Author Archives: Crispy Chicken

[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”

When I was in High School, an administrator pointed out to my class that our mission statement was printed, framed, and put up in every class. But most of us had never read it. The silence that followed mocked us: “How could we be so uncultured and ignorant?” Of course, he really had to goContinue reading “Empty Enough for a Battlefield”

I’ve been reading a bunch of Slate Star Codex and thinking a lot about what makes something “instrumentally useful” i.e. it helps you survive or complete some goal that will reinforce its use; both of these have a lot to do with natural selection, probably one of my top 5 favorite concepts. One of theContinue reading “What Works and for Whom”

I’d like to talk about what kinds of thing are incommunicable in language and what that really means. I don’t have it all in one beautiful system, but I’m looking forward to being mortified by how wrong this post sounds when I come up with such a system. One thing I want to setup isContinue reading “What Kinds of Things Are Incommunicable in Language?”

The shorthand for the meaning of an utterance is communicative intent in the form of new information or a desired reaction in the interlocutor. To see why a deeper notion of communicative intent is needed, let us consider Conspicuous Communication, when communication-like rituals take place in order to have such experiences “on record” rather thanContinue reading “Conspicuous Communication”