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
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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.
Please do! I'd also be curious if you disagree at all with Brian Christian.
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Eyeballing it I suspect we basically agree on everything. Iirc I used the 37% optimal sampling for sequential ranking example myself as well. It’s a popular one.
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