Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

So let's say that there's a *descriptive* account of climate change (here's how things are changing) and there's a *prescriptive* account of what we should do about it (fight it like it's an emergency, plus use this situation to fix society). The descriptive part has real predictive power. So far so good.

As for me I will place my trust in the weirdo freaks who jumped multiple quintiles in their standardized tests and those who derive growth from instability. Give me a moneyball team of high-variance space oddities and I'll make hay of the elites.

Here's a strange thing: most of the elites in the developed world have no liminal experiences with gatekeepers or gatekeeping institutions. They think in terms of binary sorting, sheep and goats. So they look at the most stable indicators rather than the most disruptive ones. It is actually an anti-progressive stance in the sense that we have gatekeepers distributing positional goods with very little expectation of growth, development, or the cultivation of surprise by those who they reward.

Keynes' work on probability is the same way.

Charles William Eliot and his consequences

People are clinging harder than ever to the notion that identity is durable and material at exactly the instant that it has become more transient and ephemeral than ever. We all know this to some extent. We're all watching the machinery of the culture industry manufacture new selves, new subjectivities out of holograms. That much is to be expected. But what is most remarkable and dissonant is that there are masses who willingly agree that these phantasms speak to their innermost realities.

I accidentally found myself talking about Nick Land at work over lunch. WHOOPSIE FUCKIN POOPSIE

One of my absolute favorite things about people is when we want to know whether an opaque handheld container has any liquid in it, we give it a little shake.

Fluid is indicated by error in our interopceptive acceleration predictions.

I think my very favorite thing about this mask is that it is something that lets me spout off all of the impulsive, sarcastic, mean-spirited shit that chips off while my public face is building a Key to All Mythologies.

τυγχάνων

Late night grinding through a massive email from a friend hashing out biosemiotics vs Chomskyian approaches to LLMs. You KNOW it's ya boi Cosmo.

Society if Harvard hadn't actively discriminated against both CS Peirce and Norbert Wiener in the early 20th century:

Remember that Justinian was the emperor for both the Justinian Code and the Nika riots. Remember that Cybersyn was creating a comprehensive structuralist economic model while Chile's soldiers were reduced to ransacking Pablo Neruda's house. You can have extremely refined symbolic state capacity -- even while material state capacity has collapsed.

I foresee neomedievalism. The attacks on consensus institutions, and the grifts that have been cashing checks in the name of consensus institutions, have been very successful. We're going to reach a point where the most responsive institutions will be absolutely tied in knots responding to the sharpest, most analytically refined critiques of human history, while the dumber and less responsive institutions will plod on because they water the plants and feed the goldfish.

We must really be living under conditions of managed outcomes (not competition / competitive equilibrium) if there's enough surplus capacity to orchestrate these incentives.

A Potempkin village relies on forced perspective. Wherever there is a widespread social conceit being entertained, there is also a balance of incentives and disincentives holding the audience in their positions.

Anyone can lie, but when you lie in such a way that other people are incentivized to share the lie, it's public relations.

Hey remember how all of those people made those social media posts encouraging their friends to take "camping" trips with them in the summer of 2022?

Trying to think of memes from the 20th century that have achieved mythic / paradigmatic status:
- Spaceship Earth (technically before the 20th century, but it didn't really break out before Fuller)
- Prisoner's Dilemma
- Survivorship Bias
- Infinite Monkey Theorem
- Doomsday Clock
- Library of Babel