hey psst over here

imma let you in on a secret

you know words right?

yeah you know what i’m talking about

the good shit

anyway you know where words come from?

people just make them up! anyone can do it! you don’t need permission or anything!

here watch i’ll do it

the new words are “relip” and “thamagar”

there it’s done we have new words easy

i’m not gonna define them or anything that would be uncouth words don’t have definitions

but let me show you how to use them

when you say “why don’t you just?” that’s relip

when you talk for an hour about the minute boring details of a subject that’s thamagar

when you look at a problem and you think of all the other stuff in the area that you’ve done that’s like it and can use all of that to come up with a solution that’s thamagar

when you look at a problem and go “i don’t know much about this but here’s a crazy idea” and it works that’s relip

(when it doesn’t work it’s still relip you’re just not being very good at it)

when you can’t see the woods for the trees you’re being thamagar

when you forget that woods are made of trees you’re being relip

experts are almost always thamagar about their subject

when you’re learning something new you’re usually relip

when you can explain something precisely and carefully and answer people’s detailed questions about it you’re being thamagar

when you can explain something in a sentence with no weird words you’re being relip

the difference between me and @notateapot is we’re both relip about most of the shit we talk about but she wants to be thamagar while i like it this way

While my... esteemed sibling... is of course correct that words don’t “have” definitions, I believe it is overstating the case. It is still useful to offer definitions for words. Why else would we have dictionaries?

Despite the rather whimsical nature in which it introduced them, TC’s new words do appear to serve a useful function. As such I would like to suggest some provisional definitions for them:

Relip and thamagar describe perspectives on a subject. A perspective is relip if it is highly abstracted from the subject’s context, and as a result is able to ignore most of the details of it in order to focus on a few most salient points. It is thamagar if it sees the subject as deeply embedded in its context, with access to all its detail and understanding of how it connects to its surroundings.

A learner is typically relip because they do not yet have the context that will allow them to be thamagar. An experienced person is typically thamagar because they have spent enough time with the subject to have learned all its context and connections.

It is important to understand that neither of these things are good or bad. Relip pushes you in the direction of simple solutions, while thamagar allows you to solve problems for which no simple solution is currently possible. A relip perspective is helpful for clearly communicating your ideas, while a thamagar one allows you to elaborate on important details that were elided for the sake of clarity of presentation.

To tie this back in to my current project, I would suggest that rationalism encourages a relip perspective, while feminism encourages one that is thamagar.

my sis @notateapot is doing a thing where she talks about rationalism and feminism

nat is mostly pretty on point here but i think there’s a big thing that she’s never gonna tell you so imma have to do it

rationalists and academic feminists have one really big thing in common that makes them natural enemies

they’re both giant fucking nerds who don’t get invited to any of the cool parties

(hello hi me too please invite me to better parties)

this means that they mostly end up hanging out with the other weird nerds who share their weird nerd interests

so after a while they develop their own little nerd in-jokes and invent their own little nerd-speak

this makes talking to them really fucking difficult 

you have a conversation and you think you’re talking english and then all of a sudden they say “yes but what about Pascal’s mugging?” or “alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction” or “may the fourth be with you” and suddenly everyone around you is laughing and shouting “ni! ni!” at the top of their lungs and you have no fucking idea what’s going on

because it turns out that you might have been talking english but they were hearing nerd-speak and vice versa

and it gets even worse when you take two nerds from different academic fandoms and put them in a room together because they’ve got different things that they’ve trod to death and they don’t even remember that they’re speaking in the local dialect of nerd

and now you’ve got a room full of people shouting about whether Han Solo would have made a better captain of the enterprise than Kirk or whether objective reality is a socially constructed paradigm

it’s really annoying

Honestly, do you think you could at least try to take things seriously rather than just heaping scorn on everyone who attempts to better their understanding of the world?

Unfortunately, buried in my sibling’s borderline incoherent ramblings is the core of a valid point.

In “The Limits of Organization”, Kenneth Arrow outlines a thesis that one of the economic factors that drives the formation of organisations is the efficient acquisition and transmission of information.

To paraphrase: Although the price system is, in a technical sense, efficient, a key problem that people have when using it is that of dealing with uncertainty. Although there are various ways (for example, complex financial derivatives or insurance policies) that uncertainty can be incorporated into the price system, but these can in and of themselves create a number of problems in and of themselves through creating perverse incentives.

The role of the organisation in this context is then to manage uncertainty by creating a group entity that is able to deal with information in a way that improves on what the market will allow, by creating a higher trust environment with its own internal information channels and its own internal coding of various concepts to allow this information to be transmitted more efficiently - for example, a technical jargon serves this purpose by reducing complex concepts to single words. As long as two speakers have mutually complex jargon, entire long discussions and debates can be altogether elided. We can discuss “asset management” or, indeed, “alienation”, without having to first find common ground for what the concept we are talking about is and deciding whether it exists.

