Tootfinder

I know next to nothing of substance abt The Amazing Digital Circus. All I know is that every time a trans woman makes a virtual reality story she makes a zillion bucks and her characters get turned into fortnite skins cuz of our innate sauce with the feeling of physical disconnection, and im lowk tempted to try continuing the family nacho recipe even as itd be purely cynical cuz I actually really really only care abt the process of becoming a real physical person im tired of thinking within …

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

Wanna know why #psycholinguistics is so fascinating?
In a 2001 #experiment participants saw sentences like
"While Mary dressed the baby played in the crib."
Then they had to answer the question:
"Did Mary dress the baby?"
Up to 51% of all answers where "Yes!" – and participants were *very* confident about their answers.
🤯
Original paper:
Christianson, Kiel & Hollingworth, Andrew & Halliwell, John F. & Ferreira, Fernanda (2001). Thematic Roles Assigned along the Garden Path Linger. Cognitive Psychology 42(4). 368–407. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0752
Also a fascinating read:
Ferreira, Fernanda & Bailey, Karl G.D. & Ferraro, Vittoria (2002). Good-Enough Representations in Language Comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11(1). 11–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00158

Monday's killing in Biddeford Maine
—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigrant death squads have committed in the U.S. since the start of Donald Trump's crackdown
—has been met with public outrage,
but nothing indicates that the federal government thinks anything went wrong at all.
As is its custom, ICE told lies about its victim, calling Duršn Guerrero an "illegal alien" in its statement
and suggesting that agents slaught…

ICE Brings The Occupation Home | Defector
On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the…

Donno what’s worse, the verse itself or DuckDuckGo’s generated explanation of it. @… https://partyon.xyz/@nando161/116925119988965039

Enjoying MillMint today, and thinking about the way a world built by one person inevitably winds up uncannily unified in aesthetic to the point it undermines the project's credibility with regards to what it tries to express about ours
https://millmint.net

Ever taken Paxlovid? This is a fascinating explanation of the #ritonavir "incident" at Abbott Labs.
(Yes, it's from the dread private equity-owned Veritasium but it gets points for working in James Hoffman's coffee lab. 😁)
▶️ The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Hey, #Utah. How's about a new, government-funded cult, as a treat?
"These group exercises and private corrections resemble tactics used in Synanon, a notorious and controversial drug treatment program seen as one of the first versions of a therapeutic community model. The Other Side Academy leaders don’t claim a tie to that program. But Delancey Street Foundation — where several ear…

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy