Luke Allen
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Luke Allen has not written any posts yet.
I have a very simple rule of thumb for evaluating the value of products and services: Agency, Resource, Status, and Experience. It reminds me that in everything I buy commercially, I'm paying for ARSE:
I was thinking about the various services and ministries provided by my small-city church, and to reconstruct its social impact, you'd have to have at least these things:
Increasing its positive impact on the city would be easier... (read more)
I'm trying a live experiment: I'm going to see if I can match your erisology one-to-one as antagonists to the Elements of Harmony from My Little Pony:
Interesting! They match up surprisingly well, and you've somehow also matched the order of 3 out of 5 of the corresponding "seeds of discord" from 1 Peter 2:1, CSB: "Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander." If my pronouncement of success seems self-serving and opaque, I'll elaborate soon:
And now the reveal. I'm a generalist; I collect disparate lists of qualities (in the sense of "quality vs quantity"), and try to... (read more)
I posit four basic categories of value: resources, experiences, esteem, and agency. You've listed a group of esteem games.
In the first example, let's assume your spouse likes the other restaurant significantly better than the one you both like. You deny yourself a specific potential positive experience by using your agency to grant her a more positive experience, and in doing so, you obtain the esteem of the sacrificial as well as the esteem of the generous in your spouse's eyes.
If it's a healthy relationship, that esteem is a side benefit which gets folded into the gestalt benefit of relational harmony enhanced through generosity. But if the esteem is the main goal, the... (read more)
I define SL4 in terms of a description I heard once of a summary of Baudrillard's work: a simulacrum is when a simulation breaks off and becomes its own thing, but still connected to the original. And whether or not that's how Baudrillard thought of SL4, it's a useful concept on its own. (My simulacrum of "simulacrum" as it were.)
For example, a smartphone is a miniature computer and video game console that also has telephone capabilities; it's a simulacrum of Bell's talk-over-telegraph-wires device.
The iPod Video is an almost identical piece of hardware and software minus the telephony, and even that can be simulated with the right VOIP app. I can imagine someone saying, "Well, it's still essentially a smartphone." But we don't say the same of a laptop computer using a VOIP app, or even a jailbroken Nintendo Switch or DSi. We've reached the edge of the simulacrum.
In the late 00's, I was made aware of the Hero's Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it's the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief -- or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero's Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero's journey is life in the "doomed village": things look normal and sound normal, but something's profoundly wrong in the world, and it's about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun... (read more)
The map is to the territory as the corporate media complex is to the Truth.
Why should I believe a level 4 simulacrum of the election results when all the superweapons are both at stake and in play?
Let's get our ontology correct. She used philosophical tools to approach philosophical problems, and wrote essays on the results in philosophical terminology. That makes her a philosopher. If her results were incorrect, at worst she's an incorrect philosopher like so many others throughout history who moved philosophy into "less wrong" territory.
The same is true of Buddhism, and Christianity too: in addition to being religions, they're philosophies, making ontological and ethical statements and explaining how those were reached. And atheism, while a philosophical viewpoint, also has had religious social structures built around it, such as taboos against self-coding as religious.
Exploring the philosophical "realm" and "mining" new seams of gold ore (or fools' gold) is what makes one a philosopher, whether one comes in with a pickaxe and mule like the '49'ers or a bulldozer and dynamite like the industrial strip-miners.
Agreed on tech change. We now expect a new generation of video game consoles every five years, a new version of Microsoft Office every three (but did NOT expect the name change to "Microsoft 365," an increasingly ominous claim of ubiquity), and new phones every other year.
The only real technological surprise I've had in a good long while was yesterday when I suddenly realized Notepad.exe now has a "New Window" menu option, which simply spawns another instance of Notepad. To me, this is cause for celebration, and I find myself wondering why there wasn't more fanfare for this superb productivity hack.
Which, indeed, is why I categorized "certification" as Status or marketing: the product gains standing in the eyes of whoever believes the certification has merit, but gains negative status with whoever distrusts the certifier.