metacargocult

what i like about
this cargocult analysis
is its bottom-up originality

squeezed out of direct confrontation
with media stupidity

so i thought blogs that linked it
might be worth sifting

(what i don't like about it
is its bottom-up contingency
lacking top-down necessity)

[numbering mostly added]

I. Ignorance is innocence

cf eg "zen mind, beginner's mind"
open lack-of-prejudice can be angelic
the 1st time you try bowling you may get a strike

but "Forrest Gump" was sentimentally dishonest
(also "Being There")

we may deserve a world where
innocence effortlessly triumphs
but we've never had one

IA. Complicated explanations are suspect

g spencer brown would defend this one

if the intuition senses
a simpler way
it has the right and duty
to reject the too-complex one

IA1. The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

isn't this an explicit variant
on the anthropic principle?

IB. Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

IB1. Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.

IB2. Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the
prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real
knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled

Popular beliefs must be true.

No bad idea can survive.

People are generally smart.

Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the
same boat as everyone else.

II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person's explanation of the means of his
success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful
people

This is the key to the cargo cult.  To enjoy the
success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

Your idol gets the blame if things don't work out, not you.

You have a right to your share

You get to define your share.

Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.

Celebrate getting more than your share.

III. It's not your fault

If it's good for you, it's good

Society is everyone else.

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

There is no long term

Don't miss an opportunity.

Consequences are things that happen to others

Only you can hold yourself accountable.  Don't let
others make you do that.

If somebody starts the blame game, you can still win it.

There are evil people and institutions, and surely one of them is more
responsible than you are.

You are not the problem

An ugly image means a bad mirror.

IV. Death is unnatural

You're special

Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

Pain is wrong

Life should not hurt.

It's a Whiffle World.

Tragedy is a synonym for calamity

Bad things are never consequences of one's own action or
inaction.

There will be justice

Bad people get punished.

You, however, will be forgiven.

The geometry of ego

1st dimension: every human (in a line)

2nd dimension: the same (at 90 degrees)

at the intersections
the relationships of human to human

A's relationships to B, C, D...
B's to A, C, D...

 |
D| * *
C| * *
B| *
A|   *
 +-----------
   A B C D

3rd dimension: every human again

with the intersections
their relations to others' relationships

A's relationship to
B's relationship to A

with ego blindness dominating here

 
 
 
 
.

The ontology of the Con

reagan's victory in 1980
was a cold awakening for us hippies
the progressive dream drowned

and ever since we've been pedaling in sand
in tar
no traction

i see one hope

the solidity of science

social science without academic bs

an a.i. simulation of the Con

world history rewritten

in the broader context of psychological evolution

the etymogeny of meaning

the mysterious depths of sexuality

wakefulness intimidation ego and sleep

 
 
 
 
.

Blogger zen

web
log

page
stream

link
share

no dates

no titles

no self-mirror

no self-censor

here are just all
the good things i've found

a million tiny lenses
amplifying

short and sweet

why i liked them

why you may not

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Web3.0: Ego abhors a vacuum

the challenge of meditation
is not to think

the mind normally filled
with neurotic habits

and the challenge of artistic creativity
is to subvert cliche
(vs nabokov's gap-fillers)

and the scandal of philosophy
is the sophomoric sophistries
like free will or epistemological solipsism
tying innocent minds in useless knots

and usenet newsgroups often used to
suffer from negative intelligence
flamewars displacing constructive discussion
like coinage under gresham's law

or kneejerk techno-utopianism
urging (eg) educators
to squander their budgets on digital multimedia
when the real problem as always
is rewarding the best teachers

so the semantic web movement
for its earliest days
jumped the track
seduced by the shiny
techno quick fix
of xml
and its pie-in-the-sky promises
about embedded metadata

delivering only a flatline
adoption curve
while (eg) wikipedia
keeps rocketing up exponentially

and while journalistic coverage
of 'web 3.0' increases
the hype sounds more and more
hollow and anemic
rdf topicmaps microformats blahblahblah

endless jargonmania
but no 'there' there
never jam today

so i'll suggest again
that metadata belongs in the file header
(not in embedded markup)

and that wikipedia article titles
have solved one semantic problem
by automatically redirecting visitors
when an article title has changed
(i wish blogger did this)

so webpages can begin painlessly
categorizing themselves in their headers
with the closest wikipedia article title/s

and google should index these
with a special keyword
eg "wikiarticle:Ajax_(programming)"

but even more
we can categorise filetypes
"filetype:timeline"

and even more, i now propose
an ontology wiki
eg "ontoclass:business/merger"

that encourages experiment
and redirects changed classnames automatically

and that uses storycycles
as the macroformat

allowing description of
any random news story
any random wikipedia article
any random web resource

by sketching a universal
usual story

of everyperson (eg their wikipedia biographies)
of everyproduct (eg their history and web resources)
of everyprogram (eg the software lifecycle)
of everyenterprise (eg their corporate history)
of everyfile (its creation and dissemination)
ov everyword (its etymology)
of everyidea (its genesis and evolution)
of everyspecies (its selection pressures)

so that the metadata
for any given object
can emphasize precisely
those 'slots' in the usual storycycle
where the object's particular history
deviates from the usual expectations

these storycycles being compiled
incrementally, wiki-fashion
by storytellers who understand
the usual range of details
(a storycycle storycycle)

with an ongoing appreciation of the impermanence
of particular wording
or particular orderings

software storycycle
biography storycycle
business storycycle
hardware storycycle

.

After words

if humans were incapable of
cunning injustice
before 50,000 bc
when language evolved

is it possible
when language is perfected

language itself
can be transcended?

.

Ego and injustice on the Tree of Life

let's say
ego is injustice

and ego-types
are characterised by
characteristic injustices

which might be assigned
characteristic colors
on the Tree of Life

and adolescence
transforms the childish ego
(oriented towards parents,
siblings and playmates)
into an adult ego
with more-or-less adult
accountability

childbranchcolor breaking up
adultbranchcolor breaking thru

and the emotional extremes
of adolescence
are due in part
(or mainly)
to western society's incompetence
in modeling justice

so that every teen has to improvise
their own justice
their own anger
in their own ego




i praised the movie 'clueless'
for breaking new ground
in modeling compassionate solutions
to stereotypic teen angsts

and i await a teen tolstoy
writing the great teen novel
(presumably as an adult)
unknotting western teen angst

its egos and injustices

for good