Although in the context of academia in particular and knowledge construction in general there is no marketplace per se, the “marketplace of ideas” holds a similar role, and creates similar pressures for individual subdisciplines to enable a more efficient communication of concepts about their particular area of focus.

All of this comes with a high up-front investment of effort: The reason organisation formation rather than incorporates the market is because for individual transactions the cost of acquiring the jargon is simply not worth the effort. It is only the cumulative effect over many discussions and many explorations of the possible space that that investment begins to pay off.

This acts as a significant barrier to entry: If all of the communication happens in this coded language, any attempt to acquire the knowledge that they have developed requires a similar investment, and the language becomes not just a tool for efficient understanding but also an effective barrier to entry. This is how academic disciplines become “inaccessible” to the layperson.

The problem then becomes worse when two non-intersecting disciplines interact, because in order to successfully communicate between the two this barrier must be cleared in both directions.

Thus any attempt at bridging these non-overlapping intellectual worlds must require a significant effort of translation, and possibly the formation of a common creole (a language hybridising the two) or pidgin (a simplified language drawing on aspects of each language, often for the purposes of trade) if any common ground is to be found.

see? nerd speak

You literally post epistemology jokes on your blog.

epistemology is fucking hilarious

...

I give up. There’s no talking to you when you’re like this.

my sis @notateapot is doing a thing where she talks about rationalism and feminism

nat is mostly pretty on point here but i think there’s a big thing that she’s never gonna tell you so imma have to do it

rationalists and academic feminists have one really big thing in common that makes them natural enemies

they’re both giant fucking nerds who don’t get invited to any of the cool parties

(hello hi me too please invite me to better parties)

this means that they mostly end up hanging out with the other weird nerds who share their weird nerd interests

so after a while they develop their own little nerd in-jokes and invent their own little nerd-speak

this makes talking to them really fucking difficult 

you have a conversation and you think you’re talking english and then all of a sudden they say “yes but what about Pascal’s mugging?” or “alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction” or “may the fourth be with you” and suddenly everyone around you is laughing and shouting “ni! ni!” at the top of their lungs and you have no fucking idea what’s going on

because it turns out that you might have been talking english but they were hearing nerd-speak and vice versa

and it gets even worse when you take two nerds from different academic fandoms and put them in a room together because they’ve got different things that they’ve trod to death and they don’t even remember that they’re speaking in the local dialect of nerd

and now you’ve got a room full of people shouting about whether Han Solo would have made a better captain of the enterprise than Kirk or whether objective reality is a socially constructed paradigm

it’s really annoying

Honestly, do you think you could at least try to take things seriously rather than just heaping scorn on everyone who attempts to better their understanding of the world?

Unfortunately, buried in my sibling’s borderline incoherent ramblings is the core of a valid point.

In “The Limits of Organization”, Kenneth Arrow outlines a thesis that one of the economic factors that drives the formation of organisations is the efficient acquisition and transmission of information.

To paraphrase: Although the price system is, in a technical sense, efficient, a key problem that people have when using it is that of dealing with uncertainty. Although there are various ways (for example, complex financial derivatives or insurance policies) that uncertainty can be incorporated into the price system, but these can in and of themselves create a number of problems in and of themselves through creating perverse incentives.

The role of the organisation in this context is then to manage uncertainty by creating a group entity that is able to deal with information in a way that improves on what the market will allow, by creating a higher trust environment with its own internal information channels and its own internal coding of various concepts to allow this information to be transmitted more efficiently - for example, a technical jargon serves this purpose by reducing complex concepts to single words. As long as two speakers have mutually complex jargon, entire long discussions and debates can be altogether elided. We can discuss “asset management” or, indeed, “alienation”, without having to first find common ground for what the concept we are talking about is and deciding whether it exists.

Although in the context of academia in particular and knowledge construction in general there is no marketplace per se, the “marketplace of ideas” holds a similar role, and creates similar pressures for individual subdisciplines to enable a more efficient communication of concepts about their particular area of focus.

All of this comes with a high up-front investment of effort: The reason organisation formation rather than incorporates the market is because for individual transactions the cost of acquiring the jargon is simply not worth the effort. It is only the cumulative effect over many discussions and many explorations of the possible space that that investment begins to pay off.

This acts as a significant barrier to entry: If all of the communication happens in this coded language, any attempt to acquire the knowledge that they have developed requires a similar investment, and the language becomes not just a tool for efficient understanding but also an effective barrier to entry. This is how academic disciplines become “inaccessible” to the layperson.

The problem then becomes worse when two non-intersecting disciplines interact, because in order to successfully communicate between the two this barrier must be cleared in both directions.

