Tiled With Pentagons

DO NOT TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY YET. I PUBLISHED THIS WITH A LOT OF LLM INFILL TO HAVE IT VAGUELY COMPLETE AND REASONABLY CORRECT RATHER THAN EXTREMELY INCOMPLETE AND UGLY, AND TO BE ABLE TO POST 110. I WILL COME BACK TO THIS BY THE END OF THE MONTH; THIS IS JUST EXTREMELY OVERDUE ALREADY. ANYTHING NOT IN ARIAL SHOULD BE SUSPECT. THIS IS NOT IN FINAL FORM. (Epistemic status: A promising but weird research direction in agent foundations and philosophy of language. A half-built conceptual tower whose mortar and paint are both still wet: please excuse our mess while we innovate. Some of it, I'm confident in as pretty much right; some of it is merely suggestive; probably much of it is wrong or incomplete. Certainly it lacks the math it'd need to be truly correct. The prior art here is strange and thin:  Gärdenfors, Tarski, and the later Mohists make for odd bedfellows, and I can't tell whether that's a warning sign or a moat I can easily clear. I gave the simplest parts of this ...

(Epistemic status: Believe in the me that believes in you, you had the power within you the whole time, the real treasure is the meals you made along the way, etc etc. For everyone who's ever claimed they can't cook while holding a sandwich they made, and everyone whose life would be improved by a move away from girldinner and boyslop and gender-inclusive Huel.)    Learned helplessness is a strange thing. Have you ever met someone who didn't even realize that they were lying to you, who claimed incapacity in one breath and in the next, undercut their own statement with an object-level display of competence? Possibly you've overheard someone singing serviceable counterpoint with their shower speaker and then, clad in terrycloth and embarrassment, express hope that they didn't bother you with their awful singing voice; or sat patiently tutoring someone who claimed they can't code or do math and then, as you return from getting a glass of water, quickly tab away fr...

(With thanks for foundational conceptual engineering to ZM.) Your day seems to be going fine. So does your week. But you find yourself constantly feeling behind, constantly putting out a fire right before having to dash off to the next fire to put out; in a fragile state, like if anything at all goes wrong, you'll break. You've got too many plates spinning. You're smart, you're competent, you're skilled, and you're motivated. So what's going wrong? What are you missing? There's something specific but elusive that you need, and the word for it is "Slack". No, not the overgrown Discord-like that's metastasized into the way all communications in your company get run, the abstract resource, the rationalist term of art. Put succinctly, it's uncommitted capacity. It's the breathing room, the bit of extra reserves that let you keep slightly clearer of the edge of your safety envelope. It's the margin that lets you absorb a shock withou...

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)     This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art:  an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake...