes and not others — it only happens at night, you need to use a special kind of wire, the vitamin D supplements from one supplier aren’t the same as from a different supplier, etc. Splitting has gotten a reputation as the sort of thing scientific cheats do to draw out the con as long as possible.

But as we see from the history of scurvy, sometimes splitting is the right answer! In fact, there were meaningful differences in different kinds of citrus, and meaningful differences in different animals. Making a splitting argument to save a theory — “maybe our supplier switched to a different kind of citrus, we should check that out” — is a reasonable thing to do, especially if the theory was relatively successful up to that point.

Splitting is perfectly fair game, at least to an extent — doing it a few times is just prudent, though if you have gone down a dozen rabbitholes with no luck, then maybe it is time to start digging elsewhere.

Scurvy isn’t the only case where splitting was the right call. Maybe there’s more than one kind of fat. Maybe there are different kinds of air. Maybe there are different types of blood. It turns out, there are! So give splitting a chance.

Reality is weird, and you need to be prepared for that.

Pragmatic information theory

by Crispy Chicken

Back in the day, I spent a lot of time thinking about information theory, and Suspended asked me to share some thoughts on what a more “pragmatic” version of information theory might look like—one that describes actual human or animal communication, rather than just a passing of digital messages.

I’II start with a little preamble, which is that, basically, this isn’t a weakness of information theory, just a lack of ambition from the field. Claude Shannon didn’t get around to it was hard and he was working on other things, and most of those who have taken up information theory have either gone deeper into its use for digital protocols, or applied it to human language in a much more macro way than this. There are exceptions, but I haven’t seen anyone want to actually do something like “Make linguistic ethnomethodology rigorous with information theory,” and that feels like money being left on the table.

Information theory today is about communicating a fixed set of symbols and making sure you get that out on the other end. That’s not what we usually think of as communication.

What we need more than anything is a definition that doesn’t force us to define all the psychological ways communication happens, but is closer to reality than “just transfer this string of symbols.” I’d be willing to go far as saying that science has only helped us understand humans insofar as it has given us mathematical abstractions that are better than studying humans directly. So what’s the mathematical abstraction that will take us one step further than strings of symbols over a noisy channel?

I’d argue it’s a combination of information theory, causality, and statistics. Information theory introduces the idea of a noisy channel, where I write a bunch of symbols that can be corrupted or flipped in the transfer. Now in communication, what we actually care about, is I send you symbols, and what I get back is what you end up doing with those symbols.

And what we want to establish is the capacity of that channel. Now how do we establish the capacity of the channel, given that I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing to you with those symbols? I (for example) try to see all the ways in which I can manipulate you, and how reliably I can do so, and use that as a capacity of the channel. This definition is precisely causality, right? It’s what I can do, to flip different bits or symbols, that ends up causing something. I’m trying to deconstruct the system into a graphical model that tells me which nodes are causing which other ones, and which ones just happen to be correlated with each other, and are caused by some other, underlying variable. So what we want is information theory where we discover the capacity of different channels by probing the causal framework. We also have to think about what errors might arise from different kinds of channels and observations, so we’ll need some classical statistical machinery.

What we need is a description of communication a bit more nuanced than this that describes some of the boundary conditions of human social coordination, take a look at what kind of second order effects they might lead to, then see whether we can simulate them with LMs and look for their traces in people.

An overflowing of difference

by Cristóbal

Information is encoded in the matter that surrounds us. Lack of information is pure noise, a uniform distribution of indistinguishable units. When the noise shuffles into a grouping, we have difference. We can identify one unit from another, perhaps by indexing them relative to the grouping. The difference is encoded by the distribution of units. All things are no longer the same.

The fact that hydrogen atoms bond strongly with oxygen atoms is information encoded by molecules of water. If one is attentive, it is possible to read this knowledge right off of the world. However, with sufficient energy, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules can be split, producing oxygen and hydrogen gases. One can read this by attentively observing how a pair of electrified diodes affect the molecular composition of water.

In order to communicate this information, we build contraptions that facilitate the reading. We draw diagrams that allow us to build the contraptions easily. We simulate the operations of the contraption through annotations on the diagrams. We imagine the contraptions operating in our heads. We use labels to denominate different parts of the diagram. We share these labels with others, so that they too can imagine the contraption in their head. This set of devices (contraption, diagram, annotations, labels) allows information to be transmitted.

The devices communicate the information by mirroring the information, the distribution of units which evinces difference. The contraption induces a distribution. The diagram mirrors the distribution schematically, with differences articulated through different symbols. The labels are mappings from symbols to words. What matters is that the words be different. If we use the same words for different processes, we lose information. The information about hydrogen and oxygen atoms is being transmitted through the world.

