Miscellanea 2
A certain kind of putdown works by pointing out someone's behaviour is driven by causes, not reasons. This was basically Freud's whole schtick, ditto for parts of Marx and Nietzsche. You can do this by uncovering facts about people's childhood, or worse, their adolescence. Lots of intellectual history does this. Categorising someone as a type of guy rather than an individual has a similar effect. Pathologizing as a rhetorical or political strategy works like this, e.g. calling people homophobes.
There are different names for this move. Hegel-via-Brandom talks about Niederträchtigkeit (baseness or ignobility) and Edelmütigkeit (nobility, magnanimity), where the niederträchtig person is someone who takes our actions to be caused and the edelmütig person takes them to be responding to reasons. Strawson talks about the participatory and objective stances in similar ways. There is a world of reasons, of moral agents, where you make moves like apology, resentment, forgiveness, and bargains, and a world of causes, of at-best moral subjects, where you can only explain, expect, and influence.
Weirdly, a similar split exists on certain vaguely-Buddhist views. On some understandings of the two truths doctrine there's a split is between conventional truth, the world of reasons and persons and their reason-giving games, and ultimate truth, the world of causes and conditions. Here the valence is reversed, its the world of causes that is in some sense superior to the world of reasons. On this version of the split, viewing people's behaviour (including your own) as being driven by causes, not reasons, is not an insult but a prompting to compassion.
***
The characteristics of naïve art have an awkward relationship to the formal qualities of painting, especially not respecting the three rules of perspective:
- Decrease of the size of objects proportionally with distance,
- Muting of colors with distance,
- Decrease of the precision of details with distance,
The results are:
- Effects of perspective geometrically erroneous (awkward aspect of the works, children's drawings look, or medieval painting look, but the comparison stops there)
- Strong use of pattern, unrefined color on all the plans of the composition, without enfeeblement in the background,
- An equal accuracy brought to details, including those of the background which should be shaded off.
Could there be an equivalent naïve narrative art? What would it look like to bring an "equal accuracy to all details" in a narrative? Is it just a matter of describing the breakfast in as much detail as the boss battle? What is the equivalent of "distance from the observer" in the narrative? It could be relevance to the main causal or thematic arc. So irrelevant details are told in as much vivid detail as the "main" plot. Is Tristram Shandy then the best example of naïve narrative art?
***
You ever listen to SACOYANS? They're pretty great. If you're ever in Osaka, and you find yourself on a rollercoaster called the Hollywood Dream, make sure to select the song "Osaka Lover" as your ride music. It's not by SACOYANS or anything, they're just both Japanese.
***
Minimalist UIs are condescending. They assume the user doesn't know what they want, and needs their attention directed to a pre-digested subset of visible menu options.
Minimalist UIs are a warning that someone is either trying to sell you something or sell you. There are way more words on any single internal page of a book than on its cover. The discrepancy was less stark in 17th century frontispieces.
How do conversational UIs (i.e. chatbots) fit into this?
***
Most media is social media if you view your past and future selves as different "people" interacting across time. Your childhood journal is a small social media platform, it just has a weird, linear social graph.
***
I think the fact the D-Day landings were successfully kept secret (despite involving so many people) makes complicated conspiracy theories more plausible.