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link roundup 12

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Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.

If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing. But one still has to ask – everywhere had Jews. Why Hungary in particular? What was so special about Budapest in the early 1900s?

After Trump’s election, accelerationism seems to be going mainstream among left-progressive political thinkers. The election has ushered in the adoption of this new theoretical stance, and with it has come what I suspect will be a sleeper aesthetic macro trend. This haute baroque capitalism is maximalist, super-ornamental, and takes capital as a first principle.

If I’m right about baroque capitalism, we should be able to find early examples of it wherever else visual culture is highly concentrated. Accepting the aesthetic as a generative and formal expression of capital sheds some retrospective light on the vaporwave phenomenon, which can be seen as a precursor to baroque capitalism. It shares many of the same sensibilities in terms of using physical manifestations of capital as an expressive tool. But vaporwave considered capitalism to be incapable of providing meaning. Vaporwave attempts to show the lifeless, dead shells of consumer “culture” that capital has left behind. Politically, these empty luxury objects and urban spaces aren’t too far off from Gean Moreno’s grey goo critique.

Sarah noted later in the essay, “Sometimes a sacred entity is personified, as with gods or demons or the centers of cults of personality. At other times, the sacred entity is composed only of abstract ideas, refusing to personify itself. Why might it benefit such an entity to hide its nature?”

My guess is that certain egregores — or certain sociocultural interpretative frameworks — tend to lose their potency when the bearers recognize them. When you figure out how they function, you see the way that you’ve acted as a cog in the meaning-making machine, and you’re able to decide whether you still want to serve that role.

For me, the content-versus-process dichotomy worked like that. In the past I’ve held the content stance. More recently I’ve held the process stance. In fact, I still tend to gravitate toward and defend the process crowd by default, despite being aware of the blinding effect of dogged adherence to a single simple framework. But recognizing the structure of both dogmas loosened the hold of the entire duality.

…and a response:

The flaw in the model, as I see it, is that the content side doesn’t just think “it’s okay when we do it.” It would be easier to swallow if that were the going premise, openly admitted. No, it’s that they insist up-and-down that rules are absolutely necessary for everyone. That diversity officers and arbitration committees must be established, with official seals of approval (and handsome paychecks to boot). The net result is that the language of compassion and tolerance can be seamlessly used to paper over destructive and vindictive personal agendas.

None of this is in the rulebook, but it doesn’t have to be. The rulebook is the foot in the door, used to legitimize everything else. It is undoubtedly well intentioned, but it is wide open to abuse, and the 0-day exploits have been in the wild for years. Good intentions are worth nothing when bad actions consistently result.

In the resulting discussions, there’s a particular flip that occurs, too. These problems are denied, at first, up until a plaintiff demonstrates a solid enough case. Then, without skipping a beat, we are told nothing is perfect, and that the alternative would be far worse. The rationale that the ends justify the means only comes into play when pressed. The argument has actually changed completely, but the emotional valence is the same: we’re right, we’re the good guys, and you’re bad for not following along. Cognitive dissonance averted. The resulting radioactive fall-out is fine by them, as long as it’s aimed in the general vicinity of the right group of wrong people.

the whole piece is truly excellent commentary on the current state of (parts of) the net.

This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then “leaked” to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique “tainted leaks.” The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society.

President Trump’s proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation’s spending on so-called intelligent systems by 10 percent, to about $175 million. Research and development in other areas would also be cut, though the proposed budget does call for more spending on defense research and some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private American companies like Google and Facebook.

“The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. “They were talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being significantly affected.”

I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

as you may have guessed, this essay was influential on the design of bitcoin a decade later.

Every era has its dangerous ideas. For millennia, the monotheistic religions have persecuted countless heresies, together with nuisances from science such as geocentrism, biblical archeology, and the theory of evolution. We can be thankful that the punishments have changed from torture and mutilation to the canceling of grants and the writing of vituperative reviews. But intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning. Time and again people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. The fear that the structure of our solar system has grave moral consequences is a venerable example, and the foisting of “Intelligent Design” on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we liable to be enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate?

