Month: September 2017

Freedom vs. Sovereignty

~ cafebedouin

“The reward for accepting unpredictability is meaning. Unlike the abyss faced by makers, the plurality of other humans who are the object of action don’t just stare back. Sometimes they accept your invitation to play on; they join you in continuing the game. To act, in the Arendt sense, is to issue a call to play an infinite game in the James Carse sense (Carsean finite games, obviously, map to maker-theaters).

The reward for dealing with others through promises and forgiveness, rather than fuck-yous, is freedom, a richer mode of being than sovereignty.”

—Venkatesh Rao, “How To Make History.” Ribbonfarm.com. September 14, 2017.

There seems to be an interesting overlap going on here where the element of surprise is the hallmark of agency and freedom, and Baggini’s bringing in the same when talking about truth.

No Regrets

~ cafebedouin

“VEDANTAM: I understand you got married about a year ago. And you applied some of your own research on regret when it came to choosing a wedding dress.

SUMMERVILLE: I did. So I actually wasn’t applying my own research. I applied to work by Sheena Iyengar on the phenomenon of choice overload as well as work by Barry Schwartz and colleagues about the idea of maximizing versus satisficing as strategies for decisions – maximizing being the idea that you want to pick the best of all possible alternatives and satisficing being the idea that you’re going to pick something that meets all of your standards but may or may not be the absolute best.

So when I was wedding dress shopping, I went to a couple of stores. I tried on five or 10 dresses at each one. And I found a dress that I absolutely loved and was in my price range. And I realized that what the research told me was I would never be happier than I was at that moment – that if I kept dress shopping, I was going to wind up feeling overwhelmed. You know, I could find a hundred different lace sheaths with a V-neck in ivory, and I would wind up feeling confused about what are the differences between these, and that the very act of trying to get the absolute best would mean that I could never really be sure if I’d done it. Whereas, if I adopted a satisficing strategy, I could be sure I’m in a dress that looks beautiful on me and is in my price range, and I should just buy it and be done. And so that’s how I chose my wedding dress.”

—Emma Maris, “Feminine And Unapologetic.” Lastwordonnothing.com September 25, 2017.

h/t Hidden Brain. What I find puzzling about Emma’s commentary is she, in her writing, is both criticizing the trivialization of gendered examples and at the same time does it herself. Crying while doing dishes and listening to the radio is only female in so far as women are more likely to be washing dishes in the first place. 

Cambrian Explosion

~ cafebedouin

“The hox genes are, more or less, the standard library for the structural assembly of animal bodies. It’s a DNA-modifying type of gene, one that activates specific other regions of DNA during early development. Need a leg? Activate the ‘leg’ hox gene, and that will start a huge cascade of related processes that make a torso segment that contains a couple legs plus all the necessary hip-joints and such in a somewhat standardized way.** This makes it easier than you’d think to adapt animal body plans on the fly; rather than reinventing legs from the ground up every time you want to adapt from quadruped to hexaped, you can just have a mutation that calls the hox gene two more times. It is also a primary mechanism of directionality, in which animal bodies have a clear orientation with a front and back.

As you might imagine, animals almost never survive a mutation to the hox genes proper, let alone thrive and speciate. It tends to mean that you get born without a head or something. So, both humans and house flies tend to have a very similar set. That holds true across the entire animal kingdom, with only a few exceptions- hox genes are frozen in time, proportionate with their importance. Care to guess which types of animal lack fully formed hox genes?

That’s right: sponges and jellyfish. Even those have a rough proto-hox thing going on, but it’s a far cry short of ours.

It goes without saying that this will have implications for species diversity in the animal kingdom. Adaptation isn’t as easy as building an animal out of legos, but it has at least gotten a lot easier. Animals can experiment with body shapes in more radical ways, and be successful more often when they do so—they’re now exploring a much larger space of possibilities.

