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.
More from pete wolfendale
This is what happens when you let philosophers try to write about real life. This ridiculous, game-playing, feigned innocence. Journals have been full of this for years, this elaborate performance of *doing philosophy* and saying nothing. I cannot adequately express my contempt pic.twitter.com/ciDeWuEkET
— Jack (@jackeselbst) January 14, 2021
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.
Which human societies, past or present, come closest to your ideal of how we should live together?
— Keith Frankish (@keithfrankish) January 15, 2021
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.
More from For later read
Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!
Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr
#Pluralistic
1/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuhIIy3VkAQmXmG.jpg)
On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."
https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg
2/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuhIS7gVkAAfwkU.png)
Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!
https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2
3/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuhIW1sVEAo7KIT.png)
Back in November, I published an article for @EFF about @HP's latest printer-ink ripoff: after offering its customers a free-ink-for-life plan, it unilaterally switched them all to a $1/month-for-life plan.https://t.co/bsc73xPSuo
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/tagduPupA5
Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.
https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN
4/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuhIjWNUcAIXt7O.jpg)
Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/FaNQc66gQN
#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV
#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r
5/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuhIm68VkAIBD9t.png)
You May Also Like
Mr. Patrick, one of the chief scientists at the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., held five classified US patents for the process of weaponizing anthrax.
2/x
Under Mr. Patrick’s direction, scientists at Fort Detrick developed a tularemia agent that, if disseminated by airplane, could cause casualties & sickness over 1000s mi². In a 10,000 mi² range, it had 90% casualty rate & 50% fatality rate
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXxITe3UwAMziPl.jpg)
3/x His team explored Q fever, plague, & Venezuelan equine encephalitis, testing more than 20 anthrax strains to discern most lethal variety. Fort Detrick scientists used aerosol spray systems inside fountain pens, walking sticks, light bulbs, & even in 1953 Mercury exhaust pipes
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXxJzCmUEAADV3N.jpg)
4/x After retiring in 1986, Mr. Patrick remained one of the world’s foremost specialists on biological warfare & was a consultant to the CIA, FBI, & US military. He debriefed Soviet defector Ken Alibek, the deputy chief of the Soviet biowarfare program
https://t.co/sHqSaTSqtB
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXxLB50UMAASBKY.jpg)
5/x Back in Time
In 1949 the Army created a small team of chemists at "Camp Detrick" called Special Operations Division. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, which fascinated Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXxPCQOWoAY8ckc.png)