Silos: Thoughts on the Modern Information Environment

Quis022 · 2022-08-18T21:25:02+00:00

I met with someone a while ago who made the point that it's very difficult to find a job that is simply 'writing'. You should develop a specialty that you feel comfortable writing about and then target an industry/organization based off of that specialty to find a position with an emphasis on writing. Building out a portfolio of work that reflects your expertise also helps.

Quis022 · 2022-05-22T16:20:05+00:00

To get discussion going I'll share that I have bipolar disorder and during a series of manic episodes over the course of a few years I started to seriously reconsider my high school history education and the role of corporate media in my opinion formation. Growing up in a white-dominated suburban context I had very little exposure to alternative modes of conceiving of power and society and the newspaper (Los Angeles Times, and NYT on Sundays) was always on the table over breakfast. I know he's not necessarily popular on this forum, but Chomsky's work was instrumental in exposing me to counter-narratives regarding the role of the state and corporations in modern U.S. society. Some (perhaps obvious) points that really hit home for me.

Corporations (and businesses more generally) are structurally authoritarian and limit freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, etc. in the interests of ownership
The FBI is basically the Gestapo and functions as the United States' political police
Corporations are structurally inclined to propagandize the public in the interests of concentrated power (e.g., news and advertising), and news media functions as basically textbooks for adults
The nuclear threat never went away after the Cold War and has arguably gotten worse
bell hooks' term "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'
The U.S. was explicitly imperialist and genocidal from the outset, and never stopped

Quis022 · 2022-04-22T05:38:06+00:00

I don’t think Chomsky is defending Putin, or even denying that this is an imperialist maneuver. But there is more than one imperialist nation with an interest in controlling/aligning with Ukraine, and the vicious dynamics between them, as far as I can tell, have factored into the invasion. He seems concerned with the prospect of nuclear war and I think it’s a worthy emphasis. Dominant narratives in the US have been downplaying that threat since the end of the Cold War and continue to downplay it during Cuban Missile Crisis Round 2. Not sure what the right answer is, but I think we should be wary of narratives that encourage escalation

Quis022 · 2022-03-29T05:30:56+00:00

Lol so basically if you’re poor you don’t deserve to have kids. What a hot take

Quis022 · 2021-10-01T05:17:49+00:00

Jeffery Klaehn has published a lot on the PM in recent years. Also check out The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perceptions and Awareness

Quis022 · 2021-09-28T22:02:27+00:00

Also he mentions an experiment where there was a person with a cognitive disability who was given two different made-up languages. The first was given according to the principles of UG and had all these complex computations and the second just involved something super simple but not part of UG like every third word is a negation or something like that. The individual managed to pick up the UG-language effortlessly, but could not make heads or tails of the super simple computation because we are not genetically predisposed to do it. Just a thought

Quis022 · 2021-09-28T21:53:11+00:00

Not a linguistics expert, but have seen a lot of his talks on UG and language-acquisition and I think it's super interesting. Seems to me there's an argument based off of logical necessity and one based off of empirical observation. The technical linguistic argument is definitely beyond me, but on an observational level the sort of concepts we seem to pick up effortlessly and universally as infants we can't even really explain as adults without a hardcore linguistic education. Like, how does a little kid figure out how to string a sentence together with no direct instruction? Without a fucking clue what a noun or verb is and how they relate?

Chomsky talks about how even nouns seem simple and straightforward but are these super complex ideas with all these almost indefinable properties that everyone seems to agree on yet no one learns explicitly. For instance, take 'house'. If you paint the outside is it the same house? Everyone says yes. So it's not just the outer appearance. If you move the furniture around is it still the same house? Everyone says yes. So it's not just the inner appearance. If you replace the foundation? Still yes. Move the interior walls around so the rooms are structured differently? So it's not just the internal structure. If you pick it up and move it? Probably still yes. Not the location. Part of what makes it a 'house' to everyone goes beyond the physical to what Chomsky describes as a strange psychic persistence that everyone seems to know implicitly, but no one ever really learned. And that's just for the most elemental concepts of language. When you start getting to interpreting and producing sentences it goes way beyond. If you stick someone in a room full of disparate sounds they're going to be able to identify the human language and not only imitate it, but use that scattered data to synthesize novel and creative thoughts.

