"Live players" vs. "Dead players" (THREAD)
Since reading this distinction two weeks ago, I've thought about it more or less every day. It's a simple distinction, but it explains so much.
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Interesting. I came up with an isomorphic concept for my next book. Here’s my email note to myself on that:
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I’m gonna need that unpacked a little (or a lot)... but I imagine that’s what the book is for?
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tldr: logical positivism is just wrong. Falsificationism is not even wrong, but gestures at an adjacent sound epistemolgy: a truth is like a log of experimental tinkering with an idea. There’s no such thing as “falsifiable in principle”. You’re either tweaking it or it’s dead.
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Embodied truths like an engineered artifact or a publishing medium can’t be true or false like propositions but they can be alive or dead, which is almost the same thing. You’re either tinkering with it, or it’s dead/untrue.
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I treat "true" as "aligned with reality", like a trued-up board in carpentry. All artifacts have a "truth" of 1, just like past events have a "probability" of 1.
Alive vs dead seems about whether future truths align with the artifact's reality? Important stat for me, if so.
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Ah, probably also a measure of (iterations of) the artifact's ability to evolve with reality.
This is a vital stat for open source projects, pun intended. Difficult to measure, which can sometimes result in undead systems (like the Node event-stream hack).
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Yep. Dead code decays. Managers can't smell it rotting, and don't understand line workers complaining about the smell. (It doesn't help that we're introverts prone to speaking in hidden tongues.)
Which is why the internet sucks. It's incredibly vital, but also littered with rot.
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