We too are just information. When we act in the world, we too generate difference. We turn right, instead of left. We move through the world, carrying matter from one place to another. We speak with particular words in a particular dialect of a particular language of a particular place. This information that we encode can also be transmitted. We use similar devices to communicate ourselves to others—body, pose, movement, spoken word, written language, etc… When a device fails to mirror difference, information is lost.

When the world fails to transmit the difference that we generate, we are lost. When the language that we use becomes uniform, some difference is not able to be transmitted. When the places we inhabit become uniform, some difference is not able to be transmitted. When the labor we enact does not affect the outcomes of a process, some difference is not able to be transmitted. Alienation is a failure to write difference.

Conviviality is an overflowing of difference in the environment. There is so much difference being communicated that the only device possible to transmit it is the world itself. The map expands to the size of the territory. When in the presence of so much information, we feel it is incommunicable. I can’t explain it… I don’t even know where to begin.

Cycling in a tiered world

by Suspended Reason

There is a girl in New York City / Who calls herself the human trampoline / And sometimes when I’m falling, flying / Or tumbling in turmoil I say / “Whoa, so this is what she means” / She means we’re bouncing into Graceland /

—“Graceland,” Paul Simon

Between the rolling hills and peaks, valleys and troughs; between the local maxima of a fitness landscape, lie local minima where the water settles, pulled downward by gravity, unable to escape. Islands, they are called by ecologists—subenvironments, bounded by impassable terrains—be they bodies of water between lands, or bodies of land between waters, like the stretching miles of desert that separate isle oases. Thus a rock formation, protruding from a crater lake, is an island within an island, doubly separated, doubly bounded. And species’ gene pool, divided mitotically and separated by mountain range, begins to diverge, as iguanas might when castaway—500 miles from mainland—upon Ecuadorian magma.

The peaks of maxima, mythologically speaking: stable equilibria, working structures fitted and tailored to their environs. Heaven to a Christian, or Eden—but we, in the middle, on this earth, never accomplish such perfection. Disruption casts us out, from garden into the wilderness; casts us down, topples us from such great heights into the chaos of the trough—the middle way of media res—where only with labors may we ascend—modifying, experimenting—searching for a new peak, a new stable height, stable for a while. And the road to the summit, unreachable yet ever-sought, is littered with bodies, and they are the bodies of our unsuccessful brothers, the failed regulators, the disproven hypotheses.

Again and again I must submerge myself in the water of doubt. (Wittgenstein, “Notes on Frazer’s Golden Bough”)

Or we are Icarus, our wax wings melted at the moment of our greatest joy, plunging us into the Sea below. (Another of Father’s experiments…) From light into darkness, thin air to heavy water: crashing and diving into underworld. Pulled by gravity, sucked by downdraught, whisked by whirlpool drowned. The heavens are a high-flying mania, the ecstasy of low entropies and immaculate conceptions—the world simplified, seeming (as a crack of light between the darkness) to fit a simple model—while Pluto mans the melancholia entropy reasserted, never defeated, the pit of all which escapes our models.

The Sea, the Sea—the unmarked and unstructured, the ever-shifting, the renewing chaos from which all life is born and into which all life dissolves. Violent yet womb-like, the saline of blood. (Blood the Sea taken inside ourselves, the ancestral environ replicated within skinsuit.) Here, in the pit, in the trough where water has settled—in unsimulatable Sea—is our opportunity for rebirth. Menace and carress. Ashen-faced and animated by water. Only in storing up energy, and devising a new form, may we combat its gravity, tame entropy again, and escape the Sea that sits between the mountains. Here, at rock-bottom, some pearl of insight must be retrieved, some realization about the raw reality one has been exposed to. Perhaps with such a shining pearl’s light will we rise again—ascend, awaken to higher faculties and upper airs.

In the mountains you can see for miles. The gaseous air is so thin there’s barely enough oxygen to breathe. Less pressure less gravitational force. Undersea, underground everything is dark, solid, compressing your body.

Undersea, the weight of water crushes us to death, crumples our lungs, forces water into us until our cells split. In the dark and the cold, homeostasis approaches hypothermia. But at too high altitude of altitudes, or the vacuum of space, the water is pulled from your cells—ebullient, evaporating, desiccating you. Oxygen expands rupturing the lungs, boiling and bubbling the blood—the Bends. The body exposed to extreme temperature fluctuations, where skin melts and freezes. We men are fitted to the mesa-, and are mesa-optimizers; the great heights are not ours to inhabit; in their polarity is their similarity.

