107 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Callouts are an excellent way to draw extra attention to certain concepts, or to more clearly indicate that certain content is supplemental or applicable to only some scenarios.
  2. Jan 2024
    1. cheap energy is a hell of a drug. we found it 200 years ago, our trip peaked about 20 years ago, and now we are getting sober, and most people hate it, because most people are stupid and have no "plan B", and when SHTF they will commit suicide, and before SHTF they will work for a suicide-culture to accelerate the collapse.

      i already had this intuition 20 years ago at the age of 15... i spent some years on self-study of psychology, to make this intuition more conscious. my "final answer" on all the problems of this world is my book: pallas. who are my friends. group composition by personality type. because obviously, most people are too stupid to choose their real friends, and instead are exploited by enemies aka "false friends".

      idiots are insulted by the radical simplicity of my proposed solution, and instead, they continue their doomed-to-fail journey to find complex-but-wrong solutions... idiots are tragic heros, fighting lost wars, dragging everyone else down to their stupid level

  3. Dec 2023
    1. naturalism, paradise on earth, relations... i heard some fuzzy attempts to approach these topics.<br /> in my work, i propose a mathematcally-exact system, to describe and predict human relations,<br /> in a culture, that also works in a post-collapse world, in small groups of 150 people. book:<br /> pallas. who are my friends. group composition by personality type.<br /> github .com /milahu /alchi

    1. couldn't that be one way to like quite dramatically Force regime change then if if you could Implement degrowth and kind of trigger a because this is a 00:30:21 a lot of what they talk about as well degrowth Scholars like it's either degrowth a controlled degrowth or an uncontrolled Financial collapse so couldn't that then force a change in the 00:30:32 financial system
      • for,: question - controller degrowth vs financial collapse
      • for: plan B, climate futures, dystopian future, civilization collapse

      • title: If We’ve Lost the Climate War, What’s Plan B?

      • subtitle: Why a carbon tax won’t save us, and what’s next.
      • author: Crawford Kilian
      • date: Nov 22, 2023

      • summary

        • a good article that shows the complexity and unpredictability of a collapse scenario and system justification theory, which sounds like the boiling frog syndrome
  4. Nov 2023
    1. Die englische Regierung hat in der letzten Oktoberwoche 27 Lizenzen zur Öl- und Gasförderung in der Nordsee vergeben. George Monbiot konfrontiert diese Entscheidung mit aktuellen Erkenntnissen zum sechsten Massenaussterben und dem drohenden Zusammenbruch lebensunterstützender Systeme des Planeten https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/31/flickering-earth-systems-warning-act-now-rishi-sunak-north-sea

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)

      relationship with context collapse

      Presentism bias enters biblical and religious studies when, by way of context collapse, readers apply texts written thousands of years ago and applicable to one context to their own current context without any appreciation for the intervening changes. Many modern Christians (especially Protestants) show these patterns. There is an interesting irony here because Protestantism began as the Catholic church was reading too much into the Bible to create practices like indulgences.)

    1. The role of stylistic indicators of temporal andspatial location and orientation—those “pointing words”that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to thecreation of this general effect.

      Deixis is the use of words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context. Usually their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on contextual cues of time and/or place.

      Examples include the do-, ko-, so-, a- progression (dore, kore, sore, are; docchi, kocchi, socchi, acchi, etc.) serve this function of distance from the speaker.

  5. Oct 2023
    1. The reader should keep in mind that, for Alter, the Hebrew Bible is not one seamless book but a haphazard collection of texts.

      !!

      Perhaps not "haphazard", but they are definitely written by different authors over a large span of time, often each with their own political point of view. Bruce seems to be playing at the common misconception that the books were written as a cohesive whole supporting only one outcome.

      There is some massive historical contextual collapse going on here, particularly in a broader culture in which multiple gods were the norm. Each author certainly had their own idea of what "God" was when writing.

    2. Alter knows it ain’t Jesus.

      The colloquial use of the word "ain't" here very specifically pegs James Bruce, the author, as writing his argument for an audience of Christians in the Southern part of the United States. It's even more stark as most of his review is of a broadly scholarly nature where the word "ain't" or others of its register would never be used.

      How does the shift in translation really negate room for Jesus? If it was a truism that it stood for Jesus, then couldn't one just as simply re-translate the New Testament to make sure that the space for him is still there? Small shifts in meaning and translation shouldn't undermine the support for Jesus so easily as Bruce suggests, otherwise there are terrible problems with these underpinnings of Christianity.

      If one follows Bruce's general logic, then there's a hell of a religion based on Nostradamus' work we're all going out of our way to ignore.

