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Crispy Chicken isn’t my real name, though CC are my initials. Perhaps keeping my initials in my pseudonym was foolish, and perhaps I’m foolish for revealing it now, at the beginning of the end of the American defense of radical openness on the internet. But I want to tell you why it was important forContinue reading “Functionally Pragmatic Salesmanship”

If something is rare to possess and well-known, it is being coordinated around. If it did not acquire both of these properties at once, it was either rare at first or well-known at first. If it was rare at first, then become well-known it was used to coordinate and that proliferated it. If it wasContinue reading “Rare and Well-Known Objects”

What does it mean to say “She motioned me to come forward.” This is the thing, above every example I have seen, that should make us suspicious about any definite notion of “meaning”. — The idea of meaning started as arguments over a ledger—the ledger is what people agree has been spoken. Previously, to winContinue reading “Miscellaneous Musings on Language”

This is a guest post from Wrench, who I’m working with along with a few others to develop the Inexact Sciences. The point of science and theory is to sculpt out useful idealized machinery to make thinking about very complex systems tractable. People always point to physics for this because they’ve gotten the best ratioContinue reading “How Should We Describe How Language Works?”

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”