And the Tower of Dedalus is the Tower of Tarot is the Tower of Babel, the great hope of Esperanto: ONE unified language, ONE god universe (Burroughs), ONE totalizing code and system. The structure of the local max personified, a working edifice built through labor which gives great vantage point in lofty airs. But which sooner or later is struck and brought down by a bolt of lightning, a bolt of reality intruding from outside the system (Murphy’s Law), a bolt of the unaccounted. Or it is overwhelmed and washed away by the tidal terrors of the Sea. Or it is blown over by great winds, or ransacked by vandals. Joyce uses the metaphor of eggshells, Humpty-Dumpty taking his great Fall. The structure of the shell—a protective barrier—cracking, Finn’s ladder tumble leading to resurrection.

But the bolt of lightning is also the lightning of epiphany, for the structure of the local maximum has become obsolete. It is too heavy, not light enough. It is oppressive tyrannical structure. Its collapse is terrifying and liberating. The lightning is the epiphany that wakes the giant from from habituated and ritual slumber, from ready-to-hand sleepwalking and into present-at-hand awareness consciousness. Which wakes us into consciousness. (Was it kykeon’s lightning-bolt that initiated Plato and began philosophy in the West? “Through a cave darkly, Plato came to see the light.”[^1] ) Like a psychedelic, breaking us out of our naturalized norms and semaphores. Awakening-by-novelty, that-which-is-outside-the-tower, awakening-by-estrangement, the defamiliarization of the schema creating a self-consciousness which is at once a Fall from innocence a fall from hubris and also an ascension, the downward motion creating that momenumtum which lets us swing upward again. For diving and floating, ascending and descending, are yin and yangs each contained in each other, and none can say where transcendence ends and death begins.

In this mean world of wretchedness and misery, I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me. In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendor of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear. I was unable to retain that passing gleam. (Sadeq Hedayat)

[^1:] Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, “The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy.”

The will of the playground

by Redxaxder

It’s time for recess, and the teacher is absent. The kids are free to play however they want. What happens?

They sort themselves into groups to play different games. Children drift between groups. Groups drift between games.

Some kids try to keep playing with the same group, regardless of the game. Some try to keep playing the same game, regardless of the group. Some keep others out of some groups.

Sometimes a group gradually trades out all of its participating kids for others. A group dissolves. Another splits. Those fuse. A group is formed. Sometimes a group is open. Anyone can join it. Sometimes an open group closes.

This has some unwritten rules. Their general shapes are “if you act like that, nobody will want to play with you,” and “if you’re too picky about who to play with, you’ll rule everyone out.” They’re enforced by local rejection. If you break them enough, local rejection turns into global rejection.

When this process is left to run as it will without interference, it finds answers to the questions:

• Which games are good to play?
• Who is good to play with?

The answers it discovers are not universal. They’re specific to person, time, and place. They’re not guaranteed to be right, but they tend toward that direction.

This process is usually not left to run as it will. Some people don’t like the costs associated with it. There are injuries from re-discovering which games are bad. Some people get excommunicated for not adapting.

Messing with it also has a cost. If the process isn’t allowed to run freely it might find the answers more slowly. Or maybe not at all.

With literal children, we’re happy to pay the second cost instead of the first. It doesn’t really matter if they find a better version of their game or their group. In playgrounds for adults, I think the balance sometimes favors the other side. Some of the games adults play are pretty consequential, and it’s more valuable to find the best versions of these games and the best people to play them with.

Detective epistemology and science fiction ontology

by Frances Kafka

It’s Brian McHale’s suggestion in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) that postmodernist fiction is to modernist fiction what science fiction is to the detective tale.

I will formulate it as a general thesis about modernist fiction: the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable? And so on.

This brings me to a second general thesis, this time about postmodernist fiction: the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls “post-cognitive”: “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on.

We can leave aside for now McHale’s characterization of both postmodern and modernist fiction and focus on the opposition between science fiction and detective fiction. Both genres, in their highest levels, offer the pleasure of ratiocination, but in different directions. The classic scene involves an exposure when the reader is invited to recollect all the facts of the story and realise how she could have known the culprit, but didn’t. The analogous scene in science fiction is the conceptual breakthrough. The conceptual breakthrough is almost always ontological, concerning not just the characters, but the stakes of the entire world, as the Science Fiction Encyclopedia points out:

An important subset of conceptual-breakthrough stories consists of those in which the world is not what it seems. The structure of such stories is often that of a quest in which an intellectual nonconformist questions apparent certainties.

