Better metaphor

Tracing down one last bug before sending the project out for first testing. Previously I used the modern yak shaving fable for this process. This time my internal jukebox automatically sang the correct fable:

Metametaphor: The song itself is a recursive function representing a real-life recursion, and it ends the way all REAL recursive functions end. Real computers have limited memory space, just as old ladies have limited body space. Eventually the function becomes a horse.

I never write a recursive function. There’s ALWAYS a safer and cleaner way to do it. Other songs of this genre (eg 99 bottles of beer) are safe while-loops.

‘My name is Yohn Yohnson’ is recursive in form but not content. The verses don’t accumulate, so there’s no real stack, just an implied stack of quotations. Real human brains have gender-dependent limits for actual stacks of indirect addressing. Female brains can handle about 30 layers of quotation or indirection. Male brains can handle 0 to 1 layers.

Soap operas, built for female brains, have very long quote stacks. Cable “news”, repurposed soap opera, continued the tradition. Here’s an 8-layer indirect addressing stack that I captured a long time ago when I was still paying attention to “news”:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Davis said in an interview that he is “no longer certain about claims he made to reporters on background and on the record in recent weeks about what Cohen knows about Trump’s awareness of the Russian efforts.”

99% of our “news” is ATROCIOUSLY BAD EPISTEMOLOGY. If we had actual philosophers, they would be unraveling this nonsense and pointing out its infinite bonkersness.

Since the philosophers aren’t doing their JOB, let’s try to do it for them. Systematize this mess.

[WaPo claims that [Davis claimed to [know that [Davis no longer knows about [his claim to [know what Cohen [knows about what Trump [knows about a [totally non-existent and thus unknowable fairy tale.]]]]]]]]]

That’s EIGHT LAYERS of claims and knowledge and anti-claims and anti-knowledge, based on a delusion (RUSSIAN_MEDDLING) that anyone who ACTUALLY KNOWS THE SLIGHTEST MICROBIT OF REALITY knows to be a delusion.

There is NO ACTUAL EVENT in any of this mess.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

Which means there is NO NEWS and NO INFORMATION. All we have is a stupendous and stupefying pile of BAD PHILOSOPHY. It’s a mishmash of midrash.