March 2024: lazy linkpost

Not Even Wrong, Lego, Siderea, Deleuze, attunement

Hi again. It hasn’t been a great month for thinking. I think my brain is sick of the grey wet weather we’ve had this spring and has gone on strike until it gets more sunlight. So it’s a lazy one this time, just a few links and some thoughts on them before I get back to the important business of eating Easter chocolate and sitting around.

20 Years of Not Even Wrong – Peter Woit

I mentioned the Not Even Wrong blog briefly in my post on The Trouble with Physics. I complained there that

… In 2006, I was still able to think “well, this is a historically rare slow patch for physics, we’ll probably be out of it soon and things will be exciting again". But it turns out physics can remain irrational longer than my brain can remain solvent, or something, and we’re still stuck.

Anyway, apparently Not Even Wrong is now 20 years old! I’ve been reading for 18 years of that. My god.

The blog has been bizarrely consistent over that time. The first post is housekeeping but then in the second post it launches into pretty much its current form, and the arguments in the comments start in post 3. Fascinating as a preserved slice of the blogosphere, depressing as a preserved slice of the last 20 years of physics.

A Tale of Two Kits – Venkatesh Rao

Fun comparison of two kits, a Lego Technic rover and a beginner whittling set:

The Lego kit and assembly protocol is very complete and legible in relation to its stated goal of getting to a completed rover model, but the extended whittling kit (including augmentation with YouTube videos) is very incomplete. It codifies only 20% of what you need to know to get 80% of the way to a hello world project like a spoon. The remaining 80% is illegible tacit knowledge your muscle memory has to pick up by hacking anyhow.

On the flip side though — and this is probably a consequence — while building a Lego model, you have no sense of progressing from rough, coarse, strategic actions to refined, detailed actions. It’s all at the lowest level of fine detail, and you feel like a puppet in the hands of an inscrutable kit designer who has already done all the strategic thinking and planning. The model comes together via a series of very efficient but non-hierarchical moves in a way that’s much smarter than your execution awareness. One move might add a bit of cosmetic detail, the next move might construct a load-bearing spine of the design, and the third move might add a dispensable flourish. You only get what’s going on in moments of hindsight as big subassemblies come together.

The consolation of the low level of definition with whittling is a high sense of autonomy and agency. Instead of the designer’s awesome rover model, constructed by you, puppet, you get your own crappy spoon.

I’m not yet sure which I prefer: pawn on someone else’s chessboard, or lord of my own tic-tac-toe board.

This piece obviously did something to my head because a couple of months later I bought my own equivalents. First, a Lego kingfisher kit:

In an earlier post on Lego Rao is unimpressed by all the “cosmetic detailing and greebling parts” in his starter kit, but for me greebling the base to make the water splash was my favourite bit:

If I did get into Lego I would want to make intricately greebled organic forms with lots of tiny tiles and foliage elements and the like.

I was also tempted by the whittling kit, and still am a bit, but these tweets about needle felting convinced me that stabbing wool with a big needle would be even more fun, while having the same open-ended sculptural feel. Kit has only just arrived, haven’t tried it out yet, but I’m also planning to bodge something together based on YouTube videos.

Also good – Truth in Inconvenience, comparing Lego and Meccano.

The best of Siderea – Gavin Leech

Linkpost in a linkpost!

You probably haven’t heard of one of the best bloggers. This is mostly because of her chosen platform: it is the greatest LiveJournal blog and the last of its kind (it runs on a fork of the LJ codebase). It is a little pocket of air preserved from 2009 and good for what ails you.

I’ve read some Siderea before but never really figured out how to navigate my way around, so this post is a public service. Most interesting new-to-me post (warning: also depressing): Looking Further from the Bridge, on lead poisoning and other environmental contaminants. You should also read the linked excerpt A View from the Bridge by Matthew P. Dumont, a doctor who worked on an insane case of 1970s lead exposure.

Personal favourite post: Siderea Reads Watership Down.

Differentiating Derrida and Deleuze (pdf) – Gordon Bearn

I’ve got it into my head that I should read some Deleuze, but all I’ve really done so far is skim this weird paper from 2000. I picked this out because I like another Bearn paper on Derrida (I wrote about this one in Broaching and breaching). I need to do a proper reading and don’t know how useful it is yet, but it’s definitely distinctive from a writing point of view:

Whenever I say “I love you” I am using a form of words slurred each Saturday into the alcohol mouths of girls without last names. Do I want them between us? With us? Nor is it just drunken couples I must share my love with, also hiding in my bed is the other love of my life, hot and fresh, pepperoni pizza. Whispering sweet love, the bed crumbs full of pizza. So one dreams of saying it so simply, so simply . . . so simply that it would not be repeatable. One dreams of words that burn to ashes as we use them. But it will never work. There will always be ashes, or I will never have said anything. For the ashes which remain are the work of iterability.

On attunement – Joe Carlsmith

I have not got my head around Joe Carlsmith’s writing at all yet, but there is something unusual going on there. His background looks to be in effective altruism and analytic philosophy, neither of which tends to spark joy for me from a writing point of view, but tonally he’s coming from somewhere much more interesting that I’m struggling to place. Listen to this, from the end of his earlier piece, Seeing more whole:

It’s a vision, for me, of a kind of poise; a not-flailing; perhaps, even, a kind of grace. Or maybe: a kind of adulthood. In so many ways, we are, indeed, as children. Barely not rocks. We barely have eyes, I suspect, relative to what it is possible; we never see near to whole; and what light can we see is almost too much, too bright. Still, we are here. We are free. We can try to look steady.

Anyway, he has this long series now on “Otherness and control in the age of AGI”, and the attunement piece is the latest part. I’ve only read this one and On green, the previous part, and they’re both long essays in themselves, and I just don’t really get what I’m looking at right now, so this description is not at all informative. I still wanted to include it though as I haven’t read anything else quite like it.

See David Chapman’s note on the same piece – I drafted this before I read it! He’s further on in the digestion process.

Next month

No idea but hopefully I’ll do better at thinking.