      What would historical linguistics have to say about this translation?

    1. You listen to their stories, and if you take them seriously, you think nothing could be more dramatic than being a writer. But I am a writer and I don’t believe a word of it.

      Is or how is fabulism tied into the way people don't believe or won't believe the context of other peoples' experience?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/t_DOjnTbEe6iyP_O1fr4fQ

  6. Aug 2023
    1. Science must find for every effect a single cause. The historian is rarely faced with the same requirement.Historians have the advantage of being able to live with explanatory ambiguity that would be unacceptable in science.
    2. These revolutions appear invisible in the history of science, Kuhn explained, because each successive generation learns science through the lens of the current paradigm.

      As a result of Kuhn's scientific revolutions perspective, historians of science will need to uncover the frameworks and lenses by which prior generations saw the world to be able to see the world the same way. This will allow them to better piece together histories


      How is this related to the ways that experts don't appreciate their own knowledge when trying to teach newcomers their subjects? What is the word/phrase for this effect?

    3. Thomas Kuhn applied the concept of the paradigm to describe the progress of scientific thought over time. The idea generated interest and discussion across a number of fields in addition to the history of science, eclipsing to some extent Kuhn’s original focus.

      Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was directed to scientific thought over time, but he was aware of it potentially being applied, potentially improperly, to other areas. As a result, he narrowed down his definitions and made his assumptions more explicit.

      This sort of misapplication can be seen in Social Darwinism, the uncertainty principle, relativity, and memes.

      It also happened with Claude Shannon's information theory which resulted in his publication of The Bandwagon (IEEE, 1956).

      • for: polycrisis, collapse, tweedledums, tweedledees, wicked problem, social mess, stuck, stuckness, complexity
      • title
        • Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?
      • author
        • Dave Pollard
      • date
        • Aug 3, 2023
      • comment
        • thought provoking
        • honest, diverse, open thinking
        • a good piece of writing to submit to SRG / Deep Humanity analysis for surfacing insights
        • adjacency
          • complexity
          • emptiness
          • stuckness
            • this word "stuckness" stuck out in me (no pun intended) today - so many intractable, stuck problems, at all levels of society, because we oversimplify complexity to the point of harmful abstraction.
      • definition

        • Tweedledums

          • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
            • authority,
            • order,
            • hierarchy,
            • individual initiative, and
            • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
          • governed by a
            • strict,
            • lean,
            • paternalistic elite
          • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
            • established ‘family values’ and
            • by their interpretation of the will of their god.
        • Tweedledees

          • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
            • mutual care,
            • affluence
            • relative equality for all,
          • governed by a
            • kind,
            • thoughtful,
            • educated,
            • informed and
            • representative
          • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
            • humanism and
            • ‘fairness’.
        • references
        • Aurélien
        • source
        • led here by reading Dave Pollard's other article
    1. signs of collapse include
      • for: collapse, polycrisis, political collapse
      • signs of collapse
        • misinformation
        • disinformation,
        • propaganda
        • censorship,
        • scapegoating,
        • disenfranchisement,
        • suppression of dissent,
        • widespread surveillance,
        • overt and large-scale corruption,
        • emergence and use of paramilitaries,
        • widespread
          • arrests,
          • incarcerations and
          • ‘disappearances’,
        • election interference and fraud,
        • election cancellations and
        • the dismantling of democratic institutions. Over the past decade, most of these have been employed in many countries, and their use is becoming widely normalized in much of the world.
    1. as the issues have become so complex and plentiful that no one can hope to be knowledgeable enough to make competent decisions about them. This is the point at which highly complex societies start to collapse of their own weight.
      • for: complexity, collapse, polycrisis, vulnerabilities - civilization
      • comment
        • the threat of sudden collapse is that our highly interdependent world crashes
        • and we are all specialized cogs in the wheel
        • If sudden collapse happens and complex infrastructure becomes unusable, it takes a tremendous amount of global coordination of specialists to bring the infrastructure back up again
        • global society is not easy to replicate with small groups, as the specialized skills are so fragmented that no small group would likely have the collective knowhow to reconstruct the complexity
  7. Jul 2023
    1. we regard this disappearance as an aberration, and notas an indication of progress.

      disappearance [of education] as an...

      there's also disappearance of context of what has gone before

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    Annotators

  8. May 2023
    1. Get some of the lowest ad prices while protecting your brand with a system backed by Verity and Grapeshot. Rest easy that your ads will only show up where you’d like them to.

      Is there a word or phrase in the advertising space which covers the filtering out of websites and networks which have objectionable material one doesn't want their content running against?

