About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full
Page Tree
Incoming links
from About
from LWMap/A Map That Reflects the Territory
  • The Rationalism community has packaged up some of the best of LessWrong into book form, and when I saw that one of the five focus topics was agency I could not resist asking for a review copy, that being something of a pet subject of mine. Now I have to follow through with a review, and I'm taking the opportunity to also completely rebuild my writing and publishing stack.
from Weird Studies/Matt Cardin
  • Listened to this one while driving so don't have detailed notes. Sounds agency relevant though
from Hakim Bey
from The Limits Of Control
  • Copied here because there doesn't seem to be a good online text, and obvious relevance to agency.
from Play
  • And play is extremely relevant to any theory of agency. The standard model of agency is essentially rational – that there are goals and actions are undertaken in pursuit of these goals. Play is by definition not goal oriented, or at least, play-goals are quite different from rationality-goals. Rationality-goals maximize this mythic substance called utility; play-goals are inherently immeasurable.
from stance
  • Stance, like agency, is One of Those Big Topics that I find myself attracted to it because it is capable of encompassing so much, but it's difficult to write about something so general. The only hope is to collect various aspects and illustrations and facets, and try to organize them somewhat, and hope that the act of doing so will be useful at least to myself. That's my meta-stance!
from Agency Made Me Do It
  • The meat of this topic is addressed in agency.
from Many Dimensional Man
  • 1977 book by James Ogilvy, heavily blurbed by Stewart Brand. Full title: Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self, Society, and the Sacred. Very much about agency; and obviously taking off from Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. sacred
from How Life Works
from William Gillis
from LWMap/What Motivated Rescuers During the Holocaust?
  • It comes down to basic questions about agency and free will. Materialist determinists (a category that includes Rationalists) don't really believe in the usual notions of moral agency. We are basically robots (for better or worse), subject to the causality of physics and our programming. Freedom is illusory; people respond to their environment according to their natures, and so are not ultimately responsible for their actions.
from metaphor
from Vynn
  • Guy I found on Twitter who is writing about the exact same stuff I am (but more coherently, he sounds like he has studied relevant areas more seriously and more recently than me). Agency etc. He's more into god (or "god-beliefs") than me, which is OK.
from metaphor
  • Something I wrote about in my dissertation, as something of a preliminary to animacy and agency. I was heavily influenced by Lakoff and Johnson's well-known metaphor theory, which blew my mind in such a way that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have a constant reminder in my head that our most abstract concepts are built out of useful culturally evolved mappings to and from the physical embodied world.
from Generative art/theory
  • Cute paper (first author is at MIT Media Lab) where they tweak the assignment of agency by language choice.
from consent
  • For me, it's an interesting edge-case for agency. Feminism and other liberation movements can be conceptualized as efforts to build both group and individual agency among populations that are thought to lack it.
from Edith Ackermann
  • Edith was a faculty member and friend at the Media Lab. Trained as a Piagetian, she did quite a lot of interesting work on children's mental models and how they thought about agency .
from Ribbonfarm
  • I was the very first guest blogger on Ribbonfarm and wrote a series of posts on agency, see Earlier writings on agency.
from Meditations on Meditations on Moloch
  • I'm writing this in the wake of the blowup between SlateStarCodex and NYT that is rocking the internet; and I'm doing it to remind myself that even if SSC has dubious politics and his arguments can be bad in sneaky ways, he's an excellent writer who has a way of bringing the most abstruse of concepts to life; and so I'm going to engage with him on that level if possible. And it turns out that this essay revolves around questions of agency.
from Answer to Job
  • Did not realize how agential Jung's archetypes are:
    • ...since...the archetypes in question are not mere objects of the mind, but are also autonomous factors, i.e., living subjects, the differentiation of consciousness can be understood as the effect of the intervention of transcendentally conditioned dynamisms. (p107)
from gumption trap
  • Coined by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. agency related, although it seems kind of naive, gumption is just another word for willpower isn't it? Not quite:
from WordOfTheDay
from Walter Wink
  • agency relevant, but I'm fucking tired of the whole schtick honestly.
from Ultimate Meaning: We Don't Have It, We Can't Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad
from schizophrenia
  • A serious disease of agency, where the usual functions of the brain that stich together a coherent feeling of a unified self break down. This is experienced as terrifying hallucinations, such as voices criticizing and commanding.
from Patterns of Refactored Agency
  • Agency simply means “the quality of being capable of taking action”. You and the people around you seem to have agency; while rocks generally do not. Inanimate objects are sometimes granted agency in a kind of humorous quote marks (eg “the washer decided to break today”); later we will try to take such constructions seriously. Agents (entities that have agency) have the additional implied quality of having goals, and that the actions they take are generally in pursuit of these goals. Agency thus carries a presumption of at least some rudimentary rationality, and a degree of autonomy.
from animism
from Technic and Magic
  • He used the a-word agency. Magic shouldn't be yet another system of control, more like an acknowledgement of what we can't know.
from occult
  • egregores and tulpas are a couple of agency-tweaking practices from this inherently fringy area of thought.
from atheism
from Agency at the Media Lab
  • I glommed onto the topic of agency in graduate school at the MIT Media Lab , and wrote a dissertation that explored its relationship to computation. That work, while it garnered some praise, I have thought of mostly as a failure. It opened up some interesting questions, but didn't really provide much in the way of answers. It tried to do too many different things (which might indicate problems with my own agency).
from Infinite Jest
  • One central topic of the book is addiction and hence agency The title refers to a video that causes anybody who watches it to lose interest in anything besides the video itself.
from Free Agents
  • book by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist who believes in free will. The book is framed as a discussion of agency
from Jeff Giesea
  • A positive interaction: (around Agency)
    • me: I am reminded of the quote "We are as gods so might as well get good at it" from Stewart Brand, the original agency promoter from 50 years ago. He didn't use that word but that was basically the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog – you (hippies) can just do stuff and here are the tools and guides to get started.
    • Punk rock had the opposite aesthetic but actually a pretty similar spirit of just do it.
    • I hope the upcoming young generations can invent some agentic subcultures for themselves!
from William Burroughs
  • author and Beat icon. Heroin addict and wrote a lot about the process of addiction. Obsessed with the idea of mind control, conspiracy theory and other agency related topics.
from Iron Law of Bureaucracy
from Agency Made Me Do It
  • I've been circling around the topic of agency for a few decades now. I wrote a dissertation on how metaphors of agency are baked into computers, programming languages, and the technical language engineers use to talk about them. (See Agency at the Media Lab).
from High Agency
  • OK, my tendency is to sneer at this sort of self-help version of agency, but honestly I shouldn't. OTOH look what shits are pushing it (Eric Weinstein) and what high-agency dudes like Elon Must are like.
from The Ministry for the Future
  • In other words, it's an agency hack -- it's imagining how the interests of the future could have agency in the present. And not just metaphorically – it's accomplished by means of a literal government agency.
from Old Gods New Enigmas
  • Interesting bits about revolutionary agency
from motivational engineering
  • This should be a thing. And I suppose I should link this from or two agency, I need to explain that this isn't what I'm doing, I'm anti-purpose
Twin Pages
hiccup.util$raw_string@44bd8eeb

Agency

30 Oct 2021 - 15 Oct 2022
Open in Logseq