Author Archives: Crispy Chicken

When people consider morality in their actions, they do it from the point of view of their experience of living that moment. They feel a certain way in a situation, and they imagine some space that others feel in a situation. They consider whether they have principles, desires, promises that apply. They do not usuallyContinue reading “Status Instability Leads to 2nd-Order Discussion”

In 2002 Avril Lavigne released the song “Sk8er Boi”, which includes the infamous lyrics: “He was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious?” What did people think this meant when they first heard it? I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that the implication isContinue reading “Initial Studies on Sk8r Boi”

I recently read “Strong and Weak Emergence” by David Chalmers. Among other things, Chalmers suggests that a system is conscious when there is something it is like to be that system and that consciousness is a case of strong emergence. Emergence is when unexpected phenomena result from the building blocks of phenomena we believe weContinue reading “Consciousness is Not Strongly Emergent”

Ophiocordyceps are a kind of fungi that take control of an ant’s nervous system, and use it for locomotion in order to find a new location to start a spore-releasing unit. Of course, this happens with memes too! Certain memes (“…If you don’t retweet this, then you hate women!” ) attempt to regulate a user’sContinue reading “Cordyceptic Memes”

People have always wanted to explain people, but we haven’t done a very good job. The problem seems to be that people are damn complicated, and you can’t just reduce them to things like status, class, education, etc. even though each of these variables has an effect on behavior. In an ideal world, we’d wantContinue reading “To Understand Context, Bring Back Earnestness”

[Content Warning: discussion of abuse] “Gaslighting” is a term I see a lot these days. When I first learned about it in high school I became obsessed with it because of how often I saw it, most especially in people attributing feelings and drives in me that I saw no evidence of. Every time IContinue reading “Can you really know you’re being gaslit?”

I am not an amazing cook. A few weeks ago, in one of the lockdown-hazes I often find myself in these days, I was cooking some garlic kale. It’s really quite simple: I stream the kale, I sauté the garlic, then I sauté the kale a bit with the garlic. Great. Except this time, IContinue reading “The Moonshot Hypothesis”

If we believe we can empathize with people by seeing the world the way they do, what are we saying? We are saying that, given the internal and external pressures they face, the landscape they see, their impression of their own identity, the individual’s actions make sense. If we believe we can empathize, my questionContinue reading “Pragmatic Narrative Microeconomics”

In the Machine Learning literature much fuss is made about local minima, locations in the parameter space in which no adjacent solution is better. Most local minima are not global minima i.e. they are not the best solution to the problem. There are many interesting challenges and solutions regarding getting out of local minima. MostContinue reading “Communicative Minima”