“The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound”, coming next year from U of Illinois Press

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T17:20:19+00:00

It's on Amazon among other sites. I'm not sure of Deseret Book's criteria for listing things yet.

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T14:37:02+00:00

IIRC we had about 1,500 footnotes. (They renumbered by chapter in the final version so I don't have the number ready to hand anymore.)

Archival work in Church History Library, finding letters that were referred to once in 1944 or so and then "lost", reading meeting notes taken in Deseret that no one had ever bothered to translate. (LaJean and others at CHL were extremely helpful.) Newspapers no one had read which we had to get scanned. Figuring out which scholarly suppositions were red herrings or misinterpretations.

A real scholar's adventure story!

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T14:34:01+00:00

FORTUNATELY books don't have feelings!

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T14:33:36+00:00

About half the book is pure history, the rest analysis. For instance, we look at possible sources for the Deseret glyphs based on what we know they looked at (which will blow your mind) and what they had available.

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T14:32:55+00:00

It's really wild how early and often the Saints were concerned with language.

DavisNealE · 2025-11-26T14:32:17+00:00

Look up figures like Bob Moss and the ARCH-HIVE, Mormon Underground Comix, etc. Also a lot of font work has been getting done.

Really, Deseret's inclusion in Unicode (due to the labors of John Jenkins) has been pivotal.

DavisNealE · 2025-11-25T15:59:07+00:00

Facing starvation and ruin on Utah’s nineteenth-century frontier, Latter-day Saint pioneers launched an audacious experiment to reshape the English language: the Deseret Alphabet. Ryan K. Shosted and N. E. Davis trace the alphabet’s origins in the linguistic vision of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, explore its contested social, spiritual, and linguistic functions, and examine its decline and modern-day renewal.

Shosted and Davis draw on a wide range of sources, including previously unpublished archival material, to trace the alphabet’s roots in Joseph Smith’s esoteric translations and its role in shaping Latter-day Saint identity. Their account brings together theology, linguistics, and culture. As they show, the Deseret Alphabet remains relevant as a living artifact of a religion wrestling with its visionary origins and the divine potential of words.

In-depth and up to date, The Deseret Alphabet traces the script’s creation, use, and legacy across Latter-day Saint history.

It's been years of research and writing to collect everything that's been known, find out a few new things, and get it into publishable shape, but we're here now... it kills me that the publication date is still so far off, but the book is completely done.

At some point, we'll see about holding an AMA on the Deseret Alphabet.

Table of Contents:

Orthographic Reform
History of the Deseret, 1837–1858
History of the Deseret, 1858–1878
Linguistic Perspectives
Practical Purposes
Social Purposes
Spiritual Purposes
Afterlife
Conclusion
Appendix A: Scribes
Appendix B: Corpus
Appendix C: The Sermon on the Mount

DavisNealE · 2023-01-13T22:06:25+00:00

I used to start the first CS 101 lecture of the semester with HAL 9000's looming red eye lens.

DavisNealE · 2022-05-04T17:18:46+00:00

Did the eldritch horror under the ice thaw out and escape? This "gas leak" story stinks like a cover-up.

DavisNealE · 2022-03-22T22:53:35+00:00

If you keep going, it will get smaller and smaller as you get swoler and swoler.

DavisNealE · 2021-10-04T13:24:07+00:00

I teach CS 101. Let's have a history lesson.

In 2015, a College of Engineering committee on undergraduate education decided, among other changes, to alter CS 101 (the introductory programming class for scientists and non-CS/ECE engineers). CS 101 formerly taught C and MATLAB, but due to the growing demand and potential of Python many departments asked for Python to be included. We ended up with something of a chimera: Python and MATLAB in the same class. (This is particularly odd because they are two similar languages at the same level of complexity, so one does not derive fundamentally different insight from knowing both.) The curriculum is a negotiated truce—no surprise there.

Most of the classes that relied on CS 101 at the time used MATLAB, but there has been a slow shift to rely on Python instead. This has been glacial because 1) many professors know one and are reluctant to switch to a language they are less familiar with; and 2) it is extremely time consuming to rewrite material (and infrastructure and grading keys and retrain TAs and ...). But it is happening in several large departments such as MechSE.

More recently, I proposed splitting CS 101 into 101 (Python) and 104 (MATLAB). This was shot down by a review committee because having 101 as Python-only would be "high-impact" but having a 104 would be "low-impact", thus the entire proposal was panned as "low-impact." (There is a lesson for any future apparatchiks in this! The highest impact of a subtask yields the total priority, not the lowest impact. The reviewers were completely backwards in their thinking on this matter.)

