zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing my exploration of a pattern language of thoughts, both verbal and imagistic ]
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This is a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships. pic.twitter.com/GqzTB866WK via @usmanm

— Nat. Maritime Museum (@NMMGreenwich) October 15, 2013

One of my favorite patterns derives from the nesting of Russian dolls inside Russian dolls, so it’s only appropriate to start with an example of what I can only call.. Matrioshka shipping!

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It’s my habit, as you may have seen, to collect certain “ways of thinking” in the miniature format provided by my Twitterstream. Whether you think of them as logical forms, patterns in a pattern language, or amuse-bouches for the mind, they are here to delight and instruct — and when you pile a whole lot of them up together, they can make you just a touch dizzy.

Today I’ll be bringing my collection up to date with two posts, Serpent logics: a ramble, and Serpent logics: the marathon. If you want a quick look at some of the neat patterns I’ve seen since I last posted on these topics, this post — Serpent logics: a ramble — is the one for you. If, after reading it, you want a gruelling, hilarious, insightful, insane, devious, extended course in this kind of pattern recognition — try Serpent logics: the marathon.

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Here’s one from today, tweeted as I was prepping this post — in a category I’ll simply call…

Counter-intuitive?

When the personal is not political. Indian-origin slave-owner in UK a Marxist-Communist. http://t.co/R0i8krpLE4

— Shivam Vij (@DilliDurAst) November 24, 2013

Admit it, that’s just a trifle mind-blowing, no? C’mon!

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Serpent Bites Tail:

Here’s a light-and-dark-hearted example of the ourobouros or serpent-bites-tail recursive patterm, with a hat tip to Allan Stairs:

What is the operation by which a self relates itself to its own self, transparently? Selfie.

— KimKierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) September 18, 2013

Follow Kim Kierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) on Twitter if you like mashups between the deepest of theologians and the shallowest of celebrities…

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I have no idea what category this one belongs in, so I’ll slip it in here. It’s from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, protecting our digital private parts:

It's great even NSA is using our Tor explainer. But they're violating our CC license by classifying it Top Secret. https://t.co/m1B2kzsr0W

— EFF (@EFF) October 4, 2013

Oh my! A Clash of Classifications!

The EFF even has it’s own playful-serious version of the NSA logo —

— as the DoubleQuote above — juxtaposing how the Agency views itself with how the EFF sees it — illustrates…

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DoubleQuotes in the Wild

The Wailing Wall in Jerusalm and Spain… pic.twitter.com/nNmm6cbGtp via @SonParecidos

— Kasper Ploegman (@Kasper_P) November 19, 2013

DoubleQuotes in the Wild is my on-going collection of paired juxtapositions that say more together than they do apart. It’s a beginning training in what F Scott Fitzgerald claimed was the “test of a first-rate intelligence” — “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.

The example above comes from Parecidos Razonables, a blog that takes off from the Separated at Birth concept and specializes in double-takes of this sort, often satirical. One of their more celebrated examples:

Vladimir Putin y Perro #Rusia #Humor pic.twitter.com/UmPVPGF3Ea

— Parecidos Razonables (@SonParecidos) November 14, 2013

I’d have juxtaposed Vladimir Putin with Daniel Craig as James Bond myself, but that idea has already been taken — a Bond fan apparently photoshopped Putin’s face onto a poster of Bond in Casino Royale, and then “plastered” Moscow with his handiwork.

Apparently the Apparat, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. I’d have been flattered…

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While we’re on the subject of President Putin, here’s another category to consider…

Mixed games:

#Putin and #Rouhani's op-eds show they are playing strategic chess game. Yet, we continue to play darts.

— Ali H. Soufan (@Ali_H_Soufan) September 20, 2013

The op eds by Presidents Putin and Rouhani to which Soufan refers are Putin’s A Plea for Caution From Russia and Rouhani’s Why Iran seeks constructive engagement.

Ali Soufan, the author of Black Banners, is always worth paying attention to — and his tweet, above, clearly belongs with that Alasdair MacIntyre quote I’m so fond of [1, 2]:

Not one game is being played, but several, and, if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one’s knight to QB3 may always be replied to by a lob over the net

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Let’s close with some examples from the arts, the first with just a touch of Tibetan Buddhist flavor…

One of mine:

Re: his “Poppy Field” paintings, Mr. Zhang said: “If they are alive, they will love these works. But if they are dead, they will buy them.”

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) September 20, 2013

For further details, see Death and hallucination color new work by Chinese artist Zhang Huan after life-altering Tibet trip.

And the second, a pair of images — each in itself a sort of DoubleQuote in the Wild comparing the forms of birds and mechanical objects in a single photo — posted together today by Wm. Benzon under the title Conjunctions:

Birds and cranes, New Jersey and Lower Manhattan.

Birds and cranes, Brooklyn and Governors Island.

