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Хороший пример того, что "понять" означает не выяснить факты, а придумать себе нарратив, который соответствует какому-то внутреннему пониманию мира.

Человек начинает с намерения найти видео о конфликте. Задача необыкновенно простая, потому что таких видео в нормальных СМИ очень много, включая источники, на которые дается ссылка.
Впрочем нигде не могу найти видео начала конфликта: везде показывают, как он сопротивляется повалившим его полицейским.

Но некоторые СМИ утверждают, что есть какие-то видео, где он якобы подходит к ним не с пистолетом, а телефоном.

https://xaxam.dreamwidth.org/1333814.html?thread=8634422#cmt8634422

Что происходит дальше? Каким-то образом, она приходит к нарративу, в котором все факты неверные (разбор после цитаты):
Я так поняла, что они задерживали нелегала, а этот чудик решил зачем-то вмешаться.
Ну и получил, как пелось в той песне маслину.

А тот, кого они пытались задержать - удрал.
То есть мужик жизнь потерял из-за какого-то нелегального криминала.
Чистая премия Дарвина.
Да.

https://julinona.dreamwidth.org/494833.html?thread=5830385#cmt5830385

1. задерживали нелегала -- ICE не задерживал нелегала. Айсовец толкнул в снег женщину, которая снимала его на телефон.
2. чудик -- Мужчина, который решил помочь женщине был совершенно нормальным человеком. Он работал медбратом в системе VA, медицинских учреждений для помощи ветеранам, и у него была безупречная рабочая репутация.
3. получил ... маслину -- Мужчина получил 10 выстрелов в спину после того, как на него набросилось пять или шесть айсовцев.
4. тот, кого они пытались задержать - удрал. -- Женщина, которой помогал убитый, была американской гражданкой. Она никуда не удрала, а продолжала снимать сцену убийства.
5. жизнь потерял из-за какого-то нелегального криминала. -- В происходящем не было не только нелегалов, но и криминальных нелегалов.

Несмотря на то, что в нарративе нет ни одного верного факта (что проверяется элементарно), он является внутренне непротиворечивым рассказом о событиях. Она не врет, не создает спин, а искренне верит, что разобралась в происшедшем наилучшим способом. Никакие последующие обсуждения, не меняют ее нарратив.

Раньше я такое видел у часовщика, когда он по мотивам обсуждения в ЖЖ создавал себе фальшивый нарратив о том, как присяжные неправильно признали Трампа уголовным преступником. Сейчас не могу найти ссылку.
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In the early 2000s, Huawei survived Cisco's IP lawsuit because it partnered with 3Com, whose CEO Bruce Chaflin hated John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco.
“An alliance between 3Com and Huawei was attractive to both sides. Huawei would get the immediate legal protection of 3Com’s deep patent portfolio; 3Com would get Huawei’s lower production costs and its connections to the vast China market. Soon after the two announced their joint venture, called H3C, 3Com’s lawyers filed a motion to intervene in the Cisco case, calling 3Com an interested party.”

--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”


Ultimately, both the 3Com alliance with Huawei and Cisco itself failed, while Huawei survived and prospered by copying technologies from the West and selling them to the rest of the world. But in the beginning, the Cisco lawsuit looked quite scary because it threatened Huawei's very existence.

“Ren told his trusted deputy, Guo Ping, who was now Huawei’s executive vice president, to get to the US as quickly as he could. Ren invoked the fable of ancient Chinese military general Han Xin*, who had accepted the humiliation of crawling between another man’s legs to prevent a deadly fight.”

* The fable of General Han Xin’s humiliation, known as "crawling between the legs" (胯下之辱), tells of a young, poor Han Xin being challenged by a bully in his hometown of Huaiyin to either kill him or crawl through his legs. Choosing to endure this shame rather than waste his life on a petty killing, Han Xin crawled through, later becoming a renowned military strategist and rewarding the man for testing his resolve.
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Under Trump, we are moving toward an authoritarian kleptocracy. The latest episode with Jerome Powell shows that money is the last resort against Trump's attacks. That is, the Fed Chairman doesn't appeal to the law because in an authoritarian state the law is on the side of the ruler. Rather, he appeals to the need for the Fed's independence and its importance for the markets.

