Writer as detective
There’s an old Italian phrase, Traduttore, traditore. Translator as traitor. The ethnographer is always a sort of translator, structurally transforming a foreign culture’s logic of practice into a conceptual logic comprehensible to his own culture. And the fiction writer frequently traffics in covert ethnography. Riffing off some ideas @RIPDCB and I worked on in a recent Cleveland Review of Books interview, I’d like to talk about the upstream end of the rigorizing pipeline.
The detective has become a classic literary and cinematic trope the past two centuries for good reason. Partly it’s an elegant plot structure, a way to present audiences with a satisfying puzzle, Chekhov’s smoking gun made full-fledged genre. But artists choose their topos in large part because it’s interesting and relatable to them, personally—hence the endless string of movies about making movies—and the detective serves as a metatextual metaphor for exploring the role of the writer (or filmmaker etc).
As GK Chesterton on city-as-semiotic-environ writes:
…there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.
The city speaks, sound and lightwaves rippling and reverberating off its surfaces, testifying to a thousand truths—some obvious, some subtle; some banal, some paradigm-shifting. The city is a dense field of communication, individuals constantly sending intentional and unintentional messages across the airwaves. We read the city and its occupants as we read a novel, and the writer or filmmaker is a “subcreator” (cf. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”) charged with creating a world rich with this meaning.
But the writer is also frequently a reporter and analyst (the world’s “antennae” Pound called artists). He reads the chaos of the city and presents a compressive narrative to his audience. Perhaps he denaturalizes his own perspective in order to see more clearly the world around him (as Jane Austen must have, in depicting her social world). Or perhaps he seeks out and enters foreign cliques and cultures, investigating and reporting on them. The writer-as-detective’s charge is to enter a scene and situation, and to “get to the bottom of it” (as in katabasis, or free diving)—to get past surface appearances and comprehend its deeper structure—then model that structure as narrative.
We see this orientation—towards a detection-of-messages-hidden, a novel narrative re-compression of reality—in party reports and investigative journalism, in the documentaries of Adam Curtis and the discourse around Mike Crumps’s Dimes Square dispatches. We see it in The Wire and True Detective and a thousand other undercover-cop shows. DFW alludes to a similar idea of writer-as-voyeur in “E Unibus Pluram,” and voyeurism more broadly is a stock literary/filmic motif (Rear Window, Robbe-Grillet). We see it in Gossip Girl—with Dan Humphrey the writer hacking through the jungle of the Upper East Side—and in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the middle-class doctor masquerading as a secret society member to get a glimpse at the truth. (Often the writer is middle class and either slumming it with working & underclasses—as in Orwell, Sinclair, & Vollmann—or else investigating and critiquing upper classes—as in Fitzgerald.) We see writer-as-detective all across Pynchon’s novels, as well as the “stoned detective” variant of Inherent Vice. We even see something like it in the famous opening minutes of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the angels floating through rooms and human scenes, observing and commenting.
Part of this is the legacy of romantic picaresque, where a protagonist might wander or quest across worlds, an adventurer unmoored by social systems or familial attachments. He necessarily needs free time and free space to do his wandering, and his reflections from the road may resemble ethnography. Almost by definition, he has either been excluded from existing social systems (cf Pynchon’s “preterite”), or else found them somehow lacking or dissatisfying. (Otherwise, why would the hero wander?) This is a different narrative structure than the classic hero’s journey, where the protagonist specifically sets out looking for a specific something beyond the borders of his garden, which will restore his disrupted homeland to equilibrium.
detection literature adversarial epistemology generalized reading Thomas Pynchon Gossip Girl
Dependency networks
by Cristóbal
The impetus of analysis is to break-down complex structures into simpler, comprehensible parts. Understand each part and their interactions and the operation of the machine becomes apparent. This is only possible when clear interfaces between the parts allow for independence. Yet, a salient exception always appears to complicate the conjured picture.
What COVID, the climate crisis, supply chain bottlenecks, the war between Russia and Ukraine and its ramification in energy and agriculture, mega-corporation’s hold on communication networks as pertaining to both entertainment and elections, and every other news item has made clear are the complex dependency relations between any possible factoring of the world.
