The woomera is a multitool, get over it you lazy bastards

writing and reading densities, the proverb, the pun, the multitool and life.

Apr 06, 2023

Craiyon generated with “woomera with cutting edge” as prompt over Woomera Launch Area 6

New version at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

This post is

a) a forwarning to the style in planned three-part piece on Mapping the Gap as a gap hunter and as a user (actually a general style guide for the reader)

I am not quite sure of their structure yet. I don't tend to plan out by bullet points when I write, usually relying on an auto-pilot to bring a narrative arc back into balance, or, not, depending on what has caught my animal notice, but this time I am keeping that planning colour-by-number in mind.

I have started the piece/s but feel I need to explain myself. And slow myself down, so it is also:

b) mostly a reflection on my writing/reading preferences.

This is not just the result of my awareness of my life as a failed poet. Poets make regardless, with or without wisdom.

While in the space of making the ‘three-parter’ mentioned in a) above, my daughter has mentioned she has read a few posts here on why we should, if only because I mentioned her in one post, and she said, “Yes, quite dense.” Not an appreciative compliment, but it was said more in acknowledgement than in judgement.

I agreed, yes quite dense.

Her words paused me to think more about density and my laziness. I understand that writing densely is not an attractive style of writing, but it has it advantages. But before I mention them I will have to explain lazy.

For some decades I have used a routine before I "complain" about something, which appears self-deprecatory.

"I am," I say, " a lazy man." And then i suggest something… —else.

I have done this clever thing for some two decades at least, since I became a parent and ordinary things got harder. Before that I floated along going along with things a bit.

Recently I have seen a meme or too that has credited Bill Gates with a similar twist as criterion for employment. “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” But check out the quoteinvestigator.com on that.

I mention this because, mis-attributed or not, well repeated quotes are like proto-proverbs. They just need to drop the references, while the phrasing needs to be lean and pithy. With time they will be ground that way and a figure of speech is born.

Proverbs are interesting because they can often be found in antithetical pairs. You know how we can have a wise saying with one piece of advice, and then find another which counters it:

Two heads are better than one.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Well, what I am really saying in a lazy way, is actually counter to the admission "I am lazy". Perhaps a type of ironic sarcasm? “Hey dudey-poos, mates, cobbers, this annoying thing I want to complain about could be fixed with a little more efficiency, a little working smarter not harder, but I'll say this idea safely by saying it’s because I am lazy.”

I am basically assuming you are not a narcissist who will take a free kick.

What I am working towards saying here is:

I enjoy dense well-ramifying connective writing
I like reading deeply connotative wordwork because it helps me remember,

my mind-palace is thus easier and better built, (also: world-building… —a term I need to define both by use and deliberately in definition, maybe after mapping… —the gap) as a result:

I end up skimming less dense but well-planned texts because I am searching for the signal in the non-signal (not even noise): the gist, the take-home message, for,
a dense text stops me doing that
and so, paradoxically perhaps, I remember more, and integrate more… —detail

Admittedly all is slower when I need to built something I have never built before. YMMV

Interestingly, it is hard work that explains hunter-gatherer laziness [as perceived by colonials]. In humans, a species hard-wired for work, laziness is not a luxury, it’s a necessity: we must relax and save energy when we can.
Vivek V Venkataramanis, ‘What Hunter-Gatherers Demonstrate about Work and Satisfaction’, Aeon <https://aeon.co/essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction>

One thing many (early) human societies do is combined tools, and in worldbuilding they/we also multi-tool all cultural formats. Such redundant doubling-down on the ability to manage multi-stage process of production is an ancient recursive skill.

Such that the woomera is a also chisel at the handle end, but you can carry just the one item. This is efficient, working smarter/lazier, not harder/dumber.

The song of the journey is the map of the songline, the song’s rhythm is a stride in stepping withover country. The people country law into voice, many hear them speak, some run away lost.

The performance is the rite of passage. The symbol is the thing of the world child.

