SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity.
New York Times • A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life
I love this! Nguyen follows this up with
“The philosopher Talbot Brewer, in his book, “The Retrieval of Ethics,” says something like we’ve lost sight of how important activities are and we’re just obsessed with how important the output is and the product is. And that’s partially because we’ve been swept up in this hyper-industrialized product-oriented world where we think, look, the thing that I’m trying to achieve is the thing that’s valuable. And I think what we lose sight of is how interesting it can be to be caught in the process of doing something.”
How many illegible others, human and nonhuman, have perished because we did not attend to them properly? I think of the terrifying rates of species extinction, as well as the disproportionate death rates of queer, racialized, and otherwise marginalized bodies. How many have not perished, but are reduced in some way, smaller versions of the beings... See more
Jasmine Wang 🌱 • Attending to the Other
A university museum worthy of its name must become at least as much a laboratory as, say, a university library. An archive must become a place of teaching and hands‐on learning. The classroom must become a place of hands‐on engagement with the material remains of the past where the tasks of processing, annotating, and sequencing are integral to... See more
Todd Presner • The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
Epistemology and
Context Omission and Trust are fundamental ingredients in the creation of facts, and both depend completely on subjective judgment. Facts are not “indivisible atoms of truth” — instead, they seem impossible to define with the objectivity we’ve come to expect from them.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
Science holds all knowledge as tentative and uncertain.
While people tend to accept this in theory, the metaphor of Facts connotes certainty and permanence, and inspires a fervor often indistinguishable from religious fundamentalism.
The metaphor of Facts thus creates a countercurrent to the spirit of science in public discourse and everyday life.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
Centralized trust creates negative externalities even when those at the center remain trustworthy. As the market expands, a purely person-to-person approach breaks down and would necessitate the presence of intermediaries. Intermediation, on the other hand, serves many roles, but also imposes costs, especially when the intermediary is a private... See more
JENA MARIE ESPELITA • TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
"I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens." And now, in his most improbable guise yet, as artistic director of the 2010 Brighton festival, Eno wants to programme works that demonstrate why surrender is key to the sort of music and art that excite him. "I came to this idea because I noticed that when I set up... See more