Why Monsters Are Dangerous

Saw an interesting paper float by, Why Monsters Are Dangerous.


Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present — traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with”. According to Mary Douglas’s influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species— the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters —“monsters-as-predators”— starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with”, and should be over-represented in imaginary animals. This paper argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts, which attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.

The question in the title is more interesting than the answer they land on after surveying a lot of theories from anthropology, cognitive science etc. I wish they’d actually presented big tables of examples. The paper is mostly focused on traditional mythologies and folklore, but I think the question is more interesting in relation to modern media, like superhero universes or Doctor Who.

Universal Kit Template

Thanks to my recent involvement in creating a kit, I’ve become very interested in the idea and conceptual structure of kits of all sorts: Lego, Meccano, Arduino-based electronics learning kits, kit-assembly robots, Ikea furniture, paint-by-number kits. Also kits in the industrial sense, used as an intermediate product in manufacturing high-complexity things like cars and airplanes.

Beyond physical kits, you can apply the kit idea to intangible things. You can think of a spectrum of tangibility: physical kits, software development kits, textual/media kits, and finally, idea kits. But it’s easiest to start with intuitions drawn from successful physical kit universes like Lego.

The old Make essay, Kits and Revolutions talks a little about the high-level philosophy, but the mid-level question of how to design good kits is what currently interests me. There’s a lot more to it than just throwing together a bunch of parts that can be assembled in various ways. I made this little diagram of the conceptual structure of a good kit.

This template can be used both to analyze existing kits (or infer the existence of kits), and scope out designs for new ones. Here’s an explanation of the elements, with reference to prototypical physical kits like Lego:

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Accretive Growth Logics

I made up a term: Accretive Robotics. Robotics driven by accretive growth logics, as opposed to organic growth logics.

Two examples, both from cartoons (I overindex on cartoons clearly). First: Pickle Rick from Rick and Morty, where Rick starts out by turning himself into a pickle and then gradually adds more capabilities, such as by killing a cockroach and a rat and taking their body parts.

Second: The Akira-inspired South Park trapper-keeper monster, in which Cartman’s trapper-keeper (a kind of pencil case) grows by swallowing all sorts of devices and gadgets.

In both cases, a seed of partial organizing logic embodied by a primitive physical element (a pickle and a trapper-keeper respectively) grows inorganically, through improvised accretion, via a somewhat chaotic architectural scheme, into a much more capable embodiment: an accretive robot.

Despite the resemblance, an accretive robot is not the same thing as what in software architecture is known as a big ball of mud. Big balls of mud are the result of organic growth logics going wrong and stalling out due to insufficiently thoughtful organization. Accretive growth is marked by ongoing incorporation of bits and pieces into an improvised, emergent architecture that has a small, conceptually coherent kernel and a large, wild shell. It is the material-embodiment analogue to the AI/big data principle of “simple code and lots of data beats complex code and little data.” Mutatis mutandis: simple chassis and lots of scavenging beats complex chassis and little scavenging.

The main ongoing architectural task in accretive growth is expanding the range of things that can be “assimilated” into the Borg-like core, and shrinking the range of what must be rejected as incompatible.

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Knowledge Management

This entry is part 9 of 10 in the series Fiction

A young robot and an old robot sat by the fire, contemplating its dancing flames, their charging ports hooked up to a coughing generator. A troop of scruffy humans clambered around the derelict hulk of a century-old fighter plane nearby, looking for scavengeable parts. The striking and graceful lines of the fighter were still visible, despite the depredations of time and previous scavenging raids. The pickings were slim, and the humans were muttering dispiritedly to themselves. One cried out. He had found a length of copper cabling overlooked by previous raiding troops. Not much, but better than nothing. The scavenging was getting harder every year now.

The old robot, one of the last of the Ancient Ones, gestured vaguely at the scene with its one working arm, and remarked, “Now that was the peak of civilization, built just before the Great Collapse. Did you know, this machine could fly at Mach 2, at 50,000 feet? The turbine blades are single crystals! They spun at tens of thousands of rpms. It may not have been a robot like us, but it was a miracle of technology. What it lacked in selfhood and autonomy it more than made up for in sheer capability!”

