[FRIAM] Schwill Rock?

[Jon Zingale]

"""
I want to get this into some ethics of AI/ML course materials, but I guess
it would be the aesthetics of AI/ML and the ethics of inflicting bad
aesthetics on a captive audience.
"""

Perhaps, it could be part of a wider collection of courses called "The
Aesthetics of Domination"? Tongues-in-cheeks aside, frenemy RogerC, I am
concerned by the dynamics of our social engines. While I tend to sympathize
with Marcus's perspective [here], I also feel that it isn't particularly
useful to me to behave along "least energy" lines. My personal path (unlike
Frank, Nick, or possibly you) has not so rigidly canalized, instead of
something more like canal-hopping, nearly constant foraging which *has*
required effort. Sometimes this has been rewarding, while other times
debilitating. As Glen states in an adjacent post:

"My own pet theory is that our anatomy has been pressured toward
fascination, a desire to concentrate, to focus for an extended time."

Pressures like these have gotten me out of many situations where others
around me continue to run into walls (like a bot in an fps), are stymied by
the rug (like a Roomba), or endlessly publish irrelevant drivel (like an
aging academic). There are probably many valid characterizations along
Glen's line, but I think I prefer to call it *hustle* or maybe *hunger*,
and it seems to be inversely related to privilege, to comfort.

Perhaps I am spending too much time watching world news or too much time
watching friends in the service industry get treated like shit by wealthy
silver foxes (in town for the century bike race), or maybe it's just too
much coffee, but I do believe I am witnessing the end-of-empire[围棋] and do
believe that yesterday's least effort strategies are not tomorrows.

So why focus on aesthetics? As many who have been fascinated by dynamical
systems can attest, or as academics perhaps can from chatting with Strogatz
for an hour, there is a surprising amount to learn about a dynamical system
from listening to one. Spotify and its suggestion engine are no different.
Aesthetics aren't random, just arbitrary, and to the degree that they are
arbitrary you can bet that they are telling us something true about our
world and about the nature of statistical inference. All this said I will
take your comment in good faith and assume we can speak productively
together about the role of aesthetics in scientific inquiry.

And to keep with the spirit of the thread, is this Schwill Rock?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO6nRXPzX1A&ab_channel=Danzig-VerotikEntertainment

[here]:
https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2021-October/090308.html

[围棋]: Though there is still hope for China, for me, such a discussion
requires a working knowledge of Wei qi.
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