is there any more insidious form of trying to drag people down as offhandedly putting down things they enjoy? downplaying play is a much more direct attack on the conatus than downplaying accomplishments.

June 3, 2021

People vastly underestimate the inherent toil of science; it's heavy-duty construction, not "bayesian" LARPing or simple "trial and error".

May 15, 2021

at some point I'll get sick of mathematics and move on to philosophy, which I'll then get sick of and move on to prose, at which point I'll be doing actual geometry for once in my life.

but if I don't deliberately exhaust myself in htis fashion it'll just be sophistry.

May 7, 2021

Yeah everything is arguably "of your mind" in some sense, but your mind isn't an arbitrary theater of representations, it's a nexus of affordances. Patterns are at least as "real" as the relations between things that allow a "self" to be constituted and for such a self to conceptualize them in the first place.

May 6, 2021

My definition of a loser is somebody who believes that adapting is beneath them.

April 22, 2021

a fact is nothing more than a point that a narrative topologically converges on.

April 20, 2021

Process and data are isomporhic only when dealing with countable sets. Otherwise, becoming is always too big to fit into identity.

April 15, 2021

Process rather than organism is the basic "unit" of life. Looking at the object first misses the information that only "exists" in a temporal context.

April 1, 2021

Resolve is real, you're not just some cybernetic system bumbling into equilibrium.

Viscosity, not homeostasis, is what defines life.

March 28, 2021

When you explicitly define terms you're building a machine, when you're choosing words based on a sense of hermeneutic continuity you're further articulating an ecology.

March 20, 2021

Aesthetics is the part of the horseshoe where pragmatism becomes idealism and vice versa.

Art is the lived ideal of pragmatism for its own sake; the singularities through which we relentlessly find novel paths out of an inexorably multiplying wilderness.

March 16, 2021

Excessively mathy economics is getting a 5th degree black belt in karate and then saying "that would never happen" when someone asks how you'd handle someone pulling a gun on you.

February 24, 2021

The great equalizer is that no matter how much sense your argument makes and no matter how much someone else doesn't know what they're talking about, they can still pander to their acolytes by calling you a pee pee poo poo face.

On some level that's genuinely beautiful.

February 16, 2021

Wittgenstein's latter philosophy is about duck-typing and how if you're classifying things any other way you're constipating yourself.

Word-play, rather than trying to make a "logical" system from the top-down, is how you make language more logical.

February 15, 2021

Theorems are instantiated and maintained by practice, without practice they're at most inscrutable markings on paper.

February 8, 2021

reading literature is a completely different physical act than reading theory or nonfiction.

February 2, 2021

Psychologizing people is the absolute lowest form of epistemology. It's not even a fallacy, it's diving to the bottom of the discursive bargain bin.

January 24, 2021

If you want to help your neighbors and peers, diligently build up your own foundations such that you have the power to do so. Refusing to try to improve yourself amounts to planning to be unable to help others in any way.

January 24, 2021

When I believe somebody's narrative about themselves, it has absolutely nothing to do with wondering whether that's the objective truth, it's simply me choosing to do so.

January 23, 2021

Texts are discrete but narratives are geometric. This is the circle one has to square between computation and process.

January 23, 2021

Probability theory is a money pump and using it for any other kind of epistemology is iffy (but sometimes understandable.)

January 23, 2021

I'm convinced that the difference between Plato and Heraclitus is whether or not to invoke the law of the excluded middle.

January 14, 2021

Mao had no idea what the fuck dialectics are, I don't care what he wrote. If you exterminate a whole species without considering their co-evolutionary links, you don't grasp even teh most basic idea of how information exists as point and counterpoint.

January 12, 2021

The difference between a theory and a model is that a theory is a haeccity that speaks for itself in a way that has nothing to do with the idea of a model "corresponding" with an ostensibly underlying reality.

January 11, 2021

A lot of things become more aesthetic when you think about them as terrain:

aesthetics = affordances

This is exactly what bores me about so much contemporary art: I want avenues and possibilities, not soft-spoken "commentary".

January 8, 2021

"Isomorphic" means "the same for all intents and purposes", where intents are inbound morphisms and purposes are outbound morphisms.

