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This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).

 This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.
And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.
We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.
This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
When you suspend the assumption that anyone who has been selected by the system *must* understand what they're talking about and/or have something to say, taking the maxim 'fake it till you make it' as a methodological frame, it all looks like competition over formal prowess.
Yet here 'formal' no longer means 'logical', but something closer to 'rhetorical' and 'bureaucratic'. Once you see this, you see that it's exactly the same effect that debating societies and MBAs have had on political and industrial management in the neoliberal era.
Once mighty cognitive institutions (e.g., universities, political parties, and industrial corporations) have gradually devolved ways that are essentially synergetic, as the stupidity in one provides leverage on the growth of stupidity in another. This is the cunning of stupidity.
And so we return to the (social) epistemology of ignorance, but with a couple new points of reference: the anthropologically inspired theories of James C. Scott (cf. https://t.co/kOJPRNzDLj) and @davidgraeber (cf. https://t.co/CMQoBVd44o).
What we find in their work is an account of the socio-epistemic dynamics through which power breeds stupidity and stupidity breeds power, the genesis of stubborn knots around which active ignorance crystallises, generating complex defences that impede the flow of knowledge.
Here's what I mean by synergy between the devolution of cognitive institutions from various domains: the establishment of active ignorance in one place provides points around which alliances form, and through which leverage is exerted to establish it in other places.
The cunning of stupidity climbs the cognitive cliff face by finding purchase wherever it can within a given set of institutions and without. Bureaucratisation and managerialism are secular trends that have spread through the ratcheting the petty personal powers of the ignorant.
The real story of the dissolution and dissipation of the counter-culture of the 60s in the US and Europe is the story of its failure to generate new administrative norms to accompany the ethical, political, and aesthetic ones it had such success with: no persistent counter-power.
Instead we got the slow integration of the acceptable remnants of those norms into a different administrative culture, not simply that which had preceded the 60s (e.g., the party form), but which was born in the 60s, in the form of general purpose management and business schools.
The result was not simply the constitution of a new class of *managers* distinct from industrial workers, whose culture is projected downward through org charts in a way that aligns the interests of *bureaucrats*, but the universalisation of HR as the blueprint for its power.
I think most people on the left appreciate the point that media consolidation created an unprecedentedly homogeneous epistemic landscape in which the formation of political counter-consensus was effectively suppressed. I don't think they see the analogy in the dominance of HR.
I should show them the online forms I've had to fill in to complete academic job applications, whose mind-boggling irrelevance is nothing so much as a trap to discourage those who cannot play the relevant formal game. They build the filters, the obstacles, and the ignorance.
When you arbitrarily empower people who have no idea what it is they're exerting power over, the best intentions in the world will not stop the systemic proliferation of these knots of power/incompetence. The old banality of evil has a new face (https://t.co/XAZxtOFHLP).
I'm neither an anarchist nor a Quaker, but their critiques of these institutional forms, rooted in the autocatalytic growth of power (both centralised/distributed and personal/impersonal), and the serious alternatives they have tried to build are incredibly instructive here.
To return to my story about administrative culture, I think this lets us understand the split between the socially liberal left and the economically progressive left that became formalised in the 90s, and which haunts every attempt to push us out of this autocatalytic nightmare.
Every liberal concession to the counter-culture of the 60s and the liberation movements that have persisted since then has been channeled through the administrative culture of which HR is the nexus. This produces some positive results, but they're always systematically skewed.
For instance, it's great that hiring processes have been evolving in a direction that actively tries to compensate for demographic bias, but when this is merely one aspect of broken filter that otherwise removes the most useful signals, it's a depressingly pyrrhic victory.
Similarly, it's great that the technical language of liberation movements and the deep thinkers who to bring their struggles to self-consciousness disperses into the wider world, but when its principal use is to play out petty micropolitical feuds in formal games, it's maddening.
Managerial overreach, bureaucratic metrics, and quasi-academic jargon are different facets of the same secular process of self-reinforcing power/ignorance. My hope is that academics' perennial hatred of management might form the basis of a teachable moment regarding our own sins.
That's the end of my thoughts on this topic for now, but as usual I will refer you to some more of my extant work on these themes:
1. My recent thread on communicative interaction, dynamic fallacies, and the (synthetic a priori) maxim 'fake it till you make it': https://t.co/2k2QHRYaC7
2. A couple recent threads responding to @cstross, discussing the broken education system and the relation between the plague of terrible metrics and general purpose management: https://t.co/SW2keOnZcv
3. Another recent thread on the Foucault Wars, which lays out the basics of my theory of jargon as pathological technical vocabulary: https://t.co/ZEu1i39QaC
4. A discussion with @Chican3ry about the difficulties of reading philosophy and how to navigate the canon, which includes thoughts on Sellars idea that 'the history of philosophy is the language of philosophy' and a brief critique of 'Sokal Overfitting': https://t.co/NLvAfU0aQT
5. A very old, but theoretically fresh post on 'The Systemic Problems of Contemporary Academia' with an eye to philosophy in particular. This contains my first attempt to think through these issues in information-theoretic terms: https://t.co/sUvKjlf85M
6. Some more recent threads that begin to think through some solutions, by narrowing the problem down to the role of public philosophy:

