Part of my intellectual curiosity dircles around the what I call informational thermodynamics. That is essentially a notion about the amount of energy required to keep a certain idea accurately alive in the minds of people. This is powerful enough notion but it is complicated by this, the fact of trompe l'oeil, which simply states that the human mind is subject to predictable failures.
These failures are part of our biology. The way we naturally think makes us take shortcuts. We abstract so that we can make up for the limited amount of brainpower we can muster at any time. What I hope is that Taleb's work will bear this out. Clearly he's ahead of the pack in his Fooled By Randomness (notebook). As much as we can know, many things are opaque, and man do I love his idea about intervention bias.
What occasioned this note is that I'm discussing jazz with Jewel and on the subject of Loussier we got to the object of Pachelbel. There is something classical about the fundamental chord changes of songs that humans find aesthetically pleasing. Oh snap. Now I have to read Benzon. But as the classic YouTube rant shows, Pachelbel is everywhere.
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Somewhat separately but related is puttering. When do our own idiosynchracies start to become obvious to us, even in our most intellective behaviors? I noticed this in my father the other day as he got his new computer and then proceded to become fascinated by the old photos that he moved onto it. He continued this routine about three times and I suddenly realized he was puttering. He remarks about how many thousands of pictures he has. He then says that some day he's going to really start organizing them. He then laments about what a huge and awesome task that will be. He start looking at one set of photos and gets engrossed. The next day he goes out and takes more photos.
Last week he gave me 40GB of pictures with the admonition that under no circumstances should I load them up to the cloud. He doesn't want anyone to see them. His audience is himself. It has been this way for 15 years, I'm sure.
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And finally there is the observation that I tend to make more often that so much of global consumer culture privileges marketing. I do not chew gum, and I mean almost never. If I have five sticks a year I can't remember. But Ironman and I noticed yesterday that we have lots of different kinds of gum, and it's all in the packaging - but in the substance of gum itself, nothing at all is new in the past 40 years except for that new brand that can change flavor. Marketing, I now more completely understand, is the art of making the old seem new, to make the dull shiny. Transferrence is our predictable failure.
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