December 26, 2020

Every text is a contract that we fulfill in our own way whenever we perform it. A disagreement about interpretation is not a disagreement about some internal "meaning" but a quarrel about whether or not both sides are satisfactorily holding up their end of the bargain.

There is something to hermeneutics beyond this interminable interfacing, but it does not belong to the public-facing part of it. The irreducible heraclitean flux that differentiates each specific act of reading is not semantic but spiritual.

December 18, 2020

Semantics isn't "meaning" (pragmatics already has that covered), it's the possibility of lying.

December 17, 2020

The difference between a theory and a model is that a theory is a language.

December 15, 2020

The whole debate about gut feelings vs. formal reasoning mistakenly conflates everything into an idea of solving a defined problem. Emotions are not propositions, their purpose is not positive knowledge but tacit ecological calibration. They're an interface, not a forecaster.

December 11, 2020

"Reasonable" just means sufficiently embedded in existing folk knowledge.

December 7, 2020

Category theorists get a hard time because they're the lawyers of mathematics.

December 7, 2020

A lot of the bad mental parts of aging are more of a choice than people think. As long as one has the will to embrace catabolism there's so much you can do. Do things that burn your pretenses to ashes no matter how uncomfortable and you'll live much longer.

December 6, 2020

Art for its own sake, even (especially) in the face of imminent danger, is the ultimate expression of refusing to let the enemy dictate (and by extension predict) your next move.

December 3, 2020

No matter how hurtfully someone berates you, always take pleasure in the fact that you can continue to live your truth as much as you want and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.

November 27, 2020

Low self-esteem is an uncalibrated idea of one's own social functioning. One's ego can still be in many respects overblown and this is perfectly consistent with it: unmoored from any truly foundational sense of efficacy, one vascillates between extreme hope and fear about their own disembodied pretense of status.

November 26, 2020

"Hi, I'm set theory. This set has the letters a and b. This set has the numbers zebra and paddington. These sets are different because they correspond to different things. What do you mean where are the things?? Stop being a smartass they OBVIOUSLY correspond to distinct concepts!"

November 25, 2020

Your motivation doesn't come from some mythical "willpower", it's a product of the mask you're currently wearing.

November 24, 2020

Our emotions are based on the precise material "fit" between organism and environment. They're not magical or predictive in any transcendent way but they're the least refined yet highest-bandwidth information channel possible.

November 21, 2020

Even when you're not using your smartphone, you're already trained to ruminate instead of look. And eventually the less you look the less you actually think.

It's nice out today (at least it was when I wrote this). Go outside, find a big open space, turn off your phone for a few minutes and just look.

November 21, 2020

Even back wen I was young enough to care about "getting around" or whatever, I never understood this idea of Hugh Hefner being the "luckiest man alive". He always sounded like the equivalent of some animal locked in a zoo coerced into breeding for other people's amusement.

November 24, 2020

Liquidity (capital) is the discrete topology on society. Any region you can identify is precisely closed off and separable from everything else.

November 12, 2020

Just like a foldable data type in Haskell is not necessarily any kind of predefined container, but rather a set of functions of expansion or contraction, foldings and unfoldings in life are acts of manifestation that exist in their own right independently of any extant vessel.

November 12, 2020

Philosophical concepts are open neighborhoods, and mathematical/logical concepts follow as closure complements.

By open neighborhoods, I mean that they're simply plopped down a-priori, you declare the concepts and any "meaning" can only follow from the ensuing topology.

November 11, 2020

An emotion is not a state, it's a movement with a beginning and an end.

Remember this next time you think too much about how you feel.

November 11, 2020

Web development is the distilled pure essence of neoliberalism. Relentlessly growing layers of abstraction in the hopes of perfect interoperability.

November 10, 2020

Narrative is the visceral topology by which language games can be played and words can be contextualized.

November 10, 2020

I'm willing to call philosophy science if and only if science is once again understood to be an irreducible act of disciplined reflection rather than ritualistic magic.

November 2, 2020

Sufficiently small things can be bounded into being predictable, sufficiently big things move slow enough to be predictable, but evrything in between cannot be predicted, only harmonized with.

