I said, in the thread QTed up thread, that the “Box people” who have responded to my writing over the years is basically English-reading middle class. And I do have consistent readership too, so by both measures, my writing is far short of existentially perfect/random art.
Conversation
But it’s not bad. While I’ve found a few coarse vector features (readership is majority male for eg, and concentrated in the moving 10-years-younger-than-me window), it’s actually hard to detect patterns beyond those. Huge variance on most other variables.
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Still, can do better. How do you get more random? It’s not enough to simply stop appealing to the Box side of people. You need imagination to appeal to True-Named side (everybody has both a Box they’re working themselves out of, and a True Name they’re growing into/uncovering).
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I’ve made a lot of progress in the last year figuring out what I want to stop doing, and I’ve stopped almost all of it. The harder challenge now is identifying things to start/continue doing.
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I recommend this challenge to everybody working in public: discover approximate instances of your Perfect Art by trial and error: things that appeal to maximally random subsets of your available audience.
Some version of this is likely possible in more private lives too.
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Seeking out the primality in others is not the only way to progressively uncover the primality in yourself, but is probably the easiest.
Tldr: don’t reduce people; make them more whole. That’s what it means to “see” others — make them more whole, and be made more whole in turn.
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The irony is… I think Crenshaw’s original intersectionality idea was actually motivated by a very similar ontological aim. Basically perform something like a Cantor diagonal on finite notions of identity. Except it went badly wrong because of an insufficiently expressive frame.
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It was done in a way that strengthened what should have been subverted.
There’s probably a rigorously formalizable version of the argument in this thread but I’m not really interested in crafting it. I believe it enough I just want to use the result somehow.
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What I’ve discovered so far about searching for Perfect Joke type art is that you have to filter out or subvert Box features of ideas, and tap as deep as possible into unconscious stream of consciousness to generate primality. Aka, formulaic exclusion, anti-formulaic inclusion.
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Primality in work tends to draw out True Named sides of people. Mostly because you can’t dissect the object, the whole subject forms a response. It’s not a feature subset of you that’s laughing.
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I’ll define a thing that may not exist: a super-perfect joke that makes everybody laugh. Nobody can resist laughing.
Replying to
One of these days I’ll vanish past the event horizon of my own latent spaces like time cube guy
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Update: creating or responding to perfect jokes make you slightly more true-named in an unpredictable way, breaking with box-predictable past, so even if nominally same people laugh each time, it’s mitigated by them getting slowly uncorrelated from past. More free/random.
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So there’s an ergodic hypothesis here. Making 1 person laugh in a random way for n days is like making n random people laugh for 1 day. This allows you to apply idea to non-public work. With just family or an SO for eg. Grow more random together.
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Replying to
Would you know about any underlying physiological or chemical anchor related to laughing?
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