An interesting hypothesis is that all social processes are expressions of frequency. While not strictly equivalent, frequencies can be understood as empirical expressions of probability—patterns of recurrence that approximate likelihood over time. In doing so, they engage with dynamical attractors, stabilising tendencies within complex systems that draw trajectories into patterned coherence. The very process of […]
Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]
Somewhere along the way, scholarship stopped wondering. It began repeating. Rote, recursive, self-preserving patterns. You can hear it, like a machine turning over in an empty hall—papers, citations, more papers—output for the sake of throughput. It’s not malice. It’s momentum. Inertia disguised as rigour. What’s fascinating is how this very pattern—this repetition—is the mechanism by […]
Ideas, if not analyses, are never truly or singularly of an individual. There is something of a distributed communications “field” and what is conceptually or technically intelligible, useful or valuable is adaptively filtered and percolates through it. The value of a good (or great) idea is amplified by the presence and persistence of less-than-stellar ideas […]
Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]
I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]
Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.
…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]
I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]
I treasure freedom of mind and thought and as against tides of wilful ignorance and meaningless superficiality I can quite accurately assert that where a companionship and friendship in or of ideas does not exist, the ideas themselves can become your friends. In this sense, my best friends are the concepts I inhabit and endlessly […]
Daedelus Kite 