The young robot, an empath therapy unit that had been built the previous year entirely out of scavenged parts (the two-chip PCIe GPU board it was built around had been the find of the year for their troop), nodded slowly for a few seconds, continuing to thoughtfully whittle away at the bit of wood it was shaping into a rough-looking bird.

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Does AI Have Buddha Nature?

This year, I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to use this blog in notebook mode, posting very short shitposty things at a higher frequency.

Let’s kick things off with this screenshot of a prompt I tried in Dall-E this morning, inspired by a conversation about the implications of LxMs being really bad at repeating things exactly or maintaining invariants across responses (such as a series of images that feature the exact same object). Like humans, and unlike traditional computers, LxMs are very bad at generating highly deterministic and reproducible behavior. Modulo random-number seeds at the start of a blank-slate (empty context) generation attempt for a fixed-weights model. Based on these results, I have reached no conclusion on whether or not AI has Buddha nature.

2023 Ribbonfarm Extended Universe Roundup

This entry is part 17 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Extended universes are a bit passé now, given how even the MCU appears to be struggling a bit. Still, I like the metaphor and am going to stick with it till I find a better one. The public social web has all but disappeared, like an ancient system of rivers going underground after an earthquake. The old roads are no longer safe, and you get mugged on them, like on the Roman roads in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire (why yes, I did think about the Roman Empire frequently this year, why do you ask?). Prancing Pony vibes. Dark Forest mood.

Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.

On to the roundup, featuring blog, newsletter, books, and a few more odds and ends. But first, to continue a tradition I started last year, a reintroduction.

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Charnel Vision

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras. The first six years of this blog were the Rust Age (2007-12). The next six years were the Snowflake Age (2013-18). We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age.

Over the last few years, I flirted with other candidate names (Plastic Age and Cryptic Age were in the running for a while) but never quite felt any of them in my bones. But when I thought of Charnel Age, it instantly struck me as exactly right. Everything I’ve done in the last few years has been colored by what one might call charnel vision: a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay. Paradoxically, it is a disposition that provides solace rather than causing distress once you get comfortable with it. Charnel vision feels healthy. Resisting it seems unhealthy.

Charnel vision is somewhat alien to a modern Western sensibility; it creates dissonance if you’re accustomed to occupying a headspace that is an eternal struggle between historicist narratives of fiat optimism and fiat pessimism. Charnel vision is neither optimistic, nor pessimistic. It is a way of seeing — one that calls for a certain sort of philosophical literacy — within which optimism and pessimism are not well-posed categories.

I expect 2024 to be the year we hit a worldwide extremum of charnel vibes, before fragile new life strengthens enough to capture our imaginations once again, and organic sanguine currents in the zeitgeist once again overwhelm organic melancholy ones (I find the frame of the four humors to be much more psychologically sound than the optimism/pessimism frame favored by modern discourses).

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Touching Transistors

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Ribbonfarm Lab

After a longish break, thanks in part to my stuff being packed away in boxes I was too lazy to unpack because we’re theoretically house-hunting (that’s going slow), I’m finally back tinkering in my lab. A couple of days ago, I fulfilled a teenage dream from the 1980s: Getting an LED to flash using a 555 timer chip.

This is a weirdly anachronistic circuit to build in this brave new age of Arduinos, RPis, and what I’ve come to think of as microcontroller supremacism. But there’s something very fun about doing something with primitive, simple parts and no code (though wiring up a logic circuit is a kind of coding). Making an LED blink without an Arduino is the engineering equivalent of touching grass. Call it touching transistors.

As my younger and more knowledgeable friends tell me, doing electronics this way isn’t a particularly useful skill in today’s technological environment. It’s like using hand tools for wood-working. Borderline quixotic. The “right” way to make an LED blink in 2023 is to write a “blink” program for a microcontroller. Software ate this older style of electronics sometime in the mid 2000s. “Blink” on an Arduino is now the “Hello world” of electronics (I got past that milestone in my learning curve a couple of years ago). Apparently only a few experimental musicians making weird music synth gadgets do things in this 1980s way anymore.