In the world of the conspiracy, though, the question of the ontological becomes blended with the epistemological, because the structure of the world itself begins to seem like the effects of some set of motives, a particular crime. We first get our inklings of this in Frederick Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World”, in which a small town which is accidentally destroyed has its members resurrected as miniature robots, minds wiped every twenty-four hours for market research. There’s something here, a touch of paranoia, which isn’t there in 2001’s Star-gate, or even in Heinlein’s “Universe”, where the characters discover that they live on a generation ship. There is perhaps a striking break when there is no longer just the modernist epistemological sundering but also the postmodern epistemological sundering.

The tower

by Suspended Reason

Molly Hitte, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon:

Gravity’s Rainbow itself seems held at the edge of discovery. In its encyclopedic scope, the novel appears dedicated to the proposition that everything is connected: there are insinuated links between synthetic polymerization and the evolution of the earth; between astrophysics and psychic phenomena; between African dialects and Rilkean poetics; between international cartels and Freemasonry; between comic books and covenant theology; between Orphism, Parsifalism, Tannhaüserism, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X; between German idealism, Pavlovian psychology, and the American cult of the good-guy loner. Just as these links could be extended, so the connections reach out in all directions, associating disparate bodies of knowledge in such intricate configurations that the universe seems on the point of cohering like a giant molecule dreamed by some macrocosmic Kekulé. But the novel remains at the level of secondary illumination and leading edges. The synthetic dream never occurs. The text refuses to yield a culminating vision of the universe as blindingly One…

One of the themes that keeps arising, in various Discords & reading groups I’m part of—including, of course, TIS—is the failure and impossibility of totalizing codes. We try to “get to the bottom” of reality, and unify all our understanding into a single coherent picture, only to find that bottom, that coherence, continually eluding us. At some point we stop looking.

There are three ways—all treated at length by Pynchon—that the world stays mysterious to us, refuses to fully yield, defies attempts at a final, complete and coherent conceptualization.

First is the passage of time, and the inevitable information loss through material degradation, which is unrecoverable. We can never know what was spoken in an anonymous English sitting room in 1708, because the soundwaves did not leave a sufficiently lasting imprint in the environment. Perhaps they were partially written down, but the paper was destroyed. Perhaps they were only inscribed neuronally, but the individuals who remembered died without re-inscribing the information in print. Most of historical happenings are unrecoverable in this way.

Second is the active obfuscation of information by interested agents. Perhaps there is a record—whether meat-memory or ink-print—of what was said last year in a Defense Department conference room. But it is closely guarded; the information exists, but is suppressed. Moreover, any information that has leaked about the conference room discussion—which has escaped suppression—may still be strategically obfuscated through the emission of further information by interested parties (e.g. the DoD)—thus further confusing the situation. There may have once been sufficient information to make a reasonable guess about the contents of the conversation, but there is now insufficient information, not because there is less information available but, quasi-paradoxically, because there is more.

Finally, there is the simple fact of the terrain’s complexity, of the Borgesian map that is so vast it cannot be written or spoken. When dealing with inexactitude, we are dealing with lossy compression, and there will always be parts of the world which are left out. Pynchon thought of these left-out excesses through a frankenhybrid of Gödelian Incompleteness and Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and whatever can go wrong is whatever endless-excess-complexity has been excluded from your model. Which partial model we choose becomes a matter of pragmatism: the question is what you want to do with it.

We might call the first type paleontological or archaeological indeterminacy; the second type, strategic or ecological indeterminacy; the third type, pragmatic or ontological indeterminacy.

The translator

by Cristóbal

translator

The dominant subject today is subcultural. They are fluent in a language (slang, jargon, clothing, music, etc) originating within a circumscribed community. Acquiring the language is a natural process of affiliation with those around the individual, regardless of whether it is a response to concrete material conditions or interpellated into existence through marketing. Critically, it involves the explicit development of a particular field of competence, determining scarcity, as well as the performance of the language to be legible as member, both to peers and external watchers.

What is notable is the subculture’s financialization. As legible and scarce, they become a commodity to be transacted and attract the eyes of financial capital. Speaking the language gives access to not only the in-group and a sensation of belonging, but also the associated spoils. Once inserted into the marketplace, the subculture must respond to their new position as commodity—only consistency can guarantee fungibility.

As such, belonging to a subculture is not free. It is accompanied by a social rigidity—the necessity of continuing to enact the subculture chosen. If these demands become untenable, the house of cards collapses, and the subject is disgraced.