Thus any attempt at bridging these non-overlapping intellectual worlds must require a significant effort of translation, and possibly the formation of a common creole (a language hybridising the two) or pidgin (a simplified language drawing on aspects of each language, often for the purposes of trade) if any common ground is to be found.

see? nerd speak

You literally post epistemology jokes on your blog.

my sis @notateapot is doing a thing where she talks about rationalism and feminism

nat is mostly pretty on point here but i think there’s a big thing that she’s never gonna tell you so imma have to do it

rationalists and academic feminists have one really big thing in common that makes them natural enemies

they’re both giant fucking nerds who don’t get invited to any of the cool parties

(hello hi me too please invite me to better parties)

this means that they mostly end up hanging out with the other weird nerds who share their weird nerd interests

so after a while they develop their own little nerd in-jokes and invent their own little nerd-speak

this makes talking to them really fucking difficult 

you have a conversation and you think you’re talking english and then all of a sudden they say “yes but what about Pascal’s mugging?” or “alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction” or “may the fourth be with you” and suddenly everyone around you is laughing and shouting “ni! ni!” at the top of their lungs and you have no fucking idea what’s going on

because it turns out that you might have been talking english but they were hearing nerd-speak and vice versa

and it gets even worse when you take two nerds from different academic fandoms and put them in a room together because they’ve got different things that they’ve trod to death and they don’t even remember that they’re speaking in the local dialect of nerd

and now you’ve got a room full of people shouting about whether Han Solo would have made a better captain of the enterprise than Kirk or whether objective reality is a socially constructed paradigm

it’s really annoying

Honestly, do you think you could at least try to take things seriously rather than just heaping scorn on everyone who attempts to better their understanding of the world?

Unfortunately, buried in my sibling’s borderline incoherent ramblings is the core of a valid point.

In “The Limits of Organization”, Kenneth Arrow outlines a thesis that one of the economic factors that drives the formation of organisations is the efficient acquisition and transmission of information.

To paraphrase: Although the price system is, in a technical sense, efficient, a key problem that people have when using it is that of dealing with uncertainty. Although there are various ways (for example, complex financial derivatives or insurance policies) that uncertainty can be incorporated into the price system, but these can in and of themselves create a number of problems in and of themselves through creating perverse incentives.

The role of the organisation in this context is then to manage uncertainty by creating a group entity that is able to deal with information in a way that improves on what the market will allow, by creating a higher trust environment with its own internal information channels and its own internal coding of various concepts to allow this information to be transmitted more efficiently - for example, a technical jargon serves this purpose by reducing complex concepts to single words. As long as two speakers have mutually complex jargon, entire long discussions and debates can be altogether elided. We can discuss “asset management” or, indeed, “alienation”, without having to first find common ground for what the concept we are talking about is and deciding whether it exists.

Although in the context of academia in particular and knowledge construction in general there is no marketplace per se, the “marketplace of ideas” holds a similar role, and creates similar pressures for individual subdisciplines to enable a more efficient communication of concepts about their particular area of focus.

All of this comes with a high up-front investment of effort: The reason organisation formation avoids rather than incorporates the market is because for individual transactions the cost of acquiring the jargon is simply not worth the effort. It is only the cumulative effect over many discussions and many explorations of the possible space that that investment begins to pay off.

This acts as a significant barrier to entry: If all of the communication happens in this coded language, any attempt to acquire the knowledge that they have developed requires a similar investment, and the language becomes not just a tool for efficient understanding but also an effective barrier to entry. This is how academic disciplines become “inaccessible” to the layperson.

The problem then becomes worse when two non-intersecting disciplines interact, because in order to successfully communicate between the two this barrier must be cleared in both directions.

Thus any attempt at bridging these non-overlapping intellectual worlds must require a significant effort of translation, and possibly the formation of a common creole (a language hybridising the two) or pidgin (a simplified language drawing on aspects of each language, often for the purposes of trade) if any common ground is to be found.

my sis @notateapot is doing a thing where she talks about rationalism and feminism

nat is mostly pretty on point here but i think there’s a big thing that she’s never gonna tell you so imma have to do it

rationalists and academic feminists have one really big thing in common that makes them natural enemies

they’re both giant fucking nerds who don’t get invited to any of the cool parties

(hello hi me too please invite me to better parties)

this means that they mostly end up hanging out with the other weird nerds who share their weird nerd interests

so after a while they develop their own little nerd in-jokes and invent their own little nerd-speak

this makes talking to them really fucking difficult 

you have a conversation and you think you’re talking english and then all of a sudden they say “yes but what about Pascal’s mugging?” or “alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction” or “may the fourth be with you” and suddenly everyone around you is laughing and shouting “ni! ni!” at the top of their lungs and you have no fucking idea what’s going on

because it turns out that you might have been talking english but they were hearing nerd-speak and vice versa

and it gets even worse when you take two nerds from different academic fandoms and put them in a room together because they’ve got different things that they’ve trod to death and they don’t even remember that they’re speaking in the local dialect of nerd

and now you’ve got a room full of people shouting about whether Han Solo would have made a better captain of the enterprise than Kirk or whether objective reality is a socially constructed paradigm

it’s really annoying

Honestly, do you think you could at least try to take things seriously rather than just heaping scorn on everyone who attempts to better their understanding of the world?