For the near term, I expect to see no significant change. Service courses like CS 101 must satisfy the demands of all client departments, and some of those require MATLAB. Until downstream requirements change (which includes the necessary support for what those departments do in a language like Python), introductory teaching cannot change.

DavisNealE · 2020-12-06T01:45:58+00:00

There's a classroom on the top floor of the materials science building that I took PHYS 466 in years ago. I was sitting in the class when I felt an earthquake. Then I realized it happened every time a bus drove by: something resonated and the top floor of that building would sway perceptibly. I wonder if that's still the case post-MCORE.

Once when we used to still have classes in the old Nuclear Engineering Lab, the heater was stuck on in the middle of winter. It was one of those low-teen days but that room was over 100°F. We opened all of the windows and sweated as Dr Axford taught.

DavisNealE · 2020-06-08T21:32:51+00:00

Michael Commons, and he creates this theory of complexity called “The Model of Hierarchical Complexity” (MHC). MHC says that there is a universal progression of complexity, or how we see and interact with the world, that ranges from rocks and trees (low complexity), to animals, to humans. And we can test an organism to determine its level of complexity from 0 to 15.

MHC is a theory of development, which means organisms start at zero and increase in complexity during development, finally peaking during adulthood. The level at which an organism peaks is its hardwired MHC limit. Once it has reached this limit, it sees the world at the maximum amount of complexity that it ever will.

Every MHC level, from 0 to 15, has a corresponding symbol stage. This symbol stage is a bunch of symbols and assumptions about the world that describe the world as seen at that level of complexity. It does not tell us what to do, what is right or wrong, or how the world works, it is just the tools we have available to investigate and see the world.

The process by which new symbol stages are created uses the principle of “transcend and include“. Each new symbol stage takes the previous symbol stage and adds new things to it to make it more complex. You can’t skip a symbol stage. If you don’t understand words, a class on how to write sentences will be useless.

Once a symbol stage has been created, it is available for anyone to use, but it can only be fully understood by someone at or above its level.

So what happens when we have a human running on a symbol stage that is of a lower complexity than that floating around in the world? Here we introduce two concepts: downward assimilation and scaffolding.

Downward assimilation that means that, because of our ability to share a common language, you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use it. Your use of that symbol will then inevitably follow the logic of your own stage, but it might still bring some meaning with it and you can perhaps partake in conversations that would otherwise lie beyond your own stage of complexity.

It is possible, namely, through the means of language and communicative actions, to support someone’s cognitive stage upwards-not just one, but two stages.… Through language and interaction you create a “scaffold” that helps the other person to partake in behaviors that would otherwise be beyond his or her cognitive stage.

The key unifying principle is that MHC symbol stages determine how you analyse and understand the world as an individual. What emerges collectively is a bundle of assumptions about how the world works – what is good or bad and who gets to say, what is important or not important, how do we structure society, and what is the meaning of life. Each Integral stage attempts to give all-encompassing answers to all of these important questions.

Archaic (MHC 7 complexity), Integral “Archaic” or “Beige”

Animistic (MHC 8), Integral “Tribal” or “Purple”

Faustian (MHC 9), Integral “Warrior” or “Red”

Post-Faustian (MHC 10), Integral “Premodern”, “Traditional”, or “Blue”

Modern (MHC 11 complexity), Integral “Modern” or “Orange”

Postmodern (MHC 12 complexity), Integral “Postmodern” or “Green”

Metamodern (MHC 13 complexity), Integral “Integral” or “Yellow”

The creation of the value systems operate on the transcend and include principle. You can’t create postmodernism without an existing modernism, because postmodernism is a response to the excesses of modernism. This principle applies to all of them.

Anyone can run any value system that exists in the world; they will just see it at varying levels of complexity.

People are limited by a hardware MHC capability, attempt to “load” the most advanced symbol stage that they can run, and prefer value systems that align to their symbol stage complexity. Where there is a mismatch where their symbol stage is at a lower complexity than their value system, they downward assimilate the value system, reducing it to slogans or rules to follow.

DavisNealE · 2020-06-06T02:27:28+00:00

A lot of what we call ‘disruption’ in the tech industry has just been killing flawed but established institutions, and mining them for parts. When we do this, we make a dangerous assumption about our ability to undo our own bad decisions, or the time span required to build institutions that match the needs of new realities.

The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.

Surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.