October 31, 2020

Wittgenstein understood that philosophy is, like every toher craft, something you have to learn to do with a light touch and free of redundant movements. Bad philosophy comes from people's pretenses sticking to their ideas like toilet paper to a shoe (and has that same stink.)

October 29, 2020

Non-determinism is a computational concept, not an ontological one.

October 29, 2020

There are two kinds of confidence: the kind where your expectations inflate, and the kind where you simply feel more calibrated regardless of expectations. I'll leave it to you to decide which one is good and which one isn't.

October 24, 2020

Consumerism perverts the very idea of "hope" by training us to hold our breath for one meaningless possibility or reward after another until we've developed a submissive relationship with every waking hour of the day. This is much different than a deep sense of striving.

Desire qua "lack" is obviously a timeless fact of life, but it's possible to either exacerbate or diminish its prevalence depending on your habits.

October 23, 2020

The only actual difference between science and philosophy is that science converges and philosophy diverges. Lately we've exhausted a lot of low-hanging fruit and philosophy will make a comeback as a way of balkanizing and tailoring epistemology with science and first among equals.

October 22, 2020

Mind over matter is real, it's just not cartesian volition. Your mind is how the parts are put together in a way that exceeds their material contingency. That you can amke a turing machine out of all kinds of different materials is a prime (but not exhaustive) example.

But it also means that it's not a question of "will" but of development; it takes time and there are no shortcuts.

November 10, 2020

The axiom of choice is the equivalence of repetition and generality.

October 19, 2020

"Chaos" and computational complexity are just vacuums in the absence of a synthetic a-priori.

October 3, 2020

The reason why there are so many conflicting anecdotes about this or that magical diet or life hack or whatever finally doing the trick and fixing somebody's problem (and why this kind of reductive advice rarely works) is that the raw materials matter infinitely less than how you put them together; something that can only be learned through experience and painstaking creativity.

September 27, 2020

The core mistake that defines scientism is believing that one starts at the finest possible level of granularity and derives larger patterns from the interactions.

All inquiry starts in the middle, from which one both distills parts and composes wholes.

September 26, 2020

Too many people do the intellectual equivalent of CrossFit and proceed to live a life of interminable sophomorism.

And by people I mean me in my 20s.

September 25, 2020

"What is it like to be a bat?" is doubly bad cartesianism. You're not merely suggesting taking a homunculus out of your body and putting it in someone else's, you're suggesting taking a homunculous out of that homunculus and putting it in the other homunculus.

September 24, 2020

People who want only economic planning imagine a skeleton without flesh, people who want only markets with no reasonable industrial policy imagine a slime mold.

September 23, 2020

Recognition is a state, love is a process.

Any striving that ceases upon the achievement of recognition was never a real endeavor at all.

September 23, 2020

Truly great art engenders the syntax of a new space. To try to find a direct "message" in any such thing would be like trying to explain why this or that mathematical axiom is "true".

September 20, 2020

To even have a grammar requires you discipline your body in some way. Randomness (as opposed to contingency) is artificial.

September 17, 2020

I don't want incremental reform, just diligent and painstaking change.

September 12, 2020

There's no such thing as the set of all sets because there's no such thing as the view from nowhere.

September 7, 2020

Feedback doesn't exist until you're literate enough to read the situation.

Empiricism doesn't come packaged in shrink-wrap.

September 6, 2020

Rationality is nothing more than doing the hard work of investigation. That's it. There's nothing magical about it, you do'nt need some prescribed method or some holy book of biases and fallacies to avoid, and anyone who says that you do is actually just using a procrustean facsimile of realitya s a way to justify their own superstitions about the devil.

August 28, 2020

In order to understand how mathematics can be constructed without being a mere figment of our imagination, think about it as dance.

The movements are your own, but they're very real and they're significant because they instantiate forms that you can share with other dancers.

August 27, 2020

Anyone who fetishizes your authenticity is trying to bypass any hard-earned understanding of your language and hollow out your painstakingly crafted gnosis into a commodity.

If you want to avoid being aesthetically plundered by the powerful, make sure that you're not only unintelligible to them but also somewhat unpalatable.