The response is a sensation of crisis. Venkatesh Rao compelling ascribes this as a nostalgia for times of normalcy, particularly among the class of analysts, be them pundits or academics. But now we are in the “perma-weird”, no matter how much hand wringing happens in the journals.
Perhaps this is why “world-building” has become the modus-operandi for corporations. By entering a self-contained structure with its own internal norms and infrastructure, one offers a sense of stability as a product. There’s no doubt that this has had commercial success—just look at Marvel. Power-hungry founders have observed the same and now are starting lifestyle businesses instead of horizontal SaaS tools. These companies will indeed profit, however the underlying dependency graph remains the same.
There are two approaches to this overdetermined structure which have traction: re-design critical infrastructure focusing on formal guarantees of independence or cordon off subsystems at smaller scales, where independence is achieved through strong boundaries.
The first approach is that of protocol design and trust-less coordination. It is the technocratic solution to crisis, centered around cryptography. One can read it as a reaction to the promises of centralization, be it the nation-state or the mega-corporation. Economies of scale are retained along the edges of production by trying to depersonalize coordination and dematerialize processes.
The second approach is of convivial forms and resilience research. Isolation from the outside world is attained through stronger interpersonal relations. Live within communities where everyone knows you. (Digital versions of this constitute the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.) Write software for your friends, which executes via a hand-written virtual machine that runs on salvaged hardware, operable from a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific.
The first approach risks their technology becoming a veil simply supervening on the existing dependency networks (e.g. stable-coins, or socially-backed valuations that enter crises of personality). The second approach risks nostalgic luddism, ignoring the power of abstraction and composition that formal systems allow. Luckily, the couple on the sailboat can program in C.
epistemology complexity weirding worldbuilding modularity boundaries coordination localism
The prana body, the zoomies, and trying to pin the mystic in place
by SQCU
At the Fluidity Forum in 2023, there had been a structure of presentations where many speakers had been placed in competing time slots, so it was nearly assured that most attendees were not able to attend all of the presentations which interested them. This structure led participants to gossip about the substance of previous talks with some urgency. As Fluidity proceeded, even these episodes of huddled recollection began to become topics of further social coordination, which brings us to the campfire conversation on effability, trumpet embouchure, and the prana-maya.
The conversation playing out at the campfire was precipitated by Matt Arnold, the forum’s organizer, commenting on the challenges they felt in making sense of a brief woo exercise in a past Fluidity Forum session. The session gave an exposition of the ‘subtle body’ in the terms of the ancients, and ultimately led the participants through a breathing exercise where they sought to breathe ‘from’ different parts of their body in directed ways. However, for Matt, it was very hard to determine what it felt like to breathe or move energy through their body, leaving Matt uncertain as to whether or not he had participated in the session in the same way as the others in the session.
I (SQCU) had attended the same session, and had found myself feeling less confused by the experience than Matt. I began to wonder if everyone, including Matt, might have experienced the same bodily sensations, but did not have enough shared context to connect the mystic/occult language describing the prana body to specific referents in the body. I suggested that the senses described by ‘prana-maya’ might correspond neatly to ‘zoomies’. (The memorable way in which small children, cats several hours past sunset, and athletes in the minutes before starting a jog all seem to be filled with an irrepressable motion.)
The woo-minded practitioners present and Matt were both taken with this metaphor, finding it to neatly match their internalizations of life histories as excitable children and also their history with yogic breathwork. This turned the conversations towards the challenges of building shared metaphors for embodied sensations, with the example of {prana-maya->zoomies} serving as a metaphor for communicating knowledge and experiences which relate to internal features of our body.
As addressed in Collin’s excellent Fluidity talk on environmental cognition, it can be difficult to know precisely what we know about our own bodies. Being able to use our own bodies to accomplish a specific goal, such as breathing ‘from’ our left hand ‘into’ our right hand, or how to shape our faces so that we can whistle a clear note, does not necessarily let us bestow that action to other humans around us. Even if we breathe very deliberately, forming characteristic signatures in a cardiogram, or whistle a very precise and mutually observable song for an audience.