We’re starting to piece together a rough framework here, in which the rise of oxygen and the slow development of meta-genomic advantages work together to provide space for a more dynamic ecosystem, but is that enough to make sense of something as dramatic and surprising as the Cambrain Explosion? It’s a start!”

Anonymous. “Notes From an Apocalypse.” Lesserwrong.com. September 23, 2017.

Keepers of the Secrets

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“Lannon said that Google had changed the way people sought information. ‘They only want information based on the information they think they want,’ he said. As a rule, he said, archivists at the library should give you the box you’ve asked for — but also suggest another box. There are fewer opportunities, now, to stumble into a world you don’t already know. ‘It’s important to look outside of your own existence.'”

—James Somers, “Keepers of the Secrets.” The Village Voice. September 20,2017.

A love letter to archives.

Truth & Revelation

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

“People’s interest in the truth is often a concern not with facts but with their meanings. The truth in a portrait, for example, is not necessarily a matter of realistic fidelity. It is rather about capturing something in the sitter that a more physically accurate picture or photograph could miss. This idea is captured in Picasso’s famous aphorism ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth’. This kind of truth is often explicitly contrasted with the factual variety. ‘There is a distinction between fact and truth’, claimed Lucian Freud. ‘Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.’ Freud’s definitions may not match those of philosophers, but his point is clear enough. The kind of truth that concerns him is that which reveals the hidden meaning of things, not facts one could look up in a reference book.”

— Julian Baggini, “Truth? It’s not just about the facts.” The Times Literary Supplement. September 21, 2017.

Out to Get You

~ cafebedouin

“There are four responses to Out to Get You.

You can Get Gone. Walk away. Breathe a sigh of relief.

You can Get Got. Give the thing everything it wants. Pay up, relax, enjoy the show.

You can Get Compact. Find a rule limiting what ‘everything it wants’ means in context. Then Get Got, relax and enjoy the show.

You can Get Ready. Do battle. Get what you want.”

— Zvi Mowshowitz. “Out to Get You.” thezvi.wordpress.com. September 23, 2017.

Driving a Moving Truck – a.k.a. Bedbuggers

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“Then we’ll pack everything in the house into cartons. I don’t love packing; it’s inside work and mostly tedious. I do enjoy packing stemware, china, sculpture, and fine art, but that stuff is getting rarer in American households. Books are completely disappearing. (Remember in Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman’s wife was addicted to interactive television and they sent fireman crews out to burn books? That mission has been largely accomplished in middle-class America, and they didn’t need the firemen. The interactive electronics took care of it without the violence.)”

—Finn Murphy, “A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick: On the beauty and burdens of the long haul.” Longreads.com. September 21, 2017.

Not a representative quote, but a fascinating excerpt. Something to add to the book queue.

The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed

~ cafebedouin

“…if you’ve done a good thing, you don’t keep on revving it and adding more epicycles onto a bad idea. We call this reinventing the flat tire…

…Papert had the great metaphor. He said, ‘Look if you want to learn French, don’t take it in fifth or sixth grade. Go to France, because everything that makes learning French reasonable, and everything that helps learning French, is in France. If you want to do it in the United States, make a France.'”

—Brian Merchant. “The Father of Mobile Computing is Not Impressed.” fastcompany.com. September 15, 2017.

Interesting throughout.

The Churn from the TV version of “The Expanse” – Season One, Episode Seven

~ cafebedouin

Amos: I’m not gonna lie to you. Either way this plays out, you’re dead. And I’m the one that’s going to bring you the good news. You’re a loose end. Nothing personal.

Spy: Just like that, huh?

Amos: Like water’s wet. Sky’s up.

Spy: Must be nice to have life all figured out like that.

Amos: It has nothing to do with me. We’re just caught up in the churn, is all.

Spy: I have no idea what you just said.

Amos: This boss that I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the churn, when the rules of the game change.

Spy: What game?

Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into somethin’ new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. 

It doesn’t really mean anything. 

Or, we happen to live through it, and well, that doesn’t mean anything either.