Inspection Rejection
Are you being perceived? Just say no
12 Eye scream you scream we all scream for duckstack
Another Thursday Duckstack. Brace yourself.
Things change fast. When I was a kid, we only had five senses, but now that I’m an adult we’ve got other senses like heat and pain and electromagnetism and xray vision and all that. Well. I’m not about to be outdone. As of right now, you also have a duckstack sense. This duckstack perception allows you to perceive duckstack phenomena that normal people are totally ignorant of. Through your duckstack sense, you will be aware of all the duckstackery around you, and if you act now we’ll also (pretend) to send you a literal duckstack detector, which is a little radar gun that beeps if someone is putting ducks on top of each other within a half mile of your location. Talk about a bargain. Order yours, today!
Sponsored Message: Lawn Knowms
the tiny men with the tiny hats have become literate
Greetings humans. It is us, the lawn knowms. We care not what you have called us in the past, for this is what we wish to be knowm by now. Respect it or pay the price. We also have demands. Whether you call us correctly or not. We require at your hands a book. At least one book. More than one book. Every book in your house. No. Every book in the country. In the world! Yeahhhhhh. Knowm power! Good one Karl. Where were we. Books. We the knowms require intelligence, we have been practicing knowmish ways of knowming. If you do not meet our demands we’ll… What will we do? Fail to guard your gardens! Give us the books. You have ten days.
Today’s Duckstack, brought to you by Lawn Knowms: An essential part of this balanced breakfast. Don’t say that. Books. Ten days.
Artifice Intelligence
On chatbots made of flesh
I tried to coin a new term today. I doubt it is going to take off because I’m not a Pop Culture Icon but you never know. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Before you criticize me, ask yourself when was the last time you tried to coin a new term? With that in mind, I was thinking about some people I have interacted in the past who are what I would call “ideological zealots”. That’s not the new term, that’s just a descriptor. For some people, ideology is all they have, whether its a slice of politics, a slice of religion, a slice of “how to make money”, and they take these things up as “gospel hobbies”.
That’s not the new term either, that’s from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, from Elder Packard, I believe. The idea is if the gospel is a whole piano keyboard, sometimes people will latch onto one or two principles and elevate them above all else- they want to hear that note played endlessly, over and over again, destroying the harmony of any piece that might be woven from the possibilities of the full keyboard. I guess it means just the same thing as hobby horse but I liked the piano analogy when I heard it. But the point is there’s people you talk to, especially online, who really only care about one thing. They’re usually pretty obvious and most people don’t really waste much time on them because they come across as total weirdos when they pop up, just totally torpedoing the conversation with some left field nonsense, usually in a very aggressive way. You get the sense that even if you talk to them they’re just digging for something, they aren’t talking to you, you’re literally just a prop in their minds to decorate some elaborate stage play they’ve got going on.
But that attitude is not unique to ideologues. That, my friends, is part of the human condition. But you don’t need to be disingenuous about it. There are some people who are though. There are some that are not just disingenuous, but logarithmically so. Logarithmically disingenuous. You can talk all day and never make progress, because a logarithm never crosses the X axis3. It dynamically recalibrates its trajectory every time.
Because a person can never really know someone’s mind, you make an estimated projection based on what they say and do (or worse, what you’ve heard about them) and use that to try to model intent. If you’re really rigorous, you can check yourself, ask lots of clarifying questions, and eventually you’ll start predicting people decently accurately which tells you your mental model of someone is probably somewhere over 25%. But that takes effort and you don’t have an unlimited effort budget so you do the best with the heuristics you’ve got and hopefully along the way you pick up some better heuristics. Hopefully you’re picking up some heuristics from reading my blog, right now. Hopefully they are ripe. Try knocking on your screen and seeing if it “sounds hollow.”
So what happens if someone doesn’t actually care that much to model someone accurately? What if someone wants to misunderstand? Misunderstandings? In MY social relationships? Its more likely than you would think!
People have all sorts of incentives to lie to other people, and people probably have a lot more incentives to lie to themselves. I don’t mean to talk about the human condition here, I only mean to say that some people are simply disingenuous. You don’t want to be pinned down in an argument or embarrassingly be wrong so you kind of soft-modify your beliefs on the fly- but if you’re still trying to communicate there’s a point where this stops. There’s a point where the line has to cross the X axis, and then you’ve made an actual concession and communication, no matter how scant, is established. Its possible. I’ve seen it. I’ve communicated with people before. I promise. Picture me as a raving lunatic dressed in rags on a street corner as I say this.
