I intended to reply to Eric's local ("lower-level") criticism of Elliott's
bullshit with this article:
https://theconversation.com/how-to-deal-with-visual-misinformation-circulating-in-the-israel-hamas-war-and-other-conflicts-216059
In particular: "... or merely continuing to watch images of war and atrocities tends to lead to additional encounters with such
content." It makes some progress on agonism (perhaps against agonism?) because it raises Brandolini's Law to the foreground.
ChatGPT was made "safe" by destroying the mental health of some very non-Presty people in the Global South. When is very
local, tightly bound, debunking a good thing and when is it a bad thing? When I get an "image of war" in my inbox ... or on
the front page of my favorite news medium, how much time do I spend on it? It strikes me that the "research" done by Flat
Earthers and QAnon ... or even, say, Bellingcat <https://www.bellingcat.com/>, is too local. And that tightly bound locality is
what makes them vulnerable to the Ur-narrative. Granted, *some* of us may be more robust to "mind viruses". But *how*? What's
the mechanism for such robustness?
I'd argue that those of us who are narrative agonize between un-integrated
narratives. But with that mechanism, you eventually get old and tired. You're
finally overcome by the suction of 1 or a handful of narratives and either die
that way, or have to get some shrooms from your drug dealer ... uh ...
therapist to reach escape velocity. Those of us who have trouble maintaining
*any* narratives, are privileged, lucky to be so stupid.
And FWIW, I suspect members of this list (and any other that suffers my presence)
<Delete> my posts waay more than they do yours. My guess is some of yours, by
virtue of their verbosity or targeted salutation, may languish unread. But I suspect
mine are sent to /dev/null as soon as procmail hits the From: line. Don't forget to
Like and Subscribe! https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smash-the-like
On 10/25/23 15:16, Steve Smith wrote:
Glen -
As always I'm at least as intrigued as confounded by the layered language puzzles you lay here for us. I was drawn through the looking
glass (down the rabbit hole?) with your reference both to "Presty" and "Legibility" and "Zetetic" realizing I
could not read your post for more than "emotional content" without reading at least the one main link/reference you offered up
and I was nicely rewarded (kicking myself) with realizing "Presty" refers to "those who honor or defer to the prestige of an
institution (such as an alma mater". Zetetic were more technical and more familiar but useful to have to dig down into.
I feel also "honored" to be a participant in your "Associative Memory by Internet Forum"
technique.... I feel as if getting to overhear your maunderings I am absorbing useful (to me, or my affinity group
of some sort) perspective as well as maybe information. I don't know if you get the <delete> as much as I
probably do, but I for one appreciate the depth and breadth of your reflections... maybe I have too much time and
would be more well served if did duck out with a "TLDR" response... or not.
I am not particularly a "Presty" although I think I *am* proud of my BS from
a state (Northern AZ) university as opposed perhaps to a 4 year private diploma mill of
some kind. But only because I know that at least some of my professors were of high
quality and dedication and their courses and the overal curricula showed it in many
cases. Perhaps a presumed third rate college would have equal or greater examples.
My daughter who pulled a PhD from UNM (Molecular Biology) struggles cyclically with the feeling
that her proposals to various funding agencies are sorted by "Presties" and hers thereby
get shuffled down the stack from ones submitted by Stanford or Berkeley (or many other prestigious
universities) grads... I don't know how real that is or if it is a phigment of her imagination or
something else. In any case it interferes with her professional progression (either enforced from
the outside or from the phantasm of her imagination)... she probably doesn't put as much effort
into her proposals because of this real or imagined fact? I think she would defer to your
"legibility" argument.
I *do* agree with your/Dorst's "Legibility" argument and your anecdotal reflection on voting. I helped Reagan run over
the top of Carter "back in the day" and was so ashamed once I realized what I'd done (starting a few months into his
term, but continuing well through the next two decades). The shame of having been such a "tool" lead me to choose not
to vote again for nearly 2 decades under the cynical cover "I don't want to encourage the bastards!" and the more
rational "I should not vote unless I am (much) more informed on my candidates". I finally took my own challenge and
began to inform myself as much as I could on my candidates, especially the local ones who were so close I couldn't see them
often... a certain complement to myopia?
I began to use the League of Women's voters reviews of and interviews with
candidates and checked (out of the corner of my eye) the Catholic publications
with a list of candidates/topics to vote *against* as a hint I might well want
to consider (positively) those candidates/topics if for no other reason than to
apply my own kneejerk moderation/complement to kneejerk single-issue voters
encouraged by the Catholic Church (and many other institutions).
I realize (because you pointed it out) that I missed the point in my last response on this thread by thinking you were emphasizing gender dichotomy rather than "community self-policing". I won't try to give a proper response to that at this point but to acknowledge that reconsidering your post through that reflection was useful... To the extent that "communities" are holarchical, I think I have observed (in my own experience) that I am prone to misunderstand how someone who is "policing" my speech/thought/expression is NOT part of my community when they are perhaps simply not as *obviously* part of my community or the communities which we share are not top of mind for me in that context. When adults who were trying to raise me (parents, neighbors, teachers, retail/service staff) I understood what/which-of "my community" they were and took their correction/policing/advice accordingly. As an adult this was harder for me given that I wasn't sure who/when/how to
moderate/admit other's "opinions" of my expressions/thoughts/ideas. I could wax anecdotally on a few dozen instances where someone "got to me" and acutely bent my attitude and subsequent presentation with a well placed/apt observation which may have felt like an acute criticism in the moment but became a powerful "glimpse in a mirror".
