May write an extended response to this (possibly as a Note, lol). I think we share many values yet have wildly different dispositions, and so our experiences here (never mind why we are here in the first place) are quite different.
I checked out your substack. Good writing, interesting viewpoints, but contributes to my subscription fatigue. I hope to see more of your posts. Just can't devote an hour to each one. Please accept my humble apology for not subscribing. I almost did.
Not a problem, and thank you for reading. Please read only what you’d like. I’m currently making up for some lost time, filling an archive, and there’s definitely no need to read it all as it comes out. I appreciate that you’ll keep an eye out!
I read your whole criticality letter, and then had to ask myself how often I can afford to read pieces like that, in the face of my existing reading backlog. I begin to see the charm in cyber brain implants that let you download the enormity of human and, now, artificial knowledge. But that both cancels the pleasure of slow absorption and feeds the same hubris as attempts to cheat death. Limitations are the stuff of life and sometimes I have to say no.
Yes, it’s really no problem. For all readers, the backlog of important existing material goes back centuries. I’m planning to begin learning Chinese fairly soon, in part for current events but also to address a millennium-standing backlog of Taoist writing I’d like to get into properly. Thank you for your time on the criticality letter and on this one.
That specific method name hadn’t been on my map, but I definitely don’t neglect reading things I can understand for pleasure when I’m learning a language. This looks like a good resource for more of that. Thanks!
I liked this letter very much, not only for its wit and its message, but for its language.
My college students today use fewer than half of the words daily than did students of my youth, and it shows in their ability to read and articulate their thoughts. (Poe is “too difficult” because of his vocabulary (his use of “big” and “foreign” words), and Joyce is to them incomprehensible, which on some level I suppose, is fair enough. One reason I read him and persisted was in part for that reason.
Someone told me some time ago that “intellect is the intersection of intelligence and vocabulary”, and while I disagreed, I haven’t been able to forget it, which is both annoying and indicative of a need to examine my reaction. I have suspicions. Jung’s notion of Coincidentia oppositorum comes to mind, but it is likely just denial.
Pound wrote that “sloppy language means sloppy thinking.” Your language is anything but: it is precise, focused, layered, and a delight to read.
Also, one has the choice these days to either go wide or go deep in both reading and thinking. We have anthropological limits, after all, of memory and comprehension. I have designed my college courses to go deep in our work because it is my experience that going deep into things is more lasting and significant. And while I am familiar with the definition of a specialist being one who learns more and more about less and less until they end up knowing everything about nothing (I have admittedly known academic specialist who have been profoundly ignorant about social issues and consequences), it seems to be a result of inadequacies in the curricula of schools at introductory levels and not of the inclination to go deep into a field of knowledge. That is why I support the humanities as an essential component of education-as a component, not the entirety, or we end up in the same dilemma.
I see that I have wandered off topic here, but it is because your letter has done its job: to promote thinking, and so, again I thank you.
I share concerns about declining vocabularies, sloppy thinking, and the future of education, and they'll keep coming up in my notes and letters, so I don't find this off-topic.
In order to keep a fair view of past and present, I try to keep an eye on the generalizations of what changes as well as the specifics: for instance, if vocabulary is declining, is the range of vocal tones or rhetorical tropes increasing? Or the use of images? In early days of facing some of these problems I went into angry ideology to oppose the change (Pound and Poe's heir Lovecraft were accessories), but the more reading I've done about prior eras of massive change in communication media, for instance McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, King's The Bookseller of Florence, Goody's Domestication of the Savage Mind, Peters' The Marvelous Clouds, and Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, the more I came to see hope.
I do think that a lot of good is being lost right now, but I also think it's not going to be lost forever for everyone, and I also think there will be a lot of other new goods to compensate (though it will be a bumpy transition). In the meantime I'm keeping some of these traditions of broad humanism alive as well as I can personally and among my closer friends, and trying to be a flexible reed in these high winds.
Are you in many groupchats on here? Is that a thing? Apart from one groupchat where an author gives his daily Scrandle results, I do not use that feature
No, those are all on Signal, sorry if that was confusing! Naomi Kanakia, Kate Howlett, and Paul Kingsnorth have the most active subscriber chats I see here, and they’re not the kind I’m talking about.