August 25, 2020

A narcissist is someone who tries to validate their otherwise inchoate identity by ruthlessly attempting to pass the turing test.

August 25, 2020

If you think there's no seeing past Cartesian "representations", that implies that "your" subjectivity is in no way defined by the patterns that you're part of but not the entirety of.

In other words, you've just decided by fiat that other people don't exist because you chose to value glib axioms over other people's existence. This is not epistemology, it's ideology.

August 24, 2020

If you start from axioms that make it impossible for anything to provably exist beyond representation, the problem is your axioms.

August 24, 2020

Aesthetics is raw intuition: generating an "idea" that does not have the connections to other signs to make it formally definable, and as such manifests as irreducible physical action.

What makes this different from mere emotion/passion is that while it might be provoked by something (like some beautiful sight), it's fundamentally an action rather than a passive reaction.

This applies both to privately having some beautiful experience and performing/making something that others can witness. Both are performance as opposed to mere signal transmission.

August 14, 2020

Something is a fetish to the degree that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy regarding the existence of Descartes' Demon.

August 13, 2020

Some people tend to think of the Real as the territory as opposed to the map, not taking into consideration that a map is never inherently a representation of anything but always a real affordance that is itself part of the territory.

If you're inconsolably angsting about nbeing trapped in an endless web of signifiers, it's because you made that bed and decdied to sleep in it; nobody forced you to turn a tool into a fetish.

August 12, 2020

Liberalism run amok is that genie that grants your wishes but only in an ironic way.

August 11, 2020

You can never truly grasp a sign, but the pretense that you can leads to greed and neediness. You only begin to live insofar that you understand that life consists of traveling through signs, and that intimacy comes from learning to do this with an ever lighter touch.

August 9, 2020

The mode of relation known as "capital", like all relations, is neither efficient nor final cause, but formal cause.

August 8, 2020

The biggest problem with hindsight bias is not assuming you could have or should have known better earlier on, it's assuming that the information existed in any sense at all.

August 6, 2020

At no point is math about osme kind of absolute truth, it's always true with regards to some system of identity, and every systme of identity is based on some fiction in which a person can step into the same river twice.

August 4, 2020

There's no such thing as complete grounding of knowledge, and there's nothign wrong with that.

All intellectual, scientific, artistic, spiritual, and practical endeavors alike are facets of an interminable process of continual grounding that extends an inherently mediated reality.

Our experience of the unmediated Real exists only as the interminable friction that happens at the boundaries of this process.

And for this exact reason, there is no such thing ever as total unequivocal domination; there is always contingency, always hope, and always life.

July 29, 2020

Aesthetics is friction.

Without friction, there is no life.

July 29, 2020

Any debate about whether some celebrity is mentally unwell or just a publicity-seeker is simply the wrong frame:

A celebrity's entire self becomes enslaved to their identity qua celebrity, so yes htey're doing this or that for publicity, but the celebrity is the one doing it, dragging the other person with them.

For example, donald trump is a fucking idiot, but Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a genius.

July 29, 2020

By simping for nothign beyond his own ego, the narcissist becomes the biggest simp of them all.

July 25, 2020

"Nature" is a co-evolutionary process that we are fundamentally part of, it is an ever-changing trajectory and not some pristine equilibrium that homo sapiens unilaterally perturbed.

Shit like anti-humanism and anarcho-primitivism ultimately amount to suggesting we simply quit, that we leave the trajectory of the biosphere in the hands of other forces instead of owning up to the obligation of stewardship that modernity shoved under the rug.

July 22, 2020

myth = the idempotent past

history = the cumulative past

July 20, 2020

All "artificial intelligence" is just more tools, the fact that tools sometimes replace certain skills doens't change the fundamental constant that all innovation and art is irreducible bricolage.

July 16, 2020

I remain convinced that Spinoza's ontology, despite his own claims later in Ethics, necessitates true contingency and by extension the possbility of free will in the strongest sense of the word.

Hint: there is no possible "view from nowhere" according to his axioms, go from there.

July 16, 2020

The raison d'etre of art is undirected generativity. It hterefore must be fundamentally an act of play

Any pretense that art must serve this or that specific function or utility is a betrayal of its true functionality.