Magnificent — what a generous eye he has — many thanks, good Sir!

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Patterns? You might think of them as Jungian archetypes, Platonic ideas, Hofstadterian analogies — or Ayat, the same word used to describe the verses of the Qur’an, signs in the calligraphy of God:

Qur’an 41 (Fussilat), 53

We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves…

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And now, consider your options. Have you had enough of these damn patterns of mine — or would you like to try out for the marathon version?

[ by Charles Cameron — spiraling costs — same pattern, different mechanism, closer to home ]
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Back in Serpent logic and related, I featured this spiral from Louisa Lombard:

Bokassa logic: "those caught misappropriating public funds were promoted on the grounds that higher salaries would help them pay it back."

— Louisa Lombard (@louisalombard) September 10, 2013

Ha, funny.

How’s this, in today’s opening salvo from Rosa Brooks at POLITICO Magazine?

“If you believe the mission truly requires 50,000 troops and $50 billion, but you know that the White House is going to automatically cut every number in half, you’ll come in asking for 100,000 troops and $100 billion,” says the aforementioned former White House official. “The military eventually starts playing the very game the White House has always suspected them of playing.”

Not for nothing does the phrase “spiraling out of control” garner 7,840,000 hits on Google.

[ by Charles Cameron — on human obstinacy, a change of heart, and what seems to me a major piece from Res Militaris ]
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There’s a pattern of backlash that occurs when you present people with facts that don’t fit their preconceptions — they don’t switch, they double up. Here’s the opening of io9‘s report, The Backfire Effect shows why you can’t use facts to win an argument:

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story” isn’t just a maxim for shady politicians and journalists. It’s also the way people often live their lives. One study indicates that there may even be a “backfire effect,” which happens when you show people facts that contradict their opinions.

Then there’s a study — Brendan and Jason Reifler, When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. I won’t go into the details, it’s the pattern it finds that’s of interest to me, but I will note that the title is a tip of the hat to Leon Festinger‘s When Prophecy Fails, a classic study in the same pattern of denial as it applied to a group whose belief in an end time prophecy was not shattered when the day arrived and the world went on as usual…

Here’s how the pattern works:

Participants in the experiments were more likely to experience the Backfire Effect when they sensed that the contradictory information had come from a source that was hostile to their political views. But under a lot of conditions, the mere existence of contradictory facts made people more sure of themselves — or made them claim to be more sure.

Everyone has experienced the frustration of bringing up pertinent facts, in the middle of an argument, and having those facts disregarded. Perhaps the big mistake was not arguing, but bringing up facts in the first place.

Okay? That’s a veeery interesting pattern to think about any time you’re considering ways to persuade people to change their minds during, for instance, a CVE campaign.

I’d like to dig into it a great deal more, of course.

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Maajid Nawaz, a former recruiter for Hizb ut-Tahrir who renounced his membership and is now Chairman of the counter-extremist Quilliam Foundation, seems to have persuaded Tommy Robinson, until recently a leader of the English Defence League, to renounce the EDL and join Qulliam — a move whose results and second-order effects have yet to be seen. Both men, however, offer us examples of people who have in fact changed their minds on matters of profound belief, religious and political, and the odd uncomfortable fact may have played some role in those changes.

The role of anomalies (cf. “outliers”) in Kuhn‘s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions comes to mind.

And if showing people the error of their ways (a very loose equivalent of telling them unwelcome facts, I’ll admit) doesn’t work, here’s another anomaly that I ran across only yesterday, that “proves the rule” by, well, partially disproving it.

Dutch ex-politician Arnoud van Doorn, previously a senior member of Geert Wilders‘ fiercely anti-Islamic party, has changed his mind — or his heart was changed for him, within him, depending on your perspective. He has made the Shahada and is henceforth Muslim himself. In this photo, van Doorn is performing the Hajj, the pilgrimage to circumambulate the Kaaba in Mecca:

Do I detect a hint of enantiodromia here?

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In closing, I would like to offer this link to an article in Res Militaris by Jean Baechler, titled Outlines of a psychology of war. It’s a weighty piece, as befits its grand sweep, and I believe it throws some light on the obstinacies of the mind to which this post is addressed.

I tried excerpting it, but it appeared to me that each sentence in every paragraph in turn begged to be highlighted, approved, tweaked, questioned, or disagreed with, and I wound up feeling you should read it for yourselves. I’ll be very interested to see if it captures the attention of the ZP readership, and leads to a more extended discussion…

[ by Charles Cameron — yet another quick dip into the dizzying world of patterns enfolded in tweets ]
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My collection of “Serpent logics” or “patterns of thinking” in the miniature format provided by the Twitter-stream got a noble boost today — you can blame my insomnia for my noticing this — from Karl Sharro and Elizabeth Pearson:

Sbarro unwittingly triggered things off by tweeting:

Something this morning reminded of my three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar joke: https://t.co/d1PgH4UkFs

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

Pearson picked upon the “nested” quality of this tweet, and tweeted back:

@KarlreMarks I like the joke, and also the neat self-citation over repetition.

