Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented. Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Image of the CityThe Great Blight of Dullness confusionchaos
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
e-worm.club A Website by Zach Sherman e-worm.club I’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles. micrositescommunicationthinking