July 15, 2020

The better you understand formal constraints, the better able you'll be to make truly nuanced and novel material moves. Learned realism is the opposite of fatalism.

July 13, 2020

An individualism defined by preoccupation with identity is no individualism at all.

July 11, 2020

Capitalism is much more centralized than its advocates like to admit. Describing capitalism on paper as anything else than this historical reality is just imagining an ontology that never was.

July 9, 2020

The thing I have trouble intimating to many people more clever than myself is that all kinds of abstruse theoretical philosophy is by and large totally right but naively using it as a basis for policy is like trying to re-derive all engineering through theoretical math textbooks.

July 7, 2020

I believe in lateral checks and balances as opposed to a hierarchy of oversight. This doesn't quite make me an anarchist but it seems to be in the same spirit: governance needs to exist but it must be a mesh rather than a pyramid.

July 5, 2020

Contemporary mathematics is an object lesson in how there's no such thing as "first priunciples" but instead a labyrinth of ever deepening roots that start from what we can see on the surface and keep going down and differentiating indefinitely.

June 30, 2020

narrative is the articulation of that which can't (yet) be directly defined.

June 24, 2020

The mischaracterization of pragmatism as a complete disavowal of contemplation as an end in itself has been a disaster for any kind of effective action.

June 22, 2020

The best biopic of Descartes is the scene in Zoolander where Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are told that the files are "in the computer".

June 21, 2020

Narcissism is living according to the pretense that the story of your life has a fourth wall.

June 21, 2020

Anyone who wants yo uto be in any way illiterate is someone who wants to control you.

June 20, 2020

Ideologies are operating systems, not absolute claims about how the world works.

June 10, 2020

The people I know with serious STEM talent by and large don't hand-wring about thinking "objectively" or "logically" or "rationally". Maybe it's domain dependence, but in all likelihood they just tacitly understand that any kind of deep thought is first and foremost an art.

June 9, 2020

Chaos is a razor-thin line between freedom and friction, between unfolding and catabolism, between baptism and heat death.

May 30, 2020

Mind achieves independence from the body insofar as it composes invariances. This is never 100% achievable, but it's the essence of human striving.

May 26, 2020

If you constantly second guess yourself and don't trust your intuition, you're likely being greedy. You're not going to outsmart life and avoid ever messsing up, just make the mistakes and move on.

May 24, 2020

The overt choices you make are less contingent and more interchangeable than the kind of commitment you continually choose to put into something.

Commitment is the eternal return, everything else is ultimately somewhat fungible.

May 22, 2020

Science uncovers bedrock, philosophy investigates magma.

Neither is prior to the other, they're just two different toolsets for two different types of matter that coexist and over time co-evolve.

May 20, 2020/p>

The most rigorous things look casual because you fall through their pathways with so little friction you don't even notice.

May 20, 2020/p>

Accusations of unrigorous language are often tells that the accusor doesn't konw the context well enough to be rigorous.

May 17, 2020/p>

Everything on our screens is too sleek. Art requires friction, reason requires friction.

May 15, 2020/p>

The belief that all psychological problems can be solved by directly tampering with brain chemistry completely ignores that forces behave differently depending on the structure of the landscape they inhabit.

May 13, 2020/p>

If you decide not to theorize because you have shit to do in the real world, I unironically salute you. But if you want to theorize, the worst possible thing you can do is half-ass it and cling to loaded concepts instead of dropping them and seeing if they break.

Theory is as Real as anything else, but only if you're actually theorizing and not merely projecting.

April 22, 2020/p>

The threat of automation isn't unemployment: if there's more net wealth in society then just share it. The issue is that automation always cuts corners, and too much of that will eventually lead to an irreversible and dangerous loss of tacit industrial know-how.

April 21, 2020/p>

Never gaslight someone about their health. Even if something is psychosomatic (whatever that means), calling someone's pain imaginary only makes it worse. You may as well say "I don't see an arm!" to someone with phantom limb syndrome.

April 21, 2020/p>

the problem with video games is that you very quickly step twice in the same river.