— Elizabeth Pearson (@lizzypearson) October 7, 2013

and to clarify:

@KarlreMarks Er.. Self.. Citation. Inserting a tweet in a tweet. It's neat!

— Elizabeth Pearson (@lizzypearson) October 7, 2013

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That was neat enough indeed, what with three instances in a row of self-referential tweets, each of which enfolds a previous tweet within it — the pattern I’m always on the look out for, and call “Matrioshka” after those nested Russian dolls — but there was more to come. I turned back — how could I help it — to the first tweet from Sharro:

Something this morning reminded of my three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar joke: https://t.co/d1PgH4UkFs

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

and searched for the tweet embedded therein:

Three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar. But then they refuse to continue the joke because it's based on White Man stereotypes.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) April 8, 2012

A little deeper into the conversation, I came across this rejoinder, which sent me off on a further journey:

@lizzypearson haha, no I'm not that vain, it's only my bar jokes which are collected here: http://t.co/nX5n1ileOy Oops, I did it again.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

and lo, the embedded link here led me to a page that contained not one but dozens of tweets, all based on the formula of the three characters went into a bar joke, many of the examples turning Sharro’s mind to matters of philosophy and the Middle East…

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They’re all examples of the kind of “collision thinking” that Arthur Koestler specifies as the source of creative insight (aha!), comedy (ha!) and tragedy (aiyyeee!) — but I’ve selected three which represent three of the different patterns I’m intrigued by:

So three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. Do you think it's a coincidence?

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) May 21, 2012

That’s a serpent biting its tail joke, if ever I saw one, a conspiracist take on conspiracism.

And the barman says 'why are you all dressed this way?' So, three time travellers walk into a bar.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) September 25, 2012

Now that, I aver, is a extaordinary example of enantiodromia, or direct reversal.

And for the pattern I call nominal, one can hardly better this play between the word minimalist and its context…

So a minimalist walks into a bar.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) November 24, 2012

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It’s time for me to get minimal, too. I have a quite a long line of “Serpent logics” more or less lined up and ready to go, but putting too many of them in one post gets tedious for the readership, so I’ve cut these examples out of the herd to give you a taste, and will follow up with two mmore selections in a day or two.

[ by Charles Cameron — exploring recursive form as a mode of pattern recognition ]
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I was explaining what this series of posts is about to a friend the other day. I said it’s a compilation of tweets that in some way reflect a “serpent bites its own tail” form, which some people seem to be particularly attuned to, and which almost always exposes some point of humor, irony, paradox or discovery that’s worth paying attention to. And then I read my friend fifteen or twenty examples from the last post in the series straight through — and taken neat, one right after another, they’re hilarious.

Here’s a sampler:

CONFIRMED: Nothing coming out of Syria is confirmed.
News photographer .. decided to put his camera aside and walk into the photo he would have clicked.
Please donate to my Kickstarter to help fund my search for a great idea for a Kickstarter.
Why coups beget coups By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson | Foreign Policy
For $3,200 I can pay for open access to my 5,000 word essay on open data.
The Business of America is Spying on America
The conference call that wasn’t. How’s that for responsible reporting that isn’t?
Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she cannot avoid being a character in her own film
This is what we’ve come to: I am ordering packing tape from Amazon so I can seal up a box I need to return to Amazon.
The BBC says anyone who accuses it of bias – is biased
Writing your name with a marker on your arm so that if you are killed your body can be identified.
Important personal details about Junipero Serra: he loved chocolate and self-flagellation.
Decapitated snake bites itself (warning: it’s kinda creepy)
The joke of the century: Al Jazeera accuses the Copts of burning their own churches! Talk about irresponsible reporting, unbelievable!
Whoops! Surf City Riot Suspect Arrested After “Liking” His Own Photo On Police Facebook Page
Scientists Unlock Self-Fertilizing Crops

There’s real tragedy there, and comedy aplenty — and also simplicity, beauty:

All that is visible rests on the

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) August 16, 2013

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In one of my academic byways, I came across this parenthesis, which is now my favorite parenthesis of all time. It’s from a scholarly discussion of an early “magical” treatise, the Picatrix, which is of interest among other things because it contains the earliest known description of the experimental method in science:

(with the parenthesis that speech is a kind of magic)

That’s from a summary of the Gayat al-Hakim or Picatrix, from Martin Plessner’s introduction to “Picatrix” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti. And it’s almost a Matrioshka parenthesis…

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I’ll be continuing to collect these serpent-eats-tail tweets in the comments section here, but will probably try to hold off on individual examples until I have a bunch to post at once, to avoid constantly occupying the list of recent comments when I run across these things quite regularly…

First cluster coming right up…