[FRIAM] self and next*

[glen]

Ha! Yeah, I'm sensitive to the accusation. So when I toss in alternative (but nearly similar) constructions, I try to do it in an affirmative way ... to comfort the postulator that they're not alone. I also use alternative constructions to "listen actively" ... trying to see whether I understood them correctly by repeating back what I thought they said but in another "language". If i'm being an @sshole, it's not a gish gallop, it's "showing off", I suppose. But I try to sandwich in between clear qualifiers like "if I understand you" or "from my dilettante understanding of X". I'm OK with people accusing me of false humility or showing off. I worry more about accusations of bad faith ... because, at least in the original sense, the bad faith actor's deception is rooted in self-deception. Whatever happens to y'all out there, if I'm lying to myself, then I'm truly screwed, in here.

I think there's some kind of "plucking" going on with democracy. By "pluck", I mean something like a player-piano with coupled oscillators decorated by flanges, plucking the other oscillators. Short of some Causa Prima argument, there need be no fundamental driver (like in a player piano). It could just be a wandering or perhaps periodic manifestation of the coupling. It's that model which forces me to reject the simple pendulum model of uni-dimensional politics. Every time someone says "It's a pendulum. It'll swing back the other way eventually" my cardiovascular system is aroused and I can't help but object. Where does the energy come from? Does it wander? Is the wandering progressive? Is Pinker right and even if it plucks back regressively sometimes, is the larger ephemeris progressive? Or is it actually just chaotically exploring the whole space of possibilities? You don't know. Nobody knows! (That's when they get all worried that I'm unstable and try to change the conversation to food or football or somesuch nonsense.)

On 4/4/22 10:20, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> On 4/4/22 10:59 AM, glen wrote:
>> I wish I knew of a way to navigate metanarratives methodically:
>>
>> In Hungary, Viktor Orbán Remakes an Election to His Liking
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/hungary-viktor-orban-election.html
> 
> Glen -
> 
> Virtually every conversation here coming from "the cool kids table" here leaves me with a heady sense of being Galloped_by_Gish, yet I accept (trust/hope/believe?) that this is not the intention, only rather the consequence of my having both depth and breadth limits when parsing and trying to follow the expanding threads of references and implications. With only occasional en-conversation tactical-exceptions I find everyone here to be almost exclusively attempting to not only communicate their ideas but often to actually build ideas that perhaps require a collective that transcends what can (easily?) be built by any individual here.
> 
> I've had a few sit-down beers (and bites) with you and never felt that you arbitrarily raised the stakes (or subtleties) on a conversation until I was enough out of my depth that you could perhaps have slipped any kind of mickey you wanted into the conversation  without me noticing.   It doesn't surprise me that in a weekly (or more often) Salon at the Saloon that you *might* in fact fall into such tactics very effectively.   I assume your beer-hall compatriots come in a wide range of intellectual sophistication, or perhaps after the year or more you have been mixing it up there, there is a core group of highly capable participants?
> 
> I don't know if I know exactly what you mean by "cross-trophic rhetorical moves"  though it does evoke in me some specific examples or experiences I have with various narratives here and elsewhere.   It would probably be trite for me to point out re: "I wish I knew of a way to navigate metanarratives methodically:" that "It is Meta all the way down!"  or maybe "all the way out!" or "all the way through!".   Science (and even more acutely Math) has the convenience of allowing for explicating and constraining context ("assume a spherical cow") which as the parallel thread here points out is not the way of natural language and in fact, what seems to challenge the very idea of "algorithmic consciousness" (if not "intelligence" or "life" as well).   I'm sure others have gone over this and it went past/over my head, but maybe it just comes down to "open" vs "closed" systems of signs and symbols?
> 
> Re: Orban...  All I can see/hear/think when I hear Orban/Hungary is the cognitive (ethical?) dissonance between Tucker Carlson's cozying weeklong broadcast with him and Orban's (apparent) helpfulness with Ukraine's plight right now.  I'm probably just not paying enough attention.   I like your hair-splitting question about "free but not fair" and the syntactic/semiotic conflict implied there?  Or maybe the upshot is different than that and I am conflating.  Again.  Some more. Forever.
> 
> Muddle,
> 
>   - Steve
> 
>>
>> On the one hand, I'm sympathetic with the idea, say, that one needs a state issued ID in order to vote in person. On the other hand, I recognize that getting, keeping, and having the extra time off or cognitive free cycles to remember to bring it to the voting booth are all important factors. Overhead is expensive, especially in a society that doesn't compensate you for the time you spend on overhead tasks. (My company's overhead is relatively very small. But it's still about %20. Behemoths like universities runs much higher like 50% or more. How can 50% of your budget be "overhead"? It boggles. But there's also the inane slogans like "Safety is Job #1!" Pffft. No. The mission is job #1. Safety supports that.)
>>
>> But like the Federalist Society's takeover of SCOTUS, gerrymandering, and the false equivalence between election and voter fraud, I have no way of explicitly punctuating cross-trophic rhetorical moves. I can scream Composition/Division Fallacy till I'm blue in the face. But it's largely lost. (The other day, 3 pints in, I was trying to broaden a discussant's understanding of confirmation bias by comparing it to survivorship bias, where he accused me of "gish gallop": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop. [sigh])
>>
>> Anyway, I'd appreciate any opinions on whether Orbán's election was "free but not fair."
>>
>> On 3/30/22 09:47, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> I missed mention in this dialog where the collapse of the USSR is figured in the analysis.
>>> For example, if the conflict with Russia escalated and there was a full-scale nuclear exchange, and the United States collapsed, then it would be reasonable to talk about Idahoans becoming their own unique state.  They'd just have to persuade anyone they were shipping potatoes to that they were a country.   I would say some Idahoans are barely recognizable as Westerners.    I'd probably recognize the values of a Kyiv resident as more like mine.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 9:19 AM
>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>> Subject: [FRIAM] self and next*
>>>
>>> On the heels of Marcus' challenge re: next* and EricS' discussion of iterative inter-subjectivity, Scott's tolerance to Thorfinnsson's insane comment triggered me:
>>>
>>> Who Gets Self-Determination?
>>> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-gets-self-determination?s=r
>>>
>>> "A people" is Yet Another convenient fiction only grounded through repetition and entrainment, a purely social, but no "less real", construct. Being in that triggered state, this article carried a little extra intensity:
>>>
>>> The end is nigh for Northern Ireland as we know it – and unionists can blame themselves https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/30/the-end-northern-ireland-unionists-blame-themselves-dup-sinn-fein
>>


-- 
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