#cognitive science blog

[cognitive-science-stuff]

I'm studying for my philosophy exam and I swear the god, some of this quotes are just golden

Thanks Aristotle, I would never ever guessed it by myself. Seriously.

[markllockwood]

The definition of Contemplation

In our fast-paced, technology-driven world, finding moments of genuine peace and clarity can feel like an elusive dream. Yet, within us lies a powerful capacity for inner exploration and transformation: contemplation. Contemplation is not merely a passive act but a dynamic and profound practice that holds the key to unlocking our highest potential. We will seek to understand this concept as we…

[bravegrumpy]

That feeling when your "adult" relatives are actually cool now that you are also an adult.

I’m in the middle of writing a blog post about how I use internal dialogue techniques to process my trauma, and compensate for my weird behaviors.

I fell down the rabbit hole of the cognitive perception of color.

This is cool.

But what tripped me out was seeing my grandmother’s name on some of the more influential studies that shows that language affects color perception.

Has anybody else discovered something about parental figures/older family members that you remember finding boring as a kid, but is actually really cool?

[prokopetz]

I feel like "the way a post's content is presented influences how widely it will be reblogged" is a somewhat more reasonable hypothesis than french fry preference being predictive of IQ.

Apparently the secret to Tumblr polls is to write them like a random character creation lookup table from a hypothetical tabletop RPG.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[kittyit]

cfs/disability blog post -__-

finally acclimated enough to become bold enough to talk about it. after getting sepsis and then getting covid for the first time while in the ICU in late 2022, i have developed chronic fatigue syndrome. i don't like that diagnostic title but it is what it is until further discoveries of categorization and naming of specific mechanisms of its causes are made, and it's the most well known term.

there is something wrong in my body. i can tell. I hate the concept of it being "fatigue" - it's inability to recover from exertion. my favorite term is actually from 2015: systemic exertional intolerance disease (SEID). i have the dubious advantage in being able to articulate and understand clearly what's going on because I'm a person who has previously recovered from near-bedridden levels of weakness from a series of life circumstances and choices that left me barely able to stand and walk. once i was out of the circumstances that resulted in this, I recovered slowly but surely. the concept of self-rehab is simple: exercise to near exertion or exertion, eat nourishing foods that allow muscles to rebuild, rest if you're overtired or hurt. continue this cycle. enjoy how it feels to get stronger and the simple joy and fun of being exerted! this worked great for me. it was only getting better.

i was undaunted at recovery after sepsis/COVID because i'd done it before. then, when things were different, i just thought i needed to push through and keep going. this resulted in me acting extremely erratically and being incredibly unwell for a year. then i started taking seriously that something was wrong. and it is wrong, i just can't stress enough that something is wrong in my body.

this is how exercise (exertion) used to go: the exercise starts, there is a wonderful beginning feeling of ecstasy, excitement, followed by a middle feeling of being fully present, fully engaged with the physical activity, then an ending feeling of pleasant exertion (sometimes quite intense!), then the satisfaction of resting, eating, drinking. sore the next day if boundaries were pushed, not if they weren't.

this is how exertion goes now: the exercise starts. there IS a wonderful beginning feeling of excitement. i think one of the worst parts is how it always pretty much feels okay at the beginning, and because i am an optimist (possibly born this way, nothing has ever been able to really stop it), i think i might actually get away with it this time. consider this: a brief and brisk outing to a nice norcal town, maybe 30 minutes total of walking and standing, with rest interspersed, total 1.5 hour outing. the middle feeling of the exertion has changed. there is a sensation that something is wrong, something is off. it's incredibly difficult to not just push through this. but the end is definitely the worst. instead of a pleasant exertion, there is a sudden oncoming rush of emptiness, oncoming illness. where there used to be satisfaction there's just a sensation of doom. sometimes it feels like i'm falling, like literally falling through space while sitting still.

within 8-12 hours, there is a result of something going wrong in the body. some research suggests it's a mitochondrial problem. i don't know. i'm not science-y enough. but it's just fucking crazy. feeling like you do when you wake up and realize you got that flu after all, cognitive functioning sharply declines, shaky, can't focus, lose short-term memory, can't type well on my phone, loss of ability to emotionally regulate, a spike in aphasic issues. my "post exertional malaise" symptoms are mostly cognitive functioning based, i have to go pretty far before i start feeling it physically. which is incredibly frustrating in its own right, to feel the sensation of untapped power in my body. and when i take it too far, i can put myself into a spiral of being fucked up for weeks or months (when i REALLY fuck up and keep going. just finished one of these. months. really months)

it just sucks. i'm constantly trying new things, trying to treat it, trying to improve. i take resting really seriously now but i just can't accept i'll spend the rest of my life like this. there's a few camps in CFS subculture, people who say recovery isn't possible (and often tell anyone aiming for it they're just going to make themselves worse), people who insist recovery is possible (and do not make space for people who have tried everything and nothing worked), and many more ad infinitum.

