Author Archives: Crispy Chicken

Again and again people trying to do anything complicated for a long period of time are beset by the same issue: What do our words refer to, since they clearly don’t refer to truth conditions of the person who originally wrote them? The answer is that “refer” is a misnomer, and it’s an especially confusingContinue reading “Functional Transmission Theory”

Anyone with ambition has felt the difficulty of attempting to get where they’re going because they’re not “in” with the right groups. Much reform today is directed at making things meritocratic by attempting to quantify potential and using metrics to control power structures. Of course these metrics are largely applied to the decision to acceptContinue reading “Expanding the In-Group Won’t Solve Your Problem”

There are many ways for language to be complex, and most of them have nothing to do with the actual structure of language. Consider the sentence: I feel you. If I am talking to a friend, and they express frustration. Then I’m saying that I understand what they’re going through and trying to validate theirContinue reading “The Coordination Problem”

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”