Pfeilstorch

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I want to present a new frame here of "selection games." I think this will help inform all the talk of surrogation and in-bounds vs out-of-bounds play. We'll build up from the most simple kind of selection game—an agent selecting a non-agentic object...

One major source of conflict involves the bounds of a given game. Different individuals, depending on their status in the game, have different opinions on what is "in" or "out" of bounds. Some might call these opinions justifications of their prefere...

This is the first part of a three-part essay on strategic manipulations of other agents' epistemic states. Parts One & Two lays the groundwork, tying together theories of metonyms, expression games, and signals vs. cues. Part Two (forthcoming) will l...

In trying to re-factor the signal and correctives frame, I wanna first lay out a theory of the "game" that is discourse. This is a first attempt at laying out the ways in which discourse is a game, and the core criteria that define a given discursive...

This just keeps coming up in the chat, and Crispy and I did a little podcast convo about it today. Original Nerst post for the uninitiated. A lot of threads to pull on here I think, from Hegelian dialectic to fashion to evolutionary epistemology. Ind...

This is an in-progress info page. Feel free to direct any questions or comments to thepfeilstorchs@gmail.com, or post in the comments. All knowledge is about the same thing, which is the working of the world. And since the workings of the world are b...

i would like to propose—for the sake of some discussion—that the phrase, “tfw no gf” refers, after Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” in fact to the state in which one has no understanding of the author, or the other books they have written; wher...

Jumping off previous conversations between @hazard, @snav and I. Wanna start hammering down what we mean by introspection, which parts of it are more or less fallible, etc. To be clear up front before I start talking limitations: I definitely think i...

xpost from my blog that includes footnotes for those interested Ken Burke’s A Grammar of Motives is the fourth “grammar” I’ve engaged with that explicitly identified itself as such. The first two were English and French. The third was the grammar of ...

@hazard and I had a chat on Twitter yesterday/today about fake frames, and I wanted to open it up, in part because I articulated my objections so poorly. I think getting into actual examples will help us work this out better, come to an understanding...

Nietzsche, Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense: What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished...

Been reading Frans De Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? and wanna start a mega-thread on animal intelligence. Will post excerpts as they come up. Starting the thread after discovering a Wikipedia entry on causal reasoning in n...

Figure this is extremely @crispy's shit. Recently, biologists and philosophers have been much attracted by an evolutionary view of knowledge, so-called evolutionary epistemology. Developing this insight, the present paper argues that our cognitive ab...

Spin-off from the Predictive Hermeneutics megathread, which is not just a theory of art-making but an approach to art-making that Dewey 100% sets up. I know @thechickenman is into his education theory, which I don't know much about but wanna learn. I...

Are you a RAW guy or OCB? I kid. Post papers you think are worth reading, or of interest to others, as you come across them. Somewhere between link dump and open discussion. Kicking it off with a Friston et al paper, "A formal model of interpersonal ...

I have sometimes gotten annoyed at people arguing over whether "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts." I think there genuinely is a difference between thinking in a "reductionist mindset" and a "hollist mindset", but I haven't seen either ...

What is predictive hermeneutics, you may ask? Luckily, @veryragged and I have written an entire paper explaining it: "Predictive Hermeneutics" (PsyArxiv) Predictive processing, a meta-theory from cognitive science and computational neuroscience, prop...

discussing online is hard, it requires precision, it asks the user to laser in to find a clear point and whittle it down to nothing. frequently, the results will be worth little either. exploring online is easy and fun, as well as being generative! t...

crossposted from: https://crispy.substack.com/p/the-lipstick-economy-of-ideas-is There’s an idea called the Lipstick Effect: during an economic crisis, especially a more moderate one, people will buy relatively cheap luxury goods—like lipstick. What ...

Hear your neighborhood pals chat on the airwaves. Kickin it off w/ @beiser on the Henry George Program: Georgism, Memes, and Ideology, with Chris Beise‪r‬

What unites the HBO's Succession, Trump's The Apprentice, Venkat's Gervais Principle, and Jane Austen's novels? They're about strategic interaction. Specifically, strategic interaction in either high society, business, or the blurry confluence of bot...

crossposted from: https://crispy.substack.com/p/back-to-poetry As the public space becomes increasingly policed, people make ample use of higher levels of abstraction to describe object-level things. But it’s not all at the meta-level, is it? A euphe...

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change: Visualize a small number of particles—three to six—moving through a tunnel of time; each draws energy from its past momentum, renewed and accelerated by repulsion...

A while back @plover recommended I watch some Richard Powers videos to learn how to move, do some basic waltz moves. View on YouTube Don't have the bandwidth to actively work on dancing now, what with music and writing projects, but I really want to ...

(written for a diff target audience than this forum, but with content that's relevant. Mostly me doing a sort of ritualized-public-renunciation of my old ways) The Hidden and Biased Brain As a teenager I went on a multi-year pop-psychology reading bi...

Gonna keep notes, thoughts, and raised questions here as I work through the book. Strategic Interaction is divided into two essays, "Expression Games" and "Strategic Interaction." The opening sections of "Expression Games" are incredible: succinct, c...

(written for a diff target audience than this forum, but with content that's relevant. Mostly me doing a sort of ritualized-public-renunciation of my old ways) (sequel to Dual Process Theories Are Broke: Part 1.1) Bundling Drives and Cognitive Abilit...

And I said, I said, ‘I spent the week deciding Kant was the first Modernist, then spent the weekend discovering that Clement Greenberg called Kant the first Modernist. Which is exactly what I hated about childhood the first time around: you thought y...

@snav shared some cool diagrams he's been working on. I feel like I've been wanting to diagram more, and also have some already up my sleeve. Kicking it off with one that's still very half-baked, but hopefully a start in trying to point at something ...

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Complexity vs engineering Lessons for the Inexact Sciences Pfeilstorch and extraordinary science Discussion post of Alex Boland’s “Narrative Engineering”. A lot of provocative stuff in this essay for us. Markets as anti-inductive. Godel and completen...

This should eventually be a longer, more eloquent post so I can properly hide behind eloquence when making Bold Statements, but @suspendedreason is always telling me that I need to just write. Epistemic Status: distilled and filtered to the purest of...

Link to Are.na channel of resources and readings.

Cross-posting from Spilled Reality for discussion / archival. Linguistic carvings have fitness to a function or use, and/or a generic fitness to a set of functions. The basic Roy G Biv color scheme—and purple is now usually substituted for indigo and...

Cross-posted from suspendedreason.com The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least ...

fixated lately on Rudnick making the rounds in big pubs with his rose sale. seems like it’s time to pull the wagons together and launch a “grift” (a respectable art publication, [spiritually] based on the west coast, with an eye towards moving the ar...

That is, for the purpose of an evaluated subject, what matters is only what the evaluating body interprets or understands. While there is no correct answer as to the meaning of "meaning"—that is, as to what the real or true meaning of a text is, whic...

I want to work through a very simple illustration of some surrogation mechanics, to hopefully lay groundwork for future thought: There’s an old spelling rule from grammar school, “i before e, except after c.” It’s a heuristic, or rule of thumb—it isn...

(I Was getting bored and losing motivation writing this, so I switched to a more brutalist writing style to get it out. This was prompted by a convo with @snav the other week) Ontologies are sort like programming languages for concepts, but with a lo...

Recently, Natural Hazard kicked off a little informal manifesto-making w/r/t what topics we're interested, what we wanna write about & figure out together. Gonna use this space as a top-level index of individual posts... If you want to have yours up,...