Going Critical

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

I’ve had this essay stashed in my to read pile for ages and it was totally worth the wait. It explains the concept of ‘diffusion’ in networks using concision, clarity and interactive demos. Better yet, you can tweak the parameters of the demoes live to get an intuitive grasp of how, for example, transmission rates affects critical thresholds. Reading this and playing with the demos has given me a much better understanding of how memes, infectious disease, knowledge and culture spread through networks. The end of the piece, which focusses on how cities / density are powerful both for positive (scenius, cultural transformation and intellectual breakthroughs) and negative (infectious disease, shitty social phenomena) reasons was particularly interesting. One to read on a desktop, not mobile.

A Fresh Coat of Moss

You should embrace the visceral quality in reading. Read mostly fiction. Read slowly. There is a kind of marinating that happens with very good works, they are always more than their story. The goal is not to digest information, but to layer over your reality with a fresh coat of moss. Your own world becomes colored by these stories, so it is worthwhile to spend time seeking the excellent works from across cultures and history.

You should have a goal, in some sense, to be influenced by the works that you read. All stories influence you, regardless of how they get to you. A person who reads no great stories will be influenced by the few stories he does come across in life, for better or worse — and I think mostly worse.

—Simon Sarris, from Reading Well

Complicated vs Complex

Recently, I heard Arthur C Brooks discuss the difference between complicated and complex problems on an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show and it made me think about how that distinction applies to art.

Complicated problems seem difficult when first encountered, but are easy enough to crunch with enough compute. It might take a while, but if you work through the process from beginning to end, you’ll get the answer.

Complex problems often start with simple questions — who will win this football match and how? — but the correct answer, if it even exists, is unknowable. Too many moving parts. Too many unknowns. Too much randomness.

Of course, complex problems are more interesting and important to contemplate:

• why are we here?
• how can I live a good life?
• who do I want to spend it with?

I think this applies to art too. Art that asks more questions than it answers endures, both in the mind and in the canon.

The complexity inherent in good art shouldn’t be confused for complication. The key is work that is dense with meaning and mystery; not necessarily dense pictorially, musically and linguistically. It can be simple, but not shallow. I’m thinking of artists like Agnes Martin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Basho who draw power from a minimal approach.

I want to make photographs which share the qualities of the work I admire: pictures that get better over time, that contain details missed on first glance, that leave you with a feeling that you can’t shake. I’m seeking complexity.

Democratically elected governments can to some degree adapt to spatially extended responsibility, because our communications technologies link people who cannot meet face-to-face. But the chasm of time is far more difficult to overcome, and indeed our governments (democratic or otherwise) are all structured in such a way that the whole of their attention goes to the demands of the present, with scarcely a thought to be spared for the future. For [Hans] Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this:

“What force shall represent the future in the present?”

from Tending the Digital Commons by Alan Jacobs

Dil Green on the difference between care and cleverness:

Care is regenerative. If you care for someone and you put care into a system, it becomes more capable of caring for you. Cleverness, though, is always extractive. Cleverness looks at a situation, goes away, and thinks, “Aha! I’ve made a new idea out of that.” It’s taken something away from a system or situation and all it’s come up with is a clever idea.

Via Jack Cheng #396 Maintenance Ethic

A Transcendental Gap

“With your thought you can’t encapsulate everything that an apple is, because you forgot to taste it. But biting into an apple won’t capture everything an apple is either, because you forgot to tunnel into it like a worm. And so with tunneling too. What you have, in each case, is not the apple in itself, but apple data: you have an apple thought, you have an apple bite, you have an apple tunnel. A diagram of every possible access to the apple throughout all of time and space—assuming it could be made (which it couldn’t)—would miss the kind of apple that a less complete diagram would capture. And in both cases you wouldn’t have an apple, you would have an apple diagram. But for sure there is apple data: apples are green, round, juicy, sweet, crunchy, packed with Vitamin C; they make an appearance in Genesis as the most unfortunate snack in human history, they sit on boys’ heads waiting for arrows to shoot them in stories…. None of these things are the apple as such. There is a radical gap between the apple and how it appears, its data, such that no matter how much you study the apple, you won’t be able to locate the gap by pointing to it: it’s a transcendental gap.”

—Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), xxix–xxx.

Via The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo 📚

Present, Spacious, Alive

Following on from the previous post, I loved this podcast/dharma talk

Christian Dillo on the case against happiness, the problem of having a problem with our problems, merely doing it, unconditional aliveness, the difference between pain and suffering, and saying ‘yes’ to the truth of your experience.

Suffering = Pain x Resistance

Christian Dillo on Pain and Letting Go

I.

We need to reverse the habituated get-away-from-pain dynamic and create a new turn-toward-pain dynamic. This turning toward is friendly or, as I will call it going forward, kind, because contrary to our common and deeply embedded habit of resistance, it accepts and even welcomes what is already the truth of our experience. If something is already the truth of our experience at this particular moment, why resist it, why not be intimate and present with it as it is?

II.

For most people, letting go of pain means getting rid of pain. This is an understandable error because the pursuit of happiness compels us to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. We can begin to enter a deeper understanding of letting go when we turn the idea upside down and explore what it means to let pain come. Look at it this way: letting go is the opposite of grasping and also the opposite of pushing away. Let’s look at both, one at a time.

From The Path of Aliveness

There Should Be A Guy

by Max Lavergne

There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower’s cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that’s what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it’s not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can’t get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren’t then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendents hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don’t think that’s too extreme.

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