Goodhart's Law & The Wire

[version]

I agree about "raising the alarm"

or more like, depicting the problems in way that - unlike NGO reports or idk CSPAN or something - has a real cultural footprint

Reminds me of something Richard Powers says in The Overstory,

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

 

[luka]

That's why Dickens has done more good in the world than Marx.

 

[sus]

Reminds me of something Richard Powers says in The Overstory,

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

I think this is true and also that half of politics is just putting things on tables that aren't currently on them.

What's a good place to start with Dickens? He's just not a player in the American canon; besides a stint with _Great Expectations_ in grade 9, I have no exposure.

 

[luka]

There is no American literary canon.

 

[luka]

But part of the joke is i only started reading him a few weeks ago so I don't know the best place to start. I've only finished one novel. Halfway through another.

 

[sus]

There is no American literary canon.

oh boy I can't believe this disrespect!! Son, Melville birthed modernism. Gertrude Stein and TS Eliot were Americans who gave England it's last proper wankoff in the début de siècle. The wet dream of the Mandarins they fulfilled was itself a last-ditch clinging to Kantian aristocracy before American pop culture smashed and knocked up every last porcelain lady. America owns postmodernism, and it gave out modernism on loan.

 

[luka]

That;'s what the CIA taught you in school. nationalist boosterism.

 

[luka]

there are individual Americans, eg Whitman, who wrote well but there is no American canon. No infant nation can have a canon.

 

[sus]

This is England's national heritage

 

[sus]

there are individual Americans, eg Whitman, who wrote well but there is no American canon. No infant nation can have a canon.

hey don't get all nice and reasonable on me now

 

[version]

View attachment 3881
This is England's national heritage

You know how we do.

 

[IdleRich]

Keep trying to tell my girlfriend that Moby Dick is as important as the Russian masters but she won't have any of it.

 

[luka]

i think she's right Rich. The Cult of Dick is a CIA invention.

 

[IdleRich]

Explains why Dick never penetrated Russia I guess, CIA had limited traction.

 

[version]

 

[sus]

Staying on-thread, I wrote a 10,000 word encyclopedia entry on "surrogation," a concept encompassing everything from gamification, the "nearest unblocked strategy" problem in AI, and signaling theory/animal mimicry, to Goodhart/Campbell's laws. Y'all are welcome!

https://gdjohnson.github.io/docs/surrogation.html

 

[sus]

Folks on this board might get the most from the section on "Qualitative surrogation," which quotes liberally from our boy Reynolds in heralding the triumph of glam

 

[Corpsey]

It would be interesting to get Obama's honest, truth-serum elicited opinion on the wire and how it relates to his experience as president etc.

Cos depending on who you believe he was either happily/carelessly complicit in war crimes and Wall Street crimes or he was a basically good man stuck in a hard position where he couldn't really change the system he found himself at the top/centre of.

The latter being obviously what the wire's all about.

 

[luka]

Staying on-thread, I wrote a 10,000 word encyclopedia entry on "surrogation," a concept encompassing everything from gamification, the "nearest unblocked strategy" problem in AI, and signaling theory/animal mimicry, to Goodhart/Campbell's laws. Y'all are welcome!

https://gdjohnson.github.io/docs/surrogation.html

just read it. didn't like it.

 

[luka]

just read it. didn't like it.

joking, only joking. not read it yet. bear with me.