In the first volume of Rabelais’ comic work, upon hearing of his reputation, Thaumaste challenges Pantagruel to a public debate in order to test the protagonist’s erudition. To escape sophistry, it is proposed that the debate take place in the form of signs, rather than with words. The demand of performing his erudition leaves Pantagruel in a anxious state. He spends the evening reading up Bede, On Numbers and Signs; Plotinus, On Things Which Cannot be Told; Proclus, On Magic; Artemidorus, On the Meanings of Dreams; Anaxagoras, On Signs; Ynarius, On Things Which Cannot Be Uttered; and Philistion, Hipponax, On Things Not to Be Spoken, and a whole lot more.

Perceiving his stage fright, Panurge intervenes recommending he go to sleep, but not before a good twenty-five or thirty drinks. Panurge is Pantagruel’s companion, who will subvert the demands of erudition through jest. He declares himself to Thaumaste as mere disciple of Pantagruel, and as such, a prelude to the real debate. After a series of comical back-and-forth signs (worth reading and re-enacting), Panurge lays the final blow—

Panurge put his two index fingers either side of his mouth, pulling it as far back as he could and baring all his teeth; and with his two thumbs he pulled his eyelids very deeply down, making a very ugly grimace”

Rabelais’ character does not take the challenge head on. It is a literature of lightness, of humor and wit, taking life not with the strong wide stance of a defender, but with the grace of deflection of Aikido, a matador’s olé at the bull fixed on the red cape. Life comes at you and you elegantly side-step and laugh at it strewn out against the floor. Is this not Calvino’s auspicious image for the millennium?

The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring—belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

Who is this subject that Rabelais presents us? Bakhtin offers the categories of the rogue’s subversion of rules, the clown’s playful mocking of language, and the fool’s stupidity which estranges us. I’ll offer a fourth: the translator. Their identity is not located within a group, but rather in the interstices between them. They too agents of “heteroglossia”, many voices coexistent within the same entity, bringing into question the stability of any one frame. As we know, translation is the most intimate one can be with a text.

Only a cursory understanding of their role would suggest that they are unserious and unwilling to be invested in any particular identity, split between two poles. Both embedded within the habitus, while also able to step out of this frame, the translator must be able to deconstruct the vortexes that funnel behaviour into compact homogeneous points. Unlike the performer, the translator cannot simply sail in style, but must understand the ocean currents driving the movement of the waves from underneath. It is notable that two of the most incisive characterizations of the United States come from immigrants: a Swiss (Robert Frank’s The Americans) and a German (Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas).

The translator too longs for belonging. “Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.” The nomad may pack light, but they are attuned to the changes of the land. Wim Wenders even has stated in interviews that, were he not a filmmaker, he’d be a tour guide.

Taste test

by Neil

This is a friend’s favorite pet anecdote, from Liquid Intelligence, Dave Arnold’s 2014 deep dive on cocktails.

Lime juice is an extremely common cocktail ingredient, and no self-respecting mixologist would use the stuff in the green plastic squirt bottles. Intuitively, we might expect fresh-squeezed lime juice to be the best — it’s fresh! But Dave Arnold had the idea to actually run a taste test, and:

Not surprisingly, the day-old juice always loses. Surprisingly, the lime juice that is several hours old usually wins over lime juice that is superfresh.

But why? He continues:

My subjects for these tests were predominately professional American bartenders. Most good American bartenders use lime juice that is juiced at the beginning of the shift and therefore is several hours old during service. My cocktail compatriot Don Lee ran this same test with a bunch of European bartenders, who typically juice their limes à la minute. They tended to choose fresh lime juice over any of the other batches. Best, therefore, may just be what you are used to.

In this situation, at least, “good taste” emerges from the practical properties of the medium. Hours-old lime juice is not a priori the best, but once you learn unconsciously that the taste of hours-old lime juice is associated with high quality, it comes along for the ride.

On aliveness, pt 3: Ecological axes

by Suspended Reason

Previously.

How else do environments—ecosystems; arenas of gameplay from the perspective of a player—differ?

They differ in the quality of a player’s sensory exposure to other players. This exposure may more or less direct, more or less mediated, more or less proximate and prolonged. There are those we know and interact with only through their public speeches, their press releases and fourth-hand rumors. There are those we live and deal with directly, day in day out. And our ability to falsify appearances—the ability of others to falsify their appearances—is much greater in the mediated, indirect and “clipped” relation than the unmediated, direct and prolonged one.

These other players will vary in their alignment to us, and vary across contexts. The family burrow, the the clonal superorganism’s nest, are highly aligned social environments. Out in the open, we are more exposed. Alignment entails cooperation; cooperation entails upholding and assisting another’s accomplishment of intentions. Conflict, by converse, is marked by the subversion of another’s projects.

