The Chronicles of Wasted Time

On Simulation, Part I

2009-11-27T18:21:05Z

I had a conversation with max_ambiguity that broaches some recent concerns of mine about simulation.

When I was riding my bicycle earlier this week, I thought again about how I always get angry at drivers, and that I dislike how this anger wastes my emotional and physical reserves. Lots of cyclists, I'm sure, get angry at drivers, especially in a congested city; your safety depends on remaining aware of your exposure to hurtling machines of varying tonnage, your own adrenaline is up from simple exertion, and then some douchebag makes a left turn in his Escalade while talking on his cellphone, forcing you to hit your breaks because it's your momentum or your life. This elicits a volcanic, but utterly impotent, rage in me.

So while I was biking earlier this week, I found a solution; rather than thinking of drivers as moral agents whose efforts to snuff me were deliberate, I would imagine that they were just simulations, no more possessed of moral agency or the potential for courtesy than a video-game boss. Stupid, rude, dangerous drivers were simply an obstacle, ghosts in the maze. And you know what? It worked. What use is there in getting mad at an algorithm? I calmed down, and ever since, bicycling around town has visited less stress and fatigue on my body. Montaigne compared anger to an acid that consumes its own container.

But this got me thinking; if this worked so well when commuting, how would suspending my belief in the interiority of others-- not seriously, but for pretend, as my son would say-- benefit operations in other areas of daily life? I quickly decided that deliberately viewing the world as a sociopath would be a moral abomination. The self-delusion I entertain as a cyclist could be morally justified by the fact that while the douchebag in the Escalade could do considerable harm to me, I could do no him no harm (except potential guilt and a probable bill at the auto body shop), and therefore my disregard for his interiority would have not effect on him or anybody else whatsoever.

Regarding a bank teller as a simulated person, on the other hand, strikes me as a categorical moral transgression. But then, I thought, what if I regarded myself as a simulation also? Would I treat myself any differently?

To be continued...

Hack the World

2009-11-20T15:16:52Z

Alan Liu's Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (2004), p.7-8:

Wherever the academy looks in the new millennium, it sees the prospect of a world given over to one knowledge-- a single dominant mode of knowledge associated with the information economy and apparently destined to make all other knowledges, especially historical knowledges, obsolete. Knowledge work harnessed to information technology will now be the sum of all worthwhile knowledge-- except, of course, for the knowledge of all the alternative historical modes of knowledge that undergird, overlap with, or-- like a shadow world, a shadow web-- challenge the conditions of possibility of the millennial new Enlightenmnent.
If cultural criticism is to be legitimate, I speculate, then together with the creative arts, it must metamorphose not so much into Kafka's insect as into a different kind of 'bug.' I have in mind the slow, sprawling, yet ever graceful "Kuang" computer virus at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which can break the densest ICE (intrusion countermeasures electronics) of corporate databases because it transforms its own substance into that of the database, draws nearer and nearer until there seems to be no difference, and then at last injects the one powerful difference it has treasured at its core. My highest ambition for cultural criticism and the creative arts is that they can in tandem become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work-- a problematic role in the information world but one whose general cultural paradigm needs to be explored. Many intellectuals and artists will become so like the icy "New Class" of knowledge workers that there will be no difference; they will be subsumed wholly within their New Economy roles as symbolic analysts, consultants, and designers. But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial, professional, and clerical mainstream of knowledge work itself, may break through the ice to help launch the future literary. For it is the future literary-- or whatever the peculiarly edgy blend of aesthetics and critique once known as the literary (and its sister arts) will be named-- that can serve as witness to the other sides of creative destruction: not the boundless "Creation" that has powered the market rallies of the New Economy, but the equally ceaseless destruction that produces historical difference. This is why it now makes sense to think of cultural criticism and the creative arts as having come into special conjunction. Where once the the job of literature and the arts was creativity, no, in an age of total innovation, I think it must be history.

northrop_fried @ 2009-09-04T11:05:00

2009-09-04T15:07:49Z

Got this in my e-mail today.
Would you really want to encourage your students access to this anonymous complaint service? I'm not certain.

Dear Professor,

I am writing to inform you of a great new resource you may wish to utilize in your upcoming courses. It's a free, easy, and anonymous online service which acts as a private suggestion box that students can use to address their professors. It is particularly beneficial to the academic dynamic in that students may address their professors openly, directly, and privately, without fearing repercussions, complaining to higher authorities, or suffering in silence (or in all likelihood, futile noise).

Imagine, for example, a situation where students cannot hear you lecture, or where widespread cheating occurs for a particular assignment. In both cases, students will likely never speak up. www.autocomplain.com wishes to aid communication processes where power dynamics previously hindered them.

