Fluid Rigor

May 4, 2017 By

What made us human? It’s one of the most enduringly interesting questions, from mythology to science, because the apparent ordinariness of being human conceals an abyss of ignorance about how it works and how it came to be.

A profound answer to this question is the one provided by Darwin: natural selection made us human. Theories after Darwin must attempt to explain more specific aspects of human evolution. What was our selective environment like, and what were the crucial adaptations that allowed for the development of our special kind of cognition and social organization? In what order did they occur? Does evolution act on elements of human culture, or on human groups as superorganisms? Some examples of post-Darwinian origin stories: cooking made us human, running made us human (I’m partial to both), compassion made us human, schizophrenia made us human.

Perhaps you have heard of René Girard. He was an interdisciplinary scholar who proposed a theory of what made us human, a process he calls hominization. I have been reading Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and have found it to be a fascinatingly troublesome theory of everything. [Read more…]

One Weird Longform Trick…on the Blockchain!

April 25, 2017 By

Good news everyone!

We are now accepting applications for the second offering of the Ribbonfarm Longform Blogging Course, Summer 2017 edition. The first time Sarah Perry and I ran the course, which was last November, we had 15 participants. We also ended up with 31 people on the waitlist. This time we have an upfront application process (application deadline, Friday May 5) rather than a first-come-first-serve ticket sale.

The application process is to help us screen for participants who are most likely to both benefit from the course, as well as turn into regular contributors. Which is kinda the main point of us doing this.

The course will run in June/July on TBD dates/times based on the scheduling constraints of accepted applicants. It will be an expanded offering compared to last time (6 live video sessions instead of 4), and incorporate all the feedback and meta-learnings we got out of the pilot offering.

We’re also going to try and accept more participants this time. The main constraint there is our editing bandwidth. The most demanding part of teaching the course last time was working 1:1 with participants on their course essays. But I have some tricks planned to make that easier.

And what’s all this about blockchain? Well, read on!

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Idiots Scaring Themselves in the Dark

April 13, 2017 By

Getting lost is a special experience; usually you are not lost. On ordinary days when you are oriented (not lost), a hidden process is happening in the background: you are constantly checking your mental maps against your environment, and finding them to accord well. This constant background process creates the positive sensation of average-everydayness, mundanity, homeliness. You know where you are.

Then things start looking weird. Conflicts between the mental map and the environment start setting off alarm bells. Very gradually, you realize you are lost. You deny it for as long as you can, perhaps acting stupidly and getting yourself more lost. Then it hits you. [Read more…]

The Limits of Epistemic Hygiene

March 2, 2017 By

Perhaps the most impressive (and measurable) achievement of technological modernity has been the drastic reduction in infectious disease mortality. It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this victory. It is one thing to say that half, or a third, or a quarter of children used to die before their fifth birthday from infectious disease, and more adults besides. It is another thing (and quite difficult) to imagine what it was like to live under this alien (to us) regime of death. Cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid, polio, influenza, tuberculosis, pertussis, dysentery, measles, plague, yellow fever, and more besides, claimed the lives of human beings, leaving behind disfigurement, suffering, grief, and fear. There was almost nothing to be done:

The little child of Newton and Etta Riggs Loomis was removed to the home of its grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Loomis, after diphtheria was pronounced to be in the home of Mrs. Ann Riggs, in the hopes that it might escape the dread disease. But the monster followed it and the child died Monday, aged 2 years.

Badger State Banner, January 15, 1891, collected in Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy, 1973.

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The Strategy of No Strategy

February 23, 2017 By

Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on campus. I was living on my own for the first time and had never been outside of California’s perennial summer weather environment before. I was a poor fit for an East Coast school and didn’t last a full year, getting ill from the cold temperature and transferring out to a California school. At the time, I felt like a failure.

Ensō (c. 2000) by Kanjuro Shibata XX. CC BY-SA 3.0

Like many people of my generation and my socio-economic bracket, my teenage years were eventually consumed by the looming issue of where to go to college. I tried to get the best grades, study hard for the SAT, and make whatever connections I could with alumni to get into colleges I wanted. I applied to many of them, recycling and modifying personal statement letters like the individual payloads and sub-payloads of a MIRV’d nuclear missile. Once I got to college, the clarity and structure that routine provided evaporated. I had to make my own. It was certainly very difficult.

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Unbuilding the Wall

February 16, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Toby Shorin.

Although symbols are intangible, that doesn’t mean they are inaccessible. On the contrary, we routinely understand and interact with the world by interpreting and intuiting their meanings. Symbols can be created, altered, proliferated, and overthrown.

This essay will discuss one symbol and its meanings: Donald Trump’s Wall. During the ‘15-‘16 election cycle, the Wall became as much of an aspirational motif for the right as it was a corrupt one for the left. In some ways, the Wall usurped Trump himself as the central image of the election. Compared to Trump, whose innumerable controversies make him an ethically difficult figure even for many of his supporters, the Wall makes a simple proposition: in or out. This legerdemain condenses a whole lineup of wicked problems and convoluted realities into a highly condensed ideological meme, representing the entire package of Trump’s policies. Ease of compliance is visible in the rally chants of Trump followers (“build the Wall, build the Wall!”), which acknowledge and perpetuate its myth.