However, just as the interiority of the jhanas might have a congruent we can see in ourselves and others, Collin’s example of environmental cognition in whistling presents another congruent: trumpet embouchure. Trumpets are hard. A novice trumpeter must tighten their face, screw their lips together, and then force a powerful flatulence of air between them, all at once, to activate the latent potential of their horn to make a clear note. Fortunately, as with Collin’s example of whistling as environmental knowledge, once the nascent brassist has discovered the right pose for their face, even for a brief moment, there is an unmistakeable and clear feedback as the trumpet vibrates in kind with the brassist’s face.
Considered as a tool for communication, the trumpet can be transformed from a musical tool to make clear notes (through the right pose and set of mouth) into a didactic tool for the discovery of what it feels like to carry the right-pose in the face and mouth. This metaphor, of ((prana->zoomies)->(whistling->embouchure)), suggests that while some forms of environmental knowledge might be extremely difficult to transfer, other kinds of environmental knowledge could be shared by modifying the shared environment instead of trying to directly speak the senses.
feedback communication environmental knowledge yoga breathwork niche construction
Conspiracy and narrative, pt 1
by RIPDCB
Conspiracy theories carry within them a poison pill. Justifiably so, they contend that official narratives of controversial historical events, in all of their tidiness and coherence, select out intense ambiguities, obfuscating the host of weirdnesses that tend to accompany such events. In trying to weave a counter-narrative, conspiracy theories vie for legitimacy through conventional narrative structures, repeating the same faulty steps (though, importantly, for different reasons) that official narratives take. Their desire for narrative coherence forces authors and believers alike to overinterpret, torquing over what’s unknown to tell a conclusive story. But historical events, such as the JFK assassination, elude conclusiveness entirely. Loose ends and disinformation go hand in hand, and I’d argue this is intentional, consummated in the justifications for the deletion and erasure of vital evidence, and the witness murders and suicides that tend to accompany the messy ambiguity of it all.
Conspiracy theories, then, can amplify their own outlandishness in a horseshoeish way. As they try to seize the authorial reigns of a contentious event, they undo their own legitimacy by becoming just as implausible as the official narrative, band-aiding over missing information and chronology gaps in order to achieve narrative coherence. The overemphasis of a given fact or suspicion—justified by impassioned appeals to the information deficit—leave the whole field reeking of interpretive bias and disassociation. And, most importantly, their authors and believers always come out looking like creatively malnourished, overzealous readers of ambiguity.
The public, when given the choice between two narratives—one implausible for all of the suspicions it dismisses as pure coincidence, another fighting its incompleteness by virtue of the information state–will usually opt for the former. Not merely because its ‘safer’, but also because the psycho-social fracture that can result from the never-ending questions birthed from the deep historical chasm of conspiratorial events can be a lot to hold. (Charles de Gaulle put it succinctly in talking about the American people’s perspective on Kennedy’s murder: “They don’t want to know. They don’t to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out”).
It’s important to note that above- and below-ground state sponsored organizations have, in the past, utilized undercover agents to spread disinformation, sometimes even gaining the confidence of group leaders and planting with them bogus insights. These messiahs, feeling the holy spirit of true knowledge flow through them, take to the pulpit and ultimately hurt the cause by spewing what they’re fed. Sometimes, these vocal leaders are even flipped into informants themselves, spreading agency lies for cash and protection. This situation has been well documented in UFO communities, specifically in the New Mexico, Arizona, and western New York areas, where defense contractors and aerospace firms were looking to cover-up the covert testing of innovative surveillance and military technology.
Such examples of targeted disinformation grant us a peak into the mechanics of the post-WWII media ecosystem–a highly discursive space that is at its most politically purchasable when there is an overflow of information from all directions. By intentionally pushing conspiracies farther to the fringes, a false dialectic of believability is created between the official narrative and the counter-narratives, one where the excluded middle drops out; or, at the very least, the middle starts trending more towards the former, as the coincidences are chalked up to human error and incompetency. Fuck-ups become a hell of a lot more plausible when the basic gesture towards other explanations is spoiled on contact by rampant disinformation.
