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It's selection all the way down
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It's selection all the way down

Noise to Signal #11

Pfeilstorch
Aug 3, 2021
2
Share this post
It's selection all the way down
pfeilstorch.substack.com

For God, it’s either this or that:

Twitter avatar for @natural_hazardHazard @natural_hazard
Every game Is a selection game in the eyes of God

July 31st 2021

2 Retweets5 Likes

For Academics, it’s definitely this:

Twitter avatar for @Research_TimTim van der Zee @Research_Tim
How to keep afloat any (false) theory: 1) Do many (small) studies 2) Publish only the positive ones Sadly, this *is* our publication system. https://t.co/NF0Ot1T6pA

December 10th 2016

86 Retweets78 Likes

Conceptualization games portrayed as selection games.

Twitter avatar for @justindrossJD Ross @justindross
@rivatez Isn’t it weird how the bad guys never win

December 4th 2018

26 Likes

This^ is better than "History is written by the victors" because it carries its own proof with it.

To a player, everyone’s a player:

Twitter avatar for @chaosprimeChaos @chaosprime
@natural_hazard you either die a mark or live long enough to see yourself become the grifter

July 29th 2021

3 Retweets26 Likes

Language is cool because it’s naturally input and output, why shouldn’t everything digital be this way:

Twitter avatar for @ctbeiserCB (nyc) @ctbeiser
there's something really sad about how music listening software and music-making software have diverged so heavily. authoring during playback, deciding to cut the drums, accruing mastery—there's no fundamental reason this can't be possible from within Spotify.

August 1st 2021

6 Retweets55 Likes

What is the meaning of a word?

Twitter avatar for @VividVoid_Vivid Void @VividVoid_
Image

Arielle Dundas @ArielleDundas

Quote tweet this with a picture you have for some reason been waiting for an excuse to share (again).

July 29th 2021

30 Retweets218 Likes

Thread of who’s left where and what happens, i.e. history:

Twitter avatar for @femboy_swiftAustrianSchoolSwift @femboy_swift
Absoutely mind-blowing story After the Anglo-Saxons were defeated many of them sailed into the Mediterranean sea in search of a new home. The Anglo-Saxon fleet consisted of 250 to 350 ships, and up to 5,000 people, including “three earls and eight barons", their top fighting men

July 31st 2021

86 Retweets447 Likes

This was probably adaptive at some point, but now it selects for people who don’t know how to filter and add-up uncertainty:

Twitter avatar for @BecomingCritterCritter @BecomingCritter
Slovic’s paper on horse race betting suggests that the more information we have, the more confident we become in our analysis without a proportionate increase in accuracy
Image

July 30th 2021

2 Retweets21 Likes

“Unit of goal” = “unit of selection,” because the individual behaviors of one’s “sub-agents” determine game outcome:

Twitter avatar for @The_LagrangianAdam Strandberg @The_Lagrangian
Attempted def: an "agent" is a collection of agents whose goals are sufficiently correlated that they *cannot* be achieved independently

February 29th 2016

13 Retweets44 Likes

No comment:

Twitter avatar for @antilegibleNeil @antilegible
@yeetgenstein No, but I did just discover that “Schoethe” is…a ship name. Like in the fandom sense

July 30th 2021

3 Likes

Poetry is intensively cognitive. Every metaphor is its own new category. Every conceptual blending, remix, and new vibe is the act of bringing a new thing into the world from the ingredients of what already is.

Twitter avatar for @antilegibleNeil @antilegible
Correspondence and coincidence are the basic tools of art

July 29th 2021

5 Likes

Broke: essences. Woke: statistical distributions.

Twitter avatar for @JakeOrthweinJake Orthwein @JakeOrthwein
🧵 Realizing that Darwin didn’t just replace a theistic explanation for the nature of life with a non-theistic one. He replaced the theistic *mode of explanation*, reliant on fixed essences and definite meanings, with one based on contingently arisen forms and fluid meanings.
Image
Image

August 1st 2021

5 Retweets72 Likes

Language games:

1)

Twitter avatar for @lisatomic5lisatomic @lisatomic5
@averykimball strange to me how an idea like "women are more emotional than men" leads to two responses: 1) "no they're not!" and 2) "and that's good, actually!" but then those ideas exist in superposition, and beliefs only collapse down to 1 *or* 2 depending on what is needed for an argument

July 26th 2021

6 Likes

2)

Twitter avatar for @literalbananaScience Banana @literalbanana
I think what Feynman is saying here is very similar to what Garfinkel gives as a distinction between exact and inexact sciences
Image