Of course, the Wall is not just a symbol; it is a very real political project with significant implications. But symbols are not just ideas; they are very real concentrations of meaning with political agendas and the potential for momentous adoption. For example, the key symbol of the now-dead Occupy movement, “the 99%,” has been instrumental in spreading awareness of income inequality, and nearly 10 years later remains a crucial tool of global leftist discourse. In the apparently straightforward gesture of the Wall is hidden a similarly nuanced conceptual model. The Wall defines America by drawing its boundaries, producing an exclusionary, misleading, and compelling model nation. As a symbol, it functions on three levels: the geopolitical, the psychological, and the semiotic—it fucks with meaning itself.

[Read more…]

After Temporality

February 2, 2017 By

Time is weird. The alleged dimension of time has been under investigation by the physics police on charges of relativity weirdness and quantum weirdness. The math is hard, but you can see it in the ominous glint in the eyes of physicists who have had a couple of drinks.

But subjective time is even more suspicious. Each observer possesses detailed and privileged access to a single entity’s experience of time (his own); however, this does not guarantee the ability to perceive one’s perceptions of time accurately, so as to report about it to the self or others. Access to the time perception of others is mediated by language and clever experimental designs. Unfortunately, the language of time is a zone of overload and squirrelly equivocation. Vyvyan Evans (2004) counts eight distinct meanings of the English noun “time,” each with different grammatical properties. Time can be a countable noun (“it happened three times”) or a mass noun (“some time ago”); agentic time (“time heals all wounds”) behaves like a proper noun, refusing definite and indefinite articles.

Perhaps we will get some purchase with chronesthesia, since Greek classical compounds are well-known for injecting rigor into the wayward vernacular. Chronesthesia is the sense of time – specifically, the ability to mentally project oneself into the future and the past, as in memory, planning, and fantasy (Tulving, 2002). It is sometimes called mental time travel. But already there is weirdness: why should the “time sense” be concerned with the imaginary, rather than the perception of time as it is actually experienced (duration, sequentiality, causality)? [Read more…]

The Throughput of Learning

January 31, 2017 By

Learning in the 21st century is not about acquiring more information, knowledge, or even insights. The goal is to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions. But you have to get there one step at a time.

When you first start learning, early in life, there is a bottleneck in the amount of information you have access to. You soak up everything like a sponge, because you are open and there is relatively little to absorb.

But very quickly, in elementary school, your access to information stops being the limiting factor. You take home a few giant textbooks, and suddenly the bottleneck moves to ways of structuring and contextualizing the information.

In high school, you learn a variety of methods to structure information — outlines, diagrams, underlining and highlighting, reports, essays, notebooks and binders. The bottleneck moves to your ability to synthesize this information, to turn it into new ideas.

In college, if you make it that far, the bottleneck moves to insight generation. You start questioning the world as given, and find that the juiciest intellectual rewards are ideas that shift how you view it. You start hunting for the revolutionary, the controversial, steering your learning toward the red pills of paradoxes and contradictions.

rf5.001

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Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society

January 26, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Chris Reid.

The destinies of cultures can be read in games.

–Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games

Before it was stolen, patented, and sold to the Parker Brothers, Monopoly was “The Landowner’s Game,” a Georgist propaganda piece meant to illustrate the unfair behavior of the landowning class. The game accomplished this by setting up rules and fictions (game mechanics) that generate a reliable system behavior (game dynamic) which produced the intended experience (aesthetic): That aesthetic, frustration, has disrupted family game nights for decades. The dynamic is familiar to nearly anyone who has played it: those who manage to own more property have the money and power to be better insulated against chance, and those who don’t are likely to lose even more. The game spirals out as losers are burnt down to nothing and winners become even more powerful. Winners might find the game fun. Losers are deliberately irritated by a slow, nearly unavoidable death. In theory, the game mechanics could be adjusted to produce a ‘smoother’ outcome for more players, but it was never the point. It wouldn’t be “Monopoly” otherwise.

Monopoly’s rude feedback loop, illustrated in Hunicke et al., MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.

Monopoly’s rude feedback loop, illustrated in Hunicke et al., MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.


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How to Dress for the Game of Life

January 17, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Pamela J. Hobart.

Being basic involves wearing regular stuff for being regular’s sake. And “normcore” is the practice of choosing certain clothes to blend in, instead of to stand out. What makes basicness and normcore very different from other fashion trends is that they must be understood referentially, in comparison to what other people are wearing, and psychologically, in terms of why a wearer chose the look (instead of being a characteristic inherent in the clothes themselves).

Over the past couple of years, the concept of normcore (as initially conceived by trend forecasting group K-Hole) has been mocked and bastardized, all while quietly taking hold anyway. Its motivation — a frustrated need for belonging — is still felt keenly, and fashion cycle exhaustion is only worsening in a wired, 24/7 world. Models who might have hit the runway a few times per year have given way to fashion bloggers who change outfits multiple times per day. A quick scroll through Instagram is all you need to figure out the hard truth: there’s nothing new to wear under the sun.

The promise of normcore

The promise of normcore


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