[ExI] gaming the system

Sat Apr 30 16:11:44 UTC 2022

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] gaming the system

>…You mean there's modern poetry with rhyme and rhythm?  I quit taking the New Yorker and ATlantic Monthly partly because of the horrible poetry they publish - no rhymes, no meter, obscure in the meaning department.  Of course you have 'lower level' stuff, like Breathe that I circulated, that the magazines would never print - literary profs would burn the issue in public as a protest against sensible poetry.  bill w

Billw, it is far too cynical a view you present sir.  Sure, the rules of poetry have relaxed quite a bit from the days when Shakespeare was shaking the sonnets.  This allows anything, aaaaaanything… to be consider poetry.  All it takes is for the appropriate use of the return key and insertion of random punctuation.  For instance, let’s take the following poem, written by… you:

You mean there's modern poetry with rhyme and rhythm?

I quit taking the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly,

Partly because of the horrible poetry they publish.

No rhymes! No meter!  Obscure in the meaning department.  

Of course you have 'lower level' stuff, like Breathe

That I circulated, that the magazines would never print – 

Literary profs would burn the issue in public

As a protest against sensible poetry.  

bill w

Ah such subtle poetry!  It inspires me to try.  Here goes:

There once was a lad named Bill Wallace

Who used dynamite instead of a phallus

They found her vagina 

In North Carolina

And bits of her boobs in Corvallis.

Now before you object… who here has actually met “Bill” Wallace?  In person?  How do we reeeeally know he or she doesn’t have the items found scattered about the countryside?  Anyone?  That’s sensible poetry!

My friends, the internet does crap like this to our brains.  It’s an addiction, I tells ya, an ADDICTION!  Hey cool.

spike

On Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 8:51 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

Regarding Musk’s notion of making the Twitter content filters public led to the observation that this could make it easier to game the system.

That rattled around in my brain like a golf ball in a 55 gallon drum.  I came up with an idea (as is my wont (or one of my many wonts (such as wanting excuses to use the term wont (they call me the wont-monster.))))

An earlier observation was the comedy gold provided by the Babylon Bee, which made a skit of an overly sensitive Twitter employee freaking about Musk buying Twitter.  Then Twitter played along with the gag by slapping a sensitive content label on a tweet about sensitive Twitter employees (referring to her (and comically self-referencing the Twitter employee who chose the label.))  But it isn’t entirely clear the label was Twitter playing along with the gag.  It might be that software did that, and that their software is flawed.  I chose the more charitable interpretation (Twitter was making fun of itself.)

Regarding Musk’s notion of making that software public (not defeating it, just making it public domain): that would allow users to download the filter, run a test case on an edgy post, shape it, edit it, rework it until it gets by without a warning.  So this would be a form of gaming the system, and could spawn an entirely new genre in a sense: how to creatively word a message in such a way as to communicate an idea around restrictions.  Gaming Twitter then becomes analogous to poetry in a way, where you say things with a rhyme and a rhythm, to communicate ideas in a framework of sorts.  Going around Twitter filters becomes modern poetry.

spike  

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