There are a few ways that percolation and pests relate. One is the percolation of pest reconnaissance – do the ants cover an extensive area within the house or are they confined to its edges? Another is the percolation of bait signal – does the water vapor or food odor pervade each room or stay local? Odorous food will draw ants much faster than dry crumbs because of that second factor. There's also pest foraging percolation (have the ant pheromone trails been laid to draw a swarm? is there anywhere to escape the mosquitos?) and pest residence percolation (everyone's yards get anthills in most neighborhoods, but in some neighborhoods they keep them out).
Percolation theory is a very widely applicable abstraction.
This was another fascinating read. What’s interesting, to me, about your larger project is exactly how it raises these issues of being a good neighbor. You’re working in a space that straddles these different communities with their different sensibilities. I think you’re asking the right questions about it.
I feel like I can relate to these questions because I’ve encountered them in my own way. I was initially drawn towards math as an undergrad, but became disillusioned with the STEM universe and defected to the humanities, albeit philosophy. Some of that disillusionment was motivated by cynicism, but I feel it was justified overall.
I’ve come to think that there is something about “our” cultural inheritance that makes these questions especially acute for “us.” It’s important not to overstate this and reify it, hence the scare quotes, but it’s real. TS Eliot spoke of the “dissociation of sensibility,” for example. I think of it as a tendency to take what is really a tension, between "neighborhoods," and amp it up into a conflict. There is no conflict, at bottom, but it comes about insofar as we create one. (The ants are just doing their thing, right?)
There are different ways to try to ride that tension without blowing it up, but it’s not easy. Derrida tried to “write with two hands”—left and right—but I think he ended up shedding more heat than light, as they say. It’s about subtleties, things that are hard to talk about directly. But I like where you’re going with these letters.
Thank you! And yes, the issue of being a good neighbor has been central to me here from the beginning. It's a crucial theme in my understanding of history generally, from the earliest states to the Industrial Revolution: I think the major broad-based advances in culture and economics correspond to changes in habits of neighborliness and vice versa.
What were some of your disillusionments with STEM, if you don't mind me asking? I might use the information to help decide what to include in future letters.
The patterns of how neighborhood tension transform into conflicts and separations are definitely deep and mysterious. I think this follows from the anti-inductive nature ("excluding mechanistic manipulations and interpretations") of competitive solidarity, as I understand that term. Neighborhoods are in part defined by their emergent solidarities, and transitions to outright conflict within them or between them are bifurcations of prior joint solidarities. Currently my thoughts keep going back to "the Anarchy" in India when thinking about the topic... the fall of the Mughals, the rise of the British mercenaries, all driven by internal conflicts of the Indians.
It's definitely tricky stuff. I went back to review "dissociation of sensibility" from your comment, and remembered others here on Substack have compared some of my letters to the metaphysical poets before – for the use of "extended conceits" as in "The Internet as a Hive Mind" iirc. Do you have favorites among those poems? I love Eliot's own work, but I haven't made enough time for what he admired, yet.
I'll try to keep going in a good direction, and I hope you keep reading and commenting!
My disillusionment with STEM was more philosophical than anything else, as I didn’t pursue it far enough to actually experience it at first-hand, beyond undergraduate courses. So, take this for what it’s worth. But I felt funny about the way that developments in STEM-world sometimes exceed the grasp and intentions of those who initiate them. So many examples of unintended consequences, historically.
Now, I don’t think this applies to everything and everyone in that world, I know that there are people doing good work. I personally just felt anxious about the possibility that I could get swept up in something bad. This was in the first decade of this century, and part of this sense came from the bad vibes I was getting about the direction that the internet was heading in.
Like you, I was never a fan of social media, though Substack does seem different. Let’s hope it stays that way!
May write an extended response to this (possibly as a Note, lol). I think we share many values yet have wildly different dispositions, and so our experiences here (never mind why we are here in the first place) are quite different.
I would look forward to that, and I agree re values and dispositions.