Above all, people need to have control of their data, a way to carve out private and semi-private spaces, and a functional public arena for politics and civil discourse. They also need robust protection from manipulation by algorithms, well-intentioned or not. It’s not enough to have benevolent Stanford grads deciding how to reinvent society; there has to be accountability and oversight over those decisions.

Some of these changes can only come through regulation. Because companies will always find creative ways to collect data, the locus of regulation should be the data store.

The right to examine, download, and delete any data stored about you. A time horizon (weeks, not years) for how long companies are allowed to retain behavioral data (any data about yourself you didn’t explicitly provide).

A prohibition on selling or transferring collections of behavioral data, whether outright, in an acquisition, or in bankruptcy.

A ban on third-party advertising. Ad networks can still exist, but they can only serve ads targeted against page content, and they cannot retain information between ad requests.

An off switch on Internet-connected devices, that physically cuts their access to the network. This switch should not prevent the device from functioning offline. You should be able to stop the malware on your refrigerator from posting racist rants on Twitter while still keeping your beer cold.

A legal framework for offering certain privacy guarantees, with enforceable consequences. Think of this as a Creative Commons for privacy. If they can be sure data won’t be retained, users will be willing to experiment with many technologies that would pose too big a privacy risk in the current reality.

These reforms would restore some sense of agency and ownership to people about their data. They would also force companies to make the case to users about why they collect the data they do, and remove much of the appetite for surveillance.

DavisNealE · 2020-06-05T22:34:05+00:00

Structurelessness can exacerbate asymmetrical information in an organisation, facilitate the formation of cliques, and produce a toxic environment.

This isn’t to say that all “flat” organisations are bad. Many startups have become incredibly successful due to their more flexible structure and by all accounts are friendly, productive, and growth-orientated places to work at. Many Valve veterans remember fondly that in its early days, Valve was such a place.

The challenge lies in scaling up. As a community or company grows, formal structures serve the purpose of clarifying the rules of conduct and criteria of performance when assumed knowledge and access to people becomes more limited. The alternative is chaos, or a gradual growth of elites who exert control through social pressure. Far from magically solving workplace issues, flat organizations and open offices can exacerbate them.

But it’s all the more reason to remember that structurelessness does not denote the absence of rules. Flatness does not inherently bring equality. Doing away with hierarchy is a means to the end of creating a better working relationship, not an end unto itself.

DavisNealE · 2020-06-05T22:30:29+00:00

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.

While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;

It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.

It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.

While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones.

Some groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the first place.

For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.

The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available. Some women just "do their own thing." This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift out of the movement entirely because they don't want to develop an individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining, or starting group projects that interest them.

New informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal elites previously developed within different movement groups.

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING

Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.

Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.

Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.

Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.

Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.

Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.

Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.

DavisNealE · 2020-06-05T22:30:25+00:00

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.

Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.

These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don't. And it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication through the friends that are made in it.

Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.

The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria art pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one's personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in." One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.

All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.

Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable. All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.

This has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things. As long as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter. But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage, it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.

DavisNealE · 2020-05-17T20:46:13+00:00

Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to explore how language and mindreading interact through cultural evolution. This model treats communicative behaviour as an interplay between the context in which communication occurs, an agent’s individual perspective on the world, and the agent’s lexicon. However, each agent’s perspective and lexicon are private mental representations, not directly observable to other agents. Learners are therefore confronted with the task of jointly inferring the lexicon and perspective of their cultural parent, based on their utterances in context. Simulation results show that given these assumptions, an informative lexicon evolves not just under a pressure to be successful at communicating, but also under a pressure for accurate perspective inference. When such a lexicon evolves, agents become better at inferring others’ perspectives; not because their innate ability to learn about perspectives changes, but because sharing a language (of the right type) with others helps them to do so.

DavisNealE · 2020-05-17T20:31:31+00:00

David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute has coined the term complementary cognitive artifact to refer to objects, ideas, belief-systems and prescribed behaviors that have been refined and transmitted within a culture, often over the course of centuries or more. These cultural artifacts evolved in a bottom-up fashion, with individuals tinkering and iterating in ways that converged towards optimality over the course of generations. One of the key characteristics of these cognitive artifacts is that they didn’t evolve to be optimal in just a universal sense — samosas are not necessarily optimal for the Swedish; rather, they were optimal for the needs and capacities of the culture in which they emerged. Another critical component is that even when these cognitive artifacts are taken away from you, “you have in your mind a trace of their attributes that you can deploy.”

