Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Einer neuen Studie zufolge liegt das CO2 Budget, mit dem sich das 1,5 Grad Ziel mit wenigstens 50% Wahrscheinlichkeit noch erreichen ließe, bei 250 Milliarden Tonnen. Es ist damit nur halb so hoch, wie bisher angenommen. Bei der von den UN vorangetriebenen Halbierung der Emissionen bis 2030 liege die Chance bei maximal 40%. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/30/climate-crisis-carbon-emissions-budget

Studie: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01848-5

• for: MET, MST, MCT, FET, MET - information, MST - information, Amanda N. Robin, major evolutionary transition, major system transition, facilitating evolutionary transition

• Title:Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations

• Author: Robin et al.

• Date: 2021

• Abstract

  • A small number of extraordinary “Major Evolutionary Transitions” (METs) have attracted attention among biologists.
  • They comprise novel forms of
    • individuality and
    • information,

  • and are defined in relation to organismal complexity, irrespective of broader ecosystem-level effects.

  • This divorce between

    • evolutionary and
    • ecological consequences

  • qualifies unicellular eukaryotes, for example, as a MET although they alone failed to significantly alter ecosystems.

  • Additionally, this definition excludes revolutionary innovations not fitting into either MET type

    • (e.g., photosynthesis).
  • We recombine
    • evolution with
    • ecology
  • to explore how and why entire ecosystems were
    • newly created or
    • radically altered

  • as Major System Transitions (MSTs).

  • In doing so, we highlight important morphological adaptations that spread through populations because of

    • their immediate, direct-fitness advantages for individuals.

  • These are Major Competitive Transitions, or MCTs.

  • We argue that often
    • multiple
      • METs and
      • MCTs

  • must be present to produce MSTs.

  • For example, sexually-reproducing, multicellular eukaryotes (METs) with

    • anisogamy and
    • exoskeletons (MCTs)

  • significantly altered ecosystems during the Cambrian.

  • Therefore, we introduce the concepts of Facilitating Evolutionary Transitions (FETs) and Catalysts as

    • key events or agents that are insufficient themselves to set a MST into motion,
    • but are essential parts of synergies that do.

  • We further elucidate the role of information in MSTs as transitions across five levels:

    • (I) Encoded (Genetic);
    • (II) Epigenomic;
    • (III) Learned;
    • (IV) Inscribed; and
    • (V) Dark Information.

  • The latter is ‘authored’ by abiotic entities rather than biological organisms.

  • Level

    • IV has arguably allowed humans to produce a MST, and
    • V perhaps makes us a FET for a future transition that melds
      • biotic and
      • abiotic life
    • into one entity.
  • Understanding the interactive processes involved in past major transitions will illuminate both
    • current events and
    • the surprising possibilities that abiotically-created information may produce.

Indyweb / Indranet citations - Michael Levin, Roy Baumeister, Adam Omary youtube conversation - specifically, the question about whether a social superorganism of global human civilization / society / culture constitutes a new Major Evolutionary Transition of Individuality - https://hyp.is/rQgvZn2hEe6-TF8HFSS9mg/docdrop.org/video/UfoVTA0ilsY/

Eine neue Studie ergibt, dass der Verlust der Biodiversität noch dramatischer und Gegenmaßnahmen noch dringender sind als bisher angenommen. Untersuchungen zu großen Säugetieren und Vögeln zeigen, dass bisher zu wenig berücksichtigt wurde, dass sich wichtige Treiber des Artensterbens erst mit jahrzehntelanger Verzögerung auswirken. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65315823

Resources

Links and resources from the second half of the chat and Q&A:

• TAG Feedback Protocol via https://learninginhand.com/blog/feedbackchat
• Robin DeRosa's OER pedagogical endeavor
• Annotation Rubrics
• Faculty Focus Live - A Hyflex Course: Bridging the Gap Between Online and In-person Students
• Bringing Theories to Practice: Universal Design Principles and the Use of Social Annotation to Support Neurodiverse Students by Christian Aguiar, Fatma Elshobokshy, and Amanda Huron
• Compass Points rubric

Video

Watch on YouTube

Sloan, Robin. “Author’s Note.” Experimental fiction. Wordcraft Writers Workshop, November 2022. https://wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com/stories/robin-sloan.

brilliant!

Ippolito, Daphne, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, and Sehmon Burnam. “Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers.” arXiv, November 9, 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.05030.

See also: https://wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com/learn

A Google project entering the public as ChatGPT was released and becoming popular.

For additional experiences, see: https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/authors-note/

An interesting theory...