      Contextual intelligence seems to be one...

      Apparently the platforms Verity and Grapeshot (from Oracle) protect against this.

  9. Mar 2023
    1. Mentioned this to someone who moved to Bushwick and kept saying "I wish more of Brooklyn was like this" with a rebuttal saying "this is why the people who made it attractive to you aren't here anymore" and got the "it's not my problem" shit. https://twitter.com/hollley/status/1641149981678530560. I think that's where being a "transplant" into a different place becomes violent - your presence IMMEDIATELY disrupts the environments you're in (and because of that, you have an obligation to minimize it as much as possible).
    1. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

      Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

      For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

    2. Dass das ägyptische Wort p.t (sprich: pet) "Himmel" bedeutet, lernt jeder Ägyptologiestudent im ersten Semester. Die Belegsammlung im Archiv des Wörterbuches umfaßt ca. 6.000 Belegzettel. In der Ordnung dieses Materials erfährt man nun, dass der ägyptische Himmel Tore und Wege hat, Gewässer und Ufer, Seiten, Stützen und Kapellen. Damit wird greifbar, dass der Ägypter bei dem Wort "Himmel" an etwas vollkommen anderes dachte als der moderne westliche Mensch, an einen mythischen Raum nämlich, in dem Götter und Totengeister weilen. In der lexikographischen Auswertung eines so umfassenden Materials geht es also um weit mehr als darum, die Grundbedeutung eines banalen Wortes zu ermitteln. Hier entfaltet sich ein Ausschnitt des ägyptischen Weltbildes in seinem Reichtum und in seiner Fremdheit; und naturgemäß sind es gerade die häufigen Wörter, die Schlüsselbegriffe der pharaonischen Kultur bezeichnen. Das verbreitete Mißverständnis, das Häufige sei uninteressant, stellt die Dinge also gerade auf den Kopf.

      Google translation:

      Every Egyptology student learns in their first semester that the Egyptian word pt (pronounced pet) means "heaven". The collection of documents in the dictionary archive comprises around 6,000 document slips. In the order of this material one learns that the Egyptian heaven has gates and ways, waters and banks, sides, pillars and chapels. This makes it tangible that the Egyptians had something completely different in mind when they heard the word "heaven" than modern Westerners do, namely a mythical space in which gods and spirits of the dead dwell.

      This is a fantastic example of context creation for a dead language as well as for creating proper historical context.

    1. Sustainability and a continuum of human unsustainability
      • simple diagram showing trend towards collapse

      • spectrum from sustainable to collapse:

        • sustainable
        • unsustainable
        • socio-ecological crisis
        • socio-ecological collapse
    2. human systems may have expanded beyond their ability to absorb energy and materials from the environment, and these resource constraints interacted with socio-political conflict to generate socio-ecological collapse.
      • key observation
    3. Civilizations that may have experienced socio-ecological collapse in whole or part due to their over-extraction of resources include
      • Historical societies that have experience ecological collapse:
        • Mayan
        • Roman
        • Greek
        • Easter Islands
        • Pitcairn Islands
        • Norse colony in Greenland
        • Cahokia in American Midwest
        • Anasazi
    1. Instructive quotations: Who doesn’t love a great quote? And quotations can work very well in a media environment that privileges brevity and catchiness. On the surface, the words of a past leader might seem explanatory for a topical news story, but dig a little deeper into the quote’s original setting, and the particularities—who said it, when, and for what purpose—might make the saying less apt.

      Often instructive quotations aren't appropriate for the current situation because they have been stripped of their original context which doesn't apply to the new situation in which it is being used.

  10. Feb 2023
  11. Jan 2023
    1. Another problem arises from the very nature of documentary material astexts not written for posterity. When reading Geniza letters, one is often in theposition of an uninvited guest at a social event, that is, someone who is unfa-miliar with the private codes and customs shared by the inner circle. Writersoften do not bother to explain themselves in a complete manner when they

      know that the recipient is already familiar with the subject. 17

      17 Indeed, writers often used this shared understanding to stress the relationship they had with the recipients.

  12. Dec 2022
    1. The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

      I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

  13. Oct 2022
    1. It is only too easy to misapply excerpted passages by taking them out of their original context. Ideally, I should have followed the technique, recommended as long ago as 1615 by the learned Jesuit Francesco Sacchini, of always making two sets of notes, one to be sliced up and filed, the other to be kept in its original form.

      Francesco Sacchini advised in 1615 that one should make two sets of notes: one to be cut up and filed, and the other kept in it's original form so as to keep the full context of the original author's context.