With the discursive space flooded, most will opt for shallower waters, away from the overflow and on what appears to be solid ground, the impression of which is based on larger structures of authority and conventional plausibility. Often times, then, conspiracy theories, with their teological bent towards Truth, can’t help but fall short given that they’ll never be able to tell the full story.
Sometimes I’m of the mind that fiction is better suited to exploring deep history, or at least a better entry point into the field that doesn’t force you at the outset to take a stand. But I believe delving into conspiracies and conspiracy literature is valuable if you can separate the counter-narratives from the all-encompassing dialect of one truth / many fictions. Conspiracies, when collated not just from a single event but across similarly inconclusive events, may never square away the truth, but they can help you recognize patterns and strategies commonly deployed as methods of obfuscation, diversion, and media manipulation.
epistemology narrative conspiracy torque policy discursive warfare adversarial epistemology ambiguity legitimacy detection indeterminacy literature
Collin’s Razor: Look at the biggest and smallest results
During a late night conversation at Fluidity Forum, some of us went around and shared our personall razors, the little tricks we keep at hand that can often reduce a big problem into something tractable. Here’s mine:
Collin’s razor: look at the biggest and smallest results of your formalism before using it; if the real world implications of those results don’t make sense, you need a new formalism.
In my day job, the formalisms I’m making are usually reports or charts - a small bit of business logic trying to capture something about the real world, like “how many COVID-positive patients are on each ward?” or “how often do we get recurrent callers to our call center?” It’s much easier to write code that compiles than it is to write code that’s meaningful, so I end up with a little bit of SQL that may or may not be true. And how to check it? Well, I nearly always ignore any sort of complicated statistics and go straight for old reliable: find the most relevant column to sort on, and look at the biggest and smallest values. While my final product will nearly always be an aggregate measure, I won’t compute that aggregation measure before looking at the raw data.
What if the biggest value is way larger than anything else? Should it be? Sometimes this will find a data entry error, and you need to correct it for your results to matter. Sometimes this finds a definitional error: “Oh, there are more patients on this ward than it has beds - I see now that I neglected to filter out past stays that aren’t active currently.” Sometimes this finds a definitional oddity that isn’t exactly an error, but informs what you ought to be asking instead: “Hmm, do I want to count a case where you’re throttled as a repeat call?” And most interestingly, sometimes it finds something very far out of distribution where you genuinely don’t know the story: “Wait, why did this one person lose so much weight on that diet?”. And of course, this all works the other way around too. Especially when you’re investigating something involving averages, “how many zeroes are getting in to the final result?” can often influence averages more than anything else.
If your formalization is going to be valid, it needs to be valid the whole way through, and that means that you need to hold any outliers in your hand and decide what you’re doing with them as a class, not just arbitrarily carve them out. Techniques like winsorizing are acts of statistical cowardice and capitulation, unable to resolve the data to real-world implications because you know in your heart there aren’t any, just trying to get something mediocre enough that you can produce a result that won’t surprise anyone. To understand something in the aggregate, you have to understand what it means for an individual instance. If you don’t have time to see them all, make sure you see the most extreme ones.
Analyzing agent strategies for insights into systems
How might we map the winding path of a highway, if we couldn’t see it?
One approach: By tracking the movement of cars traversing it.
What could we learn about a highway in general, if we only had GPS positions for a handful of cars? We could get a sense of congestion and construction zones and speed traps. Where the highway narrows from several lanes, or opens up again. We could even get a (very partial, approximate) sense of the positions of other cars, based on the passing and weaving patterns of the cars we’re tracking.
Sure, some cars off-road, but relatively rarely, and only in situations where either (1) road infrastructure is severely lacking en route to their destination, or (2) the driver’s perception or judgment fails. Why do drivers stay on the road, and obey speed limits? In part for practical reasons: convention is followed because convention is convenient. You drive on the right side of the road because it’s in your interest to follow convention. But in part because there is normative enforcement via honked horns and PD.
Any organism, any agent, carries mutual information with the environment he inhabits. He learns how that environment works through costly trial and error (often over millions of generations) and comes to embody (often very literally, cf good regulator theorem) that environment in his behavior and physical form.
