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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
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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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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’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.
ECONOMY

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The people can always be brought to the bidding...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the naysayers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Hermann Goring

We've seen reports of Yoruba leaders asking President Buhari to stop the war and sack service chiefs immediately as a way of beginning restructuring.Our country is sitting on a keg of gunpowder they claim. Once again partisan hacks want to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

You see, when you are fighting small limited wars there is a natural inclination , on the part of politicians not directly impacted by the war to want to blow things out of proportion. There is a basic disconnection now in this country between the population and the war

....and i find it quite frankly. Frightening. Compared to what was obtainable 2015, the security situation in Nigeria has vastly improved yet the media ..and partisan hacks portray a much more pessimistic narrative.

Consider that in 2015 over 21 Local government areas and 2.6 million Nigerians were cut off from the rest of the country, under the administration of a caliphate in Nigeria for 16 months. A huge chunk of the northeast was no mans country.
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satoshi0x
satoshi0x
@MasterGrimaldi
Would anyone like to admit why he cc'd himself in an email Wei Dai would see at ibiblio's host address? I have a few ideas.


was the .ae ccTLD a nod to Tim Berners-Lee/registries that issue top level country code domains? Is that why Tel Aviv is a place I commonly find OTC/Bitcoin related companies and DAC/dev protocols and operations based? Why UAE/Israel have opened commerce bilaterally in 2020?

Bitcoin is worldwide P2P software and growing into a network of the same ilk, what it can send without interference we can't even grasp yet. Even if you don't like another person, or their religious beliefs, bitcoin doesn't care. I lived through 9/11, my friends died in war.

But even I don't want Bitcoin just for the people I am more likely to have similarities too. And in working with the @_Devcoin guys for a few years now, officially since 2020 - I realized people from all spots on this globe and I share much more in common than everyday Americans.

And I haven't turned my back or spurned Americans either. I'm just saying we need to change our mindset. We want things but we won't admit it takes a whole world to pull off what it is we seek. The media is to blame for this but I also think we're at the point for grownups to act
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Kirsti Miller
Kirsti Miller
@KirstiMiller30
@FionaPearman @ScottMorrisonMP Morrison is our statue of unempathic neoliberalism - erected by evangelical and corporate Australia to celebrate their victory over compassion, equality and secular humanism. 

Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.


@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
Australia politics isn’t working for people, and it sure isn’t working for the planet.

@ScottMorrisonMP My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project, delivered through two generations of privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, underfunding of government services (locked in by tax cuts),...

@ScottMorrisonMP restricting freedom of information, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

@ScottMorrisonMP Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.
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Lauren Thoman
Lauren Thoman
@LaurenThoman
I should mention, this is why I keep talking about this. Because I know so many people who legally CAN'T.

How do I know they have NDAs, if they can't talk legally about them? Because they trusted me with their secrets... after I said something. That's how they knew I was safe.


Some of the people who have reached out to me privately have been sitting with the pain of what happened to them and the regret that they signed for YEARS. But at the time, it didn't seem like they had any other option BUT to sign.

I do not blame *anyone* for signing an NDA, especially when it's attached to a financial lifeline. When you feel like your family's wellbeing is at stake, you'll do anything -- even sign away your own voice -- to provide for them. That's not a "choice"; that's survival.

And yes, many of the people whose stories I now know were pressured into signing an NDA by my husband's ex-employer. Some of whom I *never* would have guessed. People I thought "left well." Turns out, they've just been *very* good at abiding by the terms of their NDA.

(And others who have reached out had similar experiences with other Christian orgs. Turns out abuse, and the use of NDAs to cover up that abuse, is rampant in a LOT of places.)
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The evils committed by Ravi Zacharias were enabled by a toxic organizational leadership that is evidenced by how these same leaders responded when confronted about the widespread and ongoing abuses being perpetrated by the namesake of the institution. 1/29

Please take time to read this piece by @DavideAFrench and the 26-page letter written by a first-hand witness. Here are just some of the excerpts: 2/29

"At one point, Ravi suggested to me that the Task Force “issue a statement that they [the Thompsons] are hooligans, they are scoundrels, they are thugs, they are serial extortioners.” If we didn’t do that, he told me, he would ask his attorney to do so on his behalf." 3/29

"...I distinctly recall Ravi & Sanj mocking the Thompsons’ marriage & scornfully predicting how soon Brad & Lori Anne would get divorced. “I predict their marriage won’t survive the year,” Ravi asserted with laughter. “A year?” replied Sanj. “I wouldn’t give it six months!” 4/29

"In 2017, in the early stages of his RICO against the Thompsons, Ravi would often invoke Kelly [his attorney], making statements such as “my attorney said we are going to crush them.”" 5/29
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This is Chris Gratien posting. I created this series during Fall 2020 for my students as asynchronous material supported by readings and discussion. This is going to be a long thread, but it will be a great shortcut for those looking to make similar use of these materials.

There are two items worth pointing out: 1. This is an overview of the political, social, and cultural history of Islamicate societies. It does not deal with the origins of Islam or many theological questions. It does discuss Islam’s spread and the transformation of Islamic law.

2. This is the first part of a two-part sequence that takes the history of the Islamic world into the present. It emphasizes developments and themes that have particular relevance for later periods.

This is really a multivocal narrative of Islamic history. We feature over 20 scholars from almost as many institutions. Many of those who worked on it, myself included, study the early modern and modern era but have teaching obligations that take us further back in history.
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Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

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Enough Jaw Jaw, this is War!
1. People's Justice Courts to be set up worldwide
2. Citizens' arrests of all Identified Suspects
3. Lab Inspections
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4. Public Show Trials video streamed live
5. Cross Questioning of suspects via Twitter & Zoom
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A growing list of suspects to be interrogated


Foul Traitors, Charlatans, Frauds, Bat Molesters! Frankensteins, Well Poisoners, Plotters, Deceivers!
Dr. Shipmans, Saboteurs, Devils in White Coats!


Organisations to be Investigated
WIV
Wuhan University IMA
WIBP
WCDC
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Nanjing Military Lab
SinoPharm
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NIH
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FORT DETRICK
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Tamboola - Brings Turning Point in Life

People who offer Tamboola daily to Devis swarupas are blessed with apaara ashta aishwaryas and beyond.

Maa Lalitha Tripurasundari is seen doing Nitya Taamboola Charvana.


"Tamboola Poorita Mukhi, Daadimi Kusuma Prabha"

This nama from Lalitha sahasra describe Maa lalitha parmeshwari as one who has her mouth with Tamboola rasa and looks like one who shines in the hue of pomegranate flowers.


It is said suvasini sthree and kanyas should do Tamboola charvana daily to gain aishwaryas, hve a great health, be always energetic and happy. Men also do it to get a clarity in thoughts and also peaceful mind and bliss.

People who think we are lacking that spark in life should try this and see the benefits themselves. All you need are

Nagavalli Paan
Mishri
Elaichi
Jaiphal
Supari Full
Lavang
Javvadi
Madhu (Honey)
Gulaab Petals / Gulkand
Kesar

People can add all fragrant things additionally

If you dont have all of it, do it with what best is available at home. Maa wants the samarpan and prem. In a family count the number of people and offer that many of the paan to the goddess.
RELIGION