      This is broadly one of the values of note taking in Hypothes.is. One can take broader excerpts of an authors' works as well as maintain links for fuller context to reconsult, but still have the shorter excerpts as well as one's own notes.

  14. Sep 2022
    1. “I think it’s such a fascinating story,” Martin said. He also appreciated collecting in an area where there wasn’t a huge amount of established scholarship. “It’s fun to have something to study, to try to understand, to apply your critical eye to without any outside pressure,” he added. “There’s not a lot of promotion about [these] artists. You just have to find it out yourself.”

      Reading and studying it all without any regard to the Indigenous culture. Steve Martin is using Western perspectives to attempt to understand non-Western art which has a different basis.

  15. Aug 2022
    1. from primarysources rather than from secondary works. Always give, inn footnote, the exact citation of volume and page of the au-thority quoted. Verify quotations carefully in every detail.A quotation should never be wrenched from its context insuch a way a5 to d o violence or injustice to the views of itswriter.
    2. Perspectiae and continuity. Correct perspective is es-sential t o sound critical malysis and interpretation. Thehistorical writer must always keep the time element clearlyin mind, and must recognize that an estimate of any histori-cal ersonage or event is determined in no small measureby t1e time or the conditions under which the person livedor the event occurred
    1. The real issue with "learning in public" is them emphasis placed on "being an expert," which is *everywhere*. It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.

      The public online commons, by means of context collapse, allows people to present themselves as experts within an area without actually being experts.

      Some of these "experts" or "gurus" primarily have expertise in communication or promoting themselves or a small piece of a topic about which they know a little more than the average public.

    1. Come back and read these particular texts, but these look interesting with respect to my work on orality, early "religion", secrecy, and information spread:<br /> - Ancient practices removed from their lineage lose their meaning - In spiritual practice, secrecy can be helpful but is not always necessary

      timestamp

    1. But commission member Kondratiuk, a heraldic expert who served as a military historian for the National Guard and US Army for more than four decades, said such objections are “a misreading of the heraldry.”“That’s the arm of God protecting the Commonwealth,” he said, referring to the upraised sword. “That symbol has been used in European heraldry for hundreds of years.”He added that the Native figure’s downward-facing arrow indicates “peaceful intent.”“The Native American on there is an homage to the Native Americans,” Kondratiuk said, adding he “voted with the pack” to see what recommendations the commission would produce. As for the motto: “That’s an allusion to the monarch,” he continued. “The Founding Fathers would have been very familiar with that.”

      Example of how older traditions have passed from memory and are now re-read (mis-read) in new contexts.

  16. Jul 2022
    1. At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.

      Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.


      Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.


      How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

      The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

      Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

      Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

      Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

      How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

      How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

  17. Local file Local file
    1. 'I don't think it's anything—I mean, I don't think it was ever put to anyuse. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they'veforgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew howto read it.'

      Walter and Julia are examining a glass paperweight in George Orwell's 1984 without having context of what it is or for what it was used.

      This is the same sort of context collapse caused by distance in time and memory that archaeologists face when examining found objects.

      How does one pull out the meaning from such distant objects in an exegetical way? How can we more reliably rebuild or recreate lost contexts?

      Link to: - Stonehenge is a mnemonic device - mnemonic devices in archaeological contexts (Neolithic carved stone balls


      Some forms of orality-based methods and practices can be viewed as a method of "reading" physical objects.


      Ideograms are an evolution on the spectrum from orality to literacy.


      It seems odd to be pulling these sorts of insight out my prior experiences and reading while reading something so wholly "other". But isn't this just what "myths" in oral cultures actually accomplish? We link particular ideas to pieces of story, song, art, and dance so that they may be remembered. In this case Orwell's glass paperweight has now become a sort of "talking rock" for me. Certainly it isn't done in any sort of sense that Orwell would have expected, presumed, or even intended.

  18. Jun 2022
    1. send off your draft or beta orproposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend,family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. Thenext time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input andsuggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.

      A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

      This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

      Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

    2. • Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a worksession, write down what you think the next steps could be forthe next one.• Write down the current status: This could include your currentbiggest challenge, most important open question, or futureroadblocks you expect.• Write down any details you have in mind that are likely tobe forgotten once you step away: Such as details about thecharacters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning,or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing.• Write out your intention for the next work session: Set anintention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem youintend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.

      A lot of this is geared toward the work of re-contextualizing one's work and projects.

      Why do all this extra work instead of frontloading it? Here again is an example of more work in comparison to zettelkasten...