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce comes to mind as an excellent example.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220901145339/https://diggingthedigital.com/dieper-in-de-penumbraverse/

Heb nog nooit iets van Sloan gelezen, behalve zijn blogfeed dan. Deze boeken maar eens opzoeken.

!- references : evolutionary biology * Evolutionary biologists have developed similar ideas to explain how throughout history, groups of individual organisms that clustered together and discovered better fitness as a result of symbiotic relationships began to reproduce as a whole new entity. Hence the collective became the new individual * Robin et al. paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world * Robin et al. video presentation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world * Stuart West video: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world

Second Transition: Columbian Exchange

In evolutionary biology, there are also another type of transition, Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET). Robin et. al propose that the introduction of writing (inscribed language) was a major information improvement that played an important role leading to a major system transition (MST).

Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world

http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/

I'd seen this before, but never read it as it was iOS only...

Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.

Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition

This can be interpreted as an instantiation of the hero's journey, in the context of research that combines evolution with ecology as in the research paper: Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations (Robin et al., 2021).From this lens, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) was first made possible through spoken language, then accelerated through written language. The authors claim that another Major System Transition (MST).is emerging, which they posit to be abiotic in nature involving Artificial Intelligence.

Faced with a self-induced civilization-scale threat, we may ask whether a major cultural evolution may be necessary to avoid catastrophe and whether it may constitute another MST. Could a rapid higher level global understanding of the epistemological dualism of self and other which undergirds normative alienation, othering and conflict, both with others of our own species, of other species and with the planetary system itself play a major role in the transition?

https://fat.gold/guide/

Robin Sloan's olive oil company

Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.

Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.

Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

https://every.to/superorganizers/tasting-notes-with-robin-sloan-25629085

A discussion with Robin Sloan about the creativity portion of his writing practice which is heavily driven by his store of creative notes which he takes in a Field Notes waste book and keeps in nvAlt.

Robin Sloan's writing process sounds similar to that of Niklas Luhmann where he chose to work on things that seemed exciting and fun. This is, in part, helped by having a large quantity of interesting notes to work off of. They both used them as stores to fire their internal motivation to get work done.

Robin Sloan has built a system that will present him with random notes from his archive every time he opens a browser tab.

I like the idea of taking notes as a means of finding one's way towards something which can't be articulated.

This is an interesting way that one could define insight.

Robin Sloan has a waste book practice where he takes his notes in small Field Note notebooks and transcribes them into nvAlt. When he's done, he throws away the notebook.

https://vimeo.com/232545219

from: Eyeo Conference 2017

• http://eyeofestival.com/2017/speaker/robin-sloan/
• https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017/232545219

Description

Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

Notes

Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4

Writing using the adjacent possible.

Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

Open questions

How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

What sources would you use to train your model?

References:

• Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
• Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
• Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
• Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production

I have noticed in some anthropological literature that it appears that the authors completely missed the boat as the result of the lack of ability to communicate with their subjects or better understand their broader basic contexts.

Particular examples of this: -1930s: A. Irving Hallowell conversations with William Berens, Chief of the Berens River Anishinaabe about rocks

• Robin Wall Kimmerer mentions in Braiding Sweetgrass that the new American immigrants looked down on the indigenous people for not "giving thanks" for their food, when in fact it was so embedded into their general culture that it should never have been in question. The immigrants just didn't possess the ability to see the how the thanks had been given.

God instructed Adam and Eve to eat whatever they desired, though prohibited them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Skywoman Falling", she explained how in Indigenous culture, they follow Original Instructions. These "instructions" are not rules but rather guidelines for each person. Kimmerer explains how during Skywoman's time, the first people's understanding of the Original Instructions were to care for the and have respect for hunted animals, value family, and hold respectful ceremonies for their beliefs.

It's a fun game to follow up on these intertexts, even a bit. If you read the page or so that this quote is extracted from, you'll see that it's when Crusoe is regretting the way he'd started to build a boat, before thinking about how to get it to shore. Betteredge's analogy, then, is that he's bitten off more than he can chew: he's agreed to write this narrative, but soon finds it a very serious undertaking, since there are a lot of details to relate.

ACE framework

The first definite reference to "Robin Hood" appeared in the poem Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman) by William Langland, circa 1370. Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw and a highly skilled archer and swordsman depicted in English folklore. In some versions of the legend, he is depicted as being of noble birth. Having fought in the Crusades, he returns to England to find the Sheriff has taken his lands. In other versions, he is instead born into the yeoman class. In both versions, is said to have robbed from the rich to give to the poor.

Edit: University System of New Hampshire's Academic Technology Steering Committee

Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up [oo]

VÖ: 16.6.2017

Apple Music / iTunes