I really don’t trust anyone who thinks “the truth isn’t up for debate”:
Pragmatism, in a nutshell:
(The danger here is only looking for your keys under the streetlamp.)
If we decide what we're saying with our words, it's hard to figure out how they're tricking us.
Self-surrogation is a necessity:
As Sam Fussell (son of Paul) wrote in Muscle, money and bodybuilding are the same thing: legible ways of tracking and accumulating points:
Because bodybuilding/powerlifting is so numbers-oriented, among other things, part of that reality is remember how it first felt to bench press 315 (three wheels!), to bench press 405 (four wheels!), to squat 500 (five wheels!), to deadlift 500 (five wheels!). Every single one of those lifts took years (for me) to build up to. They were a kind of concrete sanctification of what I was doing (that pleasure comes from pain, that dreams come true through sheer industry and endless repetition with some minor variation).
Or as Logo puts it,
Randomness is globally efficient because of—not despite—its local inefficiency:
In some sense, the only interesting problem is getting tools you can manipulate to represent the complexities you perceive:
bUt I jUsT tHiNk ThIs WaY bEcAuSe It MaKeS sEnSe:
Reality is way may more complicated than theory, and there’s no fundamental social particle with definite rules that describe its behavior, 🧵
Claude Shannon was a cryptographer and mathematician, but more than anything he just wanted to know why some stuff could make other stuff predictable; he pushed that farther than almost anyone else, because he thought about it extremely clearly:
When you fill in what you most expect from distributional evidence, everything looks like the mean:
“But you can’t really *lie* with photographs, can you?”
Language evolves because we need more precise labels for our linguistic thought experiments, but that’s hard when a very general label is tainted by a distinct subset:
Choice-narrative Linkage:
Actually, the only way to be authentic is through performance.
Go for the signals no one would be crazy enough to fuck with:
Check out our new site! theinexactsciences.github.io