Legibility, Illegibility, Anti-Legibility

woops

is not like other people
Opacity, transparency, being open, being vulnerable, being predictable, being unpredictable. Donkeyspace, the metagame, darkness, light, vision, blindness, order, entropy, information, surveillance, control.
@suspended always knows what his own threads are about (or should be about)
 

woops

is not like other people
Opacity, transparency, being open, being vulnerable, being predictable, being unpredictable. Donkeyspace, the metagame, darkness, light, vision, blindness, order, entropy, information, surveillance, control.
what is this thread "not" about?
 

luka

Well-known member
not at all because the possibility that it is a con or a prank is part of the work, part of the fun of it
 

luka

Well-known member
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
 

luka

Well-known member
The very medium of poetic textuality incorporates and instantiates the features of breakage at local and microscopic levels, as discoverable by phonological and other types of analysis, into a dialectic which may look arbitrary or merely optional but which polarizes the task of poetic composition. Formal and structural features within the language system, the selective-discourse system, the prosodic and formal verse system, all within the contrastive perspectives of historical development, compete to provoke the formation of shifting hybrids across boundaries of sometimes radical counter-tension. The active poetic text is thus characteristically in dispute with its own ways and means, contrary implication running inwards to its roots and outwards to its surface proliferations: not as acrobatic display but as working the
work that, when fit for purpose, poetry needs to do. These are the
proper arguments of poetry as a non-trivial pursuit, the templates
for ethical seriousness. As just one example, the condoned spillage
of innocent blood is everywhere around us, now, and the artificers
of consolatory blessing who are the leaders of organized religion are
up to their dainty necks in this blood. I have believed throughout
my writing career that no poet has or can have clean hands, because
clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands
do no worthwhile work.
 

luka

Well-known member
In prose, though not all prose, there is generally a quite closely defined

channel or corridor of sense-making, following the sequence of phrases

and sentences, with a serial progressive development which is not dis-

tracted by word-sounds or by excess of side-meanings—incidental or

accidental semantic possibilities that lie outside the main channel.11 But
in certain types of “difficult” poetry this corridor of sense is much wider

and more open, more like a network across the whole expanse of the

text, with many loops and cross-links of semantic and referring activity

which extend the boundaries of relevance, and of control by context,

in many directions at once. If these many directions are developed so
as to produce strong contradiction and self-dispute then the method

may become a dialectic practice, in which poetic form and expression

are brought into internal contest with themselves and with each other.
 

woops

is not like other people
In prose, though not all prose, there is generally a quite closely defined

channel or corridor of sense-making, following the sequence of phrases

and sentences, with a serial progressive development which is not dis-

tracted by word-sounds or by excess of side-meanings—incidental or

accidental semantic possibilities that lie outside the main channel.11 But
in certain types of “difficult” poetry this corridor of sense is much wider

and more open, more like a network across the whole expanse of the

text, with many loops and cross-links of semantic and referring activity

which extend the boundaries of relevance, and of control by context,

in many directions at once. If these many directions are developed so
as to produce strong contradiction and self-dispute then the method

may become a dialectic practice, in which poetic form and expression

are brought into internal contest with themselves and with each other.
classic con-trick double talk and distracting patter
 
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sus

Well-known member
For example, a complaint from a friend of mine who's done a fair amount of "on the ground" development work in Africa is that a lot of people who are looking to donate want clear, simple criteria to guide their donations (e.g. an RCT showed that the intervention was highly effective). But many effective interventions cannot have their impact demonstrated ex ante in any simple way.
 

sus

Well-known member
This issue of projects which are more legible getting more funding is an issue across organizations as well as within them. For example, my friend says that, back when GiveWell was mainly or only recommending charities that had simply quantifiable return, she basically couldn't get her friends who worked in other fields to put resources towards efforts that weren't endorsed by GiveWell. People who didn't know about her aid background would say things like "haven't you heard of GiveWell?" when she suggested putting resources towards any particular cause, project, or organization. I talked to a friend of mine who worked at GiveWell during that time period about this and, according to him, the reason GiveWell initially focused on charities that had easily quantifiable value wasn't that they thought those were the highest impact charities. Instead, it was because, as a young organization, they needed to be credible and it's easier to make a credible case for charities whose value is easily quantifiable.
 

sus

Well-known member
Adam Elkus:
> Broadly speaking, Alice ideally must first be sphinxlike in character to pull any of this off. She must foster [[ambiguity]] about what her ultimate goals are in order to have an advantage over those around her. This style of behavior is called “robust action” in sociology. For Alice to be an ideal manipulator, her actions must be interpretable from multiple perspectives at once, potentially function as moves in multiple [[concepts/games|games]] at once, and conceal her public and private motivations. This maintains her flexibility and discretion and thwarts attempts by rivals to narrow her space of choices. Forced clarification of her [[commitment|commitments]] and lock-in to hard goals only gives Bob an ability to constrain her.
 
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