Thus the environments we inhabit also take on cooperative or adversarial shapes; even the non-living, “inert” aspects of an environment can be arranged so as to subvert or uphold our intentions. The termite mound minimizes both the thermodynamic and informational entropy of its occupants. A highway is built to be as predictable as possible: the road infrastructure all around the world is markedly similar in form and pattern, so as to assure safe navigability. Cooperative built environments are inductive, while adversarial built environments are anti-inductive.

Environments vary too in the number and diversity of players. An ecosystem may be more scarce or abundant in resources; and the more resources, the more energy, the more players. Areas nearer to the equator receive more sun; this increase of energy means more life, more diversity. But abundance is also a relational descriptor, the capacity of a player to harvest and use its environment. In carbon-rich environs, thick with life, abundance is another way of saying that that a player or set of players is temporarily advantaged or disadvantaged respective to other players—in other words, power and abundance may be different descriptions of the same ecological position.

An ecosystem may be more or less institutionalized, more or less formalized and ritualized. They may differ in their degree of virtualization and mediation (and hence, in how distant or proximate an average evaluation will be). And they may be more or less stable, may have higher or lower frequencies of disruption, and their players faster or slower rates of adaptation.

From the opus operatum to the modus operandi: habitus, a primer

by RIPDCB

Structuralism is viewed as a failed project. How could it not have failed? It desired the world entire, to render reality as a series of objective relationships that could be represented objectively—to stabilize the world’s fluidity in a diagram. In wanting to investigate and ultimately formalize society and its structures from a bird’s eye view, the distance inherent in looking at life from the outside of experience was never going to withstand the destabilizing force of perspectivism. Structuralism did a good job of diagramming how things are done, but it could never pierce the interior of why they’re done.

Enter Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of the habitus. It’s a solution to a problem he saw at the heart of structuralist anthropology: an emphasis on the results of a practice over the modes of a practice in trying to diagram a culture’s logic. In other words, confusing ends for means, using an action’s ‘what’ to explain its ‘why’. Bourdieu believed that was all wrong, that any framework trying to capture how a culture operates must incorporate the practical reasons that underlie our associations and actions, reasons that are often left unsaid. He theorized that our interactions with each other and social reality more generally are a product of the habitus, a model accounting for how we manage to have regular, efficacious responses to similarly structured situations across different contexts—responses common to a particular cultural set, too—that nonetheless are experienced as intuitive and natural, present and particular.

So what is the habitus? It’s the collection of dispositions that make up the field of possible ways that a person might read a situation and all the ways in which they might respond to that situation. The dispositions themselves are simultaneously frames and heuristics, lending consciousness its scope by gently nudging our interpretations and actions like a silent Virgil through life’s many turns. The habitus is the product of the structures that govern an environment, such as the educational opportunities afforded to members of a given class. While material conditions are integral in shaping one’s habitus, they aren’t deterministic. Two people growing up under the exact same economic conditions in the same city might not have the same family structure, a meaningful difference as far as the composition of the habitus is concerned. No single material condition will dictate the field of possibles—it’s about the totality of the conditions of one’s life, historically indexed and contextually sensitive. Habitus also isn’t deterministic as far as a particular interpretation or action is concerned; it’s not that you will necessarily have X-response to Y-situation, or that X-response was primed to be played before you entered into Y-situation. It’s akin to a deck of cards: the card pulled isn’t predetermined, but what is certain are the number and compositions of the cards that could have been pulled. Finally, the makeup of the field of possibles isn’t static—the habitus updates and changes as new situations are encountered, as old actions that once work fall flat or become outmoded.

Habitus is both structured and structuring: it is shaped by shared values and hierarchies, digesting the perspectives of others insofar as those perspectives reflect the relationships that shape society, and, conversely, the actions issued from the habitus mold the world to its past-in-present structuring. A product of the explicit and implicit statements that scaffold social reality; an organ that decodes and signals simultaneously.

We’ve learned that to be alive is to be in dialogue with the world, to be reading it and writing to it always. The habitus lends a new angle to the ecological perspective, one that allows for the objectivity of material conditions to exist alongside the subjective experience of how those conditions affect us. It admits that we are the product of our environments and that our actions and reactions are fit to past experiences, without tying the selection process to a mechanistic model of interaction that presupposes every move’s intent is to produce its explicit purpose. The habitus’ connective tissue is association, not unconditional reason or extra-rational biases. Through alignment and misalignment, through success and failure, through incentives and demoralization a sensitive, historical, and dynamic impression of the world is built through which information is processed, in which heuristics are stored, and from which actions are born. A response can be—in fact is—both conditioned and intuitive, pragmatic and spontaneous. Or it least it should be if you’re not a rock.

