We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that #story.
Yul got this for free by living his stories from day to day. The only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that's why he felt such a compulsion to tell them. #Anathem

#Anathem
The work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day.
All of the story had been bled out of their lives.
That was how you got a productive economy. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of ~story.~
If their employees came home with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. >>

CORD: Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?
RAZ: Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.
CORD: Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.
RAZ: That’d be great.
#Anathem (Peregrin)

Global News BC: Vancouver developer seeks delay in paying $10 million owed to city https://globalnews.ca/news/9756941/anathem-10-million-delay-vancouver/ #globalnews #britishcolumbia #news #communityamenitycontribution #Vancouvercitycouncil #Vancouverdevelopment #Vancouverrealestate #anathemproperties #vancouerdeveloper #VancouverPolitics #CityofVancouver #vancouerhousing #Economy #anathem

RAZ: But what’s a Bottle Shaker?
FRAA OROLO: Imagine a witch doctor in a society that doesn’t know how to make glass. A bottle washes up on shore. It has amazing properties. He puts it on a stick & waves it around & pretends he has some of those amazing properties.
#Anathem

FRAA OROLO: Happens every few centuries. A charlatan appears & claims association with the mathic world. We just need to establish whether he's a Throwback-turned-Mystagogue* or a Bottle Shaker. The former can be dangerous.
___
From THE DICTIONARY:
THROWBACK: Anathematized ex-avout
MYSTAGOGUE: 1) [ancient] theorician specializing in unsolved problems.
2) Avout who held that no further theoric problems could be solved; discouraged research; locked libraries & fetishized mysteries.
#Anathem

OROLO: How do you know if someones a criminal? Branded? Tattooed? Who decides? Does a woman w/shaved eyebrows say "you are a criminal" & ring a silver bell? Or is a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood w/a hammer?
ARTISAN QUIN: WTF?
OROLO: Do you thrust the accused thru a donut-shaped magnet? Or use a stick that twitches when it's brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision sealed w/black wax, or is it rather that―
ARTISAN QUIN: I can’t take you seriously.
#Anathem

[🗓️s LATER]
RAZ: I feel a little let down that we are no longer breaking any rules.
ARSIBALT: I know it must be an odd sensation for you, Fraa Erasmas, but you may get used to it after a while.
[#Barb didn’t get the joke. We had to explain it. He still didn’t get it.]
#Anathem

There was nothing he was afraid to ask about until he understood it perfectly. I made him my fid. People thought I was being charitable, but it was mostly self-interest. I learned more theorics in 6 weeks, by sitting next to #Barb, than I had in 6 months before Apert.
Barb’s willingness to do things the hard way in the near term was making his advancement toward the long goal—even though he didn’t have one—swifter and surer than mine had ever been. & now I was advancing in step w/him. #Anathem

Fraa Jad nodded, but it was hard to tell whether he was accepting the challenge, or really enjoying the cake.
#Anathem

Fraa Orolo was #fascinated that Quin and I were talking about him as if he weren’t there.

RAZ: He means there’s no real distinction between Kinagrams & Logotype.
QUIN: But they're incompatible... but I see what you mean.
OROLO: Why do you suppose it became obsolete?
QUIN: So Kinagrams could gain market share
O: That sounds like bulshytt, too.
#Anathem
Q: To make $$, by making it harder to use Logotype & easier 2 use Kinagrams.
O: How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?

@zeitschlag
Der technische Begriff dafür ist Scheisse. Jedenfalls im Buch #Anathem von #nealstephenson. Da erklärt ein Techniker die Geschichte der Version des Internets das die haben und spricht von künstlicher Dummheit, von Algorithmen die Informationen automatisiert verfälschen bis zu dem Punkt an dem das Netz nur in seperaten geschützten Bereichen nutzbar ist.

Ist natürlich schlecht für den Gesellschaftskonsens wenn wir automatisierte Wahrheitsproduzenten haben die den Konsens zerstören.

ARSIBALT: I better get a stained-glass window for this.
RAZ: Maybe you’ll get a concent.
ARSIBALT: If such things continue…
RAZ: We're the Hylaean Theoric🌐of these people! How can they destroy us?
ARSIBALT: Making us destroy ourselves
JESRY: You're appointed Cell 317's morale officer
#Anathem

In #Anathem, Neal Stephenson makes a distinction between syntactics and semantics. A computer (a "syntactic device" in the book) can reproduce the syntax of information, but it cannot assign meaning to anything, let alone words.

Proving that being able to speak is not the same as being knowledgeable, if that needed proving.

#GPT is all syntactics and no semantics.

@root2702 I've been thinking a lot about this pericope lately, for obvious reasons. #Anathem

SAMMAN: There was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.
ARSIBALT: So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?!
S: The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the 2nd Millennium.
JESRY: Into what?
S: No one is sure. We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself. But the functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists.
#Anathem

I don't know how I never noticed this before, but the audiobook narrator William Dufris gave Dr. G.E.B. Kivistik (#Cryptonomicon) and Fraa Lodoghir (#Anathem) the exact same voice intonation. That's perfect :)

#NealStephenson

cc: @daltonator @root2702

Trying, but failing, to knock myself out by reading Neal Stephenson's #Anathem
While it's got some good ideas (Time Monks! Meme Hygiene!), it's awfully kludgy and slow. Especially compared to #SnowCrash or #Seveneves which are both dense, but move along at pace.

#bookstodon

#Anathem - rodding Ecba
https://mstdn.ca/@alanalofgren/109532209178962192

I came to the conclusion that we (or, at least, I) gain competence at a skill not in a smooth curve, but in packets -- quanta. I'll be working on some new thing, and at some point (usually after a break), I'll come back to it and bam! suddenly I'm better at it, it's easier, things happen more smoothly.

-- Spoilers for "Anathem" below, proceed at your own risk --

I think that Neal Stephenson had a great point in #Anathem about the idea that the hack of human consciousness - the basis of our storytelling facility - lies in the fact that our consciousness is entangled with those of the other versions of ourselves nearby on the Many-Worlds yggdrasil/worlds-tree. Instead of having to build another mental model of a counterfactual world - on top of the one we're already working with, the model of the world we're in as we perceive it - to explore differences between that one and ours ("what if...?"), we simply tap into the already-existing mental model of that possibility in the version of ourselves that is actually there.

So it occurs to me that competency comes from becoming more in synch with those other versions of yourself that are also practicing that skill. The more of you in Synch, the more competent you are at it. You're all gaining skill through practice, but it's the synching of yourselves that causes the quantum leap in improvement.

I definitely think the Edharian Millenarians were on to something. Can you speed up the synching process if you're more aware of it?