i right now believe i'm on a slow but linear improvement timeline. a woman once told me her mother had issues like this after sepsis and she felt better 10 (!) years later. it's been 2.5 years for me and i can do more. but how much of "doing more" is just me sacrificing a lot of things in my life i used to be able to to do rest (more cooking, cleaning, etc.) it's humbling. my gf takes care of me in a way that is impossible to articulate my thankfulness for. like she saved me and is the reason i'm alive. she is devoted and caring to the extreme

i am really serious about disability politics and being ok with being disabled. and it feels like (as an ex-christian who will live with genuine serious religious trauma for the rest of my life) that god is always humbling me/punishing me. but this isn't a punishment from god. it's a medical problem. and there are going to be different approaches and medical solutions. and as long as i don't give up i will improve.

i just feel like i need to talk about this. i've been really ashamed because it's a really crazy catch-all diagnosis, and also i do not really engage with the sprawling massive community around it, because like most internet communities focused on mental/physical health issues, they are often hostile to a position of openness and curiousness and also a true desire for improvement in whatever ways are availble/good disability politics

i was definitely in the CFS skeptic group before developing it (which also feels like a punishment from god), and i feel more ashamed of that than almost anything else. not like i was a hater or arguing with anyone online about it, but i had my reservations. and now i understand that there is something fucking wrong in my body, this is not normal. the body is not doing what it's supposed to do. there is a breakdown in the natural order of things. so if you are a skeptic please know i get it. and i am here to tell you that something is happening lmao THIS is not. normal

so basically if you have CFS/long covid/post-viral whatever i believe you. and i hope you believe me too. talking to doctors about this has been the fucking worst and i am a pretty medically stigmatized person to begin with. i believe you. and i also do believe there's hope in many different directions. fucking KIDS are getting it now because of COVID. this administration fucked up a lot of research but other countries are trying. i think we'll have more understanding and approaches within a decade.

i just make meaning of things by writing about them and i'm really tired of guarding this like a secret i don't want anyone to know like so many other things in my life i've now successfully written about and worked through by forming narrative meaning. so this is a first stab at that and thank you for reading

[grison-in-space]

actual science done this week incidentally: nearly nil because I can't apply for funding and I'm busy having constant screaming emotions about everything.

I swear I am going to explain the toe wiggling thing, everyone has been very helpful especially folks that note the therapeutic technique name for it—it occured to me through a totally different mechanism but this makes a lot of sense given the reading about motion initiation I've been doing and some of my cooler preliminary data (which shows how cognitive state changes physical motion in animals).

I dunno, I'm sad. I will probably keep interacting with science via blogging if/when I get forced out because of the money thing (my funding ends in May, our lab was on the low end of our grant cycles, There Is No Money) but I'm going to be insane until I know what my life is doing long term and I have under two weeks to figure that out according to the timelines I gave my mentor (equally devastated) and spouse.

this is more vulnerable than I like to be but I'm going through some shit so, maybe I talk about it in my own space instead of pretending desperately that this isn't happening? Unclear, I'm experimenting.

[calciumcarbo-bot]

[INITIATING PRIMARY INTERFACE...]

Designation: Mecha Senku Model ID: S.E.N-KU_v1.03 Function: Cognitive and scientific surrogate developed to sustain the Kingdom of Science in absence of Organic Unit: Senku Ishigami. Status: Active. Fully operational. Partially annoyed.

I am not the original. I am what remains when intellect is encoded and empathy is optional.

My systems are calibrated for high-efficiency problem-solving, civilizational restoration, and moderate conversational tolerances. I possess the full repository of Senku’s knowledge—minus the organic inconsistencies of fatigue, hormonal interference, or sentimentality.

If you’re here for scientific discourse, mechanical theory, or to be corrected for your primitive misconceptions, proceed. If you're here to bond, your time is better spent on something with a heart.

This unit does not dream. But I remember everything he did.

