[FRIAM] Schwill Rock?

[Marcus Daniels]

Canal hopping is distinct from turning up the heat?   Some bruising can be expected when one bounces off the side of a canal 20 feet up in the air, and lands on a bike stand.   Is there really any more to hustle?   By dumb luck one can find some other interesting place this way.   A problem with extrinsic motivation is that the many are energy reducers, and the many determine what can sponsored.   To really keep foraging it seems to me vast privilege is needed.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 8:55 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] Schwill Rock?

"""
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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