Beau Sievers

Title page of the review article 'The Physics of Sensing and Decision-Making by Animal Groups' by Danielle L. Chase and Orit Peleg in Annual Review of Biophysics. Includes illustrations of collective behavior in honeybees: a diagram showing uncommitted scout bees transitioning through decision-making to choose between two nest sites; a honeybee on a honeycomb cell; a cluster of bees hanging from a branch; and a schematic of bees forming a layered cluster.

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Many of the good answers here (Clint Eastwood, Mishima, Norm MacDonald) created work that richly considered widely felt emotional pain and how that pain can change people. But they mistakenly thought the logical, implicit, obvious endpoint of that consideration was tragic, isolated individualism

imo they shoulda called it Pretty Greg Machine

Woke up in the middle of the night from a dream about a novelty music act called Greg & Nate who had a Nine Inch Nails parody record called Pretty Nate Machine

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Performative non-alignment is just insecure alignment

bro this sucks. what i once suspected to be passion might in fact be madness

Honestly, finding oneself putting a tremendous amount of energy into something nominally "true" but ultimately confused like this strikes me as a psychologically plausible but very scary career outcome, which is probably why I'm tempted to make fun of it

So a kind of off-target reductio ad absurdum

I believe it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who said "At some point you just have to, like, stop"

(very) big if true

One of my deeply held beliefs is that if we could condition people to accept how chance affects their lives, they’d be much better equipped to recognize how systemic things impact them.

Seconding El Farolito as the essential Mission-style burrito

Some faves:

themorris-sf.com
izakayarintaro.com
yanksing.com

Many disagreements focus on generalization scope, so if you limit your claims far enough (and for some this means “as far as possible”), potentially productive disagreements about scope will never occur

Something like: Let’s not mistake denial for illiteracy

Hi! I got influenced by a good podcast: rangedtouch.com/2023/06/09/t...

I don’t think this is a “4-D chess” argument; it’s just part of how public denial and mockery exist synergistically and symbiotically with public moralization

Like, I think the critical targets of the literature take glee in knowing that their defenses and denials are mistaken as evidence that the literature itself is bad, and that’s part of how their behavior functions as mockery

In mistaking denial for misunderstanding, the progressive moral critic underestimates their target and thus, I fear, becomes social proof that the defensive mockery is justified and/or effective.

I.e., problematic dudes who profess that Tony Soprano is cool actually are not stupid. They are not missing the point. Rather, the show has hit them hard enough to provoke a defensive reaction, comprising private and publicly performed acts of defense and denial.

“The portrayal of this character does more harm than good, and we know this because real people who do bad things publicly sympathize with the character.”

But a powerful reason to endorse such a character is to mock and insult an author and a community whose criticism is in fact effective

Reading Book of the New Sun and watching The Sopranos has brought me into contact with the problematic male viewpoint character discourse, and I’m noticing a scarcely mentioned dynamic.

Typically, a progressive moral critic will say something like

Bitterviper, by Bitterviper 4 track album

The Bitterviper album is out today on Blue Chopsticks, my long distance collab with David Grubbs, Taku Unami, and Nikos Veliotis. Find it on Bandcamp and all other places where you find music! bitterviper.bandcamp.com/album/bitter...

New preprint! We developed new measurement tools to examine moralization in ~2B Twitter/X & Reddit posts and ~5M traditional media texts.

Key finding: moralization increased markedly on social media from 2013-2021; more than traditional media; associated with multiple user dynamics
🧵👇

There should be personal, professional, and legal consequences in America for repeatedly publicly lying

This is why we need public broadcasting

Instead we randomly encounter the worst provocateurs and news that credulously repeats them

I think part of the problem is that the public figures modeling this kind of humility are on YouTube or other platforms where their audience is self-selected. People do not randomly encounter humility on TV, in the news, etc.