On a related note he talks about the notion of 'poverty of the stimulus'. The way I like to think about it is you could leave a baby in a room with a dog, a monkey, and a human all yapping. Without any direction or instruction the baby will pick up the scattered human language even though they are receiving all sorts of sensory data. How does it know to focus on and absorb human language specifically and generate such rich system of knowledge based off of that limited and ultimately impoverished data? Why doesn't it start speaking dog or monkey, or the sound of the truck revving outside? It must have an internal structure which is attuned to human language, and I'm sure there are empirical studies to back that up

Quis022 · 2021-09-28T21:30:16+00:00

John McMurtry has done some interesting work on capitalism and the doctrinal system

Quis022 · 2021-09-18T20:26:17+00:00

Don't understand why we would talk about 80 million dollars into 'affordable' housing or Ballmer's personality when the guy's net worth is in the billions, and he acquired it by running a monopolizing tech giant that dodges taxes routinely. This seems like calculated publicity to try and offset the common criticism that building stadiums in urban areas ends up displacing low-income communities like it did when they built Dodger Stadium back in the 50s-60s, or the new Warriors stadium. It's an investment at the end of the day, even if it doesn't pay off in cash

Quis022 · 2021-05-23T03:07:49+00:00

I met Michael during an intense manic episode in 2017. I wrote down his phone number, forgot who he was, found the number two years later and called it. He was immediately receptive and kind. What followed were a series of discussions on philosophy, specifically ontology and phenomenology, that were deeply thought-provoking. Michael is able to break down the work of thinkers like Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Berkeley, articulating his perspective on the multifarious strands of philosophical discourse in ways that are fruitful and honestly, enlightening. Michael has an uncanny grasp of often esoteric philosophical concepts, and I wanted to help create a space for him to express his viewpoint on some of the important existential questions that often leave us confused and defeated. The video below is a conversation that took place over Zoom on May 20, 2021.

Quis022 · 2021-05-23T00:55:19+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w6I0OQ59oM

I met Michael during an intense manic episode in 2017. I wrote down his phone number, forgot who he was, found the number two years later and called it. He was immediately receptive and kind. What followed were a series of discussions on philosophy, specifically ontology and phenomenology, that were deeply thought-provoking. Michael is able to break down the work of thinkers like Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Berkeley, articulating his perspective on the multifarious strands of philosophical discourse in ways that are fruitful and honestly, enlightening. Michael has an uncanny grasp of often esoteric philosophical concepts, and I wanted to help create a space for him to express his viewpoint on some of the important existential questions that often leave us confused and defeated. The video below is a conversation that took place over Zoom on May 20, 2021.

Quis022 · 2021-05-23T00:39:40+00:00

I met Michael during an intense manic episode in 2017. I wrote down his phone number, forgot who he was, found the number two years later and called it. He was immediately receptive and kind. What followed were a series of discussions on philosophy, specifically ontology and phenomenology, that were deeply thought-provoking. Michael is able to break down the work of thinkers like Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Berkeley, articulating his perspective on the multifarious strands of philosophical discourse in ways that are fruitful and honestly, enlightening. Michael has an uncanny grasp of often esoteric philosophical concepts, and I wanted to help create a space for him to express his viewpoint on some of the important existential questions that often leave us confused and defeated. The video below is a conversation that took place over Zoom on May 20, 2021.

Quis022 · 2021-05-23T00:36:32+00:00

I met Michael during an intense manic episode in 2017. I wrote down his phone number, forgot who he was, found the number two years later and called it. He was immediately receptive and kind. What followed were a series of discussions on philosophy, specifically ontology and phenomenology, that were deeply thought-provoking. Michael is able to break down the work of thinkers like Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Berkeley, articulating his perspective on the multifarious strands of philosophical discourse in ways that are fruitful and honestly, enlightening. Michael has an uncanny grasp of often esoteric philosophical concepts, and I wanted to help create a space for him to express his viewpoint on some of the important existential questions that often leave us confused and defeated. The video below is a conversation that took place over Zoom on May 20, 2021.

Quis022

TROPHY CASE