Tag: art

Seeing Red – Or, How the Enlightenment Got Colour-Blind

Posted in philosophy, psychology, reality, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
6–9 minutes

With the MEOW thesis now roaming freely across the intellectual savannah, knocking over conceptual furniture and frightening the rationalists, it’s time to walk through a simple example. We’ll stay safely within the realm of conscious perception for now. That way, no one panics, and everyone can pretend they’re on familiar ground.

Our case study: colour.

Or rather, the quite embarrassing misunderstanding of colour that Western philosophy has been peddling for roughly three centuries.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary of this topic, Colour, Perception, and Mediated Ontology.

The Realist’s Apple: A Comedy of Certainty

Picture an apple on a table: plump, unashamedly spherical, wearing its redness like a badge of honour. The traditional Realist swears it’s red in itself, quite independent of anyone wandering in to admire it. The apple has redness the way it has mass, curvature, and that little bruise from the careless shop assistant. When you enter the room, you ‘see’ the red it’s been proudly radiating all along.

Image 0: Subject viewing red apple.

By school age, most of us are told that apples don’t ‘have’ colour; they merely reflect certain wavelengths. A minor complication. A mechanical detail. Nothing to disturb the fundamental metaphysical fantasy: that redness is still ‘out there’, waiting patiently for your eyes to come collect it.

It’s all very straightforward. Very tidy. And very wrong.

Idealists to the Rescue (Unfortunately)

Ask an Idealist about the apple and the entertainment begins.

The Berkeley devotee insists the apple exists only so long as it’s perceived – esse est percipi – which raises awkward questions about what happens when you step out for a cuppa. God, apparently, keeps the universe running as a kind of 24-hour perceptual babysitter. You may find this profound or you may find it disturbingly clingy.

The Kantian, inevitably wearing a waistcoat, insists the apple-in-itself is forever inaccessible behind the Phenomenal Veil of Mystery. What you experience is the apple-for-you, sculpted by space, time, causality, and a toolkit of categories you never asked for. This explains a lot about post-Kantian philosophy, not least the fixation on walls no one can climb.

Contemporary idealists get creative: proto-experience in everything, cosmic consciousness as universal substrate, matter as a sleepy epiphenomenon of Mind. It’s quite dazzling if you ignore the categories they’re smashing together.

What unites these camps is the conviction that mind is doing the heavy lifting and the world is an afterthought – inconvenient, unruly, and best kept in the margins.

The Shared Mistake: An Architectural Catastrophe

Both Realist and Idealist inherit the same faulty blueprint: mind here, world there – two self-contained realms entering into an epistemic handshake.

Realists cling to unmediated access (a fantasy incompatible with biology).
Idealists cling to sovereign mentality (a fantasy incompatible with objectivity).

Both take ‘experience’ to be a relation between two pre-existing domains rather than a single structured encounter.

This is the mistake. Not Realism’s claims about mind-independence. Not Idealism’s claims about mental primacy. The mistake is the architecture – the assumption of two separately-existing somethings that subsequently relate.

MEOW – yes, we’re calling it that – puts it bluntly:

The problem isn’t where colour is. The problem is assuming it has to be in something – mind or world – rather than in the event.

Redness isn’t inside your head or inside the apple.
It’s co-constituted by biological, cognitive, linguistic, and cultural mediation interacting with persistent constraint patterns.

Time to peel this onion… er, apple.

The Four Layers of Mediation (T₀–T₃)

A Ridiculously Oversimplified Cheat-Sheet That Still Outperforms Most Metaphysics Syllabi

Image 1: Four-tier diagram (T₀ Biological → T₃ Cultural)

T₀ – Biological Mediation

Structure and Sensitivity: the Architecture You Never Asked For

This is where the Enlightenment’s fantasy of ‘raw perception’ goes to die.

Your visual system transforms, filters, enhances, suppresses, and reconstructs before ‘red’ even reaches consciousness. Cone responses, opponent processes, retinal adaptation, spatial filtering – all of it happening before the poor cortex even gets a look-in.

You never perceive ‘wavelengths’. You perceive the output of a heavily processed biological pipeline.