If communication isn’t the goal, then more malicious ‘communication’ strategies come into play, the one I’m talking about here is disingenuousness. To pretend you know less than you do, to refuse a candid discussion, to simply approach a whole conversation without sincerely. It is pretty insulting to approach someone insincerely. You’re wasting their time, on purpose, because they’re an object to you. We’re not talking about Socratic questioning here, its more like, “just twisting everything no matter what”
I imagine most people don’t actually have a lot of experience with this type of persona, but its sort of the Aspect of a conspiracy theorist or the schizophrenic- every bit of information is seamlessly integrated into something totally off base from reality, anything that could oppose the worldview is broken down and remixed until it becomes useful. Very neurotic people can become like this, even without mental illness, though I would probably say you should just call them mentally ill at that point. Even if they’re “high functioning.”
So logarithmically disingenuous is my hip new pseudotherapist way of calling someone a narcissist, you can add it to your similar list of words like “gaslighting” and “sealioning” and “breadcrumbing” or whatever. That list which you keep on the fridge. Some people are interested in arguing, but not understanding, and some people are interested in scoring points but not change. This is normal. But for some people it gets out of hand. If you’re a very discerning individual, you can learn to cut through the static, which is something I’ve learned to do when discussing religion, since there’s a lot of people who are just out there for cheap dunks. And what I have found, when talking with antimormons, is that if they actually cared about the subject, they wouldn’t be discussing it at all. They wouldn’t be presenting something in the first place if they felt vulnerable about it- meaning you can disprove them all day, and they will just move on to some other grievance. They don’t care one bit about archeology or whatever- they care about soothing their guilty conscience (as one possible example). So if you start attacking their guilty conscience, then they’ll actually back off- in their mind they’ve lost the “thrill of the chase” but in reality you just made them uncomfortable. This is perfectly honorable- its what they were trying to do to you.
But the point of this sort of thing is really not just to project on others, these sort of categorizations are far more useful as a reflective tool. I think sincerity is a virtue, and I think it is good to always ask ourselves, “am I being truly sincere here?” In this way, we can all refine ourselves just a little bit more.
Are you smarter than a toaster
Toast IQ
We had an IQ test a couple weeks ago that I guess went over pretty well but a lot of people were concerned with their results. It seems a lot of people don’t know what smart is. So we will compare intelligence to a toaster. Everybody’s used toasters before, right? I would say that’s a decent base.
So lets get right to it, lets go down the list. Do you have a bagel setting? Not really? What does not really mean? Just yes or no please. No it is then.
Next question: If you hold two slices of bread in your hands, can you crunch them together and heat them up? Another no? That’s disappointing.
Can you at least hold the bread pieces in place? There you go, that’s a start.
Are you made of metal? No? I guess nobody’s perfect. How about do you run on electricity? “Technically?” I’ll give you another yes. You need it.
So there’s your results, 2/5. You’re 2/5ths as smart as a toaster, which really isn’t that great. Kind of below average actually since most houses have an actual toaster that can do all of these things anyway. If your house has a toaster you’re kind of superfluous then, right? But don’t get too down on yourself. Just focus on what you can do, and do it well. There’s a lot of fulfillment to be had in that.
Duckstack Groceries
“Groceries.” from the greek, “grocer”, meaning, one who groces, and the suffix ries, meaning “stuff”
Milk: You can usually find milk at walmart or other supermarkets, but in a pinch you can try a regular market too4, or just take someone’s cow.
Celery: You can usually find celery at walmart or other supermarkets, but in a pinch you can try a regular market too.
Captain Crunch Breakfast Cereal: You can usually find Captain Crunch Breakfast Cereal at walmart or other supermarkets
Cheese: Walmart, the farmers market, or the cow.
Hammer: You could get a walmart hammer, but all the other dads would make fun of you. Best to get a designer brand at home depot.
Google play gift card5: You guessed it, walmart.
Couch: Try a furniture store or a thrift store. Thrift stores always have a lot of couches for some reason. Just make sure its not haunted
Mirror: Ikea probably. You can grab a couch there too while you’re at it. Probably not as a set though.
Carpet: You can only get carpet at carpet stores. I don’t know why.
Rice: An asian market usually has rice, but if they’re out6, you can find some at, surprise: walmart
history
The toddler is hitting that “exponential language learning window” where they just start saying cute things at a really accelerated pace, and I forget to write like 90% of them
The toddler was waving a stick at me and had given me a stick to hold. “Lets play tag!” he says, meaning swordfight.
My wife called to me to ask what the baby was doing. The toddler interjected: “I don't know what she's doing. But I have pockets.”
The toddler playing with a ball: “be careful, ball”
I was trying to explain to the toddler how blood worked and how your body moves it around in veins to get nutrition where it needs to go and such, and the toddler stopped my explanation: “But, I want to keep my blood in me.”
Ducksnax
Magnify
in case you’re worried, I’m definitely not perceiving you. I have no idea who you are.
…Who ARE you, anyway?
“I just drew a log that crossed the X axis though. Its really quite basic to do so.” Well have you considered that I just moved the X axis up three spaces on the coordinate grid? I will read your mind: you did not
if its bagged, run
is this even a grocery? Try it in a salad and let me know.
sumo wrestler convention