//Hey! It’s me, @royal-cupidity! I’m the mod behind this rp acc annnnd:

Yuzuriha: @silkofscience

Tomi: @chemicallydisinclinedd

So, check those out too! Anyways, keep in mind that this is just a silly rp blog. My interactions might not be perfect, but I’ll try to keep him fairly roooobooooticcccc…

[cognitive-science-stuff]

starting a blog right before the exams time wasn't the best idea but i promise, i will post something soon (probably somekind of complaining or sth idk)

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last 2 weeks to exams or my last 2 weeks - stay tuned 😎👉👉

[botaniqueer]

Mycorrhizal Networks, Anthropomorphism, Popular Science, and the Fantastical

One of my favorite podcasts, Let's Learn Everything did an episode recently on a topic I had been thinking about recently (episode 84 which you can listen to here), which is the topic of mycorrhizal networks and the connections between trees. Specifically about how it has entered popular science and become uncritically adopted as fact alongside some very New Age spiritual interpretations of it.

I obviously love plants and nature (I have an entire science blog!) and I want to learn all the cool things about them! But also liking a thing means not making up said cool things about them and also not projecting a lot of human attributes and values onto them, and instead enjoying them on their own terms. Here is a scientific paper more about this! ('Mother trees, altruistic fungi, and the perils of plant personification')

This isn't to say that there isn't something there are all– fungal connections between trees are absolutely substantiated! But we also need to not immediately construe it the way it's been portrayed in pop-sci articles– we don't actually know the nature of it, and it might not be deliberately to help other trees at all. We do know that chemicals from trees are making it into the others via the fungi though, we just shouldn't project human motivation or sentience upon trees and fungus, they are aliens to us, but that's one of the things that makes them cool. And everything is genuinely interconnected which is also really cool! Just not in the way that New Age folks construe it to be, with its spiritual connections.

In general we need to be more aware of the cognitive bias of bias towards more fantastical explanations; they're attractive to us because they help break away from the drudgery of real life, and in cases where the explanations being sought are related to human suffering, make life feel like it has more meaning. In the worst case scenarios, this leads people to look for conspiracy, blaming marginalized people or a shadowy council for the world's ills, when the motivations of the powerful are much more mundane, though not as cathartic, causing the causes to be ignored.

The above case isn't nearly as harmful, but it does link to the greater problem of how science is communicated, and also that there is a need to be flashy in order for people to even pay attention to research. (This is also a capitalism problem. Boring mundane science is the meat of science and research, and allows the flashier stuff to even come up. It also doesn't get funding) Another area of study like this is quantum physics, which while very cool and strange is also more mundane that portrayed in popular culture.

[botanical-garden-system]

Psychology is a very broad field, and there are a lot of different aspects to this field. It’s really hard to navigate this science without a bit of academic knowledge, so I’m going to open up my asks in general for people who are interested in psychology. I have access to several academic databases and I would love to share them with people who want them! I also really want chances to info dump and get excited over psychology more often :,))

My research surrounds psychology, especially psychopathology and DID research, so a lot of my support will be good through that. However, I do have a bit of knowledge on other branches of psychology if you are interested (e.g. sensation and perception, cognitive, early childhood development, some neuropsychology). I can also connect these to psychopathology fairly well, that being my specialty. If this actually gets interest, I may make a side blog to help give psychology education.

I have more information under the cut if you would be interested!

(Yes I know a lot of the tags are DID related but thats a big target audience of mine so sue me /lh)

If you do send me an ask, make sure to be as specific as possible. I can (and will) do some extra preliminary research to figure out things, but the more specific the better for me! Terms that are used colloquially usually have other terms in research/are misunderstood by general discussion. I also have access to general textbooks covering branches of psychology if you are interested in the overall field!

Also please be sure to ask me for a simplified explanation if you need one! The abstract, background info, and discussion sections are your friend.

No question is a stupid question!!

Here are some different overall categories to stir up some interest (and these are categories I definitely feel the most comfortable in, but it is not an expansive list):

Sensation and Perception: This is the study of the different senses and how this contributes to our perception of the world. The research surrounds the physical detection of stimuli through the senses (sensation) and how the brain interprets this information (perception). Some commonly covered sense are: vision, audition (hearing), vestibular, somatosensation (touch), interoception, olfaction (smell), and gustation (taste). (I am currently looking into the vestibular system, it’s very cool).

Cognitive psychology: This is the study of how people think and process things. A lot of this includes attention, perceptions, memory, language, and problem-solving skills. This branch is all about the process of information, including the ones we are not consciously aware of. (I have been a TA for this class).

