speculative extension: humor
maybe i make myself even more of a caricature of a semi-autistic philosophy person by saying this, but humor kind of doesn't make sense! why is being funny so high-status? why do we like humor so much? what's so enjoyable about it?
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one provocative answer is that humor is good because it's a demonstration of the ability to play, to loosen your grip on the cookie of your goals. humor is this same kind of agility, and is just as impervious to formulas and rubrics as play is
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i have other thoughts on why this is the right theory of humor, but i'll save that for later
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anyway, the intended takeaways here are
1. play is essential to doing and thinking correctly
2. not-play is also necessary sometimes but less often than you might think
3. most of the least effective and worst stuff in the discourse is a failure to play
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Replying to @acidshill
very strongly endorse!!!
some unsolicited play takes
1. play is good
2. a lot of what looks like seriousness is actually play for weirdos
3. a lot of play gets turned into seriousness by mistake and then it's no fun anymore
4. grey tribe is defined by playing differently
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ATTENTION
i am now shilling PLAY because it is very cool. play is a good way to approach large parts of life, including twitter
play is fun, but it’s also sometimes a good way to learn things and make friends and probably has other benefits
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ty also to @reformliturgist for helping me connect play to my discussion of moralizing
moralizing i take to be broadly "anti-playful tribal attitudes"
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The biggest change in my worldview is to be less moralizing. I used to primarily judge things/people/ideas as good or bad. Now I'm much more likely to view them as functional in a particular ecosystem.
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GIF
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selene on play and (not) naming things and parenting
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Speculation: the core of the "don't jinx a good thing by Naming it" is about avoiding Clinging or Grasping
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"if only we stopped trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time"
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Obviously this too can be posed as an optimization problem (eg explore/exploit models) as I’m sure you know. Some versions are even surprisingly tractable... which seems to be less well known. eg
Yes! I'm literally just repeating everything I learned from this
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Heh I did a talk once 20y ago for a non-STEM audience titled “why life is (NP) hard” where I walked through a bunch of nice life-lesson optimization models without the math... bandit problems, phase transitions etc. Should dig up slides.
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