This is a big part of why I’m interested in strategic interaction as a lens. The idea is that people have already done a lot of the hard work learning about how the social world works. This knowledge is mostly tacit and nonverbal. You can’t just ask people how the social world works. But you can look at their actions and reverse-engineer from there.
This is also why I’m interested in learning from children’s games specifically. There was a brief moment on Twitter a few months back where people were trying to square “People in the olden days weren’t stupid” against “The Romans literally used a Caesar cipher to encrypt messages.” The reasoning was, how could anyone be fooled by such a simple cipher? Well, the beginnings of anti-inductive treadmills always seem painfully naive to those further along. Precisely because, looking retrospectively, past strategies are inductive and factored in—are obvious because they are taken for granted in the present game-state among more sophisticated and experienced players. (Not generally sophisticated; sophisticated insofar as they are trained specifically in a suite of cultural practices relevant to excelling at the game.)
Similarly, my gambit is that kids play fundamentally similar games to adults, but are less specifically sophisticated players. They can’t cloak their motives in layers of obfuscation and rhetorical grandstanding. And they don’t really have to. They just have to be n+1 steps ahead of the other kids on the playground. (The same way we only have to be n+1 steps ahead of other adults.) Spoiler, kids’ n is a pretty small number. Can we “decrypt the Caesar cipher” of social gaming?
Scavenging for cognitive toolkits
Quite often it’s useful to come up with rough binaries as a quick and ready classification tool. There are two general approaches that people have toward the inheritance of 2000 years of intellectual history, two attitudes which happen to be quite common. Suspended Reason has coined a rather useful pair of names for this binary: “pro-lineage” and “anti-lineage”. These are not quite two schools of thought, but rather two directions, which in practice are often mixed. Regardless, we can think of them as ideal types; some situations tend to put them in sharp relief. Philosophy offers a very good test case.
A common motif in Two-Cultures miscommunication, from the scientific side, centres on philosophy. For many science-oriented people who have a brief exposure to philosophy, there’s quite often horror at the apparent obsession with the past. Often it seems quite diseased that philosophers apparently seem to be studying what Kant, Hegel or Plato thought, instead of learning how to come up with real philosophy. (This is most common with Continental and ‘traditional’ philosophy, which tends to be the most humanities-oriented side of philosophy.) Why are these people reading “masters” like Plato and Hegel instead of moving on? Few in the sciences today would bother to read Newton or Einstein, Darwin or Bichat. This objection I am going to put under the “anti-lineage” camp, while the philosophers themselves who defend a historical approach to philosophy I am going to put under the “lineage” camp. The difference between the two hinges on the difference of the status of the lineage.
The lineage is history, it is the archive that is passed down from one generation to the next through writing. This archive is an archive full of holes and breaks, and is marked by a series of names which function as singular points. These are the “great names” which the lineagists are concerned with. For them, ideas are inseparable from the contexts and the people who produced them. This is not a purely “humanistic” orientation; there are many lineagists who are scientists and mathematicians, and we can find anti-lineagists in the humanities. The anti-lineagists are more ambivalent toward history, this archive, with some of them having a more iconoclastic response to this history. They would prefer that we throw out the rubbish, never mind if the wheel is reinvented. The raw material of the lineagist is not the opus or the author but the idea and the insight, which is detached and studied in isolation.
The lineagist “remembers their history in order to have history and to make history” and “dwell in history thanks to the specific nature of their cultural memory” (Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory). Instead of a weighing-down, an obstacle or handicap, history is the positive condition for novelty. The anti-lineagist does not simpy forget history, but has to actively find ways to negate its effect. The most common method is using mathematics; formal methods are designed such that ideas can be easily translated from one person to another, so to understand gravity doesn’t require having to read Newton’s Principia; any old physics would do.
Here I do not mean to take a stand for or against either side; I suspect that these orientations are more personal than intellectually derived, and arguments for and other each side are usually going to miss the point. What interests me is maintaining a plurality of such approaches, and trying to hash out a “third space” where both sides can talk to each other cordially.