Ali A. Rizvi @aliamjadrizvi

The great Richard Feynman on why the social sciences are not science. https://t.co/c0TvxbCgFb

April 7th 2020

1 Retweet42 Likes

3)

Twitter avatar for @rohn_jawlsrohn! @rohn_jawls
Flirting is so manipulative, you’re literally trying to trick someone into being attracted to you against their will. Giving compliments is also manipulation. And trying to make a positive impression in any way? Buddy you best believe that’s manipulation

July 25th 2021

124 Retweets1,528 Likes

“It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”

Twitter avatar for @michaelcurziMichael Curzi @michaelcurzi
Don’t know who needs to hear this, but someone approaching you with vulnerability doesn’t give them a legitimate claim to your engagement or support. Kindness, or at least geniality and respect, can be expressed without investment. People often use their suffering as a hook.

July 26th 2021

7 Retweets92 Likes

On foraging for mushrooms, the intense cognitive overhead of the particular selection game—plus “transfer phenomena.”

Twitter avatar for @RoopeKaaronenRoope Kaaronen @RoopeKaaronen
This might be related to the ”Tetris Effect” to some extent. One could probably also argue for a ”predictive processing” account (perceiving ”priors”), but not sure. I have good connections to foraging societies, and could gather a sample of ~1000 reports with little effort.

May 27th 2021

6 Likes

Not very anti-inductive. If you’re wondering what “communication” gets you evolutionarily, this is it:

Twitter avatar for @natural_hazardHazard @natural_hazard
can you believe that fishing still works? after thousands of years those swimmy lil bitches are still falling for it

July 30th 2021

33 Retweets328 Likes

The “Generalization Crisis" but for Twitter. People love to complain about specific instances through the guise of complaining about categories—it makes the personal political.

Twitter avatar for @zuza_realatrophy wife 🎀 @zuza_real
"men be like-" "women be like-" just shut up and tell us that specific thing that your ex did

August 1st 2021

1,676 Retweets19,736 Likes

One axis of taste: whether you care about fiction games for the sake of fiction games, or whether you want them to teach you something about non-fiction games:

Twitter avatar for @ChanaMessingerChana @ChanaMessinger
@whomademecrispy @AshtearLucca Puzzles are the concept! (For me, so far, what do I know)

July 25th 2021

3 Likes

The son of a Jewish father and an African American mother,[4] Karp was raised in a Jewish family in Philadelphia and graduated from Central High School in 1985

Karp's thesis, supervised by Karola Brede, was titled "Aggression in der Lebenswelt: Die Erweiterung des Parsonsschen Konzepts der Aggression durch die Beschreibung des Zusammenhangs von Jargon, Aggression und Kultur", which means "Aggression in the life-world: The extension of Parsons' concept of aggression by describing the connection between jargon, aggression, and culture.

Karp has described himself as a socialist[16] and a progressive

Twitter avatar for @F_VaggiFederico Vaggi @F_Vaggi
@noampomsky The founder of Palantir did his PhD with Habermas. It's an interesting rejoinder to people who like to quip that tech CEOs just need to take more classes in the humanities.

July 28th 2021

25 Retweets558 Likes

Categories are context:

Twitter avatar for @TheMarkTwainMark Twain @TheMarkTwain
When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

July 27th 2021

19 Retweets150 Likes

“Gf who,” “Bf who” discourse is just type of guy theory:

Twitter avatar for @LithrosScott Hansen @Lithros
gf who uses folksy common sense to arrive at better conclusions than professional experts

July 30th 2021

7 Retweets133 Likes

Speaking of which:

Twitter avatar for @suspendedreasonSuspended Reason @suspendedreason
@hujane @nosilverv @peligrietzer @Rivky_Mondal sorta relevant—"the mortifying ordeal of being known as a type"
Intuitionisitc Type (of guy) TheoryNew Type of Guy Just Got Offhandedly Dismissed Constructing a new Type of guy happens in two phases. The first phase constructs the Type by pointing to a reco...page.brick.do

July 25th 2021

5 Likes

Beware of what you use as primitives for your models and maps, they are inevitably part of the territory:

Twitter avatar for @natural_hazardHazard @natural_hazard
dope how my jacket can model humans. like, it moves totally in sync with my arms when I'm wearing it! i wonder how it maintains such an accurate map of the territory... and now that I'm thinking about it why does it only do this when it's being worn? observer effects, man...

July 26th 2021

5 Retweets44 Likes
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