Several here have "policed" my ideas/attitudes/presentation/speech in an appropriately professional and
respectful manner (which in your case often includes a friendly "PFffffft!" or ?mocking? "Ha!" )
and I am always caught in the pain of recognizing the need for a refactoring and the opportunity it represents. I
love/hate it when that happens. Those of you with the most blunt and pithy observations are the most likely to achieve
this... the abrupt knocking-sideways that is always unwelcome in the instant but often fully valued upon reflection.
"receiving the keisaku" as it were?
- Steve
Along these same lines, I know there's a significant contingent of "Presties"
on this list. And I still don't have a good note-taking app that I find convenient enough
to use. So I'll post this here, in part because it's a higher order form of ad hominem,
in part because of our Presty friends, and in part because I need to note it somewhere so
I can find it again.
Bayesian Injustice
Why rational people often replicate unfairness
https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/bayesian-injustice
A tiny part of the red flag for Zach Elliott's bullshit (cf
https://simonesun.com/blog/2022/5/12/stop-pretending-transphobia-is-scientific-debate
for why I assert his rhetoric is designed bullshit), is his training institution,
Oklahoma State. I'm sure it's a fine school ... maybe not as good as mine (Texas
A&M), but prolly in the same tier. And neither OSU nor TAMU produce what I'd
call well-rounded students ... at least not like what I've seen come out of Reed
(in Portland) or Evergreen (here). And while Reed definitely has some prestige, I
don't think Evergreen's in the same tank.
Yet another tangent: We have an upcoming election for several commissioner and director spots on
various local boards. Now, I don't know most of these people. I see all the yard signs and such. We
got a flyer in the mail where a challenger pointed out the entitlement of an incumbent. ("Do
you know who I am? I'm the fscking mayor of Tenino!" 8^D) Yaddayadda. But what do you do when
you're aware of your own ignorance but still believe in voting? You have a similar risk for zetetic
injustice. I ended up almost blindly taking the recommendation for 3 of the board seats, the
candidates for which I was completely ignorant. But everyone else on the ballot was equally
"legible" ... I think.
I've had the same complaint about the fideistic shunt surrounding open source software.
Just because some package is open source, doesn't mean you should import it, for a wide
variety of reasons. A really funny example is
https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code,
which provides a moral something like "Yeah, maybe reinventing the wheel isn't as
bad as they say it is." High order legibility is not only a function of the
legibility of the atoms, but also of the composition, including both composition through
time (e.g. provenance of data) and composition over space (high-order or cumulative
structures).
And finally, just a tangent about Zach's trumpeting that he's written books.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/
To be honest, I think I'd ascribe more *Authority* to a ChatGPT-written book
on Gender Dichotomy than to a Zach Elliott book on it ... which is to say,
Authority=0. Is Zach more or less legible than ChatGPT? I just don't know.
On 10/19/23 14:39, glen wrote:
Ha! I care much less about any particular false dichotomy than I do about the
causes of dichotomies. The causes of dichotomies lie in agonistics, us versus
them, this vs that, inside vs outside. Whatever triage methods we *happen* to
adopt (or have impinged upon us) are always subject to fining and coarsening.
When policing your tribe, you have to choose a (set of) scope(s). Which tribes
are you policing?
One element of the 5Ws approach to media literacy is "Who". Who is Zach? He writes
books! And makes videos! Surely, as a trained architect, he's an authority on gametes,
right? An expert on probability distributions? Of course! >8^D This post is helpful in
determining who Zach is and whether you might want to propagate his bullshit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/h81ymm/trust_fund_cismale_20_year_old_undergrad_is_new/
He's abandoned his named TLDN. But it's still available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220915143439/https://zacharyaelliott.com/about-me.html
and here:
https://www.genderparadox.com/about-me.html
Yes, I'm guilty of ad hominem. But, as I've argued here before, the assessment
that a fallacy is always a fallacy is, itself, a fallacy. I guess, as an
admitted postmodernist, I should be proud of Zach for his ultracrepidarianism
... the same way I'm proud of my anti-vaxx friends who think they understand
vaccines better than, say, their PCP. It's OK. They prolly stayed at a Holiday
Inn Express last night. Network theory seems helpful, here. When deciding which
tribe to police, it's useful to track the cliques and components of the graph.
We're known by our friends as much as our enemies.
On 10/19/23 09:48, Steve Smith wrote:
On 10/18/23 11:27 AM, glen wrote:
Here's PZ Myers policing his community:
The Gamete Delusion
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/10/17/the-gamete-delusion/
https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/watch/is-sex-bimodal
I don't really have a dog in this fight other than the general feeling that I
support underdogs (and not just the ones who fly off in all directions at once).
to paraphrase one of the more notable FriAM-Sages... "people should be called what they want
to be called"... harping on the emic/etic conflation some more, I find these discussions
(e.g. Dawkins et al) rather off-point in this regard. I understand (vaguely) why we all feel we
must make sweeping generalizations about *other people's business*... some of it is an empathetic
response, wanting to understand, but some of it is the response of someone who wants to control
others. These *are* conflated by circumstance in the sense that in spite of the pithy aphorism
"your opinion of me is none of my business", most of us actually *do* care what others
think of us and it does effect how they interact with us. It always feels unfortunate that those
who want to tell others how to present/feel/be too often set the subject of debate.
I *expect* someone with their own dog in the fight to have an insider/personal
view of these things and am generally interested and curious about their
perspective up to their privacy. For those who mostly just want to stir up a
dogfight, I'm not particularly interested in their view beyond preparing myself
for when *they* might choose to try to stir up a dog(cat?)fight in *my*
backyard.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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