It’s this sense as I suggested in my recent essay The Apocalypse of the Human: Technicity, Magic, and Integral Reality that we are going through a phase-shift, a temporal short-circuit that is merging and unifying the magical world view of our ancestral pool with the hypertechnification of our contemporary accelerationist investment in NBIC technologies. Things are happening so fast that time is reversing itself and the future is imploding toward us rather than the other way round. We are not moving forward toward the future, but rather the future is moving and imploding onto us at the speed of light. The notion that the apocalypse has already happened is this sense of revelation, of a knowing more than can be known, a gnosis that is sending messages back from the future into our now. Caught between a sort of Philip K. Dick schizo episode of Exegesis and a William Gibson meta-fictional Peripheral we seem to be entering a intermediated realm or twilight zone in which almost anything is possible rather than impossible. Our reality systems are falling apart even as new one’s replace them, forcing us to shift our very notions of the human into realms that have no meaning beyond the nihil.

…and referred above:

At the heart of the Weird Tale (think of H.P. Lovecraft!) is this keen sense of contact between incommensurable worlds. The notion that one comes up against something that one can neither explain (Explanandum and Explanans) or interpret (reduce to human meaning). As Hempel and Oppenheim would explain it: “It may be said… that an explanation is not fully adequate unless its explanans, if taken account of in time, could have served as a basis for predicting the phenomenon under consideration…. It is this potential predictive force which gives scientific explanation its importance: Only to the extent that we are able to explain empirical facts can we attain the major objective of scientific research, namely not merely to record the phenomena of our experience, but to learn from them, by basing upon them theoretical generalizations which enable us to anticipate new occurrences and to control, at least to some extent, the changes in our environment”.2

It’s in this sense that we are losing control over our reality systems, our sciences are hedging their bets, and the predictive force of the sciences are coming up against the incommensurable. Over and over I’ve related this to R. Scott Bakker’s notion of ‘medial neglect’: the notion that our brains through a long emergence in the evolutionary process were fitted (adapted) to the natural environment for purposes of survival and propagation. But that with the emergence of agricultural civilization our submergence in the natural world was short-circuited, and we began a process of abstraction – a cutting away from our natural environmental constraints through a process of artificial construction of abstract environments. In our latest phase we’ve displaced the natural for the artificial to the point we are entering what Scott terms a ‘crash space’ beyond which our human modes of explanda and meaning are forever lost and cannot be bridged, ever.

this blog is one of my favorites. and, since he links it above, and i find myself reading it again, an r scott bakker essay from last year:

And this is basically the foundational premise of the Semantic Apocalypse: intentional cognition, as a radically specialized system, is especially vulnerable to both crashing and cheating. The very power of our sociocognitive systems is what makes them so liable to be duped (think religious anthropomorphism), as well as so easy to dupe. When Sherry Turkle, for instance, bemoans the ease with which various human-computer interfaces, or ‘HCIs,’ push our ‘Darwinian buttons’ she is talking about the vulnerability of sociocognitive cues to various cheats (but since she, like Barrett, lacks any theory of meaning, she finds herself in similar explanatory straits). In a variety of experimental contexts, for instance, people have been found to trust artificial interlocutors over human ones. Simple tweaks in the voices and appearance of HCIs have a dramatic impact on our perceptions of those encounters—we are in fact easily manipulated, cued to draw erroneous conclusions, given what are quite literally cartoonish stimuli. So the so-called ‘internet of things,’ the distribution of intelligence throughout our artifactual ecologies, takes on a far more sinister cast when viewed through the lens of human sociocognitive specialization. Populating our ecologies with gadgets designed to cue our sociocognitive capacities ‘out of school’ will only degrade the overall utility of those capacities. Since those capacities underwrite what we call meaning or ‘intentionality,’ the collapse of our ancestral sociocognitive ecologies signals the ‘death of meaning.’