viciousness

«Aristotle requires the vicious person to pursue what she believes to
be good. It is important to note that this is not a necessary
condition of vice. One can be vicious by knowingly pursuing the bad.
One can also be vicious while lacking any conception of the good or
bad. Roger Sterling, a character on the television series Mad Men,
never bothers to develop a conception of the good or bad. But, since
he is blameworthy for failing to do so, and since he consistently does
what a self-indulgent person would do, he is still vicious.
Aristotle's conditions on vice are sufficient. His analysis of vice,
[...] enables us to account for the vices of people who falsely and
negligently believe that they are doing good.»
-- Heather Battaly,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12024/full

nomadology of holes

«I know what I was doing, where and how I lived during those years,
but I know it almost abstractly, rather as if someone else were
relating memores that I believe in but don't really have... That's
what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps,
sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are
catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in
most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place.» -
Deleuze

in case you missed it the first time around

«According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is a „feeling of vengefulness
(Rachegefühl)‟. It occurs when, due to some impotence, a „reaction
ceases to be acted in order to become something felt (senti)‟ (Deleuze
2006, 111). As interiorized reaction, it is the local and
surreptitious illness that defines „those who came off badly‟ in any
healthy civilization, i.e. any culture based on a natural hierarchy
between masters and slaves. „While the noble man lives in trust and
openness with himself (...), the man of ressentiment is neither
upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His
soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back
doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his
refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how
to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race
of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer
than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater
degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance‟.»
-- from Sjoerd van Tuinen, "A Thymotic Left? Peter Sloterdijk and
the Psychopolitics of Ressentiment"
http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23451/Thymotic%20Left.pdf

Deleuze 2006 is:
 
  G. Deleuze (2006) Nietzsche & Philosophy, transl.
  H. Tomlinson, NY: Columbia University Press.

storytelling according to star wars (c/o Prescott Harvey and Demian Farnworth)

> Promise: Did they make a meaningful promise to the right audience?

Cool things happen away from civilisation, amidst bounty hunters etc.
-- the promise is to do with the frontier.

> Picture: Did they paint a compelling picture of what life will look like if said audience takes them up on that promise?

The picture people want to see is dirty, gritty, second-hand.

> Proof: Did they provide enough proof to believe their promises and picture?

(We don't always need an explanation - there's a sense of magic that
comes from the unknown!)

> Push: Did they push them to act?

The risk is real, not fun.

international

Somehow I had gotten these two quotes from Sloterdijk's "You must
change your life" (2013) merged in my memory. Putting them together,
I thought he was talking about Free/Open Source software, and some
kind of simulationist singularity.

«If one is prepared to understand the faculty, the university and the
scholars' republic as collectivizations, anonymizations and
perfections of the master function -- and this means judging the
'Enlightenment' more highly than it usually judges itself -- then one
can make analogous statements about the next two steps of pragmatic
trainer functions, namely writers and journalists. They carry the
toughening process on which the res publica of the knowing is based to
the respective wider levels - first into the classrooms, from which
tomorrow's literate individuals capable of judgement and action will
emerge, and then into the public media that serve the communication
among today's society of the knowing. From this perspective, the
teachers are character masks of the school system, just as journalists
are personifications of the press -- so they too, if they wanted to
see themselves in that way, would serve a positive dynamic of
collectivization that sought to expand a particular quality to the
level of 'society' as a whole, a quality long believed to be afforded
only to the few: that of mastery, be it the solving of a factual
problem or the art of living as such. But as long as the
collectivization of mastery - in philosophical terms, the
self-determination of 'society' (as if 'society' could possess a self)
-- does not take place, individuals would do well to continue
practising as if they were the first who will reach the goal.» (pp.
296-297)

«After half a century of militant youth movements, a creature that had
been absent from the scene for a long time resurfaced: the adult. Its
reappearance gave life to offensive pragmatisms that filled empty
word-shells like 'democracy', 'civil society' or 'human rights' with
actual content. Thus the awareness of what had been achieved was
accompanied by a broad agenda outlining the next optimization steps
for countless targets of progressive praxis. Today, this is the real
working form of a decentralized international that articulates itself
in tens of thousands of projects in the traditions of world
improvement élan -- without any central committee that would have to,
or even could, tell the active what their next operations should be.»
(p. 402)

the myth of Hermes

«In the myth of Hermes, the principles of identity, noncontradiction,
and the excluded middle are denied; the causal chains fold themselves
into a spiral, the after precedes the before, the god knows no more
spatial borders and can be, under different forms, in different places
at the same moment. Now, if I reconsider the course of my research, I
notice that it always places itself under the sign of a limit to be
identified. All the fascination that I could bring out regarding
hermetic thought was the subject of my novels -- understood as the
grotesque representation of a mental perversion.» - Umberto Eco, "Weak
Thought and the Limits of Interpretation"

abstract (draft)

The research develops around a technological intervention intended to
transform a peer produced reference resource into a peer produced
learning environment. The site will become a practicum and laboratory
where we can study how people learn mathematics.

Concurrent with developments in online peer production, there has been
a increase in demand for skills related to science, technology,
engineering and mathematics across society. A new peer learning
approach may move this system toward equilibrium. To fulfil this
promise, we require a viable theory of peer learning.

Examining the literature, we see that mathematics has always been a
socio-technical affair. We can draw on previous approaches that
situate learning within a socio-technical context. In particular, we
see that the fidelity of our learning model will be key to its
success. Furthermore, human participants will require cohesively
integrated meanings and incentives. We can understand this in a
preliminary way to mean a common value system.

We then propose four lines of inquiry. First, a quantitative
approach, using the legacy data from PlanetMath, aiming to find the
social factors that influence learning outcomes. Next, a qualitative,
interview- and design-based approach to understand requirements for
peer learning systems. Third, we use relationships with contemporary
philosophy of mathematics, media, and games to situate the theory
within texts. Fourth, we use participatory design to expand the model
of peer learning, and understand the implications of our learning
model in field work with PlanetMath users.

Future work with both research and development aspects may ultimately
demonstrate that PlanetMath provides a ``better'' way to learn
mathematics. Apart from applications in the mathematics context, the
theory of peer learning and the technical models we have developed
have implications for science and technology fields, and for any
system where peer learning is a viable approach.