I checked out your substack. Good writing, interesting viewpoints, but contributes to my subscription fatigue. I hope to see more of your posts. Just can't devote an hour to each one. Please accept my humble apology for not subscribing. I almost did.
Not a problem, and thank you for reading. Please read only what you’d like. I’m currently making up for some lost time, filling an archive, and there’s definitely no need to read it all as it comes out. I appreciate that you’ll keep an eye out!
I read your whole criticality letter, and then had to ask myself how often I can afford to read pieces like that, in the face of my existing reading backlog. I begin to see the charm in cyber brain implants that let you download the enormity of human and, now, artificial knowledge. But that both cancels the pleasure of slow absorption and feeds the same hubris as attempts to cheat death. Limitations are the stuff of life and sometimes I have to say no.
Yes, it’s really no problem. For all readers, the backlog of important existing material goes back centuries. I’m planning to begin learning Chinese fairly soon, in part for current events but also to address a millennium-standing backlog of Taoist writing I’d like to get into properly. Thank you for your time on the criticality letter and on this one.
If you haven’t already considered it, please do give some thought to comprehensible input as a means of language acquisition. It’s very helpful.
https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Chinese
That specific method name hadn’t been on my map, but I definitely don’t neglect reading things I can understand for pleasure when I’m learning a language. This looks like a good resource for more of that. Thanks!
I liked this letter very much, not only for its wit and its message, but for its language.
My college students today use fewer than half of the words daily than did students of my youth, and it shows in their ability to read and articulate their thoughts. (Poe is “too difficult” because of his vocabulary (his use of “big” and “foreign” words), and Joyce is to them incomprehensible, which on some level I suppose, is fair enough. One reason I read him and persisted was in part for that reason.
Someone told me some time ago that “intellect is the intersection of intelligence and vocabulary”, and while I disagreed, I haven’t been able to forget it, which is both annoying and indicative of a need to examine my reaction. I have suspicions. Jung’s notion of Coincidentia oppositorum comes to mind, but it is likely just denial.
Pound wrote that “sloppy language means sloppy thinking.” Your language is anything but: it is precise, focused, layered, and a delight to read.
Also, one has the choice these days to either go wide or go deep in both reading and thinking. We have anthropological limits, after all, of memory and comprehension. I have designed my college courses to go deep in our work because it is my experience that going deep into things is more lasting and significant. And while I am familiar with the definition of a specialist being one who learns more and more about less and less until they end up knowing everything about nothing (I have admittedly known academic specialist who have been profoundly ignorant about social issues and consequences), it seems to be a result of inadequacies in the curricula of schools at introductory levels and not of the inclination to go deep into a field of knowledge. That is why I support the humanities as an essential component of education-as a component, not the entirety, or we end up in the same dilemma.
I see that I have wandered off topic here, but it is because your letter has done its job: to promote thinking, and so, again I thank you.
Thank you for this comment!
I share concerns about declining vocabularies, sloppy thinking, and the future of education, and they'll keep coming up in my notes and letters, so I don't find this off-topic.
In order to keep a fair view of past and present, I try to keep an eye on the generalizations of what changes as well as the specifics: for instance, if vocabulary is declining, is the range of vocal tones or rhetorical tropes increasing? Or the use of images? In early days of facing some of these problems I went into angry ideology to oppose the change (Pound and Poe's heir Lovecraft were accessories), but the more reading I've done about prior eras of massive change in communication media, for instance McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, King's The Bookseller of Florence, Goody's Domestication of the Savage Mind, Peters' The Marvelous Clouds, and Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, the more I came to see hope.
I do think that a lot of good is being lost right now, but I also think it's not going to be lost forever for everyone, and I also think there will be a lot of other new goods to compensate (though it will be a bumpy transition). In the meantime I'm keeping some of these traditions of broad humanism alive as well as I can personally and among my closer friends, and trying to be a flexible reed in these high winds.
Are you in many groupchats on here? Is that a thing? Apart from one groupchat where an author gives his daily Scrandle results, I do not use that feature
No, those are all on Signal, sorry if that was confusing! Naomi Kanakia, Kate Howlett, and Paul Kingsnorth have the most active subscriber chats I see here, and they’re not the kind I’m talking about.