A preliminary bridge (though one more on the side of the anti-lineagists) is the notion of the toolkit. The toolkit is not a detachable “insight” or “idea” taken from a thinker, but rather perhaps a problematic core, a particular flip of perspective. Toolkits are not right or wrong, but are rather useful or not useful. They are not expositions or explanations, but rather puzzle-esque works that inspire and pop headcanons. Such toolkits can fluidly slip between lineagist and non-lineagist groups. They do not need a particular origin inside or outside a particular lineage. It is autonomous and is situated in a particular ecology of thought and practice. The significance of such a tool comes from how it is able to multiply perspectives, points of view.
As an attempt to link up lineage and anti-lineagist groups, I suspect that many ideas from the lineage can become useful jumping-off points for vibe-style intellectualization, which can be detached from its original environment while bringing in lineage-style insights into non-lineage environments. A toolkit is not a formal idea (like a scientific idea or pattern that a non-lineagist might like) nor is it a particular contextualized idea. It is more similar to an intuition of something. Working through the lineage is often able to give “illegible” intuitions; a toolkit can be thought of an attempt to spark or reproduce this intuitive “feel” outside the context of such a tradition. It is these which I plan on writing up for future posts.
epistemology philosophy intellectual history lineagism anti-lineagism
Lightness
by Cristóbal
C—After paying a hefty sum to bring around 40 books to Brazil and then walking into three gorgeous libraries I have open access to, I’m starting the think back on the decision. I wonder how the discourse on American universities would be if they were like Brazilian universities—worse infrastructure, more communal, and free.
B—I keep thinking about buying a projector so I can watch movies at home more comfortably, but my calculus so far has been towards a lifestyle of going to the theater… Suburbanization is a sickness.
People are bringing weight into their life to avoid the public cinema. I’ve only liked going to the cinema since I realized the best films all played at a cinema near my house, where the box office is on the street and the atrium is only feet deep. Taking the train to the multiplex, and then going up three escalators to get to the screen? It’s starting to get heavier than the projector.
Part of the lightness thesis is that what cannot be made light should be made into public infrastructure.
C—Privatizing these dimension of life is a kind of bureaucracy, an unacknowledged weight.
B—I don’t like this usage of bureaucracy. I’m very pro bureaucracy, I’m anti-dross. A bureaucracy should be responsive, should lift responsibilities from you.
C—I think when I say “abstraction without indirection”, it’s about “bureaucracy without dross”, e.g. lumber production is a bureaucracy that enables you to make Enzo Mari chairs.
B—Another word for lightness is “economy”.
C—“Economy of effort.” Both the exchange of labor, and the withholding of labor.
B—Another way to view this question is as one of what should be weighty in a life. I posit we should be held down by our commitments to others, but not by the task of living.
S—Have you browsed /r/ultralight? They get obsessed with shaving mere ounces off their pack and end up with super elegant tent designs, where you reuse your hiking poles as the structural props for your tent (e.g.). Not being burdened by a pack (not bringing your bag with your gear everywhere) and its relationship to freedom.
There’s a way in which the ultralight people end up becoming heavy about lightness. Being light about lightness means being ok with taking a $1 bandana with you and using it to wrap a sandwich and then when you’ve eaten the sandwich using it to blow your nose. Being heavy about lightness is weighing the bandana on a scale and paying $70 for microfiber cloth that is half an ounce lighter
C—You can incur weight to become a public service to others.
I’ve enjoyed the “information theory of meaning”. We’re trying to construct structures that can surpass us in space and time to propagate some information. The intersection is perhaps that bad “weight” is form carrying no additional information, and good “weight” carries unrepresented information.
S—I wonder how levity of mood connects with freedom—something about playfulness meaning you’re not locked into a habituated or socially-mandated mode of response? Open-ended rather than closed.
“The spiritual style of Bresson’s heroes is one variety or other of unself-consciousness. Consciousness of self is the ‘gravity’ that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is ‘grace’ or spiritual lightness.”
C—We should do a “lightness” write-up.
B—You should do it—to me the concept is the process of production itself, the fundamental link between design and economics and engineering. Almost so large as to blot out the sun. Impossible to write up
B—A lightness tip: travel only with one power adapter, and make sure it’s as small as possible. In this way, you will achieve enlightenment.
