rime @rime@schelling.pt

Competent players always maintain plausible deniability, so semiotic drift is constrained by an arms-race between inference vs laundering of ulterior motivations. In effect, this means words are pushed and pulled until they settle into a semiotic compromise determined more by the fluctuating social dynamics of the speakers than by fitness to any pragmatic purpose they might serve.

The ontogenetic purpose of words is chiefly to be used as proxies in a subterranean tug-of-war between rival factions with social stake in their indiscriminately-transitive semiotic associations, until they eventually evolve into mere diegeticised simulacra of their ancestral referents and/or fall out of use as soon as they lose their laundered potency.

Writing tip: If you struggle to put your thoughts into words, consider thinking less specific things. Once you let go of whatever preconception you had about what you thought you meant, and just follow the flow of the words, you'll find that they flow with much more muchness. This is good if you care less for substance, and you just want much more muchness written.

@glaebhoerl You a conlanger by any chance? Question out of the blue; I just noticed you had two conlanger-vibey toots.

@glaebhoerl This is beautifwl:
"For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life."

@cosmiccitizen having the impudence to invent obscure terms of your own, and being loony enough to use them in conversation with yourself, is a superpower and/or a one-way ticket to Azkaban or wherever they put loonies nowadays i forget.

In general, any word can:

1) be inflected into any word-category (eg "Hanson" ↦ "hansonian", "hansoning", "hansonium", "potato-hanson")

2) be a word-category that other words inflect into (eg "potato" ↦ "hanson-potato", "adjective" ↦ "hanson-adjective")

Furthermore, you can apply affixes unto any multiword segment of a sentence by wrapping it within "|"s. If you want to, you could say eg "I am an anti|washing under the couch|ist"—meaning "I don't want to wash under the couch, and this fact is part of my identity".

The lexicon of #TheLanguageOfEverythingElse has only word-stems, but all stems have a variant usable as an affix.

If "rational" is the product of "ration" (noun) + "-al" (postfix for adjectifying a noun), then you can also use a variant of "al" as a noun and "-ration-" as an affix.

For example, if "ration-al" is syntactically legal, then "al-ration" must be too—perhaps referring to something like "the act of adjectifying something in a manner that accentuates the speaker's reasoning ability".

Say not "exponential", say "recursive".

The former is merely a statistical* frame on the latter. By saying "recursive", you're referring to the underlying process that generates the statistical pattern, and you may start to visualise the mechanics.

*(Note, I'm using "statistical" as a pejorative. Statistics often-not-always entails deliberately blinding yourself to the underlying mechanics. Just collect data and churn the numbers.)

@mgj Same! Related:

Why plants mostly reproduce sexually is a mystery since asexual reproduction is a lot cheaper.

Yet, most asexual species acquired that trait only recently, suggesting that asexual lineages rarely tend to last long. The trait is "twiggy" on the evolutionary tree.

Hypothesis: most plants are obligate outbreeders because the *option* of a mixed strategy forces them to myopically grab asexual fitness—at the cost of resilience to existential threats.

https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/sex-at-the-limits-bakers-law

@niplav relation to augary acknowledged, but it took me ~30s to see, so idk if it qualifies as "obvious", but it certainly goes without saying.

What cognitive patterns are forever out of introspection's reach?

Maybe patterns that are larger (more parallel) than working memory?
⤷ No, bc we can chunk-into-word any regularity that catches our attention.

Which aspects of perception are out of reach of deliberate imagination?

Maybe patterns in raw perception?
⤷ Well, I can look at an object and try-hard imagine it changing colour. With practice, what's the theoretical limit to "visual imposition" like this? How does that even work?

@niplav In a sword-fight at least, if your opponent can precisely predict where you intend to strike, your best bet is to close your eyes and sync your moves with a random element in the environment. or something.

interesting quadrant btw!

someone should make a large collection of all interesting conceptual quadrants like that.

*sigh*

TODO

@niplav "Omohundro sludge" is that your nym? Supposed to evoke a sense of the unmanageable dynamics between meta-levels of a competitive game between agents with theory-of-theory-of-mind? I like it.

If you know a superintelligent hostile agent is guaranteed to accurately model all your intentional cognitive moves, where do you inject a RNG in order to level the playing-field? Are there games you can force them into such that the outcome is closer to p=0.5?

@cosmiccitizen "people who follow me on Mastodon tend to be intensely high-IQ, highly attractive, and extremely sexually gifted"

following for evidential decision theory reasons and hoping that causal magic works out :p

@niplav i'm telling you, stuff is connected!

1. discover the Germs of Generality to everything.
2. optimise the topmost leverage points upon which all your other activities depend (Ahmdal's argument¹).
3. for each problem you face, *solve the generalised game*: find the level of abstraction at which Pólya's argument² holds true—now, you solve a bigger problem w less compute.

¹https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Amdahl%27s_law
²https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Inventor%27s_paradox

@niplav mfw i accidentally trigger a chain of metaphors across n concepts and have the unnerving sense i'm psychotic and/or genius.