on being gwyneth

analytic meta-arguments – arguments about the categories into which arguments fall or to which they can be assigned – are always ideological, and are thus always more satisfying to the ideoloque.

an evangelist is someone persuaded that their own metaphor is not only powerful but true.

You’re neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You’re right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right…

— Benjamin Graham, cited by Warren Buffett

there’s no such thing as this community.
there’s no such thing as that community.

is there any such thing as any community?

the world is made of representations, not of things.

the backlash against post-modernism is the reaction of normative authoritarianism, the dismissal of narrative in favor of categorical assertion.

http://cigfran.net/index….ed-conversation

labels are not just empty words, and different labels for related things are not synonyms. labels help us organize complex ideas for efficient communication. of course, their compactness can also be abused, hence the common reaction to them. but we cannot dispense with labels, or else conversation would become either pointlessly reductive or completely unwieldy.

a lot of political identity is the struggle for the authority of and over labels, because labels are, in a sense, all we really have of each other and the world beyond direct experience. they are the product and means of abstraction. they are the sign, without which the signified is unintelligible.

it just occurred to me that assembly language programming is the realworld practice of the kind of number theory that gödel was working in, where statements are reduced to symbols which can be manipulated in the language the statements were made in.

which suggests that perhaps an actual working model of the incompleteness theorem could be programmed.

one of the things i never got quite clear was the idea that darwinian evolution is not competition between species for survival but competition within species – or more specifically, within gene pools – for replication… which is the transmission of genes.

i finally had this driven a bit deeper into my head by a fascinating little exchange between richard dawkins and freeman dyson, in which dawkins seeks to correct what he sees as a misunderstanding on this point, on dyson’s part.

the exchange is prompted by dyson’s thoughts regarding what he terms the “darwinian interlude”; a lengthy period of what we have come to think of as normal evolutionary process (“vertical” gene exchange within species), preceded by a period in which gene exchange was lateral, and succeeded again by such a period into which we may be entering now, largely by way of technology.

deflating somewhat the attractiveness of this notion, dawkins points out that in fact lateral gene exchange never really went away, having persisted among bacteria.

and as it turns out, such exchanges are not necessarily limited to bacteria at all, but in fact might regularly occur from bacteria to their host organisms.

now that puts an interesting twist on things… and i have to wonder, in my absymally ill-informed way (remember the admission of ignorance with which i began this comment), whether this might not supply at least some credence to the possible operation of punctuated equilibrium.