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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from LWMap/Naming the Nameless
  • The rationalist/nerd world view has some limitations, and a lack of respect for the superficial is one of them. In this piece the author acknowledges this and tries to work out ways to overcome this bias or compensate for it. Oscar Wilde said that "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances", so this can be read as an earnest effort to overcome this shallowness, to come to grips with the lived social reality in which aesthetics plays an important role.

superficiality

03 Feb 2026 - 03 Feb 2026
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    • I can just barely see what this is pointing to, because I have been so heavily trained in western thought, I've got the autistic nerdy side. The systems side. Preferring underlying rules to individual particulars.
    • Minsky/Freud purports to uncover the unconscious depths. This seems so obviously the right thing to do to me, but what if its not?
    • LLMs demonstrate that superficiality can get you very far indeed. They are entirely engines of the surface, although some depths seem to emerge. But no deep inner life as far as we know.