It would be fun to make a cartoon sketch in the spirit of the Three Little Pigs. The first pig built its house out of norms and Trump easily blew it away. The second pig built its house out of law and Trump easily blew it away. The third pig built its house out of gold and so far we see how Trump is huffing and puffing, but can't make much damage to it, at least internally in the US.
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Trump said the project to have US oil industry companies expand their operations in the country could be “up and running” in less than 18 months, in an interview Monday with NBC News — a timeframe starkly at odds with estimates from energy industry experts, while oil companies have been largely silent about their willingness to reinvest in Venezuela.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-05/trump-tells-nbc-us-may-reimburse-firms-for-venezuela-oil-efforts

If the US "runs" Venezuela, all oil contracts agreed to by the Venezuela government would be considered signed under duress by the US and prob Venezuela law, which means any future government could walk away from them and/or use further coercion to enforce them. Bribery and other forms of corruption would also be an option. In the long run, a future Venezuelan government or even private parties could sue the US for damages. The oil companies investing into the infrastructure would probably ask for US guarantees, both monetary and legal. As the result, we as taxpayers would be on the hook should things go wrong. In the typical Trumpian way of doing business, he privatizes personal gains and socializes losses.

upd:
Before making any commitments, oil companies want to ensure there’s a stable government in place, that the rule of law is upheld and that they have some degree of confidence Washington will to support their presence in Venezuela even after Trump is no longer in office, the person said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-05/us-to-meet-with-oil-executives-this-week-on-venezuela-revival
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Back to the Allison Gopnik interview, she makes two good points about a) school education in general and b) science education in particular:

I think it’s not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, “No, learn how to code. That’s the thing that will actually be helpful to you.” Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again.

One of the things I say is, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. How do we teach science? What we would do is, we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little. Maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball a lot to second base. When they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn’t actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball.
...
I think the current way that we do schooling is a good example of Goodhart’s law. We teach kids — because kids are so good at wanting to be skilled — we teach them how to be good at school, which we think is going to be correlated with the ability to do a wide range of things as an adult. Then it ends up being a separate kind of skill.


There's another interesting spot in the conversation where she discusses ADHD, and to me her thoughts rhyme with the Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) story:
...we know and we just take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds — we say that they don’t pay attention, but what we really mean is that they don’t not pay attention. They’re paying attention to everything at once. That’s why two-year-olds are really distractible.

Then, as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. People vary in how much they end up within that state of focused attention. I think there’re lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused attention. We really want people to have very focused attention.


In the LRRH story, the wolf initially takes advantage of the young girl because she's easily distractible. Ultimately, she overcomes her "distractibility" and develops focused attention skills, partially before and mostly after her resurrection, depending on the version. In essence, the fairy tale presents a recipe for modern education, which took off back in the Charles Perrault days. Is this a coincidence or confluence?
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В западных сказках терпение как черта характера или линия поведения чаще всего принадлежит женщинам/девочкам. По-моему, это противоречит Библии, где Ева, не в состоянии терпеть искушение, срывает запретный плод. С другой стороны, это хорошо согласуется с Одиссеей.
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“...from the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner: “A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.”

“...from the American novelist and critic Ronald Sukenick: “All fiction can be profitably regarded as argument. When you define fiction by representation you end up confining it to realism at some level and arguing that fiction, as a form of make-believe, is a way of lying to get at the truth, which if not palpably stupid is certainly round-about and restrictive. My approach frees fiction from the obligations of mimesis, popularly, and most often critically, assumed to be its defining quality.”

An important qualification to this argument is that there is not necessarily any single privileged way of reading the conflict in a story, or sometimes even defining what or who it involves. This sounds extreme, but it can be especially true in longer and more complex narratives like the story of Oedipus.


--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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“under US law, the heavier narrative task is placed on the prosecution, who must not simply tell a story, but tell one that is complete. It must have a central figure, fully equipped “beyond a reasonable doubt” with the motivation, opportunity, means and capability to commit the crime – that is, to engage in a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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“Books also had a “shelf life.” In a seventeenth-century bookseller’s shop, they could wait patiently for readers to come and purchase them. But staged plays were big events that happened at set times. They required an immense investment of both funds and labor: a paid company of actors and a theater, which must be built, purchased, or rented. They also needed to bring in the broadest cross-section of society if they were going to meet expenses. This difference in the technology and marketing of these two narrative media has only grown with time. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”


I wonder whether AI could close this gap.

p.s. a little bit later:
“...once revealed, the action of the story of the murder of Councilman Stubbs can be described in “terms of a linear chain: A->B->C->D (where D is the Death of Stubbs).
...
Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative’s most challenging gaps.
...
..we have to move from a horizontal to a vertical analysis, descending into the character to construct a plausible sense of her complexity.”

“The model, then, for the construct“tion of character in fictional narrative might look something like this:

reader/viewer + narrative -> reader/viewer’s construction of a character



In this view, a narrative can be represented by a product of Action and Character.
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“the way we usually behave when we interpret: that is, we usually assume that a narrative, like a sentence, comes from someone bent on communicating. The novelist Paul Auster put it simply: “In a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page.”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

>> this aasumption is no longer true. Copernicus showed that humans are not at the center of the universe. Darwin showed that humans are not at the center of biological world. LLMs show that humans are not at the center of the world of communications.

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“...the issue of closure. Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won’t close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one’s eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren’t there, underreading and overreading.