The biology isn’t the barrier. The biology is the view.

Image 2: Chromatic processing pathway (T₀→T₁): the layered biological transformations that make “red” possible long before consciousness gets involved.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

Prediction and Inference: You See What You Expect (Until Constraint Smacks You)

Your cognitive system doesn’t ‘receive’ colour information – it predicts it and updates the guess when necessary.

Memory colour biases perception toward canonical instances. Attentional gating determines what gets processed intensively and what gets summary treatment. Top-down modulation shapes what counts as signal versus noise.

There is no percept without mediation. There is no ‘raw data’ waiting underneath.

The Enlightenment liked to imagine perception as a passive window.
Cognition turns that window into a heavily editorialised newsfeed.

Image 3: Expectation and input co-determine the percept: “red” emerges from the encounter, not from either source alone.

T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation

Categories and Symbols: How Words Carve the Spectrum

Enter the famous Whorf skirmishes.
Do words change perception?
Do they merely label pre-existing distinctions?
Do Russians really ‘see’ blue differently?

Berlin & Kay gave us focal colour universals – constraint patterns stable across cultures.
Roberson et al. gave us the Himba data – linguistic categories reshaping discrimination and salience.

The correct answer is neither universalism nor relativism. It’s MEOW’s favourite refrain:

Mediation varies; constraint persists.

Words don’t invent colours.
But they do reorganise the perceptual field, changing what pops and what hides.

Image 4: Different languages carve the same physical continuum differently: English imposes a blue/green split; Himba divides the region into several greens with no blue boundary at all.

T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation

Shared Practices: The Social Life of Perception

Your discipline, training, historical context, and shared norms tell you:

  • which distinctions matter
  • which differences ‘count’
  • which patterns get ignored

A Himba herder, a Renaissance painter, and a radiologist do not inhabit the same perceptual world – even when staring at the same patch of light.

Cultural mediation doesn’t rewrite biology; it reorganises priorities, salience, and interpretive readiness.

Image 5: Three observers confronting the same stimulus yet extracting different distinctions: the scientist tracks wavelength, the artist tracks hue and value, and the Himba pastoralist tracks ecologically salient greens. Same object, different salience hierarchies. Not arbitrary – just mediated.

What Seeing Red Actually Involves (Step By Exhausting Step)

You walk into a room. Apple on table. Looks red. What just happened?

T₀ – Biological: Long wavelength light hits L-cones harder than M- and S-cones. Opponent channels compute (L−M). Adaptation shifts baseline. Edge detection fires. You don’t have ‘red’ yet – you have transformed photoreceptor output.

T₁ – Cognitive: Your brain predicts ‘apple, probably red’ based on shape and context. Memory colour pulls toward canonical apple-red. Attention allocates processing resources. Prediction matches input (roughly). System settles: ‘yes, red apple’.

T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual: The continuous gradient gets binned: ‘red’, not ‘crimson’ or ‘scarlet’ unless you’re a designer. The category provides stability, ties this instance to others, makes it reportable.

T₃ – Cultural–Normative: Does the exact shade matter? Depends whether you’re buying it, photographing it, or painting it. Your practical context determines which distinctions you bother tracking.

And through all of this: Constraint. Metameric matches stay stable. Focal colours persist cross-culturally. Wavelength sensitivities don’t budge. The encounter isn’t arbitrary – but it’s not unmediated either.

What happened wasn’t: Mind Met World.
What happened was: an encounter-event unfolded, organised through four mediational layers, exhibiting stable constraint patterns that made it this and not that.

Where This Leaves Us

Colour is not ‘out there’. Colour is not ‘in here’.

Colour is the structured relational event of encounter.

Four mediation layers shape what appears.
Constraint patterns stabilise the encounter so we aren’t hallucinating wildly divergent rainbows.

There is no ‘apple as it really is’ waiting behind the encounter.
Nor is there a sovereign mind constructing its own private theatre.

There is only the event – where biological structure, cognitive dynamics, conceptual categories, and cultural histories co-emerge with the stable patterns of constraint we lazily call ‘the world’.