  19. May 2022
    1. In the case ofLévi-Strauss, meanwhile, the card index continued to serve inimportant ways as a ‘memory crutch’, albeit with a key differencefrom previous uses of the index as an aide-memoire. In Lévi-Strauss’case, what the fallibility of memory takes away, the card index givesback via the workings of chance. As he explains in an interview withDidier Erebon:I get by when I work by accumulating notes – a bitabout everything, ideas captured on the fly,summaries of what I have read, references,quotations... And when I want to start a project, Ipull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind ofoperation, where chance plays a role, helps merevive my failing memory. (Cited in Krapp, 2006:361)For Krapp, the crucial point here is that, through his use of indexcards, Lévi-Strauss ‘seems to allow that the notes may either restorememory – or else restore the possibilities of contingency which givesthinking a chance under the conditions of modernity’ (2006: 361).

      Claude Lévi-Strauss had a note taking practice in which he accumulated notes of ideas on the fly, summaries of what he read, references, and quotations. He kept them on cards which he would keep in a pigeonhole. When planning a project, he would pull them out and use them to "revive [his] failing memory."


      Questions: - Did his system have any internal linkages? - How big was his system? (Manageable, unmanageable?) - Was it only used for memory, or was it also used for creativity? - Did the combinatorial reshufflings of his cards provide inspiration a la the Llullan arts?


      Link this to the ideas of Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

    1. Consequently, we cannot understand the history of science if we take a narrow (that is, modern) viewof its content, goals, and practitioners.5. Such a narrow view is sometimes called “Whiggism” (an interest only in historical developments thatlead directly to current scientific beliefs) and the implementation of modern definitions andevaluations on the past.

      Historians need to be cautious not to take a whiggist and teleological view of historical events. They should be careful to place events into their appropriate context to be able to evaluate them accurately.

      The West, in particular, has a tendency to discount cultural contexts and view human history as always bending toward improvement when this is not the case.

      link to Dawn of Everything notes

    2. Chief among these is the need to understand scientific study and discoveryin historical context. Theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors deeply impact thedevelopment and shape of science.

      Science needs to be seen and understood in its appropriate historical context. Modern culture (and even scientists themselves) often forget the profound impact of theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors on how science develops and how we perceive it.

  20. Apr 2022
    1. It is notinsignificant either that among the illustrations of the Roland Barthes par RolandBarthes there are a series of facsimile reproductions of the author’s handwriting,analogic reproductions of linguistic graphemes, pieces of writing silenced,abstracted from the universe of discourse by their photographic reproduction. Inparticular, as we have seen, the three index cards are reproduced not for the sakeof their content, not for their signified, but for a reality-effect value for which ourexpanding taste, says Barthes, encompasses the fashion of diaries, of testimonials,of historical documents, and, most of all, the massive development of photogra-

      phy. In that sense, the reproduction of these three slips ironically resonates, if on a different scale, with the world tour of the mask of Tutankhamen. It refers, if not to the magic silence of a relic, at least to the ghostly parergonal quality of what French language calls a reliquat.

      Hollier argues that Barthes' reproduced cards are not only completely divorced from their original context and use, but that they are reproduced for the sheen of reality and artistic fashion they convey to the reader. So much thought, value, and culture is lost in the worship of these items in this setting compared to their original context.

      This is closely linked to the same sort of context collapse highlighted by the photo of Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders in Tim Ingold's Why Anthropology Matters. There we only appreciate the sense of antiquity, curiosity, and exoticness of an elder of a culture that is not ours. These rocks, by very direct analogy, are the index cards of the zettelkasten of an oral culture.

      Black and white photo of a man in Western dress (pants, white shirt, and vest) sits on a rock with a forrest in the background. Beside him are several large round, but generally otherwise unremarkable rocks. Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders; a picture taken by A. Irving Hallowell in 1930, between Grand Rapids and Pikangikum, Ontario, Canada. (American Philosophical Society)

    1. One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.

      Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

      Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

      For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

      Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

      One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

      This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

      How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

      Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

      It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

  21. Feb 2022
    1. Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that canstill be understood even when you have forgotten the context theyare taken from.

      Integrate this into the definition of permanent notes.

      Fleeting notes are context collapse (context apocalypse?) just waiting to happen.

  22. Jan 2022
    1. An over-reliance on numbers often leads to bias and discrimination.

      By their nature, numbers can create an air of objectivity which doesn't really exist and may be hidden by the cultural context one is working within. Be careful not to create an over-reliance on numbers. Particularly in social and political situations this reliance on numbers and related statistics can create dramatically increased bias and discrimination. Numbers may create a part of the picture, but what is being left out or not measured? Do the numbers you have with respect to your area really tell the whole story?