Free is easy, cheap is hard

by Collin Lysford

Here is a level one question from the PISA test aimed at 15 year olds:

an economic case study mirroring Shapman’er and Ariely’s “How Small is Zero Price?”

“According to the text”, the answer is D. The word “free” makes you less thoughtful. But is it such a bad thing to be less thoughtful?

If someone wants to hand you a free voucher, you can’t lose money for holding it in your hands. (Unless you’re someone easily bullied by fast-talking strangers, but then they could do that with anything.) Do you like the store or not? Does the voucher expire? Do you have time to read the terms? Did you just pop in to use the bathroom and have about five seconds before you piss all over this social sciences grad student? Free means not needing to care about all this. It makes you less thoughtful in the sense that catching a baseball is less thoughtful then doing trigonometry to figure out where the ball ought to go. You’re thinking less because you’re busy accomplishing the goal.

To the credit of Shapman’er and Ariely, in the original study, they mostly get there:

One reason for this could be that that the decision to take a chocolate for free is a much simpler decision, and that simplicity could be the driver of higher affect (Tversky and Shafir 1992, Luce 1998, Iyengar and Lepper 2000, Benartzi and Thaler 2002, Schwarz 2002, Diederich 2003, Gourville and Soman 2005). In particular, a free Hershey’s involves benefits and no costs, while a Lindt for any positive price involves both benefits and costs — it is possible that options that have only benefits create more positive affect compared with options that involve both benefits and cots [sic].

But “positive affect” is just another head on that horrid hydra “utility”. Why does a zero cost option have to create more of an abstract measure to be a legible choice? The fact that you can shortcut away from numbers is exactly what’s so nice about free. If you need to encode that shortcut as a number, then of course that encoding is going to seem counter-intuitive. “You don’t like thinking about a precise number of dollars? Interesting. Precisely how many dollars is that worth to you? In numbers, please.”

This is why I really dislike the frame of the word free “shaking all rationality” out of you. Rationality here stands for an endless hunger for arbitrage, an utter devotion to the fungibilty of dollars. 20-for-7 forces you to orient yourself towards the market in a way 10-for-free doesn’t. If you have infinite trust in the market and always accept this orientation, this is fine. But that’s a real easy way to get scammed! If you get a DM from two twitter bots, one offering “$100 of free bitcoin” and another offering “$1000 worth of bitcoin for only $100”, then surely most of us would take the first one if we took any at all. There’s obviously a lot more risk involved in forking over money to get something than the risk in passively accepting. (And even that is not risk zero! If they are a cop they do not actually need to tell you.) This distinction is very salient in bounced check fake job scams: someone will ask “I got this remote job that seems too good to be true, but I’m not paying anything, so I don’t understand how it can be a scam?” Then they learn the dirty trick: the scammer is going to give you an overgenerous check, ask you to pay them back the difference, and then the check will bounce in a couple of days and you’ll be on the hook.

Wow, that’s devious! If only there was a way to be safe to those sort of attacks! Wait, there is; just hold on to your $7 instead of giving it away to the researcher on the promise of making $3 more than you otherwise would just taking the free thing. Damn, that was easy. For only $3, you too can avoid needing to figure out the motives of a behavioral economist. It’s another case of missing the latent structure because the assumption “Everyone in this experiment trusts me and is treating my offerings for trivial amounts of value according to an internal pricing structure they consistently use for all pricing decisions” is one of those untrue things everyone agrees to pretend is true enough that they can keep doing the studies.

What is the real pricing structure people actually use? Well, when stuff gets weird, maybe it’s not a structure at all. Maybe they aren’t represneting this as an internal currency that just has some bonus affect value around zero. Maybe it’s more of a slow, contextual muddle that can handle the increased uncertainty.

Notes on Pride & Prejudice

by Suspended Reason

1. Austen is obsessed with card games, carriages, conversation, cotillions & quadrilles. The books’ primary seasonal rhythm is social, the oscillation between the public and the domestic life. Home is where “teams” (families, friends, business allies) process past (public) outings & plan future ones. The carriages—obeying specific customs, and communicating depths about their occupants (e.g. one character gets cold-shouldered for arriving at a ball in a hack chaise)—cart the players from their private to their public arenas, where they engage in game-playing with real stakes: alliance-building, marital pledges, business deals—much of which happens through the bowerbird-like performance of sexual and class fitness (a la piano recitals, witty repartee), or in the conversations that pepper otherwise low-stake card games. And the players, organized as they are in these seasonal-social rhythms, occupy strategic macro-orientations in the stream: personalities, or masks, or “ecosystems of heuristics” which become Austen’s titular subjects: Pride, Prejudice, Sense, Sensibility.

