rime @rime@schelling.pt
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition for visual salience against their neighbours. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
Joined Apr 2023
my nutshell model of hippocampal formation is this:
entorhinal cortex (EC) encodes generalized dimensional structures / types of relations via grid-cells & object-vector-cells, and hippocampus maps specific (sensory, abstract) cues onto those relations, thereby making place-cells, landmark-cells, splitter-cells, etc.
iow, EC is where abstract math is stored when it's deeply intuitive, and hippocampus is the thing that *applies* those mathy relations to practical stuff.
[Curie-point (critical temp below which electron-spin correlates across atoms)]:[macro-scale magnetism]::[error-threshold (critical mutation rate/noise below which genetic info net accumulate across gens)]:[macro-scale evolution]
also relevant for the transition from [subliminal⇄conscious (aka self-organised criticality)] & [default-mode network⇄dorsal attention network]. but ppl hv already made the connection btn consciousness & Ising model.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Error_threshold
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Curie_temperature
i suspect one of the primary benefits i've gained fm maintaining a modular densely-connected idea-network (in RemNote specifically), is that the nodes themselves begin to form a place-cell map, and mks it easier fr me to quickly embed new things i lurn in an abstract-space-efficient manner.
i so goshdarn hope smbody mks a rly good memory-palace-like 3D note-taking environment fr VR/AR soon. it'd be so overpowered fr encoding world-model.
why do u want to be able to self-generate allthings u lurn? bc what matters fr ur ability to generate new insights is the *transformations* btn abstract subspaces. and that means u want to integrate as much of ur world-model into a fractally-coherent small-world network of hippocampal place cells as u can. if u lurn things in isolation, cryptically-related abstract models cud be neurally embedded far apart, which means u hv to uproot/refactor if u wish to flexibly swoosh twixt them.
Why do you think people are so quick to sneer upon those who create new jargon with insufficient license? And why do ambitious people try? Why do you think people still write "with respect to", "ran", "because" and "between" as opposed to "wrt", "runned", "bc", and "btn"? It's hard to coordinate on new ways to say stuff, but the marginal bottleneck on rate of improvement here is not Moloch—we first have aggressive semiotic control loops via inferred/heuristic social implications to contend with.
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.
rime
boosted
I like that a songbird produces birdsong. It's good symmetry.
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.)
rime
boosted
@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
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?
rime
boosted
@niplav Related: "Nash-attacks". Borrowing cousin_it's example:
> "let's say Alice has the option of cooking a pie, but must share half of it with Bob. So Alice cooks the pie and everyone is happy. Now let's give Bob the option of stealing the whole pie and frustrating Alice. Then Alice won't cook the pie because she will anticipate that Bob's optimal decision would leave her without pie and frustrate her, so everyone is worse off."
"…and there is still much debate concerning the ethical and legal justification for the bombings," said the victorious historians.
"the worst-case complexity depends purely on the size of the biggest dimension"
that is, we're only considering the serial complexity; we're computing the slope for each dimension in parallel and counting that as one step.
oh. searching a space of independently sorted dimensions for a single target value has worst-case complexity that's entirely independent of the number of dimensions.
that is, assuming every observation gives you the direction towards target along every dimension, just do binary search independently for all of them. the worst-case complexity depends purely on the size of the biggest dimension. prob true wrt avg case too.
…everyone knows this already, say? in my defence, rediscovering>>reading.
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition for visual salience against their neighbours. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
Joined Apr 2023