    1. This system of short annotations was conceived to de-contextualize information and free it from pre-structured meaning frames that would otherwise remove the possibility of further variety. Moreover, it could be expanded without limits in terms of both number and possible meaning combinations. Finally, it allowed a continuous (and recur-sive) improvement of open-ended combinatory performances, thereby shift-ing the burden of recollection from contents to indexing systems.74

      In a valuable article, Lorraine Daston, ‘Perché i fatti sono brevi?’, Quaderni storici 108 (2001), 745–70, esp. 756–59, noted that a clear analogy exists between these features and the art of excerpting.

      Can one trick oneself into forced context collapse with relation to the material one is reading in such a way so as to force surprise and the creation of new ideas by then re-contextualizing them into one's system of notes?

    2. That is why Francis Bacon was rather skeptical about the possibility that excerpts might be shared among scholars. His opinion was that ‘in general, one man’s Notes will little profit another, because one man’s Conceit doth so much differ from another’s; and because the bare Note itself is nothing so much worth, as the suggestion it gives the Reader’.47

      See Bacon’s letter to Greville examined by Vernon Snow, ‘Francis Bacon’s Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960), 369–78, at 374

      This is similar in tone but for slightly differing reasons to Mortimer J. Adler recommending against loaning one's annotated books to other users. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/6x75DnXBEeyUyEOjgj_zKg)

    1. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlierversion of ourselves;

      It is likely a good broad generality that from a historical perspective, those looking at people from the past do so by considering them simply an earlier version of ourselves.

      This sort of isocultural cognitive bias is something to be very cognizant of particularly in cases without extensive context as it is likely to cause massive context collapse.

    1. Because there’s no need for context/app switching.

      Rebuilding one's earlier context and switching between apps are tremendous sinks of time and energy when writing, thinking, and creating.

      It's better to get as much done as possible in the present so as not to need to do all the work over again later.

    1. And protecting life-supporting cooperation requires suppressing certain kinds of selfishness. Biologists, unlike many economists, grasp when the “greed is good” ethos gets deadly.

      At what scale might such cooperative efforts fail?

      Look at the scale of the bitcoin bros using crypto and bitcoin as a completely selfish endeavor. Has this reached a scale for social failure? (Separate from the end date at which the bitcoin/crypto system completely fails and collapses?)

  23. Dec 2021
    1. Possibility of linking (Verweisungsmöglichkeiten). Since all papers have fixed numbers, you can add as many references to them as you may want. Central concepts can have many links which show on which other contexts we can find materials relevant for them.

      Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

      Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

      As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

      Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?


      What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?


      How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

  24. Nov 2021
    1. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember,”

      The Western word "ceremony" is certainly not the best word for describing these traditions. It has too much baggage and hidden meaning with religious overtones. It's a close-enough word to convey some meaning to those who don't have the cultural background to understand the underlying orality and memory culture. It is one of those words that gets "lost in translation" because of the dramatic differences in culture and contextual collapse.

      Most Western-based anthropology presumes a Western idea of "religion" and impinges it upon oral cultures. I would maintain that what we would call their "religion" is really an oral-based mnemonic tradition that creates the power of their culture through knowledge. The West mistakes this for superstitious religious practices, but primarily because we can't see (or have never been shown) the larger structures behind what is going on. Our hubris and lack of respect (the evils of the scala naturae) has prevented us from listening and gaining entrance to this knowledge.

      I think that the archaeological ideas of cultish practices or ritual and religion are all more likely better viewed as oral practices of mnemonic tradition. To see this more easily compare the Western idea of the memory palace with the Australian indigenous idea of songline.

    1. But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public.
    2. Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context.
    3. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.

      Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

      In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

      How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

  25. Aug 2021
    1. Roberts (II, D) argues thatprinted commonplace books demonstrate a fundamental early modern modeof reading, that of extractingsententiaefrom texts, and thus erasing theoriginal context of these passages in favor of creating new uses for digestiblecouplets.

      How is this similar to/different from modern Bible readers erasing the original context of the texts and reimagining the words for their lives in a world far removed from the original?

    Tags

    Annotators

  26. Jul 2021
    1. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

      Interesting to see so many different words to describe not just those who are poorly read, but those who have misunderstood or misapplied their reading.

      Historically, I wonder how much of this may have been applied to those who misused quotations out of context?

    2. Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, 0 elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to under­standing more. The skilled operations that cause this to hap­pen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

      I'm not sure I agree with this perspective of not necessarily asking for outside help.

      What if the author is at fault for not communicating properly or leaving things too obscure? Is this the exception of which he speaks?

