It's selection all the way down

Noise to Signal #11

Pfeilstorch

Aug 3, 2021

For God, it’s either this or that:

Hazard @natural_hazard

Every game Is a selection game in the eyes of God

For Academics, it’s definitely this:

Tim 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

Conceptualization games portrayed as selection games.

JD Ross @justindross

@rivatez Isn’t it weird how the bad guys never win

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:

Chaos @chaosprime

@natural_hazard you either die a mark or live long enough to see yourself become the grifter

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

CB (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.

What is the meaning of a word?

Vivid Void @VividVoid_

Arielle Dundas @ArielleDundas

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

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

AustrianSchoolSwift @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

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

Critter @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

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

Adam Strandberg @The_Lagrangian

Attempted def: an "agent" is a collection of agents whose goals are sufficiently correlated that they *cannot* be achieved independently

No comment:

Neil @antilegible

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

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.

Neil @antilegible

Correspondence and coincidence are the basic tools of art

Broke: essences. Woke: statistical distributions.

Jake 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.

Language games:

lisatomic @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

Science Banana @literalbanana

I think what Feynman is saying here is very similar to what Garfinkel gives as a distinction between exact and inexact sciences

Ali A. Rizvi @aliamjadrizvi

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

rohn! @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

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

Michael 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.

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

Roope 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.

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

Hazard @natural_hazard

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

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.

atrophy wife 🎀 @zuza_real

"men be like-" "women be like-" just shut up and tell us that specific thing that your ex did

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:

Chana @ChanaMessinger

@whomademecrispy @AshtearLucca Puzzles are the concept! (For me, so far, what do I know)

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