April 8, 2020/p>

Rhetoric, unlike mere syllogisms, intimates a larger shape in which an argument is embedded, and as such is much more rigorous and falsifiable than that which can perpetually "make sense" in a vacuum regardless of how detached it becomes from what's tacitly apparent.

April 3, 2020/p>

The hallmark of pedantry is that any given line of argument makes sense in its own right but does not retain any kind of shape upon any kind of transformation; nothing about it is invariant, every side of it simply another post-hoc rationalization.

April 3, 2020/p>

hysteresis: it's not art unless you paid some sort of non-monetary cost for it.

March 21, 2020/p>

The world is a manifold. Zoom in enough and travel distance is euclidean, but globally the existence of highways and airplanes and mass transit and national borders and telecommuting means actionable distance is not metric.

March 20, 2020/p>

A model should never be treated as a prediction but instead as a test of how much you can perturb your own assumptions before what follows from them falls apart.

March 20, 2020

It wasn't apocryphal tales of the USSR that turned me off from central planning, it was reading about the history of robotics and my own repeated failures stemming from my attempts to deliberately think my way through all of life's problems.

March 5, 2020

Our current chauvinism for naive abstraction has marginalized the fact that complex problems have layers that must be addressed with processes rather than algorithms and that processes have tempos that can't be reduced to simple sequences of symbols.

Tinkering is not mere trial and error, it's a temporally irreducible conversation with the matter at hand.

March 3, 2020

Denial is a habit, not a mental state: you have to train your way out of denial.

February 25, 2020

The more literate you are about a situation, the more your means of communication will consist of varying shades of silence.

February 19, 2020

An illusion is anything that can be proven to be untrue when one's context is expanded. Optical illusions are created by making things with insufficient embedding.

February 15, 2020

Subversion is impossible without self-discipline that is in some way exceptional.

February 9, 2020

Physical stimuli trigger emotional pulses, but how those emotions unfold is a matter of the patterns by which your mind channels and composes affects.

February 8, 2020

your library is a single organism, you need not justify why you own this or that book.

February 7, 2020

Contrary to popular belief, you don't get ontology by spinning your wheels about underlying "semantics".

February 5, 2020

Praxis is semantic grounding plain and simple.

Asbhy's law is a reasonable approximation, but the fundamental limitation of top-down thinking is that abstractions have no meaning outside of their embedding.

February 4, 2020

excessive focus on a universal idea of complex systems is rather ironic.

February 3, 2020

physical pathologies like repetitive strain injuries are a potent example of alienation, a result of reducing people to interchangeable machine parts.

February 2, 2020

A text is all surface. Subtext, the "interior", is the application of functors.

February 2, 2020

Individuation is not the enactment of some pre-existing authentic self, it's a process of calibrating how you relate to the world in a way that increases your degrees of freedom.

February 2, 2020

There is an ocean of difference between authenticity and conatus, between pretense and intuition, between projection and expression, between modeling and reading, between identity and individuation, between reaction and action.

The former is what we resort to in a world we have not fully interfaced with and a self we have not fully integrated. Acquiring the latter is an active, perilous, and interminable process of construction and evolution with no shortcuts whatsoever.

February 1, 2020

The problem with thought experiments is that logic inherently does not have content, so if you're thinking about any kind of substantial issue it's more important to be literate about the situation in which it's embedded than it is to painstakingly compute on a naive model of the situation.

Put another way, if you can't read a situation but only build models, any scenario of more than trivial complexity will simply become garbage-in-garbage-out.

January 28, 2020

People dunk on Plato too readily. He was ultimately "wrong" in the same way that Newton was "wrong". There's a deep ontological limit to assuming that phenomena are a shadow of form but the vast majority of science was built on that fiction and it's not a trivial one to replace.

January 25, 2020

The real political horseshoe is the two poles of a totalizing "market" pattern and exhaustive command-and-control economics.

January 24, 2020

I often think that matehmatics is too important to put off until 30 but then sometimes I think it's too dangerous to study in one's 20s.

January 24, 2020

Intuition and rationality are about neither x nor f(x) but the ocmposition of f. Phenomenology—f(x)—is no escape from the frailty of induction.

January 21, 2020

Any cogent economic critique requires understanding that money is a syntactic, not a semantic idea.

