Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

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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

Hell is leaving a sentence incomplete in a draft and later having no clue how to end it.

I hate that thing where it makes more sense to read an essay from the inside out. Luhman's book on self-reference is like this: if you start at the beginning you're fucked, but if you start at the middle and leak outward then you have a chance.

Taxis is a canon of rhetoric! Get it right, people! I want Narratio, Partitio, Refutatio, Confirmatio, Peroratio!

The most frustrating ideological position is to be 98th percentile something. You can't get yr kicks by being a centrist contrarian, but you don't get the flaming purity of a True Believer either. You have to defend both ideological radicalism AND a few carve-outs on their merits. It fucking sucks.

It's ya boi Yung Sensorium Engaging in Transvaluative Sign-Processes

I would say that the main difference in my personality since becoming a legal adult has been acquiring a deep and bitter sense of guardedness. I used to YOLO way more shit, and chiefly social stunts.

NPR Boomers like it when you talk about old Randy Newman albums with them. It's a form of discourse that's recognizable and safe, unlike *gestures broadly*.

One of the richest ironies is that the academic humanities are disparaged as an idle hobby at the same time that the Elon demographic is certain that these academics have somehow unleashed a set of cheat codes that threaten to override everything else in industry and technology.

Given the tendency of academic reviewers to become less reliable with more leniency (as during lockdown), and the tendency of academic presses to make cooler book designs with more time, and given the delays involved in academic publishing...
We are probably near or in the historical nadir for unhinged books that look really cool.