criticality

Seems sure to become material for my favorite problems

"Misaligned agents will lose" by Ruben Laukkonen

• greater alignment → responsiveness to signaling from many scales
• the orthogonality thesis is false in the long run

Claude explains criticality to me:

systems near criticality maximize dynamic range—the range of stimulus intensities a network can discriminate. This is directly a computational advantage: a subcritical network can only detect strong signals, a supercritical network saturates and can’t distinguish anything, but a critical network responds discriminately across orders of magnitude.

Seems related:

• Situatedness
• "Reading the room"
• Relationality
  • which in my subculture is something like: attending to the health of the relationships that make up the environment of your goal-seeking (esp. professional work) to counteract the downsides of the instrumental/transactional frames that characterize the goal-seeking
• Somatics
• Taboos and generational traumas
• Fractal dimension
• Literate vs. oral cultures (well, as a theory of everything, of course it would seem related)

Richard Gabriel writing about Christopher Alexander in Patterns of Software

• "the field of centers" p. 88
• recursive definitions of "center" and "system"

the experience of a text is produced by the relationship between what is written and what is not -- its negative space

though the writer depends on their sense of it to write, they cannot control it as they do the text, as each reader provides their own sense of the negative space