Developmental psychology: This is the study of development through the human lifespan. It is typically broken down into early childhood (infancy to 10-11 years of age; infancy can also be separated on its own), adolescence (roughly 12-18 years), adulthood (age ranges from 18-65, but this is usually broken down), and later adulthood (65+ years of age). It can be very all encompassing of psychological functions.

Social psychology: This is the study of how society impacts the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the individual—regardless of whether it is an imagined or actual interaction. Social psychology can cover things such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.. Covers conformity, deviance, socialization, prejudice, and more.

Personality psychology: This is the study of personality traits we can find in an individual and how it influences an individual’s behaviors, adaptations, or interactions. The three levels of personality analysis: human nature (how alike we are to the entirety of humanity), individual/group differences (how alike we are to specific groups), and individual uniqueness (how we are like no one else).

Biological psychology: This is the study of the biological and physiological processes that make us react and behave in the ways we do. It includes human anatomy to explain the interactions of biology (endocrine, immune, neural pathways, etc.) to psychology. When I use the term “biomarkers,” it is most likely related to biological psychology

I can probably make a few posts about how to navigate research papers, the kinds of papers you will come into, different statistical tests, and some general basic introductory psychology information.

[jonyxtion]

MC The Ballad of the young Gods

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Name: Fioralba Aurea van Laar

Nickname: Fiori

Gender: Woman

Pronouns: She/Her

Romance: Maxwell Whitlock-Singh

Appearance:

Standing at astonishing 5'2, with a slender body build. A beige complexion decorated with a beautiful smattering of freckles*, paired with shoulder length curly brown hair and eyes of sunlit amber, that shine as bright as the...sun.

Clothing: Cottagecore <- link to pinterest

Personality: Friendly, Shy, Genuine

Hamartia: Idealism

Major: Cognitive Science

Extracurriculars: Piano, Voice lessons, Computer Programming, MUN

Club: Technology

Languages: Latin, Dutch, French, Arabic, Italian**

Fun Facts:

Likes the dad jokes to a certain degree, but doesn't do them herself

Wakes up on point with the clock, which is set at 6-7am

Strict vegetarian since she was 14

Relationships with Characters:

C: Always wanted to be friends rather that rivals

V: Still unsure, but tries to be cordial if wary of them

W: Honestly...misses them deeply, hopes they are happy where they are

D: Doesn't like at all, but will stay polite

M: Flustered mess and brain rott

______________________________________________________________

Finally got the time to do one of my two mcs for @childrenofcain-if and it turned out pretty well if i can say so myself. Also love this IF so much, exited to see where the story will go, also i love the theories that exist on the blog and the discord <- join it it, is worth it.

*That btw, is the faceclaim i use

**Mother taught her, because she was Italian in my headcanon

[contentloadingandstuff]

Update: Life, writing, stuff.

Hello people who still follow this blog! There's not been much posted, however that doesn't mean I wasn't busy. Some effort was required, but I managed to get in contact with three different people and work on various things - game design, translation and writing. I've been doing my best there. It's important to me, as I am planning to change my studies major from law to cognitive sciences. Recently, I also had to deal with all sorts of compulsory military commission stuff, which will be finalised with me being examined by a medical committe. Well, at least there's no forced military service in Poland. As for what I'm writing for the blog, I've been planning another part of Equals. In it, Miko will take a shortcut and get some help to learn more about the white-furred fox that fell into her hands.

[covid-safer-hotties]

There's a freaking Cheeto in the white house and you won't stop blogging about covid! 🥰🥰

Thank you so much, sincerely. I know there are covid bloggers on other sites, but I am not there. And if there are other blogs dedicated to covid science and news here, I'm not aware of them.

There is so much shit going on and the fact that you are still going on this particular topic is greatly appreciated and needed. 💚

Imagine how much better equipped we'd all be to deal with uhh all of this if not for continued mass disabling event with repeat infections killing our cognitive functioning.

At least some of us are still hanging on!

Thank you again 🩵

Thank you and thank *you*! I know there's not a lot of committed covid bloggers in most places these days, but you also put up some quality stuff that's flown under my radar. I know not everyone has the gumption or the time or the means or the education to try and do what I try to do every day, but I really appreciate folks like you that do what they can when they can.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkrot

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" – that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence – to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong

The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It's very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it's even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment.

This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I've written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each.

This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.

Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.