a) Video Essays as a Philosophical Medium: https://t.co/a6epfzXYLS

b) Enlightenment and Opportunism: https://t.co/V8DJcgf9jm
7. 'The Going Price of Power' (https://t.co/aa2rcbOc40): An outline of the broader economic narrative I'm trying to construct, which ends with a discussion of managerialism and the secular trends I'm complaining about.
Finally, I'm going to reference a couple recent pieces by @OlufemiOTaiwo and @lastpositivist that have been jostling around in my brain as I'm articulating these thoughts:
1. https://t.co/K9z8XUxSIu
2. https://t.co/e76UYs5Zkq
3. https://t.co/ThvjoWStHQ
4. https://t.co/5izUq7ufea
And that's the morning thread! Additional thanks to @deonteleologist for occasioning some of these thoughts.

More from pete wolfendale

pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.


I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.

Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.

I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.

We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

The characteristic Pete thought is: wait a minute, this whole area is dominated by an assumption that no one seems to be questioning, and I've got two options to express that: i) outline the logic of the issue in a quick and compressed way, ii) write a small book with references.

The discipline seems to want something in between these poles every single time, and this makes me extremely anxious because I feel (with good reason) like any partially referential engagement with the issue will get instantly torpedoed by anyone outside its referential remit.

To repeat something I've said before: I'm actually quite good at being *concise*, I just find it very hard to be *brief*, because most of the thoughts I have don't permit brevity. Consider what your (referential) reactions are to this brief piece:

One of the main genres of publication I've actually excelled in over the years is dictionary articles, which I take a lot of joy in writing, and include some of the pieces of which I'm most proud. Consider this one on the crux of Meillassoux's project:
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 I accept that I haven't given a proof of this impossibility, but I believe the concerns I've laid out could probably be formalised in a way that would lead to one, though it'd involve something like a combinatoric diagonalisation similar to Russell's paradox.

@schulzb589 To state my issue in a more philosophical way, I think the desire to combinatorially totalise mathematical syntax is an effect of something like a transcendental illusion, what I sometimes call the Mythos of Logos.

@schulzb589 It's the Leibnizian desire to obviate creative dialogical interaction (dialectical reason) by providing a deductive system (monological reason) that would allow us to simply 'shut up and calculate'; the desire to obviate the pragmatic autonomy of discovery by automating it.

@schulzb589 It doesn't matter how many times this desire is betrayed by its own formal tools: Russell, Godel, Turing, Chaitin, etc.; it doesn't matter that these betrayals are what drive the externalisation of thought by producing new tools to automate computation. It always comes back.