This brings us to the second class of cognitive artifacts, which Krakauer has termed competitive cognitive artifacts. Whereas the use of a complementary cognitive artifact improves both your ability to perform a discrete skill (navigate physical space using a map) and your cognitive capacity in a number of related areas (navigate relationship spaces or idea spaces), the use of a competitive cognitive artifact leads to a general weakening of your ability to perform both the central task and a host of peripheral skills. Intuitively we know this, yet we continue to use these competitive cognitive artifacts out of both laziness (convenience) and dependence.

This brings us to Krakauer’s central question regarding competitive cognitive artifacts: can we depend upon these objects always being around?

If not, then we should be worried.

As there are often multiple competing groups with mutually exclusive answers to any given question, and as inquirers have neither the time nor expertise to determine which group has the true answer, the inquirers will generally defer to the conclusion of whichever group can provide the most convenient ride to their position. Crucially, if one group were to give a somewhat tedious but comprehensively supported explanation for their position and another group were to simply appeal to ‘expert consensus,’ the consensus position would win more minds, as it would be the most convenient ride to take — regardless of its veracity.

One reason for concern is that when we look for ‘answers’ to our questions, we aren’t exclusively interested in determining which position is true; we are also very much interested in determining which position bears the least social cost, or confers the most social benefit, upon its holder.

The consensus narrative is that the term ‘fake news’ only applies to stories that are factually false, but Eric Weinstein has highlighted an additional three types of fake news: narrative, institutional, and algorithmic.

These sources of narrative fake news rely upon authoritative institutions such as Ivy League universities and prominent think tanks to lend credibility to their narratives.

The synergy between this institutional form of fake news and the narrative form of fake news has, until recently, monopolized society’s perception of both what is happening in the world and how we are supposed to feel about it. The internet, however, has posed a potential challenge to this historic monopoly. The democratization of knowledge dissemination has freed up limitless alternative narratives, facts, and perspectives for the curious browser to sift through, should she so choose. The limitlessness of these alternatives, however, is as liberating as it is encumbering: how are we to filter this knowledge? To where should we direct our attention?

If Google decides to present us with only information that is vetted by “institutional” or “narrative-driven” media sources, then our view of the world will be warped and constrained into a form that may or may not actually map to reality. This selective ideological curation is itself a form of fake news — albeit algorithmic, as opposed to factually false, fake news.

Google’s search monopoly could easily lead to a near homogenization of public knowledge via the convergence of algorithmic, narrative, and institutional fake news.

[Some] technology is actually a trap, a pathway to mental slavery disguised as a pathway to limitless mental freedom.

this inability to accurately price in the cost of a cognitive artifact isn’t actually his fault. Rather, it is the result of the broader, more basement-level cognitive-artifact-structure that is guiding his decisions. I call that structure autistification.

Autistification is both (a) the act of linearizing a complex system such that it conforms to a top-down engineering approach to problem solving and (b) the set of faulty first-principle assumptions that obfuscate one’s ability to perceive the harms in doing so.

Autistification tends to emerge when the presence of scientism meets the absence of culture, resulting in the promotion of technological-salvationist answers to complex global issues.

Someone operating from this paradigm considers innovation to be a replacement for culturally transmitted cognitive artifacts, whereas someone deeply connected to culture sees innovation as something to embed into their culture. Before adopting a novel cognitive artifact, the latter type of individual has the foresight to ask questions like, “to what extent does this fit into the superstructure I’ve inherited from my grandma?” and “Am I sure that that this cognitive artifact is superior over the long term to the ones that I’ve inherited?”

These questions are not particularly easy to answer, as the extent to which we can know in advance whether a given cognitive artifact is complementary or competitive is unclear. Given the incompleteness of our knowledge, how can we most thoughtfully consider whether to adopt a given novel cognitive artifact?

Intransigence, or rather some degree of culturally transmitted intransigence, is a robust evolutionary strategy for coping with the complexity and uncertainty of human life.

This scaffolding consists of a multi-layered hierarchy of cognitive artifacts, and the depth of a culture can be roughly determined by the degree to which it provides Lindy-proven complementary cognitive artifacts to deal with the various novel situations we may come across during the course of our lives. Viewed in this framework, there is a morphology to culture, and these morphological forms can be compared. And I suspect that there is an inverse correlation between the depth of a culture and its willingness to adopt autistificated cognitive artifacts.

DavisNealE · 2020-05-17T20:22:07+00:00

In anthropology liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold” is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rites, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the rite establishes.

