Atomic individuality and absolute independence are illusions born from the misapplication of pure reason. An atomic individual with total independence is not a possible object of cognition.

This fantasy (really a “nightmare of reason”) can entertain lifestyle anarchists, ancaps, and neoliberals only because they suppress the necessary context in which humans must come into being: community.

“Optimizing for efficiency” is usually taken to mean optimizing for the maximum effect attainable with minimum effort. In the absence of a proper critique of the value of the expected effect, this is deleterious!

In most cases, we should actually be pursuing a course which rewards greater effort with improved outcomes even (and perhaps especially) when the “efficiency”, the ratio of the amount of effort to the size of the outcome, is reduced.

Let’s abandon the efficiency fetish in favor of working more carefully, with finer resolution, to realize better quality.

I want to be codifying the design of infrastructure, the deployment of software, and the flow of information with inference figures.

Some forms of compliance and complicity masquerade as kindness.

Pattern matching is lovely. I’d strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t played with a language supporting pattern matching to do so ASAP. As a matter of fact, skip straight to unification. However, <something about tension with abstraction>.

The very premise of pattern matching is that the surface representation of a structure can be used as an iconic interface to its components. <explain iconic>.

Pattern matching lets us access arbitrarily nested components of data by matching an instance of the data against a schematic form of it, with free variables located at situations where we will find the components we want to extract.

This places naive pattern matching in direct opposition to representation independence.

I suspect that a common root of these was the use of general logic as an organon. In Kant’s critical philosophy, he admonishes against this, warning that will produce monstrous results.

To use logic as an organon is to use it to extend our knowledge. That is done whenever we try to reason from purely general logical principles to existence of any sort. This occurs, for instance, in the axiom of unrestricted comprehension.

Humanity’s humans don’t generally believe it, but they deserve to live well. We must become convinced that we deserve to live well, so that we become compelled to form our communities to serve this end.

• Girard’s (Girard 2011) culminates in a formal theory of transcendental inter-subjectivity.

I wish I wanted what I want to want.

Scientific progress is not well served by investigating every hypothesis and running every conceivable experiment. The search space is infinite, but our time and resources are finite. Scientific understanding advances by abducting plausible and promising hypothesis based on penetrating understanding of current ways of knowing. Promising heterodox theories must be investigated, but not every crumb from every half baked theory advanced by every crank.

The same holds for political and social progress. Nothing is gained by giving mind share to every last ranting idiot. Those who try to equalize all discourse, and claim every dissenting view must be entertained, no matter how absurd, disingenuous, or ill-founded, are either profoundly mistaken about the nature of inquiry and insight, or are operating in bad faith.