The apple was never red ‘in itself’.
You were never seeing it ‘as it really is’.
And the Enlightenment can finally take off its colour-blind uncle glasses and admit it’s been squinting at the wrong question for three hundred years.

Next time: Why visual illusions aren’t perception failing, but perception revealing itself.

Until then: stop asking where colour ‘really’ lives.

It lives in the event. And the event is mediated, constrained, and real enough.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Editing Is Hard and Propensity

Posted in art, fiction, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.

I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript – ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me – 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.

On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.

Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides – and let’s be honest – I can’t afford an editor in general – or at least can’t cost-justify it – and all my writing is a passion project.

Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.

Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even – even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.

This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses – homoeopathic as they might be – and I’ve had mixed results.

I’m rambling

Must really be avoiding the editing process…

Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.

Image Comparison: A Tale of Two Propensities

The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction – a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.

The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.

There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.

They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.

As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.

What happened to the rest of the time?

OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.

It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.

OK, this time for real. Let me know what you think…about anything in particular.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Propensity for Simulacra, An Excerpt

Posted in Audio, fiction, free will, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, quote, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Man starts over again every day,
in spite of all he knows,
against all he knows.
— Emil Cioran

I posted Chapter 26 of my novella, Propensity. I share it here because it invokes Baudrillard’s Simulacra.

Consider it an advert – and a window into Propensity.

Simulacra – When the Camera Becomes the Conscience
Blog Post: Propensity, Chapter 26 – Simulacra
Audio: Propensity, Chapter 2 – Oversight

The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?

No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.

The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.

As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?

This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.

A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.

Editorial Review

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.

—Reedsy Discovery Review

Meantime, give it a listen.

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Written by Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park

Philosophics

The Sane Society, Revisited: Why Work Still Drives Us Mad

Posted in agency, economics, modernism, philosophy, podcast, psychology, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
4–6 minutes

Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalism™ – not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterday’s corporate newsletter. We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana

Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 – because Capitalism™ and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.

Video: Apathetic Office Worker

On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitution in 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.

‘…the vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.

‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘

Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.

We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.

I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continues…

‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.

‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.

‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’

In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.

The irony is that we’ve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient – streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, we’re positively thriving.

Stand by for more sanity to follow…

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

On Death and Dying

Posted in healthcare, identity, language, music, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Disclaimer: I should be finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis book, yet I am here writing about death and dying. Why? Because I was watching an interview with Neal Schon by Rick Beato. I should have been working on my book then, too. It seems I can write about death more easily than finish a book about the failure of language. Perhaps because death speaks fluently.

I haven’t produced music professionally since the mid-1980s, and I haven’t performed since 2012, yet I am still drawn to its intricacies. My fingers no longer allow me to play much of anything anymore. This is a sort of death. When the body forgets what the mind remembers, that’s a particular kind of death – one language dying while another can’t translate.

As Neal was walking Rick through his equipment and approach to music, I was taken back to a similar place. I wanted to plug into a Fender Twin or a Hi-Watt, a Lexicon 224 or a Cry Baby wah. I still have nightmares thinking of setting up a Floyd Rose.

Video: Rick Beato interviews Neal Schon

But I can’t go back. As for music, I can’t go forward either. I’m at a standstill, but in a regressed position. It’s uncomfortable. It feels a lot like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. I used to be able to do that. Don’t get me wrong – I am not claiming to be on the level of Neal Schon, a man I remember from his days with Santana, but when you reach a level of proficiency and then lose it, it hurts; it can be devastating.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I recall being in hospital in 2023 – a physical rehabilitation facility, really – and I found a piano in a vacant common room. Drawn to the instrument, I rolled over my wheelchair and played…nothing. My fingers wouldn’t work. The piano sat there like a relic of my former self. I rolled toward it as though approaching an altar. My fingers hovered, twitched, failed. The sound of nothing has never been so loud. I cried. I cried a lot those days. I was down to 58 kilos – at 182 cm, I weighed in at just over 9 stone. It wasn’t the best of times.

I still feel a certain nostalgia.