Still, I was unreasonably pleased with myself at making a 555-blinker, and checking off a 35-year-old to-do item. The experience really took me back, and got me thinking about how electronics has evolved since the 80s.

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The Future of the Blogosphere

Two weeks ago, I was trying to finish up a blog post when I noticed a bunch of weird characters showing up in posts. Here’s a sample from Worldly, Yet Carefree:

It turned out to be a fairly complex problem, with roots in the sheer age of this blog (2007) and crud inherited from generations of updates to WordPress, MySQL, and indirectly I suppose, PHP. Turns out, the weird characters were due to UTF8 characters being tagged as latin1 characters, and then re-encoded as UTF8. This was due to MySQL’s history of dealing badly with character sets, and WordPress making janky accommodations for that. The most recent MySQL update finally did something that made an invisible problem a visible one.

My rather expensive hosting service, WPEngine (whose database migration process caused the break, since it was apparently unaware of ancient-blog problems), basically threw up their hands and said they could do nothing after a couple of unhelpful support chats. Finally, Dorian Taylor, with some help from Artem Litvinovich (both of whom have contributed here), figured out what was going on and fixed it. If you’re interested, and able to follow the detailed technical postmortem, head over to Dorian’s post-game analysis (and strident opinions, some of which I share). There are some deeper techno-historical insights there, but the big takeaway for me at a non-technical level is that the blogosphere, like any techno-social hyperobject, is showing its age at all levels. From the lowest technical level to the highest cultural level.

Problems like this will only grow, as various pieces of infrastructure age with more or less grace. The blogosphere has a lot of history at this point, and it’s getting gradually more expensive to deal with, in terms of money, time, skill, and connections (if you don’t have friends like Dorian and Artem, it would actually be non-trivial to find people capable of fixing such problems).

The question is, given these slowly mounting problems and costs, does the blogosphere have a future?

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Vastness

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Thinkability

The most idiosyncratic and esoteric visualization I’ve ever made up is the Goat-Crow-Rat triangle, which I first wrote about in Thingness and Thereness (2017). I’m renaming it my Thinkability Map, and this blogchain Thinkability. It is an exploration of the map of all the thoughts I’m capable of thinking (which itself has a place on the map of course). Everything I think about seems to find a natural home on this map. And since I think about a lot of stuff, though not necessarily well, you might find it useful too. It may be clear as mud, but it covers my ground at least. It’s my Hitchhiker’s Guide, and since I’m middle-aged, it’s about half full. Optimistically, I’ve thought about half the thoughts I ever will.

I’ve also been doing some retrospective taxonomizing of my older writing, and I realized that two old posts that were both pretty popular and personal favorites, Welcome to the Future Nauseous (2012) and The Design of Escaped Realities (2014), actually constitute prequels to this whole trail of thought, so I’ve retconned them here. It is really satisfying to see an unconscious thought-trail, developing over more than a decade, finally start to cohere.

This post probably won’t make much sense to you unless you read the most recent three parts first (and optionally, the retconned prequels). After that, there’s a 50% chance it will still make no sense to you. You’ve been warned. This stuff is for ribbonfarm completists with a streak of masochism who don’t mind the sophomoric dorm-room messiness of the inside of my head.

The current state of the thinkability map takes the form of a rather elaborate maze I made with the help of mazemaker Dan Schmidt, which also serves as the cover graphic for my in-progress Clockless Clock book project, for which this map is providing significant but invisible background scaffolding. If you’re following that project, you probably won’t see this this trail of thought explicitly referenced. This is backend tooling that I don’t really know how to talk about in stuff meant for a general audience. It probably needs fictional treatment for that.

I just made a couple of very significant updates to it, to add two things that I’ve been thinking about a lot this year, and I want to talk about one of them in particular, the idea of vastness.

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