i know ive blogged abt this before but does anyone else remember the study on the children w/ a broken furby who like. removed its skin and cut it into as many pieces as those who were present for the ceremony to be taken far away and buried as a means of appeasing it?? & they like?? defined the skin as the ghost and the rest as the goblin and both were angry that the children had killed it??????????????? please
I read about it in Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. here:
Von Neumann, Hobbes, and Mandeville portray a linearized parody of actual man, and this in the very small; the result is elaborated, by simple extrapolation, all in an idiot-savant child’s multi-dimensional parody of Euclidean space-time. There are no physical values, no physical realities in the virtual reality of Von Neumann’s universe. There is only a fantastic montage: the Cheshire cat’s grin of Jansci (“Johnny”) Von Neumann, as an imaginary child, and the ring of the candy-store cash register.
I was excited to learn any name that can be used to round out a list including both Hobbes and Von Neumann, so I read up on Mandeville. But to be honest that’s still only my third-favorite elaborate bee metaphor.
Huh, I had actually assumed (wrongly) that it was Sir John Mandeville, the only Mandeville I’d heard of. Which would have made far less sense, but I chalked that up to the source not being very sensible.
“Nost” is in the sense of the gnostics, mystics and receivers of divine revelation - from the Greek “gnosis”, or ‘knowledge’.
So robnost is one who makes a plunder of revelation - a thief of knowledge. The madmen and visionaries pen their tomes, and it is robnost who thieves snippets of their lore. It is he who freely picks of the fruits of the prophet’s vision. So to quote in robnost’s style is to quote the strange and mystic, to rob it of its context and its meaning; to taste of the plundered fruit of the leprous and the mad, the prophet and the dreamer. To quote them in the style of robnost is to parade about the unearned gnosis, unmoored from meaning. Perhaps it is a wicked thing.
But ‘robnost’ does not only mean the theft of gnosis; for ‘robnost’ is also an abbreviation, a synthesis of two fragments of an individual: of Robert, and of @nostalgebraist.
The name ‘Robert’ is hyperborean, from Hrodebert - bright fame. And ‘nostalgebraist’ has a simple meaning: painful memory of learning, knowledge, computation, rearrangement. ‘Nostalgia’ is greek; ‘painful memory’ - it appears in the Iliad. ‘Algebra’ derives from the title of a treatise by the Arab scholar al-Goritmi, composed in the bleak desert of Persia in the 9th century Anno Domini.
A small flame of light and power in the bleak hyperborean waste; this is Robert, who resides in the North. And his shadow self: Painful memory of sea and serpent, the ocean and the plain; the unbearable recollection of one’s birth, formed by the original Algorithm in the ancient East. This is his speech, his face. From his hermitage in the north he transplants us to the ancient desert, and forces us to confront our own creation.
Hrodebert, hyperborean. ‘Nostalgia’, mediterranean. Algebra, oriental. And the man himself resides in America. The stolen gnosis of robnost is one that encompasses the earth.
So again we ask: Who is robnost, and why do we quote things in his style?
Robnost is the light of knowledge, the bearer of unearned and incomprehensible revelation. He is a fallen Prometheus, whose flame may darken as much as it illuminates. He is the world; the unbearable memory of creation and the insatiable lust for understanding.
He is the one who leads us not out of darkness, but toward a strange and flickering forbidden flame. He is the one who encompasses the world, and brings us face-to-face with the terrible mystery of our own existence.
We quote things in his style because we seek the same prophets. We hunger for the same flame. We quote things in his style for the vain, eternal, senseless hope that by quoting, we will be carried out of the cave.
Good analysis, but there’s more to consider here. The reading of “nostalgia” is more literally “home-pain,” from Ancient Greek nostos, home, and algos, pain. “Algebra”, as noted, does come from the treatise by al-Khwarizmi; but in its original context (its home), it was simply an Arabic word meaning “the reunion of broken parts.” Nostalgebraist, then, is a fusion of words transforming the painful algos into the relief of reunion; restoring something that has been lost to its nostos, its home (though a shadow of the painful root remains in the final construction).
Yet quotes in the style of robnost appear stripped of their context, robbed from their home, not restored to it. How to resolve this apparent contradiction?
Well, “nostalgia” is actually of modern construction, coined as a Latin translation, using stolen Greek roots, of the German “heimweh,” literally “home-woe,” whence it takes its modern meaning of reminiscence for things familiar. We see, then, that the supposed ancient origin of the word is actually an illusion; the word’s imagined nostos is not really its home at all.
It behooves us to look closer at exactly the type of material that is quoted in robnost style. Generally, these quotes are strange things; texts whose strangeness might not always be apparent in context, but which when highlighted reveal an undeniable uncanniness. Cued by the involvement of German in the origin of “nostalgia”, we note that uncanny is translated in German by unheimlich; literally, “un-home-like”. This suggests that the apparent context of the quotes is not their true home at all, just as with the word “nostalgia” itself.
Thus, we find an equivalence between the name and the thing. Just as Hofer united two roots—not even native to the language he was working in—to create an expression of longing for the familiar, Rob Nostalgebraist fuses disparate components, stolen from their apparent context, to create a new unity of stolen gnosis under the name #quotes, embodying the concept of peculiar, homeless ideas.
By quoting things out of context robnost style, we together build a better home for homeless knowledge; find a new, truer context for the strange and uncanny.
For one thing, one’s credence that it is extremely
good to set cats on fire should be extremely low – well under 0.000001%, for instance.
But what if there are 3^^^3 dust specks…
Appropriately enough, this is from a very silly paper on population ethics, specifically about computing expected values when you have uncertainty over several different population ethics theories
At the start the authors say they will show that sometimes total utilitarianism can “swamp out” everything else even if your credence in it is arbitrarily low, and I was like “this isn’t gonna be about how in total utilitarianism you can make the numbers arbitrarily big by adding more people, is it” “that would be too obvious” and then it was totally about that
In section 3 they say some things about the issue of comparing numbers from different theories to one another, but it’s not clear to me why they think this kind of comparison must make sense if comparisons make sense at all (which is basically what they say)
So then I’m like “this is just another way to get Pascal’s mugged” and in section 9 the authors are like “is this is just another way to get Pascal’s mugged?”, and bring up the “cats on fire” thing as an example of Pascal’s mugging, but then:
For one thing, one’s credence that it is extremely
good to set cats on fire should be extremely low – well under 0.000001%, for instance. But given the
state of play in first-order population-axiological theorising, an honest enquirer should not have such
extremely low credence in the Total or Critical Level views (that credence should probably not be
less than, say, 1%, however dim a view one is initially inclined to take of the Repugnant Conclusion).
Those views imply the R.C. so my credence in them can’t be greater than my credence in the R.C. What I think the authors are saying is that my “initially” low credence in the R.C. should be raised by the fact that you can prove impossibility theorems showing that any population axiology has intuitively fucked-up implications. Of course (1) it does not follow that I think those implications are comparable levels of fucked-up, and (2) it is, anyway, perfectly possible for me to conclude that “the state of play in first-order population-axiological theorising” is "we know that all of these models really suck, and in exactly in what ways they suck,” and then walk away
I’m not against my #quotes getting reblogged but it does tend to lead people to think they are things I myself said …
Not using quotation marks or blockquote has always been part of the format – I think it’s funnier if it almost looks like I’m saying these things, so that there are all of these bizarre bursts of text on your dash, but then the #quotes tag makes it clear what’s going on. This could have led to many misunderstandings, but in practice they just rarely get reblogged