Rigorizing plumbers
One of the most important ideas uniting us is the rigorizing pipeline. Patterns in the world are noticed as anecdotes, folk wisdom records ways of interacting with those patterns, systematization allows the exact scale of the pattern to be recorded, and then formal methods can exploit those patterns for, hopefully, the good of humanity. The universe in all it’s complexity feeds in to the source, operational knowledge comes out the end.
What’s interesting about the rigorizing pipeline is that you need different maintenance tools for different parts. Throwing away senseless outliers can make sense near the end, but outliers you don’t understand are much of the content coming in. The plumbing is different, and the tools you need to have on hand are different. But this isn’t a paean to anti-rationalist woo: the pipe has a direction for a reason. You’re trying to take immense undifferentiated pattern and parcel out a part you can understand so it flows through. But if the pipe is blocked near the start there’s no use trying to open it with the wrenches you use for the end, even though that’s where you’re trying to get the water to go.
TIS is a gathering point for plumbers who are working near the source of the pipe but understand what’s meant to come out on the end. This is not a reaction against formal methods, but an acknowledgement that they’re often applied prematurely to pipe segments that are much further upstream than the well-defined patches of science many plumbers envy. Instead of a cargo cult belief that the tools of the scientists at the very end of the pipe are the ideals we should always emulate (the “scientific method”), we want to examine phenomena that require more qualitative, anecdote-based analysis. Never mind if it looks a bit like woo; we’ll know the difference.
The tools you use on the end of the pipe are undoubtedly the most delicate and highest leverage. This doesn’t mean they’re the best tools, though: if you’re working out a clog near the start you need something broader and less precise. Those are the tools we’re seeking to build here.
Lights on
February 29th is a day you don’t get every year. It’s a good time to announce the return of ephemeral things. So: the Inexact Sciences blog will begin the second season of publication here at tis.so starting tomorrow. One post a day til it’s done.
We’ve got a healthy mix of old-timers, new timers, guest-posters-turned-flock-members, and some familiar faces who aren’t here yet but we hope to tempt back by activity. We’re still as focused on the anecdotal, interactive, and epistemological as we ever were. There’s a bit less focus on the frames of communication and games in favor of ecology, lightness, and information flowing through time.
When artists sell out, who are they selling to? What is the unit of survival? Do we understand the orders of magnitude of nature? How much should you care about the lineage of an idea? Why did you tip the hot dog man? Where should you look for deer next year? What sort of lime juice is best? How do you shit? These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring this season.
If you have something to say as a response to or inspired by our explorations, you’re encouraged to submit a guest post suggestion here. But don’t wait too long. When our queue runs completely dry we’ll take it as a sign to go back to the well of observation, and will pull the shutters down for at least a year. If we have more to write, we’ll keep writing; if we don’t, we’ll respect your time and go find something to write.
Lights off
tis.so is ceasing regular updates for the foreseeable future. Our investigations are pulling in disparate directions these days. TIS was driven by synergistic excitement that produced plentiful posts. A major focus that unites most of our writing is the drive to call things what they really are, and so it’s important for us to say that the music has stopped.
We have a twitter list including the authors, guest posters, and a few other friends. tis.so will remain online; we don’t like link rot. Authors are still welcome to add new posts if this feels like the best place to host a thought. We’re just releasing ourselves from the obligation to release anything regularly, as well as emphasizing that any posts that come will be more individualistic instead of arising from internal discussions.
Some of us are bound to cross paths again, and this site might bloom with the result. Otherwise, short in time but rich with experience — here we were. Thanks for thinking with us.
Not all heroes wear capes
by RIPDCB
When we’ve written about degenerate play in the past, the focus has been on the condemnable strategies deployed by players that violate the spirits of games while staying within their legal limits. Thus far, degenerate play has been treated as a nasty, if ubiquitous, social wart: an outgrowth born from the tension between spirit and letter, from the impossible problem of properly aligning the incentive structures of games with the all-too-human desire to win (or to lose on your own terms).
Degenerate plays have been treated, for the most part, as dishonorable. The kind of plays that elicit sighs of ‘C’mon man’, that set bad examples for other players, that make the game just plainly less fun to play. Players who deploy these strategies will often, and should, incur some level of reputational damage, if not from game designers or referees, than from the community of players and, if present, an audience.