We are all more open to new music as a young things, the power the novelty… —and you repeat what you learned when a young'un as an elder, less open to the new, nostalgia is a tradition forming device. The second childhood is not new.

Our economics now separates the youthful excitement from old farts (somewhat negated by various new streaming platforms). The worldbuilding doesn’t care? Indeed while multitools are a popular tactical and tradie product, general economic theory is not so keen on that style of productivity. They don’t do any one thing really well, this ruins comparative advantages.

Thus successful modern economics disdains redundancy and multplicity when preferring the comparative advantages of a well-run core business, via taylorised specialisations. All guided by executive summaries…

#but AI can do that, why do the hack work when we can automagic it#

In the mid to late 20^th century youthful novelty becomes the ~~tradition~~ economic practice, and young kids today never know their elders don’t know anything, and the elders have nothing to complain about... as they cannot get young people to help while they still know everything.

As a species we are built/biased to multi-tool our things. It has helped us survive through several ice ages and dry periods over 100 000 years and more as Homo sp. The stars our destination or not.

My propensity to write densely comes out of a practice which evolution has allowed…

—I like dense writing and I am proud.

Too many cooks spoil the broth. / Two heads are better than one.

On the one hand writing densely is bad writing, for many readers are excluded. This is true even if dense writing uses less words.

Well-structured writing to persuade or inform diplomatically regards the audience as potential idiot kings. One way to do this is as follows:

I'll tell you what I will tell you.
I tell you X.
I tell you what I have told you

From a readers point of view, and this is more true as one gets older and time is running out, 2 out of these 3 things are WASTING MY TIME. If not the trees which provide the paper, or the electrons before you now.

This type of “clear” writing is not a preference for me to write, and in reading it my time can be wasted, among other things.

Damn I think I did it four times, wasting me own time.

Two heads are better than one. / Too many cooks spoil the broth.

On the other hand, surely I am not the smartest person in the room. This is generally unlikely. So I'll write for myself and that other smarter even more lazy person can explain it, if necessary. Being smarter they may well be more kind. Kindness being a type of tough laziness.

I'll write densely to convey the complexity in one multi-tool, and so possibly get it conveyed in a more timely manner. Of course, peeps have to get it, before they can remember it. Otherwise they will just remember their confusion and stare blankly at the future.

So in my planned three-parter Mapping the… —gap, I’ll be doing the dense thing as kindly as possible. It will be dense because I’ll be defining terms, including defining how terms are defined. This recursion creates an instant density and thus scope for confusion. But it also allow things to be a multitool or two.

In recent decades polyvalent and polysemous prestidigitations have been employed not to generate multi-tools but to provide modes of uncertainty and aporic hilarity.

One type of multi-tool is the polyvalent pun, it operates to mean two (or more) things at once, including truth values, which must happen when we realise we suspend our judgement. Often these multiply meant things, in a tight reframing of each use in the others’ frame, provokes laughter. Or grimly undermines the ability in some of us to mean anything at all.

Some also hope to use these unhanded un-tools in the generation of uncertainty to create chaos which they think they surf to power and dominion. To destroy the potential of ataraxia. I.E as a provocation, and not to suspend rashness in dogmatic beliefs, but to forestall all agency in people (making soulless slaves and mobiks), removing them from the equation the players must consider in order to “win”. Whatever that is.

(The local example is the narcissist gaslighting their chosen fools, while the big current example is Russian imperialism and its agencies abroad within.)

I.E My polysemous plays are not attempts to promote ambiguity in order to give it to the man, nor in order to avoid responsibility and troll away everyone’s life, nor to provide an escape root by fence sitting, nor to reveal the aporic undecidability of life incomplete (I mean they can but…), (but), but to pun and so carry more utility for less weight, it just needs to be unpack at the other end. So I guess you do need to know it is a multi-tool. (Gnosticism a-go-go?)

Now you know, off we go.

(Also, above, I have just explained the joke as a polysemous recursive re-framing…. —explaining jokes is never funny, hey Timmy, did you laugh back there?)

found on midjourney searching for kinds of kindness