Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I don’t know. Too-good metaphors have their place. Sometimes they launch us with enough force to escape. And we think partly by jumping to conclusions. “Whose hearts have left their bodies here in England / And lie pavilioned in the fields of France.”

I am grateful for popular science writing that can keep some epistemic humility about its work: that can balance astonishing news carrying weird implications against the reminder that sometimes the truth doesn’t make sense even if we do have it.

Things we aren’t – forests or LLMs or planets or abacuses or moths or whatever – aren’t us in domino masks. It is not the case that everything other than the human soul is only present in creation in order to provide metaphors to humans for their souls. I also suspect that Italian is not just English with a really strong Italian accent and bees are not a model for a perfect human society. Different things are actually different.

A wrinkle in the “forests are internets” thing is that (I suspect) a lot of people promulgating it are trying to do forests a favor by putting them in these terms. In practice, this may often be true. But it seems worth watching closely. These things get away from us.

But metaphors are always not good enough or too good. There’s never the one that takes you exactly as far as it’s accurate and leaves you hydrated, sunscreened, and pointed in the right direction.

I think there’s a powerful force in popular science writing, more or less necessary to what we’d recognize as popular science writing at all, to familiarize the strange. This is not formally divisible from what it means to explain something.

The “forest fungi are just like our conception of the internet/kinship/brains/etc.” story is a fun one and I suspect it’ll be around for a long time. But I think this piece is a good model for one way to shoo back an overextended idea.

https://undark.org/2023/05/25/where-the-wood-wide-web-narrative-went-wrong/

And the horrible thing is, both of – okay, look, we all get the form I’m using here; fill it in mentally.

Blue Sky people describing Mastodon: Imagine an RSS feed of 10,000 Northern European cisbros whose homepage is the Talk tab of the Wikipedia page for Federation of Debian-Using Naturists: somehow, none of them has ever encountered American-style irony even once, but each of them badly wants to tell Americans, using the great tradition of debate, that they shouldn’t trust Trump, that their own home duchy hasn’t had any mass shootings or racism in many decades, and that yerba mate is delicious.

Mastodon people describing Blue Sky: Imagine 10,000 media-Twitter microcelebrities who are all proud to have been invited to the cool afterparty but also mortified they lost their follower counts; half of them go back to Twitter if Musk’s been out of the news cycle for 72 hours, and many are sincerely amused by coming up with the worst possible neologisms for the app’s wonky features. Everyone is pretending it’s Twitter in 2008 only this time they’re not as uncooly enthusiastic about Obama.

Troubled to report that @RahawaHaile had a dream where for unknown reasons she produced a Julia Child–esque show starring James C. Scott entitled “Seeing Like a Plate” in which he refused to cook or speak and would only put a book on a plate and scowl.

Ah, good, my engagement e-mail from the business networking site is here!

(We could plausibly have big new social networks by the end of the year. Like, tens of millions of DAU of things we’ve never heard of today. That’s dizzying. I hope the fediverse can build the policy, culture, and UX needed to be The Thing but I worry it’s a lot likelier to be Patriot Bob’s Attention Economy and Crime Reporting App with the good-enough UI.)

(I don’t follow these things closely and could be reading everything wrong, but the power vacuum opened by Reddit and Twitter’s problems seems like it has a few wonderful potentials and many frightening ones.)

[very calmly, from behind a huge broadsheet newspaper in the parlor after dinner:] They’ve found a vampire einstein, darling. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vampire-einstein-tile-math

I will never stop bringing up that forecast track error for hurricanes appears to be improving roughly linearly over time: http://www.hurricanescience.org/science/forecast/models/modelskill/

Obviously this physically can’t continue past the x intercept, and it looks like we might have hit a floor recently. But even with those caveats, the fact that a linear fit works at all is just ridiculously impressive.

https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/110520275460688758

The homebrew GNSS observatory continues to exceed expectations in both signal quality and silliness.

Available in near infrared in some jurisdictions.

(Just for the avoidance of doubt, I think disasters are in fact bizarre and unfair exceptions wherever they happen. That is pretty much the definition of a disaster. Thinking that is not the bad.)

The more I watch people talk about disasters, the more I think a lot of people mentally divide the world into Disaster Places and Normal Places and believe that they (wise, pragmatic, likable) have chosen to live in a Normal Place. This means that disasters that happen to them are bizarre and unfair exceptions, while disasters that happen to others are unfortunately what they get for their careless choices. This is a bad mindset. https://mstdn.social/@kissane/110504283096767652