January 21, 2020

Philosophy, like literature, is not about correct answers: it's about facilitating a richer relationship between reader and world.

Reading is ontography.

January 18, 2020

attention = patterns of physical action that determine how information is framed.

Like all data, "sense data" can only exist through active sanitation.

Nature is hte opposite of universality. Evolution, technology, and society are life's relentless war against the particular.

January 15, 2020

People cal reality random as a coping mechanism to obscure what it really is: nebulous.

January 12, 2020

If you want to know the purpose of something, ask yourself what stubborn pattern couldn't exist without it.

January 11, 2020

The subconscious operates as a material, formal, and final cause but never an efficient cause.

January 11, 2020

Rhetoric is the thickness of discourse.

Discourse without rhetoric is computation.

January 10, 2020

If you write bad poetry you'll do bad science. Sorry, I don't make the rules.

January 7, 2020

Philosophy, and for that matter, sicence, is a lot like when you're drawing a picture where instead of drawing a clean line you just sort of keep scribbling loose pencil marks until something emerges..

Pedants then find petty reasons to call it "fake" because the lines aren't clean enough.

January 2, 2020

Being bored in the real world feels a lot better than being entertained by a skinnerian monstrosity.

January 2, 2020

Resist the urge to complete a bunch of thoughts with a single keystone idea that links them into a system. Appreciate the intermittent porousness of your prose.

December 31, 2019

No texture without repetition.

No material without texture.

No prose without material.

December 31, 2019

The meaning of a text is a question of where and how it exhibits permeability.

December 29, 2019

The flood of moods that come rushing back when you have an unexpected visceral memory of the unarticulated heap you inevitably were a decade earlier.

December 28, 2019

Nerds think imperatively.

Artists think declaratively and leave operational semantics to the whims of the gods.

December 27, 2019

Psychology is the infantile insistence that there exists an alternative to reading the fucking room.

December 25, 2019

Every rapid period of intellectual growth was ultimatley a symptom of one thing: all the people I met who helped me open up.

December 24, 2019

You never "get" art, you just continaully develop an increasingly nimble ear.

December 22, 2019

If you tell me that poetry is logorrhea, I by and large agree, and in addition I think you should cultivate an appreciation for logorrhea.

December 22, 2019

The obsessive quest to weed problematic connotations out of language is the discursive equivalent of trying to "scientifically" manage a forest.

December 21, 2019

The nature of community is extremely tacit and illegible and I often worry that reducing it to amateur poetry about being "organic" will lead people to chase the trappings of it instead of the real thing.

December 18, 2019

Aesthetics is the interfaces we build to dissolve the prison of blindingly brilliant subjectivity.

December 15, 2019

You can't prove the validity of your intuition to anything or anyone outside of it.

You realy only have two choices: decide something for yourself, or let someone or something do it for you.

December 13, 2019

"since feeling is first" explains why sophists don't get laid, but you can't understand what it's saying if you're a sophists so the knowledge is only available to people who don't need it.

December 12, 2019

Play for its own sake is a good thing and anyone who says otherwise is a repugnant arthropod.

December 12, 2019

Your ideas are only as substantial as the interface they create with the world.

December 11, 2019

There's something deeply fragile about nonfiction. The sensibility you gain from literature or from mathematics or (some) philosophy is a skill, not something about truth or falsity, but arguments about the "real world" often turn out not to be worth the paper they're printed on.

December 10, 2019

Progress comes from weirdos who make crazy (often but not always) impractical shit and don't have the sense (or the giveafuck) to maximize their own "utility".

People who are obsessed with self-improvement and "winning" are generally speaking the parasites.

December 8, 2019

The medium is the message up to isomorphism.

McLuhan = semiotic homotopy

December 6, 2019

The scientific replication crisis is a symptom of most "science" being simply unintelligible. The language games of psychology, economics, neuroscience, nutrition, etc. simply have no tractable interface with any facet of physical or even social reality; they throw labels around and act shocked when 1 + "one" doesn't equal 2.0

December 5, 2019

Constantly remind yourself that if you were really so sure about how the world works, everything would be easy and you'd be monstrously rich.

