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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Semantic satiation (“a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener”) is the tip of a very big iceberg. Much of what Lewis Carroll was trying to do was turn it into a martial art. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation …

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Verbal experience is so central to all experience that disrupting it with higher-order semantic satiation —with good poetry or Carollian absurdity — is one of the most powerful ways to alter the experience of mind without drugs or meditation.

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      TIL Carroll’s White Knight poem in Through the Looking Glass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks%27_Eyes … is apparently a parody of Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer bit in Resolution and Independence, which I’d never heard of (and am now biased to think of as bad)https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45545/resolution-and-independence …

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      It is vicious as a parody, and relentless in its use of every trick in the book to drive a verbal derealization, which makes Wordsworth’s inability to actually see past his own failed expressionism very clear (though I needed Harold Bloom to point it out)

      6:16 PM - 12 Sep 2019
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      • Harold Bloom Quotes Salvator R. Tarnmoor interminable schizophony Chris Johnson Daniel Viau _
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Elsewhere in the collection of Carroll-scholar essays I’m reading, one essay explores his obscure work on puzzles and word games, which bridge his work as a mathematician and fiction writer. The craziness in his works is not free association nonsense. It is carefully constructed.

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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Constructed to what end? To break down your stream of consciousness at the verbal base layer through a kind of gentle torture based on the same principles as semantic satiation.

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          For example, his endless use of indirections in naming and pointing is not an early anticipation of C programming pointer chase interview questions. It’s not meant to test your ability to reason in convoluted ways, but to make you abandon the attempt.

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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Basically he was trying to get the effects of good poetry through mathematical means. Creating a verbal reality that dismantles its own verbal foundations even as it evolves, leaving behind only the felt world. Like the grin without the Cheshire Cat. All 50 years before Godel.

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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          I previously lazily assumed that as a mathematician Carroll was likely average, but now I’m not so sure. Seen as math-poetry of verbal derealization, Alice is almost a premonition of Godel. And looking at some of his puzzles, there was definitely a very live connection.

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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Like, he played a lot with rewrite rule puzzles (like connecting two 4 letter words via a series of transformations), recursion etc. Ops that play a major role in Godel. It almost feels like he was to Godel (via Alice) something like Frege. Just via a much more scenic route.

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