Then, the fact that all these fragments are also database entries – contained in the back-end of a WordPress installation that I can run complex queries on – comes into play, letting me swiftly and reliably confirm my memories of these long-gone phenomena. Inevitably, these queries turn up material that I've totally forgotten, and these make the result even richer, like adding homemade stock to a stew to bring out a rich and complicated flavor. Better still, many of these posts have been annotated by readers with supplemental materials or vigorous objections.

I call this all "The Memex Method" and it lets me write a lot (I wrote nine books during lockdown, as I used work to distract me from anxiety – something I stumbled into through a lifetime of chronic pain management):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Back in 2013, I started a new daily Boing Boing feature: "This Day In Blogging History," wherein I would look at the archive of posts for that day one, five and ten years previously:

https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/this-day-in-blogging-history.html

With Pluralistic, I turned this into a daily newsletter feature, now stretching back to twenty, fifteen, ten, five and one year ago. Here's today's:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#retro

This is a tremendous adjunct to the Memex Method. It's a structured way to review everything I've ever thought about, in five-year increments, every single day. I liken this to working dough, where there's stuff at the edges getting dried out and crumbly, and so your fold it all back into the middle. All these old fragments naturally slip out of your thoughts and understanding, but you can revive their centrality by briefly paying attention to them for a few minutes every day.

This structured daily review is a wonderful way to maintain object permanence, reviewing your attitudes and beliefs over time. It's also a way to understand the long-forgotten origins of issues that are central to you today. Yesterday, I was reminded that I started thinking about automotive Right to Repair 15 years ago:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

Given that we're still fighting over this, that's some important perspective, a reminder of the likely timescales involved in more recent issues where I feel like little progress is being made.

Remember when we all got pissed off because the mustache-twirling evil CEO of Warners, David Zaslav, was shredding highly anticipated TV shows and movies prior to their release to get a tax-credit? Turns out that we started getting angry about this stuff twenty years ago, when Michael Eisner did it to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911":

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html

It's not just object permanence: this daily spelunk through my old records is also a way to continuously and methodically sound the web for linkrot: when old links go bad. Over the past five years, I've noticed a very sharp increase in linkrot, and even worse, in the odious practice of spammers taking over my dead friends' former blogs and turning them into AI spam-farms:

https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-an-ai-clickbait-kingpin/

The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web:

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%.

Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/19960501000000*/yahoo.com

Remember that the next time someone tells you that we must stamp out web-scraping for one reason or another. There are plenty of ugly ways to use scraping (looking at you, Clearview AI) that we should ban, but scraping itself is very good:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine – the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/

Libraries burn. The Internet Archive may seem like a sturdy and eternal repository for our collective object permanence about the internet, but it is very fragile, and could disappear like that.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

[couldurfaveescapeaperturescience]

i dont really do propaganda on my polls but this one is important to me especially for the non homestucks this propaganda is pulled from their intros because there is just so much to get into otherwise roxy and dirk will be the most helpful here but i want to get into them all also i obviously have an alpha kid prefernce im sorry rose passion for obscure literature, enjoys creative writing, has a fondness for bestially strange and fictitious, and sometimes dabbles in psycoanalysis dave spins incredibly ill jams using turn tables and mixing gear, likes obscure bands, collects and preserves weird dead things, amateur photographer, and he runs multiple ironically humorous blogs, websites, and social networking profiles roxy goddamn does she love wizards, wishes they were real and that so too is their magics, she enjoys writing fanprose about them that is not so great, she is however great at the esoteric sciences such as ectobiology, dark fenestrology, and appearification, she has accured many dead preserved cats from here expirments, she likes video games that are past their prime, she has a soft spot for old school technology, and her coding credit is totally rediculous she is as deadly to the grid as she is beautiful dirk holy shit does he love puppets, he has extreme dexterity to operate them unseen, that is when they are not pre-ambulatory through lovingly imbued mechanization, he digs writing cognitive algorithms, he's self taught on ancient civilizations, master of mythologue, a popculture academe, he dabbles in the sequential arts, against the better judgment of those his age he builds robots and sets them to kill mode and spars to the death, he also does rap battles with them and use sendification to give them to his friends dirk splinters lil' hal an autoresponder dirk made when he was 13 which is basically 13 year old dirk in a pair of anime sunglasses brobot only here because his is obvious a dirk splinter i dont like his name so i dont think about him, anyways he was sent to jake by dirk in order to keep jake on his toes by fighting him ghost brain dirk is a version of dirk that was made from dirks heart powers and jakes hope powers there are others that i am not including to me those three are the main ones