Ah, that makes sense! I was just wondering if there is a whole social world on Substack that I am completely missing 😆
If there is then I’m missing it, too!
Regarding the topic of the article, how does percolation relat?
Thanks for asking!
There are a few ways that percolation and pests relate. One is the percolation of pest reconnaissance – do the ants cover an extensive area within the house or are they confined to its edges? Another is the percolation of bait signal – does the water vapor or food odor pervade each room or stay local? Odorous food will draw ants much faster than dry crumbs because of that second factor. There's also pest foraging percolation (have the ant pheromone trails been laid to draw a swarm? is there anywhere to escape the mosquitos?) and pest residence percolation (everyone's yards get anthills in most neighborhoods, but in some neighborhoods they keep them out).
Percolation theory is a very widely applicable abstraction.
This was another fascinating read. What’s interesting, to me, about your larger project is exactly how it raises these issues of being a good neighbor. You’re working in a space that straddles these different communities with their different sensibilities. I think you’re asking the right questions about it.
I feel like I can relate to these questions because I’ve encountered them in my own way. I was initially drawn towards math as an undergrad, but became disillusioned with the STEM universe and defected to the humanities, albeit philosophy. Some of that disillusionment was motivated by cynicism, but I feel it was justified overall.
I’ve come to think that there is something about “our” cultural inheritance that makes these questions especially acute for “us.” It’s important not to overstate this and reify it, hence the scare quotes, but it’s real. TS Eliot spoke of the “dissociation of sensibility,” for example. I think of it as a tendency to take what is really a tension, between "neighborhoods," and amp it up into a conflict. There is no conflict, at bottom, but it comes about insofar as we create one. (The ants are just doing their thing, right?)
There are different ways to try to ride that tension without blowing it up, but it’s not easy. Derrida tried to “write with two hands”—left and right—but I think he ended up shedding more heat than light, as they say. It’s about subtleties, things that are hard to talk about directly. But I like where you’re going with these letters.
Thank you! And yes, the issue of being a good neighbor has been central to me here from the beginning. It's a crucial theme in my understanding of history generally, from the earliest states to the Industrial Revolution: I think the major broad-based advances in culture and economics correspond to changes in habits of neighborliness and vice versa.
What were some of your disillusionments with STEM, if you don't mind me asking? I might use the information to help decide what to include in future letters.
The patterns of how neighborhood tension transform into conflicts and separations are definitely deep and mysterious. I think this follows from the anti-inductive nature ("excluding mechanistic manipulations and interpretations") of competitive solidarity, as I understand that term. Neighborhoods are in part defined by their emergent solidarities, and transitions to outright conflict within them or between them are bifurcations of prior joint solidarities. Currently my thoughts keep going back to "the Anarchy" in India when thinking about the topic... the fall of the Mughals, the rise of the British mercenaries, all driven by internal conflicts of the Indians.
It's definitely tricky stuff. I went back to review "dissociation of sensibility" from your comment, and remembered others here on Substack have compared some of my letters to the metaphysical poets before – for the use of "extended conceits" as in "The Internet as a Hive Mind" iirc. Do you have favorites among those poems? I love Eliot's own work, but I haven't made enough time for what he admired, yet.
I'll try to keep going in a good direction, and I hope you keep reading and commenting!
My disillusionment with STEM was more philosophical than anything else, as I didn’t pursue it far enough to actually experience it at first-hand, beyond undergraduate courses. So, take this for what it’s worth. But I felt funny about the way that developments in STEM-world sometimes exceed the grasp and intentions of those who initiate them. So many examples of unintended consequences, historically.
Now, I don’t think this applies to everything and everyone in that world, I know that there are people doing good work. I personally just felt anxious about the possibility that I could get swept up in something bad. This was in the first decade of this century, and part of this sense came from the bad vibes I was getting about the direction that the internet was heading in.
Like you, I was never a fan of social media, though Substack does seem different. Let’s hope it stays that way!