_(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)_
-Okay, three years lat—three _months_, three _months_ and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have [suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response](/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/). I was pointing at _something_ real with that post—there is _some_ subgraph of the network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is definitively _not_ interested in ...
+Okay, three years lat—three _months_, three _months_ and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have [suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response](/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/). I was pointing at _something_ real with that post—there is _some_ subgraph of the discourse network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is definitively _not_ interested in ...
But it's a _small_ subgraph. It is written that every improvement is necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement. When the center of collective narrative gravity shifts, that _could_ be the homing device of our [beautiful weapons](http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) converging on the needle of Truth in the haystack of thought, but it could just be the blind thrashing of Fashion.
The Smart Subgraph [sounding the alarm](https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/) might have been an input into authorities calling for a half-measured lockdown ("lockdown")—which was only enough to push <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> [slightly below 1](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-4-30-stuck-in-limbo/). That might have bought us time if we had any [live players](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2) who could do the test–trace–quarantine scurrying we fantasized about, but it doesn't look like that's a thing.
-The lockdown ("lockdown") became a distinguishing tribal value for Blue Egregore, with hick anti-lockdown protesters an object of scorn: ["The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests"](https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/25/21234774/coronavirus-covid-19-protest-anti-lockdown), proclaimed one _Vox_ headline on 25 April, "How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives." The "risking their lives" characterization of that piece's subhead makes an interesting contrast to what similar voices would say about the George Floyd protests little more than a month later: ["Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue"](https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-pandemic-public-health-racism.html) proclaimed _Slate_ on 2 June.
+The lockdown ("lockdown") became a distinguishing tribal value for Blue Egregore, with hick anti-lockdown protesters an object of scorn: ["The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests"](https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/25/21234774/coronavirus-covid-19-protest-anti-lockdown), proclaimed one _Vox_ headline on 25 April, "How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives." The "risking their lives" characterization of that piece's subhead makes an interesting contrast to what similar voices would say about the George Floyd protests little more than a month later: ["Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue"](https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-pandemic-public-health-racism.html) (!!) proclaimed _Slate_ on 2 June.
-Is it wrong for me to say "similar voices"? I _know_ that Maia Niguel Hoskin (author of the _Vox_ piece) and Shannon Palus (author of the _Slate_ piece) are different people, and that reporters often have no control over what headline gets pasted on top their work.
+Is it wrong for me to say "similar voices"? I _know_ that Maia Niguel Hoskin (author of the _Vox_ piece) and Shannon Palus (author of the _Slate_ piece) are different people, and that reporters often have no control over what headline gets pasted on top their work. And yet somehow some notion of "the tendency of thought published in _Vox_ and _Slate_"—or, more daringly, Blue Egregore—seems ... um, useful for compressing the length of the message needed to describe my observations? I read a lot of things on the internet by many authors—not just officially "published" articles, but comments and Tweets, too. Every comment is unique, but I want to say that no comment is _maximally_ unique—only I'm not quite sure what that would mean. Every comment expresses information, but there's [_mutual_ information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) between comments.
+
+Seeing one "protests are a Bad public health threat" comment in late April makes me _less surprised_ to see more such by authors I had already tagged as "similar"—and seeing a "protests are Good as a countermeasure to the public health threat of white supremacy" comment in early June makes me less surprised to see more such from similar authors, perhaps even some of the _same_ authors who said protests were a public health threat in April. The stronger the correlation is, the more tempting it is to posit Blue Egregore's existence as an _entity_ that persists over time, albeit less cohesively than Maia Niguel Hoskin.
+
+I almost wish—emphasis on _almost_—that I had something substantive to say about racial oppression and police brutality. I don't doubt that these things are very real and very dangerous, but they belong to another world from which my privilege protects me, and the intra-elite squabbling in _my_ world that _purports_ to refer to these things mostly serves other functions.
+
+
+Arrest the cops that killed Breonna Taylor
+
+https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx
-[TODO: but the things-Slate-and-Vox-writers-say category is predictively useful]
[TOOD: I don't have anything interesting to say about racial oppression and policing; I'm more concerned with inter-elite squabbles]
[TODO: Kayfabe wants me to believe anti-cop rioters and anti-speech petitioners are the same, but mere coalition-membership is less predictively useful for the actual for the actual weft of people's lives and their effects on the graph]
[TODO: but I'm most angry about Hsu]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff