The basic unit of labor (for the kind of harvest I was raised on) is the crew. Four, six, or eight workers are given a shared task. “move the food from scattered among the plants, to concentrated in a wagon”
A blog that covers topics of Nick Land, Hyperstition, Accelerationism, Mark Fisher, Psychoanalysis, Felix Guattari, Schizoanalysis
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment about a hypothetical superintelligent AGI that is obsessed with maximizing paperclips. It can be modeled as a utility-theoretic agent whose utility...
To carry on the general theme of the last post, I thought I’d list in brief a few other common misunderstandings that I have encountered a number of times in Deleuze scholarship. These are my…
Over at The Naked Void, Nikola recently put up a post about Deleuze’s proximity to idealism (here). Very loosely, his argument ran that any philosophy of presence is essentially idealism, and…
In animal communication, signals are frequently emitted using different channels (e.g. frequencies in a vocalization) and different modalities (e.g. gestures can accompany vocalizations). We explore two explanations that have been provided for multimodality: (i) selection for high information transfer through dedicated channels...
In pursuit of the question I cannot answer alone
I am hosting an in-person event in Toronto tomorrow @ Danu Social House on power literacy. RSVP here. I did a workshop last week, my first in-person one since 2020. I used to do many in-person workshops before and will do more now. I like bringing people together to discuss important things; one important thing is power.
Seeing inside the body with portable devices
This is a lightly edited version of a talk given at Fluidity Forum in September 2023. Expect scattered transcription errors. A few years ago, some friends and I started a group called The Inexact Sciences…
What is Anoma? This is a surprisingly hard question to answer. Anoma is not a blockchain. Or, more accurately, not just a blockchain. Anoma is an architecture.
Why is there no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences? Why is it that humanists can gesture to only a handful of seminal…
As debate rages over the abilities of modern AI systems, scientists are still struggling to effectively assess machine intelligence.
Jung and Freud discourse pops up now and again on Twitter. The discussion is tired - mysticism vs. scientism, etc., Buried beneath this uncharitable interpretation and its stale caricatures of the Jung and Freud story is a more interesting one waiting to be told.
An attempt to articulate a problem I'm having in understanding how generalization occurs in the science of science. Very roughly speaking: it's about the idea that the science of science will necessarily involving converting large parts of epistemology from philosophy into a science. Rapidly written thinking-out-loud –...
This is an abridged and edited version of a piece published in Everything Studies. Since I’ve been active on Twitter, I’ve had front row seats to the best intellectual slapfights…
The world is four-dimensional according to fundamental physics, governed by basic laws that operate in a spacetime that has no unique division into space and time. Yet our subjective experience is divided into present, past, and future. This paper discusses the origin of this division in terms of simple models of information...
Congressional staffers descended on the Bay Area over the summer to try and make antibiotic-resistant bacteria at a community biology lab. No, it wasn't an attempt to seed a dangerous outbreak, it was all part of a workshop on biosecurity for policymakers.
For over half a century, software engineers have known malicious actors could exploit a class of software defect called “memory safety vulnerabilities” to compromise applications and systems. During that time, experts have repeatedly warned of the problems associated with memory safety vulnerabilities. Memory unsafe code...
Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and more
Containment protocol: None. Words can’t hurt you. Words aren’t real. Philosophical ideas don’t affect reality. You won’t notice any changes after reading this. You won’t find yourself, in conversation…
A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and...
Proximity to criticality can be advantageous under changing conditions, but it also entails reduced robustness. Here, the authors analyse fight sizes in a macaque society and find not only that it sits near criticality, but also that the distance from the critical point is tunable through adjustment of individual behaviour and...
The anonymous review of The Anti-Politics Machine published on Astral Codex X focuses on a case study of a World Bank intervention in Lesotho, and tells a story about it: The World Bank staff drew…
A colleague asked me for a short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work. Here's three hours of stream-of-consciousness thinking in response, lightly revised -- I was surprised by the strength of my feeling! It would ideally be heavily revised and improved, but it seemed better to release an...
