GEBen.pdf

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1. pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 08-Jun-2024 19:53:47 JST pistolero

   in reply to
   @laurel
   
   > That was an excellent article! Very nice blog aesthetics too.
   
   Bruce Schneier's a cool dude.
   
   > Also got me very interested in the book he mentions "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott.
   
   I have a copy but it's "epub". (I have a physical copy. It is a good book.) I think the reason the internet heard about it was this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ . The review is very good, but it's not really a review, more like a really good essay that includes a book review. This is also a pretty good discussion of "legibility" as a concept: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ .
   
   "The Logic of Failure" is on my reading list (but that list has always been growing faster than I can read).
   
   > Lately I've been trying to understand why I myself used to think so much in this type of abstractions.
   
   Necessary condition of cognition: you have to ignore a lot of detail in order to reason about anything. The idea is played with in "Funes, the Memorious" (short story, attached) and also GEB (like a thousand pages). "Decision fatigue" is is caused by exhausting the brain's supply of glucose, avoiding decision fatigue conserves energy, so simpler stuff is more appealing, so you get a blind spot if acknowledging something would cause you to do something different or reevaluate enough.
   
   > zoomers seem to prefer porn than actual sex.
   
   Sex is complicated and jacking off is easy. (I think there's a lot going on there.)
   
   > you need to be wealthy enough to shield yourself from the various indignities of normal interaction, the consequences of your actions.
   
   Yeah, nobody that actually has to go through a TSA checkpoint was responsible for the decision to create TSA checkpoints.
   
   > I've been increasingly embedding myself in Russian online spaces for the past couple of years and the difference in conversational quality is huge.
   
   Yeah, even Russkies around fedi tend to be pretty interesting.
   
   > extreme bad faith from moderators and their protected groups.
   
   Ha, "a politically tense climate in the anglosphere prevents the free and open discussion of ideas" has been on my list of "Ways in which we are speed-running the Cold War again but this time we are the USSR".
   
   > You read a thread on an imageboard or forum and the posts make zero sense, like reading a foreign language or something.
   
   Well, here's something: the Germans agencies are dumping agitprop in order to combat "hate speech", allegedly they run around making accounts and "infiltrating". (I have more to say about this, I don't know if I have dumped the links at you.) Some lefty fliers about doing this have been making the rounds for about a decade, especially places like 4chan where you can melt into the background as soon as you're nailed. You wander into a thread, maybe it's not real: the thread started with FBI agents trying to entrap people that they don't realize are German BNF agents, antifa accidentally trolling other members of antifa, the 0.50RMB Army posting stuff from a script, and it turns out that OP is someone from a university that got a grant to study "right-wing extremism" on the internet, maybe the thread has zero actual people that mean what they are saying and are interested in the topic. It's certainly possible to expense the $20 to avoid CAPTCHAs on 4chan: who else would put up with the CAPTCHAs or pay to post on 4chan?
   
   I don't think non-English places have that going on: maybe you get US military intelligence doing psyops on VK or Weibo or whatever, but it's not *everyone*, continuously, all at the same time. I can't read Russian, but Japanese discussions are free of this kind of thing.
   GEBen.pdf
   funes_borges.pdf
   seeing_like_a_state.epub