Auto-Complain is committed to facilitating a constructive communication process, even allowing a recipient to address the sender directly. Auto-Complain also maintains the strictest of privacy standards and will never sell or distribute user information.

If you feel you could benefit from opening the doors of communication with your students, tell them about Auto-Complain and include it on your syllabus.

Auto-Complain may be used for a variety of purposes, including work-related or customer-service-related issues as well. I hope you find this information helpful.
Thank you for your time.

buteo jamaicensis (borealis?/light morph)

2009-04-15T20:43:01Z

I saw two red-tailed hawks copulating atop a Romanesque weathervane on the downtown campus today. Lot's of ruffling and squawking.

northrop_fried @ 2009-04-03T13:20:00

2009-04-03T17:22:32Z

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

--Nissim Ezekiel

northrop_fried @ 2009-03-05T20:52:00

2009-03-06T01:52:28Z

Hot water bottle, where have you been all my life?

northrop_fried @ 2009-02-27T07:22:00

2009-02-27T12:22:31Z

I never heard of "comfort food" until I moved to Toronto. Before, that most of my friends my whole life were Jews and Italians. We just call it "food."

Writer's Block: Animal Instinct

2009-02-19T19:25:10Z

What creature would you choose as your spirit animal?

View 502 Answers

GIANT GROUND SLOTH

You don't say.

2009-01-23T02:54:11Z

northrop_fried @ 2008-12-31T18:47:00

2008-12-31T23:47:47Z

Pac-Man is about Shamanic initiation. Initiate eats sacred meal, "devours" ghosts by absorbing them into himself, wanders through an underworld maze of darkness until he transcends it, getting, as it were, to the "next level." Pac-Man overcomes gender, reborn as "Ms. Pac-Man," whose courtship with Pac-Man is psychic reintegration-- the alchemical wedding of mail and female cosmic principles-- and whose ingestion of fruit represents the acquisition of wisdom in the service of the tribe.

Man.

Happy New Year. Only three to go until Time Machine Go.

(x-posted to grantmorrison)

Swedish Music

2008-11-27T00:28:21Z

Welcome the Swedish pop renaissance; who knows the funk so lived so close to Lapland? Global warming?

And then there's the permastoned summer vibe of Dungen that outdoes the Neutral Milk Hotel-type people at tokiness:

Finally, The Knife, which is a bit like Siouxsie, if Siouxsie fans won't take offense. Plus, more skateboarders!

northrop_fried @ 2008-11-05T00:32:00

2008-11-05T05:33:09Z

In my lifetime, I have never been so proud of my country.

I got your partisan rancor right here.

2008-11-03T20:06:18Z

I've restrained myself from posting too much about politics this election; I don't have that much time and I don't have much to say that somebody else hasn't said.

So I will say this once. I endorse the Democratic party for everything from President to 11th circuit appeals judge to county clean-water commissioner to you-name-it. I want the presidency for the Democrats so much I dare not hope.

I like Obama enough; he is not an ignorant authoritarian but a person who seems to cultivate prudence.

But I don't like him as much as I revile the present-day Republican party. I have voted for Republicans for particular posts; I have my sympathies with old-fashioned Yankee Republicanism: muscular but sober foreign policy, fiscal restraint tempered by patrician decency. For such Republicans, to govern was to be a steward rather than a demagogue or engineer.

This was all some time ago. This was the party of Taft and Eisenhower, not yet the party of Richard M. Nixon, the fearmonger, hypocrite, racist, that hunched and despicable machiavel who harnessed into a ruling majority the fears and resentments of people bewildered and threatened by change and destroyed the American people's faith in its own government.

Like Nixon, Reagan viewed the presidency rather than the American people as sovereign. All his sunniness was trade in a radical nostalgia echoed by the emerging right-wing commentariat that saw America as corrupted and endangered by the identity politics of the 60s and 70s, the specific demands of women, blacks, Native Americans, gays, and so forth, all of whom rudely and without provocation attacked the machines of privilege in a supposedly classless society.

The Republicans became what they beheld. Sarah Palin is nothing but identity politics.
She is the Al Sharpton of right-wing identity politics, but worse, Sharpton wouldn't obliquely suggest that only urban liberationist-Christian blacks are real Americans, while Palin (and other McCain trained monkeys like that "plumber") does suggest, more than obliquely, that only white rual born-again Christians are real Americans.