And then there are the people I’ve lost along the way – as another Neal reflected on – The Needle and the Damage Done.

Love and art are both acts of repetition. When one ends, the reflex remains – the impulse to reach, to share, to call out. Death doesn’t stop the motion, only the answer.

I’m lucky to have left Delaware. When a girlfriend died in 2020, I remained and connected with another until 2023, when she died, too. From 2020 to 2023, when I was out and about, something might have caught my eye, and I’d reflect on how Carrie might have liked that.

But it was different. It was more like, ‘I should let Carrie know about that,’ only to realise fractions of a second later that she wouldn’t see whatever it was; she couldn’t. And I’d carry on. I didn’t need to repeat this with Sierra. My relocation to Massachusetts solved this challenge – not so many triggers.

I’m not sure how the loss of ‘professional’ music relates to deceased partners, but it does – at least enough for me to make this connexion. Perhaps I’m just connecting arbitrary dots, but I’ll call it nostalgia.

I don’t play, but I still hear it. The song continues without me. Nostalgia is just rhythm without melody. Perhaps all nostalgia is epistemological error – the confusion of past fluency for present meaning.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
2–3 minutes

The Enlightenment’s Most Beloved Lie

“The world does not need more confession;
it needs better design.”

— Against Agency

🔗 Read the full preprint on Zenodo
🔗 Explore the Anti-Enlightenment Project

The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.

But this was always a fiction.

Not an innocent one, either.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency

Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.

Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.

Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.

This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.

Ethics, too, must shift.

Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”

The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.

It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.

This is not nihilism. It’s realism.

Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.

The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.

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Posted by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Missing White Supremacy’s Woods for the Tree

Posted in equality, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Radical Futures Studio’s “7 Signals” deck has been circulating widely. It’s a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

As far as stories go, it’s effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.

Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask

But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system – the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenment’s brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions – remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.

To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere – climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.

The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.

Racism is a systemic lie

None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalism’s last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenment’s promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.

If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.

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Post by Bry Willis

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Bayes in the Culture War: How Priors Become Prison Walls

Posted in identity, intelligence, language, maths, perception, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

Are you rational, or merely rehearsing your tribe’s catechism? Bayes’ theorem insists we should all update our beliefs the same way when presented with the same evidence. Yet in today’s political divide, identical events harden opposing convictions. The problem isn’t the math—it’s the priors. When your starting assumptions are inherited, acculturated, or indoctrinated, no amount of “evidence” will move you into enemy territory.

A Bayesian Sketch of the Divide

  • Let H be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
  • People in Camp R and Camp B begin with different priors P_R(H) and P_B(H). That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
  • They observe evidence E (news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
  • They update:

posterior odds = prior odds × P(H \mid E) = \frac{P(E \mid H) P(H)}{P(E)}

Except they don’t, not cleanly, because trust in sources warps the likelihoods.

Video: Jonny Thompson on Bayes’ Theorem.
I love Jonny’s content, which is why I reference it so often. He and I have such different philosophical worldviews. Vive la différence (or différance).

Why this locks in polarisation

1. Wildly different priors.
If Camp R starts at P_R(H)=0.8 and Camp B at P_B(H)=0.2, then even moderately pro-H evidence (say likelihood ratio LR = 3) yields:

  • R: prior odds 4:1 \rightarrow 12:1 \Rightarrow P(H \mid E)\approx 0.92
  • B: prior odds 1:4 \rightarrow 3:4 \Rightarrow P(H \mid E)\approx 0.43

Same evidence, one camp “settled,” the other still unconvinced. Repeat ad infinitum, preferably on primetime.

2. Identity-weighted likelihoods.
People don’t evaluate P(E \mid H); they evaluate P(E \mid H, \text{source I like}). Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor d<1. This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.

3. Different hypothesis sets.
Camps don’t just disagree on P(H); they entertain different Hs. If one side’s model includes “coordinated elite malfeasance” and the other’s does not, then identical data streams update into different universes.

4. Selective exposure = selection bias.
Evidence isn’t i.i.d.; it’s curated by feeds, friends, and fury. You are sampling from your own posterior predictive distribution and calling it “reality.”