This perspective on degenerate strategies assumes that what’s in the best interest of all parties involved—both game designers and players—is deploying strategies that celebrate the spirit of games. Which is a good assumption to have! Part of the collective conceit of game playing is that we all let go a little bit of that will to power so we can enjoy playing together, agreeing to let the ‘best’ (whether that be the most skilled or, in some cases, luckiest) player win. Degenerate plays will always crop up, but the hope is that either a top-down disincentivization by rule-keepers & designers, or a collective enforcement of the game’s spirit by the community of players, will be enough to keep them at bay.
It’s also a fact that some game states are higher stakes than others. Whether due to a large public profile or potential payouts, no-holds-barred, down-right-dirty winning can supersede any collective faith in the game’s spirit if becoming a champion is really worth it. In such high stakes environments, competitive advantages tend to shrink, and degenerate plays can, at least sometimes, become edges worth exploiting.
Professional sports are a fine example of this kind of situation, none more obvious than the exploitation of certain fouls. Fouls in theory exist to punish players for breaking the rules of the game, but they can also be exploitatively utilized by players who know how to draw fouls in certain high leverage situations. Suspended Reason has written about fouls and flopping in professional basketball before, specifically with respect to the optikratic nature of how these fouls are administered—i.e. fouls are, by necessity, doled out based on appearances (the referees determine whether it ‘looks like’ he’s been interfered with, pushed, blocked out, etc.). Because of the optikratic nature of (most) fouls, there exists an incentive for players to appear as if they have been interfered with in order to draw a foul in a given context, specifically in close-game situations when an extra shot attempt (in basketball) or a few extra yards (in football) might be the difference between win and a loss.
These attempts at hacking the game might go unpunished within the game state itself (some sports have developed penalties for flopping, but they are, at best, unevenly enforced), but they don’t go unpunished in the grander scheme of the sport. Certain players who use these degenerative strategies gain less-than-ideal reputations for exploiting the system, specifically among the viewers of the sport. And as they should: encouraging degenerate strategies regardless of the game is–most likely at least–bad for game playing in general.
But from a team’s perspective, specifically the team for which our degenerate player plays, this degenerate player might be something of a hero. He is incurring, on behalf of the team, a reputational hit by putting his integrity on the line to draw fouls in high leverage situations, which, if successful, can give a very valuable edge to a team right when they might need one. And if his attempt fails, then the optics are just awful: ‘Look at X-player, flopping in crunch time to get a foul? He’s a cheat!’
Team sports are nothing if not about the team, meaning that selflessness, especially when the game’s on the line, is one of the most valuable traits to have. A player electing to push the rules to their limits by playing them like a fiddle is, in an ironic sense, acting selflessly in the greater context of the situation. With the eyes of the audience on him, he embraces the social mark of a flopper or a foul-drawer in order to force an opportunity for his team to tie or take a lead. While we as viewers might not appreciate the ethical totality of his actions, I would be willing to reckon that his teammates do.
My point here is that it takes all kinds to win. While incentivizing degenerate strategies is a net negative for both individual games and game playing on a whole, players who are willing to take on a reputational scar for the good of the team represent a kind of selflessness that is, in its own way, aspirational. For as long as degenerate strategies exist as viable strategies within a given game state, they will be exploited until they are corrected for, at which point new strategies will arise to take their place. It’s no surprise that the most consistently competitive teams in sports tend to find edges in the untraveled footnotes of the rule book, forcing referees and competition committees alike to reevaluate the state of the game as such.
In high stakes games, to see the bounds of what’s acceptable as limits worth bending, not bending to, is, on an ontological level, an advantage with no counter, as long as you have players willing to fall on the sword when your acting falls short.
When we ethically browbeat all deployments of degenerate strategies, we conflate the ethical differences between those that are unilaterally selfish and those that, in benefitting a team, are something in the realm of selfless. In other words, in focusing on the individual actor in both situations, we risk severing the player from the team, who might very well be the actor who should be held accountable for coaching or scheming up degenerate strategies as competitive advantages.