Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]
Narrative culture as mythological abstraction optimally self-propagates through precisely these forms of wilful misdirection and perception-shaping. Appraised in gestalt, the roles of fictional narratives are really no different than any other essentially tautological and self-generating system of belief. The most beautiful aspect and functional bootstrap of this system is that which is hardly at all […]
Algorithmic complexity is a measure of information. For any non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. interesting) system, there exists no shortest/best programmatic representation – i.e. theory, model, framework or network wiring. This means that in some circumstances we can reduce ad infinitum. There is no best, only better; a lesson in abject humility still to be learned by […]
Utopian technological fantasies provide precisely an inverse, equal and opposite promise of abbreviated complexity, simplicity, reduced information or cognitive burden from the unmanaged entropy they materially invoke and to which they are often applied as aspirational panacea. Notice here that recurring trope of escape into a world of pure control and endless choice in subjective […]
To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]
The most consequential questions are not those that (only) provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts as entities and systems of communication are those that generate more of themselves, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies.
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
The most consequential questions are not those that provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts of communication are those that generate more information and artefacts, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies as conceptual or logical ancestry.
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
A curious revelation of logic, mathematics and physics is that the concepts themselves are never really all that difficult and can usually be quite rapidly grasped if the method of education is sufficiently powerful. The difficulty lies in acquiring an aptitude to intuitively understand and leverage the relationships between the symbols that are used to […]
Context: Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns Rolf Landauer coined the phrase that information is physical. The consequences being that all computation and sophisticated or automated statistical analysis at scale has similar costs, at scale. Diminishing returns is a function of the second law of thermodynamics. The article’s observation that “new approaches” are required is accurate. Are […]
Context: Australia installs first space laser optical ground station in southern hemisphere It is interesting to observe, and from a broader (integrated, technological) systems perspective, that the value acquired by iterating upon and through the technical ratchet of space-based communications solutions and innovations is a measure of displaced information (as much as material) entropy. Much […]
Daedelus Kite 