@schulzb589 The desire to brute force reality, be it mathematical or empirical, is always lying in wait, whispering seemingly 'reasonable' lies about what is and isn't rationally possible. This is as close as I come to endorsing Heidegger and Adorno's worries about technoscience.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).
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Roland Baker
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Moderna's mRNA-1273 & Pfizer's BNT162b2 consist of mRNA 3821 nucleotides long encoding *all* 1273 amino acids of the Spike including a 2 Proline-stabilized RBD. This is a plain English Description of the code:
https://t.co/w7koHyMJjL

The article mentions a “10 nucleotide linker” (GCAUAUGACU) in the poly-A tail. This is described in the patent link below (Modification of RNA, producing an increased transcript stability and translation

Here is a link to the full mRNA code if you wish to download it, blast it or make up a batch in your garage


An overview of the encoded spike


Initial mouse
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Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom
@SahilBloom
Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇


1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.


3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"


4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]
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Jo Luehmann
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@JoLuehmann
Christianity has been a weapon used by systems of oppression to call that which is harmful and abusive; good and God’s will. It has been a weapon to normalize hegemonic power, and keep people from questioning it or challenging it because “it comes from God.”

1/

Gender “norms,” harmful ideas about sexuality, social hierarchy, the construct of race, notions of nuclear family, toxic ideologies of work, bodies, finances, government, relationships, parenting, or criminal justice; are all rooted in Christianity and...

2/

backed up by verses of the Christian Bible taken out of context, to assert that this isn’t just normal, but what God desires. And who dares challenge God?

Christianity has allowed for people w/power to use the idea of god, and *his* “word,” to pass their ideas as God ideas.
3/

This is one of the reasons why people react so violently when we say the Bible is not the word of God, they can’t accept that everything they’ve been given as normal, good, ideal, God’s will... may just not be so.

4/

Their nervous systems tells them it is better to maintain the certainty of what is in their hands; even though it causes harm; than to give into the uncertainty of imagining a different world where equity is possible.

And then their ego gets involved, and admitting they’ve

5/
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GAVNet
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Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/12/2021

Quantum causal loops

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#loops #quantum

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#ClimateChange #forest #farm

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#glacier #lakes #ClimateChange

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https://t.co/TkxKFDQMC6

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I made a thread going over exactly how I find these stocks BEFORE they take off 🚀
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So, let's start with the software I use…

Finviz!! Finviz is a free website that I use to scan for stocks.

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Head on over to finviz and go to the screener

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✅Quarter +10%
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The next scan I use is the opposite of the first one.

Simply change:
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Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

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"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

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The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


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Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


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LING PURANA: IMPORTANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS

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Vyasji divided this into two parts. This book is different from others and has eleven thousand shlokas which depict the glory of Shiva. This Puran is the summary about importance of Tridev.
It starts first with a questions. Then it describes the Shrishti in brief.

Then there is description of Yog and Kalp. Next is the evolution of Ling and its puja Vidhi. It consists of dialogue between Sanat Kumar and Shail etc. It also mentions the character of Dadhichi, the dharma representation of that yug, Bhuvan kosh description,

Chandravansh and Surya vansh. Next there is elaborate description of Shrishti, story of Tripur, Ling and Pashu Paash vimoksha, Vrats for Shiva, Discipline, Repentance, Arisht, description of Shri Shail. Next is the story of Andhakasur, Varah, Narsingh,

k¡lling of Jalandhar, Shiv sahastra naam, story of Daksha's yagya and its destruction, killing of Madan and marriage of Parvati.

Next is Vinayak katha, Shiv tandav, Ambrish katha and Upmanyu .
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To people who are under the impression that you can get rich quickly by working on an app, here are the stats for https://t.co/az8F12pf02

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omg I just realized that me . com is an Apple domain, of course something wouldn't work with these dicks
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