Matt Arnold @matt@penguicon.social

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Reasonable Believings"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/reasonable-believings

This episode is more than an hour long.   The epistemological categories—truth, belief, inference—are richer, more complex, diverse, and nebulous than rationalism supposes. https://metarationality.com/reasonable-epistemology   You can support the podcast and get episodes a week early, by supporting the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/fluidityaudiobooks   If you like the show, consider buying me a coffee: h

In this installment of the newsletter for my new event, Fluidity Forum, I wrote an essay about how to design groups.

Three ways for a rich textured social experience to collapse down to a sort of flat samey-ness.

https://fluidity.substack.com/p/applications-open

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "The Purpose Of Meaning"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/the-purpose-of-meaning

Peculiar features of language make sense as tools to enable collaboration, rather than to express objective truths. https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning You can support the podcast and get episodes a week early, by supporting the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/fluidityaudiobooks If you like the show, consider buying me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattarnold

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Meaningful Perception"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/meaningful-perception

We actively work to perceive aspects of the world as meaningful, in terms of our purposes, in context. https://metarationality.com/perception   Here are the images mentioned in this episode:   In this episode is a mention of a perception test of tracking basketball players passing a ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo Also mentioned in this episode is a more advanced version of the percepti

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Accountability And Routine"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/accountability-and-routine

You are accountable for reasonableness: Accountability is the key concept in understanding mere reasonableness, as contrasted with systematic rationality. https://metarationality.com/accountability   Reasonableness is routine: Routine activity usually goes smoothly overall, despite frequent minor glitches, because we have methods for repairing trouble. https://metarationality.com/routine   You can supp

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Aspects Of Reasonableness - and - Reasonableness Is Meaningful Activity"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/aspects-of-reasonableness-and-reasonableness-is-meaningful-activity

Aspects of reasonableness: A summary explanation of everyday reasonable activity, with a tabular guide and a concrete example. https://metarationality.com/reasonableness-aspects   Reasonableness is meaningful activity: Understanding concrete, purposeful activity is a prerequisite to understanding the formal rationality that depends on it. https://metarationali

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Part Two: Taking Reasonableness Seriously"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/part-two-taking-reasonableness-seriously

Everyday reasonableness is the foundation of technical, formal, and systematic rationality. https://metarationality.com/reasonableness   This is not cognitive science - The Eggplant is neither cognitive nor science, although it seeks a better understanding of some phenomena cognitive science has studied. https://metarationality.com/cognitive-science   The ethnomethodological flip - A dram

Today Birdsite rolled out a feature in which every user can see how many times every tweet has been viewed. I created and shared a Tampermonkey userscript that hides this.

(Also, it hides the Trending Topics pane. Writing that part of the userscript was the first thing I did when I joined Twitter in 2021.)

https://gist.github.com/MattArnold/efd773432385b5a932bdeb7474ad3a2d

#opensource

My favorite static site generator, Spacebook, wouldn't build any of my websites ever since I got an M1 Mac with the new Apple chip. I did some digging; it took a couple of weeks of occasional work in my free time, but eventually I diagnosed where the problem was. As soon as I fixed it, I issued a pull request with a fix to the project.

I've benefited so much from that software over the years, that it's good to give back and contribute to open source.

@Wheresatom What did you switch to?

@skipfordj I would be willing to do that. Are you expressing interest? If so, I should bring Paul Keyes into that conversation, since he's a co-admin.

@Configures But this is a Penguicon instance, and revising the CoC is a question for the convention. It's unlikely to succeed, because the way in which the CoC needs to be expanded to address the issue would be at odds with the prevailing culture within post-2015/2016 fandom.

@Configures What would address the issue the most would be to expand the Code Of Conduct. I wrote our CoC to specifically limit the amount of bile being spewed, but only the pattern of bile we saw constantly spewed in the 2010s. It is not able to address the bile spewed back by those who hate the original bile-spewers; that conduct is, arguably, *protected* under the CoC as it exists.

@Configures
1. No, I'm happy that this server exists.

2. I have no problem continuing paying for it. I'm not saying "don't contribute funds", but no amount of money addresses the issue.

3. Help would be good, and is certainly just as needed now as ever, but no amount of spreading the workload addresses the issue.

You want to know the irony? I stayed away from Twitter from its inception until 2020, when I joined Twitter to engage in conversations with the authors I'm narrating in my audiobook. To my delight, I discovered Twitter's algorithm seems to work well to surround me with what I want.

Twitter is where I go to escape Mastodon.

It's time I admitted this. Hell is half-empty & half the devils are here.

I've run this Mastodon instance since 2019. This server is lovely. Mastodon's Federated timeline has now become what I used to avoid Twitter for.

Ironically, I can't shut it off, because as an admin, stemming the toxic firehose is literally my job.

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "Acting On The Truth, And Overcoming Post-Rationalist Nihilism"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/acting-on-the-truth-and-overcoming-post-rationalist-nihilism

The conclusion of Part One of In The Cells Of The Eggplant: Taking Rationalism Seriously.   Acting On The Truth   Rationalist theories of action try to deduce optimal choices from true beliefs. This is rarely possible in practice.   https://metarationality.com/action-in-rationalism   Overcoming Post-Rationalist Nihilism   Realizing rationalism is wrong can be devastatin

On the Fluidity Forum Newsletter, I wrote about community formation, & why we have an attendance application process.

I addressed 3 ways for a rich textured social experience to collapse down to a sort of flat samey-ness:

Decoherence: a collapse into, basically, nothing

Vibe Cascade: a collapse into one vibe

Tribalism: a collapse into a mutually-reinforcing conflict process

https://fluidity.substack.com/p/applications-open