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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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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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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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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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