      What if the author isn't properly contextualizing all the necessary information to the reader? This can be a particular problem when writing history across large spans of both time and culture or even language.

    1. It is certainly important that we possess one text from Anaximander’s book. On the other hand, we must recognize that we know hardly anything of its original context, as the rest of the book has been lost. We do not know from which part of his book it is, nor whether it is a text the author himself thought crucial or just a line that caught one reader’s attention as an example of Anaximander’s poetic writing style.

      This is one of the first (existing) annotations in Western culture. One must be careful however as the context of the rest is missing.

      What techniques might we use to help rebuild the context? What would Bart Ehrman's text suggest?

    1. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.12.41/

      A searing review of David R. Slavitt's translation of Lucretius.

      The "close enough" nature of the translation seems like the intellectual slide shown by too many moderns which decontextualizes our historical precedents. Perhaps fine for a quick view, but could be a slippery slope for taking as part of the basis for Western intellectual tradition.

    1. On the difference for writing for one's self and for others. Of course there's also the need to be able to re-decifer one's notes again in the future. It may be best to keep more detailed for your future self as if you're writing for the public.

      I like the idea of distance in "communication space" which comes up in the comments. This is related to context collapse and shared contexts which are often too-important in our communication with regard to being understood in the far future.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in Commonplace Book | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:13:34</time>)</cite></small>

    1. In other cases, it’s impossible for an outsider to guess what inspired the note or where it led.

      Reminder that there's value in capturing the context of one's ideas. Who knows what might be missing or what others may wish to know in the future?

  27. May 2021
    1. One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation. The overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping millions of people together into decontextualised social spaces is a shit show.
  28. Apr 2021
    1. Mesopotamia that is called Asia Minor or Turkey, and where one finds many provinces and cities.

      After the collapse of the Ilkhanate, several Mongol dynasties set up petty rump states in the Ilkhanate's previous territory. The area depicted seems to be a mixture of territory claimed by the Turkoman Artuqids, the Mongol Jalayirids(?), and the Egyptian Mamluks. While there are what seems to be borders depicted on the image, they only seem to correspond to the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate to the south without explanation of what lies further East.

  29. Mar 2021
    1. *For the uninitiated, I spent years working in product and design in news media companies before becoming a journalist.

      It would be wonderful if people had spaces on their websites for adding in this sort of personal context with respect to what they were writing about.

    1. from SenorG’s comment that began with the caveat “Allow me to push back a bit here,” and which inspired four replies from three other annotators, to actualham’s observation

      There's something discordant here in a scholarly article about having academic participants with names like SenorG and actualham. It's almost like a 70's farce starring truckers with bizarre CB handles. It's even more bizarre since I know some of the researchers behind these screennames.

      Is the pseudonymous nature of some of these handles useful in hiding the identity of the participants and thereby forcing one to grapple only with their ideas and not the personas, histories and contexts behind them?

  30. Feb 2021
    1. famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”

      This is a great example of context collapse. It's factually true, but almost no one who's seen it would describe it this way.

      It's reminiscent of how advertising and politics can twist meaning. Another great example is the horror cut of Disney's Frozen trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMk1_wwxz8

    1. We’ve always used the term ‘social networking’ to refer to the process of finding and connecting with those people. And that process has always depended on a fabric of trust woven most easily in the context of local communities and face-to-face interaction.

      Too much of modern social networking suffers from this fabric of trust and rampant context collapse. How can we improve on these looking forward?

  31. Dec 2020
  32. Oct 2020
    1. The architecture of the platform where I published allowed authorial control of content but could not control context collapse or social interactions.

      These are pieces which the IndieWeb should endeavor to experiment in and attempt to fix. Though I will admit that pieces of the IndieWeb layers on top of platforms like WordPress can help to mitigate some context collapse and aggregate social interactions better. (eg: reply context and POSSE)

    1. The author and literary critic Sam Anderson has written: “Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.”

      I like their idea about Twitter being an annotation tool and to some extent it is, and a good one at that. However, we still need to address the distribution mechanism and the fact that Tweets like this are often bereft of context and cause context collapse.

      Quote tweets and dunking mechanisms would be interesting to study in this context, particularly in a world where people often delete tweets (dunked or not) which means the original context is gone or missing and we're only left with an orphaned annotation.

      Other cultural examples of missing context include commentary for live sporting or cultural events like the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup Soccer, or the Academy Awards. Watchers will comment on something in real time (often even without an identifying or contextualizing hashtag, eg: #Oscars19), supposing an implied context from their audience, but later generations will be at odds to find or re-complete the original context.