And what of Republican principles? Palin's record as governor-- her cronyism, intimidation, and oil giveouts to curry popular favor make her the Hugo Chavez of the arctic circle. I'm tired of Bush's banana republic antics-- tee-ball on the White House lawn indeed. The Obamas would restore dignity and honor to the presidency-- the promise that got Bush elected in 2000, but which was betrayed by corruption and lies on a staggering scale

Nixon. Reagan. Palin. Tom Delay. George Bush. Amoral power-worshippers to the last, whatever bullshit comes out of their misbegotten mouths. McCain and Leiberman have both become farces, prostituting themselves to this horrorshow for their own love of power.

I'm uncomfortable with Obama's ease with the mass rally, the politics of let's-all-chant-in-unison. But his intelligence and grit have convinced me that this is not all he is. And even if it was, the Republicans still deserved to have their asses handed to them on a plate.

That is all I have to say. Vote Democrat.

northrop_fried @ 2008-10-24T02:38:00

2008-10-24T06:46:36Z

It's been a long time since I've engaged in drunken late-night Livejournaling, but it's kind of satisfying.

Punctum, sorry I was a bit of dick Saturday, but you were, like, harshin' my buzz, dude. Let's gt soon.

Busy sending off applications. All the schools are in the states. Whoever wins the election, I will be able to say I spent the entirety of the Bush years in Canada. Living the dream, you know?

I'll miss Canada if I leave. I find its people very winning with their soft-spoken passive aggression, the odd combination of dry and broad humo(u)r, the fits of earnestness. I've spent most of my adult life here. I think I might have gone native.

If leave, I shall miss ketchup chips, October flurries, ridiculous hockey obsession (I saw a hockey game on a TV over a bar in a goth club), muted and sensible politics, CBC documentaries about female ship-owners in nineteenth-century Newfoundland, the ubiquity of eggs benedict, and the "look...point" crosswalks.

I look forward to being able to get a decent sandwich again, however.

northrop_fried @ 2008-10-17T11:59:00

2008-10-17T16:00:36Z

Welcome to immortality, Joe.

northrop_fried @ 2008-10-13T17:46:00

2008-10-13T21:46:30Z

I made borscht today.

three aphorisms about teaching

2008-10-11T03:13:14Z

Reject power but not authority. Authority is generative; when someone says something that seems like inchoate thought, authority means you can say "go on" and they start thinking for real.

The goal of education is to provides students with the means and the motivation to become autodidacts, to ask their own questions and seek their own answers.

Teaching requires both training and explanation. Each task complements the other.

northrop_fried @ 2008-09-04T22:28:00

2008-09-05T02:29:55Z

Do you think those McCain hecklers are real? Or are they props to make those who oppose him look like scary radical protest-puppet wielders?

10:30: As a resident of Canada, I can avow that no bureaucrat has ever stood between me and a doctor.

northrop_fried @ 2008-07-20T12:32:00

2008-07-20T16:25:46Z

spilled red wine on my keyboard8792qKOy shift keys have have been acting funny ever since KO:

northrop_fried @ 2008-07-10T13:38:00

2008-07-10T17:31:47Z

Does anybody else ever read the wanted ads in the Economist and think "Hmmm... Burkina Faso needs an executive assistant to the Minister for Natural Resources. I could do that."?

this meme is like, so 2004.

2008-06-21T04:32:25Z

<td>

</td><td> 70%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Spider-Man</td>
<td>

</td><td> 70%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Catwoman</td>
<td>

</td><td> 60%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Hulk</td>
<td>

</td><td> 60%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Wonder Woman</td>
<td>

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Supergirl</td>
<td>

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Green Lantern</td>
<td>

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Batman</td>
<td>

</td><td> 50%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Robin</td>
<td>

</td><td> 47%</td>
</tr><tr><td>The Flash</td>
<td>

</td><td> 45%</td>
</tr></table></td>
<td>Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

</td>
</tr></table>
Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

northrop_fried @ 2008-06-13T12:45:00

2008-06-13T16:39:56Z

Beginning Chase and Phillips today.

Writer's Block: Such a Chore

2008-04-10T03:18:07Z

What's your least favorite chore?

View 500 Answers

Mopping. So I don't. The least favourite chore I do is scrubbing the shower grouting.

northrop_fried @ 2008-03-18T22:49:00

2008-03-19T02:56:16Z

Arthur C. Clarke is dead. His greatest weakness was that his capacious imagination couldn't encompass women at all. He simply had no interest in half the species.

On the other hand, he made us dream very big; he made this bookish child feel awe for the gorgeous vastness and strangeness of the universe, and for the possibilities of the human race.

Today's Rock is actually Quiet Storm

2008-02-26T14:14:06Z