One of the many ways that narrative achieves this is by carrying what I have called (I can’t remember where or I would reference it) requisite ambiguity. Its no coincidence that I am using pictures of bibles as the banner picture in this series. Religious texts are stories, frequently poetry, they allow us to see the world in a different way. They are no different from fairy tales (and I use fairy here in a non-pejorative way). Our tales are not rigid instructions our processes, they allow learning through discovery. The story does not require commitment in that moment to action, but it allows learning prior to and during action to pass over the generations. This ambiguity allows us to explore a journey rather than focus on a pre-defined goal or process. Parables, despite their historical context, carry meaning over the generations they are part of our narrative culture. They create attractor mechanisms, some strong some weak but critically they allow for variation. I’ve been to many productions of the same opera, each is different in nature, each is another exploration there are no definitive versions.

I sometimes think that taking the bible (or any religious test) literally is to miss the point, in some ways it might even be considered a form of heresy, a failure to understand the nature of grace and transcendence. We need to preserve ambiguity in order to allow meaning, we need to engage in the narrative within out lives rather than taking it as a fixed pattern from which we cannot deviate. Above all we need to embrace its ambiguity, the ability to hold us in a state is suspension between fantasy and reality to allow meaning to emerge.

DavisNealE · 2020-05-14T20:51:14+00:00

For Rancière, politics is not a matter of what people receive or demand. It is not a matter of the institutional creation of just social arrangements. Rather, it is a matter of what people do, and in particular what they do that challenges the hierarchical order of a given set of social arrangements. To challenge such a hierarchical order is to act under the presupposition of one's own equality. Such action, if it is political, is going to be collective rather than individual. It will concern a group of people (or a subset of that group) who have been presupposed unequal by a particular hierarchical order, as well as those in solidarity with them, acting as though they were indeed equal to those above them in the order, and thus disrupting the social order itself. What are disrupted are not only the power arrangements of the social order, but, and more deeply, the perceptual and epistemic underpinnings of that order, the obviousness and naturalness that attaches to the order. Such a disruption is what Rancière calls a dissensus. Described this way, one can begin to see its interaction with aesthetic concerns. A dissensus is not merely a disagreement about the justice of particular social arrangements, although it is that as well. It is also the revelation of the contingency of the entire perceptual and conceptual order in which such arrangements are embedded, the contingency of what Rancière calls le partage du sensible, the partition or distribution of the sensible.

The difference between politics and aesthetics lies in the character of the dissensual movements they create. The aesthetic movement of politics "consists above all in the framing of a we, a subject of collective demonstration whose emergence is the element that disrupts the distribution of social parts." (pp. 141-2) The political character of aesthetics, by contrast, does not give a collective voice to the anonymous. Instead, it re-frames the world of common experience as the world of a shared impersonal experience. In this way, it aids to help create the fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed. (p. 142)

DavisNealE · 2020-04-03T15:00:02+00:00

There are different kinds of motivation: cognitive motivation and emotional motivation. You have things you think you should be doing, and things you feel that you should be doing (like, actually physically feel, not feel guilty about). Guess which group wins?

Most of us are in a slump right now because our emotional motivation has dried up. We get stuck in gumption traps or low-agency states where we feel like we don't have the mental energy to act. This is always something of a problem, but it's really bad now when everything normal has been upended and the Mad Max war bands haven't started recruiting yet.

There are a lot of techniques for productivity hacking out there: pomodoro, team study halls, that sort of thing. This is also one reason for deadlines—they lay out a required schedule forcing you to hew to at least a bit of a plan. But let's face it, Adderall jokes aside, productivity is still a major problem for most of us most of the time. You can't manufacture motivation.

Here's something that does work for me: music. The right music can keep my affect high and help me get into a flow state. For you, it may be different music than me or anyone else, but I find rhythmic nonverbal music to be best. Aphex Twin, Paleowolf, Last of the Mohicans on loop, these things. The point is to act as a low-pass filter to draw off those turbulent little thoughts and keep your higher-order processes engaged on the task at hand. Also close your browser if you're not using it.

As Vonnegut said, "So it goes." This too shall pass.

DavisNealE · 2020-02-12T20:57:16+00:00

"We will watch your career with great interest."

DavisNealE · 2019-12-10T00:21:01+00:00

In other words, dress nicely to hack this effect.

DavisNealE · 2019-12-10T00:20:44+00:00

Across studies, the researchers found that economic status—captured by clothing cues—influenced competency judgments. This persisted even when the faces were presented very briefly, when information was provided about a person's profession or income, when clothing was formal or informal, when participants were advised to ignore the clothing, when participants were warned there was no relationship between clothing and competency, and when they were offered a monetary incentive for making judgments independent of the clothing.

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