there  could  be  snakes  in  here

Somebody has written an ad campaign based, apparently, on famous destructive holes in human reason. Of course it makes perfect sense for gambling companies to glorify bad reasoning, but that fact made it no less surprising to see on the street. What have we here?: The fundamental attribution error . Base rate neglect . The introspection illusion, and, Dunning-Kruger . Illusory superiority; overconfidence in weak inductions . Fine, it's unintentional - certainly it's no more immoral than its parent industry - sure, cognitive bias is already so ubiquitous that mere positive PR is hard-pressed to make us worse at reasoning. But then they go and the perfunctory line at the bottom about 'responsible gambling'. A step beyond. ******************************************** Chuck Klosterman points out that, just in writing the above, I have fallen for modern advertising's core mechanism: get us talking even in the face of its meaninglessness . Our con...

'Adrift' (c) Andrew Wyeth (1982) Talk is cheap; that's what's good about it. ********************************************************** A friend recently told me he's never going to work in the private sector. Interesting thing to say - he's not so political, and was never before so programmatic. Apparently it's the temp-contract, high-pressure ugly bullshit of it that motivates his boycott more than the world-historical extractive-destructive part. There is a strong argument against such chastity, but I didn't press it too strongly, this time. ********************************************************** What does 'radical' mean? Half the people I read use it as a synonym of ' good '; others use it for 'exaggerated', 'unjustified'. OK: what do the claims that " Insanity is a sane response to an insane world "* and " the end goal of feminist revolution must be ... not just the elimina...

(c) Edel Rodriguez (2012) Those whom heaven helps, call the kin of heaven. They do not learn it by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not come to it with reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. (Those who cannot do so will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.) – Zhuangzi The thing about doing maths - that is, "higher" maths, the kind of maths that doesn't have or need real-life instances, that in its purest Form doesn't need even a mental instance - is that you're teetering on the edge of senselessness all the time. It is the zero-gravity circus of the mind. Proofs are tightropes, sure, but you can never tell if you're really on one until you get to the assumed other side, and look back, and, in my case, find yourself not smugly bowing to the audience, but crashing to the ground, impacting a surface which is not in fact there. But decelerating painfully all the same. So people like me...

Me quitte. Baby please gon' go. Don't believe the hype. Think twice, it's alright . 'If you love them, warn them that you are awful and make everyone around you unhappy.' While there are plenty of egoist songs about how love sucks , or about banishing a wrong'un, songs which rebuff someone out of altruism take a leap of insight beyond most songwriters. (For reality is beyond them.) 1. Autoclave - MoGos "Maybe it's the heat in here, maybe it's the pressure: You ought to head for the exits, the sooner the better. I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam And no one in her right mind would make her home my home ." 2. Absolutely Cuckoo - Magnetic Fields " Don't fall in love with me yet / we've only recently met... I only tell you this because / I'm easy to get rid of But not if you fall in love... Know now that I'm on the make / And if you make a mistake My heart will certainly break / I'll have to jum...

who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you ... - ee cummings YES SURE MAYBE IT MIGHT One might spend one's life reading about living, without actually living. (Man.) The easy response is don't tell me what living is and is not, I can decide that for myself thanks. Maybe a lifestyle centred on reading encourages a false sense of superiority - or a false sense of the power of reason. (The original sin of philosophy: to mistake philosophy as essential to good action.) More generally, you might think of reading as parasocial , involving false, dubious interaction with someone you wouldn't much identify if you met them without the filter of composition. Or worse, a replacement for live discourse which hides the ad hoc, underdetermined, unpersuadable nature of even highly intellectual encounters. There's a Latin phrase I like a lot - Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio , 'be silent or say something better than silence...

(c) Randall Munroe (2010) Model of romance for you. Say there are two functions: A(y) – how attracted person x is to person y, and R(y) – x's respect for y. Then, two composite functions with each other: R(A) - how much respect x has given a degree of attraction, and A(R) - how much attraction x has for a given level of respect. If we assume that they aren't symmetrical (that people can have non- monotonic functions), then romantically active people all fall into 2 or more of 8 exhaustive romantic functions: SUPPLY-SIDE [If A(y) goes up --> R(y) goes up]. R(A) is proportional: x is ruled by beauty's halo . (X is shallow.) More eye pop, swell chest [If A(y) goes up --> R(y) goes down]. R(A) is inverse: The mind's revenge. (X is sadistic.) More eye pop, shrink chest [If A(y) goes down --> R(y) up]. R(A) negatively inverse: Hm! (X is maybe insecure?) Less eye pop, swell chest [A(y) goes down --> R(y) down]. R(A)...

Sometimes I don't finish books because I've become someone else in the interim and don't share their goal of reading it. Any book that takes more than a week is liable to fall foul of young people’s mutability in this way. A lot of what we read is just to say we’ve read it - they are plugs for gaps in cultural armour. We fail to see these through because they are interminable – cf. Gibbons’ Decline and fucking Fall – and because our motive’s so base in the first place. The act of plugging could be noble – the will to improve oneself – but it's more often the ignoble fear of looking ignorant (rather than the excellent fear of being ignorant). The educated world keeps up an arms race in which indifferent bystanders are gunned down by fully-auto sneering, where books are secondary to the concept of themselves. This side of ‘literary’ culture, call it the consumerism of the immaterial, is scarcely different from more obvious consumerism about designer labels and very la...