I'm not saying that success is proportional to intelligence, but I am saying that practical setbacks are a sign of something you don't know or understand.

Let the pain catabolize your pretenses.

December 5, 2019

The people most vitriolic against philosophy tend to be people who have been unwittingly indoctrinated by really slipshod philosphy.

December 4, 2019

If you don't have the self-discipline to play through the whole story and not skip to the end, you'll never know what you want and you wouldn't obtain it even if you did.

December 3, 2019

Every time you step "outside" of living in order to get some kind of edge by "hacking" it, you shrink your bandwidth and destroy information. Exercise discretion.

December 1, 2019

Advice only becomes helpful when you'ove spent a million hours plugging away at something and there's actually some kind of substance to refine.

December 1, 2019

The economic, technological, and political challenge of the 21st century is to harness beneficial network effects while simultaneously maintaining the variety and independence of smaller parts necessary for continual adaptation and avoidance of contagious destruction.

November 30, 2019

every map is the germ of a territory, every use an unfolding into new terrain.

November 29, 2019

I fear society losing everything idiomatic about it to technological "progress".

Senescence is the loss of idioms.

November 29, 2019

Under the condition of maximum entropy, there is no distinction between the part and the whole. Identifiable parts exist to the extent that there is redundancy.

An entity has parts insofar that it has grammar.

Parts are what survive when you break something apart. Rules are what disappear when you do so.

Zorn's Lemma is the Rosetta Stone of mereology.

November 28, 2019

If we only did what was obviously immediately useful there would be no civilization and no progress.

November 28, 2019

There's a fundamental difference between cleverness and literacy.

Cleverness alone, outside of contrived institutional settings, cannot give you efficacy.

November 27, 2019

The concept of artificial general intelligence is a scientifically unsound cover story for expanding the surveillance state.

November 26, 2019

Skills, habits, and maps are all the same thing: crevices that you fall through, analogous to the way that gravity works in relativistic physics.

November 24, 2019

When I make an ontological statement, I'm not saying it's the Truth; I'm just intimating the geography into which my own story has unfolded.

November 23, 2019

A phenotype is ultimatley defined by a relationship between an organism and its environment; not a "property" in a vacuum.

(There's no such thing as "properties", those are just relationships.)

November 23, 2019

You can't separate aesthetics from impracticality, aesthetics is the essence of surplus.

November 22, 2019

Analytic philosophy is conceptual narcissism.

Narcissism is ethics divorced from ecology.

November 21, 2019

The hardware/software distincion outside of actual computers is always nebulous and often meaningless, but the best way to view it is that software is that which remains invariant between actors. A text may offer us each different affordances ("meanings"), but there is, in most cases, a common kernel that allows us to relate to one another through it.

This is not some a-priori "object" but an invariant that for whatever reason holds amongst the tangle of interactions.

The best example of such a thing I can think of right now is currency. We may value things differently, and even have different ideas of what "value" even is, but money is a common interface through which our acts of valuation operate.

November 18, 2019

You can't impose ordre on a complex system but you can engender catabolic processes.

November 18, 2019

The distinction between organism and machine is ultimately a geometric one.

November 16, 2019

There are people who consume books and people who read and neither one of these necessitates the other.

November 13, 2019

You're at your most productive when you're doing something that's a little bit self-indulgent but not too self-indulgent.

November 8, 2019

All subjectivity is a question of relationships to other things. Objectivity is merely that which can be fenced off into a closed system with its own rules.

November 3, 2019

Organisms repeat, machines generalize.

Depression is when too many of the repetitions of one's life ossify into generalities.

November 3, 2019

Ideological differences by and large come down to a matter of taste.

No, I don't mean sentiments, I mean nebulous differences in how one chooses to read a text.

November 3, 2019

Do not mistake rhetoric for logical proof. The function of rhetoric is to alter the context of a debate, to rewrite the text in which it's situated.

It would be even more hazardous, however, to mistake it for merely shifting the goalposts.

October 31, 2019

The idea that power and control are the same thing is a relic of cybernetics and neoclassical economics (which are the same thing anyway.)

October 28, 2019

Miscellaneous Tiny Notes