5. Asymmetric loss functions.
Even if beliefs converged, choices won’t. If the social cost of dissent is high, the decision threshold moves. People report a “belief” that minimises ostracism rather than error.

6. No common knowledge, no convergence.
Aumann told us honest Bayesians with common priors and shared posteriors must agree. Remove either—common priors or the “we both know we both saw the same thing” bit—and you get the modern news cycle.

“Acculturation” vs “Indoctrination”

Same mechanism, different moral valence. Priors are installed by families, schools, churches, unions, algorithms. Call it culture if you approve of the installers; call it indoctrination if you don’t. The probability calculus doesn’t care. Your tribal totems do.

Two quick toy moves you can use in prose

  • Likelihood hacking:
    “When evidence arrives, the tribe doesn’t deny the datum; it edits the likelihoods. ‘If my side did it, it’s an outlier; if your side did it, it’s a pattern.’ This is not hypocrisy; it’s a parameter update where the parameter is loyalty.”
  • Posterior divergence despite ‘facts’:
    “Give two citizens the same court ruling. One updates towards legitimacy because courts are reliable; the other away from legitimacy because courts are captured. The ruling is constant; the trust vector is not.”

If one wanted to reduce the split (perish the thought)

  • Forecast, don’t opine. Run cross-camp prediction markets or calibration tournaments. Bayes behaves when you pay people for accuracy rather than performance art.
  • Adversarial collaboration. Force both sides to pre-register what evidence would move them and how much. If someone’s d for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
  • Reference classes, not anecdotes. Pull arguments out of the single-case trap and into base-rate land. Yes, it’s boring. So is surgery, but people still do it.

The punchline

Polarisation isn’t the failure of reason; it’s what happens when reason is strapped to identity. Priors are social. Likelihoods are political. Posteriors are performative. You can call it acculturation if you want to feel civilised, indoctrination if you want to throw a brick, but either way you’re watching Bayes’ theorem run inside a culture war. The maths is sober; the humans are not.

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Philosophics

« Je pense, donc j’ai raison ! »

Posted in intelligence, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, religion, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

The Enlightenment promised a universal Reason; what we got was a carnival mirror that flatters philosophers and fools the rest of us. MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnosed the corpse with precision, but then tried to resurrect it with Aristotelian or theological magic tricks. I’m less charitable: you can’t will petrol into an empty tank. In my latest essay, I put ‘Reason’ on the slab, call in Kahneman, Hume, Nietzsche, and others as expert witnesses, and deliver the verdict: morality is a house rule, not a cosmic law. This piece is part of a larger project that includes my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and Against Dumocracy. The Enlightenment isn’t dying – it’s already dead. We’re just cataloguing the remains.

The Enlightenment was many things: a bonfire of superstition, a hymn to autonomy, a fever dream of “Reason” enthroned. Its philosophers fancied themselves heirs to Aristotle and midwives to a new humanity. And to be fair, they were clever enough to trick even themselves. Too clever by half.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, plays the role of forensic pathologist with admirable precision. He shows us how the Enlightenment dynamited the teleological scaffolding of Aristotle, then tried to keep the vocabulary of virtue, duty, and rights standing in mid-air. The result: what he calls a “moral Babel,” a chorus of shrill assertions dressed up as rational law. Elizabeth Anscombe had already filed the death certificate back in 1958 with Modern Moral Philosophy, where she pointed out that our talk of “moral obligation” is just a Christian relic without a deity to enforce it. And Nietzsche, that perennial party-crasher, cheerfully declared the whole project bankrupt: once the gods are dead, “ought” is nothing but resentment pretending to be metaphysics.

And yet, when MacIntyre reaches the heart of the matter, he can’t quite let the body stay buried. He wants to reattach a soul by importing an Aristotelian telos, even summoning a “new St Benedict” to shepherd us through the ruins. It plays beautifully with those still tethered by a golden string to Aquinas and the premodern, but let’s be honest: this is just hypnosis with a Latin chorus. Descartes told us je pense, donc je suis; MacIntyre updates it to je pense, donc j’ai raison. The trouble is that thinking doesn’t guarantee rightness any more than an empty petrol tank guarantees motion. You can will fuel into existence all you like; the car still isn’t going anywhere.