It is true, in fact, of our response to all but the shortest and simplest narrative texts.”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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“powerful narratives, don’t tell us what to think but cause us to think. Narrative as such, to borrow a line from I. A. Richards, is a “machine to think with.”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
...
the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher
...
As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”
...
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation.
...
Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

-- David Brooks, 7/8/2025, the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/


Works well with Turchin's metaphor of musical chairs in politics/power.

TIL

Jul. 9th, 2025 09:21 am
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“Shakespeare surprised his audience with his version of the story in a way that we now cannot be surprised since we are so familiar with the tragic version. Later, in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the conclusion of King Lear, not only saving Cordelia’s life but also marrying her off to Edgar (who may not have been a prince but was certainly well born, unlike his wicked sibling). That version held the English stage for the next 160 years. Purists may object that this ruined the tragedy, but then Shakespeare could be said to have “ruined” Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Leir when he decided to kill both Lear and Cordelia.”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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“..if change is inevitable, so too is recurrence. ”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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“The difference between events and their representation is the difference between story (the event or sequence of events) and narrative discourse (how the story is conveyed). The distinction is immensely important.

...when we read a narrative, we are aware of, on the one hand, the time of reading and the order in which things are read, and, on the other hand, the time the story events are supposed to take and the order in which they are supposed to occur.
...
We can squeeze a day’s worth of events into one sentence:

When I woke up, I packed two loaded guns and a ski mask, drove to the bank, robbed it, and was back in time for dinner.


Perhaps even more interestingly we can tell the same story backwards and still convey both the timing and the chronological sequence of events:

I was back in time for dinner, having robbed the bank to which I had driven with a ski mask and two loaded guns just after my nap.


We can also make many other changes in the narrative discourse and still deal with the same story. We can, for example, change the point of view (from first to third person) and expand the narrative discourse to dwell on a moment in the middle of this series of actions and still communicate with fidelity the same order of events:

He loved that old familiar, yet always strangely new, sensation of being someone else inside his ski mask, a pistol in each hand, watching the frightened teller count out a cool million. Nothing like it to wake a guy up. Nothing like it to give him a good appetite.


“The story can take a day, a minute, a lifetime, or eons. It can be true or false, historical or fictional. But insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest. The order of events and the length of time they are understood to take in the story are often quite different from the “time and order of events in the narrative discourse.”

...we take narrative to mean all modes of conveying stories.
...
So far we have established three distinctions: narrative is the representation of events, consisting of story and narrative discourse; story is an event or sequence of events (the action); and narrative discourse is those events as represented.

...storyworld should be considered a third defining feature of narrative along with story and narrative discourse.

Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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There once was an old Bedouin, who, sensing that his death was imminent,
gathered together his three sons and signified his last wishes to
them. To the eldest, he bequeathed half his inheritance, to the second one
quarter, and to the third one sixth. As he said this, he died, leaving his sons
in perplexity, for the inheritance in question consisted of eleven camels.
How were they to respect the old man's will ? Should they kill those of
the camels whose division seemed prescribed, and share the meat among
them ? Was this the required filial piety? Did their father really want them to
prove their love by accepting this loss? Or had he made a mistake, distracted
or weakened by his imminent death ? In fact, at least one error was
obvious, because one-half plus a quarter plus a sixth do not make one.

Yetto inherit on the basis of an interpretation that disqualifies a last wish, is
this not to insult to the dead? And in this case, moreover, how could one
divide ? Who would take away the remainder of the division ? All the ingredients
were there for a fratricidal war. The three brothers nevertheless
decided to try to avoid the war, that is, to wager that a solution could
exist. This means that they went to see the old sage who so often plays a
role in such stories. This old sage, on this occasion, told them that he
could not do anything for them except to offer them what might perhaps
help them: his old camel, skinny and half-blind. The inheritance now
counted twelve camels: the eldest took six of them, the second three, the
youngest two, and the old camel was returned to the old sage.

What did the twelfth camel accomplish ? By its presence, it made possible
what seemed contradictory, simultaneously obeying the father's wishes,
discovering the possi bility of respecting their terms, and not destroying
the value of the inheritance.

--- I.Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead


I'm going to steal this parable from her.
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...part of Trump’s psychological abuse is wearing down opponents so they stop repeating themselves, and give in to the lies. I will not be worn down. Truth matters.

Here it is: We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-bully-in-his-pulpit-0e5

Good point. We should not become numb to the basic truths of the situation. Rather, we should take Canada as an example of a society united against shameless assholes abusing their power in the US.

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Here's an interesting way to make a connection between Peirce's pragmatism/logic and the category theory



Link to the paper https://ncatlab.org/davidcorfield/files/Peirce200225.pdf
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Among other things, the ant solution to the grain sorting problem given to Psyche by Aphrodite can be modeled as a replacement of an Inert with an Active. The same applies to the Trasnsformer solution of the translation problem, etc.

upd. the Odysseus solution to the Sirens problem also fits the pattern

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