    2. Social media has come to define an era in which we annotate texts every day, we easily share this commentary across contexts, and in doing so we iteratively define who we are.

      But are we also sometimes falsely defining ourselves because of context collapse within these structures?

      Isn't context collapse a root cause of a lot of the toxicity of our communications within platforms like Twitter and Facebook?

    1. Incidentally, teens and twenty-somethings, more so than the middle-aged and elderly, tend to juggle more identities. In middle and high school, kids have to maintain an identity among classmates at school, then another identity at home with family. Twenty-somethings craft one identity among coworkers during the day, then another among their friends outside of work. Often those spheres have differing status games, and there is some penalty to merging those identities. Anyone who has ever sent a text meant for their schoolmates to their parents, or emailed a boss or coworker something meant for their happy hour crew knows the treacherous nature of context collapse.
    1. If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.
  33. Aug 2020
    1. Second, in the absence of any such attenuation, I think a practical and healthy thing that any user of social media can do when confronted with a free-floating cube of news is ask: how big is this, really? Does it matter to me and my community? Does it, in fact, matter anywhere except the particular place it happened? Sometimes, the answer is absolutely yes, but not always—and these platform don’t make it easy to judge.

      These are good prescriptive questions that social media users should frequently use. (Sadly most will not unless they're forced to by design.)

    2. Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.

      How does this relate to Nicholas Carr's article and ideas about category errors in From context collapse to content collapse?

    1. A fascinating viewpoint on social media, journalism, and information. There are some great implied questions for web designers hiding in here.

    2. Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it.
  34. Jul 2020
  35. Jun 2020
  36. Apr 2020
    1. In cases of tension pneumothorax, the parenchymal tear in the lung acts as a one-way valve, with each inhalation allowing additional air to accumulate in the pleural space. The normally negative intrapleural pressure becomes positive, which depresses the ipsilateral hemidiaphragm and shifts the mediastinal structures into the contralateral chest. Subsequently, the contralateral lung is compressed and the heart rotates about the superior and inferior vena cava; this decreases venous return and ultimately cardiac output, which culminates in cardiovascular collapse.
  37. Feb 2020
    1. The biggest drawback of algorithmic feeds is that you might be looking at irrelevant content. When you see something on your timeline and want to comment, you will have to check the timestamp to see if your comment is still relevant or not.
  38. Jan 2020
    1. If you have never seen an ice-hockey stick (or experienced ice hockey) this shape is why we call these figures ‘hockey-stick curves’.

      I'm glad they've included an image of a hockey stick to provide the context here, but I've always thought of it rotated so that the blade was on the ground and the sharp angle of the handle itself indicated the exponential growth curve!

  39. Dec 2019
    1. Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days.

      The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.

      I find that using Webmentions on my site adds a lot of value because it brings all the conversation back to my site, where it really should be for more context.

    1. The people who I envisioned myself writing for—they got what I was saying and where I was focused.  The very early responses to the post were about what I expected.  But then it took off, and a lot of people came into it without the context I assumed the audience would have.
  40. Oct 2019
    1. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates.

      First Factor encouraging professional environmentalists in their denial of social collapse in the near term

    2. Especially in situations of shared powerlessness, it can be perceived as safer to hide one's views and do nothing if it goes against the status quo.
  41. Jul 2019
    1. Further, Humphreys [23] observes that the stabilization that occursduring a technology’s maturation is temporary, and so possibilities for intepretive flexibility canresurface when the context surrounding a technology changes

      Thus the broader "context collapse" for users of Facebook as the platform matured and their surveillance capitalism came to the fore over their "connecting" priorities from earlier days.

  42. Sep 2018
    1. In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream.

      If the semantics are correct here, then Bakhtin may be the originator of the idea of context collapse.

  43. Aug 2018
    1. But honestly, this is mostly just a post giving myself permission not to own my replies.

      I love this! Great rimshot at the end. Sometimes giving yourself the permission is important.

      I know there are others who don't own every reply they make because they also feel like replies are more contingent on context which primarily lives in the other place. It's fine for some of those conversations to be ephemeral and not "owned". In other case, if it's a reply to something you really care about and want to own, then by all means, own that one thing, but leave all the others out.

    1. I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.
    2. Context collapse is our constant companion online.
    3. It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements.
    4. I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt.
    5. I am not immune from these mistakes, for mistaking a limited snapshot of something for what it is in its entirety. I have been on the other side.
  44. Dec 2016
  45. Jul 2015
    1. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

      Interesting conjecture. Seems accurate.