[FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

[Steve Smith]

 uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> The additional power is to mislead someone into thinking an expression is about one thing, when it's really about another thing. I.e. in this context, it's a way to troll and "riff" off some arbitrary string you found in some other post. In some contexts, however, it's more serious. Conspiracy theories use metaphor liberally in order to *trick* suckers into thinking something that's simply not true.

I resemble that comment!

I will cop to being guilty of free-associative riffing off of other
people's threads.   When Owen was active here he used to chide us all
about "good thread hygiene" and "thread hijacking".   We (me at the
vanguard perhaps) have become quite sloppy in this.  

I will also acknowledge that the very "looseness" of popular
metaphorical speech allows me to turn virtually any word into an
exit-ramp for a good tangent, a tendency which in it's own right might
deserve scrutiny, independent of the mechanism of divergence.

I would claim that conspiracy sommeliers and more appropriately
conspiracy vintners use *colorful* language to hook the suckers in and
then use deliberately crafted misleading analogies/metaphors to suggest
all kinds of baseless things right up to the point of building
tautological cycles in their implied arguments.   They let the metaphor
do their inferring and imputing.

Ok... I agree, metaphors can be risky, reckless, suspicious bastards! 
I'm not sure if I can break company with them entirely but at least I
can try to recognize and acknowledge when I am letting them do my dirty
work.

- Steve (who is known to consort with sneaky bastards)


>
> On 5/28/20 9:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> It seems to me like the value of metaphors fits into a sparse dictionary learning approach.   If you want to compress a picture of, say, the new Apple headquarters, it helps if one has seen a circle or a torus in some form, and can just refer to that.   It would also help to have seen pictures of trees and shrubs to tweak, and to have seen solar panels.   Some features will be unique, and simple atoms are needed to refine the image.  I'm skeptical that metaphor is the best enduring representation though.   After one has seen many circles and ovals (or conic sections), a parameterized (even dependent) type becomes evident. 
>