The behavioral economists – Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Gigerenzer – have already demonstrated that human reason is less compass than carnival mirror. Jonathan Haidt has shown that our “moral reasoning” usually lags behind our gut feelings like a PR department scrambling after a scandal. Meanwhile, political practice reduces “just war” to a matter of who gets to publish the rule book. Progress™ is declared, rights are invoked, but the verdict is always written by the most powerful litigant in the room.

So yes, MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnose the corpse with impressive clarity. But then they can’t resist playing resurrectionist, insisting that if we only chant the right metaphysical formula, the Enlightenment’s heart will start beating again. My own wager is bleaker – or maybe just more honest. There is no golden thread back to Aristotle, no metaphysical petrol station in the desert. Morality is not a universal constant; it’s a set of rules as contingent as the offside law. Killing becomes “murder” only when the tribe – or the state – says so. “Life is sacred” is not a discovery but a spell, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us kill in one context while weeping in another.

The Enlightenment wanted to enthrone Reason as our common oracle. Instead, it handed us a corpse and told us to pretend it was still breathing. My contribution is simply to keep the coroner’s mask on and say: The magic tricks aren’t working anymore. Stop looking for a metaphysical anchor that isn’t there. If there’s to be an “after,” it won’t come from another Saint Benedict. It will come from admitting that the Enlightenment died of believing its own hype – and that language itself was never built to carry the weight of gods.

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Ground News

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I like to stay updated on the news of the day, so I just registered for a Ground News account. Ground News is a news aggregator. They gather news and categorise it by political leaning and the publication’s record on factuality. Their claim is to reveal blind spots so help people not get caught in perspective bubbles. It also shows when a story is picked up predominantly by one side or another. I’ve seen ads for this on many channels and have for a while, so it’s likely that you have, too. This is not an ad.

This article attracted my attention, not because of the content but because of the headline. As a statistician, this bothers me. As a communicator, the damage is trebled. I don’t receive any compensation for clicking the link. I include it for reference for those who are not familiar with the service.

Image: Ground News Screengrab

Notice the choice of writing, ‘1-in-6 parents reject vaccine recommendations‘.

Two things shine through.

  1. The use of ‘reject’ – a negative verb.
  2. The use of ‘1-in-6’ – the figure accompanying the negative verb – 17%.

Statistically, this means that 5-in-6 parents follow vaccine recommendations – 83%.

This is the summary view. Scan down, and notice the Left-leaning Raw Story references a ‘staggering number’ of parents who reject vaccines. Notice also how the language softens – the claim is revised to ‘delay or reject’. Without clicking into the story, what is this breakdown? I’m not sure, but this is what sensationalism looks like to attract clicks.

Image: Ground News Summary View

Interestingly, the outlets tend to use different language and give different attention. What percentage of this is due to political bias and which is benign editorial licence is unclear.

On balance, the articles – Left, Right, and Centre – unanimously note that vaccine use is down, incidences of measles are up, RFK policies appear to be exacerbating the health management issue. The worst offenders are ‘very’ religious, white, politically conservative people. This cohort aligns with the RFK and the current administration.

The poll also found that parents who have postponed or avoided vaccinating their children tend to be white, conservative, and highly religious, and some choose to homeschool.

For this story, one of the sources was Greek and another French. Some claim to be behind a paywall, but this didn’t pose a problem for me. Perhaps they offer some complementary views.

Separately, on the right-hand side of the top image, there is a bias indicator: It shows that 57% of the reports were from Left-leaning journals, 36% Centre, leaving the remaining 7% to Right-leaning sources.

Image: Updated Bias Distribution

When I returned to write this post, I noticed that the reporting had changed as more Centre-focused reports picked up the story.

If I were to guess, this story shines a negative light on the Right, so they may just be waiting for the news cycle to pass.

In the (Right-facing) Greek story I read, the reporting wasn’t materially different to the other stories, which is to say they don’t try to render the story through rose-colour glasses.