“Noise to Signal” will be a weekly round-up of what we found interesting, inspired by Guzey’s Best of Twitter but with a humanities spin. Lots of Twitter, but we make no commitment to only posting Twitter links.
Credentials, skin in the game, and social coordination
On the nature of certain moral “blackpills”
What Beiser calls the Aesthetic Deep State.
“The world is all that is the case." —Wittgenstein
Thread on surprise in film
Thread on regional variation in African American English
Clear explanation of meta-strategy and why it’s hard (or just disadvantageous) to talk about
Signs and signifiers (via Omega Mart)
Easy ways to say it’s all impossible because of arbitrary bundling
Mutual intelligibility in strategic interaction:
which reminds us of House of Games:
Akin to Erving Goffman's "presentation of self in everyday life" and the playing of roles in social behaviour, of theatrical conceptions of symbolic interaction in reality, Mamet's cinema draws attention to dramaturgical concepts such as proposed by Goffman in his distinction between storefront and backstage behaviour; on the backstage, however, we do not encounter undisguised, "true reality," but only further game-playing.
It’s only a problem if you treat it like one.
The fallacy of compositionality in surveys
Theory cells are hardened
Rituals and genuine commitments are hard to distinguish / Inadequate equilibria in everyday life