2. Dance is the ultimate example of these dynamics: part performance, part coordination exercise—a test of two potential mates’ ability to read and react to one another in real-time—a test of whether their orientations and play styles jive. Dances are the ultimate locus of conversation among the domestic team, when they retire from public play and speak more freely: who danced with whom; how many times; who upheld a sense of honorable propriety (fittedness, appropriateness) in subtle, continuously graded displays of both their skill at—and inclination toward (recall Mr. Darcy)—coordinating. Society is a teaching machine, whose primary pedagogical instrument is language. Censure is passed (privately and publicly, as gossip) against norm violations and undesired behavior; praise is awarded to norm-observance and desired behavior; and the whole macro structure is an extended explicit metaphor for courtship—love and war being dance’s primary subjects. (See e.g. the way many of the dances have a primary partner who is punctuated by a series of flirtations, partner-swaps—the same exploratory pattern of mate-rotation that defines e.g. teen dramas ft. Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, & Penn Badgley.)

3. Jane Austen was perhaps the first microsociologist, and also one of the great theorists of opticracy. Pride & Prejudice is the great opticratic tract of the 19th C. Our heroine Elizabeth Bennet initially writes off her eventual love interest, Mr. Darcy—a man who abhors “disguise of every sort”—on early impression. He appears prideful, conceited, cold, misanthropic. These appearances lead her instead to a flirtation with Mr. Wickham, a man who “wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming,” whose appearance “was greatly in his favour,” with “all the best parts of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address.” But we soon find that Wickham is the worst sort of scoundrel, and Darcy has been gravely misunderstood.

4. What is Darcy’s greatest failure? He fails to dramatically realize (and reenact) his inner qualities and past actions.

5. And there is regularly a distinction drawn between the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations—between Ms. Bingley’s view of a private library as a status symbol, and Mr. Darcy’s view of the private library as a resource for personal development. It is precisely extrinsic motivation, and the extrinsic motivation of an individual toward gaining Mr. Darcy’s regard, which repels him—“The fact is,” Elizabeth tells him near the novel’s end, when they compare notes on their courtship, “that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused and interested you, because I was so unlike them.”

6. And opticsmization (optimization for optics) is everywhere. Prestige is one of the great motivators, for marriages in Austen’s world—second only, perhaps, to economic capital—and the youngest daughter’s eventual elopement with Wickham threatens to taint the family’s reputation through association, the possibility of scandal a mortifying and potentially engagement-ending affair.

Cycles of knowledge

by Cristóbal

Different domains speak differently of the way knowledge is held. A psychoanalyst may speak about the real, imaginary, and symbolic, whereas a sociologist may be inclined towards the categories of charisma, rulers, and rules. Slightly higher in abstraction, we find the categories of experience, theory, and systems.

Each domain denominates types of agents that work towards transforming knowledge between its forms. A scientist transforms experience into theory through abstraction, and an engineer transforms that theory into a system that operates autonomously, through reification. Analogous structures appear in the domain of politics.

cycle 1

This is not a straightforward progression. At the end of the road, the system or rules that is established can’t represent everything There’s a forgotten excess. This one of the insights of psychoanalysis, which denominates this excess the Real while also finding a role for those that break outside of the symbolic. We can think of this process as a cycle.

cycle 2

The parallelism between these structures is the central point. In each domain, the triad is manifest is different ways while preserving a fundamental meta-structure. Because of the parallelism, we are able to ask: “what corresponds to the schizophrenic in the domain of science or in the domain of politics”. This introduces the figures of artist and clown.

Similarly, the precise words chosen don’t quite matter either. For example, instead of abstraction, reification, and defamilizariation, you may prefer the terms formalization, exploitation, and subversion.

Different movements along these domains can be exemplified by examples of concrete actors. The parallelism in structures permits us to understand these examples under a variety of parallel categories.

cycle 3

The aim is not to define a person as responsible for a single style of movement, but rather to show how different actors are operating on knowledge in different ways.

cycle 4

This process is not actually a cycle. The new system we land at is not the same as the previous time around. Rather, it spirals in time. We can apply this to processes operating together over time, across different individuals.

cycle 5

A bit more ambitiously, we can represent this in three dimensions.

cycle 6

When we advance from one system to the next, we call it innovation. A shift in theory is what we call a paradigm shift. Interestingly, for both to happen, they need to go through the other forms of knowledge.